Practice Updates:

Have you ever felt that there is no way forward that doesn’t sell out your heart and soul?

I believe the clinic I have worked for over the last fifteen years is fixing to be shut down. I am facing a crossroads. I have spent years developing skills that seek to reconstruct a culture of psychosis amid people who are institutionalized. I believe I have good therapy skills and want to branch out an be more independent from the bloody system.

I may have a number of job interviews coming up yet, wonder if can I get hired self-identifying with lived experience with psychosis? Furthermore, most paths forward seem to include insurance panels and group practices that seek people who can work with depression and anxiety. It feels like a niche of psychosis is only for pioneers.Without belonging to a group practice or focusing on brief interventions, it may be hard to get on insurance panels.

One thing I have never wanted to do was leave behind people who suffer from psychosis. It has never seemed fair that people train and fail to acculturate to people with psychosis and then move on to a paying class. Unless I open up a private practice, it seems unlikely that I will be able to develop my niche. That means paying for health insurance and taking a blind leap of faith and perhaps a per diem job. Gulp!

Blog Updates:

Currently the dilemma of finding work has interrupted my efforts on the blog this month. I have only written three blogs and had one podcast interview since my last update. That said, I did manage to get published on Mad in America.

In the process of getting that post edited, I was given a perspective that may affect my work. I realize that I have two voices. One is professional and that is what Mad in America wants me to build on. I also have an authentic and creative voice that is present in my memoir and that I seek to reserve for my narrative essays, which are more creative in nature.

For a long time, I wanted to merge those voices. I wanted to write a therapy book that was full of one-line zingers and maintain a snappy outsider perspective. I’d find myself quoting rappers to teach my concepts rather than other therapists.

When the Mad in America editor suggested that my voice was me becoming retraumatized when I refused to stop letting it rip, it let me know a little more about my audience when it comes to speaking to other providers or family members. I realize I have to develop the professional voice in order to be heard. My creative writing is where I can use my authentic voice and let out the part of me that is an artist.

I guess it is a good time to work on that professional voice as I am preparing to follow my dream and potentially open a private practice. My next projects may need to be more professional. I do have to say, I am currently writing a creative essay and am enjoying it. It will show up on my blog in future months. Perhaps I may try to publish it in journals first.

Speaking Updates:

I also have some upcoming opportunities to present my training.to a local clinic over the next two weeks.

Additionally, I will be co-facilitating the Hearing Voices Network family group starting on Monday this week.

Finally, in February I will have the opportunity to do a reading of my memoir and other writing at a book store. So, I hope there will be more opportunities to connect with you very soon!!!

So, I am hoping my followers will stay close over the next months as I transition to marketing efforts for the potential of a private practice. Transitions are stressful!!

The post The Niche that Doesn’t Seem to Exist appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

Stories related to psychosis can be intense, and can lead to traumatic recall when a sufferer retells them and does not feel contained or believed within the relationship. Perhaps this is the reason many therapists, family members, and psychiatric wards learn to shut down the telling of the story.

Shutting down stories can be seen as protecting the psychosis survivor from unnecessarily reliving the experience and going through the distress again. Perhaps this is done to avoid a fight or yet another power struggle over reality. Activating trauma that you cannot stand to consider is a bad idea, right?

Imagine being a person who has experienced psychosis and having the entire mental health system agree not to let you tell your story as a boundary. This strategy is employed over and over again despite the fact that recipients of this kind of care often become progressively more isolated and distressed over time.

Perhaps no one in the system can imagine what it is like to experience systemic indifference to traumatic material. Indeed, is it really so impossible to believe that these experiences are real and there for a purpose? Is it really so hard to believe that the person in psychosis may have some perceptions that are spot-on accurate? Not acknowledging them can be cause for further social withdrawal, instill a sense of hopelessness, and do further damage to an already ailing self-esteem.

Trying to stay on the same page as everybody else may teach a person to suppress their experiences. While symptom suppression may decrease social attacks and ridicule, I also believe it is the wrong tact for many. Too many people suppress, isolate and withdraw from social functioning. Is it not possible to create spaces and relationships in which experiences of psychosis can be dealt with in mindful manners? If survivors can be believed by supporters, if their experiences can be credited with having profound meaning, then perhaps outcomes could be better.

A New Strategy with Survivor-Led Groups

I have come to strongly believe that shutting down stories related to psychosis is the wrong thing to do. I believe this so strongly that I have come out as a therapist with lived experience with madness. I regularly share my experiences in group therapy to facilitate group reflection and the telling of stories.

I credit the Hearing Voices Network for prompting me to take this plunge. Word of survivor-led groups achieving remarkably different results prompted me to start a curriculum for professional groups. In the curriculum, which I have turned into a training and a group therapy guide, I deconstruct what psychosis is into solvable components.

It’s true that there are times when I wonder if coming out mad was the best career decision. I have had to bravely admit my vulnerabilities, which sometimes seems to hurt my credibility. And yet I find that being an artfully unreliable narrator helps guide people to their own truth more effectively. I feel I get better results having taken the plunge.

Being out has helped me exponentially in creating specialized care for psychosis survivors. As a result, I have a number of suggestions for how to encourage the telling of stories without retraumatizing survivors in group settings and in individual encounters. Many of these suggestions are based on replicating realities that happen in survivor-led groups.

1. Eradicating Stigma and Grounding Participants

Many supporters actually believe that people who experience psychosis are fragile. It is one of the three most dominant stigmas about mental health challenges, according to Patrick Corrigan’s research.¹ As a professional, I have heard this said so many times and I am convinced that my colleagues say this because they don’t know what “psychosis” feels like. At times, simply reversing this stigma can help ground someone who is in psychosis and remind them about how tough they are to be handling such real trauma.

There are other grounding techniques that I have utilized when I sense the group is starting to feel traumatized. Often, acknowledging the trauma in the room and allowing the groups to socialize and focus on related movies, music, or art can help. If group members initiate this process, it is good to compliment and acknowledge what they are doing as being helpful. Instead of controlling the group and staying on course, collaborating and enhancing these efforts is advisable.

2. Believing that Psychosis is Happening for a Reason and Holds Truths

I already said this, but it stands to be further emphasized.

I believe that if classifying experiences that trigger psychosis as an ‘illness’ can retraumatize many, finding value in those experiences will help ground many psychosis survivors who are in distress. In other words, when the helper meets the content of the survivor’s experience with curiosity and interest, the psychosis survivor is less likely to be traumatized. In contrast, if the supporter exudes the belief that the psychosis survivor will be traumatized, this outcome will be more likely to come true.

Often the survivor leader is excited to learn that others relate to them, and has a high level of hope that others can achieve wellness in spite of disturbing material. Thus, getting naturally excited when a person is sharing details and having strong beliefs about recovery being possible helps deepen the threshold for what others can bear.

Additionally, studying different causation frameworks that psychosis survivors hold gives participants a basis for understanding how experiences that trigger psychosis are possible.

In therapy groups I have often suggested there are six styles of causation frameworks that operate in different ways at different times. Sometimes the experiences may be caused by or related to political, psychological, traumatic, scientific, spiritual or artistic factors.

Knowing which framework explains a given trigger is often impossible! However, I believe that the more types of frameworks the psychosis survivor uses to explain the triggers, the more likely that they will be able to navigate the trigger in a functional manner. Positive knowledge about all explanations helps one find the value of each experience.

The more explanations the supporter learns, the better they can help make valuable meaning of these disturbing experiences. Giving up and calling the experiences meaningless does not help.

When there is a purpose for suffering, it is far more helpful.

3. Sharing Your Own Experiences with Psychosis

One of the huge benefits of survivor-led groups is that the leader also shares their own experience with psychosis. This opens people up to telling their story because it defies the dysfunctional boundary that exists between clinicians and patients—the presumption that the clinician is ‘well’ and the patient needs to learn wellness from them because they know better.

Additionally, when a survivor leads the group and discloses their own experience it sets the stage for more sharing.

One reason I believe this works is that if group members are free to judge the leader as being delusional, they get the chance to do some projective identification testing. If they do judge the leader as being delusional and see that it doesn’t bother the leader, they will become more emboldened to take the same risks and withstand others who may try to reality-check them.

Another reason self-disclosure in survivor-led groups works is because many in the group will believe the leader’s story and support them, as that is the way they want to be treated if they tell of their own experiences. Therefore, a leader who is prepared to believe some pretty outrageous stuff in a reciprocal manner is generally appreciated by many in the group.

Whatever place the group participant may be in, the tendency is to become compelled to share. I believe that sharing breaks down defenses and helps the participant let go of the traumatically reinforced material.

4. Spotting and Sharing Related Experiences to Achieve Cultural Competence

Many workers in the mental health system might say they can’t share their experiences with psychosis because they haven’t had them. Though I agree that it can be harder to relate to psychosis material if you haven’t had those experiences of being in a crisis, I think most workers likely have had some related experiences; if they learned to identify these and articulate them it would be helpful for psychosis survivors.

If a mental health worker sits in group and understands the experiences that trigger psychosis, they will probably learn to be able to relate. Additionally, being able to relate normalizes psychosis experiences and makes it safer to disclose without feeling like others don’t believe you and don’t care. In the definition of psychosis that I have created, things like dreams, interpersonal interactions, and intuitions can trigger alternative realities. I think workers can learn to relate using those common experiences and learn to join the conversation.

I think this is a measure of cultural competence. If you can see serendipitous events and imagine thoughts that may come up from them, why not share those with the psychosis survivor? Why not think about how you might explain those experiences in creative manners? Doing so isn’t going to hurt you. It is a sign of wellness and empathy.

