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pinkatchristmas · 4 years

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*tw* theories on psychosis, trauma, and the disrupted assumptive world

Psychosis: a severe mental disorder in which thought and emotions are so impaired that contact is lost with external reality. (Oxford Dictionary)

From around November 2018 to June 2019 I experienced what psychologists call “psychosis”, a symptom of a plethora of disorders that often goes untreated if it cannot be healed through medication. This was a significantly horrible period of my life that I rarely discuss with anyone or disclose to anyone that I had, due to the immense stigma in our society surrounding it.

Psychosis is, at it’s core, a divergence from reality, cultivated by the mind in a manner that is abrupt, disgusting, and inevitable to those who suffer from it. While some people have general schizophrenia, and possibly experience psychosis on a daily basis, and while I did for almost a year, I can’t really explain what it’s like without considering some theories I have regarding what might cause it.

Immense emotional stress

Genetics

Trauma that cannot be reconciled by the mind in accordance with the sufferer’s assumptive world

I believe that all three of these factors are what results in one losing their mind. For me, I had always had rather delusional thoughts throughout my childhood, which I had initially believed were the result of a reaction to a deeply spiritual upbringing and a love of fiction writing. I didn’t recognize these thought patterns as particularly disruptive or even noticeable until after my diagnosis, though there are still things about my old ways of thinking that frankly kind of disturb me. For example, I still have ideations about happenstance occurrences which lead me to believe that certain things will happen. To a certain extent, I’m aware that this type of thinking is sometimes affiliated with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, which I’m sure is linked to other disorders which include patterns of delusional thinking. However, there is a difference between believing that someone will text you back if you see a “sign” and genuinely believing you are in contact with celebrities.

The most bemusing thing about my dip from reality was the fact that I was at least intellectually aware of a possibility that my thoughts were delusional. This had never happened to me before, when to a certain extent, my thinking lifestyle prior to having psychosis was mostly delusional “for fun”. I believed in magic, and signs from the universe, and tarot cards, and astrology and all that bullshit. Now, I’m not sure what I believe in other than luck and the flow of energy between people being a tangible force (which I may discuss in a separate post). However, when I was sick with what most people would call schizophrenia I was intellectually questioning why I was having such monumental life experiences with no justification in the context of “reality”. I think that if you aren’t medicated it isn’t fully possible to overcome a force of delusional thinking so powerful you are incapable of comprehending your own brain’s motivation for surviving in society.

This leads me to a further line of thinking that correlates with the idea that psychosis may or may not be a survival tactic taken upon by the brain to protect one from a trauma response so powerful it could lead to suicidal ideation.

There are many different ways psychosis manifests and it appears in the context of many different diseases. My diagnosis was altered many times: Bipolar II with delusional thoughts, and then later Bipolar II schizoaffective type, and then later schizoaffective disorder; I’m aware that I’m Bipolar, and definitely recognize my symptoms in accordance with a traditional social awareness of the disease. However, after meeting many people with the schizophrenia diagnosis in mental health facilities I attended in order to be cured, I learned that some people just have psychosis all the fucking time. This leads me to believe that the brain is not necessarily in accordance with society’s chosen narrative regarding what leads humans to think in trajectories towards success, survival, sexual gratification, and pleasure. If we believe that our brains are only meant to exist in one format, or, if we are taught that the brain’s neurons only fire for certain reasons, that is how we will continue to lead our lives.

What I’m trying to communicate is that in the basic education I’ve received about my own brain had always led me to believe that I, personally, and everyone around me would always aspire to make the “right” or most fulfilling choice in the context of these set “needs” for the brain. What gives us satisfaction and pleasure in a psychological context may actually be, just what we’re taught gives us those things. While this may not fully matter in a hedonistic, capitalist society which is now falling apart before our eyes, I think we commonly disregard the fact that discipline can be rewarding just as much as a bout of instant gratification. This dialectic leads me to my next point, which I think can only be justified by the fact that I experienced psychosis.

