Mindful Clover
May 3, 2023
Reflections on depersonalization & derealization
I’m close to finishing my graduate program in counseling. I have grown in many ways throughout this program. However, I have also suffered quite a bit, too. Burnout, that unforgiving cluster of emotional and physical side effects, hit me hard at the beginning of my second year of the program (a three year degree in total). In general I have adored my time in grad school. Yet as I conclude, I have been reflecting on the ways in which the program hurts students. This post, which focuses on depersonalization/derealization (DPDR), is part of that reflection.
Origins
Episodes of DP or DR have been a feature of my life since high school. In the middle of my teenage years I began having what I then called existential dread episodes: a feeling that is space-y and constricted and alien. In the past two years these episodes have returned with a vengeance, which often leaves me feeling as if I don’t have much control over my mental health. It’s still hard to explain what these episodes are like, but:
It’s as if the world I’m looking at has lost a familiar element, that the humans I’m looking at have lost their humanness, and that I’m observing the world while embodied in an alien creature that I don’t understand. It’s as if everything is new—and terrifying. It’s like arriving to a new place and being captured by its novelty―yet everything is terrifying because there is a complete lack of familiarity.
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Bibliotherapy was also a large part of my healing. Books like The Power of Habit and Atomic Habits became practical tools of recovery. And they worked incredibly well: I found implementable coping skills—namely exercise and meditation—that replaced many of the negative patterns which perpetuated my misery. The locus of control moved inward, and I began taking responsibility for the depression. Yet many assumptions were baked into this process of recovery, maybe necessarily so.
As my recovery progressed, the behavioristic assumption that X leads to Y curtailed and constrained my meditation practice, which was becoming increasingly Theravadin and “spiritual.” I became obsessed with meditation maps (specifically the Stages of Insight) and my place on them; I assumed that progressing through this path would be tough but that “awakening” would be the deepest sense of peace, healing, and well-being. So I pounded all “sensate” experience with the cunning of Daniel Ingram’s noting, a practice of intensity and rapidity that deconstructs everything that enters its gaze. And it indeed deconstructs. Noting resulted in a deep relief from depression and S/I that deeply healed a wound—my identification with depression—that I thought was permanent. Yet it also revealed another creepy, destabilizing space, what feels connected to DPDR. Whether this is a consequence of practice generally, of noting specifically, or of me practicing “incorrectly,” the intense depression subsided and gave rise to an unfamiliar and terrifying landscape.
Alien Gets an A+
My first meditative episode of DPDR was in a contemplative environment: a silent 7-day vipassana meditation retreat. This first experience was manageable, however, because I assumed it was simply a consequence of “meditating wrongly” or “meditating too hard.” In short, that it wasn’t something I would smack up against in daily life, especially since the depression was subsiding. Yet after participating in a group counseling program some 2 years later, I experienced another DPDR episode in an open, leaky container. But this time, it was from a professor looking to use traumatic material for class purposes.
Led by a professor with clear problems of professional competence, my disclosure was made to be a learning experience of “how to go deep” in group counseling. “Ethical” matters here, as one of the most important considerations for counselors is the ability to navigate dual relationships. A counseling classroom, no matter how practical the content, is not a therapy office. Yet it was clear that, in order to get a passing grade, students needed to “go deep” in front of their classmates; in other words, violate the boundaries of the classroom and step into therapy-land. So, in the middle of a group session facilitated by the most powerful professor in our program, my familial trauma was put on display. I allowed this person to “draw me out” in order to teach others a skill. Yet the professor’s success with drawing me out―crying in class while re-experiencing traumatic memories of physical violence―was not met with follow-up care, or post-mortem debriefing in any way. It was more: “I guess you have more therapy to do.”
After this class, after being left vulnerable and raw for a grade, after being made an example for my peers, I experienced nightmares of the original incident (warped in a fun-house mirror) for the next several months.