5. Knowing When the Story Is Really There to Test You

It is important to know when a psychosis survivor is simply trying to establish her or his right to tell the story. In the past, survivors may have been interrupted or challenged when they tried to tell their story. Some will tell fragmented stories to see if they can get away with it and keep your interest and concern. I have been known to get in there and fish for special message experiences to demonstrate that I am there with them. However, it can be important to notice when this isn’t wanted and just let the person tell their story without being judged for doing so.

In many cases, the traumatic response may happen when the test has failed yet again. Indeed, I think it is important not to be concerned about whether the psychosis survivor’s comments are accurate or fit into your reality. Perhaps it is possible for the leader to make a few inaccurate-sounding comments themselves. This helps normalize and permit those experiences and paradoxically challenges the psychosis survivor to question themselves.

This is not to say that there is not a time to challenge an inaccurate comment that is made about you; there is a point where this can be effective. But first you have to repeatedly pass the tests. And acknowledging that you don’t understand everything about yourself and that they may be seeing something you are not aware of can help put off the challenge until the test is passed.

6. Bringing Other People or Situations Into the Discussion

If I am afraid that a person is going to get triggered by sharing their psychosis story because the group is inattentive or emotionally absent, I may try interrupting and identifying a triggering experience the participant has referenced and ask other group members if they can relate to the experience. If I am not in group, I may think of a similar experience I have heard before and share that experience to prove that the person is not alone. Usually, at least, I can relate to the triggering experience and share a story. This not only prevents the participant from feeling quite so alienated, it reminds them that others can relate and deepens the support in the room.

Likewise, if I am able to listen and discern some conspiracy ideas that might explain some of the triggering experiences and I fear retraumatization, I may propose that the group talk about that particular brand of conspiracy and how it really is possible. Again, this may help the participant feel like they are not alone. Group conspiracy talk is another way to deepen the threshold of what the group can tolerate and invite stories.

With other people relating and participating, the person telling the story is less likely to be retraumatized and may feel more supported. Then, it is a great idea to return to the story and hear it out intensely without having need for reality tests.

7. Addressing the Fact That You May Be Recording What Is Said

In many countries where the Hearing Voices Network has flourished, such as England, the Netherlands, and New Zealand, socialized medicine enables support groups to be funded outside the system where there is no need for clinical notes. This also helps create a sense of safety that invites disclosure.

Indeed, if group records are going to be taken by the facilitator for reimbursement purposes, that needs to be addressed in the room, identifying the potential for conspiracy.

Letting the participants know what I believe about the notes and the potential for them to be used in an abusive manner without my knowledge is a strategy I often employ. I point to computer screens and light fixtures and suggest that if they can put cameras down peoples’ colons, they can certainly bug the room without my ability to protect the group participants. I believe it is a disservice to promise a psychosis survivor that their material is safe. We are not in control of their ideas of reference that may be confirming unsafe realities. At least when the helper acknowledges the limits of their power it validates the concern.

When I document what takes place in a group, I also note that I have used my own lived experience to crack open stories. I tell participants that I do that. I think doing so demonstrates integrity and clarifies that the note is not written with the intent to do them harm. I also think doing so reduces stigma of the chart reviewers and takes away the perception that the helper will turn on the group participant and abuse power.

It is ideal when these issues can be avoided, but I also think it is possible to address them if you have to take notes in order to bill in the health care system.

Specialized Care Is Necessary

I believe that utilizing these strategies and other well-documented efforts of the hearing voices movement can help clinicians grow and come to a point where they can listen to stories of psychosis and contain them just like survivors can. I think that people who choose to specialize in this type of care need opportunities to grow and learn to contain such stories, and that survivors need opportunities to become specialists and lead groups themselves. Specialized care is most certainly needed.

The post Seven Strategies to Use that Help Avoid Retraumatization While Working with Psychosis: appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

“So, you have bipolar,” said the well-meaning psychiatrist, “So what’s the big deal?”

I had been talking about the stigma associated with presuming that all mental health challenges were disorders. He interrupted me.

But wait! This was the first time anyone ever suggested that I had bipolar!

Was I supposed to give up my perspective and feel I had achieved something? Somehow was this a more socially acceptable diagnosis? Was getting the right diagnosis supposed to fix everything that happened to me?

As a statistic, I was being moved from the 3.2 million individuals in the United States diagnosed with schizophrenia to the 5.7 million who experience bipolar. Of those with bipolar 70% experience psychosis during mania and 50% during depression.

I had been stable ten years. For the past four years I had been running innovative professional group psychotherapy that focuses on exploring psychosis across diagnostic categories.

I’d had the privilege or cracking open hundreds of stories and contrasting them against the diagnosis of differing staff psychiatrists. I felt I learned a lot about the mentality of each distinctive psychiatrist by doing this.

You see, if your bipolar is like mine and includes experiences associated with psychosis a lot can happen to you in the mental health system. If you stick with me through this article you may learn some innovative ways to cope with psychosis across diagnostic divides.

Common Reasons that People with Psychosis Get Diagnosed Bipolar: 

From my vantage point, there are many subjective reasons for bipolar to be selected over schizophrenia or schizoaffective. These subjective factors do not always involve a perfect equation of DSM-V criteria. I’ll go ahead and admit that I do not believe DSM criteria really helps the professional understand the reality of psychosis. Nor is being diagnosed with a psychotic disorder likely to result in more humane and appropriate treatment.

Perhaps, you get diagnosed bipolar because you have suffered a mood component and have a history of being expressive about it in the past. Maybe, your psychosis experiences are intermittent and discontinue with proper support. Perhaps you express experiences that are positive and spiritual that can make your mood and energy soar. Or maybe your body is responsive to small doses of antipsychotics.

Many get diagnosed bipolar because they have enough judgement to convincingly conceal or minimize their psychosis experiences. Sometimes you get the stamp because the psychiatrist respects and has hope for you. If you are a person of color or don’t come from a class the professionals relate to, you are less likely to get the bipolar stamp. I don’t feel I personally need research to believe this to be true. I believe my observations over time are acute enough. However, I do understand that this research does exist.

In my experience some professionals are open to learning and seeing people through the bipolar lenses, and some are more chronic in their ways.

Why Upgrade Your Diagnosis?

When in madness, there was no need to upgrade my diagnosis. I was living in an alternate reality, and I only wanted to feel safe. Being bipolar only meant that I was in danger of being killed and having it called a suicide. All I wanted was to get out of the reality as quick as possible.

In my experience of wellness, there is more of a sense of social acceptability associated with a bipolar diagnosis. Perhaps this is largely because of the misconception that schizophrenia is degenerative or only gets worse over time. Although this is not true, it’s arguable that social stigma does not lead the majority of people to believe otherwise. For example, in 2006 schizophrenia.com suggests a host of negative statistics about schizophrenia including that only 35% of sufferers experience repeated episodes without returning to functioning.

Still, negative statistics (like the one above) enhance the damage that gets done when supporters act without understanding that it is likely that people will heal from psychosis. Good people become institutionalized by bad statistics. Families may not finance a sufferer the opportunity to recover if they keep in mind statistic like that.

Looking closer at that 35% statistic, they come from E. Fuller Torrey’s 2006 statistics which suggest that after ten years, 15% of schizophrenics will be permanently hospitalized and 10% will have killed themselves verses those studied over thirty years during which 10% end up permanently hospitalized and 15% will have killed themselves. This starts to sound like a 35% throw away rate.

Consider that many health plans do not even offer treatment to people with schizophrenia. Likewise, I know locally it is easier to find a professional bipolar group or specialist than it is to find a professional schizophrenia group or specialist.

Less stigma, less negative statistics means less social persecution. That is why many people who are looking to make social rehabilitation gains try to suppress their psychosis and fight against a schizophrenia diagnosis. Many suffers learn to do this so people don’t reject you.

What it Takes to Suppress Psychosis Regardless of Diagnosis?

How does one suppress psychosis? I think it has a lot to do with having a project that is very meaningful to you and vying to be successful with it. Then, the sufferer just cannot let anything get in their way. Sound stupidly easy? The best way I can convey that it isn’t is to share pieces of my experience.

In State hospital, most staff who thought I was schizophrenic would just dominate and humiliate me. I believed that if people knew I was schizophrenic that that type of treatment would resume. My complex appeals to staff to convey that I okay with the FBI resulted in a beat-down by the cowboy security squad. Begging for aspirin with a highly uncomfortable fever, caused one nurse to write a note that I was sexually inappropriate with her. These are not the types of things you want to see happen to you on the outside,

Meanwhile many of my peers tried to recruit me into their white supremacy gang, or the Mexican mafia, or the FBI, or in one case, the Navy Seals. Sound safe in there?

These kinds of experiences cannot be spoken of when you suppress your experience. Nothing happened! They become buried secrets.

But the treatment that had the most lasting impact was the experiences I had to suppress in the community.

There was the woman who flashed me a secret service badge. She initially said I would be safe if I took the over-priced apartment. She showed up again the day I came home to find my apartment had been ransacked and accused my uncle of doing it.

There was also the mail that came from my county work applications that was repeatedly torn open in spite of my complaints at the postal service.

There was the occasion when I was followed on my way to work by a resident I knew from Seattle (I was working in California.) He had handcuffs and a jean jacket with a hand made sign that read CIA on it.

There was the time a computer hacker marked-up my resume at the local library. Several encounters later he told me that he worked for the multinational corporations.

This kind of treatment accompanied me for two years and stopped when I got professional employment. It was traumatic and perpetuated my emergency state, but I learned to pretend it didn’t matter.

If you can ignore the fact that you have no rights and just persist at your immediate project you can overcome psychosis.

It’s Just a Political Discussion:

Resuming professional employment, I worked seven days a week. Eventually, I managed to get a psychotherapy license and earn enough for a down payment on a house in the bay area. I met my wife and got married.

