It’s something that’s been kind of boggling me lately. I feel like almost a completely different person from who I was just a couple years ago.
I’ve made posts about my progress before, but seriously. I wouldn’t say my delusional thoughts have decreased, but with my reality check methods as well as skills I’ve employed from lucid dreaming I’ve been able to shoot down most of them. It’s getting to the point where I’m immediately skeptical of all of them and that is just crazy to me. I mean geez, I remember when I used to go online and make crazed forum posts about my whatever my beliefs were and having people tell me I was crazy and just thinking they didn’t understand. I remember filling journals with pages and pages of the lies I thought were truth. I would be absolutely obsessive over it all. My mind revolved around the delusions and now it’s like I’m just always aware. I think I’m successfully transferring the awareness I have in dreams over to real life and my delusions and I am so proud of that.
My last true paranoia attacks were last summer. I remember staying up all night rocking in fetal position reading the same bible verses over and over because I thought the demons had come back. I ran around the apartment like a crazy person trying to get away from them. Locked myself in the bathroom tearing at my head to try to block them out. Or the time where a guy just talked to me on the road and I became convinced he had somehow followed me back to the apartment and was hiding in the bathroom ready to kill me and I locked myself in my room for the entire day until my roommate got back. I can’t even express how crazy it is that I haven’t had a paranoia attack in that long. (It used to be a nightly phenomenon, at my worst times it happened during the day too) And before that summer I hadn’t had one since the year before. They are becoming less and less frequent. Really the only thing I’m dealing with now is my mirror fear fixation and I’m improving on that slowly too.
I don’t see the evil faces when I close my eyes as often anymore, and when I do they don’t scare me as much as they used to. Im teaching myself to overcome the visual distortions I get by retraining my brain to look for normal objects around my room instead of constantly looking for monsters, evil things that want to hurt me, etc.
My main issues now would be dissociation/derealization stuff, (which don’t really bother me to begin with, it’s more just a very trippy odd feeling) and my anxiety (which I have also learned many coping mechanisms for, thanks to therapy) I’ve also got to deal with trauma related to hallucinations (?) but I’m making progress there as well. (As I’ve mentioned before I’ve learned how to pull myself out of flashbacks-also using techniques I learned in lucid dreams, and have finally accepted that there are no demons around me anymore, which was the HUGEST thing for me, I have never felt so relieved or free in my life)
I don’t even hear or speak with the voices as much anymore. They passively comment on things from time to time, but other then that I rarely “hear” them the same way I used to. Some of the voices I admit I was sad to see go (not all were bad) but I’m taking it as a sign I’m getting better.
It’s baffling because I’m not sure why exactly everything is improving so much. I’d like to give myself and my coping mechanisms the benefit of the doubt, but there’s a very good chance that it’s my brain chemistry changing as well. Is this what remission feels like?? After 19 years of terror?? Why now? Is it going to go back to the way things were?? That’s a huge fear of mine. I don’t want to go back to having little touch with reality and rarely ever sleeping and ugh.
Anyways I just wanted to share my excitement over this with you guys. My hopes and prayers are that all of you can make similar progress or are making it! Stories of triumph over this thing make me smile every time I read them. Keep fighting the good fight everyone!! I know I will!!