Imagine this; you are at a rave with your boyfriend. Everything is nice and fun, you’re enjoying the dj’s work and how it communicates with your body and instincts. You see everyone around you smiling and happy, greeting each other and that makes you feel safe and happy. You are in your zone enjoying the moment and everything is fine. This is what a party should be and should look like. And then, after some time you feel something is off, you feel an intent coming towards you, but you don’t know what it is. It’s a sharp feeling coming from somewhere, but you don’t know what it is. Then you see someone saying something to your boyfriend and to several other people and you don’t know what is happening. You notice it, and the one thing you can’t say in that moment is “it’s probably nothing”. You want to mind your own business and to continue to enjoy the party, but your survival instincts kick in with no reason and you feel unsafe. “Am I in danger? Does someone want to harm me because I did something wrong? Do I not belong here? Does everyone hate me being here?” is what you’re asking yourself. You feel cold from head to toe and just can’t shake off this feeling. Your boyfriend notices your panicked face and gets worried, turns to you, grabs you asking, “what is happening, you ok?!”. Then you immediately feel like it’s getting worse, even more real and that he is also part of it. Like what you are fearing is becoming true. Your boyfriend takes you out for a break, you talk about what you are experiencing, you see his expression of how absurd you sound while you’re telling them what you’re experiencing, they reassure you that nothing is wrong and that it’s unreasonable thinking. You hear yourself and you calm down because you realise that there’s nothing going wrong. And it’s nothing that has to do with you. It’s just a thing that people do at parties.  

This is what a delusional episode feels like, you lose touch with reality and the worst thing is that it might happen again if you still feel stressed and unsafe. If your mood doesn’t improve it will happen again. Especially if you weren’t aware in the first place that you were having an episode.  

Many people may experience delusions in their life. Maybe not as strong as others, and of course the causes are different. And at first you brush it off. You say that it’s nothing. It’s just your imagination and you can control it. Then if there really is a problem with us and we don’t address it; it get’s out of control and we ask ourselves “How did I get like this? When did it first happen? What was the cause? How did my brain end up like this?”. And maybe for some the root cause is hereditary, some maybe have some dormant mental illness, awaken by substance abuse. For others it may be PTSD or other disorders. Some may even have more than just one cause. 

So now what? How do you live like this? Step by step you have to gain back control of your being. We can’t control what is around us, yes. But what we can control is our actions and decisions. And some decisions are hard to take, and you will need help, support and love. The worst thing you can go through right now is people thinking that you are naturally like this. Panicked and pushy, clingy and obsessively needy for reassurance, violently rude and impulsive. That this is what you are, a crazy mess of nonsense that wants attention at the cost of everyone’s wellbeing. When in fact, all of your crazy actions and reactions are a cry for help. But you can’t count every time to always have someone there to pick up the pieces. 

In the beginning yes. You need a mirror or some sort of outside signal that lets you know that something is wrong. And of course, you won’t believe them at first, because normally when you used to feel in danger, you were right. Because you knew when to be rational during a dangerous situation. But when you’re not in a threatening moment or place and you still think like that. And you still are convinced that your reasoning is true. That’s the trap we fall in, and that is when we need someone trustworthy to tell us what is going on. Trust those who love you and care enough to not leave your side. If we realise by ourselves, it’s even better. But after that if we always rely on someone to tell us everything is fine every second of our life, that’s simply not fair. Help and support from others is always welcomed. But making a habit of it, that’s when we don’t own to our condition, and we dump our responsibilities on someone else. And right now, I’m not talking about the people who really are in a bad condition. There are illnesses, disorders, etc. that seem impossible to tackle and those people really need someone responsible of them. The people who still have control on their decision making and are functioning in society; they have to take the first steps towards healing, balancing and getting back on track. Realising you have a problem and that you want to get better, already puts you back on track. 

So, after taking the first step which is recognizing that you’re not as well as you used to be, what I found helpful was to express whatever you’re fearing through something, maybe a creative media. What I noticed is that in those moments our imagination is very active and our brain instead of focusing on what is around; it keeps getting pulled in the nightmare. So, the brain who is reasonable is facing a fantasy and it doesn’t know what to do with it. What it does is it starts to panic, it signals danger. And then our heart reacts as well, we are humans so of course our feelings are triggered, and we start having strong emotions. Because any reason with the brain is shut off, our emotions get the hang of our body, and it starts to act. Our body, communications and decision making become the expressive media that the heart is taking in order to signal a cry for help and to make the pain go away. Our body becomes a channel to express our pain. That is our primitive response. Babies don’t know what is happening, so they cry out for anything. But this is the vulnerable scenario. There are also violent reactions, hostility born out of anger, that has pain at its root. Sharp knifes piercing through your heart, and all you want to do is make that sensation go away. It really depends on the type of person we are. But all of these reactions are a cry for help. Knowing this, we have to channel it into something else. Something that helps us take it out of our system and it should never be on someone else. A bad decision here would be to take refuge into someone close. We have to remember that these reactions are harmful to others. Another danger people fall in is self-harm, self-destructing habits (alcohol and drugs as means of escapism) or in worst cases, suicide. And that’s when you really need to ask for help 

