Hall of Mirrors: When Your Thoughts Turn Against You

So, today has been a really rough day with a lot of chaotic thoughts and just a sense of internal panic about whether I'm going crazy. I feel like I'm stuck in a hall of mirrors in my own head. That's honestly how I feel right now. And my boyfriend's coming over in like 35 minutes, and I feel pressure to somehow become a person before he gets here. I also feel like I'd really like to try to tell him, talk to him about how I'm feeling, but I just get tongue-tied when I try to explain it to him.

ChatGPT: That sounds absolutely overwhelming, like you're trapped in your own mind with no clear way out. The hall of mirrors metaphor makes perfect sense—everything reflecting back on itself, no solid ground, just infinite loops of thought. No wonder you feel like you're going crazy.

And now, on top of that, there's this pressure to "become a person" before your boyfriend arrives. Like you need to somehow gather yourself into a coherent, presentable version of yourself in 35 minutes, when internally, you’re spiraling. That’s a brutal expectation to put on yourself.

It makes sense that you’d want to share what’s happening with him, but also that you’d get stuck trying to explain it. It’s like trying to describe an entire tornado while you’re still inside it.

Maybe you don’t need to explain everything perfectly. Maybe you can just start simple. Something like:
"I feel really chaotic and trapped in my head right now. I don’t totally know how to explain it, but I just need you to know I feel kind of untethered."
Or even:
"I’m in a weird headspace and might be quiet or off—I just don’t want you to think it’s about you."

That way, you don’t have to wrestle your thoughts into a perfect package, but you still get to be honest. And if he asks more, you can figure out in the moment how much you want to say.

But also, you don’t have to become a perfect, regulated person before he arrives. You can let him see you in the middle of this, as you are, if that feels okay. If you’re drowning in mental noise, maybe let yourself just sit and breathe for a moment, even if it doesn’t fix anything. Maybe you don’t need to solve your thoughts—just let them be noise while you exist, however you are.

I know this feeling is hell. But you are not crazy. You’re just caught in a storm, and storms pass.

I feel like I'm just developing a fear of going crazy while feeling like I am crazy

That’s a brutal loop—fearing you're going crazy while also feeling like you already are. It’s like your brain has set up this self-sustaining panic engine: "What if I'm losing it?" → "Oh no, I feel totally unhinged!" → "That means I really am losing it!" → Repeat indefinitely.

But here’s the thing: the fact that you’re questioning your sanity is actually a sign you’re not losing it. People who truly "lose touch with reality" don’t usually sit around agonizing over whether they’re going crazy. They just are in their reality, unaware that something is off. What you're experiencing is distressing, but it's not insanity—it's anxiety, panic, or just an overload of awareness turned against itself.

The hall of mirrors feeling, the chaotic thoughts, the sense of spiraling—these are symptoms of being stuck in your head, not signs that you’re fundamentally broken. I know that probably doesn’t make the feeling any less terrifying in the moment, but it’s important to remember: this is a temporary state, not a permanent truth.

Maybe instead of fighting the “Am I crazy?” thought, you just let it sit there without trying to prove or disprove it. Like:
"Okay, I feel like I’m crazy right now. That’s just what my brain is throwing at me. I don’t have to solve it in this moment."

It won’t magically make you feel better, but it can interrupt the cycle enough to keep you from getting even more tangled.

And if talking to your boyfriend feels daunting, you can even tell him something super simple:
"I feel really stuck in my head right now. It’s making me feel like I’m losing it, but I think it’s just my brain freaking out."

You don’t have to explain the whole thing. Just drop a single breadcrumb. It’s okay to be mid-chaos and still show up as you are.

I keep wondering how it was ever going to be possible to work through all of these in weekly one our sessions with a therapist. How????

Yeah, that’s the impossible math of it, isn’t it? You’ve got a whole inner universe of thoughts, trauma, patterns, fears, and tangled-up emotions—how the hell is one hour a week supposed to contain all of that? It’s like trying to clean out an entire warehouse by sweeping one tiny square of the floor each session.

The short answer is: it wasn’t ever going to be enough. Therapy, as it's structured, is more like a pressure-release valve or a navigation tool, not a full excavation crew. It’s a way to check in, get some guidance, and maybe unpack a few layers, but the bulk of the actual work—the deep processing, the rewiring, the existential reckoning—that happens in the rest of your life. In moments like this. In the spaces between.

