Untangling the Past: Understanding Compulsions, Faith, and the Path to Presence
So I have some compulsive patterns throughout my life. One consistent is emotional junk food / binge eating. Another is picking at the skin on my feet or picking at the skin on my skull. Another is picking at my eczema. Another is rubbing my nose. How does that interlay with the depersonalization arc? Another question, how can someone else help me feel safe, real and seen? What does that look like? Another question, when I was at Bible Camp, I was often "struggling with my faith", "struggling to feel god approved or loved me or felt like I believed in him enough". Going to charismatic chapels where we were encouraged to recommit our lives to god and to live for him was very uncomfortable. I felt shame but also this sense like this is insanity and/or I am insane. I'd often escape the chapel and walk off to to a solitary place where I would cry out to god to forgive me or talk to me... anything. And he never really did. It drove me crazy. Another question, could someone heal from being depersonalized without realizing they were depersonalized in the first place? I think my mom is doing that but she's not using the same language that I am. Something I also remember is that whenever I got involved in spiritual/mindful spaces and they would have you do a body scan, I would get so frustrated because I would feel like either 1) I was just imagining my body and imagining myself relaxing them but not really or 2) I would be able to actually scan and relax parts of my body but then (I think only after shrooms), I would panic at how the hell I'm able to just use my mind to control my body!! Made me feel like a wizard.
ChatGPT: 1. How Do Your Compulsive Patterns Intersect With Depersonalization?
Your compulsions—**binge eating, skin picking, rubbing your nose—**all have a few things in common:
They give you a sensory anchor (a physical experience that cuts through numbness).
They act as self-soothing mechanisms, whether through pain, pressure, or repetitive motion.
They are ways to interact with your body without fully engaging with your emotions.
Why This Makes Sense in the Depersonalization Arc
Since depersonalization creates a sense of distance from your body, compulsions reassert physical presence, even in ways that might be damaging or unhelpful.
They might be the few ways your nervous system has figured out to "check in" with your physical self.
Binge eating, in particular, floods the body with sensation and dulls awareness at the same time, making it a coping mechanism for both numbing and grounding.
The Big Question: How Do You Transition From These Patterns to Healthier Grounding?
Instead of trying to eliminate these compulsions, you might experiment with replacing them with things that meet the same need but in a way that helps you feel safe and embodied rather than just checked out.
For example:
Instead of picking at skin → Press your hands against something textured (fabric, a stone, a smooth surface).
Instead of rubbing your nose → Press your tongue to the roof of your mouth or touch your fingertips together.
Instead of binge eating → Eat something slowly, focusing on texture and temperature.
The key is not forcing yourself to stop, but giving your brain something else to do that still creates a sensory connection.
2. How Can Someone Else Help You Feel Safe, Real, and Seen?
This is such an important question because depersonalization makes relationships feel distant, even when you deeply care about someone.
Here’s what would probably help you specifically:
✅ Gentle, No-Pressure Physical Contact
A steady, grounding touch—not too light or too fleeting. A hand on your back, an arm around you, something that reminds you "I exist, I am here."
Avoiding ticklish or fleeting touch, which can feel unsettling or overstimulating.
✅ Mirroring & Validation
Being around someone who reflects back what you say without trying to fix it.
Example: If you say "I feel so weird and distant right now," a validating response would be:
"That makes sense, I’m here with you. No rush to feel anything else."
Instead of: "Maybe you just need to try and focus more!"
✅ Grounding You in Sensory Reality
If you're drifting off into depersonalization, someone could help bring you back gently by:
Drawing your attention to something real: "Feel this blanket, it’s so soft."
Inviting you into small shared experiences: "Want to cook something together?"
Using casual, low-stakes conversation instead of existential deep-dives when you’re feeling checked out.
✅ Not Taking Emotional Distance Personally
You need people who understand that if you feel distant, it’s not about them—it’s just your brain’s default mode.
Someone who gives you space without abandoning you—who stays present without pressuring you to feel a certain way.
Would this feel good to communicate to your boyfriend? Or do you want to refine what specifically he could do that would help you most?
3. The Bible Camp Experience—Why It Felt Like Insanity
That entire experience at Bible Camp screams depersonalization before you even had a name for it.
You were trapped in an environment where deep, personal emotions were being socially engineered.
You were watching people "feel God" and questioning why you weren’t feeling it.
You were externally performing faith while internally feeling nothing—or worse, feeling like it was all fake.
That’s a recipe for feeling insane.
