Mindfulness and My 4D Life - Part 6 (Gauging an episode)

How to gauge the phenomenon

I am overcoming this stuff gradually.

First, it helped that I got properly diagnosed. My psychologist listened to me explain the symptoms (not as symptoms, but as just a stream of feelings and thoughts about them), then began to rule things out. My family has a notable incidence of schizophrenia and dementia, so let’s just say that anytime I started feeling the connection slip I was 100 times worse off because I feared I was on a one-way trip down a long and unhappy slope.

Second, I am a Virgo. That means I need to understand the crap out of things. So I spent awhile researching these issues. Of course, since the primary issue I was fighting was anxiety-induced depression, these little disorders got put on the backburner for awhile. Not to mention that I had trouble keeping the differences between all the Ds straight for a long time.

Third, I am becoming more and more Mindful. That’s been such a blessing, but I will not proclaim it as a perfect path for everyone. All people have their own path to walk, and when problems arise they need to find the solutions for them. Mine may not work for you, and that’s cool. Try things, get help if you actually could use it, and I wish you peace.

As I’ve been more aware and informed, I’ve realized that I hardly notice the episodes anymore. I am aware they happen, but without the cascading distress they aren’t the paralyzing, maddening events they used to be.

Sometimes my music just doesn’t sound right (yes, my headphones are on correctly – I checked!), so I stop listening to music for a little while. Maybe I have trouble focusing on reading because I am suddenly aware that they are merely patterns of black ink on white paper instead of words with meaning. That’s cool; I’ll go play a video game.

And sometimes I get overwhelmed by sadness at being the last of my alien kind on this God-forsaken ball of rock. Then I text my beloved and let her know I’m feeling totally disconnected from the world (in this case, that means the universe of humanity) and am significantly bumming, at which point she texts back a kiss or a hug or an I Love You, and soon it matters less. No matter how disconnected I feel from my fellow humans, I know they are ready to help me remember: we’re still united.

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?”