I don’t know if this is normal or not because when I was a little girl I had a difficult childhood, and I was diagnosed with depression when I was 12. The depression seems to be gone now, but what seems to be lingering is this “blindfolded on a rollercoaster” feeling. It’s where I get mood swings that last only a few hours at most, and after the mood swing has ended I’m back to normal like nothing happened. My opinions of myself and world views will change just as rapidly and I’m basically having this constant battle with an inner voice that’s in my head constantly telling me conflicting things.
“Adults who cry need to grow up” “crying is a mature and healthy way to express sadness” “no it’s not, if I see even a family member who is crying over someone dying I’ll tell them to grow up and walk out the room smiling because I’m right. I am very good” “no that’s terrible, you should be compassionate to your fellow human beings” + (rinse/repeat)
“You’re a bad person, you deserve bad things happening to you, stop trying to be good” “you’re a good person you deserve to enjoy things and feel happy” + (rinse/repeat)
“You don’t deserve to have a boyfriend, imagine him having to put up with you” “you deserve to have a boyfriend, you need someone to love and keep you company” + (rinse/repeat)
This always results in confusion, like I don’t know who or what I am, and then I get angry. No joke, I’ve thrown and broken things during this. Sometimes, my inner voice tells me I’m stupid or slow. So then I’ll think “you think I’m slow? I’ll prove you wrong. I’m the best” I then speed things up and rush things which sometimes causes accidents.
My mood is very sensitive to certain things. Like if I said something that sounded a bit weird I’ll kick myself over it, if someone left a conversation early my inner voice is like “look what you did, you made it awkward and now that person finds you weird and doesn’t like you” “I need to slap this person now” and I’ll get angry and then when that person comes back to me and explains “sorry I had to leave the conversation early to check on something” and they’re normal with me that feeling instantly goes away. Sometimes my inner voice mimics things bullies have said to be long in the past and it’s in their voice. Sometimes my inner voice mimics my parent’s voices.
I feel like I’m constantly being harassed by my inner voice and I don’t know which side is the real me. Whenever I tell people about how my inner voice is, they just look at me weird like “huh”, so I get the impression that this is normal and I just suck at dealing with it but I find it mentally exhausting when I have a particularly active day of this.
Have you ever been screened for bipolar disorder?
Untreated bi-polar disorder commonly gets worse and worse in terms of lows / mania until it hurts you or someone you care about. Seek treatment and medication.
Well, the degree and severity of what you’re describing isn’t what most people experience, and it seems like it is at an unhealthy degree of frequency and severity.
I would say that anyone experiencing that kind of inner turmoil would benefit from evaluation and treatment. Trying to diagnose someone online is a sucker’s bet even if you’re a qualified professional, and I seriously doubt you’re going to find one of those here on lemmy randomly. But, yeah, if a family member or friend out here in meatspace told me they were experiencing that, I’d be helping them find either a psychiatrist or other mental health provider sooner rather than later.
Most people do experience at least occasional intrusive thoughts, but not to that level. It’s very good that you recognize it’s an inner voice rather than a separate source though. It does tend to mean you’ll respond well to one or more of the various treatment options, which will depend in exactly what the root cause is. Likely, there would be a combination of medications and talk therapy of some variation or another.
And, I suspect that even though most people need to try a few meds before they find the best options, that you will likely get relief quickly once that happens. So you’ll be able to approach other treatments and benefit from them quickly as well.
No, this is not normal. Have you considered speaking to a therapist about this? I understand therapists can be expensive, and there’s no real substitute for proper professional help, but I personally found talking to LLMs useful while I was waiting to see a therapist (for an unrelated reason).
I’m glad this helped you but damn it’s depressing. People should not have to resort to ChatGPT for therapy
LLMs are absolutely the worst thing you can talk to about mental health issues. There was a post here recently that linked a screenshot of an LLM telling an addict to have some meth as a treat for being a week sober. It’s a glorified autocomplete, nothing more.
Please be careful, while the thrust of your statement is correct (not a substitute for a real professional, it can give dangerously bad advise on some occasions and there’s no way besides personal knowledge and expertise to distinguish when it messes up besides hard study and real research), the meme that LLMs are glorified autocomplete is factually incorrect. Don’t be like the D.A.R.E. program and try to scare people away from things with bad facts and lies.
It is disingenuous to say that because the AI system that trains the AI system that becomes the LLM uses “next word prediction” as its success metric, that the LLM itself is nothing but autocomplete. Here’s an example of a next word predictor: a fully fledged intelligent human being who is asked to predict the next word of a sentence. And I’m not saying that an LLM is that, or equivalent, or even close, just that being a next word predictor doesn’t rule that out, and claiming or implying so is simply wrong.
True, use of LLMs is not guaranteed to be correct, and in areas where correctness really matters and you lack expertise to check it, you really should not use an LLM. But let’s not lie to make it sound dumber than it is. It’s plenty dumb enough already.
I hope this isn’t a real person.
