My Experience With Depersonalization: How To Connect With Your Body

What is depersonalization?

Depersonalization is when you feel like you are an outsider in your body, with emotional numbness, and no full control of your body. When the symptoms of depersonalization are recurrent and cause problems in your day-to-day life it can be diagnosed as a disorder.

In this article, I would like to talk about the symptoms of depersonalization and my experience and how it has served me as a lesson to connect with my body. According to Mayo Clinic, “many people have a passing experience of depersonalization or derealization at some point.” But this is more common for people who have experienced traumatic experiences.

Depersonalization sometimes comes in hand with derealization which is the feeling of not feeling familiar with your surroundings, having a weird time perception, and feeling emotionally disconnected from those that you love. For both these feelings can last hours, days, or weeks. It is important to see a doctor when this becomes more concerning.

You can visit this link to learn more about the symptoms and when to see a doctor: https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/depersonalization-derealization-disorder/symptoms-causes/syc-20352911

TW: Mental Illness

How did it feel for me?

I had been feeling this way for about a month and a half now, sometimes it was a stronger feeling and sometimes it went away but deep down it was persistent. I actually didn’t know derealization came hand in hand with depersonalization until I was doing research for this blogpost but it resonated with me a lot.

My symptoms consisted of feeling alienated from my body as if I was visiting from a different dimension. The people close to me didn’t seem real and it felt like a simulation. The places I went to felt off and nonfamiliar even when I went to visit my childhood home.

The strongest symptom was that my memories didn’t feel mine. It felt like I wasn’t the person that was in them, even memories from a few hours ago felt distant. My therapist told me that this was depersonalization but it wasn’t until I researched it afterward that I realized how by the book my symptoms were.

These symptoms made me go through depression and sometimes even suicidal thoughts. This was because I felt like I was not here and like nothing could really affect me. I felt strong emotions but still felt alienated from them.

When I told my therapist about this she told me that major changes in my life could have triggered it and anxiety could also be a big cause of it. Even though I felt like I was going through a rough time she reassured me that there wasn’t anything essentially wrong with me.

Advice from my therapist:

She explained that these feelings of depersonalization and derealization could be because of a lack of connection of my mind with my body.

She went on to explain to me that the way I like to think my emotions instead of feeling them also encourages this separation. And asked me what was I afraid to feel that caused this disconnection. After explaining to her the recent event in my life she said that I probably wasn’t done processing grief and the feelings for those events. She gave me some exercises to feel my emotions and some advice:

-How to feel your emotions:

Sometimes we think we are feeling our emotions when we are just trying to understand them. To truly feel our emotions we have to drop into our bodies and find where do we feel them. Try to give it a shape, a color maybe even a texture. Be aware of it for some minutes then let it leave your body as your breath does. 

-Feeling Embodied:

To feel embodied you need to truly connect with your body. And not only connect with it but drop within it. This takes a lot of practice but what helps me do it is to do body scans. Body scans allow you to be fully aware of all the parts of your body and the energy within them.

This makes you feel like all of your essence is in every part of your body. This feeling of embodiment helps a lot with depersonalization as it allowed me to feel present in a body even if it didn’t feel like mine at the moment.

-Connecting to your energy:

You might think that connecting with your energy might take you out of your body but it makes you aware of the space your energy takes and all that is connected to. This leaves a feeling of expansiveness but it makes you feel real as well. Real in this world at least.

What to practice:

-Movement practices:

 Movement practices allow you to fully connect with your body fully and feel like it is yours a little bit more. Practices like yoga, martial arts, and dancing make you fully aware of your body parts and everything that is happening. To do these practices along with breathing exercises which make you connect more and look at these practices from a more spiritual perspective. 

-EFT:

The Emotional Freedom Technique allows the release of energy and emotions that are trapped in the body. As I mentioned one of the causes of depersonalization and derealization is anxiety and not wanting to feel emotions. This technique, through tapping, helps open your body to feel and release. Here is a link where you can access information about tapping.

Lauren Frontiera has introduced me to this technique which has helped me a lot this year. She is awesome, go look at her work!

-Journaling emotions:

Last but not least, I will always recommend journaling as a way of dealing with anything. This helps you think through your emotions to make you feel better but it is very important to pair it up with something that makes you feel.