Referential thinking and the inability to discern the internal from the external during schizophrenia type disorders are relational issues. Nothing in the world exists intrinsically (Nietzsche). Everything in our lives is relational which means the meaning we assign to anything in our lives is based upon the relationship it has to us or something outside of us. This relationship is construed from our perception of how actions, words, events, and everything else in our lives is or isn’t impacting and affecting us and also from how it can or can not impact or affect us. We construe meaning based upon the way something relates to something else and also upon what something means to our own existence. When I was in my schizoaffective disorder episodes I had difficulty discerning the internal from the external. Referential thinking is a perfect example of this. Referential thinking occurred for me because I was unable to see the true relations people were making between the subjects they were speaking about and I instead related everything to myself. I thought every word and action “happened for a reason” and had some sort of relation to me, which it doesn’t. During my episodes I was completely isolated and I had lost all my friends. I came to believe I was a messiah because I wanted to believe schizoaffective disorder was “happening for a reason”, which was a comforting thought because I felt once I saved the world I would be reunited with my lost friends. Another contributing factor was having read a high volume of fiction where almost everything in the books was charged with meaning and had some sort of significance and relation to the plot and also had deeper meaning.
This belief coupled with schizophrenia and sleeplessness from bipolar disorder made it almost impossible for me to discern between what was and wasn’t related to me. What’s more is I attached my own meaning to the information I believed was being referenced to me from the context of my predicament. I believed people were out to get me because I was a messiah and they were trying to stop me from saving the world. I made connections to their words directly to my beliefs rather than being able to disconnect myself from the information. If someone said “he (as in someone other than me) is going down” just in conversation about another person and I overheard this I switched the pronoun ‘he’ with my name. I then used the meaning I already had in my mind of me being the messiah and also that people were out to get me and I drew the conclusion that this was one such person. I would then proceed to act in accordance with my new conclusion, which usually rendered strange behaviors which seemed out of place. The delusions in my mind from being extremely over-exhausted and having schizoaffective disorder fueled my referential thinking because they were the frame of reference from which I related any and every statement to myself. This happened because I was isolated to the point where I barely said more than several words to several people in the course of an entire day. I constantly talked to myself in my internal monologue and came to believe everything outside of my mind was somehow related to my mind. I got too much inside myself from sitting around and thinking too much and not making relations and connections to things outside my mind. I believed I was in some sort of puzzle I had to figure out and everything was a clue on how to escape it and save the world. The puzzle I had to escape was the disorientation and lack of functionality from schizoaffective disorder. It was a world where everything and anything was just information for my mind to process so I believed that things that were external had to have some sort of relationship to my mind in some way. I lived in a world of the mind and believed in nothing else.
When I have been mentally healthy I have been able to discern when words and actions that are external relate to me from times when they have no relation to me at all. When something has no relation to me that means it has a relationship to something or someone else apart from me. The barrier between internal and external in my mind is relational. When I had difficulty discerning the internal from the external it was simply because I thought everything surrounding me had some sort of relation to my subconscious or unconscious mind. I believed that my possessions were extensions of my mind and I had to organize them in order for me to have a well-organized mind. I wasn’t able to see how my thoughts are just tools for processing, analyzing, and making decisions regarding the world and they wouldn’t transcend into external consequences unless I decided to implement them. The external is connected to the internal by the senses. Our mind is what processes and makes decisions regarding the information the senses provide us with. I never understood the relation my thoughts have to the world and also their separation from it. I believed in a telekinetic network where my thoughts were being broadcasted to everyone in the world and that they would change it for the better if I thought good things and also for the worse if I thought bad things. I was trying to “purify” my mind to save the world and I became so habituated to connecting things that didn’t relate to my mind to my mind’s functionality that I lost touch with the fact that many things hold relationships outside myself and have nothing to do with the way my brain functions. My brain wasn’t functioning properly and I knew it and this along with isolation were the main factors that forced me to turn all my focus inwards. My desire to “purify” my brain created its dysfunction while dysfunction motivated me to continue “purifying”. I didn’t know how to fix my brain and I looked for clues on how to fix it from things that were completely unrelated to me rather than by analyzing my most traumatizing experiences which were memories that were within my mind. This was partly from sleeplessness, bipolarity, schizophrenia, and also from trauma. My inward turning caused me to analyze how my thoughts related to my mind’s functionality and also how everything that was external to me related to my mind’s functionality. I became so disoriented I eventually thought my brain was a physical sense of the world and the content of my thoughts could affect anything and everything surrounding me purely from thinking and without even implementing any thoughts in the form of an action. When I’ve been healthier I’ve focused on how my mind relates to my world, internal to external. I have also construed relationships on how content outside my mind relates to other content outside my mind which is external to external. When I’m healthy I have a combination of construing and analyzing relationships from the internal to the internal, the external to the internal, the internal to the external, and the external to the external.
Photo by Toni Protto