Anyone here disassociate under stress?

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Warning... I am likely going to sound a little crazy here, but it is only because I am a little crazy. I half joke. I am feeling disjointed today... sorry in advance if this is incoherent. I am trying to make my words make sense.

Yesterday I shut down. To not get into too many details, I had a series of things I had to deal with one after another with no down time and my sensory issues amplified the negative effects that these events had on me. Sometimes when I shut down, I go away into myself... I disassociate. I have done this for as long as I can remember. Sometimes I only go away for a few minutes, sometimes I lose hours. Sometimes I remain still, sitting or standing. Other times I drop. I have fallen into things and once I cracked a dash board with my head when I fell forward in my seat. I know when it is coming on. I know when I have reached my capacity for external intake. If I cannot get away fast enough, I will disassociate. But then there are the times when I just cannot recover from the events that happened earlier and will disassociate after the fact. This happened to me yesterday... I came home and left my body and I am still not feeling like I am in my body. I am concerned by this. It is typical for me to feel like I am sitting two inches back in my head (if that makes any sense...) but this is different. I feel like I am stuck in that half awake half asleep state and I hate it, this is not so typical, though I have felt this before on more than one occasion.

A week or two ago I flipped out and shut down. I made it up to my room and hid away before I lost myself in myself. When I came back around, I was sitting on my bed, rocking, my arms hugging my knees into myself...I had bruises on my arms from pulling myself in, my pillow was ripped apart and it was a few hours later. I do not remember ripping the pillow. It is not unheard of for me to rock or sway or hit my knees with my palm while I am 'gone', but I have never done anything like pillow destruction before. This bothers me. I have been under a lot of stress lately, and logic tells me that of course I would disassociate more frequently than normal because of the stress. It is not making me feel any better about it though, which only adds to the stress which then makes me feel like I am losing my grasp on reality more. It is a nasty cycle that I am in now. I keep poking my face and slapping my hands into my legs and knocking myself into things for some kind of reality check. I need that kind of knowledge that I am in this body because I do not really feel like I am. I am making progress though. This morning I could not form sentences, I was suddenly sobbing for no reason, could not focus enough to know what room I was in and I could certainly not have told you what room I was in had you asked. I found myself at one point this morning, sobbing uncontrollably out of nowhere. Then I just stopped and got a cup of coffee.

Does anyone else do this? If you do, have you ever done anything like kill a pillow without knowing you did it? Do you know when things are coming on? I 'feel' it, but I also see 'sparklies' and the 'static' in my head gets louder and it's like I feel it coming out of my whole body... I'll tunnel vision before I go away... If you have ever disassociated, what are your tells that it is coming on. Mine are usually stress induced, but on a few rare occasions, they have happened out of nowhere. Anyone have that either? It is such a weird thing... not a lot of people get this... I am usually ok with not feeling fully in my head... you get used to it... but I can't stand it when I feel like I have to fight to stay in my own head. I don't have multiple personalities (they ruled out dissociative identity disorder a few years ago) but sometimes I really wonder about that. I have very distinct moods/personalities that are very different from each other. Hell, I took to naming them a few years ago... But the thing that ruled that out for me is that I am very much aware of what I am doing when I am in each of those moods when I am no longer in that mood. Make sense?

Like, I have three me's... I have one I call Arienne. Arienne is the responsible me. When I am on Arienne mode I keep up with the house, tend to my garden, read and respond to emails, answer the phone when my friend calls, keep appointments I do not want to attend, register for classes and actually attend them. Arienne is the one who looks after the family and interacts with them. This is me mostly. This is what I try to be. This is how I want to be.

My next me would be Charlotte. Charlotte is my crazy b***h. Charlotte is also the one who will do what my Arienne side cannot do. If I am in a bad situation, my Charlotte mode sets in and leaves or handles the situation. This is aggressive me, hostile me, violent me, and the only side of me that can functionally handle change, disrupt or upset. Granted, it is not handling it productively, but my only other choice if the generator that is Charlotte does not turn on, the power goes out and stays out, so to speak.

Last I have Amelyth. Amelyth is like my big quiet. I feel the most real and least real as this mood than either of the other. Amelyth is my obsessions, my distractions, my ability to lay in the grass and stare at the sky for five hours without knowing time because I am so awestruck by the world I see and feel. I would love to be this way all of the time. I am calm this way. I am ok this way. The reality of my world will not this though. I am married and have kids. I cannot lay on the floor all day and feel the vibrations of my music. My family frowns upon this and I do not blame them. They need me. They do not want a nonperson type of person. As much as I want to, I cannot vanish into what fascinates me and simply observe the wonder that is the world in silence.

I say that to say when I am in Charlotte mode, I might suddenly realize that I am running across the street screaming at my neighbor, calling him everything but a white boy with full intention of beating him senseless, while he is running into his house and locking the doors. Yeah, I used to do stuff like that a lot... And while I do not know I am getting up or planning to try to attack someone, I do suddenly become aware of what I am doing and when I am no longer in Charlotte mode, I remember everything I did while I was like that when I finally get back to the Arienne self I try to be. The ended up dismissing that and calling me bipolar... a rapid cycler, to be specific, due to me suddenly flipping out for no seemingly rational reason. Now that autism has been brought into the picture, my sudden bursts of wacked out have been reevaluated. No one thought things like lights, sounds, disruption in routine was significant enough to set me off... now they think it is. So bipolar has been now disregarded.

I do not know what I am trying to go for here with this. Sorry for going on and on. In my own way, this is helping me keep in touch with a world outside my head and I really need that right now. I do plan to mention this to my therapist when I see her next. She and I have been focused on other things, and I need to address this as it is becoming a problem. So I will e doing that... But in the meantime, if anyone can relate to any of this, let me know, would you? I am curious to hear other people's thoughts on this, how they feel about it all, handle it, manage it... As I said earlier, I am curious about what it like for you, if you feel it coming, what triggers it... Anything. Anyway, if you made it though this mess, I thank you and appreciate it.

If you can find a forum on PTSD, there will be a lot of people there with experience with dissociation and ideas on what to do with it.

Mentally ill people will "de-compensate" (the correct psychiatric term) just as you describe here...and that's why mentally ill people need treatment.

That is classic dissociation (not decompensation, that is something different). It sounds a lot like Depersonalization Disorder with maybe even hints of D.I.D. I have the same feelings very frequently; you're not alone in that.

I have an other self of sorts called Jack, who is a lot like your Charlotte in some ways.

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Sorry about earlier post I guess I posted things I wasn´t sure about what they were and used terms very very incorrectly! Now I edited my earlier posts and that is what I actually meant.

dossa, it sounds like you have a fairly sophisticated set of adaptations you've built. If it helps any, I think that bodes well for your chances of building more adaptations and possibly better ones with the help of the right professionals. The innate ability is clearly there.

I've got a total of three different "personas" as well, I hate when I start losing my sense of self and time, it still scares me. I've always kind of "hid" two of them, and within the last couple of months I've been I guess you could say letting them out. I feel like "Sybil" sometimes, lol!