# How to Overcome Depersonalization



## 3ean (Aug 14, 2014)

How to Overcome Depersonalization

This is not a step by step guideline but an anecdotal collection of thoughts and ideas that I think you may find valuable. When reading recovery posts I would come across "let go" or "accept it" many time and as these seemed like positive notions and ideas none of them ever explained how to let go or accept. I don't want to start with a story as many of you have heard the same thing many times. No matter how we get the disorder, or how long we've had it or what our past history is, how to overcome it will be the same for everyone.

The only way to overcome depersonalization is to change your thought patterns. It is hard but rewarding work. While The Holy Grail post is excellent and is the post and source of information that has helped me the most over the course of this disorder, it treats all elements and steps equally. While they are all important, there is one piece of information that is missing from it. That is how sleeping, eating right, socializing etc, will help you change your thought patterns, which will in turn eliminate your DPDR. All of those steps before changing your thought patterns will not cure DPDR and do not affect it directly. They will merely allow you to change your thinking pattern with greater ease. This is why in every single recovery post, you see different steps that people took. Some started sleeping more, some started eating vitamins and some got out of the house more. But they ALL changed their thinking patterns and referenced that specifically. Life changes > Change in thinking > Cure DPDR. Some people through sheer understanding and will can continue eating junk and not sleep and overcome DPDR, but it will be a lot harder for these people. You can all figure out what life changes make your mind feel better and these are similar but vary from person to person. They are mostly listed in the holy grail post. But like I said, they are there to help but not cure. The only think that can cure you are your thoughts.

First thought experiment. I presented this thought experiment to a user by the name of Breach a little while back. Lets suspend our disbelief for a second and imagine that a being has come down from the sky. He has walked up to you and told you that you're going to be cured of DPDR in a month. For some reason this being has the ability to make it happen and you believe it. We are not talking 80% healed, the being means 100%. You will be completely back to normal and feel great in a month. If this were to happen (aside from the fact that you just made contact with a spiritual being) how would you feel? You would probably feel fantastic. Would you wake up and check how you feel each morning knowing that you were given this prophesy? Probably not. You would probably go about your day with very little anxiety and very little worry. Before we continue, really think about how you would truly feel if you were presented with this information. So lets think now. What are the chances that you are going to be stuck in DP for the rest of your life? Lets examine it for a second from a purely objective perspective. Depersonalization is an extremely common phenomenon, occurring transiently in almost 75% of individuals. There are very rare cases of DP lasting more than 10 years. If you were to live the rest of your life in DP I ASSURE you you will be written up in the New York Times and discussed widely as an example of the illness and its effects. the lead singer of counting crows, the writer of feeling unreal, have all overcome it and they had some of the most severe cases. So lets try to be as unbiased and realistic here. I assume you know you will not be depersonalized for the rest of your life and you will recover. This is a fact and anything that tells you otherwise is not true. You have a much higher statistical chance of winning the lottery a couple times in a row then you do of getting stuck with DP for the rest of your life. So if we know for a certainty that it is going to go away, what is the difference between that thought experiment and what you already know? Absolutely nothing. One has an exact time and one doesn't. So, why, right now, do you not feel the same way as you imagined yourself feeling when performing the thought experiment?

Lets say you have this very strong held belief that Depersonalization is out of your control. You are certain of it and believe that you have no power of being there or not. You truly think that it will be there or not and it is its own illness that is not affected by thoughts or actions. Why are you thinking about it then? If its out of your control then it is out of your control. There is nothing you can do to change it so just stop thinking about it. Now, lets say you believe that Depersonalization is IN your control and is changed by your thoughts and actions. The only action that can alleviate Depersonalization is to not think or worry about it. SO in this binary of positions on DP the ONLY thing you can do is not think about it. If it was out of your control and you thought about it would it make things better? No. If it was in your control would thinking about it make things better? No.

