summary:: An intimate look into my experiences with DP/DR, meditation, and burnout.

Reflections on DP/DR

Preface

This is a text I wrote last year as I was rounding the corner to finishing my graduate program in counseling. I've been inspired to revisit this scene from encountering, deep in the blog-o-sphere, an intelligent post on the limits of meditation and mindfulness to directly confront DP/DR. What's more interesting, though, is that he attempts to locate the "core phenomenology" of these experiences, and to consequently engineer an approach to address these episodes using that understanding. As someone interested in the limits and potentials of meditative practices with clients (emphasize limits) and myself (emphasize potentials), these interdisciplinary (cognitive, phenomenological, psychological, therapeutic, spiritual) inquiries are essential, given they are critical and cautious enough when broached with clients.

Another reason for revisiting this episode is that I'm utilizing an expressive journaling practice from James Pennebaker. I stumbled upon this approach during a long cardio session, flipping through podcasts. Essentially, you are asked to write about the most stressful experience of your life, either on 4 consecutive days, or four consecutive weeks. Additionally, you are asked to continuously write, not stopping to edit or correct spelling. An assumption is that the event still holds some emotional power in your life. Seeing as how I've thoroughly processed my hospitalization from 2016, I decided that this meditative-induced rift should be the candidate.

Finally: I think posts like this reveal an assumption about my clinical practice, one that is somewhat acknowledged but not explicitly addressed in our profession: The clinician's suffering, recovery, healing, and growth are the scaffolds for how we extend our abilities to our clients. This isn't always necessarily the case, and surely doesn't imply that you need to suffer from the client's specific ailment in order to effectively treat it. Rather, there are these meta-themes that apply across situations and problems and "disorders," such as ambiguity tolerance, which require a clinician's experiential understanding. This could be another post, but suffice it to say that I see my own experiences in growing through this DP/DR episode as an opportunity to grow my clinical skills.

Encountering 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 (which is three years 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.

The first abduction

I have a history of severe depression and S/I. It was a feature of my life from adolescence to young adulthood. Often, the worst episodes would feature DP/DR, though I didn't recognize it as such at the time. However, it was only in my 20s—after a hospitalization for S/I—that I began to take words like "recovery" and "healing" and "wellbeing" seriously. With the help of therapists, medication, exercise, and meditation, I began getting better. I became quite behavioristic in tackling my mental health and wellness. There was a formula for positive change, and it was:

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—especially 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, that would later become limitations.

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 healed a wound—my unknowing (unconscious?) identification with depression—that I thought was permanent. Yet it also revealed another creepy, destabilizing space, what I've come to view as depersonalization/derealization (there are some distinctions between the two, and I tend to pretty easily fluctuate between both in these episodes). Whether this is a consequence of practice generally, of noting specifically, or of me practicing "incorrectly," the intense depression subsided and gave rise to this alien hurdle over which I still yearn to leap.

Alien gets an A+

My first meditative episode of DP/DR 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 DP/DR 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 a lacking ethical compass, my disclosure (of experiences with violence and abuse) 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: "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, sometimes with classmates as spectators) for the next several months.

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 DP/DR, 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 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 operating 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 (and other faculty, as I would come to discover). 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. Glenn Wallis, a critical thinker of Western Buddhism, puts it nicely when speaking about the radical, collective implications of mindfulness (my chosen sitting practice) as they impact the individual.[1]

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. In no way am I saying this self-directed work isn't important, as the re-emergence of traumatic materials attests to the (potential) need for more individual therapeutic work [2]. Rather, my conceptual understanding of contemplative practice didn't 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 DP/DR episode that lasted months, one that I'm still working through in 2023.

The socratic alien

At this vantage point, many of my behaviorist and materialist assumptions of 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―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. Of course, sitting is still important, too.

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?

Referenced In:

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cDate: 2024-01-08
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summary:: An intimate look into my experiences with DP/DR, meditation, and burnout.

Reflections on DP/DR

Preface

This is a text I wrote last year as I was rounding the corner to finishing my graduate program in counseling. I've been inspired to revisit this scene from encountering, deep in the blog-o-sphere, an intelligent post on the limits of meditation and mindfulness to directly confront DP/DR. What's more interesting, though, is that he attempts to locate the "core phenomenology" of these experiences, and to consequently engineer an approach to address these episodes using that understanding. As someone interested in the limits and potentials of meditative practices with clients (emphasize limits) and myself (emphasize potentials), these interdisciplinary (cognitive, phenomenological, psychological, therapeutic, spiritual) inquiries are essential, given they are critical and cautious enough when broached with clients.

Another reason for revisiting this episode is that I'm utilizing an expressive journaling practice from James Pennebaker. I stumbled upon this approach during a long cardio session, flipping through podcasts. Essentially, you are asked to write about the most stressful experience of your life, either on 4 consecutive days, or four consecutive weeks. Additionally, you are asked to continuously write, not stopping to edit or correct spelling. An assumption is that the event still holds some emotional power in your life. Seeing as how I've thoroughly processed my hospitalization from 2016, I decided that this meditative-induced rift should be the candidate.

Finally: I think posts like this reveal an assumption about my clinical practice, one that is somewhat acknowledged but not explicitly addressed in our profession: The clinician's suffering, recovery, healing, growth, repeat suffering, etc. are the scaffolds for how we extend our abilities to our clients. This isn't always necessarily the case, and surely doesn't imply that you need to suffer from the client's specific ailment in order to effectively treat it. Rather, there are these meta-themes that apply across situations and problems and "disorders," such as ambiguity distress and tolerance, which require a clinician's experiential understanding. This could be another post, but suffice it to say that I see my own experiences in growing through this DP/DR episode as an opportunity to grow my clinical skills.

Encountering 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 (which is three years 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.

The first abduction

I have a history of severe depression and S/I. It was a feature of my life from adolescence to young adulthood. Often, the worst episodes would feature DP/DR, though I didn't recognize it as such at the time. However, it was only in my 20s—after a hospitalization for S/I—that I began to take words like "recovery" and "healing" and "wellbeing" seriously. With the help of therapists, medication, exercise, and meditation, I began getting better. I became quite behavioristic in tackling my mental health and wellness. There was a formula for positive change, and it was:

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—especially 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, that would later become limitations.

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 healed a wound—my unknowing (unconscious?) identification with depression—that I thought was permanent. Yet it also revealed another creepy, destabilizing space, what I've come to view as depersonalization/derealization (there are some distinctions between the two, and I tend to pretty easily fluctuate between both in these episodes). Whether this is a consequence of practice generally, of noting specifically, or of me practicing "incorrectly," the intense depression subsided and gave rise to this alien hurdle over which I still yearn to leap.

Alien gets an A+

My first meditative episode of DP/DR 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 DP/DR 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 a lacking ethical compass, my disclosure (of experiences with violence and abuse) 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: "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, sometimes with classmates as spectators) for the next several months.

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 DP/DR, 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 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 operating 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 (and other faculty, as I would come to discover). 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. Glenn Wallis, a critical thinker of Western Buddhism, puts it nicely when speaking about the radical, collective implications of mindfulness (my chosen sitting practice) as they impact the individual.[1]

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. In no way am I saying this self-directed work isn't important, as the re-emergence of traumatic materials attests to the (potential) need for more individual therapeutic work [2]. Rather, my conceptual understanding of contemplative practice didn't 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 DP/DR episode that lasted months, one that I'm still working through in 2023.

The socratic alien

At this vantage point, many of my behaviorist and materialist assumptions of 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―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. Of course, sitting is still important, too.

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?

Referenced In: