An Atheist’s Journey Through Psychosis
After a lifetime of struggling with depression and anxiety, I had tried many different things in an effort to find healing, including intense exercise, cognitive behavioral therapy, mindfulness meditation, self-help books, and experimenting with different coping strategies. After a while, I realized that despite these efforts, I had unhealthy core beliefs about myself that were at least partially responsible for my symptoms. Therefore, I began searching for therapeutic techniques that would allow me to change these core beliefs, because no matter how hard I tried to change them consciously, I never could.
The Beginning of My First Psychotic Break
I found a coaching program that used a special technique that could supposedly change a person’s core beliefs and transform their life. It involved a combination of imagination, visualization, and intentionally trying to feel both old, detrimental beliefs and newer, beneficial beliefs. Because its claims seemed too good to be true, I contacted the coach and negotiated a pay-as-you-go arrangement instead of buying the package deal. I wanted to be able to cancel at any time if I wasn’t convinced of its effectiveness.
As usual for me, I dove head-first into the program and gave it the best effort I could. The combination of my obsessive-compulsive disorder and my determination to heal caused me to put over an hour a day into this therapy when most people usually did only fifteen minutes a day. As I continued to desperately follow the program, something did indeed start to shift within me, but it wasn’t anything good. Instead of my beliefs shifting and my life improving, I started to confuse my imagination with reality.
At the time, I didn’t realize that I was losing touch with reality. I thought that these shifts in my perception were a natural progression of the program. That’s what made this program so dangerous! It blurred the distinction between imagination and my true feelings and core beliefs. Because I thought that my increasingly delusional state was just my imagination, I had no idea that I was actually becoming psychotically delusional.
In the summer of 2020, I woke up in the middle of the night convinced that a robot in my mind was trying to take control over my body, threatening to set my spine on fire and kill me. I got out of bed and ran into the garage to get my infrared laser thermometer to check the temperature of my lower back. Even though the temperature read normal for human body temperature, it made no difference to me. I continued to believe that a robot was hijacking my mind and body because I was delusional and in full-fledged psychosis.
My fear escalated as I tried to convince my wife that there was a dangerous robot in my head in the process of hijacking my mind. While I could tell that she was very concerned for me, I knew that she didn’t believe me. If you’ve never had this happen before, it's actually quite painful to have someone very close to you not believe you when you’re so convinced that you’re telling them the truth. She compassionately and anxiously told me that she thought that something was wrong with me and called 911. I’m glad she did.
When the police arrived, I opened the door to greet them and told them what was happening to me. You know, that a robot was taking control over my mind and that I needed to fight him off in my imagination or I would forever be erased and he would have permanent control over my body. Interestingly, as a side note, I believe that this robot was a metaphor by which my mind was processing the fact that I was going psychotic. I was losing myself, just not to a robot, but to psychosis!
Despite my best attempts to explain the subtle nuances of mental reprogramming to the medics, firefighters, and police–I only succeeded in convincing them that I was crazy. At this point, I was surrounded by three police officers in my front yard in the middle of the night. They assumed defensive postures, slightly bending their knees with one foot forward and their rearward hands resting on their holstered pistols. They gently, but firmly asked me to come over to the ambulance so that they could take me to the hospital. Despite their kind offers, I was frozen in indecision. Due to my delusional state, I believed that they were actually going to take me to jail. However, I didn’t want to go with them because I believed that to prevent this robot from taking over my mind that I would need to stay home, sit on the couch, and conduct strategic battles in my imagination to defeat him. For a moment, I actually considered running away from the police or even physically fighting them if necessary so that I could escape. I honestly thought that my life was on the line. However, I believe it was my wife encouraging me to go with them to the hospital that eventually caused me to comply. There was still some sensibility left within me, but it was rapidly fading. I hopped up on the stretcher, and they strapped me down, very thoroughly. This was the beginning of my first psychotic break….
The Beginning of My Second Psychotic Break
After being stabilized on anti-psychotic medications in the hospital for two weeks, I was sent home with several prescriptions, a disheveled beard, and appointments with a terrible psychiatrist. When my wife arrived at the hospital to pick me up, she was surprised and saddened to see the state I was in. Because of Covid, she wasn’t allowed to visit me in person at the hospital, so she had no idea what I looked like until then.
