I’ve experienced this before at the start of my ocd but it only lasted a day. I stopped taking Zoloft in September and my OCD has slowly worsened and now I’ve been experiencing what I think is depersonalization for the last two weeks. I’m really scared and don’t know what to do to feel like myself again. Does anyone have any advice?
Derealization is not fun. Experienced this badly a few months ago. Stick to your values and goals-after a couple weeks it improved for me.
My first advice would be to discuss with your doctor or psychiatrist. Also are you doing ERP or have an OCD therapist? Discuss this with them as well. I have experienced this with my OCD and exposure helped. I acknowledged how I was feeling and then got present in doing the things I needed and wanted to do while resisting any compulsions.
@NOCD Advocate Jess, CPSS Thank you Jess! I have an ocd therapist but haven’t talked with her in over a month so I’ll try to schedule. How often and how long did you do exposures for? Also do you take any medication for your ocd?
I describe this feeling as “losing my grip on reality” - I smoked w33d for the first time on my new mood stabiliser (as well as Zoloft, but it never effected that in the past) 2 weeks ago and I’m still not completely over it, but it’s getting better day by day. I’ve been trying grounding techniques because I have been having really bad harm ocd, real event ocd and just general intrusive thoughts thinking I don’t trust my perceptions of what is happening around me and all of the horrible things that could happen. Listening to music from the times I felt most like myself is definitely helping me. Reading about depersonalisation helped me realise that I am not crazy, this is normal and happens to others. Trying to understand why these thoughts and feelings occur and to understand my disorder itself better is also helpful in grounding (I find). I’m sure these things are all specific to the individual and won’t work for everyone, but these are the things that have been helping me a bit so far