So finally, once I got that kind of support behind me and put a well-meaning psychiatrist in a spot that challenged his perception of disorders, I got bumped up from schizophrenia to bipolar, yay!

Now the DSM-V, which wasn’t yet written during my escapades, says that people with bipolar who go through psychosis in a low mood can experience fear and paranoia. This is exactly what I experienced. Perhaps, one day I’ll get out of my depression and become hypomanic! That gives me something to look forward to!

However, when we examine the recent research this point may become moot.

Laboratory Science Supports Treating Psychosis Across Diagnostic Divides!

In the laboratory they are coming out with scientific findings that strongly support the view that diagnostic differentiation is irrelevant.

In fact, in a very recent article published by The Psychiatric Times, schizophrenia is being considered a syndrome that is more of a neurodevelopmental disorder than an illness or disease. Additionally, these findings do not support different kinds of neurodevelopmental evidence for bipolar verses schizophrenia verses schizoaffective, verses depression with psychosis.

If treated poorly, the neurodevelopmental process will become more extreme! Thus, sufferers can be trained to cope like dyslexics can be trained to read. This vantage point can help promote training in social functioning like specialized job placement programs like the IPS model out of Dartmouth. This practice can help participants in early prevention programs, or at any stage of recovery. get back to work.

Of course, there are many other social skills to learn when you have to suppress trauma! Of course, social skills are gained through socialization groups.

Other Considerations Stemming from The Research:

Moreover, I believe that understanding that you have an underlying condition like ADD, Dyslexia, or Autism can save you from living out your depression and mania to their fullest. Instead of feeling like a slave to the moods, neurodevelopmental understanding helps understand the basis for the moods. By learning that there are reasons you haven’t been included, one can use it to make meaning of depression and play back tapes of the consequences of mania.

Additionally, sufferers can learn about ways they have been traumatized for being different. Also paying attention to real underlying trauma that exacerbates the expression of the syndrome becomes important.

All this can help people with bipolar psychosis learn how to live in their strengths and focus on their abilities and the ways they are exceptional. Albert Einstein, Temple Grayden, and Earnest Hemmingway are just a few of many examples of how people with neurodevelopmental issues can contribute to society in very advanced ways.

As a society, some of us are learning that celebrating neuro-diversity, like they do in some more traditional societies, can lead to better outcomes for people who are built differently. In fact, some might argue that if the problem is neurodevelopmental, expecting symptom suppression without accommodations and providing support groups is just not humane.

Treatment for Psychosis Across Diagnostic Categories:

Here is where I can help other bipolar people if they are willing to explore those terrifying experiences with other good people who are stigmatized. This may involve getting to know people who are from different cultures and may still be in challenging circumstances.

Losing privilege and connecting with those less fortunate is so counter-intuitive in this land where the haves hate the have-nots. But oddly going against the grain in this manner can help exponentially!

If your bipolar experience includes psychosis, treatment can exist in group therapy that normalizes and permits you to express your stories without getting punished. If you are encouraged to work with people with differing diagnostic histories you can learn to be a leader and supporter.

No doubt, the mental health incarceration system varies based on the socioeconomics of your locale. Regardless, it will train you to suppress those psychosis experiences and pretend like they are not real. If you fail to suppress, you will be rejected and ridiculed by others and if this upsets you, you will be punished by going back to the hospital.

If you are able to play the game and can return to work, go ahead and become the bipolar diagnosis. To do so you can simply engage in social rehabilitation and work without upsetting the applecart. It becomes a political discussion with a psychiatrist like the one I had above.

Group Therapy for Psychosis:

Okay, I’ll admit, suppression is not always so easy for all of us. But over the years I have seen many individuals hide their psychosis, avoid my groups, and pretend like what they went through was just bipolar stuff. Indeed, I had to play this game for six years. I had to start over again without anyone knowing anything about me.

However, if you are like me and had to overcome some dramatic circumstances, suppressing all those experiences and trauma may turn you into a traumatized droid. A part of you is permanently disassociated and all you can do is work and try to act in ways that keep you out of trouble.

I am here to promote one potential outlet that I was eventually able to use: group therapy in which the content of psychosis is shared and participants learn from each other.

For example, I hear very few voices and never thought of aliens, but when I learn from people who do, it helps me be more flexible in the meaning I make of what happened to me. My desire to collaborate and support helps me be flexible and decreases my distress.

As a psychotherapist, I started leading these groups and sharing my story to prompt others to feel comfortable in doing so. I learned that by sharing my story and demonstrating that I had recovered, I could use my suffering towards a useful purpose.

Whether you do it as a professional, a peer counselor, or a volunteer, getting support for those things you’ve been through and teaching others how to survive with psychosis can be very rewarding. It can help bring you back to life!

Opportunities to do this can be available through the hearing voices network movement. This is an international movement that seeks to set up peer support outside the mental health system. In the United States, you can click: www.hvn-usa.org!

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The post Learn How I Upgraded My Schizophrenia to Bipolar, And What That Means appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

When you think a person has a delusional idea, it is so important to remember that they often have amassed a significant amount of evidence to convince them they are correct. They likely know what they used to think, it is just that what they currently think seems to be more accurate. In fact, we consider ways the persons’ course of study might make some of their ideas more accurate than mainstream ideas on some occasions!

Ask Yourself: How Did You Get So Lucky to Witness a Delusion!

In many cases, the delusional person has experience in the mental health system has had other people tell them they are delusional in the past. Thus, the fact that they have let you know their thoughts is significant. To know how to respond, it can be important to know why they have told you their thought in the first place.

Maybe they have told you because:

• You have spent time with them so that they trust you,
• They have hope that you can help them,
• They presume you and everyone else have had the same experiences that they have,
• They are desperate and endangered in their emergency,
• or perhaps they are just testing you out to see where you stand in the conspiracy.

It is a good idea to understand why they have shared the idea and be delighted that they did.

In group therapy, I have found countering with your own experience with delusions and stories about what happened to you, and encouraging others to do the same, helps invite exploration. More on this later.

Don’t Presume Delusions are Wrong, Explore and Confirm Ways They Are Right:

In dealing with people in a mental health setting who are labeled as delusional, across the board, I think the worst thing that you can do is confront them and tell them you think they are wrong! They historically don’t have enough support in the world to be able to agree to disagree and it can really hurt them to hear that you too don’t believe or care about what they are going through.

Ultimately, more and more we are finding that voices and other experiences that make them delusional have value! The hearing voices movement has helped emphasize the importance of this. Often, the delusional person will need to know that you believe this before they will let you be of assistance to them.

Even if a delusional person asks you your opinion and says it will help, I believe you will be far more valuable to them if you are willing to spend a little time getting to know the journey of what they are experiencing without having an agenda.

Believe me they will be testing you to see if you have an agenda.

How can it hurt them or you to listen for a while? We often entertain ideas from distinct ideologies and look for common ground to make relationships. Instead of looking for ways they are wrong, confirm ways that they are right.

Join in and Contribute Conspiracy Ideas:

It is far more effective to share conspiracy ideas that you have yourself to normalize their experience. Do you think JFK was really killed by Lee Harvey Oswald? Clearly there is some degree of conspiracy that you can buy into! In group therapy that I have run over the past eleven years, it is helpful to normalize conspiracy topics and collaborate with them.

When “delusional” people get together and get invited to share, they often help each other by working together to excavate these ideas or experiences. Often, they will not volunteer their thoughts unless other conspiracies are on the table. Expounding on conspiracy with peers is a great way to tease them out.

I have learned to respect conspiracy ideas as bearing the potential of being more correct than mainstream ideas; but also bearing the possibility of being wrong when examined over time. I find that most delusional people can accept this with reflection. A group is often effective if it just lets the conspiracies rip and gets people talking.

The Importance of Finding Out How the Idea Came into Being:

As I suggested above, conspiracy ideas don’t come from nowhere. They come from a long string of experiences that get put together. I call these experiences special messages. A lot can be achieved when a delusional person is willing to identify what experiences they have had that help them think this way.

When experiences can be uncovered and identified, I believe the delusional person will feel a sense of relief and will be more mindful of those experiences. I don’t believe that identifying experiences only serves to reinforce them,

Think of it this way: being more mindful means, they judge them less and accept them more. Instead of racing to solve the conspiracy that may threaten their existence, they can reflect on the one experience with someone else. As if each experience was traumatic, uncovering it and clearly explaining is more likely to help the person let go of it.

Identifying These Underlying Experiences in a Group Context:

In group therapy with other delusional people, defining the different kinds of experiences that can lead to delusions (or what I prefer to term divergent views) can help facilitate associated stories that highlight certain kinds of special messages. A group facilitator can share their own experience with an experience and others can relate to it. This way individuals become more aware of their experiences.

Examples of special message experiences are things like:

Uncanny intuitions,

ESP,

Sensing the thoughts of another,

Having others be able to sense your thoughts

Premonitions,

Hearing voices,

Visions,

Dreams,

Tactile torture,

Interpersonal feedback,

Seeing clues of conspiracy in media,

Seeing clues in words,

Seeing clues in numbers,

Seeing clues in the world that surround you

Not Moving too Fast:

Often, before a delusional person is willing to disclose their underlying experience, they may need to have a corrective experience of making sure they will not be punished or incarcerated again for sharing their ideas. There is a tendency in mainstream treatment to impose reality on delusional people that often comes with loss of rights, unwanted medications, and, most commonly, by being ignored or called “crazy” or “delusional.”

Additionally, many have experienced severe poverty, like homelessness, as a result of their delusional ideas and these kinds of depravations can be perceived as an even worse form of punishment.

