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If you've ever felt unreal, numb, checked out, or like you're kind of watching your life from the outside, well, there's a chance that OCD could be involved in that. We talk about that a lot for panic and maybe other ways people experience anxiety. But remember that anxiety symptoms can occur across all sorts of conditions. Right? The anxiety disorders, the trauma disorders, the OCD and related conditions, all of those can experience some kind of numbing or checked out kind of experience. Not everyone with OCD will experience this. And that's okay, Right? But for those who do, it can really be confusing and isolating when you get so anxious about something that you start to maybe feel derealized, depersonalized, not connected to yourself or your environment. And let's talk about what's going on and what you can do. Depersonalization is feeling detached from yourself, and derealization is feeling detached from the world. People who experience really intense anxiety can have depersonalization or derealization episodes. And intrusive thoughts can even lead to this too. Can get people to even question if they feel normal or even start to doubt, am I in my own body or not? Remember, OCD is the doubting disorder and it can get you to doubt anything, even if your consciousness is in the right body or not. That could be a symptom of ocd. I've treated people who are afraid of, what if I somehow switch consciousness with somebody else even? Right? So this is. There's all sorts of ways that OCD can affect this. The more you're checking your bodily sensations to feel if you're connected or not, the more likely you aren't going to feel connected to yourself. Sometimes people with OCD can even punish themselves in response to intrusive thoughts. Maybe they even think, I deserve to feel bad, I deserve to not feel fully connected to myself. Or I deserve some kind of hunger or fatigue or pain or something like that, right? I'm a bad person. We can even see this in scrupulosity, where this idea that punishment is almost a form of penance for the OCD thoughts and images and urges that we have and that we should feel bad now. It's so unfortunate that OCD can be so convincing, right? Because we wouldn't want this on probably even our worst enemies to feel some of these types of things. This vigilance, well, it pulls attention away from us living our lives. We don't actually trust our own physical cues anymore. We don't trust our own senses when we have OCD after a while. And the compulsions well, they take us away from activities that we could be doing to connect to our body, connect to our environment, our friends, our family. And there can be other things that even connect to this, maybe neurodivergence, trauma, all of that can even in some ways intensify these disconnects that people have. How do we help exposure and response prevention therapy can be helpful in these situations because hey, these experiences, they're very frightening, but they're common and they can be managed. ERP can help you to really rebuild the connection with yourself and regain the sense of presence, presence in your body. What are some of the things that we want to do? Awareness of where OCD is at so that you really understand what's happening and that you know that just because you think something doesn't have to mean that it's true. We help you reduce compulsions, we help you make value based choices. We allow you to have needs without having to earn everything. We can even do something called interoceptive exposures where we have you deal with the physiological sensations that you experience if you feel depersonalized or derealized and show you that you can handle those without it developing into some kind of panic experience. All of that is done through great exposure and response prevention treatment and available to you right here at nocd because our therapists are specialized in utilizing ERP with OCD and other anxiety disorders. So let us help you, right? You don't have to live with this in the driver's seat of your life. We can tailor treatment around this and other co occurring conditions. So if you've had trauma, you've had panic, neurodivergence, all of those things, we, we can be there to help you with all of that. Book a call with our care team today to see what we can do to help you so that you can start living that life that you want to live and not have it ruled by anxiety and other conditions. We hope to hear from you soon.