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Depersonsaliation/derealisation disorder sounds complicated and scary. But it makes perfect sense once you understand how the brain reacts to threat, and how that reaction can become a habitual response to any form of stress. This article makes the complex simple.

‘I’m not seeing a doctor!’ I insisted with a look on my face that was intended to end the debate once and for all. As far as I was concerned, it was simple: I wasn’t going to the hospital, walk-in centre or GP surgery, because I couldn’t go. I couldn’t cope with going. Such was my abject terror that, unless it was a matter of life or death, I avoided all things medical. The problem? This was rapidly becoming a matter of life and death.

I had worked as a counsellor for about twelve years before I went on my first training course with Carolyn on dissociation. I had so many lightbulb moments that day, it felt like my brain was burning. But I was energised, inspired, encouraged … and also very, very sad. Sad because for over a decade I had been completely ignorant of the major reason why so many of my supposedly ‘difficult’ clients had failed to move on.

The issue of boundaries had always been a non-issue for me: I saw my clients for 50 minutes; there was no contact between sessions (no need for contact between sessions, surely?); it was a purely professional relationship. No dramas, no big deal. And then I started work with my first really traumatised client, and everything was called into question.

I used to think that one day, maybe one day (a long time in the future), I’d be ‘normal’ and then I wouldn’t have these thoughts any more. I was paralysed with the overwhelm of my self-hate. Ironically, the one thing I thought I was good at was finding fault with myself.

What if shame is nothing to be ashamed of … but instead is the hero in our story? Even as I write it, my head is twisting inside-out, upside-down to get used to the idea. But it’s something I’ve come to firmly believe is true, no matter how counter-intuitive it may feel.

For a very long time, I didn’t ‘do’ anger. In the family I grew up in, the adults were allowed to be angry with me, but as a child I wasn’t allowed to be angry with them. Nothing much changed when I myself became an adult, and mostly I just accepted it as the way it was.

When bad things happen, what do our thoughts do? Self-blame, paranoia, overwhelm, meaning-making, catastrophising? These thought patterns were my loyal companions until well into my thirties.

Real hope isn’t cheap. Real hope is born out of a bloody struggle. Hope has guts. Hope is what you’re left with when you’ve stared down the despair. So what changed? How did I get from hopelessness to hope?

Years ago, when I first started therapy, I was invited to imagine a safe place. I didn’t understand the concept at all. I didn’t have anywhere that I could summon to mind and feel positive about. Bummer.

Self-care is entirely counter-intuitive to survivors of abuse. To me as an abused child it is obvious that I am bad. I am being hurt because I am bad. And I am bad because I hurt. It’s a never-ending cycle of self-evident obviousness.

At the moment of trauma, one of the most traumatising, life-shattering parts of it is that we are entirely alone. We call out in the universe for someone to be there for us, and our call returns to us empty. We’re on our own. That's a tough gig.

I’m not comfortable with the term ‘mental illness’. I know there’s a lot of rhetoric around ‘parity of esteem’ for physical illness and mental illness, and that’s why the term has been pushed to the fore. But for me, mental illness and being traumatised are two different things.

I came to be a therapist quite late in life after a successful but ultimately unrewarding career in business. I always felt that there should be something more to life than making money, and it struck me repeatedly how mental health difficulties disrupted the lives of so many of my staff.

My therapist is retiring next year. I’ve worked with her for nearly five years and I’m not ready to finish therapy yet, so this is a difficult issue for me. I’ve realised that many other people face the same or similar situations, so I thought I’d write about how it’s impacting me and how I’m dealing with it.

I was abused by my dad, and also my grandad. And in many ways, I want to just leave it there and not say any more, because every time I say it a huge cloud of fear comes up and a voice screams in my ear that none of it really happened. It’s like, for a moment, my heart falls into my feet and I’m overcome by this terror that I really am just making it up.