Loss Of Self: Dissociation & Depersonalization episodes

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I have had episodes that are somewhat DPD like. I trance out and get strong synesthetic qualities and sometimes feel somewhat "out of body".

I see that you are having difficulties understanding what you have written, mystyc, so I shall break the problem down for you to facilitate your understanding:

The problem is that in your poll you have not included any option for the overwhelming majority of people with AS who do not suffer from these kinds of psychological maladies. Here is your poll so that you can see what we are discussing:




If we look through your poll we see that in the 8 choices not one of them includes an option for people with AS who do not suffer from these kinds of psychological maladies.

You provided choices for-

-People with this psychological malady.
-People who are unsure whether or not they have this psychological malady.
-People who have another random psychological malady.

You have difficulty understanding the difference between knowing that something is true and being unsure that something is true- yet this understanding is clear and elementary to almost all normal people, whether AS or NT.

When you make the bizarre claim that I am not being 'honest', you are attributing malign motives to others with no rational basis for doing so. Imagine if a research scientist who had a flaw in his methodology pointed out to him by a colleague responded not with reasoning and analysis but with angry and bizarre accusations that he is a ' liar' and is 'dishonest'. Pointing out flaws in methodology is a normal part of the rational discussion of ideas. It does not mean when people do this that they are 'bad people', 'dishonest', or are 'conspiring against you'.

When you make personal attacks on the integrity of people who are patiently trying to help you it can only damage your ability to relate to others.


Magliabechi.

I have DID, not DPD. But sometimes I feel everything is like a dream and not real (derealization). I used to have 10 personalities because of my DID. They are not typical in DID like I had a 500 year old Martian for example. Some of the others are more like DID such as my 2 year old personality and my 5 year old personality. I even had a Republican personality that thought Bush was the best president ever! He wanted Bush to run a third term! I am female so its weird that I have some male personalities. They don't really come out anymore...that I know of. Someone would have told me if I "switched." I also have Evil Schizoaffective Disorder, how evil! My doctor is Dr. Evil! He's so funny because he thinks I have delusions! I don't because what I experience is real, not fake. Just things feel like a dream sometimes. Also, it feels like I am not in control over my own body.

Magliabechi, go away.

Does anyone here daydream a lot when you are depersonalized?

I am curious mystyc. What is meant by "thought confusion"?

For the record, I have not been diagnosed with DPD, but I strongly suspect that I may have it. My "episodes" are short, on the order of minutes, but frequent and come in clusters. And for others reading this, this is distinct from my information/emotional overload episodes.

My episodes are not long enough to daydream, but if they were longer, I can't imagine if "daydreaming" would make any sense. It is like, suddenly I am not "me" anymore, as though I were just born into the world with all my thoughts and memories. Then by the time I adjust to this, I am "me" again. Albeit, a much less comfortable version, heh. The differences between how our episodes manifest will likely cause similar dissimilarities.

From what I read about your posts, your episodes are much longer, more intense, and common than my own. Mine however, are short and frequent. What I hate is like when I am watching a movie or TV and I have an episode, and I can no longer understand what I am doing or why I am watching it. I lose that sense of the "suspension of disbelief" and there is no point in watching. This is most confusing. But before I can come to terms with it, the episode is over. That is one form of "thought confusion".

Another form is simply based on how my mind works. All my thoughts have various motivations and rationals behind them. It is sort of how I order things in my mind. But those motivations and rationals disappear and I am left with a big pile of thoughts with no order.

When thinking of "thought confusion" I was sort of thinking about "thought disorder" which has a formal clinical definition. But they are a bit different. So excuse my informal language there, heh.

I'd like to hear more about your DPD. Although there is no standard medical treatment for it, what have your doctors tried? Are you able to hold a job at all? What are you like when your episodes are really bad?

How do you know it's DPD and not just apart of having an ASD. I mean alot of people depersonalize that don't even have autism.
Most people on the autism spectrum who get sensory overload will depersonalise but I donot beleive it is truly depersonalisation or disassociation.

I am confused as to who or what you are referring to in your question.

So the psychological malady that you suffer from leaves you with a severely impaired capacity for rational thought. That explains the choices in your poll: it was all 'a big pile of thoughts with no order'.

The next time you wish to make a poll, but are having problems with coherent thought, you might like to try presenting your ideas to someone else first. You would explain to your helper that you wish to communicate but are having problems with rational thought, then with his or her guidance you would be assisted to produce the poll that expresses what you want to communicate clearly.

This has to be a better way of proceeding than producing 'a pile of thoughts with no order' and then attacking people who point out the lack of order in your thoughts.




You are undergoing a psychological crisis. There are people who are willing to help you. There are people who will be patient with you, but if you attack them and drive them away you will be left very alone indeed. That cannot be good for you, mystyc.

