People who have psychotic hallucinations see, hear, or sense things that others don’t. In psychiatry, hallucinations are often dismissed as meaningless, and one of the main aims of certain anti-psychotic medications is to prevent them. For people around the psychotic person, hallucinations can be unsettling or unpleasant. It is understandable that there might be an urge to “correct” the psychotic person, and tell them that what they experience is not true. Telling them that what they experience is not true, will however not necessarily help them. What happens is true for them.
What are hallucinations, and what is causing them?
My personal experience is, that hallucinations are fragmented and disorganized memories of traumatic events that have happened earlier in life. The brain just does not understand that the events have happened in the past and are no longer real in the present day.
When something overwhelmingly difficult or traumatic happens, the mind might be unable to process it, and the event doesn’t get stored as a normal memory. Instead, it lingers as an unexplained present-time distortion, that can get triggered by things in the current reality.
Things in normal reality might get a different meaning than they have, because stuck on top of them is a fragment of an old untreated trauma-memory.
When a trauma memory is triggered, it also triggers the emotion connected to it, which is usually intense fear. That is why in schizophrenia, some ordinary-seeming things can cause paralyzing fear. Life among these floating trauma memories becomes an attempt of trying to cope with panic-level fear that can unannouncedly overwhelm you at any time. Naturally, you try to avoid anything that might trigger the memories. You develop coping mechanisms that greatly narrow and inhibit your life, but it is the only thing you can do, being in survival mode. It might for example feel difficult to go outside of one’s home because one might encounter something unfamiliar that might trigger the fear.
The good news is, that if psychoses, or at least a great deal of them, are caused by traumas, then there is a chance for healing. Traumas can be dealt with and worked through. This is by no means easy, but it is possible.
Relating to hallucinations
I believe that the trauma memories get triggered and surface because the mind is attempting to process and heal whatever it was that caused the trauma. The hallucinations can therefore be the key to healing. They are telling about what has happened to a person in their past. For that person, those things just did not stay in the past but are continuing to haunt them in the present.
Saying to that person that those things aren’t real, is therefore unlikely to be helpful. Instead, it is better to allow or even encourage the person to express what they are experiencing, and to relate to whatever they are expressing with empathy.