Speaking of Depersonalization and Derealization …

January 16, 2012 - 2 Responses

Severe depersonalization and derealization are part of living with Dissociative Identity Disorder. And in general I don’t feel like I have any control over my dissociative symptoms. But something interesting happened recently that has me thinking about the role my choices play in my pathology. I’ll tell you all about it but I have to tell you these two other things first or else the original thing won’t make any sense.

Thing One

I like to make digital collages. I use polyvore.com’s web-based application to make them. (It’s easy to use, super fun, and I totally recommend it to anyone who likes to play with color and images and textures and space.) I made this one last May for a faux photos contest: It’s a fake picture of me. Lizard is a nickname my father gave me (my middle name is Elizabeth). And though that child isn’t me, she looks prim, awkward, and inwardly melancholy enough to play the role.

Thing Two

I don’t have any real pictures of me as a kid. None. No school photos, family pictures, nothing. And it’s not because they were never taken, it’s just because … well, I don’t know why. I feel like I must have had some at some point. But I’ve no idea what happened to them. I would like to have some because I think mementos like that are part of how human beings build a sense of personal history.

Original Thing

Sometime during my hiatus the polyvore website hiccupped and evidently some of the images went all wonky because when I came back from said hiatus and looked through my collages I found several were not as I’d left them, including the one above. Now it looks like this:

And that strikes me as terribly amusing. After all, this is how I see myself as a child. Invisible. Leaving no trace of my existence in my wake. Or maybe it’s fairer to say this is how I prefer to see myself as a child.

Investing in Dissociative Symptoms

You see, depersonalization and derealization aren’t things that just happen to me willy nilly. I also invest in them. As much as I’d love to know what I looked like in kindergarten, I haven’t gone to any great lengths to find out. I haven’t exhausted every avenue, knocked on every door. There’s a reason for that. And it’s not just because I have Dissociative Identity Disorder … it’s also because, without even meaning to, and without any conscious awareness of ever doing so, I colluded with DID. I partnered with it. I decided, in millions of tiny, imperceptible moments throughout my life, that I’d rather not know.

And that is the real reason I don’t know what I looked like in kindergarten. That is the reason I created a pretend picture of myself for a polyvore contest. Because yes, I want to know. But not badly enough to find out.

Categorized in Dissociative Coping and Dissociative Symptoms
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Dissociative Symptoms: Derealization

January 13, 2012 - 4 Responses

My mom told me that teachers got a little irritated with me from time to time when I was a kid. WHAT?! It hurt my feelings because school was my jam when I was growing up and teachers were like rock stars. Why, oh why, would they get irritated with a dedicated little fan like me? Apparently I asked too many questions, some of which rankled because they implied to overly sensitive egos that I was doubting their intellectual authority. It still irritates people that I question so much but at least when it comes to Dissociative Identity Disorder, I don’t particularly give a shit.

And now a conversation between me and a human I’ve decided to call Ben:

But, bless him, Ben was just saying what everyone else said. And it certainly wasn’t his fault that derealization was so hard for me to grasp. I kept getting it confused with depersonalization, which is understandable on account of these two dissociative symptoms so often work in tandem. The biggest challenge, though, was the word ‘real’. You see, the best explanation I could get from anyone else was that derealization is the sense that people, places, and/or things are unreal. And I guess I feel like if you can’t define a word without using all or part of the word in its definition, then you don’t really understand what it means.

  • When I go to a friend’s house and pass it by over and over in an increasingly frantic search because although it’s there, I don’t recognize it as my friend’s house, I am experiencing derealization. The house doesn’t seem unreal; it just seems unfamiliar.
  • When a nurse from the hospital came up to me in a thrift store and asked how I was doing and I told her she must have me confused with someone else, it wasn’t because she seemed unreal. It was because I had no idea who she was. (Until she told me, of course, and then I was just appalled at her lack of professionalism.)
  • And when I am describing a dream I had and my son says, “That wasn’t a dream. We did that yesterday,” I suppose it’s fair to refer to that as things seeming unreal. Fair, but not accurate.