At the time, I still didn’t fully understand what had happened to me. Because I was in denial of my new psychotic disorder, I was able to talk my psychiatrist into taking me off my anti-psychotic medications after only a week out of the hospital! This was an incredibly foolish thing for him to allow me to do because it caused me to have a second psychotic break in just a few weeks. People recovering from psychosis should never wean off their meds that quickly. At least six months on anti-psychotic medications would be far more appropriate in my opinion.
Not surprisingly, only four weeks after getting out of the hospital from my first psychotic break, I started to feel those familiar shifts in my perception happening again. I knew I had another one coming. I told my wife about it and we cried on our couch because I didn’t want to spend another two weeks in the hospital like that again. For me, the psych ward is like being in prison. There’s very little to do and the highlights of the day are meal times. I even had a fellow patient tell me that he had been to prison before and that there really was no difference.
After lamenting what had to be done, my wife and I decided to get a head start and try to get me to the hospital before I totally lost it again. Keep in mind that I had already been an atheist for five years before having these psychotic breaks. As we parked our car and started to walk a couple city blocks toward the emergency room, I could feel my belief in God coming back. However, I knew that this wasn’t a real conversion to Christianity, but instead my psychosis coming back.
Because of Covid, my wife wasn’t even allowed to sit with me in the waiting room. I cannot convey to you how awful it is to go through such a scary and destabilizing experience without anyone around to support you. I didn’t even have any hospital staff assigned to be with me. There I sat in a makeshift waiting room full of chairs, all by myself, going psychotic. As I waited there for about an hour, I began to have a unique hallucination. My heart stopped beating. I could feel the heart beating in my chest slowly fading out and then…..there was nothing. However, because I was still conscious, I decided to check the carotid pulse in my neck with my fingers, and yes, it was still there. Therefore, while I could still feel a pulse with my fingers, I could no longer feel my heart beating in my chest. I then thought, “Oh shit, here we go again.” I was entering psychosis, fast.
Soon after this hallucination, a couple hospital workers put me in a wheel chair to take me to a quarantine floor while they tested me for Covid. They wheeled me into an elevator and the door slowly shut. At this point, I was still sane. However, by the time we exited that elevator, I was INsane. I was completely delusional, hearing voices talk to me, and I firmly believed in God again.
I was psychotic….AGAIN. I was put back on the medications that my foolish psychiatrist had allowed me to discontinue only three weeks earlier. Within two days, these medications brought me back to sanity and being an atheist again. Between my two psychotic breaks, in the period of eight weeks, I went from atheist to Christian to atheist to Christian and finally back to atheist again. When I was psychotic, I was a Christian and when I was sane, I was an atheist.
My father, a close-minded evangelical Christian, always held contempt for my agnostic atheism. He perceived the intellectual objectivity and humility of my agnosticism–acknowledging what I did and didn’t know on the basis of sufficient evidence–as a form of cowardice, weakness, and indecision. However, this experience of rapidly changing beliefs must have been my mind’s joke on him because I was converting and deconverting from Christianity faster than a Catholic during spring break!
After spending two weeks stabilizing in the hospital, just like the first time, I was released to go home and begin my long, difficult recovery to wellness.
The Delusions I Experienced During Psychosis
During my two psychotic breaks, I experienced many different delusional states and beliefs. On the ambulance ride to the hospital in my first episode, I believed that God was threatening to kill my wife unless I killed myself in her place. I spent the entire ride to the hospital banging my head on the stretcher as hard as I could trying to kill myself with a head injury to save my wife. I also pressed my abdomen into the restraints around my body as hard as I could, hoping to rupture my abdominal aorta. At the time, I thought these things were possible, despite my experience to the contrary as a previously trained paramedic.
At one point during the ride to the hospital, I believed that God was going to strike the ambulance with lightning to kill me. For a moment, I looked up at the ceiling of the ambulance and honestly believed that I was about to die. A certain peace and stillness came over me as I knew that all of my pain, suffering, and striving was about to be over. My impending death wasn’t scary for me; it just felt like my journey was over and that it was time for me to rest. I actually experienced a sense of relief. However, I lamented the fact that I was about to go to hell in my wife’s place, which was an awful realization, but I was okay with my decision. Better me than her. I had just reached the end of my life. However, for some reason, the lightning strike never came. It was all just a delusion.
