Derealisation and day-to-day tasks

[ellachimera]

I am afraid to go to the store today. My family needs the food, I will probably have to go, but last time I went I felt like the whole world was strange and I somehow..wasn't real either. It was a few days after having been triggered by a discussion with my mother, who abruptly made me talk on the phone to a nun in the monastery where she had abandoned me when I was 15 for two or three months, having left me there with nothing to wear but a set of clothes made for a nun, making me too ashamed to walk back home going past my schoolmates and all. That nun said to me that my life was meaningless (I am an atheist, you see) and my fundamentalist mother continued that discourse to no end, until I decided to block her some three days later.

Problem is, right now I don't know how to get back on my feet and do simple things like going alone to buy food, I am irrationally afraid I will get back to that state of derealisation again. I mean, I go to work and back, I went with my daughter to buy clothes and everything, so I can do stuff. I only have attached somehow this fear of losing myself to going alone to that store, to buy stuff for my family.

It's dumb because being able to provide for my children and my husband is the best thing I ever did, I am so proud of it normally and feel like a super mommy doing these things. I think maybe the comments that were made by both women about how useless all this seems to them made me so furious that I temporarily almost lost touch with reality.

I look at my kids and I am happy. I think that allowing my mother in a life that my husband and I build completely without her help, actually despite her malicious involvement, was a bad decision. My life, the way it is buit, evolves around my children and husband. The fact that she made the nun talk to me about how useless it all seems to them and that she herself called my life a lie, while I watch my two children play and laugh and ask for hugs and be happy, much much happier than I ever was as a child - all of that makes me feel like I've had it. This was the last straw.

I need to go to the shop, I know I will feel like that again, like the whole world is a weird illusion and my thoughts are going everywhere, mainly off the chart. I am sick of living with all of these downwards spirals. I feel sick of having my emotions all over the place. I wish I could be better. I wish I could repattern my thoughts and behaviours to avoid hurting like this and being so useless as I am these days.

I also wish I didn't need a ~3000 words rant to say a simple thing that I probably didn't even put across right. For this, I apologize. Thanks for reading.

[Otillie]

I wish I had advice that would fix the pain, but all I can do is say, I hear you, I hurt for you, what your mother and that nun did was pointlessly cruel. I get it that you lost your hold on the earth for a moment; I would've.

I am in awe of your courage in building your life and living in it and loving your family despite the past. You are showing your family what it looks like to be a flawed and hurt but real person in the world, when you had no one to show that to you.

May it get better.

[ellachimera]

Thank you, Otilie, that is beautifully said and really appreciated.

I ended up not going, I just asked my husband to "please just let me be weak for one day" and he begrudgingly went instead. I see why he wouldn't want me to go down that path, especially since he's been pestering me to go NC on my mom for years on end, and he has low tolerance for addictive behaviour, having been the victim of a violent, alcoholic father himself as a young child.

I guess you just do what you can do and when you are ready to do it, after all, though. I promise myself I'll make it up to him. It's time to pull myself by my own laces and behave like an adult *starts playing videos on transactional analysis to learn what that actually means*.

[Otillie]

Not going sounds like totally the loving, adult thing to do. I read in a book once: "We all have limits. We just don't know where they are till we've reached them."

It sounds like you reached one, and acknowledging it and listening to it is so important.

[Not Alone]

Not going sounds like totally the loving, adult thing to do. I read in a book once: "We all have limits. We just don't know where they are till we've reached them."

It sounds like you reached one, and acknowledging it and listening to it is so important.

Sounds like you made a healthy decision.

[Three Roses]

Hi - have you read about derealization? From the glossary at https://www.outofthestorm.website/cptsd-glossary :

Derealization - This is one of a number of symptoms of CPTSD and is a form of dissociation in which a person feels as though the world around them is not real, that they are in a dreamlike state and detached from their feelings. This maladaptive strategy is used when CPTSD sufferers face overwhelming trauma they cannot escape from (as in childhood abuse).

Derealization and depersonalization, for me, are signs I'm in an emotional flashback, or EF. Pete Walker's website has good info about EFs and the steps to counter them - http://pete-walker.com/flashbackManagement.htm

[ellachimera]

Derealization and depersonalization, for me, are signs I'm in an emotional flashback, or EF. Pete Walker's website has good info about EFs and the steps to counter them - http://pete-walker.com/flashbackManagement.htm

Thanks for that, I have skimmed through the things he proposes as ways to respond to EF and I love the idea that I need to say to myself that I am an adult with allies and coping strategies rather than a helpless child, that I am experiencing a flashback and I have nothing to fear in the present.

My flashbacks usually turn out with me being defensive in a discussion, running away from it and the pain I attach to it unwillingly, because my brain sudeenlythinks I am in the same situations I was abused in. I have much work to do to recognize these states but I explained this to my husband today and he agreed this is exactly what I do and expressed his concern that , when I get in "my bubble" as he calls it, it is impossible for him to take me out of it and show me there is nothing threatening me in the present. It's much better now, I feel, than it was a few years ago, so I have hope that, if I get a bit of help regarding this, I'll do even better at recognizing triggers and bringing myself back to the present when this happens.

However, no. I don't experience derealization as flashbacks. I simply and suddeny feel like reality is not real and I am not there. It's hard to explain. My thoughts go everywhere, just like in a psychotic break, only now I am aware the thoughts I have are ridiculously irrational and wrong, so I don't dwell on them. It's like a sudden bombardment of unhealthy and weird thoughts that, associated with the feeling of ireal reality and absence of myself from it - becomes ...well, surreal. Give me something to do and I can gather myself up, even if I can't properly focus on that thing. ANy type of activity anchored in reality will make me come back, like actually doing the shopping as opposed to walking to the shop.

By the way, I went to a shop today by myself after taking a betablocant to be on the safe side and, even though I was hurting and easy to startle (I am thankful for headphones though), I made it in one mental piece. As my manager likes to say: "Result!"

[Bix]

I was going to say, headphones help me get through something that is likely to set me off for dissociation. Glad you already know about it! 

I was real interested to see you mentioned betablockers.  When I first heard of them, they sounded like a good idea to me.  Do you find they help with stopping dissociation?