depersonalization

[i_am_who_i_am]

does anyone here ever find their dp feels sinister. sometimes mine feels like everything is unreal but also the enviroment or situation feels dark, eerie and sinister for the moment i am in that state of dp. i dont always experience this feeling with it but lately i have been. its almost as if something evil is going on it feels like. it the worst feeling i have ever had. caused me even much more fear. and now i feel like my whole brain is in a fog when i think back about it because it almost seems like the whole day was a dream. i can not stand dp and dont see how anyone could enjoy this feeling and i know some people do get high just to experience this. itm just bothered about the way my dp felt yesterday it really made me feel like i was losing touch with reality and like i was in some dark sinister area when i was only in my livingroom. nothing looked different just felt that way.

[gummby]

I relate a lot to your post. when I'm out of my DP I try not to think about it if possible. everything feels similar to a nightmare; I notice dark areas of the room or the lighting and it feels like a horror movie. very eerie, jaded, surreal. but this is a natural mechanism your brain uses to deal with something adverse. if you're under too much stress, physiologically you're health is jeopardized. your emotional state, and if you like Maslow, you'll know that you have higher states of mind like self actualization etc etc. most of my psychs never understood my symptoms and because my DP/DR was trauma related they gave me a lot of moral mumbo jumbo. this is not the wisest way of helping a person in our condition. he wanted me to feel normal so he said that its good to feel bad [about my trauma].

I honestly feel you need to help yourself feel comfortable in your skin and then your environment will form to your mind. our household/living environment is a reflection of our mental state. if you're going through something awry you can only fix those problems by dealing with your emotions first. and nobody will care about you as much as you will. probably. you need to feel important, safe, and able to care for yourself and your children. and even t hough i don't have children, i think it's a good thing to be in good shape on every level of your being while taking care of them. I'm really sorry, and I feel for you completely. these mechanisms fade with time and care.


Please msg me if you want to talk

Brittany

[i_am_who_i_am]

My therapist tells me not to do anything to releive the anxiety. He thinks breathing techniques and meditatiing and stuff if good for anxiety but anything i do to try to take my anxiety away i should try to avoid and i should let myself sit with the anxiety until the levels go down on their own. i guess  its a way of learning to manage anxiety without using any outside source. but i find that method tricky because theres a fine line between what is reassurance and what is not.  to me the journal sounds like a good idea but i just wonder if it would be considered a form of reassurance because it would be something i would be doing to help relieve the anxiety instead of just sitting through it.

[Sue357]

Hi.  I suffer from anxiety but it seems to be getting better, thanks to klonopin.  I have a question:  I hear people talk about dp but not sure I have ever had it.  What exactly is it

[RubyWitch]

Hmmmmmmmm. I never thought of my journal as a source of reassurance. Interesting thought. I think, for me, it was simply a place to write down my experiences with panic, my thoughts, my fears, my feelings about what and why this was happening to me. If I got any "reassurance" from it, I would say that it came as a recognition of the pattern of my attacks. Eventually I learned some "tricks" to help get through an attack and I'd write about them in the journal. I'd write down things I'd read about panic attacks that helped calm me down, made sense of all the symptoms and why they were happening, which took away a great deal of the fear. I wrote in the journal a lot because I was afraid to tell anyone what was happening to me, how terrifying the attacks were, how I believed it meant I was going crazy.
Now that I've been thinking about it for the first time in a long while, I think that journal did become a source of reassurance to me. But I see that as being a good thing. What is wrong with reassurance? What is wrong with ANYTHING, be it a journal or medication, or therapy, if it helps us cope with this disorder?
There are so many types of therapy out there, but I don't know of any one kind that frowns on people getting reassurance from wherever they can. That dictates we must endure an attack with nothing to help us. Perhaps they mean to toughen us up, but that makes no sense to me and I would find that philosophy rather cruel. It also sounds really counterproductive. I read in a book written by a very famous psychiatrist who said that anything that helped us deal with panic was OK...........as long as it was legal. That made me laugh, but it also made tremendous sense to me.
Perhaps I am not understanding what you mean by "reassurance." You say that what you find "tricky" about therapy is that at some point you can't call everything reassurance. I do agree with that only because not everything IS reassuring. If something helps us BECAUSE it IS reassuring, what could possibly be wrong with that?
Maybe I need you to clarify this theory for me.
      

