Extensive List of DPDR Symptoms

Depersonalization-derealization can cause significant changes to your everyday life. These are some of the most common symptoms, but not an exhaustive list.

If you think you might be experiencing DPDR, take the symptoms quiz here.

Emotions:

• Apathy: Lack of interest in your life, causing you to feel like you don’t care about

  • Your future (e.g., budgeting, getting promoted, getting a new job, starting a family)

  • Relationships (e.g., making new friends or forming new romantic relationships)

  • Personal growth (e.g., learning, exercising, eating well)

  • Hobbies or things that used to bring you joy

  • Competition (e.g., sports, doing well on tests)

• Loss of Emotion: Inability to produce emotions associated with people / things that used to promote an emotional response

  • Loss of love toward family (e.g., significant others, children, pets). You might feel like you logically know that you love them, but don’t feel emotions associated with love

  • Inability to feel positive emotions from things that used to bring you joy (e.g., music, tv shows, movies, being with friends, practicing a hobby)

  • Lack of fear from things that used to make you scared (e.g., horror movies, heights, certain situations)

• Low Libido: Intercourse is often still an enjoyable act, but lacks the anticipation or emotion it used to have and is desired less frequently

• Mirror Neurons: Emotional inability to

  • Read other peoples emotions

  • Empathize with other people

  • Understand how your actions will impact other people

Executive Functioning:

• Amnesia: Forget small or significant events that could be benign or difficult (e.g., traumatic)

  • Walk into a room and forget why you’re there

  • Do something (e.g., buy items online, drive somewhere) and forget that you did it

  • Forget simple facts (e.g., date of birth, name)

  • Can’t access memories (e.g., childhood, positive, negative)

  • Disconnection from your life pre-dissociation

• Blank Mind: Spending long periods of time not thinking about anything

• Brain Fog: Confusion, forgetfulness and a lack of focus / mental clarity

  • Limited vocabulary and difficulty articulating thoughts

  • Abstract reasoning and problem solving (e.g., breaking a problem into smaller components) are difficult

  • Concentration issues

  • Struggle with elementary concepts (e.g., alphabet, sentence structure)

  • Things that used to feel easy (e.g., hobbies) now feel very difficult

  • Difficulty extrapolating to the future or considering the consequences of certain actions

  • Struggle with approaching and making large decisions

  • Difficulty processing and understanding what people are saying

  • Feeling like you don’t have intuition or a gut feeling anymore

• Lack of Internal Monologue: Losing your internal monologue (i.e., your stream of consciousness)

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Self Perception:

• Body: Your relationship with your body has changed, making you feel as though

  • There is a pane of glass or space between you and your body

  • You can’t recognize yourself in the mirror

  • You’re viewing your body in the third person

  • It’s strange being in your own body

  • Your body and mind are functioning reactively and you’re not controlling them

  • You’re trapped in your mind

• Place in the world: Your perceived place in the world has changed

  • Feel like you’re a character in a movie or simulation that is following a script or being controlled

  • Feel like you exist in the world, but are not a part of it

  • Feel like you’re the same age as when you started dissociating

• Ego Death: Feel as though you no longer have an ego or sense of self

Thoughts:

• Agoraphobia: Fear of places or situations that could cause helplessness or embarrassment - usually develops after a panic attack. This can lead to avoiding otherwise safe environments for fear of

  • Spaces that could lead to embarrassment

  • Triggers that could bring up past trauma

  • Situations that could worsen dissociative symptoms

• Dreaming: Altered dreams during sleep or the daytime

  • Strange dreams about childhood

  • Constant daydreams or recollection of past memories or dreams

  • Regular deja vu

  • Lack of dreams

• Self Deprecation: Thoughts regularly revolve around your personal shortcomings

  • Thinking about what you used to be able to do (e.g., large vocabulary, sociability)

  • Being overly critical about interactions with other people (e.g., I wasn’t able to be myself)

