# Have been through hell...now seeing the light?



## Chiron (Apr 2, 2015)

Hi all,

I've been lurking on here for a while now, visiting intermittently but have never posted and haven't been too engaged. I know many who have recovered do warn about spending too much time on these forums, or focusing too much on the more frightening, dispiriting content-- a wise warning, I'm sure-- but I do feel like I might benefit from some contact with other people who might be going through the same thing. I say 'might', because like many of you, I do worry from time to time that what I'm experiencing is something more insidious or irreversible than DP/DR or an anxiety disorder, but from many of your own descriptions and other works I've read on anxiety, DP/DR, it seems like the most accurate diagnosis.

A little about myself, and I'll try to keep this as short as I can... but I'd also like to just get it all out there.

Back in 2008, I felt myself cross some invisible mental threshold, slipping into a depressive episode from which I could not escape, despite my best efforts in the years that followed. A breakup with a girlfriend who had been my first serious, sustained relationship, plus the stress of living in a college environment with all of the concomitant academic and social pressures one encounters there (not to mention the binge drinking), well, I think it pushed me over the edge. I have never been emotionally resilient, and have had a tendency to ruminate since I can remember-- when I was 8 years old, I lost a jacket while on a ski trip, a loss the crippled me for more than a month. I just couldn't stop thinking about it, how much I missed it, imagining how lonely and abandoned this inanimate object must feel. My parents often described me as "sentimental". Looking back, my reaction to this event I think was one of many red flags we might have missed. Yes, children often lack perspective and haven't hardened themselves against the blows one inevitably endures in life-- but a month of grieving over a jacket? So I think it comes as no surprise that when my first relationship ended, it felt like my world was collapsing around me.

But it wasn't just this lone event that did it-- there was a backdrop of stress, obsessive tendencies, low self-esteem, and anxiety that had plagued me for years, though, like my parents, my hope was that I would just outgrow these habits of mind and feeling and somehow manage to get on with life. I compensated well enough-- on the outside, I played the part pretty well. I earned admission to an elite boarding school, was elected class vice-president, gave talks at class assemblies to an audience of 1200. I was popular. I got into a reputable college, where I made good grades and participated in a number of extracurriculars.

But the stress was brutal. I could never focus in class-- my head was always whirring with fears and fantasies-- and I would have to cram before every single test, often pulling all-nighters and sometimes making use of off-label stimulants to help me stay awake and focus during these times. To say I was disrupting my circadian rhythm would be putting it very mildly-- by the summer of 2010, the band in my head had gone full-blown-Bjork, sometimes throwing rhythm right out the window. I couldn't sleep, or would wake up early, wheels spinning in my head all through the night. I was irritable, often-suicidal, and obsessive-- I would do math problems in my head incessantly just to prove that I was still smart, and scrutinize every word that came out of my mouth with such intensity that after a while, withdrawal, isolation, and silence were really the only option that remained. Socializing was horrifying.

So my parents finally convinced me to try anti-depressants-- Prozac, to be exact. I went home, met with a psychiatrist, and by our third meeting I walked out for a prescription. Fluoxetine, 20 mg.

I was extremely reluctant to try medication-- I felt like I was cheating, and of course I poured over all sorts of horror stories and negative anecdotes online. And wouldn't taking this pill mean I was capitulating to the very industrial-capitalist system that I believed was responsible, in part, for my mental state? Competition, individualism, not to mention the destruction of the planet and loss of biodiversity as a result of unchecked human ambitions and ingenuity-- a solution from Big Pharma was not ideologically consistent here. But I was desperate.

Prozac helped. I started to sleep again. I started to talk again. I determined I could go back to school. I just wanted to put the whole thing behind me. But I was terribly shaken, and in no way totally healed. Waves of suicidality continued to sweep over me, and I felt kind of numb. At the time I attributed that detached feeling to the medication, and I was determined to get off. Eventually, I dropped out of school, spent some time meditating, and after a particularly intense retreat felt I had done the necessary work and tossed my prescription in the trash. I found an internship at a university some 1,000 miles away in Atlanta, Georgia, packed up my car, and drove off.

By the third week in Georgia I thought my life was over. I had been monitoring my numbness constantly since withdrawing from the medication, and seeing no improvement, decided that my emotional core had been chemically castrated, and that I would never experience what it meant to be a human being again. I panicked. Absolute despair, sitting in the bathtub crying, screaming. I can't feel anything! I can't feel anything! Brain damage, brain damage! I didn't think that depression or anxiety might be responsible for this, nor did it occur to me until years later when I stumbled across DP/DR/Anxiety literature that the self-monitoring, agitation, obsession, and panic might be causing this deadness.

My mom drove down and picked me up. I was hospitalized for a month at an inpatient psychiatric facility, where I would end up two more times in the next three years. I had two extended rounds of electroconvulsive therapy-- part of me hoped it would just destroy me so that I could have an excuse to kill myself. I spent 9 months in Peru looking for spiritual healing, spending weeks on end in the Amazon working with curanderos, or medicine men. I had some very powerful experiences, but as far as feeling better-- it never happened.

Finally, this past summer (2014), after my third and most recent hospitalization, I started to see things in a different way. Maybe I wasn't brain damaged, and maybe I didn't have a spiritual problem any more, and maybe existential ruminating isn't going to get me anywhere. Maybe this was 'just' anxiety and depression-- the numbness, the deadness, lack of emotions, the obsessive self-analysis. I started working with another doctor, and finally, toward late autumn, I ended up on another SSRI (Sertraline, Zoloft). A part of me screamed that these pills were evil, that they were responsible for how I was feeling, but I stopped listening to that voice. Within days of taking the medication, I started to feel better. The voice in my head-- the constantly worrying, chatting, analyzing, speculating little gremlin-- it began to fade away. My jaw, which had always been clenched, started to relax, and I stopped furrowing my eyebrows. For the first time years, there was a quiet space in my head.

