2d ago

What the actual fuck is DPDR

Well, so yesterday night i had tthe "luck" of getting to feel what depersonalisation and derealisation (DPDR) actually feels like.

I got woken up in the middle of the night to do something quite short and i almost instantly realise "Something aint right. Everything feels weird". And then slowly I realised, what it was that I felt. It felt like I was watching someone control my body. If I wanted to lift my arm Icould "feel" felt how my brain sended the command to my body execute, and suddenly my arm moved. I felt like my true self was a few centimeters below my skin, waiting to get released from its fleshy vehicle. Everything i touched felt like i touched it with a quite big glove on. If I walked i felt like watching a stream of my body moving while sitting somewhere else with a VR Headset. Luckyly it faded away quite fast, after I was finished with what I had to do (it took 5 Minutes at max) and laid back in an attempt to sleep (which of course didnt work that well, since my mind was still processing the experience it just had).

This was devinetively the weirdest experience I had in my lifetime.

8 comments

yeah I hate that feeling, I don't get it as much anymore but whenever it happens it lasts a bit. 🤔 Didn't know that it had a long ass name

This definitely happened to me a LOT when I was growing up. Oddly enough, right around the time of puberty. Which, now that I think about, explains a lot. Mine was usually right after dreams about being small. I ended up over 6 feet tall by middle school, so that's either an expression of dysphoria, body dysmorphia, or both. I'm going with both.

Gotta love those moments where you start to think "oh. Thats... not normal?" 😐 like looking at a word youve read and said thousands of times and thinking it looks weird?
Then again i can almost disassociate on command so shrug (i think of the crowd noises at the end of Pink Floyd - Welcome To The Machine) and I'm generally quite disoriented when i wake up anyway
- Yeah learning that a lot of dysphoria symptoms are, in fact, not commonly experienced by most people was quite the revelation to me.
- When I read that article that starts with a copy/paste of the DSM symptom list for dpdr before saying what that list is, I was like "why is this article just a giant list about me?"
  Interesting there's a name to describe things I kinda just assumed were partly just an autism thing.

Sounds like a parasomnia, I had those occasionally before I started estrogen. I haven't had one since starting HRT.
I still have a hard time telling when I'm dissociating or experiencing derealization or depersonalization - acute episodes are more noticeable like during traumatic events.
It's hard for me to differentiate these as PTSD symptoms from something like gender dysphoria. My PTSD has made it harder to recognize or acknowledge my gender dysphoria.

I had that happen to me once, or at least I'm pretty sure it was this. It was like I was standing behind my body, basically staring at the back of my own head, and through it. I obviously couldn't actually see the back of my head, but I felt like that's where I was positioned. Weird and awful feeling.

Oh yeah, that's a really awkward feel. I had that when I was quite young, and then from time to time ever since. It feels like being in the zone that you remote control your body, but not quite, and the head gets all fuzzy.

8 comments