Day 9: Paranoia & Dissociation - When Stress Distorts Reality.
This post is part of a 10‑day series exploring the nine criteria for Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), followed by my personal diagnosis story. These posts are educational in nature and rooted in lived experience — they are not intended as tools for self‑diagnosis.
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Sometimes, stress doesn’t just feel overwhelming. It alters reality.
You might suddenly feel like people are against you.
You might question whether your memories are real.
You might feel like you’re floating outside your body, watching yourself from far away.
You might feel numb, foggy, disconnected, like the world isn’t quite real.
The DSM describes this as “transient, stress-related paranoid ideation or severe dissociative symptoms.”
But that doesn’t capture how scary it can be.
How isolating.
How hard it is to explain to someone who’s never felt it.
What This Looks Like For Me
I didn’t know what dissociation was.
I just thought I was “spacing out.” Or “shutting down.”
But there were moments when I couldn’t feel my body.
Moments when I couldn’t remember what I’d just said.
Moments when I felt like I was watching my life through glass.
And then there was the paranoia. Almost constant at some points.
A sudden belief that someone was mad at me.
That I was being judged.
That I was about to be left, punished, exposed.
But it was also more than that
It was the inability to take my garbage to the dumpster because I felt like I was being watched.
The inability to leave my room at night because I always felt like there’d be someone in a window.
The inability to look at my reflection in anything because I questioned if I was real.
It didn’t come from nowhere.
It came from stress. From fear. From old wounds being pressed too hard, too fast.
What Helps
Learning the signs. Once I knew what dissociation and paranoia looked like in me, I could catch them earlier. While I try to distract my mind more so I don’t have the opportunity to dissociate, it can cause its own issues.
Grounding techniques. Cold water, deep breathing, naming random things I can see, anything to bring me back to the present. (I randomly called out a pink garbage lid in the car, and my husband laughed. It’s been a learning process to say the least.)
Safe people. Friends and loved ones who didn’t dismiss it, but gently reminded me of what is real.
Therapy. Especially trauma-informed work that helped me understand why my brain protects me this way, and how to feel safe again. This comes with a lot of sitting in my own discomfort, which I’m not very good at.
If You Relate
You’re not crazy.
You’re not broken.
You’re not making it up.
Your brain is doing what it learned to do: protect you.
Even if it’s not always helpful now, it was helpful once.
And you can learn new ways to feel safe. Ways that don’t require you to disappear.
You’re allowed to come back.
To stay present.
To feel real again.
