Greetings, friends!
Personal depersonalization in psychology is a disorder of perception in which a person begins to perceive events happening to him as if from the outside. It seems to him that all this is not happening to him, and that he is just a spectator, observing his own life from the first person. Such a disturbance in perception does not necessarily indicate a serious mental disorder; it sometimes occurs as a reaction to severe stress or fatigue. Today we will analyze in detail what personal depersonalization is, why it occurs and what treatment methods exist.
What is depersonalization?
Depersonalization is a disorder of self-perception in which there is a loss of part of the mental properties of the individual. A person begins to perceive his own actions as someone else’s. He even feels as if he cannot influence these actions. Personality depersonalization can be a symptom of another disease or an independent disorder (F48.1 according to the ICD-10 classification).
The term "depersonalization" is of Latin origin. It is formed from the words de (absence) and persona (person). Accordingly, it can be translated as “lack of personality” or “loss of personality.”
Sometimes this condition is not associated with serious disorders, but is a temporary phenomenon caused by strong emotions. It can be triggered by severe stress or even vivid pleasant experiences during which a person simply does not believe that this is happening to him. This phenomenon is called “transient depersonalization” and usually lasts from a few seconds to a minute.
With depersonalization, a person experiences a feeling of detachment. It seems to combine two personalities, one of which performs all the actions, and the other indifferently watches the first. At the same time, his own actions seem completely alien to him. Interestingly, there is no clouding of consciousness. The “observer” maintains complete clarity of mind, soberly assesses the situation and realizes that he is in the wrong state.
Sometimes depersonalization is also accompanied by derealization - a state in which the sense of reality is lost, and the world around us is perceived as very distant or unreal. At the same time, the person no longer perceives reality very soberly, and after leaving this state, some memories may be absent or cloudy, like memories of a dream after waking up.
Symptoms of depersonalization
Personality depersonalization is usually diagnosed by symptoms such as:
- significant weakening of feelings and emotions;
- prolonged apathy;
- a person’s lack of interest in events affecting him;
- loss of specific personality traits;
- a feeling of “grayness” of the surrounding world;
- cool (neutral) attitude towards loved ones;
- deterioration of tactile sensitivity (a person feels touch weaker);
- memory impairment (vague memories of recent events).
Memory impairment is associated with derealization. For a person, what is happening seems to be something on the verge of reality, so the events are remembered as a dream. As a result, the next day he may not remember everything and is not always sure whether it actually happened. Changes in behavior are observed. In particular, he performs many actions (including even answering questions from loved ones) “automatically.”
Patients diagnosed with depersonalization report that they feel as if they simply do not exist. They observe themselves from the outside - as if they were an old acquaintance. Many people say that they don’t even recognize themselves in the mirror. They see another person there who lives nearby and does some routine actions. At the same time, their mood is absolutely neutral; they experience neither positive nor negative emotions.
With depersonalization, a person experiences a deterioration in all aspects of perception of the external world. He loses character traits, his ability to think creatively is impaired, and his memory deteriorates. Also, most patients experience a significant decrease in tactile sensitivity. Since a person does not associate his own body with himself, he practically does not feel touch.
I don’t feel like a person, I’m losing my sense of reality
Hello, dear specialists (so to speak). My name is Klim, I am 16 years old, and I came to this site in order to get answers to the questions that concern me. The fact is that recently I began to feel strange changes in my life and especially in my thinking. It was as if I had completely changed my past views and fallen into a place where I would never become a successful person. It all started in the summer of this year, when I was deprived of communication with friends for quite a long time, since everyone had moved away. My family doesn’t have such an opportunity, so I sat and rotted in the city. Relations with relatives are not exactly tense, but not warm either. Rather, they are indifferent and barely alive, because we communicate very little on topics that concern us. As a result, I began to feel a total feeling of loneliness, I developed sleep disturbances and spent about two hours a day sleeping. Apart from this, no side effects were noticed (I didn’t see hallucinations, I didn’t hear voices, etc.). But against the backdrop of all these experiences associated with loneliness, I began to gnaw at myself for the fact that on the eve of adulthood I had not learned anything, I did not feel like a full-fledged person and I did not know where to move next. I lived like an amoeba, did not sleep for days, drank a lot of coffee, walked alone, and over time began to think about suicide against the backdrop of a deep depressive state. The worst thing was that it seemed to pull me out of sleep even when I could fall asleep.