Magliabechi.

It really makes me uncomfortable that someone would take the disclosures that an individual makes about their cognitive issue on a mental health thread and use that disclosure to question their thinking ability in an unrelated claim made.

It would make me feel really bad if someone did that to me. I make a lot of personal and mental health disclosures in my posts...

Cognitive dissonance topic

Yep, sometimes I am just beside myself. And then we have a conversation, which, to others, looks like I have split in two! We get back together when all is resolved.

Seriously, though, I think I know what you mean. A feeling of alienation. This sounds almost schizoid.

A disassociate like ketamine, salvia, or PCP? Derealization commonly comes with that package, is my understanding. My only experience has been secondhand, my son's been put under twice in emergency, and the dose for that is such that total memory loss occurs so he couldn't recall anything about it. There was just me sitting with him watching him staring out further than usual and drooling/foaming a bit.

I have been thinking about this DPD in the past day and have done some reading. This is relevant to some depersonalized sensations I had very briefly (lasting hours/days over several weeks) on two occasions after being traumatized by being targeted by sociopaths.

Subsequent to each of those two traumas, I experienced significant (permanent) changes in my cognitive function. The experiences were also very psychologically upsetting as I picked up some of the cognitive behaviors of the sociopaths as I tried to analyze them (I had to analyze them as I had to try to protect myself from them). This "infected by the sociopath's cognitive behaviors" mental distress I went through each of the two times I was traumatized, had a DPD quality as well.

For these "infection" experiences, as history_of_psychiatry indicated in an earlier post on this thread, there was a synesthetic quality to the experience. I believe that the synesthetic quality is due to the fact that I use somatic intellectual processes to build internal representations of systems in my subconscious as part of my "special interest" systemizing activity. I have posted elsewhere here that because I use somatic processes to create internal representations of my systems, my focus on my "special interests" take on a stimming quality. I.e. when I'm systemizing I have the same effect as stimming from the synesthetic analytic thought activity.

After considering the foregoing ideas, I think that perhaps because (1) I use somatic cognitive primitives to build internal representations of the systems I analyze and because (2) on the two occasions I "systemized" the cognitive behaviors of the two sociopaths that targeted me I created internal representations of their cognitive behavior models in my own mind, this process led to my subconsciously creating affectively meaningful but temporary internal representations of their sociopathic cognitive behaviors in my own mind.

The two periods of DPD-consistent episodes that I experienced, one each after my trauma with a sociopath, satisfy brain imaging study findings of a somatosensory region activation as part depersonalization episodes, consistent with my somatosensory process being the focus of psychological trauma when somatically systemizing the sociopaths' cognitive behavior.

In the second of the two brief periods of depersonalized symptoms, following the second trauma, the depersonalization was much worse than the first trauma. In the second, I had distinct experiences of a collapse of Self, and a loss of Self and rediscovering it. After I "rediscovered" my sense of Self, the brief period (a few weeks) of depersonalization experiences stopped and I have no experienced any since. I can't really comment on my "rediscovery" of Self feeling, except to say it's a long story.

I have not yet differentiated the foregoing experience from, alternatively, being a short-term, adult-onset, trauma-induced borderline personality disorder experience, during which depersonalization symptoms can arise.

Thanks for posting this thread. I think I'm close to figuring out how it is that I can get "traumatized" by being exposed to sociopaths... if you are a synesthetic somatic systemizer, don't analyze scary peoples' thought behaviors.

I have a different personality (?) ie. I behave differently depending on what name people call me by, which my psychologist told me was a result of post traumatic stress or something & that it is a common way to dissasociate.

Magliabechi, people who feel certain they don't have such a disorder, who think they know they don't have it, CAN vote for "most likely don't have it". This poll has no need to differentiate between those who tend to feel really quite certain of what they think they know, and those of us who tend to say things like "most likely". Because it's not a poll about our attitudes towards this. For purposes of the information the original poster is seeking, "I most likely don't have it" and "I'm certain I don't have it" have no meaningful difference. Yes, they are different, but that difference is not at all relevant to his question.

Furthermore, I doubt that you are correct that most people with an ASD are certain they don't have DPD. Personally, I think most haven't heard of it so can't be quite so certain.

Last edited by Mysty on 22 Dec 2008, 10:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I just read up on Wikipedia about DPD. I think I might've had it right before I had my nervous breakdown from all the stress I was dealing with in high school. It says it can be preceded by a lot of anxiety, so I'm sure that's what may have caused it if that's what it was. It could also have been a kind of shutting out the world, because I was unable to cope with it too. Like, when a kid covers their eyes and says they're invisible, so you can't see them. I thought if I stayed really quiet and caused no problems, I wouldn't be bothered cause it'd be like I didn't exsist. It's kind of difficult for me now to really get back into understand the mindset I had at that time.