[Jodie]

Hey to anyone who reads this post, i joined this forum yesterday and was so happy to find it and to find a whole community of people who are going through depersonalisation.

This is a very long post i do apologise.

I got DP just a little over a month ago, i still don't know the definite reasoning as to why it came, all i know is that i had been smoking weed heavily for a year with no bad side affects, until this one day. I had also been going through a lot of stress within my relationship, I'm not sure whether this contributed to the DP.

I had been arguing all day, very intense never-ending argument. There was physical violence and just mental trauma all day.. i even smashed up this plant pot in my kitchen and threw everything around because of how angry i was.. along with this i hadn't smoked a joint since i woke up all the way through to 5pm.. which had not happened for months i usually smoked the minute i woke up and then every couple of hours, i could feel the withdrawal of the weed (dry mouth, sweats) so i went out to catch up on my smokes later that day when the argument was over.

So i went to meet and chill with a friend, i felt no overwhelming stress regardless of what had happened that day and we just smoked 3 or 4 strong joints in a 2 hour or so period, i pulled up to his house and dropped him back home.. i then pulled out my phone to text my girlfriend and tell her i was sorry for what had happened earlier.. That's when it happened.

I took one look down at my hands and had a complete mental episode. All of a sudden i was disconnected from the world as i knew it and was staring down at alien hands. I felt a whole chemical change in my mind and i knew something serious had happened. I instantly rejected my body as my own for this 10 seconds and had a very overwhelming first experience with DP. I must have been really high which made it worse, but i had been smoking so long i didn't really know what high was anymore so i didn't feel like i was too high at all. I looked in the car mirror and told myself 'this is not going to happen to you' I remember pleading with god and getting very emotional that this could have happened because of drug intake... I started my engine, lit a cigarette, turned on the radio and drove away.. but the experience brought on a huge panic about attack about 20 seconds later that lasted for a good 20-30 minutes. I continued to drive, got home, had a glass of water and went to my girlfriends house. I picked her up and as the aftermath of the panic attack kicked in my body was shaking uncontrollably with fear I could hardly drive and when i pulled over and got out of the car i threw up.

She was worried about me, I had a million thoughts at this point.. because i puked i thought am i ill? have i eaten something that has made me ill? She thought i was just ill too.

Never the less i had no idea what the fuck had happened to me, why my panic attack was so weird, why i had been shaking uncontrollably afterwards, and why the fuck i had looked at my hands and just felt like they weren't mine all of a sudden.

I don't know how i managed to get to sleep that night when i got home but i knew i had to, and i knew i would deal with the rest in the morning.. when morning came i never imagined to wake up in a completely different mind state than ever before.

I decided to quit weed on that day DP first happened, i had got upset that this could have happened because of drugs and it was a complete no brainer to quit.

I remember looking in the mirror in the car and pleading with a god i never usually plead to or acknowledge.. 'please don't let this happen to me', i promised to never put another substance inside myself again. I threw my weed away out of the car window that night, and threw the rest of my weed away a couple days later back at home. I have not smoked since that day.. i haven't been through any normal insomnia or any of the usual weed withdrawal. I think my mind was so overcome by DP, but the subconscious withdrawals of weed definitely made the DP worse and it has taken me up to now (4 weeks) to start feeling a little more 'normal'.

In the days that followed, the derealisation was the first thing to hit me, I was driving past cars and it felt although i'd never seen the world this way before, i would look at things and think how would that feel if i touched it? all of these two dimentional images... I would describe the whole experience as being reborn, within the same body. learning everything again from scratch. Even though i always knew things were the same, my perception had very much changed I was very scared i had developed a serious mental illness.

The first 2 weeks were actually terrifying, i can't explain the depths of what i was going through now.. i kinda wish i had wrote it down, regardless i didn't yet have a coping mechanism or understand what was happening to me. I just kept falling deeper and deeper, and i had atleast 5 panic attacks in this time period which i could only explain as 'mental panic attacks'. They were so much different to any other panic attacks i've had in the past.. which had made me think i was having a heart attack and dying. These panic attacks just elevated my DP symptoms so badly, that i started to believe i really wasn't real, and then from there i was just sinking into the existential thoughts and was so far removed from the norm, every time i looked at my body i would get butterflies and panic, even the thought of other people having a body made me panic.

i really did not know how to control this and thought i was just a slave to my new mental illness.

