Having a dissociative disorder means that when you begin to feel bad, sad, angry or scared, you immediately go up into your head to try and source the "reasons" why you're having those feelings.
This is extremely common among Borderlines and Narcissists. As children, they were terribly confused about behavioral anomalies they experienced in their home, and wanted to figure out why those events inspired such difficult feelings.
When they got busy in their head scanning every possible causation factor for the pain they were feeling, it helped distract from and ease the emotional pain inside their body. Thus, ANALYZING one's feelings became a habitual, self-soothing tool that follows them into adulthood (when a behavior 'works' for us humans, we keep reverting to and utilizing it).
A lot of clients have told me they feel sad or depressed in their head, but the brain does not FEEL sadness~ it merely tries to make sense of whatever's felt in the body, and sensations of "sadness" typically sit in the heart or solar plexus region of the body.
A lot of children grow up having emotions censored by their parental units. They're not allowed to have sad or angry or frustrated feelings, because their parents don't want to have to deal with a child's darker emotions, and be inconvenienced.
If our parent(s) didn't make room for our difficult emotions, we aren't inclined to either, so they're reviled and banished from our personality structure, and remain suppressed lifelong. Suppression of feelings creates fertile soil for Anxiety Disorder and panic attacks to take hold, because these are uncontrollable feelings that break thru all emotional controls and trigger the autonomic system in our body, causing uncomfortable physical sensations like, sweating, feeling faint, racing heart beat, etc. In short, we can’t IGNORE these feelings, or mentally sweep them aside, like we’ve trained ourselves (lifelong) to do with most others!
For many years BEFORE I began writing about and helping people recover from the toxic impact of having loved someone with BPD, my entire practice was focused on dismantling anxiety and panic attacks in clients. For some inexplicable reason, I understood precisely what caused this issue, and knew how to resolve and heal it once and for all, WITHOUT MEDS.
When I began uploading articles on BPD to my website, the locus of my practice was abruptly turned. I still worked with anxiety issues of course, but now, people were trying to recover from a toxic relationship they'd not had any way to RECOGNIZE at the start due to emotional dissociation, and their inability to trust their instincts and intuitions (or extra-sensory bodily sensations if you will), which would have alerted them to impending danger ahead! When we shut down ‘some’ feelings, ALL feelings lose their vibrancy. It’s just the way emotions work, unfortunately.
Dissociation from feelings means you have no inner compass or guide to help you determine whether someone's trustworthy or not. Nobody can rely or depend on another emotionally, if they are not trust-WORTHY. Emotionally underdeveloped individuals therefore, are highly susceptible to "trusting" all the wrong people with their well-being and happiness (remember that song, “looking for love in all the wrong places”??
My online "Overcoming Anxiety" course can make a considerable dent in your crippling anxiety and panic attacks. I'm available for a brief consult, should you want or desire a quicker way to surmount those incredibly uncomfortable anxiety or panic attacks you may still be up against.