[Tim Couch 1999]

This doesn’t apply to all DP/DR sufferers, mainly just the ones who’s DP/DR is likely intertwined with anxiety.

Could the entire DP/DR experience just be one massive intrusive thought? There are a lot of people on this forum who also have Pure OCD, and I can’t help but wonder if DP/DR is just a symptom of this. My experience with DP/DR seems to change by the day. One day I’m experiencing DP by not recognizing my body. The next day it will be all about my surroundings feeling unfamiliar. The next day it will feel like I’m in a dream. If DP/DR was separate from Pure OCD, why would the experience be changing so much? Wouldn’t I be having the same experience all the time? I guess it's possible the OCD and DP/DR are working in tandem.

I’m not 100% on board with this theory, I just wanted to throw it out there and see what other people think. This has probably been theorized by other people before me.

 

[coolwhip27]

Yes!! This is how I view my depersonalization. For me it’s not just a theory, cuz I can literally witness when my thoughts start getting caught and DP kicks in. I have pure ocd, and ever since I’ve had it i have struggled with dp, to varying degrees. The degrees change like you said, the manifestation of the DP will shift depending on the ocd. They work in tandem. And, DP only goes away when I have a clear mind. If I start thinking about the fact that my DP is gone, boom it’s back. Yup, one massive intrusive thought

 

[coolwhip27]

To add on, this all has to do with the “accepting” thing that peeps who recover from DP mention. I say that because intrusive thoughts only exist in our mind if the thoughts are seen as intolerable. A sort of hellish state in my own experience. Everything is just negative in the intrusive thought state. Therefore we disassociate, I guess? Agree or no?

 

[Chip1021]

To add on, this all has to do with the “accepting” thing that peeps who recover from DP mention. I say that because intrusive thoughts only exist in our mind if the thoughts are seen as intolerable. A sort of hellish state in my own experience. Everything is just negative in the intrusive thought state. Therefore we disassociate, I guess? Agree or no?

I don’t know what the relationship is with dissociation and “intrusive thoughts” (though I have no difficulty believing that there is one, at least in some cases). But you pretty much said in this response much of what I was going to say. Thoughts are only experienced as “intrusive” when we find them unpleasant, disgusting, perverse…or if you don’t mind being old-fashioned, evil. Nobody who has enjoyed their own thinking has described it as “intrusive.”

For those of you who think OCD is the source of tour DPDR, have you tried ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy)? I’m not a big fan of “programs,” but I feel the principles from that therapy might be particularly relevant toward helping with that problem.

In response to OP, I’m not sure I would agree with your language in describing DPDR as “one big intrusive thought (“a thought” is not actually a thing). However, you might have a point about DP in certain cases being part of the experience of a certain kind of thinking.

Because our language has evolved to be highly complex and symbolic, we tend to disjoin our thoughts from our experiences more than they really are. For example, moods like depression and anxiety are often described by psychiatry as “thoughts, which then produce feelings, resulting in maladaptive behaviors, which reinforce thoughts” in a certain triangular relationship. But that’s not quite accurate. A mood like anxiety is a thought-and-feeling. They are really one and the same, part and parcel of the same experience. Certain psych drugs can work to reduce the physiological experience of a mood, thereby reducing the “thought” aspect as well. So the more extreme example of DPDR might in many cases also be an example of a combination thought-and-feeling.

And with regards to your claim that the experience keeps changing daily, let me ask you: are you sure the experience itself is really changing all that much, or do you think what is actually changing is the way that you are talking to yourself about that experience (that is, you are just using different language, or interpreting the experience differently)?

 

[Tim Couch 1999]

And with regards to your claim that the experience keeps changing daily, let me ask you: are you sure the experience itself is really changing all that much, or do you think what is actually changing is the way that you are talking to yourself about that experience (that is, you are just using different language, or interpreting the experience differently)?

I guess the dissociation is consistent, but what does change is what I perceive as the biggest threat from dissociating. This is what I believe is the OCD of it.

 

[Chip1021]

I guess the dissociation is consistent, but what does change is what I perceive as the biggest threat from dissociating. This is what I believe is the OCD of it.

This is generally how I experience it too. Whenever somebody on here asks me what the worst thing is about my DP, my honest answer must be “whichever aspect of this experience I’m focusing my attention on at this moment.”

