My Greatest Fears In Psychosis

I breathed in violently and my insides reverberated in an almost epileptic manner. I was both hot and cold and utterly psychotic, the equilibrium of my mind out of key. Like a cancerous tumor, the lies overwhelmed me in this paranoid state of mind. I couldn’t come out of it for the life of me. Imagine it as an act of tightrope walking on a sliver of suspended reality. And when in that world beyond belief, here are a culmination of my greatest and most colorful fears that stalked me:

Fear of conspiracy. Everything was a subliminal message connected to something else, and my mind dissected chaos and ordered it in patterns. The lyrics to a song were specifically addressed to me to warn me of something imminent, or the license plate on that car ahead of us stood for something.

Fear I had fallen from grace. I feared I was damned to hell when I dwelled on the sin I committed. I doubted my spiritual Father, since Satan seemed to have an amplified line to my inner ear and would tell me I was his, and that I was never Jesus’ daughter.

Fear of the Devil. In a similar line of thinking, anything outrightly associated with Satan sent chills up my spine. I could see things only in either good or evil, angelic or demonic. And the demonic scared me. From a twisted subplot on Freemasons that frequented my thoughts, to just the metaphysical sense of evil in a room, I feared my spiritual enemy greatly for what he could do to me.

Fear of God. There’s a healthy fear of God, and then there is an unhealthy fear of Him. While I was strongly doubting my faith and spiritual family, I grew in the fear that a God who could banish me from His presence and send me to hell was someone I couldn’t trust.

Fear of the FBI. Paranoia seems to have a similar effect on those subject to it because I’m not the only one who has thought the FBI was bugging their house. This seems to be a belief among schizophrenic and psychotic patients.

Fear of dying soon. For whatever reason, one delusion I had was that I was going to die young.

Fear of the end of the world. It was fall of 2012, mind you. When December 21st came around I was really relieved to see it go.

Fear of scary movies. I was paranoid over any of those. I watched a movie about the Antichrist that had me believing I was a main character. I remember crying and being afraid that it was based on parts of my life.

Fear of random stuff too random to know why I fear it. Fear became a pet to me. I fed it out of weakness and an uncontrollable impulse while in manic psychosis. I was afraid to sleep in the hospital in 2012, believing those who were after me would extract my thoughts. Funny as it seems now, I lost sleep over the fight of fear.

Sometimes, all I could do to combat the fear was call on Jesus. Whether I was paralyzed lying on the ground or having a panic attack, Jesus was the only Comfort to my soul. He still is. In the midst of chemical imbalance and emotions that I couldn’t trust, I cried out to Love. It is Love, after all, that “…casts out fear.” (1 John 4:18) Through the right medication, prayer, behavioral talk therapy (aka Truth) and time, I was freed from this crazy mindset.

When you’re paranoid and in a manic-induced state of fear, what do you do? How do you combat fear when rational thought doesn’t have power?

Finding yourself or someone you love in a psychotic state is a very scary thing. I would encourage anyone in this situation to find a hospital or rehab and seek immediate professional help.