# Recovery from DR (long post...)



## Mid50s (Aug 15, 2010)

I wrote two longish posts in the Introduce Yourself section, and someone noted that the Recovery section would be better. So, if you would like to read about a recovery, I have one for you. But first, since I started reading the posts from people at this forum, I made a point to read up on DR/DP and educate myself on what the state-of-the-art view is on this. All the studies and research about this have come out AFTER my bout with DR back in the 70s. I've confined myself to Wikipedia, and I've learned more in the last day than I have in the last 30 years about what was going on with me back then. And I still have a lot of the same problems I did then --mainly social anxiety, but I also had spiritual crisis and obsessive-compulsive personality thrown in. From what I've read, it would have been a miracle if I HADN'T gotten DR/DP! I have a lot more reading, reflecting, and interacting-with-people to do to make myself a happier person and "grow", but the visual crap I went through for a good 10 years (from age 18 to about 30) --the horribly oppressive unreality of my perception-- is definitely gone. And by that standard, you could say I've recovered. All the reflecting I do on the quality of my perception now is positive --how unusually nice, fresh, 'wonderful' something is -- a scene, people, a still life. Most of the time I'm unaware of my apperception --it's just normal whatever --the background to my work and leisure activities.
One morning --I remember it vividly-- I woke up with DR as a permanent condition. For a few months before then, I could switch it on an off at will. Or rather, things would go unreal, but I could snap back to real, let it slide back into unreal, and snap back again. At school in my senior year, sitting in my government class I could make the lecturing teacher switch between being real and unreal. I did this to alleviate the boredom of the class. And once at a family get together, I could do the same thing watching the group of people I was with. It was a curious novelty so I played with it. Then I woke up one morning and found myself stuck in the "unreality-on" mode, and I couldn't get out it no matter how hard I tried. I used a technique I called "hard focus" to try to get things back to normal, but I couldn't. I would stare at this bush outside a window in the family room and try to make it come back to being alive. Like others (I learned today), I concluded that I had some sort of brain dysfunction --probably brain damage due to some glue I did a year before. After a couple years of this, I worked up the courage to see a psychologist --at a free clinic. I asked to be tested for brain damage. He thought I was goofy so I didn't go back. He had people with "real problems" to deal with. I tried again later with a psychologist. He was a nice guy, but he didn't seem to have a clue what I was talking about, so I stopped paying for that. Finally I went to a clinic with the word "Psychiatry" in their title (thinking this is the serious stuff I need). By then I had come across a reference to my problem accidentally in a book by R.D. Laing who was describing the symptoms of a schizophrenic woman. I concluded that I must have schizophrenia (which I was very happy to find out because it's much better than brain damage) and went to this clinic to see if they could treat me for that. Cure my schizophrenia so I could get reality back. By now this is 5 years into the DR. All the time I was working crappy minimum wage jobs, and all my friends had graduated from college and some had started families. I was the loser of the bunch --and I had been the smartest in school! But if you're crazy, you're crazy, so you just have to deal with it.
The psychiatrist interviewed me, wouldn't "confirm or deny" my suspicion that I had schizophrenia, and started me on bi-weekly, then weekly sessions with a 40 year old psychologist who was also a church minister. I saw him for a good 4 years without a break except for maybe 2-3 weeks vacation once a year. He followed to what then they called "reality therapy". William Glasser was a proponent of it. In therapy I wanted to talk about the subtleties of my phenomenological apperception, but he called that "spinning" (intellectual bullshit) and asked me, instead, if I had met anyone and how I got along with people at work. But he would indulge me from time to time. He called himself, "a paid friend." He said, what's wrong with that? So that's how I thought of him --as a paid friend. It ended weird. I confessed to him that I was obsessing about what he thought of me. That I was no longer interested in "my problem" but about HIM. HE was the issue. I told him I couldn't take the stress and had to break off the therapy. I think for his own reasons (he was gay, I think --even though married-- and I had been with him for 4 years), and he didn't put up a fight about me leaving. I had read about transference and I knew that's what was going on, and I sort of feel he let me down at what could have been a valuable time. But he was seeing me for free after the first couple years --letting me do yard work at his new house to pay off my bill! I knew his kids ,and talked to his wife (she was a psych too), so I couldn't complain.

But that was a major event for me. Going through those feelings I had about him (they were mainly about being abandoned --trite as that might sound) put me on a new level. My having such feelings came as a real surprise to me. I didn't know I had it in me. That was the first time I had felt that sort of energy inside me. I can't remember what was going on with the unreality at that point. But within a few months I had re-enrolled back in college (this time in Philosophy rather than math), got near straight A's, met my to-be-wife (we've since divorced), graduated, and tried to make it in the educational film business. I know for sure that when I was going to college the Unreality was not part of my life. I wasn't denying it or trying to suppress it. It was just a non-issue. I never did have, at any point, except until the last 10 years or so, have what I would call "reality" experiences (that is, the opposite of unreality experiences). I always wanted that cathartic stripping-away-of-unreality-and-being-replaced-by-reality-experience, but it never happened. I went from unreality to everything just being kind of shitty (not unreal but not real either), to ok-not-bad-just-ordinary, to sometimes finding myself soaking up some scene or situation where I feel a connection (of love) with what I'm looking at, and I can assure you I do not take those occasions for granted --knowing what the dark side is like.

I could say a lot more about what was going in my life before the DR set in, but since this is about Recovery, I thought I should focus on what came after. From what I know of my own experience, and from the little (a lot actually) I've recently read that backs up my experience, I would say that the cause of DR is in the emotions. Maybe you had a shitty father like me and a mother who wanted everyone to be totally "normal" even if that was far from the truth. Maybe you had some cruel "friends" who exploited your fragility instead of giving you support. Maybe a disturbed sibling. My sage advice would be to forget about the DR/DP as such and find out where your emotional hurt is because that will be the key. If you're like me then, I thought my family was fine (Ok, so my Dad was a little distant) and emotionally I was perfectly OK (I had lots of friends and girl friends and played in a band). My whole problem, I thought, was the damn unreality. Don't worry about my emotions --that's wasting time. Tell me how to get reality back. I think now that it was emotions all along.


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## nix (Feb 27, 2010)

Thanks for sharing. I also think that emotions could be main reason for DR to me too.


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## dpsince2002 (Oct 26, 2008)

Same here. Mine seems pretty tied to relationships with other people; my therapist's theory is that, since it started after a breakup that followed a pretty nasty divorce, it became a way of coping with having relationships that wouldn't really lead to intimacy and pain.


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