Thursday 31 January 2019

Depersonalization

Many or maybe most people experience "depersonalization" or "derealization" at some point in their lives. Depersonalization is a detachment from yourself, or a detachment between your mind and body, or even observing yourself as an outsider. Derealization is a detachment between you and your sense of reality. It most often happens when people experience a trauma, like being a car accident or finding out someone has died unexpectedly.

If you've ever experienced these you might have described it like this:

  • I felt like it was happening to someone else, not me
  • I felt like I was dreaming, that this wasn't reality
  • I felt like my body was going through the motions, but I was somewhere else
  • I heard the words I was saying, but I didn't feel like I was saying them
  • Time seemed to slow down and sounds became hollow
These experiences aren't delusions, and the person experiencing is still aware of reality.

It turns out there is a disorder in the DSM-IV called Depersonalization Disorder or Depersonalization/Derealization Disorder. I took an online screening test:


In the past I wrote about how I found resources that suggested I might have Borderline Personality Disorder. The description of the disorder in a manual I read about treatment of it fit me, but I wouldn't have really qualified under the criteria. This time, I think I've really found the disorder that described my experiences.

But whether I fit the disorder or not, I certainly experience depersonalization nearly all the time.

What's neat about this is that it also gives me a way to talk about my experiences to other people that I've never had before. If they've ever had a sudden trauma and felt a sort of, "I'm not here, this isn't happening" feeling in the wake of it, I can say, "That's how I feel nearly all the time."

I really mean that, nearly all the time. From the screening test, questions I answered "many times" or "almost all the time" to included:
  • I have gone through the motions of living while the real me was far away from what was happening to me.
  • I feel that I can turn off or detach from my emotions.
  • I have purposely hurt or cut myself so that I could feel pain or that I am real.
  • I have had the feeling that I was a stranger to myself or have not recognized myself in the mirror.
  • My whole body or parts of it have seemed unreal or foreign to me.
  • I have felt as if words flowed from my mouth but they were not in my control.
This affects all aspects of my life. I don't feel like a person, I feel like a puppeteer, making this ungainly thing that has it's own stupid feelings about everything go through with the things that I need it to get done.

This has also helped me understand that this isn't normal. Lots of people have probably said, at some point, that they were just "going through the motions" at work or some similar phrase. But for them that phrase means that they have lost interest in what they are doing, for me it always evoked allowing the part of you that you don't really regard as you to complete tasks without supervision despite the fact that that part of you can hardly be trusted to do so. I did this last week and when I went back to review it my writing was full of grotesque mistakes and half sentences that abruptly morphed into other half sentences. I hope I haven't done a lot of that here. It's hard for me to tell.

Back when I read Thus Spoke Zarathustra in university it occurred to me that I was no a human being, and it's really only this month that I've finally solidified what I must have meant by that.

A human being is a synthesis of many competing sets of instructions: nucleic DNA, mitochondrial DNA, lived experience, exposure to viruses/bacteria/other environmental effects that shape development, etc. But when I talk about myself, when I live my life, the thing I call me is no that synthesis. It's a disembodied rational thinker that has a hostile and domineering relationship with a homo sapiens organism.

This also explains my challenging relationship with the language of mental health and wellness. If you had a car where the engine was disconnected from the wheels, you would look at it from the outside and say the car is disordered. But from the perspective of the engine, which isn't invested in a car it has never seen itself as a proper part of, there is no disorder and maybe being connected to the wheels wouldn't be such a good thing.

I think it also explains the distance I experience from other people when processing traumatic events like terrorist attacks. It is common for other people to experience traumatic events through a different lens than they see their normal lives in part because their brain presents those events to them in a different way. Since I already dissociate so frequently, trauma seems like a natural extension of normal life as opposed to something distinct and different.

Of course just like every other disorder I've ever seemed to have, the theory for why this happens to people runs through childhood trauma. My life would make a ton more sense to psychiatrists if I had been abused as a child, but I just don't think it happened.

Since my therapist had a mild stroke I haven't really had anyone to talk this out with much. But I still think I'm really on to something.

I guess I sort of casually brought up self-harm in this post and I don't know whether I've really been open about that in the past.