DP/DR cases solved with prof help. Experiences?

Spirit99 wrote:Can I ask you what school does your psychologist belong to? I read the "long term" paths are to prefer to solve/improve dp-dr disorders therefore psychoanalysts are better. I'm looking for a psychotherapist skilled at depersonalization disorder in my area so I googled a while using words such as "curriculum psychotherapist depersonalization" and "filetype:pdf" but I got no result in my area, only psychotherapists

 

Google might not do so well with words like "curriculum" in your search.
I think any who specialize in dissociative disorders will do - or someone who specializes in trauma CPTSD/PTSD

The best psychotherapists tend to be those who've worked in the public sector/hospitals/out patient psychiatry etc. They have experience with more extreme cases.

Can you find out who the nearby psychwards or hospitals refer their patients to?

The private therapists tend not to have any real experience - other than treating bored housewives and the like.

Also, there are many places where therapist's licences are completely unregulated.
You can get yourself listed as a counselor on places like Psychology Today (at least where I live), yet have not much more than a cereal box certificate.
It's actually quite frightening.

Mine is very eclectic and believes in long term although my visits are more like "spot treatments" once in a while.
It's rare for me to need to see her consistently. Then again, I've been seeing psychotherapists on and off, seeing psychiatrists etc for about 10+ years.

She specializes in trauma and draws from a variety of areas, some of which are:

Marsha Linehan's DBT (currently used not only for Borderline, but also CPTSD (and increasingly PTSD, bipolar, chronic pain etc) CBT
Psychoanalysis to an extent
Developmental psychology
Neuropsychology
Some humanistic approach
She's aware of behaviourism even thought she doesn't love it, etc.

She goes by whatever works to make you functional, and then once stabilized, look deeper into trauma if that's what you want, or whatever you feel is holding you back.

The best ones, I've found, are the ones who will work with what you have so you can have a "life worth living" - instead of trying to "repair" you to some normative prototype.

I personally would rather let sleeping dogs lie, and I don't seem to have the capacity to go in depth with that stuff and sit with it - it just floats away and the walls go back up.

Psychoanalysis is interesting, but go through someone who specializes in severe trauma and dissociative disorders.

People say dregging up all that stuff through things like psychoanalysis is like opening "Pandora's Box"
^
Learning grounding / mindfulness / being present / distress tolerance / or whatever coping skills are necessary while developing a rapport is important - that way you can close the box when you need to.
^
EMDR can be good for this too especially if you experience stressors or certain memories or emotions as an antecedent to the depersonalization.

TheGangsAllHere wrote:Nowadays it's recognized that it's the relationship that provides the healing.

This is an example of the humanist approach (and a tangent of attachment theory to some degree)

I only find it partially true.

I'm there to learn coping techniques and to learn skills to heal myself.
I'm not into sappy bonding or feelings talk (more than necessary).

That being said, I really like and look up to her, but it's because she's extremely experienced, one of the most intelligent people I've ever met and a wealth of information - and she's has very unique traits that I would like to assimilate - especially when working with others.

This makes me have respect and some trust in her, if that rapport wasn't there I wouldn't be willing to open up or interested in what she had to say.

I can be hard to work with because I require a high degree of competence.

Spirit99 wrote:I could have 1 session with each therapist but I'm not the kind of person that "feels" anything at the first Date, my "instinct" is almost zero.

 

Brains do a lot to protect us.
In combination with the "intellectualization and distant" aforementioned, it's probably doing just that.
"To thine own self be true" is one of my favorite sayings.

No reason to trust, feel or whatever when you first start working with someone.
Trust is built.

That may be your "instinct" speaking right there.

Thanks for your suggestions, they're useful traces to start from.
Sorry if I go quite OT but I'd want to ask you some "ready-to-use" help for me right now because some recent events jumped into my life and now I feel in troubles with myself. These events rised up some terrible ghosts that were sleeping in my mind and now I feel kind of sickness somehow, I mean I feel physical light pain in my body during these events: I feel a certain heat at the base of my neck and then upon my head/brain and some days I've got light headaches. What I call "events" are some continuous noise complaint from my neighborhood (especially a barking dog) and my guess is this noise is unconsciously connected to my father's burps I had to hear all the day and night along during my childhood due to his psychopathology and that caused me a strong mental stress at that time. I feel like to be back to that time and suffer that stress because I couldn't rebel.
That said and considered what DaturaInnoxia said about EMDR I ask if this technique can be useful to "rearrange" my mind in the manner I don't get angry or somatize my mental pain in anyway right now.

