neuroticboyfriend
A lot of the time when professionals interact with psychotic people, they try to reduce our distress by getting us to stop believing things. For me, that only made things worse. It was confusing and distressing. I felt angry, scared, and misunderstood. The best way I've found to cope with delusional thinking is something I discovered on my own. I'll give an example here so, huge TW for unreality and paranoia.
Scroll away if you're not able to hear delusional thinking.
Yesterday I started freaking out thinking people could hear my thoughts. This is something I've occasionally experienced since I was a child. When this comes up, I always think there's some massive conspiracy, where everyone can hear my thoughts but they react to me as if they don't hear anything. And they're all in on it. This time, it was triggered by intrusive thoughts that I started judging myself for.
As you can imagine, this is distressing. I started talking to people through my mind, which only made it worse. I couldn't focus on what was happening around me. What I did to reduce that distress is.. weirdly nonchalant. I just sat there and thought "Well, if this is true, it's not like they're going to change how they interact with me. Everything is the same as it was. Nothing I can do about it, might as well just keep on keeping on."
That calmed me down enough to start focusing on what I was doing, and eventually completely forget about it until now. Whenever I try to treat my delusional thinking as something I have to stop immediately... it literally only makes my mind double down. But if I work within what I believe - what I "know" - I can find another way to look at it that isn't so scary.
This works with my hallucinations, too. I sometimes see shadow people; they're more like jump scares than anything. They startle me, and I start to wonder if people I'm looking at are real. But that latter part only really happens if I get fearful of them. To avoid that fear, I try to think of the shadow people as just friends watching over me, checking in. They don't do anything, after all. They just pop up, stand there, and disappear.
(Talk of unreality ends here)
So, yeah. This doesn't work for everyone, and it doesn't always work for me depending on what I'm experiencing/how I'm feeling. But without this, I'd be far worse off; it doesn't take too many missteps for me to spiral. I guess my point is, my reality doesn't have to be "normal" for me to be healthy as a schizophrenic person. It just has to be something I can live with, as happily and safely as possible.
And that's ok. Neurodivergent people are allowed to exist, and some people are helped best by finding ways for them to exist as they are without so much distress - rather than trying to eliminate troubling symptoms entirely.