Further more. I began to experience terrible changes in my mood. I could swing from apathy, blues and depression to euphoria, positivity and overconfidence. These changes happened more and more often, very chaotically, and each time a new wave of these “switches” overtook me, I became more and more immersed in myself. There were times when I became completely normal, but this happened very rarely and served as the exception rather than the rule in my life. Then school. From the first days, I began to feel a fatal apathy towards education, did not see the point in it and, roughly speaking, gave up on it all.
My thoughts were completely immersed in some crazy ideas, conversations with myself. I often thought about completely absurd topics and tried to express myself through poetry and drawings. But this didn't help much. Soon I was overcome by the fear that I was subconsciously trying to renounce everything that surrounded me. I stopped communicating with friends (or rather, I'm trying to avoid contact with people in general). Any communication causes negative emotions and after that I may even become hysterical. Suicidal thoughts did not leave me, but this was also accompanied by other paranoid thoughts that eat me up every day. I became afraid of something I had never been afraid of. Sometimes thoughts come to me that a passerby walking behind me in a dark courtyard wants to kill me, and so on. I began to see nightmares more often in my short dreams.
But lately everything has gotten even worse, although I thought it couldn’t get any worse. I became a complete parasite, a victim of procrastination, a supporter of escapism. All I do during the day is delve into myself and my head. And over time, I began to understand that I was ceasing to feel reality. Everything became very gloomy, gray, familiar, tasteless and dull. Everything seemed to be planned, as if I had become a participant in some movie in which everyone had a script except me. It's a feeling like I'm the only one who's real in this world. I began to predict the answers of my relatives, I began to guess what would happen in the next minute.
And lately I have ceased to feel not only reality, but also myself as a person. I'm not interested in old hobbies, I stopped perceiving myself as a person. I have the feeling that someone is doing all the actions for me, because sometimes I do things that I would never do on my own. Problems with memory began (failures), aggressive behavior, bad habits appeared (he started smoking, became addicted to alcohol). The worst thing is that I am ruining my life, although I am fully confident that all the fateful actions I perform are not my doing. This especially happens when I do something bad. The brain convinces itself that I am not to blame for anything and that this is all happening to another person. This is how indifference to other people’s problems and my own experiences awoke in me.
Once an incident happened that I started dating a girl when I was in a high mood, and then, when I came home, I just cried for no reason and realized that I actually NEVER wanted this relationship. The result is depression, increased insomnia and a quick separation. And, you know, sometimes, when I manage to fall asleep, I wake up in the middle of the night and feel like a completely different person, I don’t remember basic facts from my own biography. There were also cases when relatives told me that I woke up and even spoke to them, but I myself cannot remember this.
I understand that you can blame everything on hormonal imbalance or something like that, but I can’t live like this any longer. My life is a lack of sleep, fear of the future, lack of reality and lack of self. My brain thinks too crazy. What should I do?
Types of depersonalization
In psychology, there are three types of depersonalization:
- Autopsychic.
This is a distortion of self-perception. A person does not feel his own personality, mistakes himself for another and observes himself from the outside. He also loses interest in everything that was previously important to him. Often, patients diagnosed with autopsychic depersonalization of personality say that the point of their “I” lies outside the body (for example, 10 centimeters above the head or above the shoulder). - Allopsychic.
This type of depersonalization, also called “derealization,” implies a distortion of the perception of the surrounding world. Patients do not always describe changes in perception clearly enough. Some simply say that something has changed. Others claim that the outside world has dimmed or become “blurry,” ephemeral. Sometimes patients feel as if a transparent wall has appeared between them and the world, through which they observe the events taking place. - Somatopsychic.
This is a violation of the perception of one's own body. A person simply stops feeling it or perceives his figure incorrectly. It happens that the violation is present only at the level of sensations. That is, a person looks at himself in the mirror and realizes that he is quite slim. At the same time, he feels full or unnaturally large.
Illusions of macrocosm and microcosm: experiments of physicists and neuroscientists
Microcosm and macrocosm are concepts from ancient natural philosophy, meaning small and large “cosmos”, order – man and the Universe. The concept of such a structure of the universe and man is found in many esoteric teachings, and the mythology of different nations contains the myth of the creation of the world from the body of the first man. “As above, so below” - words from the Emerald Tablet of the legendary Hermes Trismegistus.
Recent research by astrophysicists has shown that the world is not as we know it: there is something previously inaccessible to human perception, but certainly exists. These are the so-called Dark Matter and Dark Energy. These substances were discovered quite recently. They are invisible to the human eye and are not recorded by instruments, but their existence is confirmed by the presence of gravitational forces. This force maintains the integrity of the Universe, holding its elements together like glue.