Thus, a facilitator is wise to recognize when a delusional person just needs to tell their shocking stories and beliefs without connecting with others or disclosing underlying experiences. This story, while it may raise eyebrows, may be getting told to establish safety and freedom from punishment. It needs to be encouraged and valued by the facilitator even if other delusional people don’t get it.

What About Reality Testing?

Someone who is delusional for some years likely feels oppressed in the mental health. Reality testing often leads to an end in the exploration or relationship.

It is important to remember that, in most cases, the person who is looking for reality testing would prefer being in control of the test. They may ask you questions and trick you to get authentic answers.

For best outcomes, anticipate this and provide persistent authenticity. Thus, all questions need to be answered with honesty, without defensiveness, and with congruent non-verbal and verbal responses.

Rarely will your feedback resolve the issue and experiences they are having. It is possible that the experiences they are having will continue to some extent for a while. But hopefully they can get to the point where they trust you through it all.

I work with delusional people a long time before I try to provide reality feedback. I generally do this when the person is testing me to see if I am the mastermind of their problems. When I am aware of this happening, I believe correcting them via non-verbal cues, and communicating about the feedback they are receiving from me can help.

In general, I will support what I think they believe to the best of my ability. Indeed, I still believe that often delusional people are correct in ways that are surprising.

Teaching the Public What You Know:

In fact, delusional people are quite common. But when delusional people are treated in the mental health system, the result be very severe isolation. Too often, this isolation is totally reinforced in repressive treatment that tries to further suppress traumatic experiences, rather than heal.

A far better strategy is to try to change public opinion about underlying experiences like ESP or voices. are and how to further include people who experience an influx of them in crisis. Most people get feedback from dreams, nonverbal communication, and intuitions, which are types of underlying experiences. They can learn to relate

The post How to Help When You Think Someone Might Be Delusional appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

How many parents out there would rather learn that their child had developed a life-threatening cancer, than hear that their child carries a diagnosis of schizophrenia? Historically burned-out doctors may be known to make such negative statements about schizophrenia at the time of diagnosis. If they end up being wrong, they simply re-diagnose the sufferer with bipolar; but still their comment happened. Perhaps, it challenged you to devalue your loved one.

Well, I am a mental health professional, and nothing excites me more than meeting someone else who has experiences associated with schizophrenia. I instantly know aspects of what they have gone through. It makes them a potential friend to me. Additionally, I come equipped with handfuls of tools that I think may be helpful for them. I am additionally curious to see what they might teach me about myself.

Strange thing is, I am not alone in my world view. Maybe you have heard of the international movement called the Hearing Voices Network? Originating from a psychiatrist in the Netherlands named Marious Romme and Sandra Escher, this movement seeks to normalize one of the many experiences associated with schizophrenia? The movement points out that one in ten people hear voices and that not everyone needs to be institutionalized in the mental health system as a result. In fact, the movement has proved that people who have been institutionalized for years turn out to be great leaders and advocates.

Stereotypes You Are Up Against:

Maybe, it is not fair to blame anyone for a negative response to the above dilemma because of all the negative stereotypes associated with the schizophrenia word. Many people think of a homeless person who is out fighting for their survival on the streets, posturing, or bearing a cardboard sign beneath the underpass. Those a little more informed of the norms may think of a crowded board and care home with nothing to do but to smoke and drink coffee. Still others in some states imagine a lengthy state hospital stay or transitions through hospital recidivism and homeless shelters. Of course, there will be those who think of shows they’ve seen like Criminal Minds or The Guardian. They may conjure images of mass shooting events that are blasted through the media quicker than our very apparent national homeless crisis.

Of course, as a parent or loved ones there is the stereotype of the fresh-out-of-school social workers supervised by burned out administrators who dehumanizes their patients the minute their backs are turned. Perhaps it is hard to watch this happen and easier just to stay out of it. Perhaps, some of you will shield your kids from this reality and try to take care of them on your own. Meanwhile, much of the public feels that we as a nation were kinder and gentler during industrial times when we provided mental institutions. We all know stereotypes are bad but still they exist are real and scare us.

When Stereotypes Become Real:

I can relate. I worked in mental health and greatly despised the life I saw many of my clients enduring. I respected my supervisors, but it never felt right. When I advanced to be able to work independently, I was so successful at advocating for better care, that it is part of what landed me in a State Hospital myself and discharged to the streets.

“You see Tim,” I was told in my second meeting with my psychiatrist two months into my State Hospital stay, “one time we had someone come in here and say they were being followed by the FBI and we found out they were in fact being followed. They hadn’t done much, but they were under investigation.”

Was she really referencing me? I had tipped to press of to murder and mayhem on several occasions. Yes, many of those stigmatized scenes are real, but they are only a small piece of the picture.

Indeed, I was willing to call myself autistic long before I was willing to call myself the schizophrenic that I am. It took me fifteen years of recovery before I started to embrace the ugly word because the stereotypes were so threatening to me.

Hard Decisions You Face:

Such stereotypes may bring really hard decisions. Your relationship with your loved one, the extent to which you perceive justice in social institutions, and your own stigma about mental health challenges may influence your take on what you are hearing.

Remember, that even though your loved one is in an emergency state potentially flailing around with conspiracy ideas and opinions about you, they know you well enough to know how you will respond. They may sense your response and resent it. Historical problems in the relationship may become exacerbated exponentially. For a minority, there is the potential of real violence while your loved one remains in emergency state? How are you to respond if someone you love suddenly sees you as the root of all evil?

And what will your friends say? How may they judge your parenting or partnership?  How do you handle privacy needs? How have you done this throughout their lives up to this point? Do your actions further shame your loved one? How much credence do you put into the medical diagnosis? What have you heard about the word: recovery? Does your loved one deserve the best treatment, or do they need to be treated fairly, just like everyone else? What is the best treatment? What kind of money and resources do you have to play with? How willing are you to support someone who isn’t behaving appropriately? How much do you value your own safety verses theirs?

Support for You:

Providers will generally refer you to the power structure of NAMI for support and you will mingle with others who have faced these dilemmas for years. If you are even willing to stay involved, you can use these groups to figure the most humane decisions to make.

Often, with this referral comes a clear concept of a chemical imbalance to which your loved one is victim. Suddenly you are surrounded by volunteers who give their time and expect you to do the same and support their views. Accepting the power of the illness, setting behavioral boundaries, imposing medications, and accepting dilapidated housing options may be the standard with which you are encouraged to comply.

Indeed, people and families are very different as are regions and NAMI boards. A variety of things can be helpful.

What it Feels Like to Find Meaning in Stereotypes:

When I was going through dehumanizing stereotypical experiences, I only felt victimized. I had always thought I was critical of dehumanizing practices; but still, I was shocked! Oh, how much worse that horrific, maddening, and dehumanizing treatment seem when you are in an emergency state. No one believed a word I said. I didn’t think I would ever be glad for enduring it. I could see no value to losing all my social standing and being incarcerated in impoverished circumstances. I feared for my future.

Now eighteen years later, I use all those degrading experiences which lasted two years after I was discharged to the streets to convince patients I work with that I know what they are talking about. I still feel overwhelmed when I think of what I went through, but I now can say I went through them for a reason.

I often say that if I had known that my suffering could lead to a lifetime of meaningful work, it wouldn’t have been so terrorizing. Instead of waking up in night terrors, or having urinated in my bed, I could have gone through what I went through more gracefully. And I wouldn’t have been as hard to manage for all the low wage work community that surrounded me. I mean any innocent child who saw me coming would run the other way. My negative energy was quite off-putting.

You May Be Needed to Make it Possible:

Meanwhile, my father had made his opinion known, he felt incarceration and mental health warehousing would be as good as it would get for me. Just like the treatment system at Montana State Hospital which was set up to help me adjust to poverty and disempowerment, it seemed like deep down he wanted to be right about his negative prediction. Still, he gave me a year of economic support to get it together. Though I could have got food stamps, my parents did help! And I still call them weekly. The memory of them being so concerned they were just enabling me while I was biking twenty miles a day to work a forty-hour week still burns.

Thank god it worked! I was able to get back to my career.

Can you imagine how great I feel with a career in mental health, a wife, a dog, and a home?

Many Others Can Do It:

Many others of us who suffer can do a lot of healing and earning of social empowerment by helping each other out. We can do this by using our experiences to reach others who may appear unreachable to outsiders. However, we also need to be paid for our livelihood.

Not only have I been blessed with the opportunity to find meaning from my suffering, I have seen others do it as well. I have helped employ a team of four to use their experiences associated with psychosis to help others. They outreached and learned to run groups in agencies.

What Is Missing for Schizophrenics in America?

Perhaps not everyone who suffers from experiences associated with schizophrenia naturally takes to becoming a therapist the way I have, but the mental health system really lacks a vision for sustainable roles for us schizophrenics to occupy. And I believe the first step towards creating such roles involves seeing schizophrenia as a culture rather than an illness.

In other countries the hearing voices movement has taken hold, healed many, and given people valuable roles. The premise is simple: let people who hear voices from different walks of life get together and share their experiences in un-monitored support groups. Wow, so much can come from that!

For the last eleven years I have run such support groups as a professional who openly reflects on my lived experience with schizophrenia. Like many hearing voices groups, the focus of my groups extends beyond simply hearing voices. I like to include and normalize all kinds of experiences that lead people to alternative thoughts about the way the world works.

I think these kinds of support groups help direct schizophrenics to care about the experiences of their brethren. Mutual learning and coping strategies result. Hence, letting schizophrenics acculturate and be schizophrenics is a marvelous step in the right direction.

The Need for A Living Wage:

However, in my opinion, support groups are just a start to what is needed to give the culture a meaningful role. In Oakland California, services that outreach to homeless encampments, board and care homes, agencies and shelters can invite institutionalized individuals out to support groups. Many of the people I serve off the streets of Oakland, can greatly benefit from having visitors who come and bring the support groups to them in their board and care home. Then, they might then learn to come out to groups in the community and get around some of the obstacles that keep them isolated.

