Dolor Comedenti

Living with paranoia is a special kind of hell.

I build relationships with people and then risk tearing them apart with irrational beliefs.

It does not take much to spin me off.

A few weeks ago, I overheard a suggestion that a peer take an action that is normally reserved for my position with my employer; within minutes, I believed that I was going to be replaced. There was zero evidence to support this—in fact, there is evidence to support the opposite.

Unfortunately, that rarely matters.

Over the next couple hours, I began to distrust my closest friends. I convinced myself that they (friends unrelated to but affected by this supposed plot) were talking about me, and that they would think replacing me was a good idea. In this instance, my paranoia limited itself to the building.

I do have a solution when this happens.

Step one is to tell someone that I am not suspicious of, if such a person exists. If they don’t exist, this whole process takes longer before I build up to skipping to step two.

Step two is that I tell the people I am suspicious of, if they are close enough to have knowledge of this flaw in my mental process, making them unlikely to become offended. We usually laugh about it, haha, but it does not go away that easily.

I will be stuck like this for at least 2 days.

Sometimes it will engulf more people, sometimes it will not. It is frequently, if not always, based on a belief that “they don’t really like me” or “they’re lying to me to get something from me.”

If I have become suspicious of acquaintances, the process is step one without step two.

If someone gets mad at me, I mentally prepare myself for them to try to harm me in some way. This takes a lot of time and energy from me. I go over conversations in my head, sometimes scroll through text messages, analyze interactions, attempting to do 2 things: figure out why the person is angry, if that is not clear (this happens more often than it should as adults) and look for possible ammo should they decide to shoot me.

I would like to not care if people are upset with me.

If I encounter another person that has a similar problem, there may be a war of sorts; misinterpretation is a serious issues. It’s perfectly fine if only me or only them are in the middle of “an episode,” but when it happens to be both at once, it’s destructive. It is like this: they believe that I am doing something for a particular reason, so they behave accordingly. Then I, seeing this behavior, misinterpret the catalyst for this, usually to the point that suspicion is created in myself—and act accordingly, somehow confirming the original belief of the other party.

In other situations, myself and another person share a paranoid storyline. This also happens, and we have a third person that brings us back to reality. This is usually more comical than frustrating.

The effects:

• Causes breaks in my trust for people that I normally trust. I question myself and I question them.
• I feel alone in the world when this happens and this increases my depression, or causes it, depending on where I started.
• My entire life gets off track. I stop engaging in the self-care behaviors that I have worked hard to establish in myself.

Fortunately, the more aware I have become of this cycle, the less time it consumes.

But it continues to happen and I cannot seem to be rid of it.

Multiple times, I have scoured the internet (and the DSM-5) looking for an explanation for this abnormal behavior-mental process-disorder, whatever it technically is.

I have yet find anything that fits.

So maybe the cure for my paranoia is communication.

Would asking if my erroneous beliefs are correct help me or cause me to believe that the other party is lying?

2025 NOTATION: I wrote this 10 days before my paranoia proved to not be paranoia.

I’ve solved these problems by withdrawing from all close relationships outside of family.

I’m currently working on solving that problem.

In the meantime, if anyone needs their future read, here I am.