Well, I learned something new today and it’s something I’ve wondered about my whole life.
Apparently, when I was a child, I experienced what is known as dissociation. From around the age of six through to my late teens, there were times when everything would suddenly go into slow motion.
I clearly remember one moment when I must have been about eight years old. I was on the swing in the garden while my grandad and mum were gardening nearby. As I swung back and forth, the swing gradually began to slow down. Then their voices slowed too like someone had turned the speed down on a cassette tape. Everything felt distorted and unreal.
This would last for about five minutes, and the only way I could bring myself back to normal was by putting music on. As strange as it sounds, music grounded me and returned everything to its proper pace.
It was a very odd experience, and it happened quite a lot when I was younger. At the time, I didn’t understand it I just knew it was real for me.
I now understand why this happened to me.
What I experienced as a child wasn’t random, and it wasn’t because there was something wrong with me. I’ve learned that dissociation in children is a protective response. It’s the mind’s way of stepping back when things feel overwhelming, even if there isn’t one obvious scary moment happening at the time.
As a child, my nervous system learned that switching off was sometimes safer than staying fully present. That’s why everything would slow down time, movement, even people’s voices. It wasn’t imagination. It was my body going into a freeze or detach mode to protect me.
What’s interesting is that this could happen even when things seemed calm. Nothing bad had to be happening in that moment. The body doesn’t work on logic it works on patterns. Once it learns a survival response, it can switch it on automatically.
The part that really stands out to me is how music helped. Music grounded me. It brought my senses back, steadied my breathing, and returned me to the present. Without realising it at the time, I had found my own way to regulate myself and feel safe again.
As I grew older, these episodes became less frequent. I gained more awareness, more control, and more ways to ground myself. My nervous system didn’t need to protect me in the same way anymore.
Looking back now, I don’t see this as weakness. I see it as my mind doing the best it could to keep me safe when I was young.
You may be asking yourself why this happened. The truth is, I did have a stressful childhood, and I was misunderstood a lot.
I’ll try to explain my situation without over indulging or upsetting anyone, because that’s never my intention.
My mum found herself pregnant at the age of nineteen. Unfortunately, at that time, it was very much the attitude that if you “got someone up the duff,” you married them. My mum and dad were not a match made in heaven, and that became clear very early on.Their marriage broke down when I was just three and a half months old.
My mum also had a very difficult childhood. She was a twin, and when she was still a baby, my nan was diagnosed with a mental illness and placed into an institution, where she received electric shock treatment.
It’s possible this was postnatal depression things weren’t understood or handled the way they are today. I’ve since learned information that would be enough to affect anyone’s mental health, but I’m not ready to go into that just yet.What I can say is that, knowing what I know now, it’s understandable why my mum struggled. I don’t say this to place blame only to add context.
My mum had experienced many situations in her own life that no child should ever witness or have done to them. Because of that, it’s understandable that when she became a young, single mum, she struggled. Unfortunately, I often bore the brunt of that struggle.
As a child, I was dyslexic and I have ADHD but neither were diagnosed at the time. Instead of support, I was labelled. I was known as “the village idiot”, a name given to me by my mum, along with others that no mother should ever say to her daughter.
I wasn’t just emotionally tormented through words and name calling there was physical pain too but the deepest scars were emotional. Those are the ones that stay with you the longest.
Over time, I learned to turn that torment into fuel. I used it to make myself stronger, to prove myself, to keep going when it would have been easier to stop. I struggled badly at school, which now makes complete sense, but when I find something I truly enjoy and connect with, I thrive.That’s when I excel in work, in business, and in life.
Now, I’m no angel far from it. I’ve had my struggles, especially bringing up three children on my own, and I fully own that. I often think to myself, “Oh my God, why did that happen?” or “Why did I do that?” But that’s life. Those are experiences, and they shape us.
I’m not feeling sorry for myself for my past. In fact, I can look back now and see it as a survival tool. I genuinely believe that if I hadn’t learned how to cope as a child, I wouldn’t have survived the stress of raising my children on my own. That’s something I’ll dive into deeper another day that’s a whole different chapter.
Finding out why everything used to go into slow motion was a real breakthrough for me. It explains so much. Understanding that I experienced dissociation as a child helped me make sense of things I’ve carried for years.
What I want to say is this: there’s no good sitting around feeling sorry for yourself. You have to get on with life. Use your negatives as positives. Thrive on your emotions. It’s true everything eventually catches up with you. I still suffer from nightmares and panic attacks, but they don’t define me.
And that’s the point.
Don’t be embarrassed by labels.
Don’t ever call yourself bad names.
Love yourself.
And look after you.
