i don’t know about you but after an episode of psychosis i feel somewhat traumatised and more than a little stupid. it’s like it takes time to heal from the fear and adrenaline pumping through your system and then i get angry. i feel like, how could i possibly have believed this was real. just because i see it in my head does not make it real and yet 3 or 4 times i have completely fallen for it and afterward, that makes me angry and left feeling violated by my own stupidity. i ask myself, what on earth does it take to make me go that far off of the rails? take for instance when i was hearing everybody’s voices around me from dog walkers to shop keepers, check out staff to petrol attendants, waiters to family, friends, psychiatric staff and other patients. i actually believed that they were really all telepathic and wanted me dead, tortured, raped, burnt alive, dismembered. you name it they wanted to do it to me. i could hear them all plotting against me and i fell for it for months on end. why? why couldn’t i discern that this was untrue? i don’t understand it. i am a pretty intelligent individual and yet my reasoning went straight out of the window. how? how on earth does this happen to a rational human being? when i stopped believing in it i was angry at myself. angry for failing to see myself as very ill at the time. angry with myself for letting this get the better of me and also somewhat traumatised at the the time and freedom of thought it had taken from me. hurt that i could’ve suspected my family of plotting against me. feeling stupid that i coud’ve fallen for it in the first place and that’s just one episode and there have been 5. some major, some minor. does anyone else feel this or is it just me?
well, for one myself, I am so relieved to see you post you realize that you were delusional ! Good job ! I wouldn’t worry about that you were delusional and believed it…schizophrenia is a tricky disease when it comes to our ill minds. I wish I could buy you flowers !
Nobody here chose to be schizophrenic; you can’t blame yourself for something outside of your control. It can be mentally draining to spend all of one’s life discerning between the rational and irrational thoughts racing through the mind.
i think that is the problem…that in my opinion it should be under my control.
There’s so much of ourselves that isn’t under our control: hunger, sexual appetite, emotions, feelings. We falsely believe we have a certain degree of control; that our actions are naturally rational and the product of choice. In actuality we have very little control, probably none. Our decisions and beliefs are governed by external or internal stimuli. Our rational mind deceives us, telling us that we have a rational basis for our thought-processes, when in actuality the rational mind merely justifies the decisions or beliefs we’ve already made or adopted.
If you keep prompting this urge for control, you’ll just end up frustrated and exhausted.
My last episode was minor but it still took 2 months to recover I was just exhausted from it for some reason. And probably went into depression over being upset that It happened again
I’m in that boat too… I get so mad at my own brain for the stuff it does…
I get embarrassed for the way I find I’ve acted and it just kills my confidence in myself.
This is exactly what I’ve demanded to know when I’ve had the “man in the mirror” conversation…
I sort of come back to myself a few days later… the head circus leaves and the swirling of the snow globe finally settles down… and then the brain tries to piece together why I don’t remember the past few days…
Then what worse is when I do begin to remember the past few days.
I’m in shock for a while to be sure… question after question… what just happened to me… and why.
Then the self anger sets in and I just hate myself for how I must have acted.
I love my family… I feel I lucked out in the family department… but I always feel a bit irritated and not on the level with them when I ask them… “what happened to me”
and they tell me “It doesn’t matter… it’s not you it’s the illness… we love you… we’re glad to see your feeling better today so yesterday doesn’t matter.”
But it matters to me… just tell me. But at the same time… I’m not sure I want to know.
It really does take some time to feel like I’m on solid ground again… to untangle the mind all over.
It is stressful and traumatic. I hate that feeling so much… but all I can do is try and make tomorrow better then today and try to make today better then yesterday.
Hi Jayne~
Having a thought or brain disorder doesnt make you unintelligent---like any other disease-you are still you! You do have more control over yourself than you think. Its just frustrating, I know. Dont kick yourself. Just take care of yourself the best you know how--thats all anyone can do.
You are ok hunni ( had to say that! 
I learned from my first psychosis that I don’t want to get caught in playing the truth-game about extreme beliefs. What I call the truth-game is the situation where you don’t take for granted some delusional belief, but try to check it for truth. I always seemed to find small chances or weird possibilities for the belief to possibly be true and I would opt for these exceptions rather than the rule. The truth-game with respect to weird beliefs is like saying: “it isn’t false until proven false”. I learned that it gave me a lot of peace of mind and control over my voices to not play this game, but to take leaps of faith instead, the trust-game, if you will. Trust or a choice for the world to be normal, and me to be rather misperceiving. Ofcourse this is difficult since it is exactly the opposite from paranoia. But for me it helped to realize that I was not necessarily in the business of checking for truth, but that I had a choice of what world I wanted to believe I lived in. I do not want to live in a world where everyone is after me, so even though it may seem like it, and even though there is a small chance that they are, I choose for a world where it is only me who makes it seem like that. In my second psychosis, I failed a fair amount of times in realizing that its not about truth but about a choice - it is hard not to play the truth-game, maybe the very essence of paranoia. But the times I succeeded made me feel very good and saved me many hours or days of paranoid checking.