I went into town earlier and I heard lots of people saying not just my first name, but my full name. Especially on the bus! Then I’d turn around to look at the them but they weren’t even paying any attention to me, so why would they be saying my name?
Literally every conversation I overheard included my name.
Does this happen to anyone else?
Yeah. No the way I finally learned to see it is that the subconscious schizophrenia is watching everything that you are watching and knows when it is most effective to throw in hallucinations and misintrepretations.
I think something goes wrong and the subconscious actually believes more strongly than your conscious self ever did that people should be messing with you… so It goes on trying to fulfill the crazy demands of conscious expectations jsut because it’s been trained to…
if any of that makes sense. I get those all the time… serious I’ll have a pleasant interaction with someone and then as soon as their face is out of eyesight I’ll hear them spouting some crap that fits into my greater psychotic experience
It’s interesting that you describe it like that… it reminds me of a passage from a book I have read about a man with schizophrenia:
“I have an illness, a disease with the shape and sound of a snake. Whenever I learn something new, it learns it too.”
My psychiatrist said I do not have schizophrenia or psychosis even though I have hallucinations and delusions. I don’t care about the label/diagnosis but he just tried to normalise everything I said I was experiencing.
For example, I told him about how I hear people saying my name whenever I go outside and he said that is normal. No. It. Is. Not. Lmao.
They might say that everyone gets it, but realistically there is a threshold at which it’s a problem.
The same if it distresses you!
The quote is too true.
One thing I came up with recently though is the underlying paradox.
Your psychosis is actually not real. It can never prove itself 100 percent no matter how much faith or belief you put into it. It’ll get to the point that you are so tired of fighting it that you yourself begin to connect dots yourself to aid in your sense of delusion being real. It’s an attempt to no longer be confused or in the jostle of trying to escape the illness’s influence or just give in and let it be real.
The jostle is where you are stuck. Regardless of what you or the illness wants because it can’t actually prove itself real. Simply because it isn’t.
It’s almost like you gotta drop sorting out the pieces and just say “prove it. Prove it in the long run.” And from there you just keep skepticism in mind. Keep to a state of disbelief in general. Just really pressure your illness to try and prove itself and just watch all the nonsense it tries. Then look for patterns. Not in the logic, but in the manifestations.
It’s all just chaos to keep you guessing… Because whatever greater conflict your head ran into within itself… It just wants to distract you from getting back to yourself and a normal life. It feeds on your focus on it.
It’s called neuroplasticity. It’s how the brain adapts to new things. The schizophrenia itself feels that it has a purpose and use and should survive. It’s purpose will even change over time. Really though it’s just a pack of neurons thinking they’re doing their job.
That’s the stage I’m at. Psychosis really does have a minimal impact on my life at this point, but only seldom do I find life immersive enough to really grip my attention away from the ongoing noise.
I do think over time it will subside, but it takes careful consideration and navigation and coping as well as accepting that it probably won’t go away… Just to keep from getting wounded and or picking at the scabs…
Oh I should add though. Please take everything I say purely on the grounds of consideration…
Like that’s just what’s been working for me
I get that a lot, but I have a hard to pronounce name so I tend to believe I’m mishearing other words and thinking they’re my name. Like when a kid yells hey Mom in a store a lot of times if it’s not really clear it sounds like my name but then I just brush it off because it was probably a kid yelling hey Mom. Does that make sense? I’m sleepy and not making sense.