Dear Readers,
I have Bipolar II with Psychotic Features. I am also strongly psychically inclined. Hearing things comes with the territory but it's important to recognize when it is a bad thing that you're hearing things if you're psychically inclined. The first key to this is the ability to recognize your own thoughts as they flit about your consciousness. Self-awareness that is very high is more than being aware of your thoughts and the effects of your actions (as many would tout it to be). High self-awareness means you recognize the sensations that go with your mental states, you recognize your internal monologue, and you are aware of when you are projecting your internal state outward (which is usually an indicator that you need to work on processing whatever you are projecting outward and integrating it into your experiences).
Meditation is an excellent process for achieving this level of awareness. While there are a lot of different schools of meditation out there and boatloads of techniques that you can use, the one that I find is most effective is entering a meditative state and actively writing down what is going through my head. After a while, you begin to see patterns emerge in your thought processes according to your mood state, stress levels, and environment. These patterns are your internal architecture of your psyche.
In general, the sensations of my thoughts are as though they are inside me. I am a person who thinks in words, images, and sound. It's a blessing and a curse at the same time. Nothing is quite like having a song stuck in your head on loop for an hour when you want to focus on something else. Psychic experiences like visions and hearing spirits are, for me, a feeling of an unfamiliar thought-form inside my head. It feels as though it is someone else's 'voice' in my head instead of my own internal monologue. I can not anticipate what that 'voice' is going to present next, unlike with my own internal monologue. The pattern is unfamiliar and being revealed as it is presented. Psychic experiences are bewildering at times but they do not hold the terror of psychosis.
Psychosis presents as a disruption of one's thought processes and one finds themselves operating under conditions where their mental state is clearly changed from what it's normal baseline is. Hallucinations and disrupted thought patterns are typically the hallmarks of this condition. Delusional thinking is disconnected from reality. Psychic experiences are connected with reality. Hallucinations are perhaps among the most terrifying, in my opinion, elements of psychosis. Because I reality test my experiences on a regular basis due to the fact that I grew up in a household where I was gaslit on a regular basis, this coping mechanism/habit makes me aware when I am entering a psychotic state. My hallucinations are primarily auditory. They seem to sound like someone speaking to me from approximately one foot behind me to the right. They also have the sensation that it is actual auditory input, not that it is thoughts.
Reality testing is a very good habit to be in when you are engaged in psychic work. I verify what my psychic experiences are telling me through getting confirmation from others who are a neutral third party. I consider the legitimacy of my experience and if it bears any resemblance to what I have experienced in a psychotic state. Most of all, I examine if it fits with what I know to be true and factual/real about the situation. On my really bad days, I drop a pencil or something just to make sure that my brain is functioning properly. Fortunately, those days are few because I have a great psychiatrist who has me on a good medication regimen that has kept me from having a psychotic issue in the last several years. (My psychotic issues come up when I am suicidal due to depression. I don't recommend it to anyone.)
Most people are not quite as deeply self-aware or as regularly prone to testing their experiences because they didn't have people in their formative years actively trying to destroy their psyche. As a result, the experience of psychic visions can be terrifying when they happen and lead them to wondering if they're experiencing psychosis. For most people, psychic visions are limited to the sense that they have seen something before or prophetic dreams. It takes a good deal of effort to build the personal awareness that lets you identify when psychic information is hitting your brain. This form of direct psychic experience is difficult to master. That is why many psychics use tools like tarot cards, runes, and crystals (to name a few, the list is really long).
Using tools to confirm what your psychic experience has shown you is a form of reality testing. This is something I highly recommend. Free sites like Facade means you can get confirmation on your psychic experience from a completely impartial source. One might thing that a randomly generated computer tarot reading is not the most reliable of sources of confirmation on psychic experiences. It is, however, startlingly effective. I have been using Facade now since the late 90s and have yet to get a result that wasn't relevant.
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