It’s such a relief to know there are others who understand what I go through.

My email addy is: syzyxx[at]gmail[dot]com

Hope to hear from some of you.

Syzyx

I’ve heard great things about St. John’s Wort, but I didn’t realize that it could stop panic attacks. I had a terrible problem with them several years ago, but haven’t had a bad one in quite some time, thank God.

@ joanharvest: I’m so sorry that you’ve had to battle these things your whole life, but it sounds like you are getting a handle on things and changing your life for the better. Congratulations on having the willpower and the courage to move outside your “comfort zone!”

I remember you from Wendy’s blog, too. Isn’t she fantastic? I absolutely love what you said at the end about blogging friends!

It got worse in my 20’s. I was living in a different area and this Dr. gave me valium and elavil. I certainly didn’t have the severe depersonalization that DreamChild had but I remember feeling disconnected to my body. I never even bothered telling the Dr. because I just didn’t think he would understand so I kept it to myself. Sometimes I felt as if my face wasn’t part of my body. I just couldn’t feel it. I stayed on the elavil for a couple of weeks then had the worse panic attack of my life. In my mind I blamed it on the elavil and weaned myself off of it and only took the valium during bad episodes of panic. I was also smoking pot and got so paranoid from it I had to stop that too.

In my thirties I had children and that helped. I guess because it took the focus off myself. I had them to think about. I also read a book called “Peace from Nervous Suffering” by Claire Weeks which described all the feelings I was having. That book saved me. I finally understood what was happening to me.

Now I am in my late 50’s and on a beta blocker which for some reason has stopped my panic attacks but a few years ago (when I found my son was a heroin addict) I became depressed and didn’t even know it. My sister and daughter convinced me to see a Dr. Now I am on Zoloft and seeing a therapist and for the first time in a long time, I am feeling really good. During all this time I became a food addict and got up to 344 pounds. I have lost almost 70 pounds in the past year.

I live on Cape Cod and drove myself over the bridge for the first time in 25 years a month ago. Driving out of my comfort zone of Falmouth gave me severe panic attacks. I was a danger to everyone because the road seemed to move around a lot.

So for 46 years I’ve been going through all of this but I improve everyday. Believe it or not blogging has helped me a lot. It is so therapeutic for me.

Brian, I love your blog. I am a friend of Wendy’s. Her son and my son grew up together and Wendy and my sister worked together for many years and are best friends. Moonbeam is one of my best blogging friends along with many others. Blogging friends are perfect for me–you don’t have to clean your house for them because they don’t visit you, you don’t have to cook for them and if you get sick of them, you just turn off your computer.

The fear had nothing whatsoever to do with what I had dreamed. It had to do with the REMEMBERING the dream. I’ve had that for about 4 years, and tried various anti-depressants, etc. for it, without much success. Finally, I took myself off the medications and started taking an herb called St. John’s Wort. The panic attacks stopped within 2 or 3 days — completely.

Within the past 7 months, however, I have had another severe emotional shock, and just within the past 3 months have started feeling as if things around me aren’t real. I’ll be sitting talking with someone, and all of a sudden, it’s as if I’m seeing the room through a filter of some kind, and everything looks as it does in a dream. And sometimes when I’m riding in a car, somewhere, I’ll look out the window, and the landscape doesn’t look real. It looks as if it’s painted or something.

Anyway, I’ve been preparing myself to be hauled off to a rubber room somewhere, because I decided I had to be going totally insane, or else I had a brain tumor. An MRI showed a spike in my frontal lobe, so the MDs decided I was having fugue states caused by that, and my therapist told me, for the first time, about Derealization Disorder. In all my years, I had never heard of it, nor had I heard of people who had the same symptoms I have.

I came home and immediately looked it up on the internet, and I’m sitting here with tears streaming down my face, because I’M NOT ALONE!!! There are others who understand what I’m going through. It’s a revelation to me, and now I have an explanation for so much. The relief is overwhelming. Now, I can research it, and go forward with some kind of healing process.

Thank you all for posting, and may we all find health and peace very, very soon!