Just wanted to clarify what I personally mean when I say "DP"
I am not talking about some vague confused state of questioning "is this the authentic me?" or existential questions about 'real' verus "fake" parts of ourselves. I do not mean (as a few people seem to define DP) a state of feeling "detached" from other people as if they all are more involved in life as opposed to being stuck in questioning the validity of life and its meaning. That is certainly all a problem, clearly...but that's NOT DP to me.
When I offer advice, suggestions, I am talking about the DP where I felt like I literally losing my Self - as if my soul or the entity that is "I" had somehow wafted out of its body - or was about to disentegrate - as if the ME I knew inside my head was not the same ME anymore, or that I had no ME at all left....I felt a strange bodily detachment, as if parts of my body were foreign, or belonged to some other entity - or that I couldn't FEEL RIGHT inside my own hands or head....my experience of touching my own arm felt as if I was touching somebody else - or that the "toucher" (the Me inside my mind who decided to touch) was not the same, or was disappearing.
Pure terror and the most surreal kinds of distorted perceptural experiences that I imagine an LSD user might feel.
Also, other people looked "wrong' or not like themselves.
It was as if the entire world I was suddenly living in was DIFFERENT from the reality of yesterday....I felt like i had never SEEN grass before, or the sky before...it looked as if it was now being seen from a different dimension or a parallel universe or something equally insane-sounding.
TO MY MIND, that was the DP of body separation from Ego and
the DP/DR of external world separation from Self.
Then it got worse.
On top of those two lovely experiences, I entered the Separation of Self from Ego. That was the deepest "level" of this hell for me - and in the same way that above, my body had split off from my Mental Self, and the External World had separated from my Perceiving Self, finally it seemed that an INNER mind/ego split occurred...whereby I was still AWARE of being a human being but the Identity Feeling (the central Ego) had been ripped away from that awareness.
I felt like I could give the right answers to live in reality,but no longer had a "ME" from which to experience my own existence.
Like a mirror inside a mirror inside a mirror...the external world broke off from me, my own body broke off from me and then "I" broke off from me.
And it STILL felt like on some horrific level, it coudl get even worse if I just waited long enough...as if even the shred of Self I had left could be further splintered indefinitely.
THAT was MY experience. So if the things I say in my posts don't speak to you, that does not mean you are NOT dp or that you have somethign ELSE, etc...we all experience it differently.
But my particular "brand' was DP and anxiety (in particular annihilation anxiety) and obsessive self-monitoring. That particular combination, coupled with a lifetime of living in fantasy alot, of wearing a mask with nearly everyone, of trying to pretend to be one way when I really felt another, of watching myself interact in the world all the time, WATCHING, evaluating, studying myself....all that added up to the particular DP experience that was me.
So when I say we must STOP self-scrutiny, etc. I am talking about someone in a state similar to what I describe above. Naturally, everyone is self-observant to some extent. But for me, and other similar obsessive types, we get our little jaws clenched around something and we refuse to let go. I REFUSED to stop worrying and questiong "am I real?"
"how do I KNOW I'm alive?" and "death? infinity? what will it feel like to be dead?" THAT stuff is the danger territory. And right alongside those questions are the tamer ones, but really wolves in sheep's clothing, such as "do I feel better today than I did yesterday?" or "Do I feel less real or more real than I did outside just now..."
Self-monitoring, using the mind and body as a THING to observe and guard and report on....very very dangerous for those of you who do not want to enter the depths of the abyss that I've seen all too well.
Peace,
Janine