I also had many other delusions during my two hospital stays. At one point, I believed that I was a serial killer, news of which spread quickly throughout the psych ward. Afterall, there wasn’t much to do there, so for a short while, I was the talk of hospital staff and patients alike. I also believed for a while that I was Satan himself and that I was prowling about like a dangerous lion. I actually pleaded with hospital staff to watch me closely because I believed that I was a danger to everyone around me. Eventually, even though I wasn’t a threat to anyone because I cared so much about everyone’s safety, they listened to me and upgraded me to a more secure psych floor, assigning me my very own personal security guard. He was very kind and talked with me while we walked the hallways for several days until my doctor decided I no longer needed his supervision. I will never forget his kindness and support.
Once, when my wife was talking to me on the hospital phone–the only way I could communicate with her because of Covid–I believed that she was actually Jesus talking to me on the phone! It’s amazing how despite hearing my wife’s voice, my delusional mind was able to believe that Jesus was talking to me instead. While this delusion was short-lived, it was definitely an interesting experience for me for sure.
The last significant delusion I experienced was the belief that my wife was having an affair. Apparently, this is a really common delusion for those going through psychotic breaks. I experienced the whole she-bang (see what I did there? ;). Anyways, I truly believed that she was cheating on me and nothing she could say could convince me otherwise. Interestingly, this delusion, like some of the others, persisted in me emotionally for about six months after my psychotic breaks. It was like the beliefs that took root during my psychosis persisted with me for as long as any other belief would, taking time and processing to go away. Even though I knew on a conscious level within a couple days of being on anti-psychotic medications that she didn’t have an affair, I still felt like she did. It was a very unique experience during my long-term recovery because I occasionally felt anger toward her and felt like she had cheated on me even though I knew it wasn’t actually true. This was a very valuable lesson for me about truth, showing me that no matter how strongly you feel or have faith that something is true, that doesn’t mean that it is actually true.
The Hallucinations I Experienced While Psychotic
In my hospital stay, I experienced several different forms of hallucinations. The first was closed-eye hallucinations. Whenever I was sleeping or resting, when I woke up and opened my eyes, everything looked normal. However, when I closed my eyes again, despite being awake, I often saw vivid, colorful, cartoonish movies. I even battled with the robot trying to take over me for hours in this virtual reality world one night. It was like I was playing a video game, but fighting for my life! Sometimes what the human brain does during psychosis is far more interesting and fascinating than what it does when working well.
I also experienced an olfactory hallucination once when I smelled human excrement for over an hour but there was no physical source of it. I looked all around the psych ward and couldn’t find where it was coming from and eventually realized that it was just a hallucination. I even tasted poop when I was eating my lunch. That was probably the worst meal I ever ate–it tasted like shit!
However, prepare yourselves for the most interesting hallucination of my entire experience. I had a delusion that there was a snake living inside me that was trying to take over and control my body, similar to my robot delusion. I could feel this snake slithering all over my organs! At one point, I felt him wrap around my lumbar spine, slither up through my intestines, slide past my kidneys, and travel under my stomach and up my thoracic and cervical spine into my head. His head then split into two heads once he entered my skull and each traveled separately, one up each side of my head. Each snake then came to rest on the temporal lobes of my head (about where the arms of sunglasses are). I remember standing in the bathroom staring at myself in the mirror, looking at my head for the two snake heads that I could feel. Because I happened to have a couple veins protruding where I felt the snake heads, in my delusional state, I thought that those were the snakes hiding under the surface of my skin.
But here’s the crazy part: those snakes talked to me and acted like they were trying to take over my body. My brain had combined the tactile snake hallucinations in my body with the schizophrenic voices I was hearing to create a full delusional reality! I could even feel the texture of the snake’s scales scraping past my organs as it slithered through my body!
