I was wondering if anyone has ever experienced anything like this before.

I'll summarize the first part since it's not really important. I became involved in some things which pretty much took all my time and attention for several years. Eventually, without realizing it, I began to define myself by these things. For the past few years I've also been under an extreme amount of stress. About eight months ago, the things which I relied on and came to identify myself with all fell apart. At once. Overnight.

Everything that I was disappeared. It took losing these things to realize that I had lost my inner self long ago, but having such an extreme void was too much at once. The burgeoning sense of self which I was only just realizing I needed to get in touch with didn't have time to grow and fill and replace everything which had fallen out. I only had a brief sense of my actual self. Everything else was nothingness. Most of our world is really defined by our perception of it - our minds and their interpretation of things rather than the things themselves. I had nothing to filter reality with. That's when I think the real ego death experience occurred. "I" ceased to exist.

This was an incredibly painful experience. I had some of the most severe mood swings of my life. I wasn't even a person. I'd grasp onto things and take on personality traits like a costume for short periods before grasping onto something else. It was like being dead - like being nothing - but still existing in a living body. There was also very little emotional control. I couldn't think things without saying them. I really do feel like I died during this experience. There was no mental structure to handle the stress and difficulty of it either.

Something else happened after. I've been improving, but in stages. Looking back, at the beginning I was like an infant. I didn't know how to handle stress and I acted out whatever came to me. There was a lot of stress too, and I almost got myself in pretty big trouble a couple of times. Then the nothingness stopped being a void and it became more solid. I was an existing being with the most basic sense of self, but I had zero preconceptions. I gained some basic emotional resilience and things were what they were. The immediate moment was all that existed, and I was the only being in the world. I spent a lot of time doing really simple things that were enjoyable - simple games, for instance. Walks outside. Life was fresh and new in a way that I can only dimly remember as a very young child.

Now I'm starting to think a bit more concretely. I feel like I'm somewhere around middle to late childhood/early adolescence, although I can only see it very well in hindsight. It takes a couple of months to go through each stage. As I progress, more of the inner me is coming out. I'm rediscovering things which I always enjoyed. However, it's different too. Almost like the same soul reincarnating in a new existence.

There are some very interesting features that I'm now noticing. The first is that my anxiety is pretty much gone. I used to have severe problems with anxiety. Now, nothing gets to me. I've been in a couple of life threatening situations lately, and they didn't make me nervous either. I still get sad but a lot of the depressive features have been replaced by whatever stage my mind happens to be in. These are things I've dealt with all my life. Suddenly life is more what I choose. It's as if the void opened up a fresh canvas, and by focusing on certain things, I get to create what I want myself and my life to be. However, it is usually my old interests that come to me. I still enjoy the same things I always did before. I just exist in a new way.

I'm curious if anyone has ever had these experiences before? Either the complete and total loss of self, and/or the recreation of a sense of self by going through stages of child development? Is there much research on it? It has been an extremely bizarre experience.