Depersonalization and Derealization

My mental health has taken a hit recently. Unfortunately, I am person who will struggle with my mental health all my life. In the beginning, it was difficult to accept that I would never be ‘cured’ but, now I have, I am able to work on levelling out my peaks and troughs, while taking comfort in the knowledge that when I am down, I will come back up. In a way, this acceptance has helped me manage my chronic illness too, but that’s not the point of this post.

Today I want to talk about, not what caused this bought of depression, not how I’m managing it, but how I experience it. Today, I want to talk to you about dissociation.

When a brain is exposed to prolonged, sustained trauma, it will often learn to dissociate as a coping mechanism. That is, it will remove your consciousness from your body, from the time and place where you are, and give you an alternate reality to focus on so that you don’t have to endure what is happening to you.

For those of us with CPTSD (Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder), even after the trauma has passed, the brain can continue to employ this technique to every day stressors. This can be a blessing and a curse. It means that when traumatic events do occur, we are better equipped to deal with them than the average person. We are often calm in high-stress situations because we are able to emotionally and mentally remove ourselves from it. But it can also caused severe mental illnesses such as DID, OSDD, sociopathy, psychopathy, psychosis and others. In me, it has distorted my sense of reality. The more stressed or anxious I am, the more I dissociate, so I struggle to remember some of the biggest moments in my life, like my wedding and my graduation.

Before I was able to name my problems, I always knew that I had difficulty distinguishing the difference between truth and lies. And not just the lies that others told me, but the ones I told myself too.

When I was a child I had imaginary friends who I sometimes forgot weren’t real people. Sometimes I even heard them speak to me. It didn’t help that my real friends and I would talk about them as if they existed in the world, but nobody else ever got confused like I did.

When I was a teenager I was a pathological liar (I’m sure I’ll get into the reasons for that in another post some day). In order to make my lies believable, I would envision the made-up scenario in my head. I would submerge myself in every detail so that if I was ever quizzed or questioned about it I would be able to give accurate, consistent information. However, the more I told a lie the more I began to believe that it was real. There were a couple of times when I was presented with witnesses and hard evidence that a thing had not in fact occurred, and I flat-out could not believe it.

As a young adult I became fascinated by conspiracy theories and repeated to myself the mantra “question everything”. I became paranoid about everyone and everything I thought I knew. During this time I was also romantically involved with an abusive narcissist, and by the end of the relationship I genuinely believed that he could read my mind.

When that relationship ended I tried to commit suicide by overdose. The drugs made me dizzy, hazy, and sleepy. For about year after that, I was convinced I had actually died from the overdose and that everything I was experiencing from that point onward, was some form of afterlife.

There was a time where I hadn’t slept in several days and my skin was itchy. I thought that if I cut my skin open then the itch would be able to escape and I would feel better.

Often I recall things, and I’m not sure if they actually happened or if I dreamed it. I have been wrong in both directions too (thinking something did happen but it turned out to be a dream, and thinking I dreamed something that turned out to have actually happened).

The pandemic has been the definition of a stressful/traumatic experience for everyone. When it first began, I basically ignored it, thinking of it like another swine flu that is blown up by the media but will ultimately not effect my life in any real way. When lockdown began, that was when I realised my own vulnerability and the immensity of the destruction this virus could cause. That was when I started to flip-flop between “this can’t be real. It’s not really happening” to “this is the most important event of my lifetime and everything that happens now will effect our lives and the lives of generations to come.”

I need to explain though, the “this can’t be real. It’s not really happening” thoughts are not the general disbelief that everyone feels in these kinds of situations. The kind where they don’t want it to be real but ultimately they know it is. This is the kind of disbelief where I am questioning my own existence and the existence of the world around me.

The first time I saw people wearing masks out in public, I thought that it was a simulation. I thought they were holographic projections of what a futuristic world could look like. When I went outside during the first lockdown, the streets were abandoned. There was no traffic and no people walking around. I thought I was in a post-apocalyptic film or game, I kept waiting for something to happen, but nothing did.

I’m not completely detached from reality though. If I was, I wouldn’t be able to communicate these things to you. It’s like I have a split brain and while one part believes that nothing is real, the other part is well aware of what is actually happening. It’s difficult to explain the disjointed feeling of unreal and real at the same time.