My Experience with Cognitive Dissociation
In addition to having delusions and hallucinations, I also experienced elements of dissociative-identity disorder, which is the modern term for what used to be called “multiple personality disorder”. Yeah, you probably thought it couldn’t get any more interesting than what I’ve already told you, but it does. At the time, I believed that I had multiple personalities, called subpersonalities, that were fighting for control over my mind. The truth is that subpersonalities are actually a real thing in psychology and everyone does have them. However, they are called subpersonalities–not personalities–because they are a collection of different behavioral patterns that combine to make a person’s whole identity. Most people don’t perceive their subpersonalities as separate identities within themselves like I did at that time; instead, they just see their subpersonalities as different moods or behaviors they express over time, which is accurate. However, because I was delusional and dissociated at the time, I misperceived my subpersonalities as primary personalities. I thought that I was like the people in movies with multiple personalities that could take turns ruling a person’s body, like Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
There is a reason that psychologists no longer use the term “multiple personality disorder” and instead use “dissociative identity disorder” in its place. It’s because there is no such thing as having multiple personalities within one person’s body. However, someone in a state of dissociation like I was can FEEL and ACT like they have multiple personalities even though they only have one primary personality.
So what is dissociation? Dissociation is an altered state of mind where some of your thoughts and feelings no longer feel like your own. Instead, they feel like they are coming from someone else inside your head instead of you. Therefore, a person can easily misperceive the thoughts and feelings they don’t emotionally identify with as coming from another identity in their head. However, instead of having multiple personalities, it’s really just a person misunderstanding their dissociated state. THAT is why it’s no longer called “multiple personality disorder” and is instead now called dissociative identity disorder. You are one person who becomes fragmented in your perception of yourself to the point where it feels like you have more than one identity within your body. Also, because you have this misperception, you can mistakenly assume that your different moods are different personalities taking turns controlling your body when it’s nothing more than normal mood changes. Dissociation is really just a disorder of emotional perception.
During my first psychotic break, because I was in severe dissociation, I abruptly swapped back and forth between different aspects of my psyche. As you would suspect, it was very alarming to my wife because it looked like some type of demonic possession. However, let me make something clear: this is just another example of how ignorance about psychology has caused people past and present to believe in unfounded superstitions like demonic possessions. We now know that these behaviors are most likely nothing more than undiagnosed cases of schizophrenia or dissociation, all of which are treatable by modern medication and therapy.
As a side note, for thousands of years religious people have been fabricating superstitious ideas like demonic possession in an effort to repress their uncertainty of what they don’t understand. Instead of admitting to themselves what they don’t know and accepting their fear and uncertainty, they choose to make stuff up to delude themselves and pacify their discomfort. However, with what we know from modern psychology and science, these anxious supernatural imaginations have no place in the thinking person’s reality. Do demons exist? Maybe, but just like any other unfalsifiable supernatural concept, why fret about something supernatural that is unproven when natural explanations make far more sense and are actually grounded in credible evidence? There’s just no justification to believe in things like demons when they are likely to be nothing more than just another fearful creation of mankind.
My Experience with Depersonalization
Besides my experience with dissociation, I also experienced several brief periods of physical depersonalization. Depersonalization is a form of dissociation where you experience a sense of detachment from your physical body, external reality, thoughts, and self as if you are a third-party observer of your life. It’s like a more physical version of the cognitive dissociation we just discussed. When depersonalization happens, your experience of reality no longer feels like yours and sometimes you even feel like you’re not fully in your body or that your body is no longer in your control. It’s a weird feeling, similar to the temporary disconnection from reality that happens when you lose or gain consciousness while fainting.
Once, while in the hospital, I walked toward a window and suddenly, something took control over my body and continued walking toward the window. I panicked because I felt like I had lost control over my body. Was it demonic possession, some evil entity taking control of my body, or a Jekyll and Hyde scenario? Nope. It was just a depersonalization episode, where I felt like someone else was controlling my body when it was actually just me walking toward that window the whole time. See the pattern here? It feels like there is someone else in your head or someone possessing your body, but there isn’t….. It’s just a misperception of the mind, one which makes the perfect breeding ground for superstition when combined with ignorance and assumption.
My Experience with Age Regression
Besides periods of dissociation and depersonalization, I also experienced a period of age regression as well during my first hospitalization.
After attempting to escape the hospital by throwing a fake punch at a security guard to get him to duck out of the way so that I could run past him, he tackled me and I was pinned to the ground by about eight people and tranquilized with Haldol. The guard that I punched toward slammed me to the ground so hard that my glasses flew off my face and went skidding down the hall fifteen feet from where I landed. I later woke up in a room surrounded by hospital staff, laying face up and stretched uncomfortably over a firm restraining table with my wrists and ankles secured tightly in restraints. At the time, I was enraged to be hog-tied to a table like that even though I later understood why they did it. I felt like a wild, caged animal. However, I chose not to show them my anger; instead, I hid it and began formulating a plan for my escape.
