Extra

Paranoid thoughts are sometimes correct, and you can not always assume that the world is friendly. In fact, there are threats, there are threatening people, and people, deep down, are not always good. If the mental health treatment system teaches that we should always trust people, this is only for purposes of making us manageable. If we are to survive and prosper, we must be able to handle some amount of the nitty gritty of life. This means that we cannot always be naive.

It is not a safe bet that people are always telling you the truth. And liars are often very good at what they do. This includes pathological liars. They can get you to believe all kinds of things that aren't accurate.

People who work in law enforcement lie for purposes of gaining evidence against you. And if they can get a confession under the guise that you won't be in trouble if you tell them everything, then it is only appropriate that you get locked up because you are a dummy.

However, there is a reason that the word "paranoid" exists. That's where we've gone a bit too far in the instinct to protect ourselves from a perceived or imagined threat. When the perception of threat is always in charge, the accuracy of our thoughts will be less. If we can learn to be more conscious of our thoughts, perhaps with no particular rule of how and what to think, we will be better off. 

Relearning how to think includes unlearning. If we can unlearn habits of thought that got us into trouble, we may be able to avoid taking the actions that got us into trouble. And getting into trouble is a common reason for winding up as a "client" in the mental health treatment system. 

We must trust some of the people some of the time. One strategy for knowing who to trust is to test the waters. I've done this. In therapy I inadvertently said to a therapist something that made it sound like I'd been doing something illegal. Later, the therapist asked for an extra detail about that. It was enough to make me realize that this therapist was gathering evidence against me. At that point, the individual was no longer a therapist. 

The mental health treatment system is not always your friend. Yet, we must trust them to some extent, and we do not necessarily have a choice about this. 

Things are complicated and they do not follow a simple set of rules. We must retune the thinking to accommodate realities that are complex. Sometimes I wonder whether people question where a schizophrenic man gains the ability to be a semiprofessional author. In my past, people attributed either being a dummy or being a "space case." (Apologies if that is an offensive term--it is used widely, and I would never apply it to anyone personally.) 

Revising the thinking means to me that you learn to track reality most of the time. Tracking reality is a matter of following it as it meanders and twists, like a stream through rough, bumpy mountain terrain. Does the universe operate in straight lines as though it was a subject of high school Geometry? No, of course it doesn't. The universe, if anything, operates with chaos. If this was not so, why would the Dinosaur Age have been obliterated, [scientists think] due to a collision of a large object from space, with the Earth? Have you seen any dinosaurs lately?