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Another Abduction
With this mental instability (and financial inability to get therapy) as backdrop, I used a recent winter break to prioritize contemplative practice. Despite my original retreat-induced DPDR, I had a strong expectation about practice: Meditation helped me overcome depression. It can help me overcome this, too. At this point, “practice” was conceptualized only as sitting meditation, and as a path to some ultimate, unshakable wellbeing-defined-as-okayness. Part of this was the influence of several meditation teachers I still admire, with terms like “industrial strength mindfulness” or “happiness independent of conditions” lurking in the background. The operative expectation was that an intensive period of meditation practice would “heal” me enough to jump back into my graduate program. In experience, however, this expectation simply falls apart.
First, this expectation reveals a deeply-held assumption that my spiritual practice was simply an academic-economic-materialistic endeavor, that practice was simply a “way to be okay” despite the relatively shitty, immensely stressful conditions of graduate school. And to some extent this is why I still practice sitting meditation today. The entire premise of Buddhist meditation is understanding how we are intimately complicit in our suffering and struggles. Our habits of mind, along with the causes and conditions of our environment, are always forming and falling apart in ways that cause pain, discomfort, aversion. Yet I landed (and still tend to land) way too far on the behavioristic, atomized individual side. So, practice was simply a way to be okay-enough to continue subjecting myself to intense stress for possible economic gain.
Second and related, I was subject to a system which has, over recent years, become increasingly toxic. I did not know this then, but this fact has become crystal clear: I was swimming in a culture of bullying and gaslighting, a culture which targets students. But at the time, I was assuming that my initial response to my experience in the group counseling class revealed a deep individual pathology, not something more collective about the program. I cannot emphasize this point enough. Glenn Wallis, a critical thinker of Western Buddhism, captures it perfectly when speaking about the radical, collective implications of mindfulness (my chosen sitting practice) as they impact the individual:
[P]laced in a materialist framework, mindfulness ultimately enhances awareness not merely of “subjective experience” but of “social experience”… [M]y “own” experience is but the existential vortex where the social meets me, my body, my awareness, etc. Taking this approach, how can you be sure that your anxiety wasn’t a ping of wisdom? (The truth often hurts, right? How might we view “anxiety” in light of that fact?) (Source)
Wallis was not in my intellectual life at this time, so instead I used the psycho-contemplative tools of Buddhist vipassana practice to fix myself rather than direct my practice at the messy system.1 In no way am I saying this self-directed work isn’t important, as the re-emergence of traumatic materials maybe attested to a potential need for more individual therapeutic work. Rather, my conceptual understanding of contemplative practice didn’t really extend beyond myself. I was without the necessary tools to understand how toxic environmental factors were being revealed in my personal practice. And so, in picking up the noting/labeling practice once more, I drastically increased my practice time and completed a self-directed retreat. It’s unsurprising that, without either therapeutic or contemplative guidance, I smacked into a DPDR episode that lasted months, one that I’m still working through in 2023.*
The Socratic Alien
At this vantage point, many of my behavioristic assumptions of my contemplative practice are shifting, albeit quite slowly. Given the cultural waters in which I swim, I am starting to understand how other assumptions―namely, those of the neoliberal subject (and how much of that is entrenched in academia!)―are baked into my understanding of healing and resilience, of wellbeing and spirituality. This seems like a dim edge, as it’s still unclear how I forge this into something resembling “practice.” Maybe writing this is enough. So, while I still have the prowess to manipulate my environment and behaviors to “optimize” for certain outcomes, practice feels like an entirely new ballgame, one that focuses on embodiment and socially-directed action. Sitting is still important, too. Sometimes.
There is so much more to this story, and yet it’s important for my past self that I say this: Anxiety and rage are part of the game in systems that disrespect and dehumanize individuals. Avoiding these emotions requires monasticism. But if you want to change systems to respect the integrity of the human―including your own humanity―you must find ways to navigate these worlds. Sitting is one way to bolster your resources to enter the arena, but it is far from sufficient.
So, was the DPDR that I experienced a result of “incorrect” practice? Of being enmeshed in dehumanizing systems? Of my “trauma” resurfacing in a broken container? All of the above? And with the multiple potential causes in mind, what is my response?
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And I eventually did direct my efforts at the messy system. It wasn’t a practice to begin with, but the process of advocacy―and the emotional turmoil it involves―led me toward reframing my efforts in a new, contemplative light.↩︎
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