Hallucinations question

[CaroN57]

Hi,

I been reading stories and see that most people I have read their hallucinations are just random out of context. For me, it felt like my subconscious got wide open from the trauma of labour. I started to get nightmares and those nightmares turned into hallucinations and very real, but it was all very logical. I wrote everything down and even if I lost some notes, the ones I kept are childhood trauma and deep fears I had and was not aware how much they where affecting me, so I'm just trying to talk with my counselor about each of them and process it, but my childhood was really fucked up so we haven't even talked about psicosis at all yet. So I guess I'm curious, if anyone had something similar to me, maybe makes no difference in the result, I still had it and are recovering from it, but I'm trying to understand better what I went through, right now I feel what I went through was caused by my childhood traumas, but haven't seen other people commenting that. On the plus side, therapy is going good because I have a long list of things I need to talk about that my subconscious told me.

[hgallo Volunteer]

Hi CaroN57, sorry to hear you've been having hallucinations, I had them too with pp mostly in the acute stage. I was convinced that people were trying to harm my babies and I saw wounds and sunburn on them that weren't really there. I didn't continue with hallucinations in the years after having pp but did have very vivid dreams that I was psychotic again and they troubled me for a fair while.

It sounds very sensible to write them down and talk them through with someone. Is the counsellor able to suggest therapies that would help? I'm not sure what hallucinations connect with or where they come from but I think you're brave to face what it's brought up for you. Take good care and keep in touch x

[CaroN57 in reply to hgallo]

Thanks, will do! And they are not going on at the moment, just when I had the episode a year ago.

[Keziah8 Volunteer]

Hi CaroN57 …I had PP in 2017. Some of my delusions and paranoia were related to real things from the past. Things I had seen in the media, things I had thought about or happened in the past…I can definitely say that things that were stored in my brain from past events, came out during my Psychosis somewhat. A lot of things that I was paranoid about and was convinced of were things that I had seen in the news/on tv before I was even pregnant or bad experiences I have had years before.I think it is possible that your deepest fears or bad experiences come out in a way when you have PP. Everyone has different yet similar experiences with this illness. But it’s comforting to share and know when someone had the same.

It helps the recovery when you do that too. My brain definitely healed a bit when another mum at the MBU described similar scary thoughts to mine.

[ppp_switzerland Volunteer]

Dear CaroN57, I had a very similar experience with this feeling of my subconscious opening wide after labour. For me it was even more than the subconscious, like there were opening senses I never noticed that I had them before. And in my case it started also like at your site, one day with nightmares and vivid dreams and turned into hallucinations. And then at one point I didn't know anymore if I was sleeping or awake... I suffered PPP in 2016 and had another baby 2020, where I had this "openness" again but could manage not to get ill again due to all the therapy I made and with a lot of rest, help, medication to sleep. I had a lot of fears in my PPP 2016 coming from my subconscious from childhood, showing up at this point, overwhelming me. Working through all this fears in therapy after the PPP made my life so much easier. For me there weren't only scary things or traumas from my childhood coming up in PPP, there were also nice things, like very intense love for my baby's and the feeling I could communicate with them in my mind. Also I felt like comunicating with my father who passed away. And I had some pictures or scenes coming through which felt like coming from the future and some of them I noticed came up in my life since then... which is really strange... And then I mixed up all this things with things from my work and from TV and, and, and... Looking back to my two childbeds, I think the Psychoses in my case, was not to know how to deal with all of this overwhelming information and senses. It was to much and I felt the pressure to do something with all of this things I noticed, in this very moment. So that's why I was extremely confused. To notice and understand that this was the case for me, helped me a lot in my recovery and now after 6 years it's ok for me, that I had to go through this really scary and awful experience.

In my second childbed when this "opening" occurred again I tried to relax and not to hang on in this thoughs. And I knew my most important task in this moment was to care for me and my baby and not for this senses and information coming through. Moreover I knew that this senses are not that important that I felt they were in my first childbed. That really helped me to stay "healthy" e. g. not to plunge into a Psychosis again. But after that second time it was clear for me that I would never have a third baby because also this time the ridge was thin and I had a lot of luck to not gotten ill again. Hope you'll find your way through all of this like I did and wish you all the best.

[Laneybug1710]

Hi Caro I hope you continue to recover from your experiences of PP and find support as you move forward. I had vivid hallucinations of people communicating to me via the television. I also experienced auditory hallucinations such as hearing conversations which I thought were very loud and all about me and people singing songs.

Even while this was happening o was somewhat aware of my illness and took comfort from knowing these things would go away which they did.

Ailania aka Laney aka Iirishgirl