How I Became Sane Again

I thought you might find it useful to know how and why I went mad, and how I became sane again.

Some Introduction First...

Shakespeare said in Hamlet that the greatest gift a man may possess is to “know thyself”.

If you do not know yourself, you cannot know what will make you happy, what you should do in life or even where you are and where you are going. A few people are born knowing their true nature and never have to wrestle with the feelings of despair, loneliness and lack of self-identity. However, the majority of people never know their true nature, and the some remaining must struggle to find their path – often not finding it until they are well past their forties or even much older again.

Much of how we see ourselves is how our culture, society and peer group think we ought to
see ourselves. This is in fact generally a good thing – it saves us having to figure out the vast
majority of things for ourselves because we simply inherit understanding from others. On the other hand, the cost is that when those around us make a mistake, we also inherit that misunderstanding.

About Me, Ruth And Our End...

I thought then of my relationship with Ruth is what sent me mad because I had defined myself as having her being a part of me. When our relationship collapsed and ended, the representation of reality I had built myself became fundamentally contradictory with itself at a core level, causing an increasing fall into paranoia, delusions, hallucinations and self-loathing.

At the core of my problem was that I had lied to myself because I preferred to believe the lie rather than reality – that Ruth and I could never work. Often the core of other people’s problems is that they think something happened to them which their conditioning says ought to be what they think happened to them, when in fact something quite different happened. For example, if a painful event happens eg; your girlfriend cheats on you, society may take the view that she was in the wrong and you are in the right.
However, if you did not sexually satisfy her because you are in fact gay, then in reality you are more in the wrong for misleading her and probably causing her a great deal of disappointment and pain. Thus her infidelity may cause you to become very depressed because subconsciously you know that you are the cause, but you have repressed a better, more accurate understanding of yourself.

How to become sane again...

How I became sane again was to fix my memory by restoring it closer to what actually happened rather than what I thought ought to have happened.

The technique is very simple.

1. Determine what are the most painful memories which you think are related to your problem.
2. Every night, before you sleep, reimagine the painful situation like a waking dream. Ideally
you do this just as you fall asleep. You may find repeating it over and over again in your mind useful.
3. Your subconscious mind will explore that memory and everything related to it as you sleep.
Pathways which had been deinforced due to repression will become reinforced.
4. Over the next few weeks, you will realize many things you had forgotten, and one day it will
all suddenly click together and you will have a new understanding of the memory. Your mental model will have just become improved. It may take many months, or even years to come to a full realization of your improved mental model but once you fix it, everything else will take care of itself over time.

In this process, you need to remember a few things: (i) The more painful the thought or memory, usually the better. (ii) You need to do this every night without fail. Doing so shows your
commitment to fix your mental model and to get better. Trying to cop out by saying “I’m too tired tonight” or “I couldn’t be bothered” or more commonly “It hurts too much to think about it” shows you are not yet ready to transcend and you will need to suffer some more despair, loneliness and unhappiness before you become ready. I’ll put it crudely and brutally – do you want to keep suffering at a low level, or endure a lot of pain now to free yourself forever?

And (iii), the most important – be honest with yourself. Maybe a part of you secretly enjoyed the
horrible thing that happened to you. Maybe you do delight in dreaming about serial-murdering
people. Maybe you do like torturing small animals. There is nothing wrong with thinking evil
thoughts – you must think them to think good thoughts – it is necessary in order to be well
balanced. Where right and wrong come in is what you do with these thoughts – if and how you
actualise them into reality.

Only by being truly honest with yourself can you ever truly get to know yourself; only by truly
knowing yourself can you really know what you can do; and only by truly knowing what you can
do, can you know what you want to do. This is how I discovered my path. I hope you find it useful in discovering yours.


This technique is actually really useful for a whole pile of things. If I have a problem to solve, or an important article to write like this one I am writing now, I perform this technique. Before long it becomes second nature and you will do it automatically every time you go to sleep. It is in fact a meditative technique which the modern world has forgotten and it is the same mechanism used by psychologists when working with clients.

You don’t want to use this technique on every single painful thing that happened to you ever. It might sound tempting, but I think you still need some painful, embarrassing memories to haunt you. Without them you lose part of the human condition, and also distance yourself so far from societal norms you could no longer properly connect with them and without others, you cannot be.

Niall Douglas