How Dark Matter was discovered: until the 70s of the 20th century, there was an opinion that our Universe is expanding and will continue to expand until the so-called thermal death occurs - a state when matter is distributed evenly throughout the entire volume of the Universe, and the process of energy transfer is no longer possible . However, it gradually became known that the real mass of the Universe is much greater than the mass of its visible parts.
This was first discovered by Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky while measuring the speed of movement of one of the galaxies. He was surprised to find that this speed was much greater than it should have been, given the mass of its visible parts. This was a real revolution in physics, because it followed that either the laws of gravity are incorrect, or there is some substance that has this missing mass. It was given the code name “Dark Matter”. In addition to Dark Matter, which is supposedly ordinary matter, Dark Energy is also distinguished - this is a substance that does not obey the usual laws of physics for particles. This energy makes up most of the “content” of the Universe - about 68.3%, while Dark Matter is only 26.8%, and a very small part is made up of the atoms we are used to - 4.9%.
In 1983, neuroscientist Benjamin Libet conducted an experiment proving that human conscious choice is illusory. Sounds creepy, doesn't it? During the experiment, participants were given instructions to choose whether to move their right or left hand. At the same time, the desire to move should have arisen spontaneously. The moment of movement was monitored by sensors, and changes in brain activity (in this case, the area of the cortex responsible for movement) were monitored using electrodes. When the subject decided to make a movement with his hand, the so-called “readiness potential” appeared in the cerebral cortex. At the same time, the participants themselves were asked to record the time when they decided to move their hand.
Neurophysiologists have long known that the readiness potential appears even before the movement itself. But the next discovery surprised the experimenters. It turns out that the subjects’ subjective feeling about making a decision arose a little later than the readiness potential. It was as if the brain had made a decision on its own.
Most people think of the mind as something separate from the physical medium, but Libet's experiment, among other things, proves that thoughts and emotions are indeed generated by impulses inside the brain. And the second misconception that this study dispels is that people know everything about their brains. Alas, it seems so only as long as this complex “machine” works normally. The slightest malfunction proves how little is known about the processes actually occurring there.
Causes of depersonalization
From a psychological point of view, depersonalization is a defense mechanism that allows our psyche to cope with severe stress. If a difficult and tense situation arises, a person steps back and observes himself from the side. And this allows him to perceive shocks much calmer, since he does not fully realize that these events are happening to him.
Sometimes this mechanism fails, and then this condition becomes permanent for a person, periodically exacerbating or receding. But one-time situations are also possible. For example, if a person is shocked by a personal tragedy, he may fall into a state of depersonalization for a while. In most cases, it goes away on its own, but if post-traumatic stress disorder develops, depersonalization may remain.
Impaired self-perception can be caused by certain psycho-emotional conditions and mental disorders, such as:
- neurosis or depression;
- schizophrenia or bipolar disorder;
- schizotypal disorder;
- panic disorder.
Quite often, states of depersonalization and derealization occur during panic attacks, since it is easier for the psyche to cope with the tension that arises. For the same reason, loss of the sense of one’s own “I” occurs in neuroses.
Treatment of depersonalization
This is a very unpleasant disorder that deprives a person of many of the joys of life, so its treatment begins immediately after diagnosis. The chances of getting rid of depersonalization directly depend on how quickly you begin to fight this condition. If you start it, you will have to undergo periodic courses of treatment throughout your life, which will return the person to normal personal and social life for some time.
If depersonalization is a consequence of another mental disorder, then it is necessary to treat it. In any case, treatment is prescribed by a psychotherapist. As a rule, techniques are used to get rid of the internal conflict that provoked a violation of self-perception. Typically, the doctor chooses a combined treatment method, helping the patient get rid of tension through both exercise and medication.
Power of Habit
Our body is woven from habits, old behavioral patterns, mental attitudes - “our truth”. He is accustomed to certain brain impulses and lives with pleasure in the state to which our external reality corresponds. If we want change, we need to create a new state of being, a new norm of things and a new truth about us. This is precisely the reason why it is difficult to realize intentions with the help of practices and techniques. We did the technique for half an hour and forgot about it. The body returns to its usual state, automatisms turn on, and most of the time we broadcast our old state into space. Naturally, it reproduces the old situation. We need to break the vicious circle and accustom the body to the new norm of things, cultivate a new state of being - transfer a person from the old to the new, desired truth.
