[seeingthingsbigger]

Hey everyone,

I'm Nina, 25, from Germany and honestly at the lowest point of my life right now.
I've been suffering with something that could be a mild form of DPDR for the past 3 months. After several bad trip experiences within a month (2 on mushrooms, one on acid - and yes, I'm blaming myself enough for letting this happen already, please be kind), I suffered from an anxiety attack on a flight. Afterwards I felt like everything was somehow behind glass, things looked off, I felt like everything was lower in volume, like my head was somehow wrapped in cotton. I also had extreme heart pounding for the first days each day waking up for about a week after the onset. During the first month I went through a number of things: beating heart, episodes of tunnel vision, one short episode of not recognizing myself in the mirror, one short episode of feeling completly detached from my body, my environment seemed colder, too big, foggy etc. Also when I was talking, I was always asking myself - who is speaking? Why am I saying this?
However, even though this was scary as shit, I was sure this was going to pass eventually, I kept on with my life as much as possible, the anxiety passed, I got my hearing back, yet, the longer the rest persisted, the more depressed and worried I got.

Now, 3 months later I still have the following symptoms: I see everything bigger. Nothing seems the right size. When I look at my phone it looks scaled up, when I look at other people, they look bigger. Everything is also a bit off on another visual level, which is really hard to describe, a kind of fogginess, paired with HD vision. I feel my emotions, but mostly despair and intense sadness and guilt. My voice does not fully connect with myself when I am talking still. I always wonder why I say things and where words come from. This doesn't happen when I'm on the phone somehow.

Other than that, I have no other existential thoughts, no panic attacks, nothing like it. BUT, I can't stop thinking about Worst Case Scenarios, I can't stop blaming myself, I can't sleep, I'm obsessively thinking about nothing else, but what is happening, what has happened, why it is happening, am I ever going to be okay again etc.

There is not a minute of my day, where my brain focuses on something else. I tried distracting myself as much as possible and it only made things worse. Now I can barely focus on work or anything else anymore. I went back to work, I'm working out, I'm meditating, doing breath work excercises and Therapy, but I JUST CAN'T GET OUT OF MY HEAD. It's driving me crazy and kills all joy for life. Do you think medication could help with breaking the cycle of obsessive thinking? CBT doesn't seem to get me out of anything so far.

Thank you so much for reading. I hope to get my brain somehow back to normal at some point in my life.

Much love
Nina

 

[Peter]

First, your depersonalization is not mild.

Do you think medication could help with breaking the cycle of obsessive thinking?

There are medications that can work for your depersonalization directly if you are lucky. The first-line treatment is lamotrigine. In terms of obsessive thinking clomipramine works well for that and sometimes it also reduces depersonalization directly.

Did you visit the special consultation hour in Mainz (they are not helpful, but I would like to read your experience)?

 

[Chip1021]

I’m curious about the part where you said this experience doesn’t happen when you are on the phone somehow. That might be a key to understanding what this is for you, and perhaps what you can do for yourself. So perhaps it would be helpful to elaborate on that. What exactly happens when you are on the phone? Do all your weird experiences go away? Or are they significantly reduced? Is it just the existential thinking about the strangeness of your own speech and the words you are using? And does this only happen while you are on the phone? What about when you are conversing with others directly in life? Does it matter the kind of conversation you are having with others?

The contents of our self-conversations are certainly a major aspect of this condition for many people. And when we are engaged in conversation with others, we can’t be focused on our own thinking, and the experience of our own strange existential thoughts become reduced in intensity or go away entirely. It can be nice to feel relatively present during those times, doesn’t it? The problem is (for me at least), it doesn’t last, and as soon as the interaction ends, I’m back inside my head.

It seems to me that I’m in my head so much in great part because I tend to me much more interested in the contents of my own thinking than I am in anything going on in the world around me. I think many on this forum can probably relate to that…whether they are interested in their existential thoughts as a positive or as a negative experience.

Just giving you something to think about, which might be the problem in the first place and therefore I might be making it worse, in which case, I apologize in advance.