The Symptom of Depersonalization

I wanted to dedicate a post about my struggle with depersonalization. For those of you who don't know, and according to Wikipedia, depersonalization is a dissociative phenomenon characterized by a subjective feeling of detachment from oneself, manifesting as a sense of disconnection from one's thoughts, emotions, sensations, or actions, and often accompanied by a feeling of observing oneself from an external perspective. It can involve someone feeling as if they are observing moments from a distance. Depersonalization can happen as a dissociative state happening in present time, but it can also exist long-term, separating the belief that trauma existed from the self. In other words, one can believe that their trauma never actually happened to them, but rather happened to someone else, or not at all. This is something that I went through, and still go through from time to time. Every once in a while, I get intrusive thoughts that my trauma is not real, that my experiences never happened, or that I'm a fraud. It took me years of therapy to understand why I was having these false, intrusive thoughts, how to combat them, and how to reinstate in myself what I knew to be true. 

 

Some of the tips I learned in therapy to help fight these intrusive thoughts include fact checking, and double checking my resources. Fact checking means quite simply to check the facts that I'm presently dealing with. For example, I know traumatic things have happened to me because 1. I have memories of them, 2. I have physical scars and brain injuries from violent assaults, 3. there were other people there (including the abuser) who witnessed the abuse. Apart from fact-checking, I can double check my resources. This means checking in with people who may have second-hand witnessed my trafficking life. For example, when I'm going through episodes of depersonalization, I will reach out to friends who had helped me through after-care of a trafficking exchange. I will contact people who I used to go or call after being raped or assaulted. After contacting these people, I will ask them to quite literally validate the events that happened to me. This is double-checking my resources, and people who were second-hand witnesses to my trauma. 

 

Going through depersonalization has really affected my self-esteem and behavior in a negative way. After going through episodes where I believed I was a fraud, it would be followed by misleading feelings of extreme guilt, which would then cause me to tell people I confided in that my experiences weren't real event though they were. The reality is that I had lived through extreme trauma, and my brain made me think that it was false as a survival tactic. This affected and ruined multiple friendships, as it often broke trust between me and people I loved and used to confide in. I was scared, and didn't understand what I was feeling, or how to deal with the misleading thoughts I was having. Misinterpreting my lived experiences as "not real" was also a tactic my brain created in order to make space between me and my trauma. It was a way to brush it under the rug, and not have to face it head on. 

 

I have since then made lots of recovery from my trauma, and can face and process most of the events that have happened to me through therapy and with close, trusted, loved ones. If I could go back in time, I would do something to cut down on the confusion, because the way the uncertainty was handled had caused a lot of hardships between me and certain friends that I believe could have been avoided. However, I've learned from those experiences, and learned to trust myself more and more each day. It's a matter of me being willing to face the truth instead of hiding from my own trauma.

 

The truth is that I was sexually trafficked. That's a really big pill to swallow. I have to face, remember, and process the traumatic things that happened to me in order to get through them instead of hiding from my pain. 

 

I feel like a lot of survivors don't talk about depersonalization, or episodes of that kind,  because we are already being told by others, and the rest of the world, that we're lying. We're  not believed by a large amount of people, and to admit that I have invasive thoughts of that nature would be points against me, making me to appear more unreliable. However, I believe shining light on depersonalization is essential, because trauma affects survivors in a number of ways, including instilling large amounts of self-doubt, self-guilt, and other insecurities. These symptoms of trauma are just that: symptoms. They're the brains way of trying to survive, trying to keep you from experiencing more trauma of facing your reality. Your brain is trying to help you escape from your own life. And as we heal, the more we will trust ourselves, the more we will be empowered, and the less scary our lives will become.