I'm diagnosed schizophrenic, and the main barrier to re-entering the world after my first psychotic break was that I could no longer relate to the person I once was. My memories felt like memories of another person outside of myself, I didn't believe it was me. It was very traumatizing and I withdrew from everyone I knew and became catatonic for over a year, convinced that I didn't remember how to be the person they once knew, and had to find it again before trying to interact with any of my past friends.

As a result of this I eventually (this first break was 7 years ago) adopted a completely different way of thinking in order to function in the world. I completely devalued the importance of my memories after realizing they couldn't be trusted in the first place and were becoming increasingly warped. I stopped seeing who I am as what I do (which is a common movie trope, by the way, you see it in Harry Potter for example), and instead adopted the view that the only thing I can really consistently say defines me is the pattern of my own behavior, which is recursive and on a loop, and while it may be altered, I no longer had to worry about my memorie's effect on the pattern.

One formative revelation that led me to this conclusion was during the integration of an acid trip, during which I had become loving and experimental with my behaviors, only to become catatonic during the last half of the trip after someone had embarrassed me in front of a group of people.

I realized very clearly that I had been locked in the same pattern of being continuously suspicious and afraid of people, and that I was constantly prepared to disconnect emotionally from others if they were to act negatively towards me.

I realized, however, while on acid, that though I felt tempted to instantly jump to hating the person who embarrassed me, I was skipping a step. The acid made me feel things step by step. I realized I had been jumping over the hurt step for a good portion of my life. Instead of wanting to lash out at this person, I simply felt hurt, I didn't want to hate him just because he acted maliciously towards me, I had realized that loving and trusting others as a baseline was the more enjoyable way to experience life.

I realized that my fear of feeling hurt has caused me to overall change my pattern to be constantly suspicious and less willing to experiment and try new behaviors because of the potential for negative feedback from others.

I realized that it was actually better to continue acting freely, and to even continue loving those who wish me harm, and to do this for my own sake. Not because they deserve this love, but because hating them was not what I wanted to do. Hating them always resulted in a shifting of my focus from what I could create to fixing something that was wrong.

Feeling hurt is not actually the worst thing in the world. Allowing yourself to feel hurt and resisting the urge to turn bitter and hateful as a result of experiencing pain was the overall better pattern.

Say you're enjoying yourself and being goofy, and someone insults you. You can lash out, strike back, make it your new mission to get revenge. But what are you doing when you do this? You have allowed their feedback to alter your pattern. Before they said anything you were busy being goofy and focusing your energy on that playfulness. Their feedback put a full stop to the goofy Ed's and diverted your attention to revenge seeking. You stay in the revenge seeking mode until something within you is satisfied, and then you may revert back to goofyness, but because of the memory of this negative experience you may be more guarded and less free in your goofyness, because you now fear that someone may once again divert your attention to the revenge path, which you know deep down is less enjoyable than goofyness.

Continuing to love people who hurt you actually allows you to be in control of your own stream. Striking back is the equivalent of allowing them to control you. They have stepped into your stream and stolen your attention. People will always be a part of the ebb and flow of your stream, but you have control over how their activities influence what you do next.

First thing when you walk into a room, are you choosing to fear what they are going to do as a response to what you want to do? Then you're going to walk into the room, searching their faces, already placing value on what they are thinking, and you will choose your first action based on what you conclude they already think of you. Otherwise you walk into a room, disregard their perception of you, and choose your first action based on what you would like to do, and fearlessly surprise them, changing their perception of you in your own time instead of being contained within the box of their current perception of you. It is the difference between being trapped by their perception or being in control of altering the trajectory of their perception. Fearing their negative feedback is the main way others can control you. Release yourself from the fear they can alter your stream away from what you really want to be doing by knowing anything they make you feel can be handled, you don't have to run from it just experience it and continue doing what you want to do no matter how much it hurts. Because altering your stream hurts a lot more than being hurt by someone being cruel to you.

All my past memories and experiences just followed these patterns. There were memories of my learning to trust people who never hurt me, and memories of disconnecting from people who had hurt me, but the pattern was all that mattered in the end. The percentage of time I continued doing what I wanted to do versus doing something to avoid something I didn't want to feel.

from Link