[i_am_who_i_am]

I think the journal thing is a good idea but i am wondering if its a form of reassurance. see cause its doing something to take away teh uncomfortable feeling of anxiety and as part of therapy arent we suppose to avoid doing things to purposely take away the anxiety and encouraged to sit with it? see thats what i find tricky about therapy because at some point you cant call everything reassurance.

[RubyWitch]

I know we can talk ourselves into anxiety/panic attacks, but I've never believed that about dp episodes. Which doesn't mean I'm saying your therapist is wrong, but from 40+ years of experience with panic attacks and episodes of dp, I honestly don't believe I've ever talked myself into an episode of dp. I can lay claim to bringing on hundreds of panic attacks.
Perhaps it has something to do with OCD which you have and I don't............?
I DO think about my panic attacks and dp episodes, but for many, many years now, I've kept a journal and write down as much information as I can about each episode........the time and date and how I was feeling before it hit and what was going on in my life at the time and how long it lasted and what I remember feeling during the episode. And then I close the book and forget about them. I know that's easier for me to do without the OCD, but it couldn't hurt to try it. If you stick with it, who knows, it may help to get it all out of your head so you don't keep dwelling on it. If the thoughts come back, pull out your journal and write down all your feelings. Think of it like taking out the garbage. When it's full it really bugs us and we keep thinking "I should take out the trash," but we put it off until tomorrow and sometimes the day after that, but think about how good we feel when we finally do take it out and have a fresh, empty bag (what a dumb anology!) but that's really how I feel when I write it all down. For as long as it takes me to fill the garbage can up again, I'm free from thinking about it.
Well, now you know why I'm not a therapist, eh? LOL
Be strong. Hang in there. Someday they will hopefully be able to cure us of this.
Peace
Greenlydia  

[i_am_who_i_am]

I have told my thrapist about it and he does not seem to think its serious and i think maybe he thinks i bring it on myself a lot  because i have ocd and tend to obsess about mental health. so when i have a dp attack i find continuing to think about it only makes it come back. i guess what scares me the most about lastnights is that if i had to look at it from the outside i would see myself as some person completely lifeless on auto pilot sitting in a dimly lit sinister looking room where everything including time stood still. and now that the feeling is gone i am haunted by thinking about how it felt which eventually will only bring it back on.

[RubyWitch]

I can't say that my dp has ever felt exactly like yours, but I'm betting that everyone who experiences dp, experiences it in different ways. I CAN relate to your feeling that it's "eerie." It scares me very badly. My biggest fear is that I will never come out of it, that this terrifying way I am experiencing reality will be how I always see the world.
I understand what you mean about things not actually looking different, everything just feels different..............strange, wrong, weird, scary. I've often thought of it as being caught in a momentary time/mind warp. When it finally passes, I feel very tired and on edge, like I'm just waiting for it to happen again. I have never found a way to help make this feeling go away. The normal steps you might use for a panic attack just don't work in this situation. You just have to ride it out. I do usually take an extra (rescue) dose of my antianxiety med, but while it does nothing to stop the dp, it does help when it's over.

If you're in therapy, talk to your therapist about this. Understanding why and how it happens will help........some. But just like a panic attack, when you're in the middle of one, it's extremely difficult to think rationally, you are just too overloaded with feelings and fear, the mind has a hard time being heard.

Just as we don't die from panic attacks, we don't die or go crazy from dp "attacks" either. It's just another "ride" those of us with anxiety/panic get to go on now and again.
Nobody could invent a ride as scary as these.

OH..........almost forgot. One time it happened to me at home and I got into bed and pulled the covers over my head. I think it worked on the therory as a sensory deprivation chamber but blocking out all the stimuli. It didn't make it stop completely, but I know it didn't last nearly as long, was not as frightening and I didn't feel as odd afterwards. Unfortunatly, I work in a hospital and can hardly crawl into a patients bed and say "excuse me, do you mind if we pull the covers over our heads for a bit?"

Talk to a professional. I don't think there's a "cure," but understanding them does help in the long run.
Be strong
Peace
Greenlydia