A catch-up....

Hello to anyone reading this. I can see that I've had a few hundred views so far, which is interesting. No idea how you found this site, guess you are as desperate as I am to find a cure for depersonalization, hmm?

My inner state has changed, but not positively, mostly negatively since I last wrote on this blog.
In fact, the last time I wrote anything for this blog was in March this year. Wow, that seems like a different lifetime and like I was a different person back then (bizarre sense of time perception and identity is a strong symptom of DP). I went to South America in May, 2 months later and that entire experience was essentially nullified by DP/DR. I felt completely numb and not like myself. In fact I lost every cool part of my personality, muffled beneath the despair and crippling loneliness I felt.

It just made me realize that, though I can still exist and survive, I can't LIVE. I can't ENJOY life, I merely exist in it. I can't perform in any area of my life, particularly socially, anywhere NEAR the same level as I once could, so whenever I meet someone, regardless of who they are, they are meeting a shit version of the real me. A pathetic shadow of a person. It SUCKS, it is SO FUCKING UNFAIR. WHY THE FUCK DID THIS SHIT HAVE TO HAPPEN TO ME? AS IF I DIDNT FUCKING HAVE ENOUGH TO DEAL WITH BEFORE? GOD YOU FUCKING CUNT HOW DARE YOU CURSE ME WITH THIS AFFLICTION. FUCK YOU.

Progress

It's March. This means that my time at University is coming to an end next month. After this I will spend 3 months in South America. After that? Well, that's a tough one.

School and Uni allow everyone a safety net, because the government will give you cash and people let you off for mistakes, but when that comes to an end, that's it. You are on your own. That's a frightening proposition for me in my current mental state.

Fuck it, it's going to come eventually, I'm more worried about South America, in terms of not being able to enjoy a once in a lifetime experience because of crippling.... *whatever it is that is happening my head*..

Adios

The toughest thing imaginable

Trying to put a label on what this experience is, is really futile in the end. Ultimately there is no way of effectively communicating that which is so bizzarre. But not just bizzarre, it's so much more than that, so much more significant. It's not your every day experience of bizzarre. It's the ultimate in surreal feelings. A bullet through the middle of your consciousness.

I wake up every day and think 'what the fuck is going on' because truthfully I don't know.
It sometimes feels like what I am experiencing is worse than insanity, and that perhaps maybe I have gone insane. The only thing that keeps me grounded is the remaining pieces of my self which have been left behind after the slaughter of my personality.

PARALYZING SOCIAL ANXIETY& HYPER-TENSION is now my life.

Creativity, or the lack thereof.

What is creativity? Why am I so detached from it? All of my ideas are stale and dry, infact, I don't really have ideas anymore. Nothing inspires me anymore in a pure kind of way. The only thing I want to do is rip off other peoples ideas.

I am so detached from my mind. I also have the flu just in time for new years eve. Excellent.

Summary of all posts

I feel fucking terrible. My emotions feel suppressed and underneath a blanket. I am angry and intolerant and irritated constantly. Nothing seems to alleviate my anger because I’m not allowed to do so in a society like this. Being in Bath has magnified everything 10x fold. I hate it here so so much.

I drank a lot last night, I’m giving up drink, all it does is push my feelings even further down and when I’m on my own I collapse into a pit of despair. I thought about suicide last night and I couldn’t even cry about it. That’s a new low.

When I’m around other people I can’t feel my anger, I become super tense and uptight, I can’t be emotionally expressive. It’s like I can only feel emotions when I’m by myself. My brain feels like it’s on high alert around other people. When I’m with Mum & Dad I can feel anger but not much else.  I can’t even remember what the fucking anger is about. 

Thursday, 13 September 2012

What to do?

I have a hard time getting my words right and formulating ideas in my head.

Today I feel quite similar with a few differences. I just feel on high alert constantly. I could be living a care-free life but I can't because I am stuck in this state of being.

A normal person shifts through memories in their heads of places and people and events and times. A normal person feels the world, or at least THEIR world, is familiar. I do not.

I feel alienated. My life is being limited so much. Instead of having healthy relationships with friends and families I am living life disconnected from all of them.

I barely ever see my friends. People don't call me anymore. I feel awkward and unusual around people.

I feel so spaced out and I'm sick of it. I don't know what to DO about any of this.

Here I will attempt to cover 'positive' and negative aspects of dissociation. 

Dissociation keeps a person disconnected from the sense of being a person. This much I know is true. 

Many people complain of feeling cut off from themselves and their feelings. I am one of these people. 

My therapist today made me aware of how I may be keeping myself in a depersonalized state of mind because, in some ways, there are benefits to feeling cold and disconnected from the world. Below I will summarise a few of these so called 'benefits'.

1.) Feeling disconnected from emotions means not having to feel the negative ones. 

Everyone loathes negative emotions. The crushing lows, social anxiety & isolation, awkwardness, shyness, lack of self-esteem and confidence, despair, panic, depression etc etc. The list is incredibly long. 