An organization as such can significantly train and employ schizophrenics to develop a variety of skills. It can give them a chance to make meaning from the stereotypes through which they may have lived or to which they feared Thus a training/outreach program can help schizophrenics move on to better and better jobs.

How You Can Help Your Loved Ones Realize this Vision?

I think it is important to end the medicalized view of schizophrenia. Updated research is defining psychosis across diagnostic divides as more of a syndrome or even a neurodevelopmental disorder like autism or dyslexia. This really supports the work of the Hearing Voices Network which contends that voices and other experience do have value and carry real meaning that must be addressed for healing and survival.

Believe me, there can be complex underlying issues to address.

Thus, as you live schizophrenic stereotypes through your loved one, remember that they may be transformed into your child’s mission in life. You cannot possibly be responsible for all the meanness in the system, but you can take updated research and success stories from the Hearing Voices Movement to your NAMI meetings. You can find ways to support employment for schizophrenics through empowering organizations like the one I proposed above. I ran such a program for a year and a half until the temporary funding was done. I know it can be done.

Successful Schizophrenics:

There are many things that can help schizophrenics find roles that utilize their passions and interests. As a culture, schizophrenics are historically oppressed like heretics in western society. However, if we are to explore many traditional societies, we may find many of the skills that are labeled as an illness to be shamanic and spiritual. There are many wise traditions to explore in creating solutions.

I personally do not throw the tradition of psychiatry down the toilet. I myself utilize medication and work with others who do as well. I also admire and champion people who do not. However, we must offer solutions that help heal the localized abuses that have occurred within the medicalized system. One solution does not fit all.

Ultimately, I still wouldn’t mind using another word besides schizophrenia. I call my groups and my program special messages.

The post How to Help Your Loved One Be A Successful Schizophrenic? appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

The Hearing Voices Network training that I attended in the end of January turned out to be a time for self-reflection and personal growth. I experienced a mixture of validation and a profound sense of alienation. One of the trainers, Marty, sensed this in me and asked me to reach out after the training was over. In sharing my experiences and perspective with Marty in a lengthy email, I felt very heard. I know the truth about the way I have been treated locally and the importance of taking a best practice and adjusting it to local cultural contexts. Marty’s curiosity and ability to acknowledge and support my perspective means a lot to me.

Locally, I have tried to work with the hearing voices network in a collaborative manner. As a board member, I have faced a significant amount of objection to this from people with whom I have wanted to collaborate. Instead of feeling co-promoted, I have tended to face suspicion and have sensed a tendency to be marginalized and silenced. Some have objected to me expressing my work in trainings and two people even left the group with this as one of their complaints. Additionally, I have felt incredibly underestimated and slighted by some people with whom I yearn to collaborate.

As a neuro-divergent man I come with a mix of abilities and disabilities. The sense that people are judging my disabilities and using them to marginalize me goes back a long way for me. I had to repeat kindergarten and would not have been accepted, had my parents not been teachers at the private school I attended. When I brought home straight A’s my father said that I should not be able to get such high marks. I achieved a great deal in high school and graduated cum laude, but I lost my respect for school when I experienced stigma for having anorexia. I knew my writing was improving and yet my grades went down. My essay nearly got me kicked out of the school instead of receiving the praise it deserved. As a result, I chose not to go to the fancy schools I got into and continued to work hard living in the library when I wasn’t working.

During the training, I was validated that the jargon that was laid out matched much of the gooney-goo-goo jive/jargon that I co-created with people who attended special messages group over the years. I have been writing to sharpen this jargon for the past ten years. While my work is organized as a structural redefinition of psychosis (or special message crisis,) hearing voices network is structured around normalizing and accepting the experiences of hearing voices. They have “an other” section that includes many of the experiences I lived with for two years, and I have done some work to further define this.

While my groups cannot be acknowledged as part of the hearing voices network because they are professional, I feel I have done a good job replicating the values and ethics of the Hearing Voices Network movement quite naturally as I have become a professional who identifies as a person with lived experience. I hope that the fact that the same concepts have been learned in different locales might help validate the paradigm shift and legitimize the concepts. I am in favor of teaching professionals the lessons of the HVN so that we can get therapy specialists who better know how to work with experiences associated with hearing voices and special messages crisis.

At the same time, I had some important points reinforced during the training. For example, when I train people not to re-traumatize themselves, I may in fact alienate many participants. Doing this does not reinforce and equal and mutual relationship, it reinforces power dynamics that are toxic to many and prevents many from sharing their story. I had the opportunity to reflect on times I had done this in the community and lost participants as a result. This important point is something that I needed to have reinforced because I am often warned not to re-traumatize people as a clinician. This is something I can fix.

Another thing I learned from the training, is that I must do more to get off this uninhabited island I am stuck on. I need to reach out to people. I need to stop raging against things I have no control about and make friends like Marty. During the training, I had the opportunity to network with some people who had read my book or are willing to support me. Not everyone is working to exclude me. The more power I give to those feeling of exclusion the more real it becomes. When I get angry that the HVN excludes me, as I did during the training, I only give those critics who are looking to marginalize me the power and satisfaction that they can be successful.

I loved the HVN training and I think that the fact we have a handful of trained people is a massive opportunity to expand the formation of local groups. I met a grant writer in the training and perhaps I will be able to promote outreach groups to help those isolated in board and care homes. I know that to extend HVN groups to institutionalized peoples that we need to know the local culture and act accordingly. I think this can be done. I have done it for ten years and I hope to be able to do it for twenty more.

I have applied to present my six-hour training to CASRA Spring Conference. They have supported me in the past. I have also applied to present a small portion of my six-hour presentation and hope that at least one will be selected.

I have many posts I am trying to officially publish in a host of different venues.  This is a very frustrating process fraught with rejection. Still I have published the following posts on my blog you can see by clicking below:

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In Madness and Civilization, philosopher Michel Foucault has predicted a proliferation of madness as disparities increase and modern society advances. Indeed, with psychopharmacology industry booming, rates of addiction, fueled by the opioid epidemic, skyrocketing, terrorism wars raging abroad, ongoing drug wars afflicting low income neighborhoods, escalation in homeless encampments in major cities, and a rise in bullying in schools, and even cyberbullying, it really does seem like higher percentage of people have been forced to explore their mental health struggles. While mass shootings have kept danger stigma in the media high and the media response continues to reinforce silence about mental struggles, the field of psychotherapy does have a lot more trends to address.

When I look through my state’s psychotherapy association’s annual conference, I see many of these trends getting addressed in workshops. But ever invisible is the issue of psychosis. Is it possible that the issue of psychosis functions as a significant part of the madness narrative? Is it possible that psychosis too is affecting more and more Americans as Foucault inferred?

What the Statistic Say:

I do not believe that running through NIMH statistics reveals much about the prevalence of psychosis. I believe that psychosis affects individuals across diagnostic divides.

According to this year’s statistic by the NIMH, approximately one in five people will struggle with a mental health issue and 46 percent of the population will sometime struggle with their mental health. In fact, there is the suggestion that these stats may be a little lower than they have been in recent years perhaps due to the economy fluctuating. Contrast this with the ever-present statistic that one percent of the population carries a diagnosis of schizophrenia added to the unspecified number of individuals who experience bipolar (which is 4 percent of the population,) and the relevance of psychosis continues to seem very small.

I believe this is a gross underestimation. I believe hearing voices and other types of experiences that trigger alternate realities is very common throughout the population so much so that it warrants the attention of psychotherapists in private practice. I believe that many people go in and out of these experiences and may have occasions in which they are defined by them. However, the cost of being open about them is very high perhaps because there is little to no established treatment available outside the psychiatric ER.

On the Ground in Oakland, California:

As a psychotherapist on an outpatient psychiatric unit, I deal mostly with people who have spent their lives funneling through emergency rooms and perhaps lived in State Hospitals or at home until they aged out and hit the squalor of board and care homes. Or maybe they were homeless or incarcerated or maintained a job and, before the local housing crisis, an apartment. Indeed, I would like to convey that there are many who have worked but as they age, they get confronted by their issues with the aging process. Our participants would be labeled with SMI, “severe mental illness,” the majority being fifty years or older or 2.7 percent of the population. Oddly, according to NIMH statistics, the SMI population is approximately double the size among youth.

Finally, in the outpatient psychiatric unit, we provide treatment that has oft been neglected to address participants’ trauma and their mental health issues. I have created a program to address issues related to psychosis, or what I prefer to call special messages. And wouldn’t you know it, the issue of psychosis bubbles up in different ways for different people across diagnostic divides. Indeed, people many participants will share things with each other, they will not share with a psychiatrist.

Deserving of a Seat in the Psychotherapy Office:

In my training, I was always encouraged to refer out when it comes to psychosis. Let the ER deal with that, was the mantra of most of my trainers. Psychosis is scary.

Because I had to earn a living throughout my training, I took my living from the poor in the inner-city and volunteered my time for the rich. Perhaps, because I consider myself a wannabe philosopher and sociologist, when I finally got licensed and earned my freedom, I started to explore running psychoses focus groups on the unit that had supported me on my way through.

And after doing many groups over the past ten years I am writing to suggest that more and more psychosis deserves a place in private practice and the revolving door of the ER is not an ethical move on the part of the trained psychotherapist. I call our local ER the homeless encampment and feel that it sends people in psychosis a large and disturbing message when they get confined to it.

How Diversifying Causation Beliefs Can Lead to Recovery from Psychosis:

I believe that a powerful dialectic exists when participants study their similarities in psychoses focus groups. Converse to the great opportunities for growth that result when participants genuinely identify with each other, there are often important points of difference highlighted that likewise can lead to growth when nurtured properly.

