Some more on Depersonalization

A young man, age 16, with severe Depersonalization-Derealization Disorder. He said: “The feelings are getting more complicated. Like the painting (office wall) feels real but the room doesn’t.” “Me feeling detached from reality. Everything feels like a mystery, foggy, fuzzy. This feels like not me.” And, “I can’t comprehend that I’m human some­times."

Basic background: Father and older sister would fight often. Client seemed to blame his sister while acknowledging that his father “was a jerk to her.” Mother was the “peace­maker.” He would have “heavy emotional flows,” depression with, at its worst, suicidal feeling, and breakdowns. But then, the antithesis: “I see my family as strangers. It’s hard to have emotions. I can’t feel for them.”

Has anyone figured out the neurology that takes a love-bare home and years-long emotional repression and turns them into depersonalization and derealization? I haven’t learned of it. This is a different species of repression, of dissociation. I noticed in me, many years ago, a general out-of-phase with reality that would be “enhanced” by episodes of depersonalization. I’ve defeated much of the detachment but not all. Example: If I exercise for more than five minutes, I feel that I’m taxing my mind in a poisonous way by making it push around this foreign bulk that is not myself. This makes impossible the exertion.

The young client became emotionally numb to his gauche family early on, to where they were “strangers.” I described the same phenomenon in an earlier blog post:

My 1950’s family was a roll-of-the-dice assemblage of fake-emoters and sleepwalkers. Growing up, I was inert to any feeling about ‘family’ or ‘happy family’ or bond or loyalty or love or even reliance. Pick a dozen or two random words from the dictionary – ‘nostril,’ ‘bridge,’ ‘perambulate,’ ‘dish,’ ‘rally,’ ‘circumference,’ etc. I will experience more gut feeling for any of them than I do for ‘father’ and ‘mother,’ ‘mom’ and ‘dad.’ Those terms do not compute in my psyche. My placid eyes and galvanic skin response would prove it.*

Emotional anesthesia can birth a variety of offspring. Dysthymia; physical numbness – a trauma­tized nurse couldn’t feel the backs of her hands; lack of empathy; lack of goal or career interest; sense of having no identity: “I don’t know who I am”; a life of vaporous intellect that will seem powerful but is actually void. Add family sterility to this anesthesia and you may grow to suffer the lobotomy of self-unreality and world-unreality. Full detach­ment from the people who were critical to your life energy may produce a peculiar chemistry: Without that mirror, there is no reflection. It seems likely that birth trauma is also a factor: the first wound and its shock.

I found that over the years, my depersonalization and feeling of a mechanical world significantly leached out, leaving the real person. What made this happen? Feeling. Getting in touch with primal loss: Allow­ing the worst emotions of childhood failure cleared the path for other feelings, which are one’s connection to self and the world. Thirty years ago, I couldn’t smell a rose, feel a heart or see my children. Feeling is healing.

- - - - - - - - - - -

* https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2018/09/transit-2-carrying-my-family-to-work.html.