I've found in my own experience of dissociation that feelings can be swept under the rug. 

I know someone who has a lot of spare cash. This guy inherited it from a member of his family who died, either that or they gave it to him as a gift, I can't remember. Anyway, this guy has it all. He's charming, has girls fawning over him, more money than he can spend which means he can go on holiday all the time. 

I used to feel incredibly envious of this guy, but now I don't. Why? Dissociation. I am detached from the part of me that feels jealous and wants to be him. I can make excuses to myself such as, 'Well, I don't care anyway' or 'I just can't be bothered with this' or 'I've got bigger issues to deal with anyway' or 'I'm enlightened'. Dissociation allows me to not feel jealousy or envy and carry on the narrative I have with myself in my head and at the same time distracting me from the sea of depression and anxiety and negative self-image that lurks below the surface. Unconsciously, I feel inferior and angry and resent his success in life, but externally I remain cold and non-envious. 

2.) One can derive a sense of superiority through detachment. 

I came to depersonalization, in part, through spirituality. I seeked to be in control of my feelings. In depersonalization feelings aren't felt to the same extent and can be discarded with excuses. "Well ofcourse I don't feel happy or sad, I'm depersonalised... duh.." 

This kind of thinking doesn't actually help in anyway, it just prolongs the feelings of numbness. You are excusing yourself for not feeling anything, which has no benefits apart from keeping you more attached to what your feeling and identifying with it further.

When looking at how most of humanity allows emotions to dictate behaviour, somehow a depersonalised individual can feel they are 'above' emotions or 'above' personal problems, which is exactly the type of sense of superiority I am referring to. 

I have been guilty of this many many times in the past and one thing that I am now working on is not lying to myself about how I really feel and instead trying to actively feel my anger, hurt, frustration, disappointment and vulnerability instead of acting as if these issues will go on their own or as if I am somehow above them. We all have our cross to bear.

3.) Lack of self means a lack of the problems associated with self. (Or does it?)

Most people are preoccupied with a self-image a lot of the time. Many are trying to change it, many are relatively happy with it, others despise and hate it. I fell into the last category mentioned. 

I never liked myself. I always hated my looks. I thought my eyes were too small and I wished they were blue. I thought my nose was too big and bulbous and strangely slanted. I thought my jaw wasn't manly enough, that I looked too young, that I looked tired and unwell. The list goes on and on. I was constantly dissapointed with what I saw in the mirror and this created unhappiness for me. I was quite vain while paradoxically hating what I was being vain about. 

While depersonalised, these kinds of thoughts about how we are and negative or positive emotions around this issue tend to be put on the back burner. My thought process stopped being about my physical image, body and behaviour and changed to be purely about depersonalisation and how spaced out I felt. The narrative changed from obsessing about 'me' to obsessing about something that was happening TO 'me'. This ties in with 2.) These issues were now no longer in my conscious awareness, so I felt like I had improved, like I had shed attachment to my body. 

Once again I was wrong. Being around others, even so called friends made me feel inferior. I was jealous of their lives and what they were doing. The connections they had made me angry and irritable but again I just convinced myself that I wasn't jealous and that I wasn't envious. These were just more ways of keeping myself avoiding personal issues. 

I know that I am consistently avoiding because I can feel the energy of my body. Eckhart Tolle mentions frequently about 'the pain body'. I feel this makes a great deal of sense and can see in my own experience how dissociation keeps one from focusing attention upon the pain, while at the same time being a direct part of the pain itself. 

NEW POST-

For the last few weeks I have been seeing a therapist. The therapist is a woman who mainly specialises in problems arising for Women after childbirth. Due to her specialist subject, I wasn't sure whether she was the right person for helping me to decipher exactly what has been happening to me for the past 18 months, but it turns out she is very good.

If you haven't read my introductory post then I will quickly summarise it...

I have been experiencing depersonalisation and derealization for close to two years. Normally, these two 'disorders' come about due to heavy drug use, trauma, sexual & physical abuse in childhood and beyond or by merely experimenting with drugs like weed or hallucinogenic stuff such as LSD or 2ci, etc.

For me, though I had been a recreational drug user in the past, my feelings of unreality and loss of a self came about through a history of anxiety and depression as well as a meditative practice which may have contributed to a kind of breakdown while I was in my first year of University in London.

A quick google search will tell you most of what you need to know about dissociative disorders and the impact they can have on functioning. I am just getting by as it is.

What I hope to do in this blog is to keep an online journal of my thoughts and feelings, as well as actively searching for a solution to the feelings of unreality, which I feel are rooted in my anxiety, depression, obsessive & analytical thinking as well as having a fragile identity. My therapist thinks the same and has helped immeasurably in making me aware of the possibilities of why I am experiencing this. She also recommended I keep a blog, so hey, that's good.

Avoidance of intense, debilitating emotions seems to be the main aspect of why I feel the way I do. Beneath the surface of my outer self, lies an incredibly anxious and perhaps depressed person; though most would never think anything like this if they met me and would likely consider me 'personable' and maybe even charming.