Yes I can understand. When my DPDR started when I was a teenager, I remember it staying for some time and slowly disappearing and then coming back again. And every time I was in DP and/or DR, I could not remember how I felt when I was in the previous state. When I was in DP, I could not remember how I used to feel when I was normal, and when I was normal again I could not understand how it was possible that I had felt unreal, I could not even picture again what it meant. This is really what is reported by many people who have recovered, they can't even picture how they felt when they were in DP, and in the same way a lot of people who are having DP say that they feel like they have forgotten their "normal self".
And this is not just for DPDR I think, I think it is present in other states. Like when you have strong emotions you can feel like they will last forever (or at least that's true for me). When someone is very depressed they can feel like they will be depressed forever and they (or at least I) can't remember how it could be that they were not depressed before given "how bad their life is", or given "how difficult the world has always been" and so on. So I think this is something quite common that the brain does.
And if you can't really remember your previous state, the current state imposes itself as a new absolute reality that you cannot compare to anything else. So for some people it can even feel like this new state IS true reality. It feels like you are in this new state because you realized something. In my case it is clear when I have a DP episode, I feel like I have actually “realized” that the concept of personality is something artificial. My personality has collapsed, but at the same time I feel like I am now closer to the truth. But if you understand something you cannot “un”-understand it, it’s only a one-way process, so it feels like I will be stuck in this forever. This could also be the reason why some people confuse DPDR with a form of spiritual enlightenment, and I think there are a couple posts like this on the forum.
And again I think that for many people it’s the same with depression. I know someone who, when she is depressed, knows she felt happier before but she thinks she was happy for bad reasons. She says that now she knows that “people are all selfish”, “life is worthless” and so on, and that if she was happy before she was wrong. I had a bit the same with my mood disorder, every time I switched from low to high or high to low mood, every time I thought that “oh! now I understand!”, whatever the direction of the switch, every time I felt like I was wrong before and now I am closer to the truth. It’s like there are some things that are nearly impossible to question, they just feel true.
But as I said it also seems true the other way around. People who have recovered often say they think they have “understood” something. I read a couple of people on the forum saying that now that they have recovered once, they won’t ever fall back into DPDR because now they know how to “fight” it. Of course it isn’t necessarily wrong, but it happens so often that I think at least part of it is related to the same phenomenon. All the more that some of these people do relapse anyway despite this feeling.
So some people feel that they are depressed because they now see the world for what it is. Some people who fall into DP feel like they feel like this because they have realized something about the world or about their mind, and some people feel they are cured because they understood something about DPDR. So I think there is also some tendency sometimes to take credit for these changes of state. It’s weird to me that so many people come to the forum thinking they have found “the cure” and want to tell every one what they should do, and often with a kind of authoritarian tone, in my opinion, as if they are sharing a kind of realization. And I find it weird because very often they credit different techniques or therapies that have never been proven to be efficient. I do think people recover but maybe not for reasons that are obvious or reasons that they understand. (By the way, one can notice that even for depression it doesn’t work this way. I have rarely seen someone who recovered from depression telling every one how to do to get out of it, they rather offer support and understanding, knowing that everybody’s path is different)
So I just wanted to say that this disorder is full of illusions in my opinion. When I am in it I do feel like it is going to be like that forever, I do feel like I have forgotten my personality and it is not going to come back or at least not the same. Very often this illusion is proven wrong and still I believe it again during the next episode. So I try to see it just as an illusion. But because I think that for example “I will never be myself again” is an illusion doesn’t mean that now I can control it and trick myself into thinking the exact opposite and go back to normal. It’s just that if I know it is probably an illusion I know it is not the right moment to make big conclusions about my life or about my future. I think it was when I had general anesthesia for a little operation, they told me that after the operation the drug would still affect my mind but I would not be very aware of it, so they warned me that I should not make any big decision in the next day, like drop from studies, leave my girlfriend, buy a land in siberia… just to wait it out. I don’t mean that I should not make decisions when I have DPDR but that I have to remember I am not in the right mind to make big conclusions Even when I had the feeling that I would never be myself again it still happened that I found my “true self” again, regardless of what I felt or how strong I felt it. So to me that feeling is just a regular symptom of DPDR. That doesn’t mean I will or won’t find my true self eventually, just that the feeling is probably irrelevant.