Because I knew that the hospital staff would respond well to an act of harmless innocence, I acted pitiful and gently complained about how the restraints were uncomfortable and hurting me–which they actually were because they were so tight and wrenching my shoulders firmly behind my head. I then targeted one of the more compassionate care techs and successfully got her to loosen the restraints around my wrists and ankles so that I could move more freely. Then, I waited for the perfect moment to escape.
About 20 minutes later, when everyone thought that the excitement was over, most of the hospital staff left the room, leaving behind a small 130 pound woman to guard me (facepalm). I started by quietly working my hands out of the restraints, being careful to not break my hands. At one point, I pulled so hard that I could feel the metacarpal bones in my hand flexing on the verge of fracturing, so I decided to back off on my intensity and slowly, but methodically work my hands out of the restraints. By working the restraints around my hand in a circular process, I was finally able to break loose. The restraints on my ankles were far too loose to be effective and came off easily as well.
Once I was free, I quietly hopped off the table, landing silently on my ugly yellow hospital socks like a ninja. I felt like an assassin sneaking up on the woman guarding the door. However, I didn’t want to hurt her or anyone else; I just wanted to get close enough to her that I could blast by her without having to fight my way through her. And blast by her I did!
I sprinted by her so fast that she didn’t even move. She knew she didn’t have a chance of stopping a guy my size who was sprinting with life-or-death level focus. As I cleared her and the door, I made it into the main hallway. Then something interesting happened: for a moment, I felt like a child running for his life. I had no plan at this point; all I had was pure fear. In that moment, I experienced what I now believe was a temporary age regression where I embodied a younger version of myself, or at least I felt like it. As hospital employees yelled for help and chased after me, I had about a 15 yard head start on them. I sprinted in fear and desperation to the end of the hallway and slammed into the door of the stairwell, but it was locked! I then turned to the right and ran through another doorway just to see another patient, wide-eyed at my abrupt entrance into his room. I then ran back out of his room and looked around and saw two double doors leading into another hallway that I had missed earlier in my fury to escape. The guards were closing in, so I made a run for it and slammed into those doors, but they were locked too!
Knowing that my escape attempt was over and that I was about to be captured, I impulsively decided to try to end my life. I didn’t even think about it or hesitate at all; I just ran up to the wall closest to me and slammed my head into it so hard that I knocked myself out. The second my head smashed into that wall, my vision went black and I saw a bright yellow spark in the middle of my field of view. That spark was the last thing I remembered before waking up the next day in my hospital room on my bed.
My Unawareness of Suicidal and Self-Harming Behavior
During my psychotic breaks, I never consciously wanted to kill myself, however, my actions told a different story. If there had been an open window, I probably would have jumped out of it to fall multiple stories to my death. What was weird though is that my delusional state caused me to believe that I was doing these things for other reasons than self-harm. I never thought that I was trying to hurt or kill myself, but instead that I was trying to escape or keep my wife from going to hell. My mind was playing tricks on me. I felt like I wanted to live, but another part of me obviously wanted to die. Therefore, I was fractured within my mind between the desire to live and the desire to die, which honestly was probably just the psychotic version of what I had been living with for years. I’m just glad that I didn’t succeed.
Medication Side Effects – The Surprising Source of Suffering
It might surprise you that being psychotic wasn’t actually that painful or scary for me most of the time. However, the medications I had to take were HELL. I discovered very quickly that I was very sensitive and reactive to psych meds. I was initially put on Loxapine, an old-school antipsychotic that made me drool at the lunch table because it was so sedating. Paradoxically, despite it being such a strong sedative, it also caused me to live in a constant state of anxiety. In fact, its effects were so severe that I felt like I was constantly on the verge of a panic attack. Once, a patient care tech accidentally dropped her clipboard on the hospital floor right behind me and I felt a shockwave of fear and panic whip through my body like nothing I’ve ever felt before or since. Loxapine sensitized my nervous system and put me on edge. After realizing that the medication was the cause of my anxiety, I desperately brought my suffering to the attention of a nurse at the nursing station, and he didn’t care or do anything to help me. It took my wife calling the hospital and complaining to get my medications changed. It’s such a shame that anyone would ever be ignored and neglected like that during such a vulnerable and painful time of their life, especially in a hospital of all places.