To be specific, I have observed that participants often become more communicative about their diverse beliefs regarding the causation of their psychosis experiences. And I believe this leads to collaboration and accommodation that can help message receivers move toward social rehabilitation and recovery.

There is little doubt in my mind that the causation of psychosis experiences is a natural preoccupation for people who suffer. In fact, this preoccupation is so powerful, it warrants becoming part of the definition of psychosis in the model of treatment I have created.

Having led many long-term psychoses focus groups over the past ten years, one of the more powerful solutions I have developed involves helping sufferers learn diversity lessons about the causation of their (psychosis) or special message experiences.

I categorize the causation beliefs of sufferers as being: political, psychological, spiritual, scientific, or trauma based. In the thick of a body’s psychosis process, causation beliefs often rigidly stay in one or two of these styles. While there is often an ability to consider and ponder other beliefs, the tendency is to immediately create explanations according to a single style or two of causation beliefs. Further, there is often an immediate need to solve or comprehend what is happening that can feel addictive.

Increasing Flexibility of Causation Ideas:

What I believe happens particularly when it is finessed and highlighted by the leader is when sufferers tell stories about the experiences of their psychosis, they hear similar experiences interpreted with a different style of causation. In supporting their peers, they become forced to see how these rigid causation beliefs lead to errors.

If I could count the number individuals I’ve worked with who are in what I like to call message crisis (psychosis,) who try to reality check me when I tell my story—well, you might say I’d be a high scoring. Indeed, I have found training them to better understand my experiences often opens them up to be willing to share their story with me.

They say, “No, I don’t think you were really followed by the mafia, I think that is a delusion.”

Then, I review specific evidence that is convincing and some evidence (or special messages) that are less clear.

I have found that this helps people be more willing to reveal what is happening to them with me.

But to get back to what I primarily want to convey, I often see that when participants can see messages (or psychosis) happening to other people, it leads them to be more aware of the role that their own causation beliefs have in their suffering. Often the causation beliefs of others are at least slightly different. When the message receiver notices that different causation beliefs lead to errors, it challenges them to be more flexible in how they interpret their own psychosis experiences, which I like to call special messages.

Indeed, it is clearly conceivable that every special message (psychosis experience,) has a different causation style. Any psychosis (or message crisis) is full of thousands of these special message experiences. I believe that when every message can be interpreted with flexibility, the message receiver can return to accomplishing things that relate to social rehabilitation.

Five Styles of Causation Beliefs:

Below I have listed the five causation styles along with common explanations that have been expressed in groups I have lead over the years. Some are perhaps noticeable as common psychological theories, others as less conventional ideas that might be considered delusional.

I believe that all causation beliefs are valid, important, and perhaps operant at different times in a person’s story. I like to argue that people may be predominantly correct about the causation of their message experiences. This validates participants in a way that is needed to heal from the potential trauma they have been through. However, I argue that any given message receiver may need to incorporate other explanations to survive and thrive in the modern world.

Psychological

• Messages are your inner thoughts or unconscious beliefs. They are just in your head.  We broadcast our unconscious beliefs in ways that cause others to interact with us in ways that make our unconscious beliefs realities.

• Messages are a way of processing things that we are not willing to deal with.

• Messages are a return to a regressed period of attachment in which the baby has destructive relationships with the boobs.

Political

• Messages come from people following you around and tormenting you to control or seek revenge on you. These followers could be a gang, police, CIA, government, corporations, masons, illuminati, aliens, or other secret societies.

• Messages are real evidence that the government is socially controlling and preventing the mainstream from knowing. They have their ways of taking snitches and putting them in ditches.

Traumatic

• Messages are nothing but figments of past perpetrators or abusers.

• Messages come from the social thoughts or judgments of others, the social mainstream, or the collective unconscious of others (Stigmas) that are being used to decrease your social standing

Spiritual

• Messages come from god, fairies, aliens, ghosts or what we in the west call supernatural experiences.

• Messages are processes that may help or hurt you in evolving or adapting to the dilemmas of a modern environment.

• Messages are there to test your ability to be good and evil and are there to lead you to lead others.

Scientific

• Genetic differences or scientific processes that develop because of nuero-diversity. Eugenics suggest that these genes aren’t fit for survival and justify a complex system of abuse and social control.

• Messages happen when neuro-transmitters get changed through things like environmental stress patterns that fall into genetically derived conditions.

• Messages happen when spiritual genes get persecuted in our society

Case Study:

Because I don’t make it a habit using case histories out other message receivers, I will review my own story to demonstrate how all five causation styles may be necessary to employ to help a message receiver survive in the modern world.

I would agree with the reader who says this is convenient and limited as a result.

However, in my defense, I have used insights from other message receivers’ causation beliefs to be able to understand my journey in the following manner. Indeed, for years, I could not even tell these stories. I needed to attain economic stability and to lead professional groups with diverse individuals to be able to make sense of what happened to me.

Additionally, people take different routes on their journey to better functioning. I would also argue that being able to relate and recreate your own experiences is one of the benefits of listening and relating to other message receivers. Therefore, I host groups and encourage those who are stuck in a single style or two to come out and listen to help diversify their views.

Preoccupation with Political Abuse:

My own message experiences involved descent into political abuse that could have rendered me homeless and jobless if I had given up. Persistent throughout the two-years of psychosis I endured, I believed I was being harassed by the government and the mafia.

I was working in a section 8 housing authority complex amid significant drug use and trafficking and had leaked information to the press to try to protect the vulnerable. The result was that the company that contracted with my company, a powerful authority with connections to the President targeted the people I wanted to protect for eviction. Then, the housing authority offered to give me a large amount of free concert tickets.

Of course, I used the concert tickets to advertise the music festival throughout the project and take out twenty-four of the vulnerable clients who would come out to the expensive mainstream event. I felt it was a good use of the bribe.

After that stunt, I continued to be very popular among many of the residents. I persisted in trying to crack the mystery of the local drug war that just didn’t make sense. I learned more and more details, until I started to get scared of the persistent threats. I started to get a strong sense of connection, like people were putting on skits around me to either help or foil me.

Among other things, I called a friend with a nefarious history. He heard what I had to say and made a powerful threat. Then, I ran away. Then, I withdrew all my money from my bank account. Then, I headed for the Canadian border. Maybe my friend was using me to help him move drugs through the project. Suddenly, it all made sense.

As I neared the border of Canada I was convinced I was being followed. I stopped at a gas station to fuel and I got accosted by two policemen. One bruised my wrists and drove me eighty miles from my car.

At the hospital I lied to the psychiatrist and was given the opportunity to run.

I surrendered a few days later, from a ditch, on a mountain pass, at midnight.

In the State Hospital there was a clearly defined mafia daughter and a lot of people wanting to help her run away. She showed all patients documents of how she had taken a shot at her father. I suspected these were phony and wasn’t at all attracted to her.

However, she was most interested in me despite the persistence of my unpopular mannerisms. Indeed, she seemed to salivate after me trying to extract information about my sneaky escapades. I received an offer to join an outlaw gang for protection against her. A lot happened in three months.

Discharged to the streets, I took a greyhound and got a job in Fresno. But when I ran out of medication, I was released from the job. Not only had I refused to take over the supervisor’s job, I had started to act funny. Then, I couldn’t find any work for three months. I tried everywhere, from Walmart to county social work positions. Finally, I got a job at a Foster Care Agency.

This forced my family to get involved. At least it made me willing to accept their help. I thought they were an Irish mob family who had hidden their illegal activities from me.

A black sheep aunt who lived in the bay area was able to offer me a less risky job at an Italian Delicatessen if I moved up into Antioch, California.

Causation Beliefs toward Spiritual Causation:

My interpretation of all events that happened to me at the Italian Deli led me to the belief that I was human traffic to my mob bosses. Unable to afford a car I biked twenty miles a day to the train station and back and took the train an hour to reach my job, which was in a wealthy suburb. Every train ride I took, I could spot a rider who was clearly following me.

One day it was a resident from the job I had at the Seattle Housing Project. He was dressed in a jean jacket that had a CIA Officer sign attached to it’s pocket and handcuffs attached to the belt-loops of his jeans. I had heard he’d been arrested before for impersonating a CIA officer when I was in Seattle.  He had also cackled at me like a chicken and told me he had killed people before.

I persisted this way for ten months. I tried to find any work I could find outside the deli where I felt harassed endlessly.

Finally, I got a call back from an interview I had in the tenderloin. The job would lengthen my commute by an hour; but paid a good deal better.

In the group interview, I noticed that several of the workers were religiously preoccupied. They reminded me of the State hospital patients I had been locked up with.

Suddenly, in the middle of an interview that was going swimmingly well, a Latina woman spoke out in a shrill voice, “Oh, my god, the energy in the room is intense. It reminds me of the movie Stigmata.”

The room was accepting and rolled with this outburst with inquisitive questions.

I went home and rented the movie and suddenly it occurred to me, it was possible I wasn’t the son of a famous Irish Mafia family, maybe I was the next Jesus Christ, himself . . .

Incorporating Scientific Causation:

I was called back for a third interview, but when I asked to change my day to accommodate the interview, my boss told me he’d have to fire me if he did. This was the way I was used to being treated there. They were very controlling.

“You’re allowed to work with us, but you just can’t work anywhere else,” I was told by my boss.

Even worse, I was being sexually harassed. A co-worker told me my reputation was smeared, by a female supervisor I jaded. She started a rumor about me that I was a pedophile.

However, now when I went to church, the priest seemed honored to have me in the congregation and to woo me as if he knew something I didn’t. I came across a Cadillac with a plasticine frog pinned to a cross and I figured that my crucifixion was eminent.

