Hard Depersonalization Relapse

Hello all,

I have had Depersonalization on and off for the last two years. I say on and off because all DP really is, is anxiety with a little bit of OCD. My theory is, the worse your OCD and anxiety the worse your DP.


Anyways, I had a to of things going on in my life the last 3 months and for the most part my DP was gone up until 2 nights ago. 2 nights ago I was really stressed out and it just hit me again very hard. It was like all symptoms i suffered with hit me at once. Had a terrible panic attack. I am still recovering from the panic attack I had, it was the first one I had in 8 months. The symptom I still seem to suffer from the most is feeling like not only Im in a dream, but I feel like I'm in a different place. My home doest feel like my home. Everything feels foreign to me. Its like deja vu the way it hits me. I will truly feel like I'm somewhere else. But I know Im not? I do feel like its a dream in a sense that I don't feel like I'm familiar with my surroundings. And so of course that causes anxiety. I also struggle with other symptoms such as feeling weird that Im in a body and that I have thoughts which makes me feel like I need to "jump" out of my own body. I also struggle with existential things such as being freaked out that Im alive. Living and breathing in reality. Reality itself, the complexity of having a conscious and being in "reality" causes a surge of anxiety. So that with everything feeling foreign and like I'm looking at it for the first time has caused a lot of stress the last few days. Sometimes things feel foreign in the sense that I've seen it before... and sometimes like I've never seen it. It takes up my whole entire sense of my environment sometimes. If that makes any sense.

Has anybody had this, and did you get over it somehow?

Dear Sw48:

I agree with you that "the worse your OCD and anxiety the worse your DP." Depersonalization is what happens when animals "Freeze"- when they encounter a danger that they cannot escape. When Flight or Fight are not survivable options, the animal Freezes. People call it to "play dead"- but the animal is not playing anything, it doesn't reason: I am going to pretend that I am dead so that the predator will not kill me. What happened to it (and I know because I am an animal and I experience some DP every day)- is that it becomes exhausted, dreamy- chemicals in its brain/ body are released giving it a feeling of euphoria, as if everything-is-good. If the animals is aware of the predator being just there, about to kill it, the animal would run or fight in panic. So nature takes care of this by demotivating the animal to run or fight. The dreamy feeling and exhaustion makes the animal be... okay with not moving.

The environment does seem unfamiliar, people you've seen many times before, including your own image, all seem unfamiliar, foreign. This further demotivates the animal from running- running or fighting in an unfamiliar environment is more risky than in familiar environment.

For the lucky animal, it Freezes for just a short time because either it is killed and game over or the predator moves on and the animal unfreezes. We human often freeze for long period of times and repeatedly, because our ... predators (unfortunately for us!) don't kill us and they do not move on. Those long and repeating Freezing periods mess us up.

atina