Monday, February 22, 2010

Lessons learned: including "Who told your to invade my head?"

One breakthrough in my coping mechanism with the symptoms (people could read my mind and I could sense their presence etc....)--> "I am not responsible for my psychotic symptoms."  and "Who told your to invade my head without permission?"

Unfortunately, there is no standard interventions for my own symptoms.  Some might work for a while and, all of a sudden, doesn't work.  My coping so far... a constant processing of finding out the things that might work.

Taking symptoms such as people could read my mind and hear my thought thing...

You could tell yourself that... it is but your symptoms.  Yet, good luck with that... if you could win it over this way, they wouldn't have been coined as pathological.

If you don't give a bag of beans about how others feel, you could simply run your mouth on and on at them "unauthorized intruders in your head."  End results, other people might find it difficult to get your attention and find your head all flaky...  This might be the same reason why, sometimes on the street, you hear people all of a sudden yelling at you for no good reason.

Yesterday, for instance, as I was walking down Broadway, this woman came towards me and yelled... "Keep on playing your game!!"

I went... "8-O you could see them people accessing my head without authorizations and you are actually speaking to them?"  (So speak for the synergistic effect of putting two together... 8-O lol sigh)

At the same time, others might feel bad when not-so-nice thoughts would come into their head.  They might feel bad that the not-so-nice thoughts might be known by other people and hurt their feelings.

This is one of my worst enemy... For the longest time, I felt bad when not so nice thoughts would emerge and might hurt the receivers' feelings.... and your know your condition is going down south when it goes from singular to plural because, when you start to feel the presence and hear the voices of many people, your head starts to reenact things like the three kingdoms... 8-O lol sigh

And this is the time when you have your meds up... like what I have to do.. with the minor inconveniences I have to face when going to bed... In addition to them symptoms who have a bad habit of showing up left and right in all forms while you let go of your cognitive control when trying to fall asleep, extremely dry mouth, the sensation of the esophagus getting all tightened up and the body jerking up and down in bed as if a life fish out of water on a chopping board....

Life used to be much easier... you pop the meds, it knocks you down and put your asleep.  The worst thing could happen is for you to feel all dumb all days... none of them physical kinda stuffs... sigh

Then, the light ball went off earlier today and I realized that one way of responding to these kind of incidence is to say to myself...

"I have no control over my symptoms otherwise they will not be called pathological symptoms.  In addition, my head is my head and who the hell are you to intrude my private thoughts... pathological or not.  That should teach you a lesson being beaten up by my disordered thoughts left and right."

(Remember... the reason why symptoms are symptoms is because of the intrinsic bias patients have towards the disordered thinking.)

Then I thought of what that strange doctor of mine said to my over 2 years ago...

"放下" or, in English, "Let go."

I could not understand what exactly I have to put down and, today, I bet, the doctor might have no idea either except for he simply knows that is what I have to do.

Since then, I have learned to let go of many things... although I am still not quite sure what I have to learn to let go.

The most recent thing that I learned to let go is to let go of the control over my symptoms... as mentioned in the previous part of the writing.  I have to learn to let the symptoms to simply be symptoms while finding the least stressful way of reacting to them.  (And, of course, it is easier to say than to do... react not...)

In addition, in my previous life, people mostly could not tell that there is anything not so normal about me... until the point of the accident when I fell free from a collapsing chair in sitting position.

From then on... till today... it is just a normal part of my life to walk abnormal and go into abnormal states.  At this point, when it occurs... whether it is my limping around... sleep walking... experiencing excruciating pains migrating through my body as I take my walk ... etc... It is just the way it is so let it be.  And, hopefully, if I let it run through... I will be able to walk out of it.... and luckily, I have been able to walk in and out of strange states so far....

Essentially, I am regressing back to the mean and simply need to fill the quota.... Nowadays, I am having a paradigm shift in my MO... pretending no more... trying no more to act like them people-- normal... though I still do have my boundary and though I have no idea what it really means to act normal. 8-O  Somehow, something tells me that this is what it takes... I simply have to do it and get it over with.

Of course, God knows whether any of these thoughts are intuition or delusions...  Everything shifts and morphs all the time...  Along this line of thinking... I have given up trying to figure out how sane or insane I might be.  Somehow... no need no more.... unless... insufficient cognitive capacity.  In addition, the want to figure it out make you think and convoluted thinking drive you even nuttier.

In addition, this idea just came to me yesterday.... what about creative writing? 8-O

Monday, February 15, 2010

Symptoms

Came across the following table in a paper....  Following are the current names of psychotic symptoms.  The texts in purple are the symptoms I have to cope with on a daily basis...  As I was going through the list, I realize... oops... 100% hit... shxt... pretty bad... or not good.... 8-O lol sigh

Current names of symptoms
Descriptions
Acoustico-verbal hallucinations
Voices heard arguing or commenting on patient's actions.
Audible thoughts
Patient’s own thoughts heard by him/herself.
Thought broadcasting
Patient’s thought are passively diffused to other people.
Thought insertion
Other people intrude their thoughts upon the patient.
Thought withdrawal
Other people actively take patient’s thoughts in his/her mind.
Made affect and feelings
Experience of influences playing on patient’s sensations.
Somatic passivity, delusions of influence, alien control
Experience of influences playing on patient’s actions.
Delusional perception
Patient’s experience of a peculiar, intense, convincing experience not shared by other people.

Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Learning to read

It seems like every time I try to read adult kind of stuffs (I can read children's book without words well), my body and head gets into trouble and it would take forever, such as days, for me to recover.

The major task I am trying to do today and the days to come is to learn to read and to find ways to minimize its damages.  8-O

One plausible principle that might be useful is un-attention-un-deficit and one adaptive strategy I have come up with is to do something else distracting such as knitting while trying to read.

At the same time, reading is not the only thing that drives mes crazy.

It just came to my attention last week when trying to help this friend preparing her dataset to be analyzed.... my psychotic symptoms went for a field trip and my body went down south as well.

When the dasein moment of them fearful delusions emerged when I was doing coding or data analysis, I actually had to outsource my delusional beliefs to calm them dasien down so that I could push the thing through...  Interestingly, after I decided to leave it to my delusional protective figure in my imaginary world to help taking care of my delusional moments of extreme fear, them dasein sort of went away leaving more manageable symptoms floating around... 8-O  lol sigh

What I mean by the dasein moment... example... someone I care or not is going to die or hurt really bad... as I have described too many a time.

Some other commonly observed indicators... yawning, tearing, really deep breathing as if there is old air that needed to come out of my chest, mouth and eyes....

I don't know how them experts might classify this kind of condition.

Not my issue anyways...

Time to get back to my unknitting...

At the same time, something tells me.. incidences are but peripheral and if it were not one incidence, it would always be another....

It is just part of the  process... and that is just the way it is.

I won't be stuck in this state forever... in the meanwhile, the question... How long is it going to take before I finally could grow out of this strange form of disability?  I suspect... the same answer my doctor in Taiwan gave me when I asked him... "When could I walk again?"

"Depending on you."

Delusional or not?  Well... at least this is a belief I can manage....