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For the past few months, I've been complaining to my therapist that I feel like I'm not really present.  I'd heard of "depersonalization" and "derealization," but it was today that "derealization" started to make sense to me.

I've been noticing that I feel like I'm not really there, like I'm in a "life" simulator (by analogy with flight simulator), and one that isn't all that good.  I can sort of see where I am and steer myself through life, but it feels like I've just got this screen, like a computer monitor, to see what's going on outside, and some controls that don't have the greatest feedback to affect things.  I keep thinking of an experience I had a long time ago: there was this arcade-game like driving simulator, which had a booth like a photo booth, a steering wheel, and maybe an accelerator and brake pedal, and this small screen, maybe 12 x 24 inches.   I put my coins in, but what showed on the screen was so indistinct, I couldn't tell where I was in the simulation nor see how what I did with the steering wheel had any effect.  I'm pretty sure that at some point I wrecked the virtual car, but I couldn't really tell because I couldn't tell much of anything.  That's what it feels like sometimes, and it's a bit scary -- part of me worries that I'll wander in front of a truck because I can't really tell where I am, even though it's never happened (protected by my hypervigilance.)

This sounds an awful lot like the description of "derealization" in Wikipedia.

I wondered why I'm not conscious of this more often, but I think it's because most of my life is spent inside my own head -- like maybe I'm always in the simulator, but usually not paying attention to the screen because I'm busy thinking of something else (or obsessed with something else?)  Most of my work before retirement was software development, so at work I spent most of my time with my mind in the software, and only barely aware of the physical world or even my body.  So being in the state was normal and functional.  I kind of feel like I don't have any idea what it's like to be really "present."  (I tried yoga for a while, but whenever I'd start to feel rather than focusing on what I had to do, I would feel these intense bursts of anger which would destroy any sense of being in my body.)

And when I start thinking about this, I start getting this feeling that I must be really screwed up, like being screwed up and broken is who I am.  And that turns into despair (despair -- another life-long "friend.")

One of my gripes with my family-of-origin is that being with them is like being with a bunch of animatronic robots, which I assume is because of how our growing up was, but I  think maybe I got turned into a robot, too.

[I'm not sure whether this goes in this section (as a kind of dissociation) or in the Affect Regulation section, since it's kind of like depersonalization.]

I've noticed recently that I seem to be able to tell about my traumatic experiences, and I think I know most of them, at least in outline.  But there's no feeling attached to them.  It's as if I'm talking about what happened to someone else.  It's not a freeze reaction, because I can get angry about what they did to me, but it's the sort of anger I feel when I read about someone else being abused.  I can even remember that back during my worst years,, I was overwhelmed with dread, etc., but I can't feel it now.  It's like I split myself into two people: the abused, miserable child, which is still sealed up in the crypt inside me, and the rational adult who can talk and relate to the outside world.  But the child feels like she's someone else, not me.  I remember that at the time, whenever I wasn't being forced to deal with the outside world, I would put my mind somewhere far, far away, either by reading books (I regularly got in trouble for reading in class) or by daydreaming about something that had nothing to do with me (or at least the me in the world I was physically in.)  Like what it's like to be an ant or a bee.

One time rather recently, my therapist tried to do some EMDR with me and asked me to try to remember back to those "* years" and try to remember what it felt like.   At first, I felt sort of like I was suffocating, like being in a chamber where the air was getting unbearably hot.  And then my conscious mind simply disappeared.  I was talking, but couldn't remember what I was saying.  I'd get to the end of a sentence and not know how it started.  When I remember the experience, I was aware of my surroundings and even responding to the therapist, but at the time, I wasn't consciously aware of much of anything.  When I came out of it, the memory was pretty dreadful, but at the time, I wasn't capable of feeling much of anything.  My therapist's conclusion was that the experience was still too painful to bear and my mind was kind of tripping its circuit breakers.

