It's hard for me to imagine having ever felt any other way than I do right now.
I can only posit that I did once, because if I never had, then where did I ever get the idea that there was another way to experience the world?
Also I have recollections from my preteen/early teen years of various stimuli making me feel 'out of it' temporarily,such as blowing up balloons, staying up an entire night, and later the way psychiatric medications would make me feel.
The obvious question this raises is: 'Out of it' as compared to what?
The only answer I can think of is the way I felt back in my pre-dp/dr years (a feeling I don't so much as recall, as reconstruct with my imagination).
The 'out of it' sensation I once felt while making a loud whistling sound by blowing through a blade of grass trapped between my thumbs at some point, somehow, just eventually became the norm.
I had always been anxiety ridden.
There was never a time that I didn't have things on my mind deeply worrying me.
Never did drugs (just prescription meds from a shrink that used to leave my head utterly zapped).
But I did drink lots of beer on hunting and fishing trips with my uncle (made me feel like a big man, as well as dp/dr'd for entire afternoons).
Additionally I used to stay up all night on weekends (not partying, just drinking cokes and watching television by myself).
This would always leave me real dp'd (but I didn't worry about it at that time, because it was always only temporary. Nobody ever told me that it could stick like that).
That plus I had tons of social anxiety in school.
So much so that in the ninth grade I could no longer face that environment (there was just too much hostility there).
I did the rest of my public education on the 'Homebound Hospital' program, which was for kids who, for whatever reason, could not attend regular school.
This period is of particular interest for me, because it was during this time that I became depersonalized full time.
Previously I had stayed up all night only on weekends, but during this time I was doing so every night.
I kept a diary then, in which I treated dreams with about the same level of regard as waking life.
I would wake up in the middle of the night (or just whenever I happened to be sleeping) and log my dreams in it.
It got so that my dream life and waking life began to overlap freely.
As this went on my waking life began to seem more dream-like.
Maybe it was the real beginning of it.
At that time, though, I was convinced that it was a by-product of excessive daydreaming.
I thought if I could just make myself stop long enough, the dreamlike sensation would fade.
But I never could (so I still don't know for sure what role, if any, it might've played).
Whatever the ultimate cause of it, whether it was any one of the aforementioned factors, or perhaps some combinationation of them, by age sixteen I had it full time.
I wasn't immediately concerned about it.
In fact, in the early going it was a very novel experience that I found quite enjoyable.
By seventeen, however, I was tired of the feeling.
Not panicked about it, just tired of it.
It seemed like such a simple problem, afterall, that I believed there had to be a simple remedy for it.
But as time wore on, and I began to more fully appreciate the gravity of what I was really dealing with, I became increasingly desperate about it.
My psychiatrist, for example, insisted he didn't know what I was talking about whenever I tried to describe what I was feeling to him.
So I sought help elsewhere.
In the summer of my seventeenth year I saw I hypnotherapist.
I just wanted him to hypnotize me to feel "fully here."
But he explained that it didn't really work that way, so I followed his recommended approach for awhile in the hope that it would rid me of it.
Except it didn't.
When I was eighteen I tried another hynotherapist, but that led to nothing either.
It was in that same year that I first heard the word 'depersonalization', from a Texas Rehab psychologist.
I suspect my psychiatrist never said the 'd' word because he was afraid that if I had a name to go along with the feelings I was trying to describe to him he might get sued (he'd been prescribing me stuff since I was thirteen that wasn't FDA approved for anyone under eighteen).
When I was nineteen I tried biofeedback, the idea being that if I could re-integrate my brain, the dp/dr would lift.
Though I got pretty good at it, it never did have any effect on the dp/dr.
The failure of that, plus dozens of different nutritional supplements (like choline), and special diets (for hypoglycemia, and food allergies) left me so frustrated and exhausted that I finally just abandoned the search for a cure by my early twenties, and I just focused all of my attention on getting through college.
From my twenties until fairly recently I didn't really think about it hardly at all.
It was always there, but I ignored it and simply lived life as though I didn't have it.
In '99, after finally going online, I typed 'depersonalization' into a search box and clicked 'go' just to see what (if anything) might come up. (I'd typed everything else in, afterall, just for fun.)
The amount of information that came up was fairly staggering.
Practically 'information overload', and I could only do cursory scans of it all, just trying to pin point clues to a possible cure.
For all of the available information, however, there was nothing that led me to any specific treatments.
I began feeling a hopeless, overwhelmed sort of feeling again, not unlike what I was feeling back in my early twenties.
I continued doing periodic searches on the topic over the following years (mostly just typing the words 'depersonalization' and 'cure' in together and running searches, but always getting "Your search returned 0 matches").
I began hanging around this particular board last fall, just to lurk in the "Regaining Reality" and "Alternative Remedies and Therapies" sections (actually trying various things that members had posted in there, but with nil results as always).
By late winter I had registered here myself (on pure impulse).
