Beating Depersonalization

How I beat long-term depersonalization

Recently, I watched a video full of tips on fighting dissociation. Only problem: Every technique assumed the viewer was going from a “normal” state to a dissociated one, and could respond when that transition started. Based on the comments, I wasn’t the first one wondering, “But what if you’re dissociated all the time?”

For years, I’d hear people use the term “dissociation” without knowing what they meant. Then I learned more about it and thought it was something I’d experienced in the past, in my teens when I was wavering in and out of minor psychotic episodes with more-constant extreme derealization. So I was devastated earlier this year when I googled, “Why do I sometimes feel like a completely different person?” and took a quiz that rated my symptoms in the range of severe depersonalization.

The thing is, I wasn’t too “severe” in terms of mental health by that time. I’d spent many years recovering and progressing. And that set me up to quickly resolve my depersonalization once I had a name for it. Since I made up my own technique, I’m writing this blog post to share it with the world, in case anyone else finds it helpful.

My dissociative experiences

My dissociative symptoms are complex, and seem to defy the lines in the sand drawn by diagnostic constructs. I’d say I clearly have (or have had) a dissociative disorder encompassing elements of:

• depersonalization
• conversion disorder (a.k.a. somatoform dissociation)
• borderline personality disorder-style identity instability
• other specified dissociative disorder (which is itself basically dissociative identity disorder “lite”) — or confusion of this with other dissociative and BPD symptoms
• derealization

Why did the dissociation happen?

I knew from the time I was a teenager that the conversion disorder was the result of my subconscious dealing with extreme stress, anxiety, and fear — basically, a protective force trying to prevent me from doing things that could result in further harm. But I didn’t have insight into two key pieces to the dissociation:

1. My understanding of the world was causing constant harm. I understood everything I did and everything I could remember doing or being in ways that evoked shame and intense anxiety. Looking toward the future, everything seemed overwhelming and I tended to take a pessimistic view on likely outcomes, with even tasks healthier people would see as trivial seeming to spell excess effort and (for whatever reason) total doom.
2. A lot of this stemmed from a lack of healthy personality structure and identity formation. This wasn’t my fault, of course — I lacked the sort of attention from caregivers that could have led me to develop these things. But the first factor perpetuated the second — you can’t form a healthy identity when merely thinking about your past, current, or hoped-for future self causes intense suicidal or self-harm ideation owing to feelings of shame and anxiety over expected “punishment” of some sort.

Wait, how was I even functioning?

Through identity splitting/dissociation, of course. Coping strategies exist for a reason.

I was caught in a constant cycle of being caught up in the emotions of the moment, and losing ready access to memories or awareness of anything else. (I suspect this is why those of us with BPD traits often experience identity instability, dissociation, and emotional dysregulation as a package deal.) Given how much shame and anxiety I lived with, I had to sometimes enter personality/identity states that were cut off from those associations. Or, I would experience both sets of thoughts and feelings at the same time, except the unpleasant ones would be relegated to “intrusive” thoughts and seem like they were coming from a different conscious than the core me.

Of course, given my conversion disorder and other dissociative symptoms, there was no guarantee the rational, totally-fine me at the center of my consciousness would actually be the part that was in control of my body. And even if it was, I was always one trigger away from collapse into a state that didn’t even know I’d ever been okay. (Those triggers could be as simple and routine as walking into my own home after work or school.)

What was the path to healing?

In a word — “acceptance”.

But that word encompasses years of multi-faceted work, so I’ll elaborate:

1. I had to process my trauma history, my feelings, and reality to start bringing the shame down to a workable level. I’m sure you know this is long-term, ongoing work that brings plenty of rewards along the way.
2. I got a couple books on Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT) and did the experiential exercises. These provided major strides in self-integration and taught me the techniques that I later used to tackle my depersonalization.
3. I did parts work (vaguely inspired by Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy) to start listening to the parts of me I was suppressing. That involved accepting those perspectives and concerns, though not necessarily feeling as though they were “part” of me.
4. I tackled the depersonalization symptoms directly, once I learned about them. I’ll elaborate on my specific techniques for this below.
5. In reading more about OSDD and DID, I learned about the process of integrating personalities, and realized that my “parts” were already partially-integrated and that I could accept them as being truly part of me, rather than separate entities/identities. Moving toward this acceptance helped with the work from (4).

Tackling the depersonalization directly

Sometimes the most obvious, naive solution works like a charm. I was tempted not to try it because it seemed “too easy”, but this was one of those times when it really was that easy.

I knew some of the symptoms of depersonalization from the test I’d taken that indicated I was way more depersonalized than an average person. Others I’d just read about here or there online. So, what was the obvious solution? Just focus hard on experiencing the opposite of whatever the depersonalization symptom was.