So, what type of media should we choose? Usually sports, hobbies or art. Something that is born from your heart. And you can show it to others and tell them “This is how I constantly feel”. In my case for a long time, I thought that art was my expressive media. I loved to paint, and I was good at it. I thought that was it, but after some time it just died. I lost the joy of it, I felt like it was not enough. People could see it but wouldn’t understand what it was. I do enjoy it when people give me feedback on my experiences, so painting wasn’t relevant anymore. Then I tried singing which did help indeed, because I could create lyrics and sing them out, but I didn’t had the skill nor the time to learn it. In these moments you need something quick that you can channel your heart, mind and energy into. And then I realised. In critical moments throughout my life, I always ended up typing frenetically to my friends, telling them what happened. That’s the only thing that calmed me down. Writing the moment down, what I feel about it, and then as I read and edit the message and re-read it several times, it helps me see the situation detached of it. That’s what got me started with these posts. It feels comfortable, natural and soothing. After I take it out on screen, it feels like I’m just reading a book afterwards. Which also helps me to see a conclusion and a solution. This is the kind of feeling we should look for when considering a media, and it’s mostly trying out different things. The difficulty here would be if you feel too strongly about something. When you regret your actions that you took in those irrational moments, and because of that you lose something important in your life. That’s when you crash. You can only grief, apologise for what you did, cry it out, isolate and hate yourself.   

When it happened to me what I really wanted was to be able to somehow fix what I did. To go back in time and be better. Be able to get out of that nightmare myself. So that I can continue my life without the memory of hurting someone; of dragging them into my mess. But I fell in a trap. It was all that I could do in that moment. My fault was that I didn’t act on it sooner. My fault was I thought I was strong enough to handle it on my own. Sometimes I feel like I still can, like I used to be able to. But no, there are moments where I don’t know how to process. There are things in life that people are doing, and I simply don’t understand why it is happening and why are they doing it. I get scared, I feel unsafe, I fall in a nightmare, and I overreact.  

But in order to move forward and get the help that we need, we have to forgive ourselves and to be kind with us. And in the beginning maybe we’re so deep in our sorrow that the only motivation that pushes us to get better is someone we care for. Ideally, we would want to do it for ourselves. But I saw people who literally were so deep in regret, pain and hate on their self that the only reason they wanted to get better was for someone they looked up to.  

The next step is something that I am yet to try out, which is asking for professional help. When you’re an adult and have the necessary resources, this should be the next step. But I can’t talk much about this topic yet, as I’ve never tried it before. But what I can talk about is the process of finding someone that is good for you. Especially when you live in a place that doesn’t have many options for therapy. Or if they are, they feel pretty secluded. At least that’s how I feel about it. The easiest way that I found was asking for recommendation. Either on forums, through friends or acquaintances. And then you find a number and a name, and you search for them on the internet and find their resume or some information to find out some info about them. 

When our options are limited, what will discourage us to try a therapist that we found through our acquaintance, is self-diagnose. Doing so will first make us search for what our problem is and then specifically go for a therapist that specializes on that issue.  I am strongly against self-diagnosis, because it’s something that I used to do, and it never helped me. The first thing I did was to justify my actions by associating myself with people with a mental illness or disorders that have symptoms that resembles my actions. I was so afraid of what was going on with me that I wanted to have a reason for why I was like that. I used to think that it was impossible the way I acted. That something must be wrong with me.  

Truth is, we don’t actually know better all the time, and there are moments that indeed affect us. Impact our hearts, because we were never in the situation of dealing with that or simply, we function differently than other people, or we experience withdrawal symptoms from substance abuse, or even experience post traumatic effects. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you have an illness or disorder. Something is there, but there are chances that it’s not as bad as you think it is. Diagnosing yourself with something hard and horrible because that’s how you feel in the moment, will only give you a reason to act like that even more. But if you can be as much as you can aware of yourself and ask for the necessary help, that’s when we start to improve.