When you have a psychotic break, you are still the real, authentic you. Your heart, your fears, your soul, your emotions, and your own personality are all still there, experiencing everything. The difference in you is delusions creating a new reality, confirmed by various kinds of hallucinations associated with them, that change your interpretation of events around you and the people involved. You are simply reacting to a different reality than everyone else around you, which makes you come across as different than normal. People may think you aren’t yourself, but you actually are—you are a victim who is suffering and held hostage by an alternate reality influencing your behavior. Your very essence, core, and what you are capable of do not change—just your reality does.

When I have expressed regret about my psychotic breaks and how they affected loved ones and how embarrassed I was, a well-meaning family member kept telling me, “You weren’t yourself.” In other words, I have nothing to worry about because I was not the person she knows. I get mixed emotions about this statement because I know she’s saying that to make me feel better—that it’s OK what I did because I myself would not do those things. However, it was really I who did those things, but only because I was living in and reacting to an alternate reality that seemed 100 percent real.

Using this concept that I wasn’t me, we lose the reality that I really experienced something so terrible while completely me, completely suffering, and going through all sorts of terrifying things that I remember to this day. This concept takes away from just how much suffering I went through, as if I just got to turn off when all that happened to me. Not everyone turns off or blacks out; every single thing........

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