For many in the world, depersonalization isn’t really a familiar word. Sometimes, it is used to refer to the act of removing human characteristics or individuality from someone or...
Dissociative Personal Stories
10 Simple Ways to Relieve Depersonalization
Depersonalization Disorder is a persistent feeling of being disconnected from your body and thoughts. It can feel like you’re living in a dream, or looking at yourself from outside...
Is Depersonalization Disorder a Form of Enlightenment?
In Eckhart Tolle’s book The Power of Now he describes the moment when he became “enlightened”. It happened when he was a graduate student living in a bedsit in a...
What It’s Like to Be Inpatient with Dissociative Identity Disorder: Part 2
Looking back on my/our times inpatient, I see an array of different experiences. While at first I felt locked up, caged and incapacitated, later on I felt safer and...
What It’s Like to Be Inpatient with Dissociative Identity Disorder: Part 1
I’m sitting in an ambulance. The blonde paramedic gazes at me in the blue light, asking me if it is all right that the proper lights are off. I...
Finding the Space Between Trauma and Beauty
A while back I had a consultation with life/career coach, Teresa Mossinger, in Susanville, Calif. I had seen Teresa two years earlier when I was transitioning from a full-time...
Depression and Dissociative Identity Disorder
As an educator, I’ve become more and more convinced of the huge need for better information and openness about all kinds of mental illness. So many of my students...
The Real Me
Everyone who cared had tried to help me for so long, but nothing was working. The elders of my church, although they placed no confidence in psychology, didn’t know...
My New Life
At the age of 23, I woke up one weekday morning with the feeling that something was wrong. I searched my mind. Oh, yes. I remembered. I remembered that...
Bird in the Invisible Cage
As I watched my 68-year-old father hug my 16-year-old daughter at the airport, my stomach tightened around the bag of worms, renewing that old, buried feeling. My son waited...
