#reality checking

[schizopositivity]

Hello! I just had a quick scroll through your blog and it helped me to understand a bit more! I was wondering if you could answer a question of mine? I have a friend with Schizophrenia and just in you personal experience, does confirming things that are real bad? Like if they think they hear dogs barking and aren't sure if it is real or not it's good to confirm something like that right?

Well I can't speak for everyone with schizophrenia. We are all different and have unique needs and preferences. I think you should ask your friend, they know themselves best.

As an example of how it could go: for me I'll ask my partner if they hear/see/smell something. And they will casually and calmly tell me yes or no. If they say no, they don't ask more questions. We both know I hallucinate and at this point in my life it's not a big deal. But I do like to check and see if it is a hallucination or not just for my own curiosity. They are the only person I feel comfortable doing this with because they know me best, and they don't treat it like a huge deal, which I appreciate.

You should also be aware of some of the reasons a schizophrenic person might not want to reality check with someone in this way. A lot of people will treat any hallucination someone they know has as a big dramatic thing that needs an immediate solution. People might react by getting really concerned and treating their loved one completely differently for having active hallucinations. Maybe they just raise their eyebrows and keep a close eye on you. Maybe they try to see the hallucination themselves. Maybe they suddenly act like the hallucinating person is in danger. They might even rush into trying to get the person into a hospital. The hallucinating person also may simply be embarrassed to tell people. And while all of this can come from a genuine place of concern, it can be really upsetting for the hallucinating person. It might just be their everyday symptoms, and someone being very dramatic about it makes them feel like they aren't seen as autonomous and conscious of themselves, or as someone that can't simply exist as themselves.

These are things you should say to a schizophrenic person while they are not hallucinating: if you want you can check with me and ask me if things are real. Would you like me to verify if things are real or not? If you are hallucinating while we are together, what would you like me to do? How can I tell when you need immediate help? And also just assure them that you won't judge them for hallucinating, you won't treat them differently, and you won't turn it into a big deal if it's not.

And if you ask them and they respond with "no I don't want to reality check with you, I don't want to tell you when I'm hallucinating" then that's their answer and you shouldn't try to push them into wanting anything else. It's not about you not being a good enough friend, it is just their personal boundaries. And if they respond with "yeah you can reality check with me, but only when I specifically ask for it" then you should accept that answer too. It takes an incredible amount of trust to reality check with someone, and that trust shouldn't be broken.

Once again, every schizophrenic person is different. I can't know what your friend would want, so please reach out to them directly about this. And if you can't openly have these types of conversations then you probably shouldn't be the one to reality check.

#answered #schizophrenia #mental illness #nd #neurodivergent #schizophrenic #psychosis #actuallyschizophrenic #mental health awareness #pseriouslypsychotic #schizophrenia questions #hallucination #hallucinating #reality checking #reality check

[gray-gray-gray-gray]

＜・STOP REALITY CHECKING PEOPLE・＞

#actually psychotic #psychosis #delusions #unreality #reality check #reality checking #Live footage of what happens in my brain when you try to reality check me #graypost #poetrypost #i like poetry that blurs the lines between poetry and visual art #poetry #writing #mental illness #nd #neurodivergent #paranoia #paranoia inducing #Ask to tag !!!

[goldmanguyperson]

just saw someone call endogenic systems “delusional” as if thats not incredibly ableist lol??? i mean for one “delusional” should not be used as an insult. that is ableist by definition. and for another things labeled delusions and hallucinations are a real origin, they dont gate someone from being a system at all?

ive met psychotic people who heard voices with distinct personalities and opinions that went away when they started taking medication. their psychosis made them plural. it was and is real to them. cuz. thats what delusions and hallucinations are. theyre real to you in that moment. And with systems being an in your head thing already (not in an “all in your head” dismissive way. i mean literally, it is a brain thing), who’s to say you cant be a system because of delusions, something that is in your head? i dont get it

#ableism #syscourse #delusions #delusion #reality check #reality checking #<- I’m not trying to but i want to be safe in case saying delusions are in your head disturbs someone having one

[moved-to-darkplanets]

Honestly this PDF is very important reading for fictionfolk of all kinds, I think.

Until quite recently my interactions with my source fandom mostly consisted of bitching to my friends about all the things that pissed me off about it due to the twin factors of a very popular ship being uncomfortably reminiscent of abuse the body went through and feeling disrespected by the source's creator. I was a drain to both my friends' emotional energy and the general mood of the fandom on here. I thought I was being "responsible" about the whole thing because I wasn't harassing or attacking anyone but I still wasn't being kind either to myself or others.

