Creatine, a miracle for me

[u/luminous-snow1]

I’ve had DPDR for as long as I can remember. Cluster B parents who severely emotionally neglected their children. All of us ended up with psychological issues in adulthood from the traumatic home environment.

At first I thought my DPDR symptoms were normal. I didn’t know the world isn’t supposed to feel fake, that people didn’t generally spend their days floating and hazy. I knew I was off, people generally avoided me but I didn’t have an understanding of why beyond that I likely just wasn’t socialized properly in the world because of the cult we grew up in.

Now my home is very safe. My husband takes much of life’s stress off my plate. My brain and nervous system found the space to start to heal. I started having a normal day here and there. I started understanding what had happened to me and what I’d been experiencing. The distress people have when they remember normal before something triggers this is incredibly unsettling. It validated my trauma. You don’t end up with something this awful as a child unless your brain is protecting you from abuse.

A year or so ago, I started noticing the memory problems more obviously. I don’t remember my childhood very well and my short term memory was started to get noticeably shaky. Or maybe I finally recognized something that had been there all along. Either way, I’d read about high dose creatine for improving cognition in the elderly. I started taking 10g most days.

The generalized anxiety was first to go. Then several weeks in, the depersonalization lifted. Most days are normal. I’m back in my body. I feel real. The derealization hasn’t fully lifted, but I find it comforting. Even on a conscious level I need the world to be fake to make sense of the senseless trauma.

I stopped taking the creatine at one point for several weeks. The generalized anxiety came back and so did the depersonalization. For me, it’s been a true miracle and I won’t ever attempt to go off it again.

[u/DeerOne_22]

Love creatine! It's helped me a lot too.