That was four months ago. I am by no means cured by now. I still feel pretty numb, which really bums me out. Music doesn't effect me, and romantic attachment is almost completely absent. My neck-- which was spasming all the time-- still hurts, and when the anxiety does come back, the physical pain I feel in my back and shoulders is almost as painful as the fear and worry and despair about my future and my health. But it's nowhere near as frequent as it used to be.

I guess I'm just hoping that the numbness will go away. There are times when I feel like I "should" be doing better. It's been, like, four months! Songs are really triggering for me-- I used to love music, but now can't really feel it, which really upsets me. I can sometimes forget about how shitty I'm feeling, but if a familiar song that I used to love comes on, I can get pretty upset. Same with looking at beautiful women-- it just makes me so immediately aware of how much I'm missing when I feel no thrill or interest seeing the opposite sex.

But I'm trying to focus on the improvements. The anxiety didn't just disappear when I started taking the medication, but now I'm implementing all the tips I've read here in combination with Zoloft, I'm seeing improvements. My concentration is much better. My mind is much sharper-- my sense of humor and wit has returned. I'm more social and can talk to people without reverting back to self-monitoring, though I'm still pretty introverted.

I see a lot of people here saying it can take a long time-- measure progress maybe in months, not weeks or days? That makes sense, but at the same time, I have trouble accepting or believing that pace. My doctor seems to think I'm improving at a good clip-- that I'm not moving as slowly as some of her other patients, and that it isn't unusual for me to be feeling very far from recovered at this point, even if I'm doing all the right things-- I have a part-time job, I wrestle for exercise and socializing, I take care of my apartment and live with three other young people. I don't do drugs or drink. But things still feel pretty dead, and there are moments where I feel so disheartened that this symptom doesn't seem to lift despite all the other improvements. I get the feeling it's the slowest one to go.

Anyways, thanks for reading. It's a lot. Would welcome any feedback, encouragement, etc. Just feels good to get this out. Bless all of you-- I know this struggle well and know how alienating it can feel. I read somewhere that without dragons, there can't be heroes, and we've been dealt a ferocious little beastie here. And even if you're fortunate enough to have friends and family that are supportive and cheer you on, only those who have encountered similar struggles will know just how heroic your efforts really are. I get choked out every day wrestling, bruised, battered. It's a cakewalk compared to this shit-- you're all warriors in the truest sense of the word. Much respect, and much love--

Chi


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## arty (Jan 11, 2015)

Great post man. Was feeling really low and this lifted me! Hope you make a rapid full recovery!!


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## Guest (Apr 3, 2015)

Perfectly sums up what my DP/DR is or was like, good first post mate.


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## butcheniho (Nov 26, 2014)

Hey, it really sounds like you're making some serious progress. I've had this for going on 8 months now and it's just getting better an better. I feel like I'm so close to being recovered. I'm a jazz musician and like you I wasn't feeling connected to music or women or just people in general. My connection to it all is back. You sound like you've got yourself in a similar mindset to me and I feel like this is what's aiding my recovery. A few other things that have helped me recover are: Realising the world is exactly the same as it has always been, you haven't found the true meaning of existence, no matter how much you think you have, letting the DP just be there and do its thing, realising it's nothing more than a defence mechanism and seeing the positives. For example being grateful for the new perspective DP gives you on life, which not everyone gets to experience, it really does help you grow as a person, I'm so chilled out about all of the existential stuff and the idea of non existence now and just appreciate everything and everyone so much more than I ever did. Just relax, you're definitely on the right track to making a full recovery, take it from me, a man who's nearly there. Just trust yourself, trust that your brain will work itself out of DP, because it will, it does for everyone who can get into the mindset you've already achieved. Also don't freak out if that mindset changes and reverts back to the old mindset, this happened for me loads of times, but happened less and less until now, where I'm basically back in a stable happy, rarely depressed, rarely anxious mindset. 8 months ago, I had no idea what was going on, thought I'd fucked up my brain from drugs. Now I can enjoy life again. Keep doing what you're doing, you'll be fine!


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## newbie101 (Nov 13, 2014)

butcheniho.... amazing response. your going to recover. that is the EXACT attitude i had.... and it worked for me.... and you have an amazing outlook on the whole thing. beautifully put!!!!! <3 xo


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## Chiron (Apr 2, 2015)

Thanks, guys. Glad to hear you're doing better-- that's great!

I think it's really hard for me to stop checking the speed of my progress. I tell myself it can take time, and not to compare myself to others, but sometimes when I see faster recovery stories I inevitably think to myself "shit, I don't have what they have. this is something worse." In some ways, I think the neck pain is a helpful reminder that this is just stress and anxiety. I try to spin it in a positive way, like "Oh, my neck hurts, or was hurting really badly yesterday? I must still be dealing with fear and anxiety, then. No wonder I still feel out of it. Carry on!".

Recovery can really take time, huh?


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## newbie101 (Nov 13, 2014)

Oh yes it can... but it ultimately comes down to each individual. Its all about you, and how you want to make this experience. You can say it ruined your life.... or you can stay positive and say "thank GOD it happened to me at the age im at now, because I know for the future that it does go away..." You really will be a strong, genuine good person after this. you will appreciate the small things SO much!! You don't look very old, so good luck to you. The back pains and neck pains and body aches all go away once the anxiety dies.

Its all just stress man! Keep your head up


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## Chiron (Apr 2, 2015)

Thanks, Newbie.


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