I have been active on this sub and under other accounts, have zen books, liked/lived the zen philosophy and I feel at one with the universe when I'm alone in a forest, or when it rains. I've had deep satori and euphoria and oneness "in the valleys and on the mountains". And yet, I'm here posting about DPDR because despite all that you can still be deeply deeply screwed up without even knowing it. I'm going to describe the whole thing because I've been fortune enough to have gone through breaking out of deep DPDR very lucidly and want to record it for myself and as a warning to everyone here.
DPDR?
Depersonalization/derealization in psychiatry speak. It's a strange mental illness because you can be totally functioning externally and feel really good about your life but "you" actually live deep inside your head and experience reality indirectly through a series of filters and Semi-Automatic conditioned responses. Like playing your own life as a video game from a basement in your mind. and you may be totally unaware that you're doing it, or you may have repressed the fact that you're doing this. Or maybe you just think everyone's mind is like this...
oh yeah sometimes I have moments where I've felt like that!
Think about this for a moment: I didn't get DPDR from time to time, I was in fact DPDR continuously and unwittingly for essentially all of my life. I used to get occasional panic attacks of un-derealization where I felt like I was getting kicked into a weird uncomfortable reality and that was BRUTAL. But i called those moments derealization or depersonalization when in fact it was the other way round - that was my comfortable DPDR life cracking when I wasn't ready.
On some level, I was even using zen to deal with my DPDR - essentially practicing zen while hiding deep inside my head.
how does this happen
Normally it's due to trauma and (self-)repression. You're protecting yourself from a world or personal history that is too painful to deal with directly. I have a relative who was an orphan and now I've recognized it in myself and broken out, I can see it in her. She's way way deep and in her 60s. It can build up slowly in childhood and then there's probably a few traumatic events and one day (like kids do) you run off to your bedroom and slam the door, metaphorically speaking. I hear it can also happen from psychedelics although they probably just reinforce existing DPDR - I was certainly 100% DPDR nearly a decade before I first did acid - in fact I think i wanted to do acid for 5 years before i actually took it because I (subconsciously) wanted to see if it could change me and I could get out. I'm not going to talk about my own reasons for my DPDR because this sub needs to raise its consciousness about three notches (not very fucking zen, guys).
what are some of the side-effects
On the one hand you could be perfectly functional, successful, normal everything. In my case, and for my for my relative, you could functionally have a split-brain personality disorder at the same time. I used to only smile genuinely on the left side of my face, she has a very strong twitch in one eye. Being in an extremely rational-logical-left-brain profession like IT/science/law while having little to no emotions. Socially awkward, lots of rationalizing, dead-looking eyes, inability to properly look after yourself, high tolerance for pain and stress. Sounds like the ideal employee right?! My relative and I are both successful in careers and life!
Lots of repressed fantasies and feelings, like when you feel something or get a little spark you rationalize it into something else like you're interpreting your own thoughts.
what happens when you unwind it all
I've become ambidextrous, dominant with the opposite hand to before. I cried about 15 times a day as I reconnected between me (real, hidden) and reclaimed functions back from the fake persona I had created - acknowledging all the real feelings I had. I smile with both sides of my face, my eyes are different and bright.
I kind of reached out and put my arms into my arms and stepped my legs down into my legs, if that makes sense. Which means I actually feel my body and skin for real. NSFW: >! THE ORGASMS OH MY GOD MELT seriously guys and gals break out just for the orgasms forget zen! !<
I still have a lot of automatic behaviors around people that were designed intentionally to deflect attention away and discourage eye contact. I still sometimes slip a little into the split-brain personality mode, but using my newly dominant hand more and checking to see if I'm using both sides of my face helps.
ok, so, back to zen.
You can probably say that this is essentially the exact experience that many people have on some level after a meditation retreat, they deal with their trauma and have a similar experience of reuniting themselves and taking up their body and mind. With mild stuff, really not such a big deal.
But when your repressed self runs and hides DEEP you can actually construct a cocoon and a persona that will still have the zen experience to some degree while actually huge parts of you remain DPDR, and no amount of meditation or study is going to get you out, because the exact reason you're down there is the exact thing that you will never touch and you would never think to go looking for in the first place
This is the goose in the bottle koan. The goose isn't going to get out unless it pecks its own way out. And it can't and won't do it until the bottle becomes more painful than it is comfortable. In my case, the stress of my job made being the persona not worth it any more, so dealing with my own truths was less painful than maintaining the illusion.
Conclusion: "Nah that's not me though"
Have fun, you silly geese. I've called you out now. If reading this made you squirm, don't worry you'll feel a lot better after a week :)
Oh and keep searching for more repressed parts of you, you never know what else is hiding down there even once you acknowledge the elephant in the room.
Submitted September 15, 2021 at 12:14PM by infiniteyawn https://ift.tt/3nvKDSt
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