In my second psychotic break, I was put on Risperdal, a very common anti-psychotic medication. While it knocked me out of psychosis within three days, it too caused intense anxiety and constant muscle tension throughout my body, just like Loxapine. The anxiety it produced was so severe and painful that all I could do was constantly pace the hallways to slightly mitigate it. However, if I stood still, it was unbearable. I couldn’t even participate in any of the planned activities with other patients, like coloring, because when I tried to sit still and color, I started to panic. I had to keep moving. This is a common side-effect of anti-psychotic medications known as akathisia, and I had it BAD.
In fact, my anxious suffering from Risperdal was so severe that despite wanting to live, I contemplated the reality that I might have to kill myself to end the pain. I felt like I could tolerate maybe one or two more weeks of this extreme anxiety, but if it went beyond that, I was going to have to get creative and find a way to commit suicide in that hospital. That is how bad my reaction to that medication was. I lamented internally that after surviving so much in my life already, I might have to kill myself even though I didn’t even want to die this time. My experience was similar to being slowly burned alive and wanting someone to shoot you to put you out of your misery even though you’d rather just get out of the fire and live instead.
Fortunately, because the nurses at the second hospital were far more compassionate and professional, I was immediately put on Valium to ease my anxious suffering. Little did I know that while Valium helped me tremendously in that moment, it would later result in a six…month…long…withdrawal that would be the most agonizing period of my life.
My Recovery–The Long Difficult Road to Serenity
After getting home from my second psychotic break, little did I know what was ahead of me: something far worse than the actual psychotic episodes and hospitalizations I had already experienced.
For three years, my antipsychotic medications caused me to have no energy, sleep 16-20 hours a day, be unable to feel any positive emotions, and instead live with a persistent feeling of complete emptiness. I was so fatigued that I couldn’t even sit upright on the couch. Instead, I spent most of my time reclining even when I was awake. I also gained fifty pounds in three months and never wanted to do anything. Looking up at the beautiful sky felt like looking at a grainy low-resolution black and white image. Watching tv was also boring to me, felt pointless, and actually became a negative experience because all it did was drain what little energy I had trying to concentrate on it. Things that used to be enjoyable did nothing for me anymore because I was experiencing a condition known as anhedonia, where you don’t feel joy or happiness in activities you previously did. You don’t realize how important the good times are in your life until all you have is complete emptiness and exhaustion. For three years, I felt like my heart had died, unable to feel anything other than numbness and doom. And the worst part of it? I had no idea if I would ever feel good again. While I knew that the medications were causing this experience, I also knew that I might not ever be able to discontinue them because of my condition.
At this point in my life, I was constantly in a state of survival. There was no joy, happiness, meaning, or purpose in my life other than to survive. I had no idea whether I would ever get better or how I would ever be able to improve in the pitiful condition in which I found myself. The only thing I knew was that as long as I stayed alive, there was hope for me in the future. So stay alive I did.
After several years of trialing different antipsychotic medications, I did find some improvement, but nothing significant enough to regain my quality of life. However, after three years, I finally found Caplyta, a next generation antipsychotic drug that changed my life. Caplyta wasn’t even on the market when I had my psychotic breaks, but it was everything I had ever hoped for while surviving those three awful years. I’m so grateful that a group of people made it their life's work to create a medication like this that could finally pull me out of the hell that all of the other anti-psychotic medications put me in. I could finally feel again! I went from needing 16-20 hours of sleep a day to only needing 10-12, a vast improvement. Over time, I began to have more energy again and even started providing strength training sessions for a few of my family members in my home gym. While I still didn’t feel as good as I did previously before my psychotic breaks, it was night and day compared to the past three years!
From the time of my psychotic breaks to finding Caplyta was a period of three years and from Caplyta to the day I’m writing this was another three years. Now I am off all my medications other than Caplyta and am healing significantly, not just from the after-effects of my psychotic breaks, but also from a lifetime of mental illness, complex ptsd, and emotional abuse. I have finally found the healing I’ve always sought. I have traveled the long, difficult road to serenity and have finally made it home. And now I hope that I can share my insights and experiences with you so that you might find healing and growth for yourself as well.
