Recovery from DPDR after many years
Hey guys! I wanted to share my experience here in hope it could help some of you. I've had DPDR for many years now from trauma and I've had all the symptoms describing this mental disorder. I did find out that it was actually caused by my eyes inability to maintain focus on both my eyes and how they worked together. I did eye exercises training this for a month at home and I am almost fully recovered. I think it's been underestimated how big of an impact your eyes actually has when it comes to these symptoms. What we perceive with our eyes and feel are actually very related to each other. The eyes switching focus created these illusions and made things LOOK like in a dream, and made things LOOK like they were further away than they really were. My eyes actually "perceived" a glass wall which made me "feel" like there was a glas wall between me and the world. But it was the eyes the entire time, which i have now fixed. I didn't feel familiar to myself and i didn't feel like people were familiar to me because my eyes couldn't sustain focus long enough for my brain to "recognize" them if you will. What i could SEE in real time did not correspond to the images/memories made up in my mind because of the visual distortions. Which made me feel like my memories weren't MINE, because they did not look the same as what I had seen. Symptoms got worse in bigger areas because it was harder to maintain focus at things far away. Was also harder in the dark and so I noticed symptoms were better on bright days.
Here's some descriptions of derealization:
Feeling that people and your surroundings are not real, like you're living in a movie or a dream.
Feeling emotionally disconnected from people you care about, as if you were separated by a glass wall.
Surroundings that appear out of their usual shape, or are blurry or colorless. Or they may seem like they only have two dimensions, so they're flat with no depth. Or you could be more aware of your surroundings, and they may appear clearer than usual.
Thoughts about time that are not real, such as recent events feeling like the distant past.
Unrealistic thoughts about distance and the size and shape of objects.
These can all be related to your vision. And these visual distortions causes a tremendous amount of anxiety and stress.
These problems with your vision can possibly be caused by the fight or flight respond and for some people this is temporary, and for some it is longer lasting. So if you have the latter you might have to train your eyes back to normal. Some of your emotions are probably related to this but there might be unrelated ones too as many people who get this also has emotional baggage in advance.
My derealization/depersonalization is gone now and with eye exercises things looks real again. Things are more vivid, the world is more detailed, it looks like 3D instead of 2D, I feel connected to the world and what I touch, things are not blurry, glass wall is gone, things are in their right shape, I can better estimate distances. I am less affected emotionally by too much visual stimuli such as when I drive or go to big crowded places. I still have anxiety sometimes but it's due to other reasons. I saw improvements the first week. Symptoms were gone after 6 weeks.