asydhouse,
Let me add to the thanks from other posters for your fantastic essay about your experiences. I keep talking about the singing frog cartoon as a metaphor for flaccon's experiences. I'd call your experience a better metaphor, except it's not fiction. I'll call it a parallel experience. It might be helpful to flaccon and I hope it is. But I must ask, if you had read a similar true story from someone trying to help you back when you were in India, how would you have reacted at the time?
What was it that helped you turn the corner? This appears to be one of those "spectrum" conditions. You seem to have the mildest form of "hearing voices" with one very accute episode. Others, like televangelists (if they are to be believed) hear voices much more often. Others carry on a constant conversation with the voices quietly in their life and still others find the voices so intrusive that they end up shouting on street corners or institutionalized.
Thanks again. If it's not educational to flaccon, it was at least educational to me.
Is there another version of this story out there in which you do not edit for brevity? If so, I'd like to read it and I'll bet I'm not alone.
Ward
Hi Ward, In fact I haven't ever written in this much detail about my experiences before. I've spent decades now occasionally thinking about it... for many years I would have a physical reaction when I tried to talk about it (heart rate increase, shallow breathing, anxiety response...), and just not knowing how to interpret what had happened. Maybe two decades before I came to firmly believe it was a psychotic break. I honestly don't know if it would have helped for someone to write to me as I've written to flaccon... but at some point in that process it would have, i think. Feeling isolated was a part of the problem, so yes at least that sharing would have helped.
I don't want to hijack this thread though, so I won't say any more about it, except to say that I have recently begun to get a handle on how I would write about it, and I do want to write my autobiography in the near future... you can check out my website if you want to see more of my current state of mind and artistic activities.
Briefly to indicate how I managed to "turn the corner": I was raised in a family with no religion (in Canada and in Vermont), and so I was very lucky that I was a teenager before religion came into my awareness. Being basically a naive atheist hippy, my paranoia went from starting with police interference to thinking I was being contacted by aliens, through to the awful realisation that hindu gods might be some kind of reality... until they suddenly revealed that it was the devil... at which point I just knew it wasn't real! It felt like they were trying to get rid of me at that point.
So, early indoctrination makes a mind trap. If I'd have been a catholic, I'd have been screwed. Even being an atheist, I had an "open mind" and someone dumped that crap into it... and I went back to figuring it was police and Hindu self-defence (they don't like people pretending to be sadhu)... but the imprint was so deep that my doubts would arise for years later. (But within a few weeks of returning to Britain, I convinced myself that I was not living in hell because I saw a young couple walking down the street, and they were obviously in love... at that moment I knew I had a chance, because I knew that love could not exist in hell! Thus worked my rationalisations... over time I talked myself into reality... submerging myself in volunteering at the head office of Friends of the Earth for a couple of years helped me a lot!)
I could only truly put it behind me when eventually I had a really good LSD experience. (I had jumped off a moving train in India at one point, and it occurred to me that everything else after that was an after death experience, so for years I was scared that if I took acid all my effort of talking myself out of the reality of that fear would be stripped away to reveal that the mundane world was just a mental construct, and I would be back in the afterlife... eventually I was able to prove to myself that this world is real, I'm not dead, and life is a beautiful thing. The trip was the final step after many years of work, a large part of it being studying science courses with the Open University and mixing with many many people, so the weight of experience overhelmed the possibility that it was all an illusion I had built up to flee from the "spirits" I was surrounded by in India. I've recently been back for the first time and found myself of sound mind in Goa... cured!
)
I'm sorry, I wanted to briefly answer your question, but it's hard to express all this succinctly, and I really should bow out of this thread now, except if flaccon wants to ask anything. You can contact me through my website, or pm me if you want.
