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My next realization following my writing of my previous post (+INFANT ABUSE AND NEGLECT: THE PERVASIVE IMPACT OF ‘WHAT IS MISSING’) has to do with a major set of manifestations of the physiological reality I live with in my body.  Related to ‘dissociation’ is the frequent (and to me common) related experiences of feeling ‘depersonalized’ and ‘dereal (derealization)’.

I am suffering today from strong senses related to both of these states.  Nothing from this past week feels ‘real’ to me, and I feel the ‘depersonalization’ related to my own self AND to the other people I just spent the past week with.  This seems like a pervasive sense that I am not ‘real’, that my experiences of the past week were not (are not) ‘real’, and that the people were not ‘real’, either.  I HATE this feeling!

My ‘realization’ is that perhaps I just clearly learned that when I have this sense in part it is an exactly very real (true) reaction to having spent time with people who are perhaps not ‘real’ to their own self or to others, either!  If, as I strongly suspect many, many people suffer from degrees of the same emotional-social early right brain formation attachment-related difficulties that I do, it would make sense then that I can learn to understand that it is often very true that these senses of depersonalization and derealization exist OUTSIDE of myself within other people and thus my own sense of what is real and of who/what a person actually is can often be impacted by this fact.

If a human being’s true state is meant to be one of healthy well-being, and if degrees of early abuse, trauma and deprivation diminish this true state, then those of us who are extremely sensitive beings WILL NOTICE when another person has ALSO been trauma-changed during their earliest developmental stages.

Can I now begin to pay closer attention to how I feel when the depersonalization-derealization senses ‘come over’ me?  Can I begin to separate (as per become more clear about ‘boundaries’) about where these senses are actually originating when I experience them?  Is there anything I can do for myself that will help me keep ‘their stuff’ from affecting how I feel?

Is there a great risk that survivors of harmful early developmental trauma naturally respond to one another within these ‘dereal’ and ‘depersonalized’ places because they happened to be our first and therefore primary and ‘natural’ states (built into our body-brain)?

How much of the smothered feeling I feel today of being overwhelmed by ‘derealization’ and ‘depersonalization’ actually — and very really — existed within the patterns present in the OTHER people I just spent my week with?

How exactly DOES it feel to me as a ‘dissociational’ person when I am around and interacting with other people who are this same way — and don’t even have a clue about their condition?  Well, if there was ever a day for me to work on my clarity about this topic, today certainly is a prime one!

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