Here's the basic problem I'm facing—when you've had the experience of not being able to trust your own brain, how do you move forward from there? And how do you convince people who were around when you were psychotic that you're not psychotic anymore, especially when some of the things you do when you're not psychotic remind them of things you did when you were? (Not sure if that makes sense.)
Basically, I'm having a problem where my partner is now calling everything I do a symptom (either of OCD or psychosis or what-have-you), even something as innocuous as fiddling with my beard or listening to the same song more than once. I'm having to justify every preference I have and explain every last little decision I make, which is especially difficult since she doesn't believe what I say even when I'm able to put into words what's going on in my head.
An example—yesterday, we were going to go for a walk, but I was starving. She was in a hurry, so I grabbed the last bit of a box of cereal, intending to eat it while we walked. Weird, sure, but hardly insane. She didn't like that and took the cereal and put it on top of the refrigerator. As we were discussing it, I grabbed the cereal (because I was still intending to eat it), but as the discussion got more heated, I just caved. However, since I was feeling rushed, rather than turn around and go back to the kitchen, I just stuffed the cereal in my bag and kept walking. Which seemed to her to be some sort of OCD tic that needed to be unpacked, dissected, and explained.
I tried to explain that it wasn't a symptom, I was just in a hurry and didn't want to go back to put it back in the place where she thought it belonged, but she told me that I didn't know my own behavior, that my explanation didn't make sense, and that I was wrong about what I was doing. The result was that I wound up feeling invalidated, permanently broken, and having to second-guess absolutely everything about the way I go through the world.
Has anyone else had this experience or something like it? How do you come back to the world when you've been "away" and how do you deal with the aftermath from the people around you?