Dissociative symptoms are dynamic experiences of the self, not static, formulaic situations that everyone with a complex dissociative disorder perceives in precisely the same way. There are times when my home, my car, or the people around me seem foreign, strange, even unrecognizable. But that’s not about real or unreal to me. It’s about distance. Derealization puts psychic distance between me and some part of my environment.

(To Ben: Don’t be vague.)

Derealization: a form of dissociation that creates a sense of alienation from your environment.

Categorized in Dissociative Glossary and Dissociative Symptoms
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Dissociative Symptoms: Depersonalization

January 11, 2012 - 3 Responses

If dissociation is a way of creating psychic distance between ourselves and something else, then each of the five primary dissociative symptoms can be seen as a different means to that same end: dissociative symptoms put distance between me and other things. OBV, right? Wrong. I’m a little slow on the uptake so I had to oversimplify it to the extreme make a super scientific diagram to help me understand.

Once I got that difficult concept down, I had to figure out what all the other things are and which dissociative symptom separates me from what. Depersonalization was particularly challenging for me to understand, and I needed another highly technical visual to make it easier:

But then I heard the phrase “out of body experience” bandied about in connection with depersonalization and I was all, say what? And then other dissociative folks told me about leaving their bodies and watching themselves from afar and I was all, welp, that settles it. I do not hang out on ceilings watching my robot body go about its business so obviously I do not experience depersonalization; ergo, I do not have Dissociative Identity Disorder. Which was a relief because then I didn’t have to keep putting in all that effort to understand dissociative symptoms … until this happened in a psychiatry session:

Me: Why are my hands so big? Are my hands always this huge?

Doctor: Do they look larger to you than they usually do?

Me: YES! Look at them! I hate it when that happens, you know, like when things get bigger or smaller. Like sometimes my hands look really small but then sometimes they get giant and then they go back to being my hands but it weirds me out because what if my hands are actually that massive and I’m just not seeing them accurately most of the time? Or what if they’re really tiny and don’t match the rest of my body but I’ve deluded myself into thinking they’re perfectly proportionate and I’m walking around looking like a freak and I don’t even know it? Can that actually HAPPEN?!

Doctor: Depersonalization? Yes, it can and does happen. People with your diagnosis often feel separated from their bodies in some manner.

Me: Wait, what?

And that is how a mild dissociative episode taught me that depersonalization is when some part of me doesn’t feel like me. It could be my hands, my face, or my whole body. It could be my thoughts, my emotions, or the words coming out of my mouth. It could be pain I’m experiencing or physical movement. There are all kinds of ways of creating distance between yourself and yourself. Some people report “out of body” experiences. But depersonalization manifests in a variety of ways. What they all have in common is a feeling of disconnection from the self.

Depersonalization: a form of dissociation that creates a sense of alienation from yourself and/or your body.

Categorized in Dissociative Glossary and Dissociative Symptoms
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A Bird’s Eye View of the Dissociative Labyrinth

January 10, 2012 - Leave a Response

Imagine you live in a neat little garden with nicely clipped hedges. It’s an okay place to live (or a fantastic one, or a horrible one, depending on who you are) but weird shit tends to happen there. One day, when you’ve gotten fed up with all the bizarre, unexplained incidences, you go looking for the source of all the trouble. And there, in a corner of your garden, is a slim opening in the hedges that you’d never noticed before. It makes you nervous, this opening; where did it come from? how long has it been there? what, oh what, is waiting for you on the other side? You slip through the gap, your stomach tumbling and your palms wet, and find a path lined with more hedges. You follow the path in a state of near panic, terrified of what must surely be a huge, horrible demon lurking nearby; but all you find are more paths, more hedges. And the terrible truth dawns on you … what you thought was a garden is actually a labyrinth, and you are trapped inside.

That’s what it was like for me to learn that I had Dissociative Identity Disorder. Doctors and therapists wanted me to give them a map of my labyrinth, but that was (and still is) a hopeless endeavor. I don’t know if it’s my super low spatial intelligence (it’s true, I’m spatially stupid) but I am incapable of mapping, not to mention understanding something from the inside. I tried doing it their way for a while and then I took matters into my own hands. Instead of attempting to understand my specific labyrinth, I would learn everything I could about labyrinths in general, thereby getting as close to a bird’s eye view of my own as I could.

And so I did.