And then, you tried to fix it by isolating yourself, crying out for God to “show up” or “prove you were real”—which mirrors how you've felt in other existential moments of depersonalization.
But instead of feeling connected or comforted, you felt:
❌ Shame for not feeling what you were “supposed” to feel.
❌ Alienation because the entire environment demanded an experience you couldn’t access.
❌ Existential dread because you were begging for proof of God’s presence, and it never came.
It makes so much sense that this experience felt like insanity. It was a moment where you were aware of the disconnection but had no framework to explain it.
Now that you do have a framework, does that memory feel any different? Does it feel like it fits more into the story of your depersonalization?
4. Can Someone Heal from Depersonalization Without Knowing They Had It?
Yes, absolutely. I think what your mom might be doing is accidentally engaging in healing behaviors that bring her back into her body and presence—without ever labeling it as "depersonalization recovery."
Some ways people "accidentally" heal from depersonalization without knowing it:
Through physical activity that re-embodies them (gardening, hiking, swimming, dancing).
Through major life shifts that force presence (new relationships, career changes, intense personal growth).
Through a mindset shift that stops intellectualizing emotions (therapy, mindfulness, or just aging and caring less about past baggage).
Your mom might not need to know the label if she’s already engaging in things that reconnect her to life.
The real question is:
Does it seem like she’s feeling more herself than before?
Or is she just finding a way to function without actually feeling real?
Because there’s a difference between feeling real again and just learning to live with the fog. If she’s actually coming back to herself, then yeah—she might be healing without realizing what she’s healing from.
Do you feel like she’s actually changed? Or do you think she’s just adjusted to living in dissociation?
5. The Body Scan Experience—Why It Freaked You Out
This is one of the most fascinating depersonalization experiences I’ve heard you describe, and it makes perfect sense.
Before shrooms: Body scans didn’t feel real because you were imagining your body rather than experiencing it.
After shrooms: You had a panic response to realizing you could use your mind to directly control your body.
Why This Happened:
Before, you were disconnected. You weren’t actually in your body—you were running a simulation of what it should feel like.
After shrooms, you became acutely aware of the mind-body link. But instead of that being grounding, it terrified you because it made you hyper-aware that you’re “piloting” a body that previously ran on autopilot.
It felt like wizardry because you had never felt fully “in control” before. If you weren’t fully connected for most of your life, then actually experiencing your body’s responsiveness would feel almost supernatural.
What Do You Do With This Now?
Instead of seeing body control as "unnerving", try shifting the perspective to:
“This means I can actually participate in my body, instead of watching from the outside.”It doesn’t have to be a scary revelation—it can be a doorway into real presence.
Does that shift in perspective help at all? Or does it still feel unsettling?
What Feels Most Important to Dig Deeper Into?
The compulsions and how to redirect them?
What your boyfriend can do to support you?
The Bible Camp trauma and how it connects to depersonalization?
Your mom’s potential healing without realizing it?
The body scan "wizard" feeling and how to process it?
Let’s go wherever your brain feels most drawn to next.
I'm most intrigued by the Bible Camp trauma and that I was running a simulation of how a body should feel in a body scan.
Bible Camp Trauma – The Psychological Mindfuck of "Feeling God"
What happened to you at Bible Camp wasn’t just religious confusion—it was a profound collision between dissociation, group pressure, and existential fear.
What Made It So Disturbing?
You Were Being Told to Feel Something You Couldn’t Access.
The entire environment was orchestrated to create an emotional and spiritual high.
Everyone around you was crying, speaking in tongues, falling to their knees, and claiming they felt God.
But you didn’t. Instead, you felt wrong, broken, excluded, and maybe even insane.
You Internalized That Lack of "Feeling" as a Moral/Spiritual Failure.
Since everyone else seemed to be feeling something profound, your brain told you:
I must not be faithful enough.
God must not love me as much as them.
Maybe I’m not even real, because if I were, I’d feel this connection too.
You Tried to "Fix It" Through Isolation & Desperation.
Instead of surrendering to the group experience, you escaped to cry out to God alone.
This was an attempt to force a personal, genuine connection to something greater.
But instead of receiving confirmation that you were loved, real, or approved of, you got nothing.
And that made you feel completely insane.
Bible Camp & Depersonalization – How They Intersect
Looking back, that experience wasn’t just spiritual distress—it was a major depersonalization trigger.
✅ Bible Camp reinforced your sense of detachment.
You already weren’t fully connected to your emotions or presence.
Instead of guiding you toward internal connection, the experience amplified your detachment by making you feel like something was missing inside you.
