A Way to View Your Symptoms

        I can very gratefully and proudly share that my DP/DR symptoms have reduced significantly in the past ten days and more importantly the feelings of detachment that I do have fail to bother me or affect my disposition.  One of the ideas that has truly helped me move even further into being fully healed has been how I now come to view my symptoms.  First, since I began this blog I have deliberately used the term "symptoms" in an effort to further drive home the fact that what we are experiencing are merely symptoms and not some impossible to overcome illness.  I believed this to be true when I first started blogging and as I near the light at the end of the proverbial tunnel of DP/DR I hold this belief to be even more true.  Viewing DP/DR as a condition prevents us from fully healing because of the fact that recovering cannot be viewed as an all or nothing sort of solution.  This is mostly due to the fact that you cannot look at someone and tell that they have DP/DR.  Even my partner, with whom I have been fully transparent about my symptoms, has no idea as to when my symptoms are disabling or not present.  DP/DR in my opinion is not a condition, but rather the combination of physical symptoms that result in thought patterns that harm our well being.  So while we can treat the DP/DR, it is equally important to treat how we feel about it.  I think that it is also important to view DP/DR as symptoms because I think we should separate DP/DR from the person that we are.  I like this way of thinking about DP/DR because it allows us to see the feelings and thoughts as maladaptive responses to the symptoms rather than something to overcome.  This thought process gives us quite a bit of power over our symptoms in that it enables us to take full responsibility for our recovery.  DP/DR is not terminal cancer or even a degenerative mental disorder.  It is solvable, treatable, and something that can exist in all of our rearview mirrors if we put in the work.
        While everyone experiences DP/DR in a different way, I think that people may be able to relate to a character flaw of mine that inhibited my full recovery.  For much of this experience I operated under the belief that somehow my symptoms were different or something that could not be cured or solved.  I thought that somehow I was different from the rest of humanity and that this experience was beyond even my own capacity for thought.  But that is where the problem resided.  Due to the fact that I saw my symptoms as something that was above or different from what others experience I couldn't work on the destructive thought patterns.  Even people with symptoms or experiences similar to mine were in my mind going through something different.  And by looking at my experience this way, I inhibited my ability to recover.  It shifted the responsibility of my recovery from me to the universe, or perhaps even more telling it made me feel that I would never feel better.  But if you are able to read this blog, or if you are able to research your symptoms, or if you're able to go through life pretty much the same as you always have than in all likelihood you are not "going crazy," whatever that even means.  So I think that we can look at our symptoms in one of two ways: everything is completely different and the world is just a figment of my imagination, or I am connected to everything but my thinking has just gone awry.  Let me be clear and say that I am not negating the physical symptoms and the pain we experience because it is true and it is real.  However, I do think we posses much more power than we even think or realize.  As much as the physical symptoms feel uncomfortable, there are many aspects of the experience we can control.  This is due to the fact that DP/DR is a set of symptoms and not a condition.  No matter how detached we feel, we are still a byproduct of the thoughts we have had, we continue to have, and we will have.