Here’s an example from the other day: I saw an electric scooter abandoned in the middle of a green area between roads. I saw it there a few days in a row and it became part of the scenery, so I stopped noticing it. The next time I saw it, it was laying on its side, on the verge of the green rather than in the centre. The most obvious explanation for this is that somebody moved it. Maybe they used it and returned it to a slightly different place. Maybe it was in their way so they pushed it to one side. Maybe some kids were messing about and it got shoved a little way away. However the exact movement came about, it was most likely a person that caused it to move. But I didn’t see that happen. From my perspective, it was in one place, then it was in a different place. So what if it disappeared for a day or two, then on its reappearance, it misjudged the time and speed of its arrival and ended up in the wrong place? What if it teleported to somewhere else entirely and when it tried to come back it got it’s co-ordinates wrong and missed it’s spot by a few feet? You see, even though it’s highly unlikely that this is what happened, I didn’t see it, so I don’t know for sure. I can’t know for sure, so in my mind any of these scenarios are equally possible.

It’s like man landing on the moon. We know that’s probably what happened, but we didn’t see it happen ourselves, so how can we know for sure that it actually did?

My most recent dissociative thought was that I was a game character that was stuck in first-person mode. I found it irritating and wanted to switch to third-person so I could see where I was going better. I know I’m not a character in a game, but if I was, would I know?

For a long time I thought (because my psychiatrist told me) that it was caused by my having an “overactive imagination”. But I’ve been thinking about this recently, and I believe it’s actually because people close to me have been fucking with my sense of reality all my life.

It started with my Mother. With things as small as “you did ask for a cup of tea, I wouldn’t have made you one if you hadn’t”, all the way to keeping the details of my Father’s illness a secret. I knew they were going to hospitals a lot and I knew he was in pain all the time, but they never told us what was going on. Maybe they were trying to protect us, or maybe they are terrified of being vulnerable in front of us. Either way, the outcome was the same. I have many memories of my childhood that my Mother completely denies happened, but I know that they did because my brothers can confirm them.

Then came a whole series of people who would tell me one thing, then do something else. My first boyfriend who said he loved me, then hit me. My school friends who said that we would all go to Sixth Form together, then left me on my own and went off to college together instead. The narssacist who lied about pretty much everything and made everything my fault some how. My best friend in the whole world, who I’d known and loved for 10 years who told me that no matter what his new girlfriend did or said, he would never lose me from his life because I was too important to him, who then ghosted me at the worst time in my life (I only knew he wasn’t dead because his Mum would have told me if he was). The girlfriend who played the domestic abuse victim who was actually an abuser herself. The boyfriend who told me he loved me, then took it back the next day. Everybody I ever trusted, lied to me. Is it really any wonder that I don’t know what’s real and what’s not?

My husband knows how important open honesty is to me. In our marriage hard truths are a sign of love and respect, even if they hurt us both, because it’s a demonstration of trust. Promises are a rare thing between us, because we won’t make one that we can’t be certain we’ll keep. All too often people will say things like “I promise I will always love you/will always be here/will never hurt you/will keep you safe” but people change and no-one has that much control over life.

I am a scientist and I believe that empirical evidence can prove or disprove the existence of something. I am religious and spiritual, and I know that there are some things in this world that we cannot explain, but that doesn’t make them any less real. I am a fiction writer and I spend a lot of time “off with the fairies” imagining made up people and places and events. I am a philosopher and continue to “question everything” in order to find deeper meaning. I am a survivor of trauma and abuse, I know that sometimes things that you didn’t believe would ever happen, do happen. I am neurodivergent and the world is not how I was taught it should be. I also have minor prosopagnosia (face blindness) so strangers all look like generic NPCs to me. All of these things effect how I experience the world around me, and inside of me. Sometimes I wonder how many other people experience the world like I do.

From time to time this dissociation can cause an existential crisis in me, but I am aware when that is occurring and can take the time and space to reconcile this. For the rest of the time, as long as I’m rational and not a danger to myself or others, does any of it really matter?

How Are You?

Sorry it has taken so long for me to get around to this. Doing anything is difficult when you’re depressed. But more on that later.

For now, I’m going to give you a general update on my health. The itching went away by itself, about 3 weeks after my last post. I was taking 2 antihistamines a day but I don’t know how much of an effect they actually had since I started taking them before I went to see the doctor. Does it usually take 4-5 weeks for antihistamines to work?

