Mindfulness and My 4D Life - Part 5 (Dealing with an episode)

What to do when I drop a connection?

An important thing I do is let folks who are close to me know when I’m having an episode. It helps me not feel like I am going through the experience alone, even if it feels like it. It also alerts them to help me out if I start really suffering through one. Even if the universe seems unreal, the loving hug and kiss from my dearest can work wonders.

I have to keep in mind that all Dissociative episodes, whether they are perception problems about me or everything else, are temporary. If I was cruising along unaware of the disconnected feeling, the moment I start having one is proof that an episode has begun; therefore it will also end.

My biggest strategy is to ride it out until the episode passes. This means I need to employ many tools in my Mindfulness toolkit:

Faith – it started, and it will stop. It will start again sometime, and it will stop in that case too. I am okay regardless.

Acceptance – yeah, it’s happening. Face forward and deal. How I’m feeling about myself or my surroundings doesn’t change their reality or mine; it merely colors my own perception of my reality. If the world doesn’t seem quite right, it’s okay. If I don’t feel quite connected to humanity at the moment, it’s okay.

Be Present – especially when the universe doesn’t feel quite real. I can re-establish my connection to the universe through focus and awareness if I patiently choose to. See, my awareness has shifted without my say so: it’s up to me to get it back. If it’s an internalized thing, then I can be an alien all I need to be, but I’m Here and Now regardless of my perception of self.

Rest – man, I can’t emphasize this enough. Whatever issue a person faces, it’s a tougher slog if they’re worn out.

Take action – one common strategy for coping is to immerse oneself with sensory input that reconnects us with the world around us.  Engage the universe perceptually through the senses. When we perceive the universe it becomes real to us. The more we perceive it, the more real it becomes. Therefore as we engage the universe with our senses mindfully, consciously, reality reasserts itself in our minds.

Engage – by staying social and involved in routine and life, the episodes are likely to pass more quickly and cause less anxiety. Let the people closest to you know you’re struggling if that would help them not feel so shut out all of a sudden or distressed as you seem to be very distracted. Sure, you might need to limit your social activity at times, but make sure you are just visiting the cave and not moving into it.

Be aware – view it realistically and gauge how “bad’ the situation really is. The earliest episodes seem horrible, because you suddenly feel like everything you believed (that is, took for granted) about the real world is turned on its ear. But if you can understand just how relative the issue actually is, you can adjust your response mindfully.

Mindfulness and My 4D Life - Part 4 (Derealization)

Derealization: De-reality check

Imagine you’re paying for your groceries, when all of a sudden you are yanked into a state of awareness that all is not what it seems. It sounds paranoid, but paranoia is more about totally believing it. With derealization, I don’t think I ever was convinced that the life I was living wasn’t real. I was, however, convinced that I had been yanked out of connection with this reality, and it was not a pleasant experience.

Probably the reason I hate déjà vu is because it is a sudden slip out of the flow of the Here and Now, shaking me momentarily out of connection with the universe. It makes sense why I struggle to discern the pattern of Past-Intrusive Sensitivity so that I can break it: I’m trying to break the sense of reliving a pattern and get back to my connection with the standard flow of time and experience. I need to break with the alternate universe so I can get back to this one.

This one is tough to grasp, because life flows around us in a way that we take for granted. Or at least life flows in a way that we do not see each drop of water in the river flowing around us. Derealization grabs us by the shirt collar and yells in our face that none of the drops of water in that river are real, or right, or whatever.

Have you ever had your ears pop because of a sudden pressure change? For a moment, the sensation is all you can think about. It totally captures your attention as your brain says, “Crud! Something just changed!” Then it goes on a little checklist of how different you now feel. How has your hearing changed for the moment? Is there pain or discomfort? Did both ears pop or just one? That sort of thing, going on under the hood, usually beyond your conscious mind.

Sudden shifts in perceptual reality are just as jarring. But as the brain tries to process just what’s different, it gets stymied by the fact that everything seems to be just the same, you sense – get an impression – that nothing is the same. Everything was real a second ago, and now nothing is real.

If a Derealization episode passes quickly, you’re left with a vague “What in the heck was that?” feeling. But if your episode seems to go on and on, it gets frustrating. Now you are not only hyper-focused on what feels or seems wrong, your poor brain is also hollering “Why hasn’t it gone away yet? How long is this going to last?”

Mindfulness and My 4D Life - Part 2 (Dissociative Disorder)

Dissociative Disorder: Sorry, your connection was lost

Here is my flawed understanding of what these Dissociative Disorders are all about for me.

My more-or-less literal translation of the 4 Ds is that my Connection has been lost along with my mind’s sense of Order, whether the lost connection is with Myself or Everything Else.

Everything you think and feel is based on associations. That’s why some folks can love things you can’t stand: they have a different association with that thing. Or why you really love someone who your parents can’t stand. These associations are developed by experiencing the universe through your senses and making connections; thoughts and emotions are connected to experiences and people.

These connections – these associations – we usually take for granted; except when someone tells us they enjoy mayonnaise in their chili or having spiders crawl on their face, and then we look at them as if they’ve lost their minds for having such warped views.