Then, I got hired by a wacky social worker at a therapy internship. His name was Jack and he said and sounded like he came from South Boston. “We’ve got to get you out of that Italian Deli before they cut those fingers off,” he said.

My hands were carefully bandaged to conceal the large warts that had taken over my hands ever since the uncleanly showers of C-Ward at Montana State Hospital.

“Hey, I get something from you,” he said, “I’ll bet you’ve been in some real impoverished neighborhoods back east.

Even though Jack was right about me, I was uneasy with his intuition.

“Do you trust me,” he asked.

The first day of the internship, I was utterly overwhelmed because everything Jack said seemed to come from private phone conversations I had had with my family.  His face often turned red. “Hey, I know what they need to do with all those boys on the corners: just turn on cold showers and take the heat away from them.  Then, they’ll be just fine.”

Later that afternoon I had another interview at a job I really wanted that bombed.  The interviewer had been distressed by my level of anxiety and red face.

That night I didn’t sleep a wink. Was I ever going to avoid this eminent crucifixion? I kept blowing my professional opportunities. I had medical coverage. I decided to see a psychiatrist.

Incorporating Trauma Causation:

My boss at the delicatessen seemed to be much more accepting of me once I was medicated. He started to tell me, “good job!” when I continued to complete the tasks with care and detail.

It was true that I felt traumatized the whole time I was politically exploited. But I never thought the endemic bullying I experienced everywhere except amid the vulnerable population was my fault. Indeed, perhaps I was traumatized as a child and that was in part why I was bullied.

But now that I was medicated and started trying to make friends with my co-workers at the delicatessen I realized that they weren’t all bullying me in as organized a fashion as I imagined. There were ways I could appeal to injustice. Indeed, some of the less dominant kids really looked up to me. A few other young females had true crushes on me. They seemed to have fantasies of rescuing me. One even said, I had a beautiful mind.

It started to occur to me that I might not be a mafia kid but more of a bullied Aspergian child.

After all I already carried a diagnosis of ADD and Dyslexia, why not throw another neurodevelopmental difference in there. At least then I didn’t have to hate all the pot smoking population for participating in making me a political prisoner. I was very socially awkward and did tend to amuse people.

And, finally, I got the job outside the Deli, but agreed to stay on one day a week so that I could maintain the income necessary for my independence. Even though I had learned to shine my parents on, I did not like the way they used my economic need to control me. Indeed, being a piece of human traffic had helped me build personal skills.

And Finally, Incorporating Psychological Explanations:

It is hard for me to immediately define how I have come to consider that psychological processes may have been involved in my message experiences.

Perhaps, this is because the bay area therapist I saw believed that psychodynamic processes were happening between us. From my perspective, she was unable to admit that her fees were financially exploiting me. The therapy was imposed on me by my parents. I believed they would in fact hold me financially accountable for the very unhelpful relationship.

Indeed, I often felt that if people listened instead of presuming I was wrong about everything I experienced—if they explored the ways I was correct about what I was saying, that they could have really gotten my attention and helped me.

And a lot of what I believed has turned out to prove correct. For example, genetic testing has since revealed that my predominantly old money family really was predominantly Irish. Additionally, my mother who admired her father’s fame as the chair of the Harvard Psychology Department, may have in fact named me Timothy, after her father’s friend, Timothy Leary. (O’Leary, in my Irish mind.) Indeed, my Harvard grandfather really did work for the CIA and get rich from remarkably wise stock trading.

For example, it was true that my father, who everyone assumed I was wrong about, really had retired from his career at age forty-five, really did live primarily off-the-grid, via stocks and landholdings, yet still too busy to keep up with me. It was true that I really didn’t understand how he did this because finances were always hushed. Of course, my nefarious friend, an ununionized longshoreman, really did have a nefarious past with ties to the Philadelphia PD (an officer with the same first name as my father.)

Indeed, the drug war really does ensnare and incarcerate a disproportionate number of mentally ill individuals like myself leaving wealthy cartels to pay off the politicians. And support the dominant and violent. And I later learned that the Italian Deli that I worked at really did have mafia ties. I was able to confirm this when a street-wise person inadvertently dropped a name I recognized from my deli days.

Once I learned that I really was molested as a child just as I suspected; once I finally, in my first week employed away from the Deli, heard my name called in a harsh, metallic voice; once I developed the strength to call myself a schizophrenic and validate myself, I could start to see psychological causation beliefs. There were personal issues that were getting replayed in surrounding relationships. In fact, I will explore this process more in my next article as it is a component of my system of treatment.

Teaching Psychotherapists to Diversify Causation Beliefs:

Often, I find that message receivers in psychoses focus groups learn a lot from kicking around their ideas and experiences, much as I have just done. Though the order in which they uncover causation beliefs invariably differs, I believe that we can learn to support each other by proposing alternate meanings that are based on alternative causation beliefs. I believe that we can empower ourselves to navigate injustice and oppression in the modern world. I think we need psychotherapists who can help us with this.

Many message receivers aspire to become healers. In a traditional sense, it is our shamanic calling. As we learn to navigate message experience with rhythm and flow, groups are a great place to practice telling healing stories to message receivers who are still stuck and in crisis. On Facebook there are many sites dedicated to normalizing the spiritual emergence narrative. They need to be expanded and extended to the homeless population.

Additionally, in groups we can give each other credit and acknowledgement for diversifying causation beliefs. Not only can this be a great way to nurture and build relationships, it can reinforce movement to social rehabilitation. Too often, we stay stuck because our efforts to change our causation beliefs fail to arouse interest in those who are paid to support us.

Without mentors who can help us by modeling and articulating these insights, how are we to know we are on the right track? Perhaps, this is part of the reason it seems like so few of us survive to socially rehabilitate.

I believe that if psychotherapists support and learn from the experiences of the hearing voices network in other countries, they can become involved in providing services that teach message receivers to heal outside the punitive environments of the psychiatric ER or the State Hospital.

We need to promote healers and success stories who can connect with the one percent of the population that is persistently struggling and create pathways for social rehabilitation. We need statistics that more accurately report on the prevalence of psychosis to support these efforts. We need psychotherapy offices that specialize in psychosis!

The post Are you Prepared to Address Psychosis in Your Practice? (Feature-Length Version) appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

When I experienced two years of psychosis early during my career as a mental health counselor, I was already getting good at managing trauma with my master’s level training. I always been pretty good at being safe for others.

I wanted some of that trauma support when I found myself confined to a ward on a State Hospital. I knew I needed to establish safety with someone but couldn’t find anyone who would deal with me. Instead, no one treated me as though I was traumatized because they didn’t want to reinforce my delusions. This only made the trauma of what I experienced worse. Invariably, hospital workers were punitive and denied anything unjust was happening to me at all.

Because I worked tirelessly and had family support, I was able to return to my career in mental health. I got my psychotherapy license ten years ago and since that time I have worked to create trauma-sensitive treatment to address the needs of individuals who experience psychosis. Here, I intend to convey two trauma-sensitive solutions I have developed, working with people in groups and in individual treatment.

The Challenge of Establishing Trust:

It’s true that it is hard to establish safety with someone when they think they are being followed. I felt I was being followed by the mafia via government surveillance; others feel they are in miraculous communion with a spirit world. Any therapist who works with individuals who have experienced psychosis can tell you that trust with any such prototype takes time.

However, too many practitioners do not feel that the stories of psychosis are worth engaging for the simple reason they might have delusions in them! It’s true delusional ideas can cause a great deal of problems. For example, maybe the police didn’t really taunt me like I reported they did when they bruised my wrists. Maybe I was too hard on the pony-tailed man who wouldn’t give me food and testified against me at my competency diagnosing me with schizophrenia. Maybe I wasn’t really being followed by the FBI like I thought I was. Maybe I was delusional when I said I leaked information from the section 8 housing authority I was working for. All that I knew for sure was that nobody cared to listen. I was on my own for quite some time.

Many practitioners reason that they don’t want to reinforce anything that isn’t real. Instead, the best practice, CBT for Psychosis, directs the clinician to separate their reality from the sufferer and teach the sufferer to evaluate their thoughts to make sure they are rational. I believe CBT for Psychosis may work at times. In fact, think there comes a time when cognitive therapy is necessary for rehabilitation. However, there are times this single strategy may not address trauma involved with the experiences of psychosis.

In contrast, I have had significant success in working with people with psychosis by finding powerful ways to validate the contents of an individuals’ psychosis to address real trauma that may have transpired. This approach is increasingly accepted now thanks to the spread of the hearing voices network support groups. Indeed, I have found that providing group support that allows people to explore psychosis, to be very helpful. Increasingly research is proving to validate the idea that treating psychosis as you would a trauma results in far better outcomes.

The Challenges of Validating All Parts of Psychosis

Of course, some might argue that the hearing voices network does not have a clear methodology for how to validate delusions when they are not caused by voices. It’s true that, some delusions are hard to validate in a genuine manner. For example, many people who hear voices believe that other people are hearing what they are hearing. Such individuals may accuse the practitioner or group leader of many things that they aren’t responsible for, making therapy and group sustainability a challenging endeavor.

My own experience in therapy was a nightmare because my therapist didn’t believe me. Thousands of dollars were spent and not an ounce of trust was achieved.

I have found it’s possible to validate things that aren’t true; however, I have had to take apart the delusional experience and look at them with a microscope. Then, I have found it is possible to validate a part of the psychosis process without validating all the mistakes that happen.

For starters, I coined the term special messages to describe experiences that trigger an alternative way of taking in information and connecting with the world. Thus, not only voices but other meaningful experiences like intuition, dreams, interpersonal interactions, and coded realities from media can trigger alternative views about reality.