My Message to Those Going Through Difficult Times
If you’re going through hard times, just know that you have what it takes to survive. You may feel like there isn’t any hope, but objectively, there is as long as you stay alive and take good care of yourself. You might feel like you’ve endured all that you can take, but your mind and body can handle so much more. If you choose to accept your pain, stay alive, and do the best you can with what you have, you will have the best possible chance of making it through. I think that most people can and will make it to the other side if they choose to objectively focus on the hope and possibilities in their future instead of trusting their present feelings of doom and despair. You are already surviving right now; you just have to keep doing it! It’s never easy, but if you just take one day at a time, one moment at a time, you WILL make it through. Honestly, you have no other choice, because if you could have avoided it, you would have; therefore, the best thing you can do is accept this challenge in your life and do what you have to do to survive so that you can get through it and come out the other side.
Let this time show you who you are: not someone who is fearless, but someone who chooses to continue moving forward despite their fear. This is called courage. Also, you don’t have to feel strong, because every step you choose to take makes you strong. Therefore, courage and strength are choices that you make in every moment of every day, not character traits only held by a few. If you understand this, you will realize that survival is a continual choice and that you can do it too.
I encourage you to choose strength and courage for yourself in these difficult days and for the rest of your life. You get to choose who you are, and from today onward, you’re going to kick this thing in the ass!
Will you do that for me?! But most importantly, will you do that for yourself?
How to Find Your Purpose as an Atheist
I’ve been an atheist for over a decade since my deconversion from Christianity in 2015. During my reconstruction into my own personal atheistic life philosophy, I encountered the existential crisis common to those going through transitions like these. After years of being told that my purpose was to glorify God, convert others to my religion, and be obsessed with behavioral perfection, I found myself wondering what my purpose would be moving forward as an atheist.
Looking for a Universal Purpose After Christianity
The problem I encountered was caused by the unreasonable expectations indoctrinated into me by my previous religion. Christianity had told me that there is a universal purpose to my life and when I left it, my subconscious sought a direct replacement. Only this time, I was looking for a universal purpose for my life from a secular viewpoint. I eventually came up with the idea that the closest purpose I could assign to human and other sentient life is that we are here to survive and thrive. However, I soon realized that this was only our living instinct, but not necessarily what we’re here to do. And again, I was still looking for that universal purpose I lost when I left Christianity.
Religion Sold Me a Problem I Didn’t Have
I eventually realized through my research and contemplation that the idea of a universal purpose for our lives was fabricated by religion. Religious people created the problem of needing a universal purpose for our lives and told us that they had the solution.This is so typical of religion, telling you that you need something (like God) to survive and thrive when you don’t and are perfectly fine as you are. Once I understood that a universal purpose wasn’t needed to live a good life, I started to wonder if I needed purpose at all. The answer I found was yes, but not quite what I expected.
What People Really Need
We as human beings don’t need to know why we’re here or how we got here to live fulfilling lives with a sense of purpose. Indeed, that’s great news because no one really knows how we got here anyway. What we do need instead are things to motivate us to keep moving forward. However, these motivators aren’t like a universal purpose that applies to everyone. While many of us share similar sources of purpose, ultimately, what motivates us individually provides our unique purpose. This could be anything from our relationships to our jobs to our hopes to our personal growth to our desire to understand the world around us. Furthermore, because motivation comes from investment, we also create purpose for ourselves wherever we invest our time and energy. Therefore, investment creates purpose.
My Struggle with Lack of Purpose
As someone who spent over a decade in unemployment due to mental illness, I’ve spent a significant portion of my life feeling a lack of purpose. For a long time, my only purpose was to survive the pain of mental illness because I knew that as long as I survived, there was hope of healing in my future. I also didn’t want to kill myself because I loved my wife and didn’t want to leave her with that suffering. So, I kept living because of these significant, but not entirely fulfilling sources of purpose. Because of my inability to make any significant contributions to my home, my family, and the world other than my own survival, I felt the pain of lacking purpose in my life. I felt like my life didn’t really matter that much most of the time and I often felt like I was just wasting it trying to survive another day. This feeling continued even though days, months, and years went by without any significant healing or progress.
Years later, as I finally began to find genuine healing from my mental health problems and become more active in my life again, I discovered that purpose comes from investing in yourself and in others. Before my healing process though, investing in anything was extremely difficult because of my mental health problems, resulting in those many years of living without feeling much purpose.