If the brain is taught to pursue certain goals from an early stage of development, it will likely continue to seek out these prizes from birth until death. From here I will give a brief timeline of the experiences I had while being psychotic. Firstly, it’s notable that I’m almost certain the thing that caused by break was in accordance with the theory that a trauma is caused by the disruption of one’s assumptive world. I have never heard anything more accurate in the context of my own experience. I think that our assumptions about the way we are supposed to both live our lives and pursue “goals”, which are really just achievable narratives applied to our interpersonal experiences on a broader scale in society than we maybe comprehend, is toxic and, due to the fact that it is the foundation upon which our capitalist worldview is based, an inevitable lifestyle for almost everyone. For example, I will display the narrative of my psychosis as a psychological example to support this hypothesis.

From a young age, probably since birth, I have had an incredibly deep-seated belief that I was a very beautiful woman and that society would fundamentally reward for this. While this is obviously an incredibly subjective world view to take, it was comfortable and the belief itself was supportive enough for my self-esteem that it became what some might call a core belief. A horrible core belief, but one nonetheless. When I entered into a relationship that was casual but ultimately incredibly meaningful to me at the time when I was nineteen, my toxic core belief about my appearance led me to believe all kinds of stupid stuff you believe when you’re nineteen. Like, for example, if you’re extremely beautiful you can get any guy you want, including the one who will eventually leave you. When that happened to me, my incredibly shallow and unjustified and probably delusion belief that I was the most attractive person I knew led my assumptive world to being shattered. Of course, the experience of loving someone and having them not only leave you, but choose to be with someone else, is incredibly painful. I think this experience would be the same for everyone. Or, uniquely horrible and similar for everyone.

Either way, that trauma is likely what caused my psychotic break. Not because of the pain of the heartbreak, or the randomness of the event (which it was), or the severing of an important relationship, but because I had had such a devolved and view on the world and had been so sheltered to any other belief about my ability to sustain a romantic relationship that it led me to have to escape my own reality.

Other traumas coincided with this one. Shortly after the said relationship ended, I was sexually assaulted, which also led to a disruption of my assumptive world. I guess the only assumption I had in that regard was that I would never have to experience something that violent in my lifetime. To compare one’s traumatic experiences is really not a fun nor fruitful endeavor, but I think when it comes to psychosis, the stronger your assumptive belief was, the harder your brain pushes against the new, contradictory belief that now has to replace the old one. So, what was I now supposed to believe? I wasn’t beautiful? I wasn’t attractive? I wasn’t worthy of love because of what I had to offer, which at the time I believe most importantly were my looks. That was the new belief. It couldn’t be reconciled. There were now all these possibilities that came with the rest of my life even though I was only nineteen that were terrifying. With both the breakup and the sexual assault, I now had two replacement beliefs that were standing in my way: being beautiful didn’t necessarily grant you a significant other, and it might make you more vulnerable to sexual violence. And that was a lot to take into consideration.

I didn’t only believe that I was beautiful; I generally considered myself to be smarter, funnier, and generally more interesting than the people I would find myself surrounded by. Did this make me an arrogant asshole? Maybe. I was also a teenager. Regardless, if my intelligence and intuition couldn’t prevent me from avoiding one incredibly painful life experience which was shortly followed by one that was literally life-threatening, maybe everything I’d thought about myself was false. What this has to do with psychosis is relevant, only because of the timeline in which I suffered my series of mental health ailments before the point I actually became delusional.

Psychosis is widely considered to be a hiccup in the evolutionary code, but I can’t attest to whether or not I actually believe this. I think that if you have beliefs that carry you throughout your life, and they are disrupted, this can be painful and traumatizing and lead to growth, (however that’s perceived by an individual in the context of our “goal-oriented” society), but if one has a predisposition to believe something about their life and then is forced to realize that there is no possibility of this belief actually coming into fruition, that’s a problem for the brain. I’m not talking about whether or not you thought Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston were going to be together forever and then were traumatized by their separation. I’m talking about things that are so deeply engrained in your personhood, you weren’t even aware they were there. The phenomenon of an assumptive world being shattered by a dismantled belief leading to psychosis is one of my theories about why it occurs, though I don’t belief this can be applied to all cases.

