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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.