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Differentiating Paranoia from being Sensitive and Overreacting

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Thanks for taking the time to post your issues and concerns.... I am sorry you are having a rough go of it.....and I'll take the "judgy comment" under advisement and reflect on that.....in future posts in threads. Hope you are feeling better. Here's hoping for a better year in 2021!
Thank you.
Have a good evening. 🌹
 
I’m 37. I think you said your in your early 40s. When we were in our 20s PTSD was barely a diagnosis and CPTSD was unknown. I made a similar mistake, I mistook severe dissociative symptoms due to CPTSD for hallucinations and delusions and honestly who could blame either of us. The terminology simply didn’t exist.
I also wound up misdiagnosed paranoid schizophrenic and then schizoaffective bipolar with paranoia. I lost 14 years of my life to multiple yearly hospitalizations and aggressive overmedication which made my comorbid ADHD (which is real) much worse and basically did nothing about the dissociation.
It’s SO hard to shed those labels since they’re so highly stigmatized. It’s also SO easy for others to dismiss our PTSD symptoms as psychosis because people are oddly so much more comfortable with there being something horribly and bizarrely “wrong with us” and our brain chemistry than the fact that we are being completely rational according to the internal logic of our trauma-conditioned brains and that THEY would feel very much the same if they went through what we went through. So it’s very easy to get mislabeled as delusional. I am pretty sure I’m biased but I’d be very careful about diagnosing yourself with delusional type paranoia. I am going to make myself into a huge hypocrite because I am in a terrible place myself and literally this Wednesday asked my psych nurse practitioner about 5 times in 20 minutes if I was psychotic. But I’d strongly urge you to honor your brain that freaking *got you this far alive* and give it a little credit. Also non-delusional paranoia related to the trauma(s) is a listed symptom of PTSD. What you’re describing sounds a lot like a trauma response. I wouldn’t go labeling yourself delusional unless someone else does first, because it literally took the mental health system 13 years to tell me the fact that “if you think you’re delusional you’re by definition NOT delusional”. Insight into being delusional is not a part of true delusions. They are “strongly held false beliefs” that you can’t shake a truly delusional person from.
I could be totally off but if this comment rings true, please don’t do what I did and bury yourself in stigmatized mental disorder labels that it’s going to take a lifetime to get out from under. Blessings and good luck.
 
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