Friday 13th June 2025
Early messages: Don’t Talk About It!
My experience at secondary school taught me a lot of things, including that talking about your feelings could mean being laughed at or called “attention seeking.” Time and time again, I watched friends and classmates get humiliated for simply sharing their experiences. So I learnt: keep quiet.
When I finally began to understand what my symptoms meant, that they might even have a name, I was reluctant to embrace the label. Therapy gave me a private space to explore how I was feeling. It meant I didn’t have to ‘burden’ anyone with my ‘baggage’ or risk being dismissed or misunderstood.
I’ve lived with depersonalisation symptoms since childhood, so I never knew anything different. But when derealisation joined the picture, it was like a switch flipped in my brain. Suddenly, I wasn’t just disconnected from myself, everything around me felt unreal too. Like I was stuck in a dream or virtual reality game. It was terrifying. I started to wonder: Am I crazy?
Why I began to consider diagnosis
Even in therapy, I often felt misunderstood. And that’s when the idea of a diagnosis started to grow in my mind, not to prove anything to others, but to validate my own experience. To say: this is real. I’m not imagining this.
At the same time, I didn’t want to be unwell. I didn’t want to be known for having a ‘disorder’. I worried a diagnosis would define me. My therapist and I spent months going back and forth on whether seeking an official diagnosis would help or hurt me. Would it give me clarity or make me feel boxed in?
At that point, I hadn’t told my family the full story of what I’d been working through in therapy. I used to refer to my symptoms vaguely as feeling “spaced out,” so they had a general idea. But sharing everything, what I was really feeling, what I had learned, felt terrifying. I knew my family would support me, but I had this internal fear that without evidence, no one would believe me.
That’s why I eventually decided to seek an official diagnosis, so I could feel more confident opening up to my family, my GP, and anyone else I needed support from.
Starting the diagnosis journey
In March 2023, I reached out to Dr. Elaine Hunter at the Depersonalisation Clinic in London. Because DPDR is so misunderstood and under-recognised, there are very few specialists. The clinic was at full capacity, and there was even a waiting list for the waiting list! But I joined it, and months later I received the pre-assessment forms. In September, seven months after I first reached out, I had my assessment with Dr. Hunter.
The Depersonalisation Clinic was brilliant in their support and delivery of information. This post isn’t to criticise them, but to highlight the massive gap in resources and awareness. Dissociative disorders are deeply under-recognised, and many mental health professionals simply don’t have the training to understand or treat them.
Receiving my diagnosis
When I received my diagnosis, I had so many emotions. I felt relieved and grateful to finally be heard and understood, and to have something I could take to my support system. But I also felt sad that this condition was real and not going anywhere anytime soon. And I was scared that people would treat me differently once they knew.
Ultimately, what I took away was this: I am not broken. My brain developed an incredible suit of armour to protect me from the things in my life that felt too scary to face. That makes me strong, and I deserve answers.
After the diagnosis, I kept working with my therapist to understand my symptoms better; the triggers, the patterns, the fluctuations. I learnt a lot. But I also became obsessive. I was constantly analysing every shift in how “spaced out” I felt, how each action impacted the world around me versus how it felt in my head. I was always researching – new techniques, new medications, new routines. But all that attention only gave DPDR more power. It started to take up every part of my brain.
Learning to let go
Three months after getting my diagnosis, I decided to let go.
I chose to stop letting “spaced out” dominate my every thought. I wanted to let life back in and allow myself to actually live it. So I stopped therapy — an incredibly hard decision and a painful goodbye. But I knew it was necessary to move forward. (I’m a huge advocate for therapy and have recently started seeing a new therapist, happy to dive into that in another post if people are interested!)
It’s now been over a year and a half since my diagnosis. In that time, I’ve done a lot of soul-searching. A lot of healing (with plenty more still to do). And I’ve learned more about myself than I ever thought possible. So now, I feel ready to share all of that with you, to hear your experiences, too, and to turn our struggles into something good in a world that so often looks down on people fighting internal battles.
If you’d like to talk, feel free to comment below or message me on Instagram. My DMs are always open.
Kate x
Mostly Kate 