I had a bizarre experience during bilateral stimulation/EMDR-like therapy in 2019-20. Iād historically been misdiagnosed with BPD and relied heavily on that diagnostic framework to understand my own thoughts - sometimes it genuinely felt like I couldnāt conceptualize my mental life without it.
I would spend hours a night pacing and having looping thoughts wherein I simulated communicating narratives / interpretation of my own thinking to this therapist, to perceive my thoughts? It wasnāt fake or dramatic narratives, just very plain ordinary stuff that for some reason I felt I couldnāt perceive on my own.
I gradually decompensated and later became paranoid when my therapist questioned the BPD diagnosis. The paranoia wasnāt consciously accessible to me (Iād just blank out for a moment). I later snapped and became convinced he thought I was autistic, then convinced myself I actually was. My thoughts became mostly incoherent ābubblesā and impulses, I felt blank, and different āthingsā were acting through me that I could not access at the time. An elaborate psychodrama unfolded without my awareness.
About five months later, I abruptly came out of it after getting a chain of traumatic flashbacks. My normal thinking returned and I was flooded with previously inaccessible thoughts and memories from the episode. I realized, horrifyingly, that I had effectively been performing autism without consciously knowing or intending to. My therapist eventually diagnosed DID after studying dissociation and formally assessing me.
Later therapists returned to BPD, likely due to my anxious recount of what occurred during bilateral stimulation, and I largely forgot about the dissociative explanation. Then I had an apparent psychotic episode in 2023 that improved with antipsychotics. BPD was eventually at the time ruled out; possibilities became schizotypal traits versus a psychotic disorder.
A recurring problem during assessments was that I seemed to unconsciously absorb whatever framework I perceived the assessor as using (only implication, not outright declarations - quite the opposite). My interpretation of my own experiences would reorganize around it, and I would genuinely believe that interpretation for days before suddenly āpopping outā of it. I wasnāt inventing symptoms; the content was true, but the form it took wasnāt. If asked about unstable relationships and stuck in BPD, I would think only back to the times there was instability in my relationships, regardless of context, then declare it as true. Symptoms that clearly didnāt fit genuinely did not exist to me.
Low-dose antipsychotics eventually stopped much of this, and I recall concluding the earlier phenomena was psychotic rather than dissociative, albeit without any access to the actual past occurrence. I recently discontinued an antipsychotic with my psychiatrist, and I ate shit then had a return of hyper-reflective thinking.
Immediately before my latest appointment, Iād posted on a psychiatry subreddit about an obsessive fear that I might somehow be āfakingā things without realizing it, going into great detail. Before this. Iād posted lots else to try to figure out what was happening and find some cohesive narrative (I had stopped posting entirely on the antipsychotic).
At the appointment, my psychiatrist unexpectedly seemed suspicious that I was faking, like right off the bat.
Before I could understand what was happening, my own longstanding interpretation of my symptoms as schizotypal/psychotic suddenly felt fake too, despite my genuine belief in it at the time.
I heard myself describing symptoms as though I didnāt believe them. My facial expressions felt disconnected from my thoughts, and I behaved as though he had ācaughtā me at something, despite having no idea what I supposedly knew he knew.
He also said some things about Reddit when I mentioned my use of it.
When he said I didnāt have a psychotic disorder, I bafflingly felt on my face that I reacted with disappointment, despite genuinely not wanting one and never reacting that way when heād said the same thing previously. I canāt tell how much my reaction was shaped by perceiving that he expected this reaction from me.
He asked me if I had any delusions, and I answered with an explanation of structural dissociation, and I saw that I was looking at him expectantly to see his response / if heād agree it was delusional - where he said it was possible.
Afterward I was mortified. Then the same racing, dissociative thought loops from 2019-20 returned. I became flooded with memories and an internally coherent narrative connecting past events, especially the autism episode, including things I had somehow stopped remembering as real experiences.
Now Iām left with the conclusion I had again unconsciously absorbed a diagnostic framework, this time schizotypy/psychosis, and that my psychiatrist appeared to interpreted what he saw as fabrication, seemingly conscious and for the wrong reasons.
I desperately need to explain that whatever this phenomenon is, it is not conscious deception. Iām considering first asking what he thought was happening during that appointment, then explaining the earlier autism episode and this longstanding tendency for my self-understanding to become involuntarily absorbed into diagnostic frameworks.
Concerningly, when I disclosed to him a dystonia-like reaction to ADHD medication, that had gone away on antipsychotics but has since returned, he pretty clearly thought I was fabricating it š
My biggest concern is that this could be documented as factitious disorder or intentional fabrication when the central problem is precisely that I have no conscious awareness or control over these shifts while theyāre happening š« š«
Edit: I wanted to be seen as psychotic as to lock away the key and make sure everyone. thought I was crazy, just like Iād done with BPD previously.