How to get Depersonalization Disorder*

Imagine this series of life scenes and situations punctuating the timeline from age five to fifteen. * Mother has cancer and withdraws into her room, into her mind. The slightly older daughter grows the “strong” persona to deal with (bury) her feelings, but is later unfairly misunderstood, by the mother, to be unemotional, uncaring. The younger sister feels frightened and abandoned. Father is “one of those” who work then come home to live their life in the garage or man cave. * Some years later, mother, now recovered, withdraws the younger daughter from the school where her deeply loved and needed friends attend. The girl has depended on these friends, having had no one else. * Mid-teen, she comes to therapy and talks very intelligently, that is, disquietingly wisely, and with an interesting poetic or fey manner, and “off” eye contact. A couple months go by before the therapist realizes this is dissociation, and the client may be on the verge of growing an intractable depersonalization disorder. Her complaint is that her mother is always demanding and angry. Always.

What we’ve seen is one origin of chronic dissociation, a gradual life of exiting the world, being detached from it. “If I’m in a bad mood, I get stuck inside. It’s like I’m watching myself.” I did not know her to be in a good mood. There was this short series, through time, of unhealed pain and withdrawing ending in mother’s life of attitude and demanding­ness. See what this does: If you’re a child and your father is gone and your mother is constantly in her own emotional bent and always requiring you to be certain ways, you will not exist to her. You will be completely invisible, absolutely unheard. That invisibility was the final wall that turned her back into herself. I wanted her to talk happily, or with some energy, about her friends, not about her perpetual loss of friends and embarrassedly feeling superior to them. I wanted her to talk about something she liked. Oh thank goodness! There is a band on YouTube. But nothing else. Friends fade away. Not, I said, because they change, but because you fall back into your quiet cavern and numb out. I wanted her to not be so psychological, so self-aware. I wanted to say: Go jump in a swimming pool, do something crazy with your sister, sing out loud with friends at the mall, run a mile in the rain. Fall back in the world. But first: Tell your mother, “Listen, listen, listen. You can’t see me from behind your dark glasses,” basically the child’s version of: “Shut up. Ditch your fucking angry attitude about life, quiet your mind so you can see me. Start caring about me instead of demanding that I be what you feel.”

Therapy, unfortunately only once a week, will continue slapping her head with reality, like the bleeding victim fading away whom you shake and yell at to “stay awake! Stay with me!” She is emphatically urged to keep in contact through the week, text or email or teletherapy, even late at night if need be. We have to prevent this downward slide to this underground cavern, where Gollum stirs in his fitful sleep. We have to prevent the cushioned walls of depersonalization. As Christine Lawson wrote in Understanding the Borderline Mother:

“Laura’s voice sounded flat and far away. She spoke in a child’s voice, as if trapped at the bottom of a well.

“‘There’s no way out.’ She drew into herself and left me with her fear. I wasn’t sure if I could reach her in time.”**

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* Inspired by John Modrow’s How To Become a Schizophrenic, Writers Club Press, © 1992.

** Christine Ann Lawson, Understanding the Borderline Mother, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., © 2000, p. 3.