She has felt it for years. Since she was in her adolescence years. Whenever she stares into the mirror to admire herself, it’s all good just until she gets a really weird feeling when she stares into her eyes.
She says she feels like she’s staring at herself from outside, sought of like there is another person looking just like her behind the mirror. She feels her heart beating, because she feels a strange feeling as though she is looking at a totally different person who is not her. She begins to feel really awkward, like a detached feeling, detached from reality of who she is! Sometimes, she is afraid of looking at the mirror!
Sometimes, when she entertains the feeling, she says she feels the distance between her and the her in the mirror widen, and the further she gets deep into the feeling, she feels like a stranger to herself! One time, she ran away from the mirror to hide under her bed, rubbing her eyes in disbelief as though to beckon herself back to reality, and just as she was about to go under the bed, she realized that it was she fighting with herself and that it is just her she is feeling afraid of.
One time, she asked her dad about that odd feeling when she was a teenager and her dad said, everybody feels like that sometime… Once in a blue moon, that ordeal may happen, but she has learned how to recognizer it. Whenever she stands at the mirror and the feeling begins to come, she gives herself one last look and says “it’s just me” and she walks away.
Sometimes, she has reported experiencing the Alice in Wonderland feeling. She’ll be washing utencils by the sink and start to feel like everything in her environment is suddenly becoming smaller and tinier than the usual size and she’ll feel like the giant in the room. The feeling does not go away easily and sometimes she has had to change her environment and sit still with eyes closed to come back to the visual reality. Sometimes, this happens in her dreams when she sleeps but it is the opposite. In her dreams she feels a tiny person and everything else is gigantic which feels weird in dreams as it makes her belive that she will forever be a tiny thing in the world and that she will never make it alive.
She needs help with understanding these strange phenomena. She needs to also know if it happens to her alone. She says if you know a place she can get help, she is willing to start there. She’s been feeling this way since 14 years ago after a severe breakup with her first boyfriend. They never had sex, they only kissed, but he moved on with another girl and said he does not love her.
She had never felt those strange feelings before the ordeal with her exboyfriend.
What do you guys think about this situation?!
Hers are quite different. I’ve experienced the same but from very different analogies, My mom calling me by name and i keep on asking myself if that’s really my name, looking at my pictures and asking myself if that is really me or even my daughter calling me Mom and i ask myself if i am her mother or she’s really mine….The feeling comes and goes because i convince myself that it is me and she’s mine. What helped a lot is that I used to write about the feeling in a journal and i was surprised by how it all turned out when i went back to read about them later on. In my experience writing helped more than talking to someone.
Interesting! When people talk about these experiences, they seem more normal than one would think!
Breakups affect people differently. She had a traumatic experience that gave birth to anxiety hence affecting her. He was her first love and being rejected cant make you feel less of a person especially if it is your first experience and therapy is not involved. It makes you not want to see the person you see in the mirror as that person keeps reminding you of how you were rejected. Therapy is always a great start.
I like this perspective! She had never experienced trauma before… The first rejection she experienced was her first toughest moment…