# It's gone. I'm pretty much back to "normal"



## Bak2normal (Oct 12, 2014)

(I posted this on the DPDR subreddit and I am posting it here too just incase there are people that browse both)

Probably a handful of times throughout my life I remember having very short episodes of DPDR. I remember just kind of daydreaming and thinking about how weird it was that I am a person and this person is me. It felt like extreme self awareness. These would last like 20 seconds or so and I'd feel my heart sink and I would pretty much snap out of it and return back to normal.

Around October of 2013(over a year ago) I looked real hard into the mirror and it hit me HARD as hell. I felt the same feeling I just described but this time it didn't go away. I went to sleep and when I awoke I still felt strange. I felt the extreme self awareness and pretty much "existing" scared me. Hearing my self talk was terrifying and I avoided any mirror. This was easily the worst feeling I ever had, and I was convinced this was worse than a terminal illness and I wanted to trade DPDR for any other illness/disease. I felt extremely helpless. Friends and family literally felt like strangers.

Well, it slowly got better. I went from thinking about my DPDR every waking moment, to thinking about it maybe every few hours. To thinking about it once or twice a day. Now around a year later I pretty much feel like it's gone. It's strange because I still understand what it is, and why it scared me so bad, but it doesn't anymore? Very hard to explain but I never thought I would get better. When I was in it real deep it felt like I would never come out.

I'm not sure exactly why I had it, if I had to guess it was my childhood. I had very narcissistic/neglectful parents and I am also a very very anxious person. So those two seems like a recipe for disaster. Also, when I was deep in my DPDR, I was in a very bad place in my life. I was doing nothing for almost a year pretty much locked in my room for about 23 hours a day.

Small thing that helped: Probably sounds silly but having some sort of video playing in the background while on the computer helped me immensely. In my case I watched tons and tons of Hardcore Pawn and it helped keep my mind busy and distracted.

Sorry for wall of text I had a lot to say and I've been waiting forever to make a recovery story. Stick with it guys you'll all be fine.

Oh yeah one last thing, while this subreddit and other websites were helpful, during my recovery I stayed very very far away from any DPDR sites or anything that would make me think of it. It helps some people to be active on DPDR forums I guess but for me acting like I didn't have it is what helped.


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