Then, I developed seven other code words to represent distinct aspects of sufferers’ experiences. In sum, if the sufferer can become more aware of the process of what they are doing during a psychosis process and the way this process relates to fellow sufferers, they can become more mindful and validated and heal from trauma.

The Message Mindfulness Solution that Supports Trauma Informed Care:

Message mindfulness happens when the person in psychosis learns to see their process by describing it to another person or by hearing similar process that they can relate to in a group. I have found that people in psychosis can often recognize delusions when they are listening to someone. However, when they are not mindful of special messages, they react and cannot see their own process as being potentially delusional.

I believe that when message receivers become mindful of what is happening to them and their peers, they go towards experiences that terrorize, anger or excite them. Then they can acknowledge their emotions in a way that can help them let go of those triggering special message experiences. With awareness, those special message experiences become less judged and easier to let go of without having emotions and thoughts spike. And the sufferer can then acknowledge that they often will be right but don’t necessarily have the evidence to presume that their special messages are accurate all the time.

Helping a sufferer or message receiver become mindful of the experiences that give rise to alternate thoughts or what I call divergent views is not an easy process and can take time. Indeed, message receivers who listen and learn from each other are better able to admit that some special messages may turn out to be true and others false. Still, they can all be considered real and can be validated and better observed by the people who get them. Plus, becoming increasingly mindful of other message processes can significantly help a body reconcile with the ways they were wrong and had their emotions spike needlessly.

The Solution of Mastery Tasks or What I call Recovery and Reality Tasks:

A second trauma informed solution that has resulted from redefining psychosis into eight components, is to distract from distress when emotions spike by completing mastery tasks. I call these mastery tasks, recovery and reality tasks.

In this process, high emotions are soothed by what I have termed the act of sleuthing. Sleuthing is the act of collecting a series of messages and to trying to figure out what is really going on. This leads to all kinds of thoughts about the way the world works (divergent views.) Then, divergent views cause the message receiver to sleuth again and be on the lookout for more special message experiences. Thus, the message receiver often gets more different types of messages until they become entirely preoccupied with distressing or enthralling special message material.

Therefore, I believe that distracting from sleuthing by completing mastery tasks may significantly reduce distressing and intense emotions. When the message receiver sits and sleuths all day they expend a great deal of emotional energy without accomplishing anything. Then, social workers or supporters are more likely to push for warehousing them.

However, to distract from sleuthing, the message receiver needs to practice and strengthen the skill of distracting.

Often, distracting efforts go unacknowledged by others because they are judged negatively in comparison to what could otherwise be accomplished. At first, in my beliefs, the message receiver needs to accept and be supported for basic actions that are productive. Thus, appreciating mastery tasks as helpful for wellness and supporting them regardless of their social standing is another way to validate and support message receivers.

Moving through trauma in such a manner beats being isolated, locked up, or restrained, which teaches the message receiver a great deal of helplessness. Nothing could discourage mastery tasks more. Indeed, these kinds of traumatizing events make message receivers less mindful and elevate the unreasonable expectation that special messages be suppressed.

Conclusion:

While I have also developed six additional solution strategies, I consider the above two solutions to be specific to addressing the trauma that message receivers experience. The six other solutions I propose are experiential, spiritual (there are two of these,) behavioral, cognitive and narrative. These solutions likewise may be responsive to trauma in some ways but are linked to differing components of special message experience and tend to work in different manners. Stay tuned for future solution focused blog posts that may help describe a recovery process

The post Two, Trauma-Sensitive Solutions for Extreme States appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

For the past ten years I have used the words special messages to bring people together behind a better-defined notion of psychosis. I hope in this article will help better define what I mean by special messages and why I think that messages are part of a process that includes seven other components that I defined in my last article.

Many people who have worked with me presume that when I say special messages I mean voices. It’s true that the words hearing voices ring true as music to my ears. Indeed, the hearing voices movement has vastly improved the social understanding of what is happening to message receivers. Less dominant are the memes associated with all the “psycho” stigma that gets equated with the psychosis word. However, I still argue that just saying hearing voices fails to unite all people under the umbrella of the word psychosis.

I have come to feel that saying hearing voices is like saying the letter “a” instead of the word alphabet. It’s true that voices offer real and valuable experiences that society tries to suppress. But, I think that there are at least twenty-five types of experiences in addition to voices that can be relevant in creating psychosis. Put those experiences together in different ways and a person can create a vast masterpiece of meaningful reality that functions as an alternative to mainstream thought.

Not everyone who experiences psychosis uses all twenty-six types of experience, but some individuals may use far more than I can depict in this article. I believe each message receiver has a profile of messages: some that they can and cannot relate to.

I contend that no message is sicker than another. Indeed, problems associated with special messages need to be measured by the level of distress they cause, not by their existence. In fact, someone who hears voices is not necessarily sicker than someone who has more “normal” message experiences like getting an intuition or having a dream. In fact, one person may hear a voice and experience little distress, but have an interpersonal interaction that troubles them drastically. Others don’t get upset about their intuitions or interpersonal interactions, but are harassed to no-end by the fact they hear controlling voices. Sometimes it is the convergence of many different types of messages that cause the distress.

An experience becomes a special message because not everyone else has experienced it and because its meaning is not always clearly defined. Indeed, special messages take an element of speculation to thoroughly understand. Ultimately, sometime message receivers are spot on accurate about reality based on their special messages, but mistake happen.

I have found that encouraging people to tell stories about message crisis or “psychosis,” over the years helps uncover a variety of types of special messages that fit different profiles. It also helps a person feel validated, heal and connect to others. Though it can take some time, I have seen many people realize they are not alone for the first time in treatment hearing stories that others tell.

I also believe healing involves being able to pay more attention to message processes instead of just suppressing them and pretending to be a normal droid. Thus, emotions associated with special messages can be felt without burning their way permanently into a person’s life.

Many of us who suffer may have become preoccupied with real issues of war, genocide, torture, apocalyptic fatalities, spirit discernment, metaphysics, social control, truth, mind control, propaganda, good and evil and healing from these dilemmas may help us become very wise and valuable social contributors.

Additionally, people in message crisis need people who are aware of what they are going through to be with them while they are going through it. Message crisis can be an extremely alienating experience in which everyone wants to correct, rather than support the message receiver.

Although some message experiences in a person’s profile may seem normal or “real,” in crisis, they can dominate the day particularly because they fit together with others that no one would believe. The following are questions that I have developed to help the reader identify experiences that have influenced message receivers into what I believe become cultural thoughts that get defined as psychosis:

• Do other people hint at things that profoundly relate to your life as though they know everything about you as though they have been listening to wire taps or are clued in through word of mouth, or other intuitive skills?

• Do you get special intuitions based on body language or voice inflection or reading peoples’ minds that often turn out to be correct?

• Do you get uncanny premonitions from gut feelings, or intuitions that might be considered ESP?

• Can you pick up on people’s energy so that you can tell how they’re feeling when they pass by?

• Do gestures or specific behaviors of others help you to most definitely know their unconscious thoughts?

• Are things that bear symbolic meaning being left around for you to find that might be there to re-program you as if they are counter intelligence?

• Do you have odd strings of “coincidence” that link together in ways that suggest or confirm things (serendipity?)

• Do people follow you on the bus or train bear objects that identify them to you as people who are following you for better or worse?

• Are you able to instantly tell if people are either for or against you

• Are people sent to represent other people you know for a significant reason (impostors, look-a-likes, doppelgangers, agents)

• Are you profoundly affected by dreams might be prophesies or reveal truths about yourself or the universe?

• Do you experience de ja vu occurrences during which something happens that feels like it is happening to you again for the second time?

• Do you find yourself reviewing vivid memories, sentences or words for hidden meanings?

• Do people use codes to communicate secret info like numbers or words; do you break words into syllables and look for punny linguistic coincidences?

• Do people have clear telepathic communication with you intentionally

• Do movies, songs or shows on the radio or TV come to take on new meanings when you read between the lines. Might they even be special broadcasts that only you get?

• Does certain forms Media contain secret coded truths that only you can understand?

• Are you touched by the truth when you read in between the lines of certain situations?

• Does it seem like people are putting on skits around you to teach you a lesson?

• Is history full of conspiracies that god reveals the truth to you about because of discernment of spirit?

• Are people slipping things in your food that are taking over your bodily processes?

• Do you have bizarre visual experiences that make you think you are in a different dimension or on a different planet?

• Do you see ghosts or entities that communicate with you in ways that other people may or may not be clued into?

• Do you hear your own thoughts as distinguishable words that give personal insights into your being?

• Do you hear people you know talking to you as though you are engaging in in telepathy?

• Do your voices become familiar characters to you that you keep track of and take on personalities that you name and react to?

• Do you get physically tortured through tactile pain or sensations that function in conjunction with your voices?

• Have you ever been taught about the “I” word—illusions—which are sounds, visual experiences, sensations, smells or tastes that mix with reality, that really are there but that may become distorted to give you uncommon experiences?

• Do people make uncanny comments about your private thoughts or experience when you pass by them talking in the community.

• Has a character on the TV starts talking directly at you referencing you by name?

• Has the hiss of a steam heater started turning into voices?

• Have clouds in the sky turn into visual shapes?

• Have you experienced things that are so strange it seems impossible that beliefs you hold are not true?

• Do you have an uncanny awareness of or evidence of who you were in a past life?

• Do you see projected images that show you secret images or entertaining stories that give you secrets about your ancestry or aliens or the mysteries of the universe?

• Can you communicate with spirits, aliens or ghosts?

• Do you sense when reincarnated spirits, aliens, or robot-machines have entered modern bodies as clones by looking at a person’s glistening eyeballs?

The post Why I Say Special Messages Instead of Psychosis appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".