The fact that remains is that your source (not the world you come from, the media itself) has no soul. It is some lines on a page or images on a screen that does not contain you, merely a mirror that was held up to you that helped you understand yourself. When the fandom does it's thing they're not talking about you, they're talking about a soup of images, words and ideas that entertained them. Something inert that is just a representation, something that cannot possibly hope to contain all that is a living person or being. There is no great canine puppet master pulling the strings over your head.

#Fictionfolk #Fictionlink #Fictionkin #Otherkin #Alterhuman #Source harm #Reality checking #Tagging just in case

[fleapit]

it's like people forgot about phantom limbs overnight. feeling a tail/ears/muzzle/paws/whatever is a really common therian occurrence it doesn't mean you're "physically shifting" and it doesn't make you a clinical lycanthrope.

#obviously this doesnt apply to actual psychotic people but ill tag it as #double bookkeeping #just in case #barking #therianthropy #fuck also #reality checking

[strawberrybabydog]

Does reality checking ever help? Do delusions ever respond to proof/logic AT ALL helped AT ALL? is there a diff between that and reality testing?

no, reality checking (the act of telling a delusional person that their delusions are fake) doesnt help, and can actually permanently make delusions worse. at best, it basically just deflects off the delusional person but doesnt change anything. challanging delusions is like the #1 thing caregivers and mental healthcare providers are taught not to do when caring for/interacting with delusional people. this is because delusions are unshakeable beliefs. if a person can be talked out of a delusion, it is not a delusion. this is an oversimplification but covers the bases

delusional people can respond neutrally to "proof/logic," but when this happens, its because of double book keeping. it doesnt help, treat, or eliminate the delusion. the delusional person is just able to recognize it doesnt make sense logically or that other people dont believe the same thing. this does not mean you should try to proof/logic someone out of delusion - please dont, that is reality checking, and as i said above is very dangerous and not worth the risk.

reality testing is different. i dont really want to talk about it though. reality testing is a rare-ish form of psychiatric treatment (<also oversimplification), and should only be done by/under the eye of a trained professional. i know that my words have a lot of impact and i fear if i talk about it, people would use that to try to treat their friends/themselves, even if i strongly discourage them not to & explained the dangers. im unsure of how effective reality testing is in practice, but from what i hear it basically just depends on the person so its kinda 50/50

#not dog #asks #reality checking #on reality checking #<cant remember which is my actual tag but apparently ive used both b4 #on reality testing #delusions

[lowempathyhighenergy]

Reaching out to everyone I know who will respond to reality check myself because my coworkers seem to not be able to see/hear me I love being fucking crazy I'm not gonna kms at all

People are responding though so I must be at least a tiny bit Just Crazy. Fingers crossed lmao

#shut it el #actually psychotic #reality checking #delusions

[shadowtraveled]

"mithrun is the only real monsterfucker in dungeon meshi" is objectively the funniest bit you can get out of his everything, but in all seriousness i think his attraction to his love interest is deliberately overstated—and that makes sense, because romantic jealousy is a classic and digestible motive, which is explicitly what kabru was aiming for in condensing mithrun's backstory, and also because until chapter 94, mithrun wasn't willing to admit to the true nature of his desires.

but because romantic envy is both classic and digestible, it probably isn’t a unique enough or complicated enough desire to tempt a demon’s appetite. mithrun’s wish, as far as we can figure from kabru’s reduced retelling, was to have a life in which he had never become one of the canaries, and that carries like 3857 implications and desires within it. that’s delicious. his love interest acts as sort of a red herring to his motivation for making it, though. (side note: i'm saying "love interest" here because, keeping in mind that i barely speak japanese on a good day anymore, "想い人" is something i'd usually take as just kind of an old-fashioned and romantic way to refer to a lover, but in context i wonder if both the connotation of yearning and the vagueness are intentional, and i think this phrasing gets those aspects of it more effectively. anyway.)

mithrun considered his love interest to be untrustworthy. there was a minute where i thought that comment might be about a similar-looking elf (yugin, one of his squad members), but comparing the two…

the "sketchy" arrow is definitely referring to the elf we know as his love interest—the bangs go toward her right, she only has the one forehead ornament, and, most notably, her ears aren't notched.

every time she’s given a full-body depiction in his dungeon, she’s drawn as a chimera, with the body of a snake from the waist down. (side note: the “what if a dungeon has chimeras before reaching level 4?”/“then the dungeon lord is unstable” exchange just being mithrun grilling his past self alive is so funny. he’s so. but anyway) there are a couple things about this.

first, the snake part of the chimera appears to be modeled after some species of coral snake mimic

which, in the biology-for-fun manga, i… doubt is a coincidence, especially with the added context of the “untrustworthy” comment. the dungeon’s conjured illusion of mithrun’s love interest was a harmless copycat of a venomous original. for whatever reason, he felt this person was a threat and made up a "safe" version of her to be in a relationship with, and while it’s definitely possible to be attracted to or even love someone you find to be toxic and/or intimidating, when you take that into consideration alongside the configuration of her body, you get some interesting implications.

