Dysphoria and stress

[Michelle789]

Just a couple of questions.

1. Does having gender dysphoria, and fighting yourself all the time over your gender, make it more difficult to handle stress that life throws at you?

2. Does anyone here find that when life throws you more stress, that the dysphoria, and constant battle in your head, gets worse?

[mechamoose]

The lack of understanding does cause stress. I feel like an alien, and that does not to contribute to feeling stable.

- MM

[LeaP]

Let me toss you another thought, rather than responding along the exact lines of your question.

Gender dysphoria is an addiction. What you are conceptualizing as "worse" is a reaction you use to protect yourself psychologically ... from yourself. When you get over the gender issue, dysphoria largely disappears. It's a phantom. When you do get over it, you may find that you were more attracted to it than hounded by it. The experience of this was part of my sense of self and reality being upended a few years ago. (I don't mean that metaphorically, either. There were times it left me reeling and physically ill.)

[KellyJameson]

For me it was an obsession to "find myself" while do everything I could to "reject what I was finding" which left me in a high state of anxiety when something was "triggering my gender dysphoria" which is just about any kind of relationship you can have with another human being through your body.

Using my body "for sex" confronted my "gender" creating dissonance (unease) that would build into a type of panic attack but with no outward signs of this attack or I would feel suffocated by relationships when I attempted the male role sexually or any other way.

I was not failing at these roles because I had become the consumate actor but I was living outside myself when I was this actor.

I also experienced dissonance with my body as a type of wrongness but never out of hate.

Curves and smoothness feel natural but angles and dangling things with its proturbance left me feeling an oddness or something is not rightness.

My body felt weird to me even though it was much admired by others so it was not an insecurity thing. I did not reject myself because I had been rejected and people attracted to me as a male made me supremely uneasy with their attraction because it left me feeling like I was being pulled even further away from myself as my identity.

You want to be seen as your inner eye sees itself.

It was simply the wrong vessel for my energy so I never felt at ease.

My body caused me problems with fitting into the gender roles. It was not the gender roles that made me uncomfortable fitting into my body. Gender roles "become a problem" they "are not the problem that causes GID"

Living this way in my opinion leaves you ill adapted for dealing with the normal stressors of life. To survive I narrowed my existence down to the simplest common denominators. I could not tolerate any demands made on me by others.

I avoided most of the challenges of life to "conserve my energy" for this gender fight I was in before I consciously knew what I was fighting.

I kept people at a distance. Kept my material needs and wants almost at a primitive level. Spent most of my time either reading or working.

I practiced asceticism as if I was a strange variation of a monk but it was not a choice but a reaction to being a male bodied female.

I avoided stress because I was already stressed out to the max even if everything was perfectly quiet in my life.

I equate it with the feeling of complex post traumatic stress disorder, which was the ultimate result of GID for me.

You are always vibrating with this type of anxiousness and unease

It left me in a constant state of apprehension because I had no core identity, from living outside my body.

The PTSD, Anxiety, Compulsions, Constant internal self talk that went around and around, ect.. have all disappeared simply by changing my body and chemistry to fit my soul.

[becky77]

Interesting stuff Kelly.
' Consumate actor' I call it poker face everyone thought I was so relaxed and chilled about everything, such was my ability to contain it all.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing and I understand so much now, that I didn't then.
The dysphoria is at its worse when you do nothing about it, someone mentioned in a previous post that to feel normal is to bring the parts of you together. So female of mind, female of body, female to everyone else (or at least feminine to everyone else). Normalcy would you say might be the opposite to gender dysphoria? Achieve the one and the other will have no hold over you. If you identify as female then you will always suffer dysphoria until you can be fulltime a woman. And yes it comes crashing in like a mountain when you have any kind of relationship. Sex is completely out of the equation for me until post-op, I just couldn't bare any guy seeing me with male parts, even if he was to be ok with it.
At one point I decided to test the boundaries of my feelings, and explore my sexuality with a pre-op TS. It was an absolute disaster, my gender dysphoria went into overdrive and I felt nauseous from the whole experience. I would rather be single than ever feel like that again.

I think from years of dealing with all these emotions, starting from earliest childhood, I have managed to control my stress levels.

The stress you are referring to is it more that you are adding extra pressure to yourself.
When we start transition we have to face up to certain realities that didn't matter before. For example work, meeting neighbors, family knowing your secrets.
Conversation broke out about the Eurovision drag act at my office and some rather negative comments arose. Normally I can switch off but I will be coming out to these people soon, so every word was absorbed and I started over thinking things, now at work its on my mind all the time. I meet a new client, my mind is dealing with the job in hand, while simultaneously running through the scenario of how will he treat me when he knows. So that's adding to my stress levels currently.
I'm ready to tell work, but I haven't got through my trial period and I'm worried sick about my income, my ability to find work should this go wrong.
That is my main stress currently and there is not much I can do till I see it through.

[GabbiSophia]

For me the stress is only hard to handle when the hormones have wore off. It is not hard to handle per say but the more life throws the stronger the gd gets.

[Aprilrain]

I don't know the answers to your questions. I can tell you that for me transitioning has pretty much eliminated the GD.