Another really interesting thing I’ve looked back on is , I had an unshakable belief for a few years after my first episode that Mega dosing Niacin would cure my sz symptoms, (i learned about it from reading about dr.abram hoffer.)
Looking back on it, I needed somethng to believe in to keep me going, anything it could of been oranges or soup anything. What the niacin really did was buy me Time to dismantle my belief system and rebuild it and develop coping techniques.
Yes its tough to face the madness during psychosis. I have mixed feelings about this, in some way I feel good about the insight coming from within the psychosis itself. But I get emotionally high during psychosis. Everything is so much more intense than out of it. So to face that I had gone mad in such intensity is indeed a meltdown. Man I even had my hallucinations shouting at me: ‘you hear voices talking to you dude! you are batshit crazy!’ I don’t know, but I think there is some irony in there. What kept me going was the paradox that knowing you’re crazy implies that you’re not that crazy.
yeah i agree, i also had high emotions in psychosis both high and low just erratic. its difficult to look back on it but the best we can do is take it as a learning experience.
I’ve seen so many unusual things like weird people on the street to weird patterns in clouds, textures of objects, colors, i’ve been in the mental hospital for about 10 times or more , i struggle with thought broadcasting also,
Some of my hallucinations have seemed so solid… hitting all the senses… (even the sense of smell) that it was very hard not to believe they were real.
It’s given me a lot of false memories… it seemed so true. It’s hard to believe some of those incidents were all in my mind. There was a great day… that never really happened…
When I came back to level… the shame and embarrassment and stark reality hitting me in the face was too much to absorb.
I, not too many years ago, went out one night in my back yard and looked up at the stars and yelled out as loud as I could (thought broadcasting) in my mind, shouting for help for our world. Haven’t you ever just screamed out loud in your mind and directed it to anywhere. I really believe that “if” there were any other entities out there in space advanced enough to pick up on my broadcasting abilities they would have heard me. I was yelling in different directions when doing so as well. What did I have to loose , go figure.
Likewise. Started with Albert Ellis and Wayne Dyer. Moved on to Aaron Beck, Don Meichenbaum, Martin Seligman, et al. In time got to Alan Watts, Aldous Huxley and Jiddu Krishnamurti. Even developed a mindfulness-based overlay on REBT called self-talk identification, questioning and revision (SIQR) in school that included meditation and non-dominant handwriting to bust up self-destructive thinking.
Vis bipolar, I dug into the best professional psych texts the med school library had to offer and moved on from there with the help of amazon.com.
Werner Erhard (like him or not) was in NLP 40 years ago, so I began to get hip to it then. In time, I hit Eric Hoffer and the 20th century de-constructionists.
Amen. My personal experience. My experience observing psychotic and borderline patients for almost three decades.
Same here. I had to find another epistemology / phenomenology set-up. The non-Authoritarian (“look to see for yourself”) Eastern philosophies (which are not “religions” in any Western sense) got me there.
Mine did, as well. My alters got wild ideas they could fix the planet (to save themselves, of course). I still have to keep an eye on them.
I had to do that for quite a while before getting hip to the 10 StEP process. Once I got habituated / accustomed / normalized to it (as a “mantra”), I could use it to dispel my wild ideas – and the energy behind them – in very short order.
Yes. When I was still into belief, I had to find some that were relatively more functional than those that weren’t. I read pages 83-88 (Steps 10 & 11) in the AA Big Book every day for a year, thinking it would help. Worthwhile ideas were implanted, but belief, per say, did not get me out of the box. I had to follow Immanuel Kant out of pure reason into direct experience. I had to move from rationalism to empiricism.
Sounds like you’re taking one hell of a ride my friend. Hang on tight - reality’s got your back. You don’t need to figure it all out, though I’m sure you feel you want to know exactly what is going on.
You may wonder about lots of things during these trying times. But I strongly suggest that you keep at least one foot firmly planted on solid ground. And that is this: No one knows all.
Sometimes my hallucinations physically harm me actually. It hurts.
Hasn’t happened much though but it’s horrifying when it does.
The nde during my second psychosis was a big red flag, levitating off of my bed towards insanely evil beings behind me in an nde kind of was a big clue that something was happening. You wouldn’t even know that you were asleep either, you are entirely conscious in there and they have control of it. Fairly advanced to be able to do that i would say.
When i heard of the shamanic spirit walk i was “ooohhhhhh, nde’s, shamanic spirit walks. induced and very realistic virtual mind experiences, i get it.” It was exactly like being awake like i am right now, no difference at all.
Throw in some seeing the future, voices knowing things i could not, seeing hidden things in our reality that could be considered interdimensional in nature.
Yes, the male voice in my head, Alien, feels very real. He sometimes puts thoughts into my head, and sometimes he’s dormant, but he is there, I feel he’s very real.
I struggle with thought broadcasting. Its the way that life is to me. Its normal for everyone to hear everyone’s thoughts… There’s so many instances where I know I’m right. But at the same time people would say more about it… I think… Why keep it a secret?
Peoples thoughts and my thoughts are the only thing ever on my mind. This whole question of my thoughts being heard is all I think about. I’m tired of it. I want to just not care and think whatever the ■■■■ I want to think without getting paranoid or irritated that someone is listening.
One time I was on the phone with this guy for the first time and as he was talking I heard him say " you know when you talk people can hear your thoughts? " at the same time he was saying something else. Its like people say two things, the thing being talked about and then your thought or their own thought. Ugh all this makes some sort of sense in my head but when I try to explain it … I don’t do a very good job.
I feel like its understood by everyone already though.
Anyways… My hallucinations always seem very real.
Sorry for the long post. And thanks if you actually read it. Lol
I thought my hallucinations were the real world. I’d sit in a restaurant, and I’d hear people talking about me, and I was the only person in the place. At the time I experienced my hallucinations I very much thought they were the real world.
They were very real to me before I gained insight. Now some I can tell are obviously hallucinations like when I see disturbing monsters or corpses or weird stuff like people’s faces shrinking. Some I can’t tell if they’re hallucinations because they could be real like when I see someone walking down the street and then they vanish a second later. I didn’t know they weren’t real until they disappeared.
