Through dealing with existential OCD I have gone through prolonged periods of time suffering with derealisation and depersonalisation. The feeling of nothing looking quite right – as if you’re walking through a movie or even like you have a third eye. I often think ‘how can nobody else see this and just go about their everyday life’ and then I start to obsess about whether anything is truly real, am I sleeping, am I dead etc. This fear used to become very overwhelming.
I’ve found it’s very important to remember that the reality of your fears/symptoms are NEVER as awful as OCD will have you believe. I spent so long praying to just feel connected to the world around me again and truly thought that I couldn’t stand or survive this feeling of everyone, including myself, feeling alien. In reality though I absolutely can stand it. All derealisation is an uncomfortable symptom of anxiety and another one we need to learn to take for the ride. It’s not dangerous and can’t harm us. The world around us has not changed from whatever it always was. We never needed to know what we were experiencing then and we still don’t need to know what it all is now. It’s just another thought/feeling that has latched because we became irrationally fearful of it.
Although I would rather have a life free from these feelings, I no longer fear it like I used to. I have accepted its presence and this has taken the edge off hugely. I can go about my day as I usually would and it doesn’t change my life whether I’m suffering with the symptom or not. Rob often says to wear the feeling like an uncomfortable coat and that’s truly spot on. Eventually we learn that we don’t need to keep our guard up and start to feel safe again but in the meantime we need to keep our enemy of derealisation close by our side and stop fighting it off. It’s so important to go about our days regardless of how out of touch or mundane it all feels. It’s never as scary as we think!