which brings us to our second point: if we assume that mithrun was not in fact fucking a snake, then sexual attraction, at least, was so far removed from his idea of a relationship with this person that he did not even bother to keep her dungeon copy human enough to maintain the illusion of the option of a sexual relationship. this is somewhat echoed in the depictions of their interactions, which also imply a frankly unexpected romantic distance. she kisses his cheek and he doesn't seem to react; she's at the edge of a narrow bed with only one set of pillows, on top of his blankets while he's underneath them.

the kiss is particularly interesting because it seems to contrast the text. kabru's narration tells us this was everything mithrun could have asked for, but mithrun is there looking unreadable to pensive, likely because this is right before the panel that makes it clear things in the dungeon are beginning to go wrong.

walking through this backwards for a minute, we have the physical barrier of his bedding and the spatial separation inherent in a bed made for one person, the emotional barrier of his mounting anxiety getting in the way of his ability to enjoy the affection he sought, and... the snake, which historically carries the connotation of temptation, yes, but also mistrust, barring physical intimacy. okay. ok. if a dungeon reflects the mentality of its lord, all of this might suggest that mithrun was not able to have any real desire for a relationship with this person. his unwillingness to be vulnerable or let another person in was insurmountable. but in that case, why was she such a focal point that she remained to the end, after his dungeon had stopped creating iterations of his friends to come and visit him? why would he get so upset over her meeting with his brother that he became lord of a dungeon about it?

well. mithrun's brother was also interested in her, probably genuinely. and mithrun had to win.

you have an older brother who your parents completely ignore, probably in part because he is chronically ill/disabled and almost definitely in part because he received a ton of recessive traits that resulted in rumors that he was an illegitimate child. you are aware, most likely because those same parents fucking told you, that you actually are an illegitimate child. but they keep you around because you had the good fortune of looking just like your mother. what can that possibly teach you but that you, like your brother, are disposable?

it's utterly unsurprising that mithrun, under these circumstances, developed a pathological need to be better than everyone around him. people don't keep you otherwise. i'd argue this is also why he says he looked down on everyone he knew while milsiril claims his dungeon reeked of feelings of inferiority—he sought out people's worst traits and prioritized them in his mind to protect his already extremely fragile sense of self-worth, and all the while he tried to be as likable and high-performing as he possibly could be. his parents disposed of him anyway, but even then he tried to keep up the performance. he was kind to everyone. he never once lost to a dungeon.

when he saw his "love interest" meeting up with his brother, what he saw was himself being replaced by a person his parents had always treated as worthless, and if that was what they thought of the child they'd kept, what value could anyone possibly see in the bastard they'd given away to die? mithrun and kabru tell the story like he wanted to win this unnamed elf's heart, but it was never about being with her. it was about cementing his worth, proving that he didn't deserve to be thrown away.

and so it's particularly cruel that his demon discarded him, too. but maybe it's also particularly gentle that, in the end, there was someone who refused to even consider giving up on him.

kui laid it out in three panels better than i could hope to.

yeah. it's love. you wanted to be loved, even when the only way you were able to understand it was through the desire to be wanted, and you wanted that so badly that the idea of being consumed felt like the promise of finally mattering to someone.

#dungeon meshi spoilers #mithrun #dungeon meshi #this has been rotating for a while but i wanted to check my evidence before getting into it thanks user angelspenance for posting that meme #half of this is just the text and the other half i'm sure has been said before but it's making my brain [radio static] so here this is #someone did for sure mention this but i do find it very cute that in his fucked up conjured world meant to portray his ideal reality #his teammates came to visit him. like part of the fantasy was then explicitly that they cared about him and were his friends. even though #he says he tried to see the worst in them. #hm it does feel important to note that i do also believe 100% in mithrun suicidality--his desire to be eaten does seem to focus a lot on #wanting it to be Over. wanting not to be left incomplete and empty anymore. #but that loops back around a bit to the hole in your heart that appears when you feel unloved. it's many things and the same thing at once #snakes #long post #severe problems #meshy

[weirdlookindog]

"Life is one darned thing after another!"

