[Georgewright6]

from Recovery to relapse with new symptoms can someone help me on this ?

So i had Dp since 2016 i started to recover and had freedom from it by 2019 and recovered in 2020 fully for about 6 months.

My anxiety started with OCD in 2014 for a year and a half and then DR came after taking MDMA for two years, in that two years my head was so focussed on the DR my OCD disappeared my OCD was almost gone when DR started i will add, in 2019 DP developed and I started to recover as it helped me get my focus of my DR and Dp together aided by the DP. 2020 I was recovered, felt real
and no longer suffered and if i did have bouts it didn’t affect me at all I actually quite liked the DP as it was trippy at times.

To my main point, I relapsed end of 2020 and my OCD and DP/DR all came back, i was in a confused fog for about a year which didn’t bother me too much my mind was just blank, as it started to clear up my OCD symptoms started to come
through, as i recovered more i've started to have old emotions come back from before i had anxiety completely which made me very confused and I realised during my 2020 recovery these feelings where absent and i think without noticing it i may have still been mildly DP’d and not 100%. Id
just add i did have emotions just not in the same way as before anxiety but it was wierd I new something was slightly different at times but i just didn’t care as i felt good, i also had more compassion and empathy but had less interest in certain things i had previously loved. 🤷‍♂️

Anyway what my question is and my main problem now is I can’t get out of this mess I have this feeling a lot now of being reconnected to my old self whilst at the same time being disconnected from that person and not being able to fully integrate with my identity, im constantly being pulled back and forth between connected and disconnected, it’s giving me crazy existential thoughts which i’ve never really suffered with, debating if my emotions are real and i’m just imaging this is my old
self and then feeling like
i did for seconds in 2020 and trying to understand if that’s how im
supposed to feel or should i feel this deep
connected to myself and emotions feelings? it’s really fucking with my head as my mind won’t allow me to stick to one i just want to reconnect to myself now it feels so whole but i just can’t get back, also I cannot stop worrying about it, the way i got out of DP in 2020 won’t work
as i have to be in that mild dp state to stop worrying about it and i soon realise that’s not how i want to feel My OCD/anxiety pulls me back into being aware of my anxiety along with myself and my emotions causing even more confusion 😫😫😫😫

 

[ThoughtOnFire]

The path to healing can take time, so patience is a virtue here. I've recently realized that at least for myself, even exiting DP/DR I will need healing for some time. These states of mind can be traumatic themselves... even to the point I'll dare to say that after recovery many will have PTSD. There will be much to process after this, possibly enough to deal with for life. You may be like me and have been too hard on yourself, pressuring oneself to recover.

 

[Georgewright6]

You know what i used to think those exact things when i first got DP but it doesn’t happen, you process things as time goes on and you change through different stages, i had traumatic memories from being ill I thought i’d never stop thinking about when i was in a state of constant DR but when it lifted and i started to come out of it i let go and stopped thinking about those things.

Now this time around i’ve started to have gaps when i really start to feel like the person i was once before i had anxiety all together, I had one gap this morning, some yesterday off and on and a half a day the day before, the whole time i still was lingering between DP and myself but it abled me to have clarity and think the way i once had and not be so bothered about Dp/DR, I think if you go in deep like I did there can be many stages to DP recovery, I am starting to think in the beginning my DR shielded me from my anxiety which was the very thing i needed to recover, DP came along after DR which pulled me out of DR and back into reality for a long while and i think finally my anxiety has come back to actually reconnect me back to myself and who i am, that’s how it feels anyway. this may mean nothing to most people depending on what stage they are in as it would of meant nothing to me 4 years ago while in DR as i just wanted it to end i had forgot what my life looked like but now i’m starting to see how this disorder works, it literally blocks you from your world and the person you are and you come back in stages.

if your lucky enough to have this disorder a short while I feel it maybe that your DP/DR didn’t get strong enough to remove you fully from yourself and your anxiety so you where able to have the tools to recover, when it gets super strong from a breakdown like I had i think your mind just shuts you down and you have to come back in stages, which can take a while, for me it was 2 years roughly at a time each stage.

don’t fear this though thinking you will feel constantly rubbish for years before you feel yourself again as that’s not true, recovery comes in many satisfying ways and stages, recovery from DR took 2 years i managed to get it to a stage where i could calm it down massively to a relaxed state and just live life as best I could and function, that was the first and worst stage.

Recovery stage 2 which lasted two years was when DP came along and pulled me back into reality and I felt real emotions and clarity and lost all fear of my symptoms after a year of up and down breaks and clarity and was able to live freely and happily for 6 months but i noticed i had lost interest in many things but also had new interests and my mind was relatively quiet of mostly anything which wasn’t a bad thing necessarily at the time, but i new something just wasn’t quite right.

Stage 3 i feel is where i’m at now, it started with DP/DR and confusion the confusion lifted after a year and i started to experience my anxiety again which now over the past 8 months has lead me at times to feeling more in contact with myself than i had done since all this started, I have also really had to work on my anxiety and learning to stay calm and accept and not focus on my thoughts or my symptoms of DP/DR and allow my mind to jump around wherever it wants which could be awful at times which has also not come completely naturally to me, acceptance has been very hard and challenging this time round, Stage 2 was way easier and less scary, but its a process and accepting it has worked slowly and i’ve noticed now im
recovering in the way i have always recovered which is by accepting!!! but my mind is going through a different process from
the last each time and recovery can’t be replicated in the same way mentally as I have had to teach myself, what i mean is i can’t recover from my DP/DR like in stage 2 as now with my anxiety present when my DP try’s to lift me out of DR my anxiety then pulls me back in! but when it does it’s reconnecting me to myself, my fears, my feelings, my thoughts etc, so how could i ever recover like before? I can’t! because this is the final stage and a natural process we must all go through. I do feel now i’m coming back to myself bit by bit everyday and it has taken since 2016 to feel this way but like i said don’t let that scare anyone as through each stage i have felt freedom in a different way each stage and it was just another stage to coming back to yourself 🤘🏻