Another theory I have about psychosis which can probably be considered pretty fundamental is that you have to have a predisposed mental health issue prior to developing delusional thoughts. I think delusions are an evolutionary tactic to prevent humans not only from the general pain of reality, but the immensely distressing fact that we are not even certain how or why we exist. Alternatively, what is the difference between a delusion and a belief? Are people who believe that Jesus Christ was a human being who was actually capable of walking on water, delusional? Objectively, in my opinion, this could be considered a delusion. The only reason it isn’t is because it is generally considered to be true by a majority of the population. What really makes a delusion is it’s specificity to your own personal thoughts and how your brain carries out fantasies, hopes in the context of the “goals” you’re supposed to be achieving, and the context in which you can no longer reconcile a specific belief with the reality you’re facing.

My delusional thoughts were largely centered around narratives regarding my self-worth. Mainly, they fulfilled the ultimately gratifying notion that I was the most attractive, interesting and beautiful woman in the world and that I deserved to go from being someone of complete obscurity to dating a celebrity, with no factual evidence that this was actually happening. The psychosis led me to believe that magic was real and that I could communicate with people through telepathy, alternate dimensions, past lives, and basically coordinated whatever train of thinking it would take for me to have a justified belief that I was dating a celebrity. This is 100% true. There were other times when I believed that celebrities were hoping to threaten my status as the girlfriend of an incredibly high-profile person, and wanted to kill me.

*TW*

This leads to another sector of my belief about psychosis that justifies the theory that it is an evolutionarily predisposed condition that is only executed in certain scenarios. For example, if you believe that you are no longer capable of living in a society where your beliefs can lead you to be a successful member of that society, you may want to kill yourself. This is a very grim analysis of a general thought pattern that people have every day, although when I had delusions some of them were literally that people I’d never met wanted to kill me, and that if I wasn’t killed first, I would have to kill myself. I know this isn’t an easy thing to discuss or read about. If evolution’s goal is to propel one forward in society by any means necessary, eradicating yourself from that template can be done through the loophole of delusions. I don’t know why the brain would be this cruel to itself, but I’m guessing if it’s already aware it can no longer be salvaged, maybe this is evolution’s last resort.

This absolutely leads to a debate regarding the nature of evolution and whether or not suicide is an evolutionary response to depression, schizoaffective disorder, schizophrenia, or other mental health ailments a person may suffer from. If you are in enough pain to take your own life, maybe that’s an evolutionary response to ending that pain. Of course, this is an incredibly difficult topic to talk about, and please know that I do not take the subject of suicide lightly and do not like assessing it’s potential place in the context of evolution. I am simply pulling from my own experience with psychosis to observe whether or not psychosis as a whole is an evolutionary function that goes against the shattering of one’s assumptive beliefs about the world.

I have other theories about psychosis and will probably post more about my experience with it here, though those are all the things I can think of off the top of my head when it comes to the full experience of undergoing that psychological phenomenon. I’m happy to say that anti-psychotics do work and while I’m grateful to now be ultimately cured from my psychosis, it was a life experience that I do not look back on fondly. I guess I hope that if anyone reads this, that they might feel better about their own mental health and know that there are always resources available no matter what when it comes to seeking help. A part of me also hopes that someone else who had psychosis might stumble upon this post and try and get in touch with me about their experiences. At the end of the day, I’m just a mentally ill person who likes to knit.