#life is... #reality check #black cats #1940s #vintage postcards

[ups3tti]

Sometimes I think about how Kai made his way out of an inferno by accepting that being the green ninja wasn't meant for him but that didn't make him any lesser while Morro died in an inferno because he couldn't let go of the idea of being the green ninja and viewed it as his only source of worth. And then I lose it a little

#i lose it even more because kai only made it out because Lloyd functioned as a reality check to him but to Morro he acted as a catalyst into #more of a spiral #kai and morro have so many parallels and sometimes i imagine them switching places #what if morro had been made to grow past his anger and envy instead #and kai was stunted before he could discover his loyalty and resilience #morro wu #morro ninjago #kai ninjago #kai smith #ninjago #sketti rambles

[nerdy-as-heck]

I need someone to reality check me, harshly, I don't want to go into details but believing I'm something I'm not is starting to cause problems and make me feel physically sick so any reply to this post would be appreciated

#reality checking #vent

[goldmanguyperson]

i think i had a dream where i made a post about unreality and how confusing it can be for people who genuinely experience certain things marked as unreality

so anyways. here’s my post but in real life now

i have been suggested that it would be better to mark things as “your reality may vary”. but also i think that the blanket “unreality” thing could be more harmful than helpful really. I used to, and occasionally still do when my mental health is very poor, have really strong borderline delusions that i have been transported into another universe, usually when in windowless/really small windowed rooms, or in rooms with mirrors that face each other. Certain things, like horror stories about finding out you were in a dream or another reality the whole time, can trigger that anxiety big time in me. Like that one reddit horror story with the improperly rendered video game asset looking lamp. But I’m completely fine with most things marked as unreality. So, I go into a thing marked as unreality pretty sure that i’ll be fine, and then i’m not because it was the 5% of things marked as unreality that gives me horrible anxiety. And that’s kind of stupid and dangerous. I don’t like it. I don’t quite know what exactly to do about it, i just know that the “unreality” marker is just, so horribly useless to me despite having problems with certain unreality things. i hate it. i would prefer if people would describe what they are talking about so i can more easily avoid it. “This is a story that includes irreversible dimension travel”, “this is a story that may trigger anxiety about being in a dream”, “this is a story that can trigger anxiety about not being real or not experiencing real things”. I would rather have anxiety triggered by a label than read a story that goes into depth about exactly how a certain unreal thing could happen and what it would do to you.

(also before anyone points it out—yeah i do actually like this kind of horror. but i only wish to experience it when i am stable and able to dismiss such anxieties)

And specifically on people who genuinely experience certain unreality things—it can sometimes be more harmful to ask them to put that warning there because 1. it can count as a kind of nonconsensual reality checking when it comes to people experiencing psychosis and 2. it is literally their lived experience. they are likely to take offense to basically being told they are experiencing something fake.

I have phantom shifts. These count as unreality to some folks. But it’s real to me!! Where’s the barrier? how do we interact? or do we simply not? last is probably most likely, but what if we’re in the same place, talking about our experiences, often enough? a constant unreality thing is just going to become exhausting, alienating, and anxiety-inducing for at least one of us at some point. “your reality may vary” or a warning for potential delusion trigger (which can happen with anything, not just not real things) just makes more sense to me in these situations. Or, literally just outright specifying what you’re talking about so people can avoid it if it applies negatively to them. That is the solution that makes the most sense to me, like i said before. I would rather know exactly what i am getting into than have to make the gamble that it’ll be something i’m okay with.

#cw delusion #delusions #phantom shift #trigger warnings #reality checking #unreality #shut up! the eagle’s talking!

[tomfrogisblue]

thinking about how ever since their qsmp characters finally admitted their feelings, cc!Fit and cc!Pac's way in which they treat the fictional relationship has done a complete 180

Now the huevitos cannot relax because at any second FitMC might declare HIS BRAZILIAN BOYFRIEND to anyone in his general vicinity and my poor ratinho ass was just chilling when Pactw pulls up his desktop for a split second to reveal ONE OF FIT'S PICS AS HIS DESKTOP BACKGROUND

#please help i am being bullied /j #we complained about baby steps and slowburn - now look at us lmao #like a hideduo jumpscare #qsmp #fitmc #pactw #hideduo #fitpac #the ship is characters not ccs - i will come 2 ur house w/ a powerpoint explaining the difference between reality and fiction for five hours #they def check twitter and giggle to themselves

[terymlxyrstdus]

james: i honestly think regulus might like me

remus: yeah…not likely

james: but we even talk sometimes

remus: so do we and he certainly doesn’t like me that way

james: but he even calls me by special nickname potter

remus: that’s your surname

#source: conversation i had with my delulu friends #remus being biggest jegulus shipper but also being james’ reality check #marauders #regulus black #james potter #remus lupin #jegulus #starchaser #sunseeker #that moment when regulus switchces to james #and then to jamie #ahdkdlmsbdjfs #dead gay wizards #dead gay witches #marauders fandom #marauders era #galaxy

[dumblr]

#quotes #feelings #emotions #love #romantic quotes #wise words #love quotes #true love #real love #facts #i love you #patience #thoughtful #reality check #true feelings #beautiful love

[mari-lair]

frustration

#hxh #hunter x hunter #gon freecs #panel redraw with artistic liberties #i really like the scene where Gon got his first reality check but still won the challange #mari draws