[andymania]

I am trying to figure out why for the past few years, everytime I try to talk to myself in my head and try to convince myself that these thoughts ar BS and other kinds of postive self-talk, I get this feeling of "phoney-ness, fakeness".It is as if my mind refuses to accept that I can think differently and it keeps reverting to my typical bottled up, empty robotic self. As a result I get depressed and feel that it is hopeless.

I was always more on the quiet side and I was always "bottled up" Can it be that my mind is so used to being in this state that it refuses to change?
Can me attempting to change my thinking be causing the anxiety/dr/depression and fear?
What is this constant rebellion my mind is putting up? Do any of you guys experience this?

 

[Ben]

This is an interesting topic to me, because I can equate with it quite well. A while ago I had a lot of anxiety about a trip I was to take for business reasons - concerned that it would give me a pretty bad spike in DP. In the end, it turned out good, but it really got me thinking a lot about how the disorder can come to be.

I live in my head a lot - I spend a lot of time ruminating and thinking about things; and sometimes when someone comes along and pulls me out of it I can suddenly feel a "jolt" back into the now and become somewhat depersonalized. Attacking the "phoney-ness" as you put it can probably bring something out very similar.

My thinking has always been that this disorder is heightened by anxiety and panic disorder, but comes to be fairly chronic when someone, probably, has maladaptive ways of interacting with their environment and has, kind of, been fairly loosely rooted in their environment. When the environment changes, even slightly, we panic and can become derealized and depersonalized. Our link to the world around us is not as ingrained within us as it is in others. A pretty loosely-knit theory, but it hasn't really let me down so far.

Taking that thought a bit further, you can't just see environment as the physical world around you (especially if you spend a lot of your time in your head), but also as the thoughts and mindset you possess. If you are going against those, or doing anything that changes those and therefore changes your view on the world, you can depersonalize and panic all over again.

We're kind of like people standing in a row boat - we can see further than others, but the ride is a bit more wobbly.