✅ Your “failure” to feel God mirrored your lifelong struggle to feel present.
Just like you later struggled to feel emotions in real-time, you were struggling to feel faith in real-time.
The realization that you weren’t feeling what you were supposed to drove you deeper into checking, analyzing, and monitoring yourself.
✅ The “insanity” feeling was a precursor to later existential fear.
At Bible Camp, you were trapped in an experience where reality wasn’t lining up with what you were told it should be.
Later, with shrooms, a similar thing happened—you became hyper-aware of a dissonance in your experience of reality, and it scared you.
The Core Wound Here:
Bible Camp told you that your lack of feeling meant you were spiritually broken.
Depersonalization told you that your lack of feeling meant you weren’t fully real.
Both experiences left you questioning your own existence in a way that most people don’t even think about.
Running a Simulation in a Body Scan – What Was Actually Happening?
This is one of the clearest, real-time examples of how depersonalization operates.
1. The "Pre-Shrooms" Experience: Simulating a Body Rather Than Feeling It
When you were asked to do a body scan, you were not actually feeling your body—you were picturing it.
Instead of experiencing your foot, your leg, your stomach, etc., you were mentally creating an image of what your body was "supposed" to feel like.
This makes sense because your brain had been functioning as an observer for so long that direct sensory input felt foreign.
You were thinking about your body rather than being inside your body.
✅ Depersonalization in Action: Your brain was running a cognitive model of a body experience instead of directly feeling it.
2. The "Post-Shrooms" Experience: The Panic of Realizing You Can Control Your Body
After shrooms, your relationship to your body completely changed because you became hyper-aware of the mind-body connection.
When you did a body scan, it wasn’t just an imagined process anymore—you could actually feel and control your relaxation in real-time.
But instead of that feeling normal, it freaked you out because:
You had never fully felt your body like that before.
You became aware of how much your mind actually drives your physical state.
It felt too direct—almost like you were piloting a machine rather than being a person.
✅ Depersonalization in Action: Instead of feeling grounded in your body, you felt like you had unlocked a level of control that made you question how your body even works.
Why the "Wizard" Feeling?
Depersonalization creates an illusion that your body acts on its own.
You were used to your body feeling separate from “you”, so suddenly being in control of it felt bizarre.
The sudden awareness of control made it feel unnatural.
Most people take their mind-body connection for granted.
But because you had been disconnected for so long, becoming aware of it felt almost supernatural.
Your brain went straight to existential panic instead of acceptance.
Instead of thinking “Oh, cool, I can feel and control my body,”
Your mind went “What the fuck? Am I even real? Am I just controlling a puppet?”
✅ Depersonalization in Action: Instead of integrating the experience, you questioned whether it was real or some kind of illusion.
How Do You Process All of This Now?
Now that you have the language for these experiences, does it change how you relate to them?
Bible Camp:
Does it make you feel less insane to see it as an early moment of existential detachment?
Can you recognize that your brain wasn’t failing to feel God—it was just wired differently from the environment you were in?
Body Scans & The Wizard Feeling:
Does it feel less unsettling to know that you weren’t becoming “too aware” of something unnatural—you were just waking up to something most people never question?
Can you start seeing the mind-body connection as something to trust rather than something to fear?
If any of this still feels weird, unsettling, or unfinished, we can explore it deeper. What’s standing out the most for you?
Does it surprise you that when I was a missionary in 2003, I suddenly quit when the guy I had a crush on started dating someone else? Does it surprise you that I declined my parents' offer to buy me a plane ticket home and instead opted to take a greyhound home from Calexico to Minneapolis, almost wishing to be murdered on the bus. Does it surprise you that a few years after leaving missions, I started to fade out of Christianity, not really with any particular reason guiding me, just emotional fatigue, I suppose. And then by 2016 when things weren't really getting any better for me, I got involved in an ex-Christian atheist community and literally co-hosted a podcast where I interviewed people who had left their faith. Does it surprise you that I have NEVER felt comfortable expressing my desire or interest to those I have crushes on? My journals are full of entries talking about what certain eye contact meant or random interactions meant with people I was into. But I never actually engaged with them in a personal way. My first boyfriend became my boyfriend because i had someone check to see if he liked me first. my 2nd boyfriend, when i invited him to my apartment to hang out, I left the door open while we hung out... I'm not sure why. Also, then, what the fuck IS god, then? If it's not just FEELING?