But I’m explaining things out of order. The blood tests that I mentioned in my last post, all came back normal (as is always the way), so I know it wasn’t cancer, or thyroid issues, or MS, or any of the other things that I was worried about. What it did mean, was that the doctor didn’t know what was going on (as is always the way). She did, however, ask about my M.E.

I think that since “long Covid” has become a thing, doctors have suddenly become more familiar with M.E (also known as post viral fatigue) because it shares so many symptoms and similarities (ikr, who’d’ve thought🙃). The doctor asked me when I’d been diagnosed, and I told her that I hadn’t officially yet. So, she said that she would put in a referral for me. She told me that it would need her to fill out an evaluation form, and that I’d also need to have another set of bloods done and a urine test. She called me the next day to ask me some questions about how my illness effects my day to day life. But at the time I was having kind of a brain foggy day and, since I’ve been living with this condition for so long, I’ve learned to adapt to my limitations. I find it difficult to determine how much the illness impacts my life since my measurement of “normal” has shifted so much, so I basically ended up telling her that I’m actually doing quite well and live a relatively normal life. It was only when I was talking to my fiancé afterwards about it, that I realised it still impacts my life every day because I have to make adaptations to live. If I were healthy, I wouldn’t need to make all of these allowances in order to just go about my day to day business. I intended to tell her all of this when I called her back for the blood and urine results, but unfortunately I haven’t been well enough to go ahead with any of that.

The 4-5 weeks worth of itching really took it out with me, and then there was an incident just before Christmas where a muscle spasm landed me in A&E. I’ve been weak ever since and the holidays in general are always a stressful occasion for me. So basically, I’ve been in a flare for about two months, with the odd ‘okay’ day.

Now (as mentioned at the start) my mental health is really starting to be affected. Not just because of my physical illnesses, the pain, fatigue and insomnia that comes with all of that, but also because of the state of the world as it currently is. I’ll go into that in more detail another time though, it deserves its own post.

I am also currently at my highest ever weight. Even back when I was almost completely bedbound, I never got up to this weight. Part of that is because, back then, I had to look after myself, so if I couldn’t get out of bed, I couldn’t eat very much. But now I have a fiancé who cooks all my meals for me, so that means that I’m still eating loads of calories but not burning them off, so my weight keeps rising. I have just bought myself a treadmill, which is something that I have wanted for as long as I can remember, and I’m planning to start walking, a little bit at a time, to build up some strength and stamina, without having to go outside.

I can’t think of anything else to tell you at this point. Basically, everything is crap.

You Don’t Have to do Anything

In this Covid-19 pandemic that we are all currently living in, there seems to have arisen a new social pressure to be productive and achieve. There’s a lot of emphasis of what new skills you will have acquired once the lockdown is lifted. What renovations you will have made to your life and your home. I have seen and heard many people say something similar to “You finally have the time to do all of those things you always said you never had the time for”, and while this may be essentially true, there is no reason why you should now be obligated to do those things.

The thing that these people are overlooking, is that this situation is unprecedented for most of us, and that what we are actually living through a massive shared trauma. For these people, their go-to coping mechanism is to keep busy so that they don’t have to sit with, and acknowledge their feelings about what is going on around them. These people will likely find that eventually they will run out of things to keep themselves busy, or that their thoughts will overpower their actions so that their ‘keeping busy’ tasks are no longer able to distract them. These people are often in denial about their true feelings, and their underlying insecurity requires them to validate their avoidance coping mechanism by shaming others into doing the same things as them.

A common feeling that is shared by many of us right now, is one of helplessness or uselessness. There is nothing we can do and nothing that can be done for us. We have no control over the virus or how our governments choose to react to it. Sometimes, these feelings can bleed into our other activities and soon we find ourselves thinking, what’s the point in doing anything if there’s nothing we can do. This apathy can quickly spiral into depression where we find ourselves wanting to do something but feeling too miserable and down-trodden to act on it. This then circles back to our original feelings of helplessness and uselessness.

Anybody who has suffered with depression before will recognise this kind of cycle, and if you’ve been lucky enough to get help, you’ll have your own coping mechanisms to dig your way out or to manage your feelings. But for a lot of people, this will be a new sensation.