Spirit99 wrote:...

My brain's not fully working either at the moment so forgive the disorganization of my reply.


^
Bruce Perry
https://attachmentdisorderhealing.com/d ... -trauma-3/

You want to be at the purple, but when you're living in strong distressing memories, flashbacks or dissociation you aren't even at (or are barely at) the blue.

* Grounding / Emotionally Regulating
>>>> Something you can do right away is looking up DBT Mindfulness + Distress Tolerance which useful for a lot of people (if you choose, you can look up "DBT peer to peer connections" on YouTube for videos on mindfulness and distress tolerance + there's tons of DBT stuff online).

Emotionally regulating starts out with dealing with physiological responses (body's response to danger and stress) aka grounding or what DBT calls "mindfulness" and "self-soothing" and "distress tolerance" so you can address the more after you are stabilized and regulated.
^
you're brain can move back up to purple where it can say and believe:
"ok, no. This is just a dog. It is 2020, I am ___ years old. It is not my dad and I'm an adult, I'm safe, I'm not trapped. Now, how do I problem solve this annoying situation" and so on.

* Children's brains develop bottom up and trauma / dissociation = having ruts near the bottom (primitive ways of coping: dissociation, overactive physiological responses, and for other traumatized people: fighting or fleeing) where they get stuck instead of continuing to smoothly grow into having the purple part of the brain as the "go-to" part to be in use

* Be it maltreatment (abuse / neglect), chronic illnesses, tragedies, natural disasters, other chronic stressors, chronic life or death situations; traumatic experiences impact brain development. Part of that is getting stuck in dissociative (green/blue brain) ways of reacting to things.

To note: it does not have to be a psychiatric or therapist definition or opinion of "trauma" either (that's like saying I think it hurt and I still carry it, but my shrink says it didn't hurt so he must be right)

* When something happens, instead of emotionally regulating and moving easily back up to purple we stay in the proverbial "ruts"

"Patterned Repetitive Somatosensory Activities" is effective in reparations/improvements (which EMDR encompasses)

* People tend to want to use purple when brain is still in green/blue, but green/blue is not capable of that.

You need to work with yourself from where you are

Bruce Perry (created Neurosequential Model of Therapeutics) has some good info and papers

https://www.childtrauma.org/cta-library

Also I gave this info to someone recently so I'll put it here too.

Disclaimer: playing with your trauma without a competent professional can make you a lot worst off than where you began, so this is, at best, for a trauma response NOT to address the old childhood trauma



^ EMDR app with free version on Android - not sure if there's free on iPhone.

It involves doing a body scan (observing where in the body there's tension etc) and rating how intense everything is for you.

Then you follow the dot (EMDR) left and right while you think of the situation (proper emdr has a certain pace to it).

Then re-evaluate body scan / intensity and repeat until manageable.

Then, if you choose, you can add a more positively framed (but realistic) belief by focusing on it while following the dot and repeating as above --- because people can be physiologically resistant to that as well.

Has to be realistic though - otherwise you won't believe yourself.
- That's where "power of positivity" fails.

It would be done once you know how to recognize you're escalating, before you're ready to dissociate (say dissociation is at 9/10, you'd work on identifying when you're at 6/10 and do it then).

As I'm sure you know, for most, there can be a bit of a point of no return when you're close to dissociating.
^ At that point it's all about grounding or riding it out as safely and comfortably as possible.

Don't force memories, it can endanger and further disable you.
^
It can be unpredictable and usually an expert will teach you how to ground and regulate and close "Pandora's box" before actually having you start working on it.

* It's not a "magic wand" - none of this is, and it's not overnight, nor is it a linear process.

* Curiosity and finding humor are a couple of the best ways to step back quickly emotionally - whilst zooming in on the past (causing further distress) is the least helpful

Lately, my grammar is killing me.