[Guest]

Hello
I hope you are well. I thought I'd ask you some questions on the board as I thought some others on here would get some help from this.

I was reading in your story about DP that when you became symptom free, the magical thoughts etc would come back & you would dismiss them & then they never returned. I seem to be having the same problems but I was wondering how you went about dismissing these thoughts.

With these thoughts on life etc, do you think its a matter of having a belief in why we exist that grounds us from not having these thoughts? I know you say that these thoughts come up to replace the real issues we are facing but I was doing some thinking & I figured since all this crap hit me I feel like every old belief has been wiped & I must replace them with new ones but I don't know where to start. I was thinking that this might be the reasons behind this recoccuring themed thought pattern.

Also, what things did you change in your life that you feel made you become well?

Thanks alot!

 

[Guest]

Oh, I DEFINITELY believe those obsessive thoughts are there to keep us from thinking other things....definitely.

It's so complicated, and the question you ask is not very specific. I certainly understand you don't want to just plop your personal question up there, lol...but I'd need to know a LITTLE more about what you mean.

For me, I didn't just say "oh, not going to have those magical thoughts anymore" and that was it, lol...my GOD no. It took a long long time for me to constantly turn away from those thoughts, and they would fight me, and try to pull me back to look at them...and it was a battle to the end.

But...what gave me the strength and ability to do it at all was that in therapy I had started to really see what those thoughts meant. Once I could personally SEE it, I could realize the "game" my own mind was playing on me.

I was trying to not look at things such as:
why I had said for my whole life that I hated my mother and adored my grandmother - one was ALL GOOD in my eyes and one was all bad. That "perfect little division" was a lie. A lie to myself. And there were some things about my grandmother that I despised, things I hated her for, but could never let myself realize. So I made all the bad things live in my mother, and kept my grandmother's image crystal clean.

I was repeating in my adult life a relationship that was bad in childhood. I had formed an intenese relationship with someone and was obsessed with this person (again, someone I was seeing as ALL WONDERFUL) and I was "acting out" some truths from childhood that I didn't realize I was doing.

SO everytime there was a conflict with this person, I would "freak out" and worry about reality and insanity and have paranoid thoughts..all thoughts that distracted me from the stuff really going on.

Does that help at all? OR have I just confused everybody now? LOL...I'll try to think on this some more and see if I can explain better.
Love,
me

 

[Guest]

Hey you

What you said definitely makes sense. I guess I need to get personal for you to answer me though.

Hopefully this will make it clearer. Last week I went for a job interview. I started worrying that I wouldn't be able to cope with learning a new job being at a new place etc, I told that to rack off & it would be fun & exciting. I just had the normal nerves etc & I was excited. They called me back 2 days later & told me that I was their first choice & no body compared to me but they couldn't afford me. They said that they would try & renegotiate for a higher wage with management but for now they would have to say No. So I sat waiting & waiting & later on the day anxiety feelings crept in. I had them on & off all weekend & then Mon, tue & wed I have had the whole "Why am I here?, Is there a God? Where do we go when we Die?" its not so much the questions that scare me its more so the feelings of the unknown, the feeling of fear. I have long forgotten about the job & just doing my best at my current position now.

Did you persistently avoid venturing into those thoughts to get rid of them? Or did you look at why you were having them in the first place?

 

[Guest]

Yep, you've already got your own answers there, crystal clear. But you're asking for a second opinion, lol...

DEFINITLEY avoid looking into those questions of life/death, reality, etc...there are no answers inside them, they are the smoke and mirrors that keep your eyes occupied from the magician's tricky hand.

It's not complicated: life is terribly uncertain. We sometimes want and don't want things at the same time. Want the job, don't want to have to actually go to work, lol.

Want the interviewers to love me, but then don't want to have to accept Reality (lower pay than desired) because it ruins the Perfect Love.

Want to KNOW now...hate indecision. Would rather just not get the job at all than be left hanging.

Want what we want when we want it. NOW.

Feel childish when we realize all that, so hate self, and feel crazy.