For people who have never had to deal with this kind of depression and isolation, it can be terrifying not knowing what to do. Desperate to connect with people and know that they are not alone, these people go to social media where they are bombarded with all of the things that the “productive” people are accomplishing. They are asked “What have you been up to?” “What have you done?” and suddenly they feel like they have to justify themselves and defend their lack of activity. This will send them down one of two paths. Either they will force themselves to be productive, even though their heart isn’t in it, or the feelings of shame will confirm for them that there is something wrong with them and that they are lazy, useless and wasting precious time etc.

The first outcome will lead to frustration, exhaustion, possibly anger, and no task attempted will be given full attention or dedication and so won’t live up to the standards that the person is now expecting of themselves. This will eventually lead them to thoughts such as “I can’t do anything right even when I try” and a return to depression. The second option reduces self-worth and increases anxiety and depression as well as isolating them further by making them believe that they are the only people feeling this way. These feelings could easily lead to self-neglect or self-harm very quickly.

Depression is not an easy thing to overcome, especially if it’s your first time fighting with the beast, and I’m not going to pretend that I have an answer for you on how to break out of the cycle I described earlier. Honestly, the reason I’m talking about it in the first place is because I am stuck in it myself. But from my experience and knowledge I can present to you these thoughts and observations. I hope that when you read them, you believe them and that they can bring you at least a little relief if not show you the path out.

• Processing trauma takes time and energy and is a different process for all of us.
• This is something that has never happened to us before so there is no correct or incorrect way of dealing with it.
• Just because a lot of people are doing something, does not mean that you should be doing it too or that it is the right thing to do.
•  Acknowledging your feelings is the first step to accepting them.
• You are the authority on yourself. Trust yourself, believe in yourself, focus on yourself. Don’t worry about anyone else. Their opinions can’t hurt you.

Anger

I have been angry recently. The anger comes and goes, just like the other emotions I feel, but I’ve been feeling angry for the past few weeks now and I don’t think it’s going away any time soon. I’m angry about the things that my body won’t allow me to do and I’m angry at the unwanted things that it does do. I usually use humour to make my disability easier (for myself and others) to deal with but I’ve found that by doing this I have made it so that the people around me don’t fully understand the difficulties that I live with. This then means that when the anger rears its ugly head, I end up getting frustrated and irritated and sometimes even aggressive towards people who laugh at me in the way that I would normally laugh at myself. Of course they can’t be blamed for laughing at me this way since I’ve already established it as an acceptable behaviour by doing it myself. But the point here is not that I feel victimised because I’m being laughed at, it’s just that the laughter implies that it’s not a vicious all consuming disease that is slowly stealing my life away from me.

I find myself in situations where I have to remind people that my life isn’t the same as theirs and that there are things that I cannot do, and that repetition just drives it home a lot harder and a lot more frequently than is comfortable. It also reminds me of my teen years when I suffered severely from depression and anxiety and therefore couldn’t work and rarely went out. People would call me lazy because they couldn’t see the illness that I was suffering with. This feels very much like that, like people can’t understand why I don’t do certain things because they can’t see the way that I feel and I’ve taught them to laugh at the illness as if it’s something that doesn’t affect me.

Only yesterday I was talking to a friend and fellow student about future career prospects. She said that she didn’t want an office job because she didn’t want to be cooped up and sat down all day, and I replied that I didn’t have much of a choice anymore. She asked why.

Last week I was talking to my partner about how I wanted to restrict our future children’s exposure to technology. I wanted them to have an old-fashioned childhood where they played outside instead of sitting on their consoles or tablets or phones all day. “Says the person who sits around on her phone all day” he laughed. I wanted to scream at him. Do you know how much I would love to go for a bike ride or camping or tree climbing or a long walk or play at the beach or go and feed the ducks or even just have a day out where I don’t have to plan everything in advance because I need to know where and when I can sit down and what the terrain will be like and how long I’m going to be on my feet and how far away things are and what time of day we’re going to be out and what the weather and temperature will be and if we’re able to come home quickly and what else needs to be done that day and how many people are going to be there and what’s expected of me while I’m there and how much enthusiasm will I need to put in. I ‘sit around on my phone all day’ because that takes little to no energy and after a 10 to 12 hour week that’s about all I have left.

So yeah, I’m angry. I’m angry because of all the things that I wanted to do with my life that I now seem unable to do, and I’m angry that people look at me and see me as lazy, and that no one seems to notice how hard I work just do as much as I do do. I’m angry because when I do take the time I need to rest, I feel like I’m letting myself and everyone around me down. I’m angry because life is hard every single day and I am alone in this fight.