  • Lack of confidence in everything that you do and create

• Interests: Different / new interests

  • Becoming more interested in things that are logic based instead of emotional (because of a decreased emotional capacity)

• Rumination: Repetitive negative thoughts about your current struggles

  • Fear of dissociation getting worse or losing your consciousness

  • Worried that you will become permanently changed and/or never heal from dissociation

  • Being convinced that your dissociation is actually a physical (e.g., brain tumor, early onset dementia, Alzheimer’s, Lyme disease) or mental health condition (e.g., schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder, going insane) that it likely isn’t

  • Need to constantly research the condition and your symptoms

  • Feeling like the world lacks depth or meaning

  • Feeling like the world is very large or very small

  • Concern that someone you’re talking to does not understand you / feeling like you’re not making sense

  • Don’t trust what is coming out of your mouth

• Time Perception: Your concept of time is altered

  • Time feels like it is moving faster or slower than it really is

  • The world feels like it is moving faster than you are

  • Lose track of time and can’t remember what you were doing while it passed

• Existential TRIGGER WARNING: Increased frequency of thoughts focusing on the nature of reality

  • World (e.g., questioning whether the world is real, thinking the world feels much smaller or larger than it is)

  • Other people (e.g., thinking everyone is a robot and following a script)

  • Solipsism: only sure that your own mind exists

  • Yourself (e.g., not feeling like you’re real)

  • Auditory or visual hallucinations: feel like you’re hearing or seeing things that are not actually there

• Intrusive Thoughts TRIGGER WARNING: Aggressive or sexual thoughts that are unwanted and seem to come out of nowhere

  • Self sabotaging (e.g., what if I were to turn the steering wheel hard right and force my car off the road)

  • Reducing people to sexual anatomical components

  • Suicidal thoughts

  • Being at peace with death, but not contemplating suicide

  • Extreme fear of death or situations that could cause death (e.g., newfound fear of heights)

Physical:

• Anxiety: Experiencing intense stress and concern from the smallest (or no) triggers

  • Panic attacks from seemingly nowhere

• Body:

  • Pressure in your head / sinuses

  • Head is filled with cotton or empty space

  • Alice in Wonderland Syndrome: body parts feel bigger or smaller than they actually are

  • General nausea

  • Body or limbs feel heavy

  • General dizziness

  • Back pain

  • Full body weakness

  • Burning down the neck

  • Gastro-Intestinal issues

  • Facial expressions don’t feel natural

  • Eyes are tense

  • Tingling feeling in the back of the head and spine

  • Sensitivity to brightness

  • Limbs are distorted or shrunken

  • Tingling in fingers or toes

  • Poor balance

  • Tinnitus: ringing in your ears

• Disconnection from Senses: Can no longer feel senses (e.g., taste, touch, smell, see, hear) as intensely

• Fatigue: Some people feel the need to take a nap after particularly intense dissociative episodes

• Inability to express emotions: Can’t express emotions physically

  • Can’t cry or when crying can’t feel the emotions associated with sadness

  • Can’t laugh or feel emotions associated with something being funny

• Increased sensitivity to substances: Substances (e.g., caffeine, nicotine, supplements) affect you much more than pre-dissociation

• Lack of bodily signals: Can’t feel signals from the body that something is needed, meaning you don’t feel

  • Hunger

  • Pain

  • Exhaustion

  • Soreness

  • Headaches

• Sleep: Sleep too little or too much

• Vision: Your eyesight feels different

  • Visual snow - dots (similar to floaters) overlayed on your field of vision

  • Habit of staring into space for long periods of time

  • Seeing the world through a pane of glass or a veil

  • Objects look larger or smaller than they actually are

  • Objects appear very blurry or very clear

  • Everything looks flat or 2D

  • Tunnel vision: Focus on one thing in your field of view and everything else becomes blurry

If these symptoms resonate and you think you might be experiencing depersonalization-derealization, take the symptoms quiz here.