Spirituality & Schizophrenia: Where Lines Blur & The Fabric Breaks

Trigger Warning: Heavy Discussion Of Religion & Spirituality, Discussion of Suicidal Ideation

I have Schizophrenia, and as I have discussed extensively here & on my other platforms, my life has filled with extraordinary as well as extreme experiences beyond normal reality. Throughout my life, going back to early childhood—just as my Schizophrenia does—are experiences of the Transcendental & the Sublime, experiences that straddle the line between Unreality & Beyond Reality. I am a Christian Mystic, I was raised in an Evangelical branch of the Anglican Church and later spent time in the more liberal Episcopalian branch, and have also been a part of a Korean-American congregation. I don’t currently belong to a Denomination and don’t attend regular services, as I have become disillusioned with the American Church & prefer individual practice. I believe in the Death & Resurrection of Jesus Christ, who I believe was a real, historical figure and was God incarnate. I believe I have a personal relationship with this God, and this relationship has played into many of my Transcendental & Barrier experiences. I also believe there is a dark side to the spiritual world as well, and this dark side has played a direct role in many of my Psychoses, especially my Delusions, but also in my Spirituality.

I’ve always felt like I could communicate with God, even as a small child I would spend many hours of Insomnia talking to a Pleasant Entity, vivid Hallucinatory scenes playing before my closed eyelids of world far different from our own. I felt like I had a special relationship with God, like I understood Him better than a lot of the other kids around me. There was a darker side, however. I would see things and sense things lurking in the shadows. They often came at night, jutting forth from the darkness my parents enforced on me for “better sleep”. Men made of fire, skeletal creatures, disordered and discombobulated animals—sometimes these creatures would stalk me during the day. They wanted to hurt me, to kill me, I thought. I identified these beings a ghosts or demons, sent to attack me. The demon figures were so heavy on my psyche that when my Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) became apparent as an adult, I actually had demomic Alter. She began as an animal-like monster similar to the ones of my childhood, but with therapy she was able to turn into a humanoid figure that identified as a succubus. Strange as it might seem, this Alter was a Protector figure. I also had a great fear of mirrors. This was partially due to “Stranger In The Mirror” Hallucinations I had, where my reflection would appear to move on its own or other figures would appear in the mirror. I developed the belief that mirrors were portals into other worlds and that if I was not careful, I could get sucked in or a demon would jump out of one at me. These early Barrier experiences instilled in me the belief that our world and the world Beyond are not separate, and made greater the sense of Unreality & Wonder in my life. I truly lived in my own, strange world.

As I began to enter adolescence, the line between mental health and spirituality continued to be blurred. I had a couple of experiences around the age of 12 that really stick out to me as Barrier experiences: in the first, it was the end off 6th grade, and I was living with my mother at my grandmother’s house. I was up in my room and crying my eyes out, contemplating Suicide. I cried out to God and heard a Voice in my head tell me to get out to room, so I darted out and down the staircase. When I tried coming back in a few minutes later, when I touched the doorknob a vision came before my eyes. I saw a figure that looked like a twisted bat with red eyes fighting an Angel with a flaming sword. The vision only lasted a moment and I high-tailed it back down the stairs. The second comes from a few months later, the night before I began 7th grade. I was having terrible, torturous Voices and could not sleep at all. Finally, I said to one of the Voices, “Who are you, name yourself?!”, and I got a reply. I then felt the feeling of talons gripping my skull, and the demon-Voice and I argued for the rest of the night, talon sensation remaining until dawn. When I checked my scalp in the morning, I could have sworn I saw welts where I had felt the talons. Around the age of 13, I entered a religious Mania that would last around a year, and I had many positive Barrier experiences during that time, on an almost daily basis. My world was alive and swimming with shimmers and colors and light, which I often attributed to God.

After my highly-traumatizing year in Foster Care in 9th grade, I entered a downward spiral mentally and spiritually. I would really only become steady in my faith again once my Schizophrenia began to stabilize and my DID had remitted. For 2019-2020, I went through an intense period of experiencing visions of God the Father, Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, Heaven, & Eternity. The visions often occurred after I would feel an internal “cue” to meditate, and I would go into a very deep state of meditation. Once a certain heart rate focus had been achieved, I would slip into Beyond Reality. I remember having a friendly debate about my visions with my Biopsychology professor, who was also my Undergraduate Advisor: he argued that there are neurotransmitters we know can cause these kind of spiritual and near-death experiences, so how can I say I was really meeting God? I retorted, is it really reasonable to argue that I’ve somehow taught myself to manipulate the exact right neurotransmitters to create these experiences on will, and even more so, the visions have internal consistency with each other & my religious texts? We left the question hanging. While I don’t have visions like I did during that period, meditation remains a major part of my practice and there are smaller vision/Barrier experiences I still do have.

At what point is it Hallucination & Delusion, and at what point is it Spirituality? Whose job is it to make that call, anyway? Generally, in Psychiatry, behaviors & traits aren’t considered Symptoms if they are a part of the person’s culture. Christianity has a rich history of Mysticism, and belief in demons & visions of Heave are widespread even in larger denominations to this day. My therapist, Ms. B, and I talk about my spirituality & Spiritual history, and she lets me lead on what I find distressing & what I do not. She is very understanding of that fact that the line is rarely clear on whether or not I believe something is Otherworldly or Psychotic. To be honest, oftentimes it does not really matter: I am experiencing it as real either way. After 25 years, the baseline experience of Psychosis is so intertwined in my life that exactly demarcating what is and is not Psychotic is futile, and doesn’t appeal. If it is personally meaningful, it is personally meaningful.

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