# DP/DR After a Breakup



## dpsince2002 (Oct 26, 2008)

My dp/dr started in January of 2003, when I broke up with a woman I'd only been dating for a couple of months. It seemed mutual, like the best thing to do, and something that wasn't affecting me very much. But instead of doing the crying and moving on that I could feel starting to come, I went numb, and shortly after that my dp/dr started, with the obsessive thinking that Feeling Unreal talks about, about my mind, existence, myself, etc.

In the last 6 years, there have been two times when I can say all of the symptoms have gone away completely, and both were moments when I was in situations relatively free of anxiety, when I had something to focus on. One was while walking out in some corn fields, and the other was driving through the country. I've seen a zillion therapists, some of whom said that I was psychotic, others of whom have focused on the obsession and treated me for OCD. I tried fluvoxamine (the generic Luvox, prescribed for OCD) for a couple of years, which seemed to take the anxiety out of my obsessive thinking but didn't affect it much other than that. During the last 6 years, though, I've had a slow but steady loss of numbness, and more instances recently of the flatness of vision starting to go away. The thoughts still race almost constantly, but feel more mine, and focus more on reality than on how I and the world aren't real.

I'm still not sure what started my dp/dr, or what's helping it to thin out little by little, but Feeling Unreal and the stories on this site have helped a lot. I always was a daydreaming, imaginative type, who lived more in my head than in the world, and had a history of dissociating for brief moments. Before the breakup, I'd gone through a pretty crazy series of life changes, getting divorced after a short and traumatic marriage, quitting drinking after realizing that I was alcoholic, and turning from dreams of a mindless desk job toward grad school. None of them were things that I felt emotionally equipped to handle, and now, when my sense of unreality starts to go away, I also start to get fears and doubts about how my life is going, that almost make it seem like an anesthetic. Fortunately, and thanks in part to you guys, if it is that, I'm needing it less and less.


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