But...what is life anyway? Does any of this even exist? Or have I invented the entire world? (see how that acts as opium to lure you away from the other more ordinary crap?)

Love you,
J

 

[Guest]

I got it one now! I thought it was something more complicated & sinister than that.

Love you too!

 

[Guest]

Actually I think I understand it even more now.

When I was a child & I was told no I would behave like a spoilt brat & feel so sad I felt like the world was ending.

I guess you could say this is my adult way of having a tantrum - I just get DP'd! I make it sinister & horrible & frightening so I don't have to deal with not getting my own way.

Definitely a lightbulb moment :idea:

 

[Guest]

the parts that ARE complicated and "sinister" are these:

We feel enormous guilt over how selfish we are. ALL humans are very selfish and very demanding and childish. On top of that reality, we can choose to act with generosity and maturity, but that don't change the underlying selfishness!

If we feel like we're going to be JUDGED for our secret self, we'll live terrified and we'll invent all kinds of good reasons to question the fabric of reality itself.

You're up against how FURIOUS you get when life isn't perfect. You interviewed well, they loved you and now they won't PAY you right! Damn them!

The world you thought you were going to live in once you grew up is very very different. IT's not perfect, it sucks much of the time. ANd you're no better than the other awful people in it, lol.....but that can't stop you from HATING its imperfections. Then you start on "well, who am I to be so demanding..."
Who are you?

A human.

Love,
J

 

[Guest]

HAH!!!! I was posting that right as you were admitting to it!!!

LOLOLOOL

 

[Guest]

Ha Ha

So how do we go about "growing up" so to speak? How do we begin to accept life & all its harsh realities?

 

[Guest]

We feel enormous guilt over how selfish we are. ALL humans are very selfish and very demanding and childish. On top of that reality, we can choose to act with generosity and maturity, but that don't change the underlying selfishness!

hmm...
Can I "indulge"?

(Charger, you SPIN me out.)

Someone said to me recently "Everybody has a RESPONSIBILITY for themselves! I have a responsibility for myself, and YOU have a responsibility to yourself."
Somebody else I know, recently said "I have a responsibility to MYSELF!!! I dont CARE if you're upset with your Mother."

I'd never heard of that before... "Responsibility to yourself". Never.

(DARE I SAY!!!) If I said "I have a responsibility to MYSELF!!!" to my Mother She'd burst out laughing, and say something like, "Well just REMEMBER your social conscience, will you."

I'd never heard of it, it actually has no MEANING for me "Responsibility to myself" doesn't ring a bell...

We feel enormous guilt over how selfish we are. ALL humans are very selfish and very demanding and childish. On top of that reality, we can choose to act with generosity and maturity, but that don't change the underlying selfishness!
Janine. I've never heard of THIS either. Cant relate... sorry. If I try to be EXCLUSIVELY selfish, I feel like I'm pushing against the weight of the world with a twig.
Very selfish, very demanding, very childish NEVER bleepin' heard of it. These comments are my secret fantasy... Utter SELFISHNESS.

Wow. People have told me I'm CONFUSED & PSYCHOTIC, but I know a few OTHER people who get their heads rammed in the dirt over "perceived" selfish and attention-seeking behaviours.

When I'm "selfish" I get swamped with a TONNE of red hot guilt and want to evaporate. When I'm the centre of attention my uneasiness is like fire.

 

[person3]

I read too much Ayn Rand to NOT know about the whole selfishness part. I think at least she saved me there

 

[Guest]

I read too much Ayn Rand to NOT know about the whole selfishness part. I think at least she saved me there

I dont "understand" selfishness.

I understand "grabs at power" people do them to me all day.

I dont think I "need" to read books on Ayn Rand, I think I need to read books on communism.

The control exerted over me is SO subversive, and yet screaming in it's obviousness.

I think the world is a vampire, I'm still trying to figure out what I've "done wrong".
I always use the phrase "so and so's trying to kill me", I cant even figure out what I mean. Complicate matters probably, introduce an element of extreme internal pressure that I hold on to under duress.
Story of my life, but I still cant figure out what I did wrong.