I am not a slave, and you are not a slave.

I am a 22 year old female that is blessed to be in this world, i have a body, even though my mind may not be accepting it as my own at times.

I know this is my body... I know who i am, when DP gets bad i really do panic but I have learned to control the panic in the last week, I've not had one panic attack. I have contributed so much to my own fear by obsessing, checking whether i am real, checking if things seem real.... please remember that nobody else who doesn't have DP does this.

Recovered is what we are all trying to achieve. just take time please.. to understand what you are going through.. every time you think you can't get over it and your going to melt, or disintegrate, or lose your mind, or something very bad is going to happen, we wake up again to face another new day.

I am starting to believe that this is all anxiety, and i am starting to understand that deep thoughts, are not the best thing for me or anyone else in life. This life is a blessing, and no matter how much we ask questions, we will never have the answers to them. Why not just go on and enjoy life in the simplest form?

All i know is that i can't answer the questions i have asked myself, nobody can... why are we here? i don't know. why am i here? i don't know. i just keep waking up in this body as me, every single day. Nothing changes. If i choose to really think about my DP and let it consume me.. then i will never be away from it.. and i am NOT under any circumstances going to be a slave to my own mind.

I want my own place, i want a good job, i want babies and a family, and trust me this DP will not get in the way of what I need to achieve in my one and only lifetime.

Every other minute i waste to these thoughts and terror, is another minute i will never get back.

Today i have already planned some things that i need to do, clean my car, clean my room. I have found in the last couple of weeks that having a schedule really helps. Placebos really help too. Whether it be vitamins, or just taking more positive steps in your life.. they really do leave you with a sense of achievement, and even without DP these things would make you feel great in your normal day to to day life.

Focus on anything but DP, but don't think about not focusing on it.

Whether you check in the mirror or not, you are still going to be there. Nothing is going to remove you from this reality.

Just get up and go and do something that takes your whole mind to focus on... whether it be driving, or cleaning, or writing. I know that when you drive you have to think and you can feel very alone with your thoughts.... deep breaths, take in the views, put the radio on and just drive, there will be junctions that you come to that need your whole attention to be able to deal with them, and you really will have moments where DP just isn't at the forefront of your mind.

When i don't think about DP and my mind is distracted, it disappears until I make it come back.

When your DP disappears, do not check yourself to see if you are real, just accept that you have made a step forward and go forward again from there move onto to the next thing that takes your minds energy, don't tempt it to come back and don't check your surroundings.

It's very easy to slip back into the obsession that comes along with DP and put your mind back into that void that only DP suffers will relate to.

This whole process is about change and why think negatively, when there are so many positives.

This really is a test of strength and will, and my question to people here is... will you?

Will you try your best every day to make this go away? Will you combat your negative thoughts with positive ones?

Will you believe that you are the controller of your mind and this is all a test?

Because if you will, then you will get out of this slowly but surely.

So this is week 4 or 5 now.. and i will keep updating with how I'm feeling, but please believe what i am saying. Today is the first day i have woken up and not been immediately DP'd. I looked down to check whether my mind will accept my body and I just told myself "no... i can't do that" just get up make breakfast and get on with this day. Don't check anything, don't think deeply about anything and just do normal things.

I'm really hoping that i'll see the back of this thing with this attitude.

Much love and please post your replies to this, with anything that you have found has helped or anything you want to say.

I am going back to work on Friday and am just going to continue with my life as best I can... fake it until i make it.

Jodie x

 

[anxiousWolf]

Hi thanks for sharing!

Glad I can relate to this...

This is also a bit long so stay with me

Dp is hellacrazy right? Don't know whether pot started the symptoms or whether pot was actually subduing them, as some pot strains have been proven to counter anxiety in controlled amounts...

But I can tell you the first DP episode really leaves you extremely vulnerable to this reality everybody else takes for granted. I myself have been studying philosophy for a couple of months and really trying to discover deeper meanings in life with pot. Pondering unsolvable questions and attaching my own meaning to them, no problems yet.

Smoked for 3 years, was high all the time, even IN college. Then when the first episode hit me, it was really out of the blue like a stone being thrown at the back of my head...

