We have hallucinations from trauma. We get them for pretty much every sense, and sometimes can differentiate because of sensory disabilities.
How we prevent/halt symptoms:
We keep it very quiet whenever possible, or wear headphones with known media playing. We can’t hear well, and background noise tends to bring auditory hallucinations.
Putting together memories. The faucets come with yelling and screaming because our perps would try to get us out of the bathroom when we locked ourselves in.
Flashlights. Some of our visual hallucinations run when we look, and we can deal with them being in the room if they’re not being a nuisance.
Closing doors. We had a friend who saw people in doorways, and we see eyes and hands in the cracks. Can’t occupy a space that doesn’t exist.
Wearing long clothes. We know we can’t feel hands on bare skin if we don’t have bare skin available.
Wrap ourselves in sheets. We feel buggy when we can’t see our skin, so we sleep covered, with our hands and head under a pillow.
With bugs, we poke them with our cane. If they’re bitey, we crush them or cup them and leave the stuff outside for a few hours.
Naming them. All spiders are named Greg, real or not. We have a giant rot monster called Twinkletoes for its shiny hooves.
Identifying a source. If we taste blood, we might bite our lip. Once the real taste fades, so does the hallucination.
Grounding tastes. We have Sourpatch gum and lemon drops for grounding, but the flavor is so strong they obscure our sense of smell.
Breathing through our mouth. Some olfactory hallucinations are really bad and resistant to external changes. Can’t smell if you don’t use your nose.
Go out. We live alone, and being with people distracts from the hallucinations and delusions we usually experience there. They usually reset with some time away.
Getting used to it. We only share hallucinations with passive influence/blending, so we leave notes just in case. There are body parts in the cabinets? Cool, move, I need the beans.
How we differentiate symptoms from external reality:
Getting closer to noise. We should hear the sound better the closer we get, but hallucinations don’t do that for us.
Turning off background sounds. Some hallucinations go away, others stay at the volume and clarity they were.
Putting on our glasses or changing distance from visual hallucinations. They stay at the blurriness they were rendered in or disappear.
Blowing on little things. We feel some of the things we see, so we look for movement. Things that might bring tactile hallucinations run if the touch isn’t skin.
When we had a dog, we trained him to run after things if we looked at it and gasped. If he didn’t go, it wasn’t there.
Take a picture. Especially when we’re reading, we take photos to more clearly see the object. If it’s obscured or has something in front of it, we don’t see it on camera.
Snap. We fall into the belief that the place we’re in isn’t real or we’re not physically here if our hearing fades too much, so we snap close to our ear to hear something.
Safety plans. We have a set of responses when the voices fall into repeated phrases, an allowance for how much we’re allowed to hurt or neglect the body, people who can remind us that what we were taught isn’t true or isn’t here now.
Not all of our hallucinations are plain bad, but they do tend to tie into flashbacks. Many of our tactile hallucinations don’t go away until they’ve run their course, and all but our auditory hallucinations are pretty stubborn. We mostly get on by learning to tolerate them, and they become less prevalent by working on memories.
We rarely admit to having hallucinations because people will discredit our trauma as delusions. All of our symptoms tie back to memory time, so removing that worsens our reality testing. We wish people would stop using phrases like “schizo” and “psychotic” to describe others who’ve hurt them. We feel isolated from other systems because of our psychosis.
Having friends with similar symptoms has been huge for our feeling safe interacting with outside people. Having a therapist who understands unreality is necessary for our healing. Some of our hallucinations will probably stay after we heal, and that’s okay. We are not bad or wrong for our symptoms.
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