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bpcyclist · Jul 25, 2020, 04:45 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by BethRags

When I was 8 years old I began having episodes of derealization. During the episodes the back of my head felt strange and my environment appeared to be unreal, as though I was looking at the world as a movie, through a glass window.

Since the episodes weren't frequent I didn't think much about them, although they did scare me. I didn't know how to tell my mom, and it probably wouldn't have mattered if I had, because she would have gotten weird on me.

I don't recall having the episodes when I was a teen, but at that time I was very happy (especially away from home) and not terribly stressed.

By my mid-20's I was married and mom to a preschooler and a baby. My sleep was irregular. I was working very hard, and was terribly tired. Back then, taking naps was not something I usually did, but one afternoon my baby son was napping and I fell asleep. When I awoke the environment had become unreal. I was 26 years old.

The sensation wouldn't go away. I felt like I was watching life through a big glass window. I told my pdoc and he prescribed Klonopin.

To my immense relief the K-pin made things look normal again. For 2 years I was relieved of that odd and depressing sensation.

I suppose I built up a tolerance to the K-pin, because the "thing" returned. From that time it has never gone away. That was 30 years ago.

Pdocs would call it "depersonalization", but that wasn't the correct term. I felt myself as real; it was the environment that seemed to have become unreal. No pdoc ever seemed to truly understand. So I went to the library and dug through psychiatric texts (long before internet days) and I finally found the word: derealization. An awful sensation, but at least I had a name for it!

I have been told that the experience could be a symptom of pyschosis, but none of the many, many AP's I've been on touches the derealization. In fact, no meds help with it - and I suspect they even contribute to it, as a side effect.

Acupuncture sure helped my body in some ways; it did not alter the DR.

My therapist tends to point at childhood trauma as the reason for the derealization I experience. It definitely becomes worse when I'm stressed, sometimes when I'm anxious, and it first showed up during a time of my childhood when truly serious trauma began.

The only tool that helps me somewhat is healthy breathing techniques. Nothing completely removes the unreal sensation. But, calming myself with good breathing brings the intensity of the DR down enough so I don't feel completely crazy and even physically vulnerable because I'm so checked out.

I firmly believe that derealization
has a neurological basis. I'm quite sure it's connected to trauma and to extreme anxiety, and maybe to bipolar disorder in some way. There's no doubt that for me, DR is somehow attached to sleep.

I would love to participate in a study on derealization, but I've never found one. Every pdoc I've seen has tried to prescribe a host of medications for it, with no success. I've had CT scans; they're clean. I've been referred to 2 neurologists over the years; neither one was helpful in any way. I had an EEG that was normal. It is very likely that brain science simply is not advanced enough to discern the fine details of what happens when a brain dissociates.

For some reason the derealization has been worse for me lately. I really don't know why, except that my sleep has been sketchy (I firmly believe that DR is somehow connected to sleep), and my therapist has been out sick for weeks. So that connection is broken.

I try to make the best of having DR...pretend I'm Alice in Wonderland and allow my imagination to drift and design...but honestly, I'm very sad about the disorder. It causes a severe impairment in my life. It makes me forget big pieces of life, memories I might like to have. DR presents a grinding Existential dilemma that feels like having a red thread wound too tightly around my finger. ("Am I real?" "Is the world real?" "What is reality? Etc., ad infinitum.)

This is probably the longest post I've ever written online! "Life: real or not" is a subject that deeply resonates with me.

This sounds like my whole life from infancy. I do btw believe bp 1 is a seizure disorder. Reason our EEGs are mostly nml is we never catch it "in the act." Wld need to catch us WHILE cycling, then, there wld be an electrical storm on EEG.