If you've ever googled "how to ground yourself during dissociation," you've seen the 5-4-3-2-1 method. Name 5 things you can see, 4 you can touch, etc. For me, it never worked. When I'm dissociating, I can see things just fine — I just don't have a memory of what I was thinking or feeling to make me react the way I was reacting, or doing anything i was doing. eventually a therapist would tell me that ironically the verything that has ruined your life chunks at a time is a protection mechanism that your mind created when you were to young to be going thru traumatic situations you were going thru. OK so my mind decides to go into copilot on absolute random to start protecting me with no disregard to my mind or my heart-Thanks. When I told myself 8 years ago I couldn't do it again to hurt my family I disappeared and it's been near eight years that I hadn't spoken a word to my family or one person who knew who I was until today. something in me snapped and I spoke with my mother who had been raising my children. the passed eight years have been so hard on everyone envolved but come to find out mostly, thank God, on myself. I feel like all this was unnecessary and could have been handled in a better way had I had knowledge of what was happening to me or support so if this sounds familiar to you or if someone close to you seems to be acting in extreme careless or unlike themselfs just know that it might be outside there control and they might need you. I'm also %100 certain I cannot let this happen to me again so I'm taking this opportunity to document daily what I'm going thru as things progress now that I'm connected again with my family and I'm also going to be creating tools to help me and anyone else experiencing the same types of thing, i am also writing a memoir of everything I can remember as well as everything i can't so that my children hopefully will whole heartedly understand that as hard as everything has been on them that it was never them or my not caring. that they were always everything to me and I just couldn't understand what was happening to me enough to somehow make it stop. I invite you if this is something you've experienced or had a family member experience and you'd like support our more understanding to join