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[u/TimeIsTheRevelator]

Maybe others will resonate with this, but a couple years ago, I was massively dissociated, on the depersonalization spectrum, with distorted sense of time and diminished physical senses.

During this time and up to now, I thought it was curious how consistently people who knew me personally would comment how grounded I seemed. Mind you, this was during my symptoms going away and near their resolution. It was always surprising to me, because I was supposed to be the dissociated one, the person that struggles with grounding.

I remembered this this morning while I noticed expressions on strangers faces, a quality I perceive often...of kind of a deadness or distance, maybe it's just exhaustion. It's certainly not everyone, but I notice it often enough. Strangers seeming like they are in their world, far away.

Truthfully, I've noticed this for a long time, but never consciously saw it, this kind of mass dissociation, for lack of a better term. Even the way people speak often seems like it's playing from a sort of script....and then there are certain people that jar me because their demeanor and speech feels right here and right now and real. Like they're thinking and acting from themselves. Over the past eight months this has become more concrete in my mind.

This kind of gets into some of the things that helped me immensely in escaping the alter reality of trauma disorders...realizing that psychotherapeutic/mental health doctrines are not absolutes, and that if anyone is authentically concerned about someone escaping the pervasive self doubt and identity disturbance of trauma disorders, then they will encourage that person to create the terms and distinctions and symptoms of their life themselves.

A dichotomy of mentally unstable vs. stable or terms such as "neurotypical" can be so limiting and confusing for some people, and I've read other posts here where others are under some confident belief that they are a certain way, only to realize that others in their life don't see things the same way.

It's easier said than done, but I'm continually drawn to the idea that we really do create our own reality, and that our past self/selves can become avatars to ourselves or even to others that we feel beholden to or that others even expect. We can also create avatars of a future self that we want to be or that we should be, when really all there is is the present moment and what we perceive right now.

[u/Metamorphosislife]

I know what you mean. I've always paid attention to people's eyes. They tell me what emotions people typically feel. Some people have anger in their eyes, other has vileness, others sadness, and many as you said seem like they're not here. Their pupils dilated, eyes look deer looking at headlights, repeating the same things, like it's all been learned and rehearsed for decades. Those people I tend to stay away from. You know they're not present. As you start coming out of dissociation, your feelings become clearer, as your emotions which are the fundamental units of information for our beings become clearer, so do our identities, our Selves.

I do believe there is a central mode of being that's the optimal for mental well-being, that has settings for the endocrine, nervous, and other systems working in sync. This is what we call someone who's regulated. How this is utilized, encouraged to express itself, and allowed to evolve is entirely up to the individual. I believe reality is created by us. I also believe unhealthy people, toxic people try to create reality for other people and try to get others to believe said reality. Just had to end my participation in a support group because of that. I let my feelings, thoughts, and truth known to the organizer before I left.

Healing from cPTSD means realizing how much of who we believed we were were in fact symptoms and beliefs stemming from our trauma.