I feel like a giant python is wrapped around my body. The heaviness of the pressure of being controlled is like being covered in 5 heavy blankets...

Someone just BROKE my attention span, of couse... man upstairs or a floorboard "re-settling"... story of my life. What world is this, where even a concentration span "isn't allowed". I'm burned at the stake. Why are people so deluded and controlling...

I swear. I've just put "internal", "external", and "general" comments everywhere... let's wait to be highly misunderstood.

I feel like doing to someone, what has been done to me.
It would be "hilarious" to magically transpose my pain and suffering into another person in an instant... and see the effect.

I wish I could have my "solid" concentration span back again, istead of the WATER I now feel inside my head.

Therapists scare me, because my trauma is too deep now.

 

[Guest]

I no longer have the "traditional" symptoms of DP/DR such as distorted visual perceptions etc. but I do struggle with my own thoughts. It seems that each time I get over one obsession, another comes into my head.

For instance, today, I was passing by a corridor with many doors and I was thinking how empty I felt and how "maybe my soul or true self is somewhere behind that door.. like we got separated or something". Now, it's just a thought but I got scared thinking that I lost it since I'm believing in crazy things. Or for istance, in my "how do I know that I didn't make people up phase", I thought "how do I know that these people are not just figments of my imagination who represent parts of my self.. such as the ego... etc."? Crazy, I know, but I do have these thoughts.

Now, (this is a question for Janine and everyone else), how do you approach such thoughts? Do you accept them with no fear and just let them pop into your head regardless of whether or not you'll believe them or do you fight them or do you distract yourself?

It seems that the thoughts are what is keeping me hostage and slows down my recovery.

 

[Guest]

Tidal how I combatted these thoughts is to say to them that they are not thoughts that I want to think about, they are illusions of my imagination caused by anxiety & they are silly. Then I just carried on.

 

[Guest]

I think another word for de-personalisation is, parents who treat you like you're invisable, but you dont know it.

"Wanting me to disappear", vanish.

I get treated like a "human-dog". Like a subjucated serf...

Like a servent in the castle, "go fetch", "dont speak" "everything you think is wrong".

I read on Dreamers website that Her Aunt had cancer (can I write that???).
And that Her Mother wouldn't let the Aunt share the sink to brush Her teeth, "use the bidet".
Sounds like Hitler... or that guy... what's His name... "Angel of death" at the concentration camps...

My Mum could "tap" deep inside my head and "steer the car". I wasn't in the drivers seat of my own head.

I still am not in the drivers seat, but lack true "out of touch" or deluded thinking.
I'm close though. The hardest thing I've ever experienced (mentally), is "having a persona" since I left home this year.
There's no personality underneath Her control.

My personality is falling away in huge clumps, my Doctor suspects that Psych drugs have caused "Tardive dementia", the content of earlier posts is SO demented, yet not crazy that my Doctor is seriously considering alzhiemers drugs (I'm 26).

My brain is falling away in clumps, but Tardive Dementia symptoms are probably much more profound. I wouldn't have "awareness" I dont think.

I just dont know who to "be" while I'm alone.

Another thing. Internal dialogue...

When people here experience DP, do you have an "internal dialogue" (High focus thought)?

My head went blank when I was 5, and I lost high focus thought since then. My true opinion is at the back of my head and I never say it (it would SURPRISE you). I have very little self-control, and purge and babble, but I lost self-control completely at age 5, but didn't act anti-social, I was actually subjugated and will-less.

I cant believe my Mother WENT FOR IT, in the way She did.

When I had DR in the therapy session this year, I had a BOOMING internal dialogue... for the first time in 21 years. My speech reflected my true opinion for a second... Therapist blew.

My "behaviour" with DR (if I could achieve it again, and write on here), would be posts two words, or one sentance long. They would be hyper-critical, observant, and in-your-face. I'd take NO pressure to answer drivel.

Polar opposite of now... conditioned & will-less.

My brain is degenerating... I "know" I need to be put into DR or else I'll collapse.