Trigger warning: This article contains themes of sexual assault. Please do not read if this will negatively affect you.
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I live with complex post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD) and the condition often means dealing with dissociative episodes which, lasting anywhere from a few hours to months, fracture my sense of security and reality.
Luckily, I have unearthed a solution that can re-establish my mind-body connection when in a dissociative state: solo orgasms.
For those who have never heard of dissociation, it is hard to imagine what it feels like. The simplest explanation is that a dissociative episode can be like looking in a funhouse mirror, you vaguely recognise the reflection but the distortions make it impossible to trust, so you end up floating in limbo, lost between fantasy and reality.
Until I was diagnosed in 2018, dissociation had been my daily reality and the idea that this was abnormal had never crossed my mind.
My symptoms began as a young child after a family friend began grooming me. Within two years, I was living in a dissociative state consistently and had detached myself completely from the surrounding world to survive.
I spent months at a time dissociated from reality, buried deep in the protected part of my brain where trauma did not exist and emotions were imaginary friends I could choose not to play with.
I lost years of my life in a fog, avoiding mental health professionals due to an all-consuming fear of being sectioned. Eventually, I suppressed the symptoms and became convinced that my mental demons were conquered.
Then, in 2017, my symptoms were re-triggered by two traumatic events – a violent sexual assault and my childhood abuser discovering my professional page, finding out where I worked.
Dissociative episodes surged again and it was like watching my life through a temperamental TV, sharp bursts shone through intermittently but foggy static overwhelmed the majority of each day.
In 2018, after over a decade of whole-heartedly believing that my brain was irreparably broken, a counsellor provided a lifeline in the form of a diagnosis.
It was both immensely relieving and utterly devastating.
I already knew that my childhood was long lost and most of my teen years had been consumed by self-destruction, but the diagnosis buried countless more memories under uncertainty and the sticky tape keeping my sense of self together came undone.
My dissociative episodes got progressively worse as I desperately tried to escape my reality.
I sank into dissociative episodes like they were the warm embraces of a lover. I believed that the safest place in the world was the bleak corner of my mind that dissociation had claimed as its own.
Continually failing to connect with people and feeling alienated from reality, I eventually came to a crossroads – one leading up a mountain that crested in a future free of CPTSD symptoms and the other sloping into a cosy, dark abyss.
I chose the hard climb and began unpicking years of learned behaviours.
While I found success with coping mechanisms to manage flashbacks, hypervigilance and chronic nightmares, dissociative episodes continued to plague my daily life.
What is CPTSD?
Usually when I’m in the midst of a dissociative episode, I cannot stand being touched by other people because it can trigger intense flashbacks or panic attacks, but I realised that my own touch did not cause this reaction.
Over time, I experimented with self-pleasure as a grounding technique for when dissociative tendencies were determined to carry my mind into a black hole.
The first mistake, however, came when I tried to use sexual fantasies to climax while in a dissociative state.
From the first act of my fantasy, intense flashbacks of sexual violence dominated and expelled any chance of coming back to earth peacefully. It was clear that lustful tangents only fed the fractured sense of self that comes with dissociation.
Because the trauma feeding my symptoms is related to sexual violence, fantasising about partnered sex of any kind while dissociating only succeeds in triggering those memories more powerfully.
Plus, when I am dissociating it is far easier to fall down dark paths in my brain that leads to intense spiralling.
That episode ended up lasting over a week because of the added flashbacks and resultant reflexive detachment, but I refused to give up on my experiment.
On the second attempt, I was a day into a dissociative state. Sitting down surrounded by pillows, I started by meditating using a technique that requires you to track your senses and slowly melted into the bed.
When I was safely ensconced, I began exploring my body very slowly. Encompassing each erogenous zone and plundering it with soft, sensual grazes to elicit a sexual response.
Anytime my mind wondered to fantasies or errant thoughts, I ceased touching and refocused my breathing and senses until it felt safe to continue.
I escalated the touch until a climax neared then, sensing that my mind was still detached, backed off to halt the orgasm.
Repeating this process over and over, my mind gradually connected to the tendrils of pleasure coursing through my body, reaching even the most fractured parts of my psyche and bringing them back together in a safe cocoon of ecstasy.
To maintain the safe mental space I had created, throughout the experiment, I played the part of a supportive partner by asking myself what felt good and why.
Eventually, I did climax but by then the dissociative state had largely dissipated and the surrounding world felt real again.
The flood of endorphins combined with real joyous emotion, not the empty happiness I had become so adept at performing, confirmed that I had broken the dissociative state.
Since that magical afternoon, I have continued to use self-pleasured orgasms as a grounding technique.
Climaxing is not always a guaranteed solution for breaking out of an episode, so I maintain an arsenal of other techniques too; kept in a handy notebook I carry everywhere.
In the simple act of sensual self-exploration, I have found a lifeline to reality, one that reminds my mind that this body belongs to me and that it is safe to live in it.
After months of experimentation, my trick is more reliable than ever and I have developed a simple mantra that I repeat before, during and after: this is my body, my sexuality and my pleasure. It is powerful and it belongs to me and me alone.
Please note that this is one person’s experience of coping with dissociation. We aimed to publish this piece to allow Hannah to tell her own story. This is not a reflection on anyone else with the diagnosis – and is not meant to cause any harm or misleading information. We stand with survivors of sexual assault, and recognise every experience of dissociation and symptoms of CPTSD is unique.