Here are some examples:

Not recognizing myself in the mirror

I’ve basically never recognized myself in the mirror. Oh, I’ve known it was me, but I’ve frequently been shocked by how alien my appearance looks. I’d cycle through getting different sorts of impressions of what my appearance was like from day to day or hour to hour. It used to be disturbing, but I’d gotten used to it.

So one of the exercises I did was staring in the mirror, studying my appearance, and mentally repeating to myself that it was really me. Really trying to experience it as my appearance, in the ACT sense of “experiencing” — something different from intellectual belief or verbal thought. This particular exercise, with my reflection, seemed to draw on a part of my brain that had emerged during the most mystifying ACT exercise I’d ever done — staring at a wall trying to truly experience that I wasn’t the wall.

Nonverbal acceptance and direct experience weren’t the only components of this exercise. I was also watching, like the dancing light thrown from moving water, the elaborate and nuanced forms of self-rejection that I’d never before realized underlay my dissociation.

Before, I would’ve just told you it was something that happened. Maybe I was a little autistic (which I did have a rather suspect diagnosis for) and it was a bit of prosopagnosia. Maybe it was gender dysphoria. Maybe no one really recognized themselves in mirrors — it’s not like we spend a lot of time where we can look at our own faces.

But standing there, mindful of my thoughts and intent on my task, I saw the flowering of rejection that really led to my dissociation, that had always been there but hadn’t been connected.

My bone structure wasn’t broad and bold like the models and TV actors. (If I wasn’t beautiful, I would be rejected and alone and worthless forever — so this was not a fact I could accept.)

My chin was weak, which made me cringe inside from a childhood of hearing and reading people being mocked and dismissed for their weak chins.

My body would never look the way I imagined myself, which both felt like a general threat (not being beautiful enough to be worthy of anyone’s positive regard) and a very personal form of invalidation (no one would ever see me, could ever see me, the way I really was).

My hairline bears the same arc as that of a blood-related abuser who harmed me deeply. I don’t want to see him when I look in the mirror, but it’s such a haunting memory that I can exaggerate the resemblance as well. Sometimes I look like his familial abuser as well.

The forms of my nose, my cheeks, my forehead, yes, my chin and hairline, are just physical forms, as they are. They have no meaning outside what I project on them. Yet I’ve never been able to see them without those many meanings, and so I’ve never been able to see and accept the physical, or even the reality of the meanings I didn’t want to admit to myself I was projecting onto them. This exercise, repeated day after day for a couple weeks, was challenging but highly healing.

Feeling like I’m watching someone else in social interactions

One reason I didn’t realize I was depersonalized is that the metaphor “I feel like I’m watching a movie” didn’t resonate with me. Instead of seeing my own actions as the behavior of a character in a movie, I felt like I was people-watching, observing someone who fit a stereotype and subculture definitely not my own who would speak and interact with others. I’d say things that weren’t consistent with my values or who I wanted to be interpersonally, but to me at the time they didn’t really “count” and I thought I couldn’t really have done anything else because I didn’t know how to react in that situation and wasn’t in control of myself.

The hard part to accept here was that, yes, my words did “count” and, yes, it was me saying them and thinking the thoughts that led to them. I just had to make a habit of noting when I tried to distance myself from my behaviors, and gently remind myself to claim them and try to step in if I wanted to turn myself in another direction.

Warped perceptions of my limbs, hands, feet, etc.

Sometimes I think my arms look like a doll’s or a small child’s. Or I see my hands and feet as my older brother’s instead. Those are just some examples of this type of dissociation.

Again, these symptoms have largely resolved after just a few times of being mindful of what was going on, believing that it’s a counter-productive way of seeing things, and stepping in to see reality instead. For example, noting how my toes are smaller and curve more gently than my brother’s, or remembering that some adults are small — even smaller than me — and noticing the wear in the skin on my arm — definitely belonging to me, at my own age.

These interventions come with the sometimes-painful acknowledgement of the deeper issues driving the dissociation. For example, I see myself physically as my older brother because I felt invalidated and identity-less as a young child, and saw him as much more real and socially valued, so in some way I merged my self-image into my image of him. I see myself as small and like a doll or child I guess as a manifestation of some often-unconscious sense of being small and helpless, or perhaps when aspects of an inner child are activated.

Resources

If you only take one thing away from this article, get a copy of Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life by Hayes and Smith. This workbook is chock full of mindfulness and experiential exercises that greatly increased my capacity to make the progress described in this post. It’s also helped me take actual actions that have set my life on a course to where it just improves on its own, in the background, because things I set in motion months or years ago, without me having to fight for every inch of ground every day. (Content warning: Some of the exercises seem to be taken out of context from spiritual practices of various cultures without attribution, and Hayes doesn’t seem to “get” the roles of oppression and abuse in people’s lives though that’s only glaring in one place I remember from this workbook.)

Anonymous Muser, How I beat long-term depersonalization, 2018