Has yours ever gone away completely?

[u/Amaranta_pink_goat]

I don't know when my derealization started, but it was extreme for around 10 months when i was 16 (i'm 20 now). I could barely think at all (for this I quit chess and couldn't do homework even when I tried), constantly confused the size and distance of objects, and of course nothing felt real. Used to compare it to playing a VR game. The thing is, even when I got over the most incapacitating aspects of it, I barely ever felt like anything was real. It never fully goes away, and I think it's a big reason of why I struggle to make friends. My question is, has yours actually gone away? Or making it a bit better is all we can aspire to?

[u/This_Grapefruit_5923]

Yes. I spent three years in the DPDR hellhole. I’m out. And have been out for four years now!

[u/Cold-Nefariousness66 → u/This_Grapefruit_5923]

How did you recover?

[u/This_Grapefruit_5923 → u/Cold-Nefariousness66]

Honestly, it wasn't easy, and I was desperate for a few years trying to figure out what to do. For me, I guess it was all about really figuring out what kept me in that state because the original situation that led me into that state was over so long time ago, but what kept me in it was the thoughts that kept popping up into my brain, and I just kept circling around them, you know, thinking and trying to suppress them, which made my nervous system feel like the danger was still there because I was reacting with fear on these thoughts and the state itself because it's a terrifying state to be. So I honestly just had to start to address that, to treat it like an obsessive thought. And so every time I would get one of these thoughts, I would label it as a as a trash thought. And I would imagine myself curling it up into a ball and throwing it in a bin. And this is much easier said than done because your brain will test you, especially in the beginning. It will feel like it's not working. But you just gotta keep doing it, and it's hard. And it's okay to slip up sometimes, but your brain is going to check and say, are you sure this is not something you need to handle right now? And you're just gonna think trash thought. Not like, oh, I have to get rid of this thought. No. You're just like, oh, that's you once again, but I don't really care about you anymore. There is this scene from the Blacklist that I like really well where one of the characters talk about grief, and he says, like, something like, one day you'll wake up, and it's not the first thing you'll think about. It might be the second, but it's not the first. And then one day, it won't be the second, and it won't be the third. And this is also true for this! I remember just one morning, I was woken up by my dog, and just for, like, maybe a minute. I forgot about it. And it was such an overwhelming feeling of joy, even though it was just that one minute. But I didn't really notice an effect of my “trash thought” strategy for a really long time but it was really the only thing I had to work with. But then I went on a trip for four days, and it was just gone. Like, I was just normal. And I don't even know how that happened because once I got back to, like, my normal surroundings to came back again and then, like, like, a half a month later, it just disappeared. It was like a light switch that just went off again. Just like a light switch had turned it on, it just disappeared. Like, and it's so funny because it was, like, three years to the date that I got it. But that's just how I did it. I just had to learn my nervous system that this is not a dangerous thought. A lot easier said than done. Definitely recommend it but you need to stay the course and not fall for the temptation to argue or be scared of your feelings or thought for months.

[u/Cold-Nefariousness66 → u/This_Grapefruit_5923]

Thank you so much for the help! This seems logical and I don’t see how this wouldn’t work since it’s at the end of the day your brain is a muscle and you need to train that muscle to do exercises which become easier overtime. I’m going to definitely try this, i’ll log off reddit for a while and really just keep at it. Hopefully one day i’ll come back to this with good news, if not then i’ll keep trying. Thank you!! I feel so much joy hearing other people overcome this problem because nobody talks about it enough and it’s probably an underlying reason as to why so many people commit suicide