Absent

DPD obviously numbs feeling, emotional memory, and takes the emotion and ‘actuality’ out of my senses. For me, negative situations and memories are often allowed through though. They can be powerful hurtful and destructive. It makes sense to me that negatives can get through, as they affirm the DPD state, i.e. does not threaten it, as positive feeling would.

 

Does anyone else get this disparity?

With DPD inhibiting the experience of time and of emotional memory, I expect others here get the mismatch of knowing about the past but not feeling that it happened, how long ago it was, or that it was to do with you. But I also get extreme episodes in which I literally experience that it is sometime years ago, which all the immediacy and expectation of it being then now. My mind knows truth, i.e. it is 2017 and years have gone. I know factually what has happened in the interim but have no emotional reality of that. So an argument goes on between my intellect and the rest of me, trying to resolve the temporal and experiential dissonance. It doesn’t resolve of course, I can’t force feeling of it being here and now or of time having passed. I understand how this is from DP, but the shock is awful. It is like continually being at the point of emerging from a coma and finding the world has moved on. It is painful grieving for the ‘unaware’ DP/DR years. I can’t experience a continuum of having existed across time.

Does anyone else get these shocks so severely?

 

Yes, this is typical of DPD. You still know what would otherwise make you happy and feel good, but you don't experience the emotion of those things. It is like this all the time for me and I know the frustration you describe. I've learnt to appreciate noticing at least logically what I know is good in the world around me, even though I don't feel it directly. It's not the same of course, but has helped me manage the loss.

A long time after DPD began for me, disturbed thoughts started and are relentless. Aspects are related to ocd but they are still a product of DP/DR. I think that the idea I might act on some extreme thought is a result of the division of self from environment and the ‘loss of agency’. Also, I’m trying to interpret everything around me when it is so unreal and so the fear of ‘getting it wrong’ gets too important.

So I also have compulsions and ideas to say and do awful things – out of character. They are upsetting and scary but I try to let them go by despite that - I try to just casually observe them as part of my disrupted state. I hope they are passing for you.

Alcohol briefly helps body sense but obviously not derealization. Then body sense, DP and DR are worse for days. Scarcely worth it though sometimes I indulge to go to happy land. Which I need.