And that's where the situation stands at present.
e
I can only posit that I did once, because if I never had, then where did I ever get the idea that there was another way to experience the world?
Also I have recollections from my preteen/early teen years of various stimuli making me feel 'out of it' temporarily,such as blowing up balloons, staying up an entire night, and later the way psychiatric medications would make me feel.
The obvious question this raises is: 'Out of it' as compared to what?
The only answer I can think of is the way I felt back in my pre-dp/dr years (a feeling I don't so much as recall, as reconstruct with my imagination).
The 'out of it' sensation I once felt while making a loud whistling sound by blowing through a blade of grass trapped between my thumbs at some point, somehow, just eventually became the norm.
I had always been anxiety ridden.
There was never a time that I didn't have things on my mind deeply worrying me.
Never did drugs (just prescription meds from a shrink that used to leave my head utterly zapped).
But I did drink lots of beer on hunting and fishing trips with my uncle (made me feel like a big man, as well as dp/dr'd for entire afternoons).
Additionally I used to stay up all night on weekends (not partying, just drinking cokes and watching television by myself).
This would always leave me real dp'd (but I didn't worry about it at that time, because it was always only temporary. Nobody ever told me that it could stick like that).
That plus I had tons of social anxiety in school.
So much so that in the ninth grade I could no longer face that environment (there was just too much hostility there).
I did the rest of my public education on the 'Homebound Hospital' program, which was for kids who, for whatever reason, could not attend regular school.
This period is of particular interest for me, because it was during this time that I became depersonalized full time.
Previously I had stayed up all night only on weekends, but during this time I was doing so every night.
I kept a diary then, in which I treated dreams with about the same level of regard as waking life.
I would wake up in the middle of the night (or just whenever I happened to be sleeping) and log my dreams in it.
It got so that my dream life and waking life began to overlap freely.
As this went on my waking life began to seem more dream-like.
Maybe it was the real beginning of it.
At that time, though, I was convinced that it was a by-product of excessive daydreaming.
I thought if I could just make myself stop long enough, the dreamlike sensation would fade.
But I never could (so I still don't know for sure what role, if any, it might've played).
Whatever the ultimate cause of it, whether it was any one of the aforementioned factors, or perhaps some combinationation of them, by age sixteen I had it full time.
I wasn't immediately concerned about it.
In fact, in the early going it was a very novel experience that I found quite enjoyable.
By seventeen, however, I was tired of the feeling.
Not panicked about it, just tired of it.
It seemed like such a simple problem, afterall, that I believed there had to be a simple remedy for it.
But as time wore on, and I began to more fully appreciate the gravity of what I was really dealing with, I became increasingly desperate about it.
My psychiatrist, for example, insisted he didn't know what I was talking about whenever I tried to describe what I was feeling to him.
So I sought help elsewhere.
In the summer of my seventeenth year I saw I hypnotherapist.
I just wanted him to hypnotize me to feel "fully here."
But he explained that it didn't really work that way, so I followed his recommended approach for awhile in the hope that it would rid me of it.
Except it didn't.
When I was eighteen I tried another hynotherapist, but that led to nothing either.
It was in that same year that I first heard the word 'depersonalization', from a Texas Rehab psychologist.
I suspect my psychiatrist never said the 'd' word because he was afraid that if I had a name to go along with the feelings I was trying to describe to him he might get sued (he'd been prescribing me stuff since I was thirteen that wasn't FDA approved for anyone under eighteen).
When I was nineteen I tried biofeedback, the idea being that if I could re-integrate my brain, the dp/dr would lift.
Though I got pretty good at it, it never did have any effect on the dp/dr.
The failure of that, plus dozens of different nutritional supplements (like choline), and special diets (for hypoglycemia, and food allergies) left me so frustrated and exhausted that I finally just abandoned the search for a cure by my early twenties, and I just focused all of my attention on getting through college.
From my twenties until fairly recently I didn't really think about it hardly at all.
It was always there, but I ignored it and simply lived life as though I didn't have it.
In '99, after finally going online, I typed 'depersonalization' into a search box and clicked 'go' just to see what (if anything) might come up. (I'd typed everything else in, afterall, just for fun.)
The amount of information that came up was fairly staggering.
Practically 'information overload', and I could only do cursory scans of it all, just trying to pin point clues to a possible cure.
For all of the available information, however, there was nothing that led me to any specific treatments.
I began feeling a hopeless, overwhelmed sort of feeling again, not unlike what I was feeling back in my early twenties.
I continued doing periodic searches on the topic over the following years (mostly just typing the words 'depersonalization' and 'cure' in together and running searches, but always getting "Your search returned 0 matches").
I began hanging around this particular board last fall, just to lurk in the "Regaining Reality" and "Alternative Remedies and Therapies" sections (actually trying various things that members had posted in there, but with nil results as always).
By late winter I had registered here myself (on pure impulse).
And that's where the situation stands at present.
e
