[DPDRDom]

Hi, my name is Dom and my girlfriend suffers with DP/DR. She feels like I am a robot and so is her and everyone else, she hates crowds, blue light and noises. There is a longer list of symptoms but honestly not sure what else to say. She has terrible visual snow and I am going to buy her sunglasses to help. By the way, little help tip, use night shift on your phone and electronics. Hugely helped.

She has had it on and off not too severely over her life but she has now had it for four months and it's getting worse and worse. We started with a scale of 1-5 where it started at 1 or 0.5 but now its regularly 7 and the highest its reached is 8.5.

I just want some advice from people who know their stuff through experience. I have done a lot of research to try and understand and she says I understand well for someone who's never had it, but you guys and your experience is what can save her. Hell, she thinks it will kill her.

If anyone has advice on how to quickly relieve and how to start the road to recovery, or any tips or any questions or anything at all, I beg you to comment because we are at our wit's end. She has exams in a week and with her memories blank and paper lines wriggling about it will dampen her grades. We are desperate, can any of you help her?

Thanks,
Dom

 

[solus]

Hi Dom,

DP/DR is harmless, and nobody has ever died from it! In fact, it seems to be a defense mechanism that serves to protect the mind from trauma or extreme stress. (Unfortunately, overthinking can make it a bigger problem than it is, and it can itself become a source of anxiety and stress.)

Her interpretations of her dp experience (that everyone is like a robot) are an attempt to project meaning on the experience. It's as if the sense or meaning of everything (self and/or world) has been stripped away so that everything appears strange and unfamiliar. People can experience it very differently depending on where their focus is.* She shouldn't give any weight to those kinds of thoughts. They're completely normal in dp. Familiarity will return to everything and the thoughts will stop after recovery.

My advice is to keep her grounded in the real world, and help keep her out of her head. She needs to be engaged with life, and not primarily for distraction. In my opinion, dp is a disorder of the emotions that affects memory, perception and thought, and you can't really think your way out of it. She needs to be actively engaged and connected with the world, emotionally, physically, socially, etc. Avoid major triggers (such as sensory overload) and excessive stress until she is strongly recovered. See the advice of people who have recovered and returned to share their advice here [some links in my profile].

Give her support in preparing for the exam. I think it's good to have something tangible like that to focus on. Worrying about down-to-earth things like her academic record (as long as it's not overwhelming) can be helpful; worrying about dp never is.

When dp passes it will be less than a memory, but the consequences in life of overreacting to it and allowing it to drain away all your emotional energy can take a while to put right.

I have pretty bad visual snow, though I've had it all my life so it's not directly related to dp. It was (or seemed) worse when I had dp or anxiety. I'm confident her visual snow will return to the level it was before.

* The biggest distinction is between a focus on the self (DP) and the world (DR), though it can be both and either term can be used to refer to dp/dr in general.

Hi, my name is Dom and my girlfriend suffers with DP/DR. She feels like I am a robot and so is her and everyone else, she hates crowds, blue light and noises. There is a longer list of symptoms but honestly not sure what else to say. She has terrible visual snow and I am going to buy her sunglasses to help. By the way, little help tip, use night shift on your phone and electronics. Hugely helped.

She has had it on and off not too severely over her life but she has now had it for four months and it's getting worse and worse. We started with a scale of 1-5 where it started at 1 or 0.5 but now its regularly 7 and the highest its reached is 8.5.

I just want some advice from people who know their stuff through experience. I have done a lot of research to try and understand and she says I understand well for someone who's never had it, but you guys and your experience is what can save her. Hell, she thinks it will kill her.

If anyone has advice on how to quickly relieve and how to start the road to recovery, or any tips or any questions or anything at all, I beg you to comment because we are at our wit's end. She has exams in a week and with her memories blank and paper lines wriggling about it will dampen her grades. We are desperate, can any of you help her?

Thanks,
Dom

 

[DPDRDom]

Thank you very much Solus.

Your advice is appreciated, and I just want to ask, how can I help her believe she's going to beat this? How can I help her stop believing these things that it's making her feel.

Thanks,

Dom

 

[solus]

She had it on and off for years, so she knows it can come and go. Remind her of that. Help her to think back on moments during the day when it dropped from an 8+ to a 3 or 4 or lower.

Don't pay any attention to the small minority of really chronic cases (which probably involve a physical issue that needs to be addressed) and who are disproportionately represented on forums like this. Dp passes for virtually everyone within weeks or months, and sooner with the right lifestyle changes and management of anxiety and stress.

In dp, a thought can become an emotional reality just by thinking it. I think this is because the emotions are unbound from the self, body or the external world and become free to attach to any abstract thoughts we conjure up in our heads. Thoughts are extremely biased in dp/dr. The anxiety, paired with the bias everyone already has to perceive threats, makes those thoughts very negative.

She should not trust those thoughts just because they feel real. Any abstract fear can feel real in dp, no matter how obviously mistaken. (It's not difficult to challenge the thoughts rationally, but in practice it's not that helpful because there are endless other thoughts waiting to take the place of the current obsession.)

- Richard

Thank you very much Solus.

Your advice is appreciated, and I just want to ask, how can I help her believe she's going to beat this? How can I help her stop believing these things that it's making her feel.

Thanks,

Dom

 

[DPDRDom]

Thanks Solus, i will let her know and any further developments Ill return to the thread