When we experience deja vu, an anomaly of our memory it calls into question what our memory is and how it functions. It can be slightly unsettling as it shows that we are flawed in the way we record information but once it is over we can keep moving on with our day. Depersonalization, is very much similar to Deja vu. There is one very large difference though. Lets say you have deja vu and then afterwards think about it. Lets pretend for a second that thinking about deja vu brings it on just like DP. You would quickly get stuck in this trap of obsessing about what memory is, how it works and it would be deeply disturbing. The more you try to understand deja vu, the worse it gets. Soon after a few months of this you would come to the conclusion that memory is not real and that you're life is forever ruined and you will never ever know what memory is again. The thing many DPer's do not understand is how quickly the brain adapts to circumstances and draws conclusions about them. If gravity ceased to exist, you would immediately draw hundreds of connections and ideas about how the world works a minute after it stopped. It only takes a minute for your whole world view to change and adapt based on what you are experiencing. Lets go back to the deja vu metaphor. Lets say, after 7 months of deja vu you finally stop experiencing it. I promise that a day later your brain will have readjusted to this new feeling of your memory being intact and drawn conclusions about it, understanding that memory actually DOES exist and that you were merely experiencing an anomaly of perception. Right now many of you are drawing hundreds and thousands of conclusions about how the world works based on your current perception. You may believe that NOTHING is real. Your brain has drawn this conclusion because you feel like nothing is real. When you recover, you will understand that things were real all along and that you were experiencing a change in perception caused by brain chemistry - nothing more. All of these conclusions and existential ideas will be vaporized when you return. Will you remember them? Yes, some of them. Will they bother you? No. Because you have a solid grounding in reality and you understand them for what they are. Consider Depersonalization like an extended period of Deja vu and your questions about reality, like Deja vu's respective questions about memory.

What if I told you that every time you see visual snow, it is a sign of horrible mental damage and that every single person who has visual snow has something terribly terribly wrong with them? You would see it everywhere. You would obsess about it, make it try to go away, worry about it and want it to stop. You would be disturbed by it and think that it is ruining your vision. What if I told you that it is completely natural and that many people have it and its not that bothersome? You would probably ignore it and not think much of it and it would go away. The amount of snow is the exact same in both cases. Its your interpretation of it that dictates its effects. When you come to these boards and read people exclaiming that their lives have been RUINED and that this is the worst thing that has ever happened to them, you think to yourself, wow this must be bad, I should be worrying too. When you see people saying this destroys their life you think it will destroy yours too and you start looking for its signs and symptoms everywhere and get very distressed when you find them. Let me tell you. This whole disorder is a joke. It's built on sand. Think about the disorder and then just laugh about how small it is. The worrying about it is ruining your life, it is not.

Lets do another thought experiment Lets pretend for a second that EVERYONE in the world experiences depersonalization severely for varying period of time once in their lifetime. Literally everyone. Imagine a world where its treated as a common thing and its deemed almost as a rite of passage of part of growing up. Keep this thought and idea in your mind as if it were true and analyze how you feel. Think about how good you feel knowing that all of these things you've experienced are completely normal. We are scared of abnormality. IF there's some sort of relief there, then understand this thought is not far from the truth. 1 out of every 50 people has DPD. That is a lot. 140 million people have DPD. And you feel abnormal? 140 MILLION. That is 2952 football stadiums full of people who feel how you do. You are in VERY good company. Half the population of the united states in fact. 140 million people feel the same way as you and you feel as though no one can understand you. If you were stuck in a room full of 100 000 of these people somehow, you would probably very quickly forget about DP, realizing that it is nothing to be afraid of. If 140 million people all got stuck with DP forever, or went crazy because of it or were severely damaged, I think we would have a problem. Try to think about a time that DP actually hurt you. Where the depersonalization itself caused you harm. It's impossible. It all comes down to you're interpretation of it. The more you fear it, the longer it will stay.

A final idea, is when a symptom arises, understand how you are interpreting it. Instead of "I feel like I'm in a dream" Use I feel disassociated. We use these metaphors and ideas but they draw up vivid imagery in our head that will only heighten you're anxiety. If I were to think, I feel like I'm dead, I start to imagine myself dead but alive, I start to think about death, and existence. If I think to myself wow my temporary mental disorder is making me feel not very alert, I can forget about it in an instant. Try not to use metaphors when thinking about your symptoms.

You may like what I've written, or hate it, but if you found any of it valuable and think that it is helpful, you need to remember that consistent practice of thinking like this is what gets you out. Not one time thoughts. Constant realistic thought patterns. If any of these thoughts made you feel better it shows that this is in your control.

If you argue that you're underlying anxiety is what is keeping your DP there instead of thought patterns, then you have a problem with you're GAD which is possible to eliminate through hard work and DP is merely a by product just like a fast heart beat of headaches.

On a final note, I think I am getting off the forums now as they are extremely helpful in the beginning but you need to let go at some point. By obsessively checking the internet you are only prolonging your recovery. I would like to thank clockwork8, selig, solomonorlando, beefyflamingo, breach and a few others for their interesting words and advice.

You're all going to be just fine. Ethan


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## Jabato (Jul 19, 2014)

"Try not to use metaphors when thinking about your symptoms." I strongly agree. Very often my mind goes overdrive trying to think ways to describe how I feel, to nail an exact description that covers all the subtleties, but overanalyzing reinforces the sensations of weirdness. Better not to try to think too much about it and just say to oneself e.g "I feel dizzy" or "I'm a bit spaced out today"


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