Severe Autism - related derealization

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Ok, whatever it is I am suffering from seems to be something that can happen when a neurotic, emotionaly unstable, absorbant (https://en.m.wikiped...ion_(psychology)), rigid person with aspergers undergoes lots of sudden synaptic pruning within a short period if time. The symptoms this causes are EXTREMELY hard to describe. And it's very frustrating because no matter how many different combinations of words I try to type into google I can never find anything that resembles the thing that I'm trying to describe.

The main problems are that it is difficult to trust my emotional compass and hard for my brain to "ground" things. It's actually a lot more complicated than that but that's the gist if it

No matter how much sense you don't think it makes, please do try to describe your symptoms.

We'll try to "decipher" what you write.

I don't want you to get in "shut-in" mode.

I'd be interested in what you have to say.

I have a long list of esoteric symptoms I've been compiling but I can't post it because I'm a new user and it contains URLs

I am not sure what it is you are asking for here. I apologize if I go off on an unrelated path.

I do deal with bouts of derealization and depersonalization (among other things). That happens to me during times of stress... the worse the stress, the worse the symptoms. Not so fun. Also not the easiest thing in the world to describe. Sometimes it feels as though I am walking through saline solution, both in a physical and mental sense. There is an almost tunnel vision like quality where sound is concerned... it becomes fuzzy and like my ears need to pop... not literally but it's kinda the best way to explain how it feels to me. Ties like that are when I am most likey bound to end up holing up in my head and going catatonic for a bit. I don't pass out, I just check out for awhile. Other times I call it sparlky. The sparlky feel has more of a tingling sensation to it where I feel kinda electric static in both brain and body... not quite like having your feet fall asleep, but not the opposite of that either. Then there are times where it is more like I am floating a few inches back in my head and my body just does the whole life thing on automatic. I could write a damn novel here... movin' on...

I also am not so trusting of my own ability to identify, express, hell... to feel my own emotions properly. I get them mixed up at best and generally have no idea what it is I am feeling beyond a general sense of internal upset... Generally I use my heart rate to know if I am feeling something. I am much better at picking up body clues than mental ones. I go back later once I am in a better headspace and try to insert the correct emotion word based on the previous situation that made me feel whatever it was. The idea is that if I do this enough I will get better at identifying emotions. Not sure if it is working, but I do seem to be getting quicker in identification time.

If what you are looking for here is a way to pull out of what you are experiencing, for myself, stress reduction is always a huge factor in keeping myself in check. Not always the easiest thing in the world to do... especially if you can't tell there is a problem until it is already happening, or if it is a physical based thing that you cannot control.. In that case I just have to do whatever it is I need to do to decompress. Some people do physical activity such as exercise, hit a heavy bag, walk, whatever. Some people just need to chill out a bit and maybe hide under a blanket and listen to music on headphones. Some focus on breathing and slowly incorporate things like mindfulness to pull back out into the 'real world'.

I have no idea if any of that is helpful or not so much but whatever the case may be I do hope this finds you feeling better.

I think whatever I have was caused by some vitamins I took to treat my autism.

In order for me to be able to function and be productive, I NEED to have that hypersensitive intense world associated with autism back. I don't care if it makes things feel painful again, right now I am so desensitized to the thought of dying that it makes life feel meaningless. I also need to be able to have all of my plans and expectations for the future set in stone down to the most subtle details, it was alot easier to remember important things when things were that way.

But even though I so desperately need things to be rigid like that, having things so rigid can make it hard for my brain to "breathe." There is also several years worth of very important data in my brain that was never encoded correctly, and there is no "safety net" to stop my brain from deconstructing things

Also, my brain seems to think that EVERYTHING needs to be as "streamlined" as possible, but it thinks they need to be streamlined in ways that are very impractical. Alot if the things that need to be streamlined are very abstract

From the little bits you wrote, I can relate completely. It seems to be what I'm going through right now. And I understand how hard it is to put it into words, and how lonely it feels to suffer with something so hard to share and to solve.

I've been feeling so alienated and alone because NO ONE seems to understand this, and not even therapists seem to get it.

I have this urge to build a routine, rigid plans and structure for my life. I have an intense urge to do this. At the same time, part of my mind is always thinking of just how pointless everything is, life feels like a burden to be honest, being a human and doing human things feels annoying and imposed on me. Reality and life itself and the human condition and existence don't have an explanation, I was born into this world and I am supposed to do things and think things that simply "are" or "are meant to be done", without logic, explanation, meaning. It's hard when you think too much. I spend A LOT of my time asking myself the big questions and wondering about the nature of life, death, movement, energy, matter, all of that stuff, with this stupid hope that I'll eventually figure it out. My biggest dream would be having an organized frame for reality, in which everything had its concept and was explained, in which I knew the nature of everything and the relationships between things. That's why I loved school so much (the knowledge part), because learning helped me fill in some blanks, but at the end of the day, school does not answer the big questions.

So yeah, I know what I need to to do improve, I know that I need to learn social skills, build a routine, reduce stress, blablabla, but it's hard to start it since I feel so helpless and alone, and like I know so little about the reality I actually live in. It's a paradox because doing things to improve your well being will likely help you get out of the place of "darkness", but gettting the strenght and will to try to improve is extremely hard when you question why you're even alive.


What I tried to tell my therapist is that living inside of my brain is unbearable. I'm constantly trying to figure things out in my mind and it's very unsettling, it's like a ruminating obsessive infinite train of thought. Not knowing things makes me unsettled and anxious. Not figuring out. Then this loop of emotions come (shame, fear, guilt, despair, perfectionism) and throw me into a meltdown or shutdown, and it all starts again. Its like living extremely intensely, everything has to be thought out and everything is a puzzle that NEEDS to be solved...

Even as I type this it feels as if I cant even explain to you properly how it feels. I would probably spend my whole life typing it and perfecting the words and trying to convey every aspect of the message so yeah, it would be too much. Most the things I do intelectually are too much, too many things to take into account, too complex.

I'd like to vent out about the therapists I've been to and how they simply DO NOT seem to get this, this depression-derealization-neurotic-intense process... After my therapy session yesterday I thought "thats it, I'm simply neurotic...". The therapist tels me to "relax" and "calm down" and "live life in the moment" BUT ITS IMPOSSIBLE, JESUS, STOP TELLING ME TO RELAX!! ! It's so frustrating and annoying how they simply can't provide us with the answers we so desperatly want and the calm we need...

I hope you're well, you can talk to me if you need ^^

(sorry for grammar mistakes, I'm not a native speaker)

There is also the issue that some of the nuances that I dont want to lose are intertwined with highly ritualistic habits that have suddenly become impossible to be pragmatic about, which is related to abstract data that has multiversal characteristics and biases that can mess with streamlining - know that none of that makes sense but it's all I can do to describe it.

I'm sorry if none of this make sense, but everything is so personal that it's really the best I can do. This problem also causes me to have constant headaches - if anyone out there has ever had the exact same problem and was somehow able to do w g whatever it is I'm trying to do PLEASE tell me EVERYTHING

It's obvious that the part of me that made everything set in stone was damaged by the vitamins I took. I NEED that part to function, even if it made me very neurotic, arrogant, and hotheaded, everything still always worked out. If there are vitamins that can take that part away, why can't there be vitamins that can give it back? But this is about more than just restoring that part, there are a lot of much more complicated parts to whatever ' s going on too.

I often wonder about vitamins. I used to take huge megadoses but have cut down to a multivitamin and B supplement.

Are you saying that you feel "less autistic" in some ways and it's interrupting the way that other parts of your internal system works?