 

[Trith]

I don't know if it is one intrusive thought, but I can see that I am easily and constantly focusing on something intensely. It doesn't have to be on something that makes me anxious, it doesn't have to be on DPDR itself, it can be anything. I am trying to figure out something, I am interested in something, I am upset about a conversation I had, I am thinking about how to solve some interesting problem at work... anything. And I am so focused I am kind of absorbed in my thoughts. And if I am absorbed by something, it means that my surroundings exist less and less to me.
And it's like when you listen to loud music in your car, part of your attention is on the music, and as you lower the volume, part of your attention naturally goes back to the road, you start to hear the sound of the engine again, be more present to your surroundings, and so on. But the more you increase the volume of the music, the less you can pay attention to what is around you (kind of), as if the volume of the rest was lowered. And for me DPDR sometimes feels like my thoughts have a very loud volume and take all my attention, like I am very preoccupied with something and the volume of the surroundings is lowered, like it exists less in my mind, it has much less weight. But the problem is that when I stop focusing on my thoughts and go back to my surroundings it feels like their volume doesn't come back up, it's like it is stuck to a low volume. Even when I try to "look outside of my mind", my mind is still in self-absorbtion mode.

But my mind is very strong when it is trying to focus intensely on something, and it feels like it is my only strategy for every problem. So when I see that the volume of my surroundings is too low, I see that this or that doesn't feel real anymore, and I naturally try to focus on something to try to make it real again. But as I am doing that the volume of all the other things decreases again and I am left with that thing only, like with a tunnel vision, just like what I do with my thoughts. Focusing is what makes my surroundings disappear and gives me that kind of tunnel vision, and yet when it is disappearing I try to use even more focusing to solve the problem, which doesn't work.
If I try to "stop my thoughts", I will focus on them, or focus on stopping the thoughts, and it becomes yet another absorbing task. And if it is absorbing, it means I will tune out from the rest of reality again.
What I am trying to do now is to not use that focusing strength to solve problems but try to relax and just do nothing. Not to "focus" again on my surroundings to try to make them come back, or focus on a symptom, or focus on a thought, or intellectualize about what it actually means to relax and focus on that meaning, or to try to focus on a new technique that will help me stop focusing, or focus on my surroundings and try to bring their volume louder by sheer mental force, or I don't know what. Just to try to relax a bit more than what I do usually. Because relaxing doesn't come by just focusing on a different object, or by focusing on relaxation. (It reminds me of Charly Chaplin in "Modern Times" who works in a factory screwing nuts on bolts all day, and when he stops he is stuck and can't help trying to screw everything because he is stuck in that mode, and just like that I feel I am stuck in "focusing mode"

)

But still, I don't know if it can help. And everybody is different. It sounds a bit like meditation, but still, my several past years of meditation practice, sometimes quite intense, did bring me many things and many cool sensations but it never really decreased my actual DR and emotionnal numbing significantly or on the long term. So this is maybe, most probably, not a definitive answer. But knowing myself I know it can't hurt me to relax on the focusing and have more energy to pay attention to other things.

 

[Chip1021]

I don't know if it is one intrusive thought, but I can see that I am easily and constantly focusing on something intensely. It doesn't have to be on something that makes me anxious, it doesn't have to be on DPDR itself, it can be anything. I am trying to figure out something, I am interested in something, I am upset about a conversation I had, I am thinking about how to solve some interesting problem at work... anything. And I am so focused I am kind of absorbed in my thoughts. And if I am absorbed by something, it means that my surroundings exist less and less to me.
And it's like when you listen to loud music in your car, part of your attention is on the music, and as you lower the volume, part of your attention naturally goes back to the road, you start to hear the sound of the engine again, be more present to your surroundings, and so on. But the more you increase the volume of the music, the less you can pay attention to what is around you (kind of), as if the volume of the rest was lowered. And for me DPDR sometimes feels like my thoughts have a very loud volume and take all my attention, like I am very preoccupied with something and the volume of the surroundings is lowered, like it exists less in my mind, it has much less weight. But the problem is that when I stop focusing on my thoughts and go back to my surroundings it feels like their volume doesn't come back up, it's like it is stuck to a low volume. Even when I try to "look outside of my mind", my mind is still in self-absorbtion mode.

