I find that I’m pretty stable when it comes to my illness, but one thing that is still somewhat frequent for me is derealization. I’ll recall a certain peculiar incident and it chills me to the bone. I then wonder about what is really going on around me. I guess pretty much everyone with this illness is dealing with that. After all, it’s pretty crazy to think that you’re at the center of the universe. In reality it would take a lot of work to pull something like that off. It drives me nuts, nonetheless. How do you cope?
Ugh I experience almost CONSTANT derealization. It’s so disorienting. And I feel like it’s a lot harder to manage than depersonalization, because when I get that I just do grounding exercises my therapist taught me, y’know feeling things, listening to sounds around you, looking for sensations to kind of bring you back to your body. But derealization…I haven’t really found an answer to that one yet. I sort of feel like everything is a dream all the time. I’ll get back to you if I ever find something that works -.-
Anna would know.
I don’t really deal with this too often but it has had its moments. I was tripping on sobriety the other day and realized how unreal the last couple years of life have been. I’ve had sz (unreal) and no pain or injury. Life felt like a dream. That feeling past though.
I’ve had derealization really bad for almost four years. I assume it’s due to the drugs I’ve done and the resulting anxiety and fear from them. It makes reality feel unreal. It sucks. Luckily I don’t hallucinate or hear voices. I just think everything looks fake and that everything I see is a hallucination. But it’s getting better. I don’t know why it is, but it is. Perhaps it is due to age, due to medicine, or due to a better lifestyle. If I can recover from derealization and improve my cognition, I’ll be happy.
Derealization is best countered with insight. Catching the delusional thought red handed as a delusional thought prevents the seed of full blown derealization from being a shitty little angiosperm.
Derealization and depersonalization are two that I’m always fighting… It take a lot of work to stay in body and stay in the now of reality.
It’s stress triggered and it’s very easy for me to feel very disconnected from what’s going on around me… and disconnected from my own self. It’s hard to keep in the world outside my brain.
I used to think this was a spiritual lifting… but I then got told that this is a symptom as well… I wasn’t astral projecting and having my soul see into the future… I was just having a stress reaction.
I’m sure the drug years didn’t help me stay grounded… so now I have to work on staying connected to what’s going on around me. I can zone out and freeze up pretty quickly sometimes.
Good luck with this one… It’s a constant battle for me.
Bingo for me. I have to put max effort into monitoring my autonomic nervous system. If I jack the sucker up for too long, we’re headed for hell of any number of different sorts.
Derealization to me goes to show that not every delusion can be captured as pathology of belief. At least, not if one is trying to understand the patient. I have it and its counterpart depersonalization mildly sometimes after extreme bodily passivity.
Yes; I agree (maybe that is surprising?). Derealization looks like a largely – if not purely – pathophysiological upshot. Very possibly a temporary disconnection of the up and down links connecting the insula to the medial pre-frontal cortices. And or just plain overloading of the insula in some fashion. I don’t think anyone has been able to get a functional MRI on an event of it yet, however.
Two can come to similar conclusions on quite different grounds, so it seems I was about two weeks too late to be that one in the scanner with full-blown derealization. Treatment had priorities over research at the time.
Sigh. Oh, well. Not sure they could have turned it into much anyway, as we don’t have precise medicinal targeting for what I described. Just the same old crude, block-out-half-the-Da-receptors-all-over-the-limbic-system thump we’ve been using for 60 years. Maybe some day…
I try to remind myself that it is not real. When I see things or hear things or when I am just sure that the furniture is alive or people really do live inside pictures (that one is kind of hard for me to let go of though), I tell myself it is not real. I admit that that can be easier said than done sometimes.
I was about two weeks too late to be that one in the scanner with full-blown derealization. Treatment had priorities over research at the time.