For me, getting a bird’s eye view of the labyrinth started with understanding these basic dissociative symptoms:

  • Depersonalization
  • Derealization
  • Dissociative Amnesia
  • Identity Confusion
  • Identity Alteration

People experience these dissociative symptoms in classic, textbook ways and in unique, individual ways. What’s universal is the essence of dissociation: separation. Just like in the labyrinth, dissociative symptoms create barriers between the self and itself, memory, or environment. We’ll examine the nature of those barriers in the next several posts, beginning with depersonalization.

Or, I will anyway. Join me? (It’ll be riveting, I swear.)

Categorized in Dissociative Symptoms
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Discussing Diagnosis: DDNOS or Dissociative Identity Disorder?

January 6, 2012 - 6 Responses

Diagnoses matter because they determine the path of treatment for what ails you. Ultimately, though, they are only labels … particular labels for particular sets of symptoms. So when we talk about the differences between Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) and Dissociative Disorder Not Otherwise Specified (DDNOS) we’re talking about symptoms. It gets confusing because:

  1. These are both complex dissociative disorders. Overlapping symptoms isn’t unusual with a variety of mental illnesses but with these two it’s nothing but overlap. Discerning the differences between DID and a thought disorder like Schizophrenia, for instance, is easier.
  2. The latter is an NOS disorder. In other words, DDNOS is the diagnosis given when a patient meets some, but not all of the diagnostic criteria for a DID diagnosis.

Sometimes people get so confused by and caught up in the line between these two diagnoses that they throw up their hands and declare that it just doesn’t matter. And depending on your reasons for trying to pin down that line, it might not. Frankly, there are some very good arguments for doing away with both diagnoses and grouping them together under the label Complex Dissociative Disorder, or just calling them both Dissociative Identity Disorder. After all, this is a spectrum we’re talking about here.

Still, as of right now these two diagnoses exist (in the United States) and there are some differences between the two. So let’s talk about them, shall we?

I like to break topics down into bite sized pieces so we’ll start with the obvious: dissociative symptoms. Then we’ll talk about how the symptoms differ, and a couple of the tools clinicians use to determine a dissociative diagnosis. I’ll throw in a DCMS Bookshelf pick that focuses on DID/DDNOS symptoms and tell you about a blogger with a talent for discussing pathology and recovery without harping on diagnoses. Comment today and you’ll get all of that for three installments of just $19.95!

For real though, it’ll be fun. :)

 

Categorized in Dissociative Symptoms
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DCMS 2012

January 5, 2012 - 3 Responses

During my leave of absence over the past few months I organized the kitchen and most of the garage, gained 8 pounds, got unnaturally good at Words with Friends, and stared into space a lot. Impressive, no? But wait! There’s more … I also came up with some new features I want to create here at Don’t Call Me Sybil this year.

New Features for DCMS 2012

  • DCMS Bookshelf
    Every month I’ll feature a book from my personal library – nonfiction, fiction, whatever – that means something to me as someone with Dissociative Identity Disorder. Not every book will be specific to dissociative disorders. Still, all of them are books I want to share with you.
  • On Our Dissociative Minds
    Okay, so technically it’s not a new feature. But I’ve decided to make it a monthly thing. On the last day of each month I’ll post an overview of discussion highlights from the DCMS blog, Facebook, and/or Twitter.
  • Dissociation Glossary
    I’m pretty sure I could happily spend every day just talking semantics. But seeing as how I’m the only one that actually enjoys that I’m limiting myself to once a month.
  • Blogger Highlight
    There are so many excellent writers contributing their unique voices and insight to the blogosphere. Every month I’ll introduce you to one of them. Assuming, that is, you haven’t already discovered these gems.
  • Dissociative Diary
    My published work is written specifically for public consumption. My personal journals and therapy workbooks are not. And while Don’t Call Me Sybil will never be an intimate online diary  – there are already lots of brave souls sailing those particular waters – I  would like to offer a slightly broader picture of who I am and what living with Dissociative Identity Disorder is like for me. I’m not good at vulnerability but I did some diary style posts for Dissociative Living that people seemed to appreciate so I thought I’d at least try it here and see how it goes.
  • Tracy Talks Dissociation
    I cried, begged, pleaded, and pulled at my hair a lot and Tracy finally agreed to let me publish her thoughts as a partner of someone with DID on a monthly basis. (And by cried, begged, pleaded, and pulled at my hair a lot I mean I said, “Will you?” and she responded, “Yes.” But that doesn’t sound as good.) If you have a question for her, or something you’d like a partner’s perspective on, send me an email with ‘Tracy Talks Dissociation’ in the subject line. If you want to remain anonymous, here’s how.