#psychology #psychology writing #psychosis #schizophrenia #schizophrenic disorder #schizoaffective #schizoaffective disorder #writing #nonfiction #science #STEM #women in stem #stem writing #research #psychology research #personal writing

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indoafrikanqueen-blog · 7 years

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Love and Whiteness (Part II)

So the last time I wrote a post on this subject it was more directly lamenting the difficulties of loving a white person and the ways in which they fail to see you on a one-on-one level. But as we get deeper into our relationship big things keep coming up. And this is why it has taken me so long to get around to writing part two of that post. Put simply, loving a white partner is not simply about the one on one relationship the two of you have. It is about much much more than that. See, there are the interpersonal dynamics between the two of you, then there are the larger societal power dynamics. Basically, what I have been coming to realise over the increasing course of my relationship is that deciding to build something with a white person is complex, because the advantages they have of being in the world slowly crowd out the little space you have. As a pansexual person in a heterosexual presenting relationship, this is because of the role patriarchy plays - a woman slowly is expected to conform to the culture of her partner, and her partner's family. That is, assimilation. But this is compounded because of the settler-colonist culture in South Africa, whiteness is seen as the highest bar of existence for all, and so with whiteness comes a sense of supremacy and entitlement, and if you don't fit the bar, you guessed it, you are less than worthy of being a part of the family. There are a number of challenges that come up when I think about the costs that being in a relationship with a white cis-het male have had on my psyche. And to speak frankly I am tired. In fact all the women in me are tired. But because it is a release, and because it may help someone else out there I am going to dish them up right now. So sit back, and enjoy (if possible). 1 - Privilege and the associated lack of lived experience. This is perhaps the biggest stumbling block in our relationship. If you are a black woman (or person) dating a white male, there probably is a phase where it is all hunky dory. But sooner or later, one day you wake up and have the earth-shattering realisation that:

"There is no way in which my cis-het, upper class, able-bodied, christian, male partner, has ever been systemically discriminated against in his entire life."

And this shakes you up because all you've ever known was struggle. As a woman, as a person of colour, as a non-hetero person, as a poor person, for me - as a survivor. And for a second you can't reconcile how it is that the two of you are together. For a split second you feel lucky, like maybe you won the lottery. You remember how hard it used to be when you were young, how you struggled through abuse, through trauma, through the vicarious trauma of those in your community, and you think "Ah, how did I get here? That all feels like a long and distant dream." Then you wake the fuck up and realise that you are not lucky. That the boundaries of the prison have just changed, and now while you are able to live and love and exist a lot easier than you were able to before there are constraints facing you that you would never imagine existed and these come in the shape of your partner's privilege.

Obviously different people are woke to different levels, but white partners in particular tend to suffer from the white liberal affliction. They think that because you agree on the basis of morality and ethics there is no need to do extra work to be a good ally. In fact they may not even know what allyship means. And the burden of educating them is then defaulted onto YOU, the partner.

Because they are an entitled white male, they get offended when you say that it is not your duty to educate them. They don't understand that you don't owe it to them. If you choose to educate them it is because you love them and you have committed to your relationship. Educating them is a god damn privilege, not your job.

In any case, privilege fucks with the power dynamics, and unless your partner is willing to put in the active conscious work, reading, listening to podcasts, watching stuff, reading and reading, he is not going to wake up. Not now. Not ever.

2- Compounded with class and privilege comes family. In the case of my partner, he is half foreign, and half South African. And I always find that the half foreign aspect is what has saved him. Of the micro-aggressions that I experience at the hands of his family, those from his dad - a white South African apartheid era male - are the worst. To him I am not an individual, I am other. Whenever he talks about black people or indians, or black colleagues, he makes eye contact with me. Needless to say he thinks I am the fucking spokesperson for every Indian person in South Africa.

And while the microaggressions from him are regular and particularly bad, it is not much better from the rest of the family. While the mum is less problematic she is not unproblematic, and the sisters are so couched in their own privilege that it suffocates me. This is the thing, when you relate to them (the whole family) it is on their terms. You do what they want and expect you to do and you do it in their way. They speak upper-crust english, and because I speak my vernacular I become a fucking cute little joke to them, "Oh, Anne*, did you hear how she said that?". Ha. ha. ha. Big fucking deal. I am sorry I am not a colonist settler who stole land, preserved imperial culture and went to the most expensive private school owned to man.