Keep It Simple
Honestly, those struggling with purpose have a tendency to make this pursuit more difficult than it is. Contrary to our struggle, it’s actually quite simple: Better yourself and the lives of others, because that’s where purpose comes from–investment. It’s not some universal concept like worshiping a god but instead a feeling you get when you take good care of yourself and eventually have the capacity to share your time and energy with others as well.
Focus on Yourself and Help Others as a Result
The whole “better yourself and the lives of others” may seem like a universal source of purpose, but it’s actually more of a concept by which you’ll be able to find what’s specifically meaningful to you. Furthermore, I’ve also noticed that when I focus on self-care and improving myself, others invariably benefit as well. We are social creatures and in order to better ourselves, we have to create value that benefits others as well. Therefore, by bettering ourselves, we automatically end up bettering others.
Anything morally beneficial to oneself will also directly or indirectly benefit society, thus constituting a potential source of purpose. It doesn’t matter whether you get your purpose from your job, your family, your friends, or other pursuits in your life. What matters is that you’re living your life in alignment with your values, because if you do that, you and others will always benefit.
Live by YOUR Values
Don’t let other people try to push their values on you, because if you do, they will benefit but you likely won’t. You won’t be living from your heart, doing what matters to you, and being who you really are! Instead of absorbing the values of those around you, begin to ask yourself what matters to you. What brings you joy, motivation, and excitement? What makes you angry? Where do you invest most of your time and energy? These are the types of questions to ask yourself if you feel like you don’t have any purpose because these questions will reveal what matters to you. If these questions don’t reveal anything, you probably just need to start trying new things and investing yourself more deeply in things. Investment and commitment is where you will find purpose.
When the Pursuit of Purpose Needs to Take a Back Seat
I would like to note that if you’re going through depression right now, and feel like nothing matters to you, that’s common–although not a great place to be. It’s called anhedonia, where the things that used to matter to you and motivate you are no longer meaningful or appealing to you. This is a common side effect of experiencing depression–no longer being able to feel motivation or a sense of purpose. Just know that there is hope for you of healing and once again being able to feel motivation and purpose. I know because I’ve lived with severe depression, anxiety, anhedonia, fatigue and more for a long time and I’ve finally begun to heal and feel purpose again. If you’re stuck right now, dealing with any disability or mental illness, know that it's okay to only find purpose in taking care of yourself when you’re unwell. Afterall, if you’re not well, it’s going to be difficult to create value in your life, so you must focus on taking good care of yourself. Don’t pressure yourself to function highly like those who are well. Just focus on getting professional help and introducing better self-care into your routine. Healing will come with time if you choose to treat yourself with love and care. Greater sources of purpose can come later.
Evaluate Yourself
For those of you who are in a state of wellness though, you already have sources of purpose in your life; you just have to notice and acknowledge them. If what you’re doing with your life doesn’t seem to matter to you, first assess yourself for depression and mental health challenges. This is critically important because nothing you change in your life will make you feel a sense of purpose again if you are unwell, unless of course the changes specifically improve your general wellbeing. Secondly, if signs of mental or emotional unwellness aren’t apparent, ask yourself if you’re doing what you really want to do with your time. Some good questions to ask yourself could be:
Are you living the life YOU want to live or the life that others have conditioned you to live?
Are you being who you really are, or are you hiding your true self out of fear of rejection like I did for most of my life?
Are you living by your own chosen values or the values your family, friends, and society have pressured upon you?
If you answer these questions honestly, you may gain some valuable insight into your feeling of purposelessness. While the value you’re currently providing to yourself and others is definitely a potential source of purpose, if it is not creating the feeling of purpose within you that you’re craving, you’re probably not living in alignment with your true self and personal values.
We Want to Feel Purpose, Not Just Know It
This leads me to the ultimate secret about purpose that I’ve recently discovered: What people crave isn’t universal or objective purpose, but instead the feeling of purpose. It doesn’t matter if what you’re doing with your life seems purposeful to someone else if it doesn’t…feel…purposeful…to you. Therefore, aim to find what makes you feel like your life matters. The best way to do this is to be yourself and use what makes you special to improve the lives of others and yourself. There is no need for you to try to be someone else and do what they’re good at. Instead, you need to discover who you are and what makes you special and give yourself permission to live authentically, because authenticity is the true source of purpose.