[Kirstinopal]

Hi! I've had dp/dr for over 2 years.
I'm gonna make my long story short-

August 2017 it got so bad I had to leave my job.
Now Nearly June 2018, I rarely leave the house and if I do it's to get the mail (thrilling, i know)

I've tried the following

-mindful breathing
-meditation
-ASMR
-Zoloft
-Xanax
-vitamin D
-vitamin B
-CBD OIL
-essential oils
-positive thinking
-keeping busy
-living life "normally"
-CBT
-talk therapy
-EMDR
-diet/exercise
-grounding

Y'all. I'm exhausted from trying to fix this or figure it out. I used to be a very social extrovert that was never home & now I'm quite the opposite.

Nothing triggers mine. If I'm having a "good" day it's on the back burner and will randomly start questioning if I'm real out of nowhere.

Idk what to try next, I think joining this site is a good idea.

If you have any ideas, let me know!

Thanks x

 

[reactor]

yeah dude its pretty hopeless. Welcome to the club. I'll be here for the rest of my life

 

[DPFighter]

Hey you're not alone in this and I personally know the feeling of trying so many things and how discouraging it can feel to not have results but there is always more to try. In my opinion many of things you have tried will have zero chance of helping your DP/DR so you may not have really tried as many things as you think to help your condition. The only things on your list that I see that could potentially bring about change would be Zoloft, Xanax, CBD oil, talk therapy, and EMDR. As for Zoloft or any other SSRI you have to be on it for months to tell if it is helping. Xanax is bad for daily use but sometimes people claim to have relief when on benzos so you should know just after taking them once. I don't really know much about CBD oil but some say it helps.

Talk therapy only works if you can identify your underlying issues like trauma that has caused you to develop DPD. Other forms of talk therapy like CBT you mentioned doesn't cure DPD but can make managing, and coping with it easier for some people. I don't know much about EMDR but it seems it is used to treat trauma and PTSD so if you aren't aware of your trauma (like many people with DPD) or you simply got DPD for other reasons besides trauma than EMDR will have no effect. You have to first be aware of your trauma in order to heal from it with a therapist. Trauma that causes DPD is often gone unnoticed by the sufferer because it is not a big traumatic obvious event they suffered but instead there whole life has been filled with a constant bombardment of subtle traumas. For example if your parents were controlling and didn't give you enough room to be who you truly are and see you for who your truly are, you end up living a traumatic childhood. This is because the repression of the self is traumatic for the mind and causes you to develop incorrectly psychologically and you drift farther and farther away from your true sense of self. So if you want to go the therapy route I suggest you investigate if you have any traumas in your life you are in denial of because DPD seems to be a mechanism for the mind to numb itself from the pain of the world. Sometimes this pain only resides in your unconscious making you unaware of it. Going to therapy for depersonalization as the soul problem doesn't seem to cure DPD very often so that's why I believe an approach from the root of the problem may work better and EMDR and psychotherapy may help you.

If you want to go the medication route I would suggest getting a psychiatrist and finding an SSRI that will work for you. Then try adding one of the top meds for DPD like lamotrigine, clomipramine, or just working with your psychiatrist to find what else may help you.

 

[DPFighter]

yeah dude its pretty hopeless. Welcome to the club. I'll be here for the rest of my life

what good does this attitude do you or anyone reading your post? Why cut yourself out of the possibility of improvement?

 

[forestx5]

I had an EEG when I was 17. I was under my parents care and she told me the results of that EEG. I was told my EEG "was normal with one lead off". When I asked her what that meant, she said she didn't know, but that the family didn't have money for expensive psychiatric care and she then begged me not to "crack up on her". LOL

I have to laugh now, because my parents were uneducated folks from families who had to persevere through the years of the great depression. They were scarred by the experience. But, that lie my mother told condemned me to 38 years of mental illness. I know this, because I had another EEG 38 years later, after identifying the trauma that

made me ill as an epigastric aura followed by a sequence of temporal lobe seizures. The neurologist who analyzed the later EEG results told me that an area of my brain showed significant pathology. I said "Let me guess....the lead to my dominant temporal lobe (left) is "off". She asked how I would know that. Well, it took me 38 years of

suffering focal temporal lobe seizures and major depressive episodes to figure it out.

In other words, you haven't tried it all until you have had an EEG.