So, yeah, white families. And guess what, you tell your partner about it and they accuse you of hating their family? It has actively started causing me anxiety. I can't go there and not get a tummy ache or headache, and a sinking feeling (Queue get out) in my stomach. Worst part is - they don't know it. My partner thinks he is between a rock and a hard place, and to date has only had a discussion with them about how problematic they are on one occasion. And in this process I am villainised. It becomes me against the family. Well it wouldn't be if they weren't such passively racist human beings.

3- Friends. I'll keep it short. This post is becoming taxing. The microaggressions are terrible. One of the friends also did the thing all white people do by referring to me as curry! Racist pig. There was no backlash from my partner who then went on the defensive and like a week later forgot it happened. Well, I didn't forget. Then, there are the extremely racist and misogynist friends. He has a friend who had a road rage incident and drove past the woman, rolled down his window and flashed a wad of cash in her face. Then bragged to me and my partner about it, and proceeded to say that he

was sure that she wanted to fuck him. My partner sees this as a once off isolated incident, and his family says boys will be boys. My partner also thinks he is between a rock and a hard place.

Don't they understand that these are our fucking lives - oh wait, they don't!

2 - Society. South Africa, and particularly Cape Town is the most racially segregated racist place in the country. It is worse because white liberals who live here go to church and think they are doing their duty unto society. They live in big houses on the foot of the mountain and donate blankets and money to charity but have never paid retribution and will not give back the land. They see no link between the exploitation of black bodies under apartheid and their economic success. And because they are colonist-settlers, they think they belong here and also behave as Gods. They don't make eye contact with you if you are not white, and do not acknowledge your humanity. When they do it is in a patronising way. They don't see black people as people, forget as their inferiors. They are entitled trash. Period. Now think about having kids, black kids, and this is what they aspire to. Nope. 3 - The lack of a reprieve. So, I go to work. It is extremely white, I go to therapy, she is white, I go home my partner is white. My family is scattered. I am alone in this city. My black friends have moved on from this mini-apartheid state to places that will feed their souls. My white friends mostly have the liberalism affliction, and I am isolated. There are very few public spaces that have black bodies in them, and it becomes suffocating. Loving a white person, then, is not about loving that individual. It is about being able to live with the toll that that love takes on your psyche and the price you pay for it. But I've basically decided that I am no longer willing to pay this price for our love. I demand respect from his parents, I will not associate with his friends, and he has to graft for it. I mean I could keep writing about this, the anger, the erasure, but I'll stop here. I love my partner. I really do. When it is just the two of us hanging, I see his soul and I truly feel that he sees mine, and I don't wanna end what we've been building. I dig it. I dig him. I dig our life. But add to the equation the expectation of settling down (I don't want to) and where (Cape Town? City of spatial apartheid?), monogamy (contentious one) and kids (I am strictly adopting when I decide I am ready - too many abandoned lil puudin' faces ouchea), it quickly becomes a lot. Look, I don't have the answers. Being in a relationship with a non-white male could easily have just as many challenges, there is always patriarchy and religion. In any case, we're investing in something here and I will try to make it work, but the bottom line is this guy is going to have to put in some serious work. I guess if I could speak frankly to him I would say: I know you've never had to work for anything in your life. I know you are hyper-intelligent, so why don't you put some of that intellect to work and research concepts such as wokeness, allyship, feminism, intersectionality? Oh it bores you? Well listen up... this is the lifeline of our relationship, and it is ALL up to you at this stage. You think that what I have displayed up to now is rage? You have no idea of the leaps and bounds by which it will expand if you don't do something about it. Gone, are the tears and the fear. This is a fight for survival, and you are either going to step up to the challenge or not.

#Whiteness #Relationships #Racism #Burden of Existence #Anger

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