Lately, since I've retired, it feels like my subconscious is very busy doing -- something.  I feel the "power drain" all the time.  But I also notice that I feel this need to  keep my conscious mind busy with more or less mindless stuff, and I have the impression that my mind is trying very hard not to see/hear something.  It's kind of sticking its fingers in its ears and saying "LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU!!"  And I sometimes imagine that maybe my subconscious is deliberately obscuring stuff from my conscious mind.  Like it's saying to my conscious mind, "just run along and play, dear, and don't worry your pretty little head," so my conscious mind will stay out of its hair while it's dealing with hard stuff I'm better off not knowing about.

I also suspect that there's nothing for me to do about it but just keep plodding along, one foot in front of the other -- like I've done for most of my life.  And hope that I'm somehow getting somewhere better and more whole than now.

My FOO consists of me, one sister, and three brothers (my parents are dead.)   One of the brothers used to terrorize me when I was growing up -- telling me what to do and threatening to "murder" me if I didn't do what he said.   It was no secret -- my parents knew about it, but they said I should just hit him back.  Looking back on it, the main thing for him seemed to be being able to control me.  As long as I did what he said, he could sometimes be kind of nice to me.

Anyway, that stopped after he went away to college, and as the years went by, I thought he'd gotten past that.

However, when I would talk about things with him, it would sometimes turn weird.  Basically, when I would state something, he would come up with all sorts of reasons why I was looking at it wrong.  This was especially weird when it was something I  knew about intimately and he knew nothing about, like when I was talking about the problems I was having with my wife which were leading me file for divorce, and he kept saying stuff like, maybe she's doing this because you're  [something.]  But in the context of the weirdness of my FOO (there's a reason I have C-PTSD), it didn't seem all that unusual.

More recently, he started sending me and my kids books; some were okay, just not stuff I found interesting, but some of them were books representing the "conservative" point of view.  By this time, I think everyone in my FOO knows that I lean what is called "progressive," so it came across as trying to convert me.   I mostly ignored them and simply got rid of them.

However, in the run up to the recent USA presidential election, I posted to the family E-mail mailing list my fears about the election.  I am trans, and I was explaining that I felt unsafe, like I was "in the crosshairs", due to the blatant transphobia and homophobia of the administration and most of the Republican party, and was seriously considering moving out of the USA if they stayed in office.  I specifically mentioned fearing the (now ex) vice president Pence, because I believe he  wants to eliminate us, because when  he was governor, he spearheaded a number of laws making life difficult for LGBT people.

This brother's response was to send me a book by one of Pence's children about the "wisdom" of Michael Pence.  You don't have to agree with my political views, but I think I was pretty clear as to how I felt about him.   When I contacted him to ask what he thought he was doing, since sending that book seemed at best pretty hostile, he insisted that I must be mistaken about Pence, since he'd heard one speech by Pence and he didn't hear anything transphobic or homophobic in it.  He also talked about how my fear that Trump might try to overturn the election was simply a case of Google leading me to misleading sources such as "Democrat extremists."  Basically, I was looking at everything wrong.

This sort of trying to make me distrust my own judgement was so familiar from my childhood: basically, anytime I thought something different from what my parents thought, they would try to convince me that I didn't know anything and I should just listen to my betters, and I would get no peace until I at least seemed to agree with them.  So this was kind of triggering.  It didn't actually make me doubt my own judgement, since over the years since I left my FOO I have learned that my judgement is actually pretty good, and better than my family's, but it brought up the impotent rage I felt throughout my childhood, when I would be judged wanting by my parents and other adults in my life and expected to agree with them.

This experience made me adjust my reading of him: I now think that he has never stopped trying to dominate me, but he can't threaten me, and I don't see or talk to him more than once a year, if that often, so he has to do it in subtle ways.   And over the years, I've tried to create a real relationship with various members of my FOO, but have never managed more than superficial conversation.  It alway feels like talking to some on-line AI bot.