Mindfulness in particular teaches us to stop hurrying from point A to point B all the time at the expense of feeling and experiencing the Here and Now of the many steps in the journey. It teaches us that we are all connected to the people and universe around us, and that it is very grounding to get consciously in touch with that connection.

Now imagine you’re talking to your best friend, and suddenly your words sound hollow in your ears. Sounds almost seem to drop from “normal” to “flat.” Or maybe I just suddenly become hyper-aware of how uniquely different I am from this friend. It’s disorienting to suddenly be so completely robbed of your connection even as the words leave your mouth, especially when the friend just converses on, oblivious that a huge shift has occurred.

Now imagine you’re in the middle of a conversation with your boss about why his new budget initiative will bankrupt the company within the hour, and BAM! Just like that you are ripped away from the Here and Now and plunged into another universe that looks and feels and sounds and tastes and smells just like the one you’re from, but you know in your bones that it isn’t the real world.

Sights and sounds seem flat, like you’re watching a closed circuit TV transmission of your interactions with the world, real-time but not really here. Now you’re in the ultimate interactive video game, one where the main character does everything you do, but it isn’t really you: it’s the character you’re controlling in the game you’re playing.

We’re talking about a sudden dissociation, the opposite of association; a loss of connection rather than the achievement or maintaining of connection. Connection to what, you ask? Oh man. Everything.

So this is a perception issue. I’m not really being yanked into a parallel earth, although that might actually make me feel better about the episode: it would at least make sense then. This sudden event makes no sense to me from the moment it happens.

My subconscious awareness of connection to the grand world around me is suddenly shaken, and all I’m left with is an overwhelming, undeniable, conscious sensation that I’ve just lost that connection.

From there, it varies based on what suddenly doesn’t seem right anymore.

Mindfulness and My 4D Life - Part 1 (What are the 4 Ds?)

My life has a 4D quality:

Dissociative Disorder – Depersonalization and Derealization.

This is a tricky bunch, because I gather from reading about them that there are some standard definitions but a certain amount of leeway has to be granted. Not everyone has exactly the same experience or symptomology.

I understand that the DSM exists to standardize psychological symptoms into categories for ease of treatment (and probably insurance coverage. But I digress.). But often it seems to try and pigeonhole folks into vague or general categories without being able to properly account for the colors and textures that vary from one patient to the next.

So I will do my best and explain my flavor of this package disorder. When I say it’s a package, it is for me. I can’t comment on what other folks experience.

Here is the basic issue: sometimes I feel like an alien only roughly related to humanity, and other times I feel normal but I perceive the world around me as kind of unreal.

I’m not saying I’m ET, nor am I suggesting that I’m trying to escape the Matrix. Just that I have episodes where reality… well, ain’t quite real.

Most of the stress and anxiety from a dissociative episode stems from a few things: it’s jarring, it’s unpredictable, and it hijacks your conscious awareness. But most of all, for me, it’s because of my instant judgment of the episode: it’s a Bad Thing.

Anxiety ramps up when we stop seeing certain events of our lives as Things that are happening and start seeing them as Bad Things that are happening. If they make us uncomfortable, or aren’t what we want, we’re quick to slap a judgment label on them. Once we focus on how Bad these events are our Contentment Tank gets a huge leak and will run dry if we don’t get in there and do something about it.

I start making a huge deal about it in my mind using circular logic and assertions of how things ought to be.

Obsessive Self: “This shouldn’t be happening.”

Mindful Self: “But it is.”

“Yeah, but it shouldn’t be! Don’t you get it?”

“Yes, I get it. Regardless, it’s happening.”

“Yeah but it shouldn’t be! It’s really wrong!”

“It isn’t wrong, it is what it is. It is, however, hijacking your awareness.”

“I know! And that’s BAD!”

It sounds funny in writing, but trust me, that’s pretty much how the process snowballs in my mind within seconds.

Since it’s perceptions that are impacted, that’s where I concentrate my efforts to deal with depersonalization and derealization episodes.

If I had to choose, I’d rather experience derealization over depersonalization.  Going to sleep can remove you from the universe in a way, so it doesn’t matter if the world seems off at that point: you’re leaving it anyway. But if I feel off, it intrudes on my very sense of self, and I’m not comfortable or at ease anywhere doing anything.

Now this has nothing to do with brain-altering substances; I don’t drink alcohol or partake of anything more than temazepam certain nights. No, this was probably brought on by a number of issues growing up, which I won’t bore anyone with here, although I’ll bet I do before this series is over.

Suffice it to say, my sense of identity and place in the universe is a little odd at times.

I’ve often spoke of myself as an alien, as if I wasn’t human. I based that on how I perceived “normal people” behaved, and realized how WAY DIFFERENT I was. This got worse in time, simply because I found myself meeting lots of folks from many different walks of life, and I still never felt that I was quite like them. I felt like I was Different.

Eventually this was joined with a sense at times that what I was experiencing around me wasn’t quite real. I’ve read that some compare it to the sensation of watching the world around them as if it were a movie or a television program. Some describe it as a hazy, gauzy, dreamlike state. For me it was not really like that. I won’t say it was more profoundly disturbing than how other people perceive it, because everyone’s experience disturbs them. But I will say that, to me, my experience is supremely freaky.

Let’s look a little deeper, shall we?