# Hello All! / Depersonalization: Episode III



## Elanonymous (Jul 28, 2014)

Hello all, I'm new to this forum, and I hope I can get some insight to what I'm feeling at the moment with your feedback and so forth. I am currently under heavy derealization to a point far stronger than before. I write this hastily so please excuse me if I confuse or make little sense.

I've had derealization since I was a preteen, episodically under periods of much stress. Each experience was very scary and uncomfortable to me, but I always seemed to pull through and out of them, since they were merely anxiety related. I've always questioned my reality at some point in my life since I was about 8 years old. I would ask my parents things like "what if everything is a hologram" but it didn't have such cynical implications as it does now to a now 18 year old fellow.

A while back I had started to consume pot, seeing how many places, namely peers-media's now changing outlook towards marihuana consumption and legalization and how apparently it wasn't as bad as they said it was... I had consumed too much at a point without realizing it (wax, apparently the one of the strongest, most concentrated ways of consuming it) for about a month almost daily via vape, and the last time I consumed it was via a bong hit (my first, and most likely my last experience with weed at all) and I went through a bad trip, because I wasn't used to getting such a quick and strong high.

I felt very bad, as if all of my fears came real and nothing could calm me down for about a minute. I am 18, and it seems studies show that my brain is in critical development stages, which makes it even more vulnerable to the psychoactive effects of weed, which made me very worried, and a night later I had an anxiety attack that left me in this sort of heavily derealized state where my body couldnt tell reality from a dream (It's very hard to describe, like if the "dream" switch was left on in my brain, and my body couldn't go into sleep because it thought it was already sleeping), so I ended up puking and took a shower afterwards and finally was able to sleep. from that week up until now (about 3 weeks), I feel more derealized than I've ever had, and constant thoughts of dread and anxiety have been on me since.

My thought patterns are odd, I am very paranoid (anything that I see in life or the media that might relate to questioning reality or things that evoke any kind of emotion) and what would be nothing silly thoughts in the past, like questioning the reality of things have become very strong struggles in my conscience. Trying to sleep at night is another struggle, because in those moments I feel anxious and very derealized because in some of my dreams I feel like I actually am awake and I despair into insanity until I wake up from them. I feel like my mind is now more naturally inclined to believe that I am living some sort of fake existence than it is just experiencing symptoms on a very real world, and it's driving me nuts, because in the past I've rationally known that I am a real person in a real world, as I have "experienced real life" before at some point in my life.

Right now I think that one of the few anchors I have in this delicate state is my mother, as I think she's the only thing that makes sense and matters to me at the moment, and I'm scared of what will happen if I lose her. She and my psychologist do not know I have consumed marihuana, and this puts even more stress into my mind because of the struggle of guilt if I don't say anything vs. doing the right thing and telling the truth, which is to my benefit, as hard as it may be, because I'd end up telling on my brother who introduced me to habitual pot usage in some way. I am desperate to go to my psychologist, and take some brain tomographies, etc to see if there's any physical indicators to whether this is just high ptsd anxiety or something worse. If I had known of these effects any earlier, I wouldn't've even tried it once.

Can anyone relate closely to this?


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## Elanonymous (Jul 28, 2014)

Thanks for the reply! The coping mechanism you suggested has helped in my past episodes, and that pinpoint, like you say, does make a difference come to think of it!

Another thing that has helped me in the past is trying to get as normally involved in daily life. My first episode in middle-school was triggered by heavy stress, but I came to recover from it completely after 2 years of just living normally and being involved in other things, namely swimming.

My second episode was triggered by an anxiety attack after falling out with a close friend and school anxieties, along with the return of those existentialist thoughts. I started to see a psychologist, it was the first time I knew what dp was, and she helped me get back in track.

Before the current episode I am experiencing, I did still have derealization, but I had become accustomed to that sensation which was less intense than now, and at a certain point I did think about how silly my past "trigger" thoughts were (and still are!). After the scare I had this episode, with the worry of impairing some brain function (which feeds this loop at the moment until I can get a checkup), I'm steadfast on laying off any alcohol and drug use for good!

I am hoping that I do not have to resort to medications just yet, perhaps with time and correct routines as in past episodes (i.e. diets, activities, exercise, mindfulness), I might be able to return some stability.

I'll try to keep my progress posted in the forum!


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