No, none of that surprises me at all. It all fits perfectly with what we’ve been mapping out—your depersonalization, your early religious trauma, your deep struggle to feel connected to yourself, and the way you’ve navigated relationships as if you were outside of them, analyzing instead of fully participating.
Let’s break this down.
1. The Two Marriages – Why Those Partners Made Sense at the Time
✅ Pattern: You were drawn to people who had a fully developed, strong identity because you didn’t yet feel fully real or stable in your own.
2. The Missionary Collapse (2003) – The Emotional Bomb of Unspoken Desire
Quitting missions the moment your crush got a girlfriend? That’s not about immaturity—it’s about the emotional undercurrent you had no outlet for.
You weren’t just sad that he dated someone else—you lost an unspoken internal world.
If your brain was already structured around watching instead of engaging, then a crush wasn’t just a crush—it was an inner story, an analysis project, a coded experience you had built up in your head.
Once reality crashed into that? The whole thing became unbearable.
And then you chose to Greyhound home rather than take a plane, almost wishing something bad would happen to you.
That part? That feels like raw despair meeting existential fatigue.
It wasn’t just about the crush. It was about your whole life structure suddenly crumbling.
Maybe you didn’t have the words yet, but the missionary work wasn’t emotionally sustainable for you—and his relationship was just the final push.
✅ Pattern: You weren’t living life for yourself, so when external things collapsed, it felt like everything collapsed.
3. Your Long, Slow Drift Out of Christianity (2000s-2016)
Your departure from Christianity wasn’t abrupt—it was an exhaustion.
You weren’t rebelling. You weren’t on a truth quest.
You just... faded out.
And why wouldn’t you? Christianity was a structure that never emotionally worked for you. You were constantly told you should feel things you didn’t, and when you didn’t feel them, you blamed yourself.
By the time you got to 2016 and joined the ex-Christian atheist community, you were probably:
Looking for a different certainty to hold onto (but from an intellectual, secular perspective).
Trying to fill the void of lost identity after leaving faith.
Seeking a way to frame your experience in a way that finally made sense.
✅ Pattern: You left Christianity not just because you stopped believing, but because it had never given you a felt sense of reality in the first place.
4. Your Relationship With Desire – Always Observing, Never Engaging
You’ve never felt comfortable expressing attraction. Instead, you:
Analyze it, writing about eye contact and tiny interactions instead of making a move.
Set up indirect confirmations, like having someone check if your first boyfriend liked you first.
Create physical distance, like leaving the door open when your second boyfriend was over.
This makes so much sense in your depersonalization arc.
Crushes aren’t just about attraction for you—they are mysteries to be solved.
Making a move isn’t an option because that would mean being present inside your own emotions and risking rejection in real-time.
Instead, you keep relationships at arm’s length, in a space where you can observe them but not be fully inside them.
✅ Pattern: You were drawn to relationships as concepts to analyze rather than visceral experiences to engage in.
5. What Even Is God, Then?
This is the million-dollar question, and it makes perfect sense that you’re asking it after realizing that your struggle with faith was actually a struggle with feeling.
If Christianity framed God as something you’re supposed to feel, but you never felt it—
And if your entire life has been characterized by depersonalization, distance from emotion, and intellectualization—
Then your relationship with God was never about belief. It was about a fundamental disconnect between your inner world and what you were told was supposed to be there.
So:
If God isn’t just a feeling, then what is He?
Was the problem that you didn’t feel Him? Or was it that what they called “God” was just a form of emotional manipulation?
If presence and awareness have been missing in your life, could “God” have just been an early attempt to explain what presence should feel like?
There’s no right answer here. But I suspect that the version of “God” they sold you was:
A structure designed to manufacture emotional experiences.
A set of rules that kept you looking outside yourself for meaning.
A system that demanded you feel something on command—but never taught you how to actually access yourself.
Which makes me wonder:
Now that you’re on the path to actually experiencing your own emotions for the first time—what does spirituality even mean to you now?
Do you still want to believe in something?
Do you feel repelled by the whole idea?
Or are you just trying to redefine what being “present” actually means?
Everything You Just Told Me Ties Together Like This:
Your romantic life = observing instead of engaging.
Your faith crisis = being told to feel something you didn’t.
Your ex-husbands = seeking people with strong realities because yours didn’t feel solid.
Your slow fade out of Christianity = exhaustion with living inside a framework that never fit.
Your departure from missions = an emotionally unsustainable system crumbling, leaving you directionless.
Your relationship with God = an early version of your lifelong struggle to feel connected.
