During my episodes, I lost my ego-boundary, which is the mental construct that helps to discern and separate what is happening externally as opposed to what’s happening internally. It felt like everything was all blended into one world and my internal thoughts were directly correlated to everything happening around me. It was incredibly confusing and I lost faith in my ability to listen to myself so I started looking for external cues as to what my actions and words should be. In the years following my episodes, I had developed thought-action-fusion where my thoughts were connected to all my actions. Along with this came perception-action-fusion, where I felt everything I was perceiving would become a part of me and cause me to do and say things I didn’t want to.
One of the difficulties I encountered during my episodes was having lost control during times where I was doing everything I could to have control. The experience of having lost control made me feel as if I was a slave to my mind, and if I didn’t have good material in my mind, then bad things could happen. To counter this, I thought I had to only ingest good material, and any time I ingested bad material, it caused me psychosis in the forms of my mind fogging up, having anxiety, becoming nauseous, becoming fearful, becoming neurotic, and feeling very impulsive. I couldn’t watch movies or TV because I had felt they were the main cause for having done bad things when I lost control. During my episodes, I was reading books to try and pull out all the material that I thought was bad and recondition my mind, so if I did lose control again, bad things would not happen.
Perception-Action-Fusion is the belief that any material I ingested is going to become actions and words spoken, including anything on TV, in the movies, on the radio, heard via spoken word, and seen or felt. This was difficult to counteract because it meant I could only perceive good material in order to not have psychosis. There was a lot of irrational fear involved, and the first step to getting this out of the way has been to counter thought-action-fusion. When I disassembled thought-action-fusion, realizing that I don’t need my thoughts to be connected to my actions in order to have control over myself, I then worked on disassembling emotion-action-fusion, which is the same as thought-action-fusion only in terms of feeling I had to control all my emotions in order to control myself. Perception-Action-Fusion caused me psychosis when I felt I was ingesting material that was going to cause me to do things I didn’t want to. In retrospect, I realized I’ve been subjected to a ton of bad material, thoughts, emotions over the past 9 years of being out of my episodes and I haven’t done anything wrong. Also, those thoughts, emotions, and materials have not become my actions at all. This realization was liberating for me and was the first step in disassembling the problem.
Another part of this was learning that I’ve ingested enough good material over the past, however many years, to counteract any bad material I’d been ingesting. When I was younger, I grew up watching a ton of movies and tv shows, so I felt that this constant ingestion of bad material was the cause for bad things I had done during episodes. After years of ingesting good material, I realized I had more of a barrier and protection against this bad material. Another helpful component was unlearning all the implicit messages I had been receiving from TV and the movies. For a couple of years, I dissected all the implicit messages and subliminal messages and filtered them out of my mind. As I did this, my sense of control and my sense of self improved immensely. I also realized that I don’t have to listen and follow everything I’m seeing and perceiving, which is exactly what television commercials always implore you to do. Not listening and knowing I always had a decision whether I wanted to listen or not was incredibly helpful.
I also learned that it wasn’t entirely the bad material that was causing the problem, it was the fear of it causing the problem that caused the psychosis. This put the onus on finding ways to not react to the bad material and to just let the bad material come and go as it normally would. While ingesting bad material, I was repressing thoughts and emotions that were normal for me to think. I was afraid to think and feel positive thoughts and emotions while ingesting morally wrong material. I realized that having fear over something is not going to give you control over the thing you’re afraid of necessarily. This idea helped me to dispel the notion that fear of ingesting bad material would help me with my fear of losing control and doing the things the bad material was suggesting.
Along with this, thought-broadcasting was also incorporated into the problem. During my episodes, I felt that the entire world could hear everything I was thinking and could perceive everything I was perceiving. I also thought I was a messiah, so I felt I had to ingest strictly good material in order to save the world, and if I didn’t the world would be in jeopardy. At this point in my life, I know I’m not a messiah but I still had to refute the delusion on the level it originated at. I journaled that “even if the world is perceiving everything I am, it hasn’t changed at all and it clearly doesn’t affect anyone. This helped to clear up more psychosis.