Normalizing Dissociation Part 3: Derealization

On Friday I went to the pharmacy to pick up some medication. It was a long wait, and I wasn’t feeling well. Around me I heard people talking, phones ringing, and the various noises of the grocery store that houses the pharmacy. The sounds seemed to come from a distance, and I felt profoundly disconnected from everyone and everything around me, as if I was an observer in a dream that wasn’t mine. It wasn’t a particularly comfortable experience but it certainly wasn’t an unusual one. I have Dissociative Identity Disorder, and I've lived with chronic, severe dissociation nearly all my life. The episode I described illustrates the combined forces of depersonalization and derealization, two forms of dissociation that often appear together. And despite the fact that I have DID and my dissociative experiences, taken as a whole, are decidedly abnormal, dissociation itself is something just about everyone experiences from time to time.

What Is Derealization?

Where depersonalization is a sense of alienation from the self, derealization is a sense of alienation from one's environment. Both are forms of dissociation, the process by which the human mind moves information, usually temporarily, out of conscious awareness. And both are - in small, infrequent doses - perfectly normal. Common descriptions of derealization include reports that:

• the immediate surroundings and/or people nearby seem strange and unreal
• everything feels like it's happening in a movie or a dream
• sounds are muffled or seem to come from far away

Like most dissociative experiences, derealization generally occurs for most people in periods of high stress, or under the influence of alcohol or drugs.

Such transient episodes of derealization are normal if they occur on rare occasions as a response to trauma or a sudden shock to our sense of self and are not associated with amnesia or flashbacks. Rather than cause distress or dysfunction in our lives, they can help us get through the worst days of our lives in one piece. - The Stranger in the Mirror, Marlene Steinberg and Maxine Schnall

For someone like me, however - someone with Dissociative Identity Disorder - derealization is a frequent interruption that lasts longer, and doesn't need to be precipitated by an inordinate amount of stress or fatigue. It just happens ... a lot.

Normalizing Derealization

Derealization is, for me, the most difficult dissociative symptom to normalize. When I talk about mild dissociative amnesia like highway hypnosis, people nod knowingly and I can see that the amnesia I live with as someone with Dissociative Identity Disorder has just become a shade more understandable to them. When I try to describe episodes of derealization, like the one at the pharmacy on Friday, I'm met with vacant looks that tell me I've either a) failed to explain it properly, or b) hit upon something that "normal" people experience, but experience only very rarely (unless they're fond of cannibis, in which case they have no difficulty understanding derealization at all).

I suspect it's a little of both.

Complete Series: Normalizing Dissociation

• Part 1: Dissociative Amnesia
• Part 2: Depersonalization
• Part 3: Derealization
• Part 4: Identity Confusion
• Part 5: Identity Alteration
• Why Normalize Dissociation?

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