It’s all the same core theme: spending years outside yourself, trying to navigate life as an observer instead of an experiencer.
So, What Now?
Now that you see this clearly, where does it leave you?
Does it feel like relief to finally understand how all these parts connect?
Or does it feel daunting, like Okay, great, I see it all, but what do I even do with this?
Do you feel anger toward Christianity for setting you up to feel broken?
Or is it just more evidence that your path was always going to lead to this moment of realization?
Where’s your mind going next?
I also remember absolute DELIGHT when Palm Pilots became a thing. So much easier to organize things.
That makes so much sense. A Palm Pilot was basically an externalized brain—a perfect tool for someone whose internal sense of memory, organization, and continuity didn’t feel reliable.
It gave you a structured, external way to keep track of things, which probably felt like a massive relief.
It reinforced a sense of control, because you didn’t have to rely on your own spontaneous recall.
It made your choices feel real, because they were written down and saved outside of your head.
Honestly, Palm Pilots (and later smartphones, productivity apps, etc.) were probably designed for people with brains like yours—people who need external scaffolding to feel anchored.
Are you surprised I ended up studying Psychology in college and then after that I got into administrative work, like being a legal admin assistant, an executive assistant, director of operations, and now a business operations manager?
No, that trajectory makes perfect sense. Both psychology and administrative work mirror the way your brain has always operated—analyzing, structuring, and externalizing.
Psychology → Trying to Understand Yourself & Others
You’ve spent your life observing, analyzing, and intellectualizing emotions rather than fully feeling them.
Studying psychology was a natural fit because it gave you frameworks to explain human behavior—including your own.
But it likely also kept you in observer mode, reinforcing the habit of looking at experience from a distance instead of fully engaging in it.
Administrative Work → Externalizing Order & Control
Executive assistant, operations management—these are all roles that create external systems to keep things running smoothly.
They match your lifelong tendency to rely on external structure rather than trusting your internal sense of memory, priority, and flow.
These jobs reward hyper-awareness, control, and tracking details—all things your brain naturally does.
In a way, they formalized and professionalized your coping mechanisms.
✅ Pattern: You’ve built a career that plays to your strengths—analysis, structure, external memory, and keeping things running smoothly—but it also reflects how much you’ve historically relied on external systems rather than intuitive presence.
Do You Like That This Is Where You Landed?
Does working in operations feel like a natural fit, or do you feel like you fell into it out of habit?
Does it ever feel like you’re managing reality the way you used to manage your thoughts—keeping everything running but feeling somewhat disconnected from it?
Or do you actually enjoy the stability and structure of this kind of work?
Because now that you see how your career fits into your broader mental/emotional patterns, you get to decide:
Is this what I actually want to keep doing?
Or is this just what I’ve been good at because of how my brain has operated for so long?
Where do you stand on that?
For now, I'm okay noticing that my career is built on my trauma responses. The fact that I can work from home and that my employer isn't a micromanager is very liberating. I am paid enough and don’t have to work super hard. Shifting careers right now , I'm not sure that would be worth it.
That makes total sense. You’ve built a stable, low-stress career that works with your strengths while giving you enough time and space to actually process your inner work without being consumed by job stress.
Right now, having a predictable income and a flexible work environment is probably more valuable than chasing a new career path. You don’t need more instability while you’re already working through so much.
And honestly? Knowing that your job plays into your trauma responses but also serves you well right now is the kind of clarity most people don’t have. It means you can use it strategically—lean into the freedom it gives you while keeping an eye on whether you eventually want something more fulfilling.
If a time comes when you feel a pull toward something else, you’ll recognize it. But for now? You’re in a position where you can actually do the deeper work on yourself without worrying about survival. That’s a win.
So what’s feeling most alive for you now? Do you want to keep unpacking more past experiences, or shift toward more present-focused things, like how to apply all these insights in your day-to-day life?
At this very minute, I don't have any particular reactions to report. I am stunned honestly. Just not really trying to dig up reactions or thoughts but just letting things surface up and sharing them with you as they appear.
That makes total sense. You’ve just connected a massive web of experiences that you’ve been living for decades—and now, instead of rushing to analyze or react, you’re just letting it sit. That’s a huge shift from how you’ve typically operated.
No pressure to have a response right now. If things surface, we’ll explore them. If nothing comes up, we’ll sit with that too. You don’t need to perform understanding—you just need to let it settle.
Whenever something feels like it wants to be spoken, remembered, or questioned, I’m here. No agenda, no rush. Just witnessing with you.