In the week or so after I got his E-mail, I was very, very upset and went back and forth over what I wanted to do.  Part of me wanted to tell him in detail why he was full of it, but I realized it would do no good, he'd just come up with new "arguments" as to why I was wrong.  I kind of want to go NC, but we have so little contact as it is, I'm not sure it would be a change.  In the past, I'd see him every few years when I'd drive down to the town I grew up in to visit with some of my siblings, but I'd already decided I didn't want to do that any more because the visits were so empty.  They were kind of like trying to visit with a YouTube video.

I'd also see him at our family reunion, which has been happening every few years, and being there for a week with him there would be difficult.  But then I asked: what do I get out of those reunions?    All they do is sit around and talk about superficial things, on the level of cocktail party chit-chat.  One year, my ex came down for a few days, and despite how difficult my ex can be, it was such a relief to talk with someone who is more than a cardboard cut-out.  My nieces and cousins are a lot better, but they don't attend any more (they've got lives of their own.)  So I think I won't go any more and I'll try to find other ways to keep up with the people I can relate to.

It feels like I'm giving up on my whole FOO.  But maybe it's that I'm giving up the fantasy (or trying to) that there's something I can do, some magic words or spell-casting or something, that will give me a Real Family, one that I can have real connections with.  A "home" --- you know, "home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in."  People who you can rely on.  But my parents weren't people any of us could rely on, so how would any of us know how to be relied upon?   It just makes me feel really, really alone in the world.

But maybe I'll feel better after a while.  When my parents died, I realized I felt relief, rather than grief, because I no longer had to wonder if there was something I could do to turn them into Real Parents.

One of the symptoms I see mentioned in the lists of symptoms of C-PTSD is "Loss of systems of meanings,"  but I don't see a separate sub-forum for that, which is why I'm posting this here.  One of the symptom lists says

Systems of meaning refer to your religion or beliefs about the world. For example, you might lose faith in some long-held beliefs you had or develop a strong sense of despair or hopelessness about the world.

I've lived with a sense of despair most of the time my whole life.  I tend to be convinced in my heart of hearts that the worst possible outcomes will come to pass.

I don't hope.   I just keep putting one foot in front of the other, mostly because I don't know how to stop.  It's what keeps me going a lot of the time -- when it's something I need to do, it's good, but when it's something I really should abandon, it's a problem.   The rational part of me can plan for the future, but the emotional part -- my soul -- does its best to not even think of the future.  Until it actually happens, I assume nothing will ever change for the better.  And even when something does change for the better, I withhold my joy, anticipating that if I allow myself to believe in it and rely on it, it will all be taken away.

These past few years (the "Age of Trump") a lot of the spaces I spend time in go on a lot about how we all need hope, as if you'd dry up and blow away if you didn't have it, and it reinforces my sense that I'm some kind of extra-terrestrial alien.  I feel like the skunk at the garden party when I say how I see it: that you can get by without hope.  What I feel but don't say: hope is dangerous, if you commit to hope, then it can kill you when it gets dashed, as it inevitably will.

The past four years I have lived in dread because I am trans, a member of a group that the people running the US government have explicitly targetted, and I kept expecting that at some point I would need to flee the country (USA).  When people would tell me it won't ever get that far, I would feel like they are deluded or are deliberately lulling me into a false complacency, so that when the blow comes, I won't be prepared.  The past few months, and especially the past few days, have sent my anxiety through the roof, since it looked like the first of many attempts to overthrow by force the system of laws which are the only protection I have.

I've been noticing a lot of times when I feel like a part of my "self" just goes to sleep for some period of time, which I mostly notice later, when I realize I've spent an evening or a day utterly out of touch with whatever I was supposed to be doing or had intended to do.  It's not like I can't remember that time, but it's like I was drugged or something suppressed who I am and was just running on automatic pilot, following my impulses.  For instance, reading, usually mindless stuff, books I've reread so often I can practically recite them from memory.  Sometimes I'm not aware of it until it's over, but more often it feels like a compulsion to not think about anything and to immerse myself in whatever it is I'm distracting myself with.