But my mind is very strong when it is trying to focus intensely on something, and it feels like it is my only strategy for every problem. So when I see that the volume of my surroundings is too low, I see that this or that doesn't feel real anymore, and I naturally try to focus on something to try to make it real again. But as I am doing that the volume of all the other things decreases again and I am left with that thing only, like with a tunnel vision, just like what I do with my thoughts. Focusing is what makes my surroundings disappear and gives me that kind of tunnel vision, and yet when it is disappearing I try to use even more focusing to solve the problem, which doesn't work.
If I try to "stop my thoughts", I will focus on them, or focus on stopping the thoughts, and it becomes yet another absorbing task. And if it is absorbing, it means I will tune out from the rest of reality again.
What I am trying to do now is to not use that focusing strength to solve problems but try to relax and just do nothing. Not to "focus" again on my surroundings to try to make them come back, or focus on a symptom, or focus on a thought, or intellectualize about what it actually means to relax and focus on that meaning, or to try to focus on a new technique that will help me stop focusing, or focus on my surroundings and try to bring their volume louder by sheer mental force, or I don't know what. Just to try to relax a bit more than what I do usually. Because relaxing doesn't come by just focusing on a different object, or by focusing on relaxation. (It reminds me of Charly Chaplin in "Modern Times" who works in a factory screwing nuts on bolts all day, and when he stops he is stuck and can't help trying to screw everything because he is stuck in that mode, and just like that I feel I am stuck in "focusing mode"

)

But still, I don't know if it can help. And everybody is different. It sounds a bit like meditation, but still, my several past years of meditation practice, sometimes quite intense, did bring me many things and many cool sensations but it never really decreased my actual DR and emotionnal numbing significantly or on the long term. So this is maybe, most probably, not a definitive answer. But knowing myself I know it can't hurt me to relax on the focusing and have more energy to pay attention to other things.

I could have written this entire post myself. Nowadays I’m just pretty completely brain damaged, or perhaps I’ve just given up trying, but this is pretty much exactly how I experience my problem. Especially when you talk about the hyperfocus on things (not necessarily DP thoughts or anxiety thoughts) that makes you unaware of your surroundings, but when you stop the thinking, external empirical reality does not seem to return much if at all. When I’m not engaging with my own cognition, I’m simply left with empty nothingness. And that is the worst feeling of all, so I return to my pseudo-intellectual-philosophical musings because it provides my existence with some meaning at least.

I do notice that when I’m engaged in some comforting conversation with someone, usually one-on-one, when we are just being silly and goofy, I can feel sort of “brought into” reality to a significant degree, and it feels absolutely heavenly. I feel much more spontaneous and connected to reality, and I actually feel motivated to act in the world. Unfortunately, it doesn’t last. When the interaction ends, I return to this spaced-out disembodied mind state. I think the story of my adulthood can be summarized as a desperate attempt at obtaining and maximizing those flow states. However, as I’ve aged, they have become more and more scarce.

 

[Georgewright6]

yeah your right i dealt with dp without anxiety and the experience is much easier and less confusing it went for me dp/Dr together Dr lifted and i was left with mostly mild dp until
that just went and came on and off some days without me realising and it was a pretty bliss experience, ive had it the 2nd time
now with ocd and it is so much harder and confusing, but i’ve still managed to get better but it is so much rougher all the wierd obsessive thoughts everyone goes on about come from
anxiety not dp when i had no
anxiety i rarely had any wierd thoughts and if i did they didn’t bother me at all where this time i had a fuck load of wierd shit, cycling through different perceptions, existential thoughts etc, anxiety does make it much harder to deal with as it creates so much confusion without the anxiety dp really ain’t that bad at some points i remember really enjoying it because i thought it was cool and gave me a different take on reality that at that point was pleasurable, ive had those same experiences this time with anxiety and it isn’t pleasurable anymore 😂

 

[retrobot]

I agree with whip on this one,
after self-evaluating for a while I had carefully noticed that my thoughts dissociate me or are the cause of it, when my attention is placed on something else I hit a weird level comfort until I remember I am the guy who has depersonalisation, then I burst into flames

 

[coolwhip27]

I agree with whip on this one,
after self-evaluating for a while I had carefully noticed that my thoughts dissociate me or are the cause of it, when my attention is placed on something else I hit a weird level comfort until I remember I am the guy who has depersonalisation, then I burst into flames

Couldnt have said it better myself retro. The literal memory of the past, that "oh shit, ive been in hell for the past half of my life" which makes you crash harder in thought. Im with ya

 

[Tim Couch 1999]

Couldnt have said it better myself retro. The literal memory of the past, that "oh shit, ive been in hell for the past half of my life" which makes you crash harder in thought. Im with ya

I experience this too. There have been times where I got lost in a video game and had completely forgotten about DP/DR. Then when I stop playing the game, I feel normal momentarily, but then I'm like "Wait, you're supposed to feel fucked up all the time. This isn't normal" and boom, it all comes back. I sometimes wonder if DP/DR would go away if I had no memory of it.