compulsive monitoring of dpdr symptoms because of emotional numbness

leminaseri said:

i dont think we experience dpdr chronically because there are obsessive compulsive components. in my experience and observations this compulsion happens because there is no other things at my life i can focus on and „feel“ them. if i would have emotional reactions on the other parts on my life, the attention on the symptoms would decrease automatically. just like people who can have bigger problems than other medical diseases they have. for instance someone with bad cancer, can still say that his family or children do have more importance than his illness. or someone bounded to the wheelchair can definitely forget his disability when sitting in the cinema (because healthy people dont anything else either). but for us, or for me, their is no cinema where i can sit and forget about my symptoms. most of the time im busy and have actually a pretty good life. i have a wonderful wife. i moved to a entirely new city from my hometown 650 kilometres away to build my family. im not bounded on my parents place as many people with chronic dpd are. but still, all of this dont change anything in my suffering. the last couple of days i got somehow worse. i really felt the pain how my life became in the last 3 years, and it destroyed me over and over again. i literally felt that pain on my chest physically.

man, i dont know how to get better. i dont know how to become better. if someone of you know something please say me. im planning in the course of this year to making very detailed diagnostic tests of my brain and other parts of my body. i have bad hashimotos and chronic low vitamin d. but never believe that these things can be the cause of all of this because i got this issues long before i got the dpdr on january 2020. at my home country turkey there is a very good, technologically high end hospital where i can afford thanks to the cheap currency there almost everything diagnosis and treatment wise. but i dont know where to begin. please make me some recommendations. ill be grateful.

once i did a qeeg there, and the doc said that my brain shows a very similar pattern to other patients who were diagnosed with major depression. but other than that, my brain is okay he said. i got very high scores on every depression scales. but dont know man. depression or dpdr or maybe even both. its just horrible..

dont know what to say anymore. please say anything what you think about my prognosis and about my future, what i can or should try. i have a very dark time lately. the last 2-3 months i was actually doing okay.

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It sucks that you feel like this. All I could say might fall in the easier said than done category but one coping strategy that seems to work for me now is to try to love myself as I am instead of fighting anything. In my case obsessive thinking usually goes with control and some form of self-hatred. So I try to give myself the opposite of that as best as I can. I try to give love to anything in my experience, even the things that frustrate me. And if there is a part of me that doesn't love me as I am, I give love to this part too. And if more frustration arises, I give love to that too. This really sounds super corny, and I used to be allergic to corny stuff, but this still works for me. I realize I actually picture being a firefighter throwing gallons of "love-water" at a fire... For me it doesn't stop the thoughts, perhaps it eases them I don't know, but it makes me feel better. Obsessive thinking can really be hard, this kind of thing pushed me to tears before, it's very real. And even if we can't stop it on the spot, I think at least we deserve to have love and understanding for ourselves.

leminaseri said:

i believe, im suffering from chronic self hatred since im 6 years old. i suffered so heavy chronic mobbing and emotional abuse that there was no other choice than hating myself. im literally on the last rope. dont know anymore whats right and left. even though im just 3 years in the dpdr (well first got it 2011 for 4 years than recovered completely dont know if we can count that years together if yes than im 12 years in 😂😂) i feel like there wont be an end from this suffering. im gonna trying codein or heroin maybe it gives me some relief

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Hey leminaseri, I can't tell you what to do, you are absolutely free, but I sincerely hope you won't do opiates. Have you ever taken any before? I have tried just painkillers in the past when I was depressed and sleep deprived, thinking I would do it just once, but it didn't help. It was kind of pleasant physically but I felt out of myself, and it definitely didn't help with derealization. I am somehow glad I didn't like it that much, but some people do like it too much. They have been there and we don't have to. I have met several people who went through that in addiction therapy, and it's really the last thing anyone deserves to add to their life.
I can't read your mind but for me, I had several motivations to do that: one was that I knew I deserved to feel good, and I felt nobody and nothing was helping really and I somehow thought "don't tell me to not do this if you are also not going to help me or care". It was also a way to say "don't tell me what to do, you can't help me so now you have lost, I'm going to help myself my own way". Also I knew the stigma associated with it, and I also knew it wasn't a good thing to do but it was some kind of self harm as well. I did self harm for a short time when I was a teenager, and it was a time when I was suffering a lot, it was unbearable and I couldn't even put words on it and could barely even cry. And when I self harmed I felt the physical pain and saw the scars on my body, I could feel that at least now there was an exterior sign of the pain I was feeling inside. The physical pain was still not as strong as the mental one, but at least the physical world was now more aligned with how I felt inside. For me, taking opiates felt like this too, I knew doing opiates regularly is a form of self destruction, but I thought at least it would match what I felt inside and, and there was this feeling, like with self harm, where even if I didn't tell anyone, it was like I felt I would be taken more seriously if people knew, or perhaps I was fed up with the fact that all my suffering was so invisible, like it didn't exist and was unbearable at the same time. Do you relate with some of this?
The thing is most of us probably know how much depression and DPDR can suck. But I think being addicted to that could add even more of the same problems of being detached from reality and from others, and could suck the little life that is left in us. I think it would not even replace the problem with another one, but just add one on top of another. But you deserve to feel good and have a good life. We don't know each other, but I like your comments, even when you want to punch me in the face (but not only), it sounds like you have especially a lot of life in you and a lot of willingness to be better. Also I think you have a good talent with those lyrics and I would really like to read more if you write more.