I've also noticed myself getting distracted while driving.  I find myself looking at something other than the road and the traffic while at the same time realizing at some level that I'm not paying attention to the road and that that is dangerous, but it takes a real effort of will to pull myself back, and a few minutes or a few seconds later, I'm back to staring at, say, a tree or the sign on a building.

I think it's always been an issue with me, but back when I was working, the fear that I wouldn't get my work done and would get in trouble (fired, yelled at by my boss, etc.) would yank me back onto task.  However, I retired a few months ago and there's so much less that I have to do that nothing terrible happens if I'm out of it for a whole day or so.  It's like some unconscious self in me wants me to stay spaced out as much as possible.

I remember this happened a lot when I was a kid.  Basically, any time I didn't have to be aware of what was going on, my mind was off somewhere where I wasn't conscious of even existing.  They called it "daydreaming," and it was usually some fantasy about insects or trains or something.  I now think it was a way of escaping from the hellish reality in which I was always in trouble and could never seem to be this utterly different person that everyone around me told me I had to be, and where I had no control over my life.  And where I didn't feel safe.  Van der Kolk mentions something about how trauma patients who never had anyone they felt safe with growing up have a particularly hard time recovering, and I definitely did not have anyone I felt safe with.  I only felt safe when I was alone and could hope I'd be left alone.

(That was my greatest wish until I was like 16 or so -- to be just left alone.   I even deliberately gave wrong answers on one of those standardized tests in the hope that they would stop calling me "so smart" and insisting that I could do better if I would only just try.  Even today, being called "smart" is kind of triggering for me.)

I also have these episodes when it's like a wave flows over my mind, taking with it all awareness of what I was doing or saying.  It's particularly distressing when it happens in the middle of a sentence, or when I'm playing the piano (and have to figure out where I am on the page of the music and even where my hands are on the keyboard.)

Sometimes I wonder if this is some sort of partial DID, like there are alters which kind of take over my executive functioning (or disable it) and lead me to do stuff I would never do.  But I don't have spans of time which I can't account for.  And it doesn't feel like whatever it is is a full-blown personality.

Lately I've been kind of worried that, with all this dissociation and increasing inability to actually make plans and carry them out, my personality is falling apart.  Or, worse, that some other part of my mind is going to take over and erase my current personality, so that it will be as if it had never existed.

And then I sometimes wonder if I have some progressive neurological deterioration -- I'm getting clumsier and stumbling and dropping stuff even more than before.  I have one friend who says he can't bike because he has no balance due to Parkinson's disease  (I notice my balance is gone, too), and another who got brain cancer last spring (she had a tumor which was removed in an emergency surgery -- just as COVID-19 was overwhelming the health care system), and I think that's what has me thinking of neurological disorders.

** TW ** Mention of suicidal ideation. **

I've been having episodes that I've been calling "Emotional Flashbacks," but they don't seem much like what the threads on "what do youre EFs feel like?" thread.  Would these be called EFs, or something else?

Right now, I have two kinds:

* I suddenly feel like I'm in a lot of pain, but not localized, and it's not like a physical pain.  Sometimes I think, I wish someone would kill me so I wouldn't have to feel this.  I'd cry if I could.
* I don't feel anything emotionally, but I find myself clenching my fists or wringing my hands and my face and shoulders and neck tense up as if I were in a lot of pain or something, but I don't feel any pain.  I keep thinking I should be able to relax, but somehow I just don't.  Eventually, slowly, I relax.

These episodes last typically a few minutes, not for hours or days like some report.  I generally can't point to a trigger, though occasionally  just before one starts, I remember that I was thinking of something I had done "wrong", or at least something that could have been considered "wrong" when I was growing up, and starting to feel like I was just the most awful, horrible entity in the universe.

Up until a number of years ago, before my transition (I'm a trans woman), the episodes consisted of feeling like I was awful, etc., and wishing I could kill myself.  To the extent I can remember, they started in childhood.  (Back when i was a child, I really did want to kill myself, but the idea of dying scared me too much for me to actually do it.  Now they're just intrusive thoughts.)