There is a phenomenon that can look like psychosis but it is dissociative in nature and treating it like psychosis won’t do us any good. When we take a close look we will see that it makes perfect sense and that we can solve it with simple SystemWork.
It is possible for parts to blend in a way that mixes the inner experience of one part with the experiences of the fronting part. The result is intrusions that don’t feel like they are coming from someone else inside, they feel like hallucinations. We are incapable of telling apart what is really happening and what is coming from another part. It means that we will act in weird ways that fit the experience we are having but not the reality around us. You can imagine it like a slide projector that is showing 2 slides at once that are mixing. Elements of one slide suddenly show up mixed with the scenes of the other. It could be images or every other sensory experience, in full scenes or fragments. This can easily be mistaken for psychosis.
When we take a closer look we will see that there has been a trigger. Something made a different part come close to the front and blend with the host. When the trigger is repeated the mixed experience shows up again. It is strictly logical in its pattern. The content of the pseudo-hallucinations is not random or chaotic, it is strongly related to trauma time. They are fragments of dissociated memory. When the experience fades we can observe an unblending happening. That is how we can know that this is not psychosis.
To treat that we don’t need antipsychotics, we need inner work. Our effort has to focus on unblending the parts that got mixed up. That can be done by getting in touch with the other part to check what they need. Then we could offer them support while we also create a boundary between us. It could happen by asking the part to step back, by covering them gently to contain their experience, by bringing them to a different room on the inside, e.g. their Safe Place or by raising any kind of boundary that feels right.
Parts who intrude on us that strongly often carry a heavy burden. They can be in desperate need and very confused themselves. Offering them an Inner Helper could give them the support they need while giving us time to breathe and prepare a plan on how to help them.
The experience of losing touch with reality, of not being in control of the situation and the sense of going crazy is frightening. It helps to understand what is happening. There is something we can do about this.
Situations like that can end with being hospitalized when the blending is constant and there is no way to do any inner work because there are no clear-headed moments for an intervention. Those who work in emergency services need to be more aware that not everything that looks like people lost touch with reality today means they drifted into a chaotic state of mind. Sometimes we just re-experience the reality of the past in an especially realistic way.
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