If you’ve been completely psychotic before to the point of a completely different reality, how do you deal with everyday coincidences?
Sometimes, I’m fine and just think - oh, that would have meant this a year ago, but other times I have a hard time deciding if things are intentional or not. Especially if it’s someone talking and basically parroting a conversation/sentence I’d heard before from someone else. I start to think ‘what if they’re really the same people’ or ‘what if they’ve talked about me to each other and think it’s funny to confuse me.’ (Not sure how they would know about my previous delusions, but that thought usually gets brushed aside in the moment and brought back out later when I look back on it and decide I’m being paranoid.)
I never act on the thoughts, but it’s really annoying and makes me anxious. I don’t want to tell anyone about it because I don’t want to be put on more medicine or to be watched sideways for months to determine if I’ve lost my mind again. It’s not something that’s just started, the thoughts have been around since my meds kicked in and I realized that my reality was not the reality of the rest of the world. I came back to myself, but now I tend to wonder sometimes.
Does it ever go away? Will I be wondering about my reality for the rest of my life? Honestly, is it because I NEED more medicine? I really don’t even want what I have.
as far as coincidences… I have to really focus on the fact that life is rather random. If someone does repeat something I heard on the radio or something like that… I have pause and tell myself… they might have heard the same station. Every area has a common linguistic culture… so I also have to take that into consideration.
As far as being in a totally different reality and my hallucinations becoming so sharp edged and so set in my memory they became real… I’m lucky that stopped when I stopped alcohol and pot.
My meds worked better too since I quit… so I’ve been able to maintain level on lower doses.
But I still have a lot of false memories from my past that I have to work through.
I would suggest learning about the philosophy stoicism, it helped me quite a bit. Basically, it helps you determine what is worth worrying about and what isn’t. You shouldn’t worry about things out of your control, like what other people say.
In the stoic philosophy, it is believed that the only things that worth worrying about is things you have direct control over, which is mainly HOW YOU REACT to a situation and how you treat other people.
Sometimes I think people talk about me or insult me, but I don’t care anymore. They’re entitled to their opinion, regardless to how misguided it is.
And if for some reason they really are talking bad about you and trying to confuse you, then they’re TRYING to get a REACTION out of you so if you have a negative reaction to what they say, then the jerks win. Just ignore them and be thankful that you have better things to do than to say petty things about other people.