It felt so weird and like you said as if I'm going through a rebirth that I pondered whether I died and ended up in hell somehow. Scariest episode ever, it lasted for about 30 minutes and then the extreme anxious fear started leaving my mind but I still kept questioning everything and trust me when I say EVERYTHING! Back home I smoked a couple of joints with my friends and felt the anxiety and DP getting the best of me again, although I couldn't describe the feelings as this was the very first time, never even had panick attacks before...

This all started a few weeks before, when I was high I pondered how this universe works, and ultimately what the frikkin' point is! Question after question and really somehow starting to believe I died but not wanting to accept it. When my high started wearing off a bit, I felt more relaxed. But the moment I got in my bed and I searched the internet trying to find if anyone else ever felt like he/she died before. Did a quick search and couldn't find anything so I freaked out over the "fact" that only people in the afterlife can ask themselves whether they're dead. I know it's really absurd and I shouldn't have attached so much meaning to those feelings but I did anyway because my anxiety was soaring high!

I layed off the weed a bit, and those few rare times where I did get high, I would ask myself what this feeling of being only me is ffs, not knowing why I'm me and how someone else feels about his/her consciousness. And then I thought (as a religious person) if the afterlife still grants you awareness, then does this mean you will be stuck with this feeling for all eternity (All F***ing Eternity)? Scared the living crap out of me, but still no big deal because when the high wore off, the anxiety wore off. Then again I made this big mistake by smoking a fat joint, and I got struck by DP again. "Why am I me", I kept repeating that sentence in myself hoping to find an answer and some comfort, but quickly the DP got its best of me and I couldn't breathe normally. So I stopped focussing on my breathing and grounded myself by grabbing a pack of ice and putting it on my head thinking about its texture and coldness, this helped me tremendously. Then again I went to search on the internet why it is that I'm me and not someone else. And found some answers claiming you won't ever know and you're you because you can't be me because i'm me and if you are me you wouldn't be you; and I was all like woah too much information, makes sense but still don't know why I'm me...

That was also my last joint.

Now two months later I get DP when I'm performing monotonic processes such as writing, gaming, drawing, painting, watching tv, ... I need to be busy, all the time, but then again too much stress will blast me into another episode

The derealization is something I get in between DP episodes. Everything feels SO unreal and during a heavy DR I thought what if I'm in a vegetative state trying to make up my own story (my life) in order to cope with not being able to move or say anything. Crazy right? That's the worst part, I know it's crazy and I can't say backoff and start feeling 'normal' again. Impossible!

And these existential questions give me head aches, stomach aches, dizziness accompanied by a sense of derealization and then a DP ep. punches me knock out. Nothing I can do, I fear my own thoughts tremendously, get knocked out and repeat.

What helps me cope is:

- food not huge amounts of it, just putting time and effort in making something delicious

- appreciating the small things!

- accept that I'm one in seven billion and not just ONE

- accept a higher entity/deity, (subjecting myself to) a creator not in its famous Catholic sense but a creator as in the most ultimate and purest essence

- MUSIC ! But not the music I listened to while smoking as that music tends to send me back into a DP/DR

- laying off all drugs including alcohol and sodas/coffee

- staying healthy and exercising

- if you feel emotional go ahead and cry your eyeballs out trust me when I say you'll get out a stronger person...

- most importantly, doing good things for other people, just small deeds to show your appreciation towards someone else, especially to someone who's not used to being appreciated, trust me you'll feel his/her appreciation metaphorically flowing through your body and mind.

- and one more thing to make you feel comfortable is Love, recognize and acknowledge the power of love within the relationships you have with friends/family and if you're relationship is plummeting letting it go may give you lots of relief, and I'm speaking from personal experience!

But in the end these questions still scare the living hell out of me, and I can't put them in a box and hide them in my basement, they're fully exposed now and manifesting themselves in my daily life. But I can learn how to ignore them using the steps above. And ignoring isn't permanent, and I know of people who permanently relieved these thoughts. especially the no-pills-people who went to therapy, most notably Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, I'm looking into that now and it looks like it can offer you lots of relief!

Thanks for reading and hope you'll feel better soon, if there's anything I forgot on the list please share!

Peace