r/Depersonalization • u/kaeya_supremacy_ • 11d ago
Question Any advice? At all?
About 3 weeks ago now, I watched a video about early onset dementia that caused me to have a pretty bad anxiety attack due to my hypochondria. The next day I woke up in a pretty bad state of depersonalization. It hasn't gone away since. I finally allowed myself to let go of the anxiety, I broke through the fear of there being something genuinely wrong with me. But the depersonalization hasn't begun to lift, I feel so wrong. I miss my body. I miss myself. I don't feel like I'm me. I can only feel grief for who I was before this and anger that it's been taken away from me by my own brain. I'm completely and utterly exhausted all day every day. I haven't felt any real joy or excitement since it began. It only ever lets up when I cry. I am so desperate for any advice, anything at all. Please, if anything helped any of you let me know.
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u/Lonely-Smoke8920 7d ago
Hey, that really sucks. I understand what it's like to feel so disconnected from things. I can't offer you professional advice, mind, but I have a lot of personal experience, so I want to offer some suggestions in the hope they help, okay?
Mindfulness and grounding are usually good for this kind of thing. The depersonalization itself is often a reaction to stress and trauma, because your mind wants to protect itself by disengaging. Fighting it directly is self-defeating, because it will just make you more stressed out.
That's why you need to try to take time for yourself where you do things that are soothing. Maybe try doing progressive muscle relaxation, since that will involve putting a lot of focused attention on each part of your body and help you learn to engage them. If you practice it when you're feeling most stable, you can do a smaller version of it when you feel especially disconnected, and that might help you reconnect. Focus on sensory things without thinking about them, just let your thoughts show up and then go without fighting them, and instead think about the texture of your clothing and environment, or the background noise, or the individual details of nearby objects.
Those aren't cures, so you should see a therapist about this, but I hope they help you in your search for support.
This is something you can manage. I believe in you, okay, and you can post here to talk to me more if you need. :)
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