***disclaimer: please refrain from self-diagnoses for any and all mental disorders listed below as they are harder to diagnose, and diagnoses should be left up to psychological professionals. In addition, this blog post will contain mentions of self-harm and/or graphic descriptions of mental health***
CPTSD sucks. CPTSD stands for complex post-traumatic stress disorder. It’s inherently different from PTSD because CPTSD is built based on a series of multiple events and is prolonged over time like chronic abuse. Those who have CPTSD don’t typically react or relive trauma in the same way that people with PTSD do. While PTSD is more centered around a trigger and a ‘flashback’ that is based in memory, CPTSD doesn’t necessarily have a set trigger, and the flashbacks are more emotional based. Flashbacks in CPTSD are often accompanied by dissociation. This means that the person might feel detached from their body or feel like they are observing the traumatic event from the outside, as if they are no longer the one experiencing it but watching it happen. This can be a form of emotional “numbing,” where the person disconnects from the pain of the flashback to cope with the overwhelming feelings.
Here is the kicker; because I have gone through so much dissociation from extreme trauma, I developed depersonalization derealization, or DP/DR, as a byproduct. This is where I am divided on my feelings of my brains coping mechanisms. On one hand, the psychology minor in me thinks it is fascinating how the human brain can break and unbreak itself as a form of protection. On the other hand, I wish I wasn’t the human lab rat for it.
Depersonalization is a feeling or sensation of detachment from one’s body, thoughts, or even self. Individuals report observing themselves from outside their bodies or living in a dreamlike state where they observe their thoughts and actions from a distance. Common descriptions of depersonalization include: Feeling like an outside observer of one’s own life. A sense of being robotic or detached from emotions and thoughts. The sensation that one’s body is unreal or distorted (e.g., feeling like one’s hands or face are “foreign” or “not theirs”).
My personal experience with DP/DR is that I feel almost as if I’m stuck in a glass box in my head and forced to watch my life play out as if it was a movie or a tv sit com. Depersonalization is specific to the feeling of detachment for me, not unlike most. I feel as though I’ve been locked inside someone else and forced to life out a scripted life. I cannot feel anything emotionally during these “episodes” but can express emotions physically. For example, I can tell I’m anxious not by the feeling but because my heart is racing or my hands become sweaty. Sometimes I find myself laughing but don’t know what I’m laughing at or why. It’s a combination of me having such a short-term memory during these episodes and be so far removed from what’s happening that I end up just being confused.
Derealization involves a feeling of the external world being unreal or distorted. A person can feel he is in a dream, or the world around him is foggy, blurry, or artificial. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what is real and what is not. Common descriptions include: Feeling like one is living in a movie or dream.
Seeing the world around them as foggy, flat, or lifeless. Objects appearing unusually large or small, or distant, as if in a haze.
I experience derealization at varying levels depending on the time of year or what’s happening in my life at the moment. Some of the worst, and earliest, episodes that I’ve had completely stripped me of my ability to sense things. I can’t see as well, almost as if I am looking at things thought a microscope and zooming in and out constantly. Touch is the worst for being taken because I can’t feel anything. Not the chair I’m sitting on. Not my body or hands rubbing together. It would be so extreme that I would cut my hand just to see if I could feel pain and still couldn’t. It’s as if my body is completely numbed.
It sounds gruesome but it’s also a helpful tool in some cases. One example is when I had on fake tan, and it stained my hands orange, so I had my best friend scrub it off with a steel wool sponge. The initial pain triggered an episode and for the rest of the time (like 45 minutes) I couldn’t feel anything even when the majority of my skin was scraped away and my hands were bloody. I was just happy I didn’t have to look like Snooki from MTV’s Jersey Shore.
Of course, when your senses are dull and you feel as if you aren’t real, you start to somewhat believe that you aren’t real. I say ‘somewhat believe’ because it’s not a delusion like psychosis but instead it’s more like trying to connect logic for a foreign feeling. I will start to convince myself that Jean Baudrillard was onto something and that this is all a part of the simulacra, and my specific simulation is flawed.
The gendered aspect of DP/DR is complex. The first gender vioelce barrier is that getting diagnosed with CPTSD or DP/DR as a femme body is hard because its no secret that when it comes to anything medical or psychological, femme bodies are disregards, and their pain or experience is minimized. This results in improper treatment or misdiagnoses. I was misdiagnosed with 5 things before my DP/DR and CTPSD diagnoses. The second barrier is that if I talk about what I’m experiencing during an episode, it makes it easier for other people to label me as crazy. There is no need to run through the village and yell “WIIIIIITTTCHHHH” just because I have trauma. Plus, it never really affects anyone else.
Episodes can last from seconds to years and there is no way to predict how long they will last. My personal longest was 3 and a half days and during that time I convinced myself that I went to class, did my assignments, and spoke to my friends when in actuality all I had done was sit in bed and stared at the ceiling.
The feeling of being stuck inside your head, absent from reality, dethatched from your body is uncanny. Everything if familiar because it’s YOU but it feels like it’s not. Looking in the mirror is the worst thing to do because of the visual distortion, and lack of feeling when you touch your face. Anytime I make the mistake of looking in the mirror, I panic more. Panicking and continuing in an anxious state makes the episode more intense and longer because your brain is trying to protect you from whatever is making you scared.
There has been a plethora of times where I pretend to act like myself when I am having a DP/DR episode to try and lessen the amount of people who can tell that something is wrong. I become a puppet for my own self as if I’m putting on a play and fooling everyone.
And it works.
Most of the time.