Hi raq
My heart goes out to you with you having faced so much loss and so much stress in your life. To be facing ongoing challenges just isn't fair. I wish there was something I could say that would offer you some form of relief.
I think we don't necessarily realise the significance of a strong and grounding sense of identity until we lose that in some major way. Then it can become a matter of 'What's wrong with me?'. With you having had the rug pulled out from under you due to ongoing traumas and other factors, it's understandable how you would have lost a solid and grounding sense of self somewhere along the way.
I can recall watching a fascinating documentary not too long ago called 'Crazywise'. It was about how western culture typically views mental health crisis, compared to other cultures around the world. In other cultures it's a matter of acknowledging a variety of possibilities for why people can suddenly change in such shocking ways. In western culture, there's a temptation to go straight for a diagnosis out of the DSM-V (a book of disorders and standard treatments). While this film acknowledges some conditions as natural, under the circumstance, it's responsible in stating that some cases relate specifically to a psychological disorder or disorder of the brain. For example...
While derealisation or depersonalisation can be regarded as a legitimate disorder of the brain in some cases, successfully treated with medication and other therapies, in certain cultures a detachment from sense of self and reality is induced, under careful supervision and guidance. It's done in order to gain a completely different perspective of self and life. This is something that's only recently being practiced in western medicine, with trials for treating PTSD for example, with the help of certain mind altering drugs. In the case of these trials or in certain tribal cultures, the person is guided carefully into, through and out of such a 'trip' (in sessions that relate to self and life understanding, from a different perspective). In such cases, there is always a person present to take people out of that trip or journey of discovery. To remain living in such a state of detachment from self and reality would be unbearable.
So, while we could go to a psychologist and beg them to take us out of the trip we're on for some reason, there may be no encouraging sense of guidance or relief from them when it comes to the way out. Again, just to be clear, what we're facing could be a psychological disorder or disorder of the brain that requires medication and other western practices. Just offering 2 very different perspectives.
