[yuri]

Im not thru with this but I have come a long way and I feel safe in my progress.

SO my way out has been by accepting, getting to know my thoughts and feelings and try to remember how I functioned before. Its the last thing I will give some tips on and hopefully it can trigger something in you the reader to start to heal.

I have studied a lot of old photos before the sickness and tried to remember how I functioned. I have wrote about it as well. Describing for myself how I was before.

There are some subtle differences I have learned about the difference with and without DpDr:

-Without DpDr your presence fills the room your in. It is hard to explain but without DpDr your feelings doesn't end at the skin level. In a sense you feel the walls and everything in the room without touching them.

-With DpDr you only take in things logically. Like I have a food pantry. Logically this is where I store food. But we doesn't process stuff only logically. We remember what our senses tells us and things that happened around the specific thing/place. Like now when Im opening my pantry I know how it smells but with full DpDr this things didn't register. The smell creates a feeling of familiarity you cant get with DpDr. That is why everything seems strange, gray and you have the feeling that something is missing. Take Mondays. Logicaly it is just a day but with feelings you remember a whole life of thing related to Mondays and that builds the full picture. End of the week and now you need to go to school, work. Maybe you always slept less on Mondays? Maybe a lot of Mondays you where hangover from the weekend? DpDr is like a switch in the brain and if you can start to remember how it was with the DpDr switch of you can start to move the switch a little. Not turn of DpDr but you can start to imagining how it would be if you didnt have it. A tiny step by tiny step you can start to find your way back,

Try to remember how it was before and maybe that will trigger something in you. I started to get better after I stoped running from the feeling of DpDr. It creates a negative loop to distance yourself from DpDr. But it takes time. Three years and counting of acceptances and learning about self. Nothing I write is something that ease the pain right now but it is a long journey. Maybe the path I walk is for you, maybe not. Hope you get well from this one way or another friends.

 

[yuri]

Also another thing that I found hard to see and accept was that DpDr gives safety in a way. A false sense of security. You close yourself in a small box, if the world is scary the little box is safe right? And while your in that box you dont have to face the hard facts. For me it is that my mother and cat are getting old and maybe I loose these two important beings in the not so distant future, Im getting old and I have no job, education, family, girlfriend or social life, Im behind and far away from my goals, hope and dreams, the world is feels more chaotic each year ETC. You hide in your DpDr box and all the realistic things you worry about they will sooner or later happen to you but you wont feel anything in your box. Not any negative emotion, no positive emotions ether. You're numb to the world. Your safe from emotional hurt but your life is in shambles. Its not worth it. Better to live with the fear, a. Accept it and it cant hurt you. Its hard to acknowledge that the thing you hate gives you the illusion of safety. Its hard to leave safety even if you're trapped in a small box that you hate. Its like the baby bird who jumps from the nest to fly. Im gonna jump this box soon, I can feel it. Then Im going to fucking fly. Hope you to will do that some day.

 

[AnnaGiulia]

Hey yuri,

I identify a lot with what you said about having the false sense of safety with DPDR.

Now that I am not DPd any more, my mind is having hard time dealing with feelings, and it is panicky looking for a way out of feeling so much - of both good and bad. I can almost feel DP in the back of my mind, just waiting to step in once I had enough of emotions.

The fear of loss is basically what freaks me out the most, and I am having a really hard time learning how to deal both with loss as such, and the fear of loss, that creates not only anxiety in me, but also some manic feeling of having missed out so much with DP, that I somehow have to compensate it, like right now. It feels like being on steroids or energy drink all the time. I am aware that this is a reaction to regained emotions that I have never mastered. Tbh, I never learned to properly feel the feelings, or to properly name them, to live with them and through them, or to accept them for what they are. I basically feel as an alien or a newborn in that regard.

I like your attitude, and I too hope you will f.cking fly, lol

A.

 

[yuri]

Hey yuri,

I identify a lot with what you said about having the false sense of safety with DPDR.

Now that I am not DPd any more, my mind is having hard time dealing with feelings, and it is panicky looking for a way out of feeling so much - of both good and bad. I can almost feel DP in the back of my mind, just waiting to step in once I had enough of emotions.

The fear of loss is basically what freaks me out the most, and I am having a really hard time learning how to deal both with loss as such, and the fear of loss, that creates not only anxiety in me, but also some manic feeling of having missed out so much with DP, that I somehow have to compensate it, like right now. It feels like being on steroids or energy drink all the time. I am aware that this is a reaction to regained emotions that I have never mastered. Tbh, I never learned to properly feel the feelings, or to properly name them, to live with them and through them, or to accept them for what they are. I basically feel as an alien or a newborn in that regard.

I like your attitude, and I too hope you will f.cking fly, lol

A.

How is it going? Didnt read your post. Some notifications doesnt get thru. Fear of loss has been me greatest struggle since summer but I think Im getting past it a little. I realete to what you write about feelings. Are you better one year later?

 

[Findmywayhome]

Hey Yuri.

I love your description of what it feels like to not have DPDR. however I haven't had the opportunity to see the world unobstructed from DPDR ever since I fell into it 5 months ago. But the idea that "your presence fills the room" makes a lot of sense. Because feeling dissociated is to feel dettached from your surroundings. and so not being dissociated one should feel attached to their surroundings.

So I presume you have went through periods throughout your mental disorder where you're DPDR was very minimal or even gone? If so, I have a question: when your DPDR was at its worst, did you think it was impossible to get out of it? I feel so dissociated, it feels impossible to get better. It's very important to make it clear that it's not because I feel hopeless per se, it's not a depressive thought, but rather, I feel like I have transcended my perception of reality and my sense of self to such a degree that it is impossible to return, like how can I just "unsee" what I have experienced in DPDR? It worries me. And I am worried every connection I have to myself and reality would be severed off completely to the point where I will be practically dead; there will be no me in the present. I will be a ghost of myself.