Does anyone else feel like they disconnected from their body and sense of self as a way to cope?
Has anyone else felt disconnected from their body and sense of self as a way to cope with gender dysphoria? I'm hesitant to call it dissociation or depersonalization, so I wont, but those are best sort descriptors for what I'm going through. This is sort of a vent but I also want to know if I'm not alone in this.
I feel very disconnected from my body. I exist but I feel like I don't have a sense of self. The longer I spend in my transphobic household, the more I become detatched from any sense of identity as a person. When I was younger I used to be more emotional about everything, I would cry myself a lot. These days I mostly just feel numb and it would take effort to dredge up emotion.
My parents installed a monitoring software on my phone, one that is known to alert lgbtq stuff generally as "sexual content". I can still speak to my friends, though on my laptop(i avoid phone communication for the fear that even if we avoid it, it would alert about something else, causing my parents to check my devices). I feel very isolated because the monitoring software has led to less consistent ability to interact with the few friends I have, damaging my relationships.
I want to be able to interact with people without my identity also becoming a focal point. I want normal friendships where I can just talk and vent whenever, say what I want, and not have my ability to talk with friends limited by being trans. At the same time I'm tired of having to hide and push who i am away... I feel like I've spent so much time building of false perceptions of myself to others(in my presentation, values, beliefs, ideas, pretty much everything) in order to protect myself, that I don't really know who I am.
I don't think it's that I've confused myself with these false perceptions for others in my life, but rather in that, and everything else, I shut down or closed off my own sense of personhood so I could survive.
These days it almost feels easier not to speak to my friends when I have the ability because I'm forced to stop and think instead of running on autopilot. And that's besides the fact that everything feels too close for safety and comfort, even if nothing it is on my phone, it feels like someone is looking over my shoulder at all times. It's so much easier to exist without thought than it is to grapple with fear, or exist with any sense of personhood and identity.
I don't really have a sense of who I am as a person... I don't know my favorite color, or food. I used too... But I've spent so much time focused on surviving that investment to energy beyond that is a sort of luxury I don't have... I don't think more time would even help that, rather removing myself from the unsafe environment so my body isn't always in a sort of fight or flight state.
it's a really weird feeling to recognize that you don't know anything about yourself. Like I'm almost not a person because I don't exist with likes, dislikes, traits, to define me. I already always sort of feel like a floating consciousness never really in sync with the world around me...
I know that I control my body, but I feel like my mind is a passenger within my body. I constantly make choices and actions but it feels like my mind is just barely connected to my body and the physical world around me. Like I just barely exist in the physical world beyond my mind. I often have no real sense of myself in the physical space, like I know I have a body and exist within physical space, but I have no awareness of body as i exist in the physical space. Like I see my arm and I know that it's there, but I no awareness of where it is in the physical space around me(so I like forget I have body that physically exists in the space around me, even though I see, hear, and feels things because I'm so disconnected from it.)
For me, I know it has a lot to do with my gender dysphoria, I early on I experienced a lot of my gender dysphoria as a trippy disconnect from my physical body. Never truly in the way where that disconnect was, I recognized and connected with my body in the physical space as a part of me, and yet I would often have these brief moments where my perception of myself didn't aling with my body(not that the perception was a conscious perceival of a picture in my mind vs a physical body) much rather unconsciously picking up that something wasn't right in a black mirror sort of way where the reflection is yours, but off and you don't always pick up on why and kind of freak out(because you know I recognized my body, i consciously recognized and perceived my body as my body and always knew it had not changed and yet there were moments of disconnect.
When I became more aware of my gender dysphoria, I'd recognize it in other ways beyond the brief trippy disconnects. I think like my brain cut off my awareness of my physical body bc I couldn't handle dealing with constant gender dysphoria I could do nothing about, with me trying to get through and being in survival mode as part of it.
These days I forget I have a body... and it's a very unreal feeling with the fact that I do. It's as if I can't concieve of the idea of even having a body unless I'm confronted with it. I don't have much of an idea of what I look like either, I can't picture myself in my mind.
It's strange because it makes me feel not real when I remember that I have a physical appearance, because I recognize my body and my appearance and at the same time I am shocked/offput that I exist physically and can be perceived by others(logically I know that others perceive me but i think I get offput most that I am perceivable beyond what I can perceive myself without a mirror).
Does anyone else have similar experiences, and should I be concerned?
Posted Aug 31, 2025, 12:18 AM UTC