Now I realize I’ve made a lot of time-related commitments here. Just remember: what I lack in consistency I make up for in awesome.

Join Me for DCMS 2012

I invite you to a new year of all things dissociation at Don’t Call Me Sybil. Subscribe via RSS or email (see the Follow button at the bottom of the homepage). You can also find me on Facebook and Twitter. However you choose to do it, I hope you’ll join me for DCMS 2012!

Categorized in Announcement
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Dissociative Identity Disorder at The Garden Gate

January 4, 2012 - 8 Responses

Elizabeth Young writes The Garden Gate blog and she was kind enough to let me write a couple of guest posts for her on Dissociative Identity Disorder. When I write for publications that aren’t specific to trauma and dissociation, I try to stay away from complex discussions of DID and instead present as simplified and approachable a definition as possible. For Elizabeth, I decided to provide a two-step explanation … my idea was to first introduce dissociation and help her readers relate to it, and then take them down the road to Dissociative Identity Disorder. Here’s how it panned out:

Dissociative Identity Disorder Part 1: Dissociation

Dissociative Identity Disorder Part 2: Pathological Dissociation

I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Categorized in Guest Blog
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It’s Good to See You, 2012

January 3, 2012 - 14 Responses

I spent most of 2011 on my knees, alternating between cold determination and sobbing desperation. It was one of the longest and worst bouts of serious depression I’ve ever experienced. I got through it by cultivating hope wherever I could … in the way turquoise and red come alive when put together, in chin-up-you-can-get-through-this-kid quotes that I drank up like strengthening tonic, in music, and my son’s refreshingly irreverent sense of humor. I used to think that hope was something you have or you don’t, it’s given to you or it’s not. Now I know that no one can give me hope; I must coax it to life, tend it, and feed off of its bitter, foul-smelling fruit.

(It goes down like cod liver oil but it sure is good for you.)

It’s a lot of work, this hope growing business, and I got really, really tired. Parts of my brain needed to rest. Hibernate is a better word, actually. Parts of my brain needed to hibernate. And eat a lot. I mean, a LOT.

I’m still tired and hungry but more in that tender way, like after you recover from a long and serious illness and technically you’re out of the woods but you’re just not strong enough for regular life yet. That’s me right now, smiling and saying hello to you and to 2012.

It feels good to be working again. I really wish I could remember where I was going with this, though.

Categorized in Recovery and Struggles
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Why I Stopped Writing Dissociative Living, Pt. 1

October 15, 2011 - 19 Responses

I’ve thought a lot about why I had to stop writing Dissociative Living. It’s flummoxed me, frankly, that writing a 500-word article a week became too much. Sure, there’s an unusual amount of stress and upheaval in my life right now, but from where I sit that accounts for not being able to, say, go back to school full-time or open a restaurant. But write and publish articles about Dissociative Identity Disorder? Hell, I do that anyway. What’s the big deal?

After chewing on it for a few weeks, I think I’ve figured it out. I found the clues to the answer in this reader comment:

There’s really only one trick, and if you have Dissociative Identity Disorder you’re already a pro at it. Read the rest of this entry »

Categorized in Dissociative Coping and Dissociative Symptoms
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Poll: Learning about Your Dissociative Identity Disorder System

September 13, 2011 - 18 Responses

I had an experience with state-dependent memory recall recently that has me questioning the almost-exclusively-internal focus typical in Dissociative Identity Disorder treatment. Have a problem, but don’t know what it is? Ask inside. Don’t know how to handle a particular situation? Ask inside. I’m wondering how many people with DID find this self-focused method successful.

If you have Dissociative Identity Disorder, I hope you’ll respond to this poll:

I also encourage you, as always, to leave any comments you wish to share. Thanks so much for participating.

Categorized in Poll, Recovery and Struggles
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