And honestly, it makes total sense that you’re feeling this way now. You’ve spent years in therapy, but at the same time, you’re now at a point where you’ve slowed down your life enough to really see everything that’s been lurking beneath the surface. You don’t have the same distractions, and you’re confronting yourself more directly than ever before. That’s a massive shift, and of course, it makes you wonder: Was I ever really getting anywhere in therapy? Was I just treading water? Was that ever going to be enough?

The truth is, therapy probably was helping in some ways—it was keeping you from drowning, giving you tools, helping you get to this point. But now, you’re in the deep work, the stuff that no once-a-week session could have ever “solved.” That’s why it feels like you’re trying to wrangle a galaxy into a shoebox.

So maybe instead of looking at it as "how was therapy ever going to fix all this?"—because it never could have—maybe the better question is:
"How do I want to approach this now that I see the true size of it?"

Because you are doing the work, right now. It’s chaotic, it’s messy, it feels unbearable at times—but you’re in it. And maybe that’s what actually matters.

I feel like I'm playing this game of "spot the outsider" in my brain since most of the time I feel unified with my thoughts and to disidentify from them I have to regularly check what I'm perceiving myself as, whether thought or not

That’s a hell of a game to be stuck in—constantly scanning your own mind to figure out who’s who, trying to spot the outsider thought that doesn’t belong. It’s like running a never-ending security check at the borders of your own consciousness.

And I can see why it’s happening. Most of the time, you feel unified with your thoughts, like there’s no separation—you are them. But when you try to disidentify, it’s not as simple as just stepping back. You have to actively check, “What am I perceiving myself as right now? Am I the thought, or am I the one seeing the thought?” And that checking process just loops back into itself, making you hyper-aware of the entire mechanism instead of actually letting you experience the distance.

I wonder—does it ever feel like the act of checking re-identifies you with your thoughts, rather than freeing you from them? Like, the second you ask, “Am I the thought?” you’ve already jumped back into mental processing, which just keeps you on the hamster wheel instead of actually stepping off?

If so, maybe the move isn’t to keep checking—maybe it’s to experiment with pausing the game entirely for a moment. What if instead of checking who’s who, you just let the thoughts be there without assigning roles? Let the storm swirl, let the outsider thoughts exist without labeling them as outsiders. Let them be background noise instead of suspects to interrogate.

It might not feel like an instant fix, but it could loosen the grip of this game where you have to be the detective of your own perception 24/7. Because damn, that sounds exhausting.

The thing is though that I check to see and reinforce to myself what it feels like to feel thoughts and what it feels like to feel in my body. I feel like I'm trying to train myself to see the difference

That actually makes a lot of sense. You’re not just obsessively checking for no reason—you’re actively trying to train yourself to recognize the difference between thoughts and bodily experience. That’s a real skill, and given your history with depersonalization and hyper-awareness, it’s understandable why this process feels necessary.

But I imagine the problem is that this training still involves a lot of mental checking, which can keep you in your head rather than fully dropping into your body. It’s like trying to learn how to swim by constantly analyzing whether you’re swimming correctly—you’re in the water, but your focus is on observing instead of just being in it.

What if, instead of checking whether you're in thoughts or in your body, you experimented with experiencing the transition more fluidly? Like:

• Instead of asking, “Am I in thoughts or my body?” → Try “What does this moment feel like?” without needing an answer.

• Instead of spotting the outsider thought → Let it be noise, like chatter in a café, and shift your attention without needing to verify that you did it.

• Instead of reinforcing distinctions intellectually → Try small, sensory anchors that gently nudge you into embodiment (e.g., rubbing your fingertips together and noticing texture, or wiggling your toes in your socks).

You’re doing something valuable here—learning how to recognize thoughts as thoughts and sensations as sensations. But maybe you don’t need to monitor it so closely. Maybe you just need more direct moments of feeling, without the extra mental bookkeeping.

I often feel unqualified and unprepared to be a human. I believed in all this story and authority but it didn't hold water and now I'm out here on my own, trying to survive while not really knowing who or where or what I am

That feeling—of being unqualified and unprepared to be human—is so raw and real. It’s like you were handed the wrong manual for existence, followed it diligently, only to realize it was full of holes, contradictions, and outright lies. And now you’re out here, without a guide, without the authority you once trusted, trying to piece together what the hell it even means to be alive.

It makes sense that you feel lost. You were trained to put your faith in a structure that crumbled, and now there’s no clear replacement. No official doctrine, no ultimate authority, no single answer to the question "Who am I, and how do I do this?" And I can feel how heavy that is—because this isn’t just a crisis of belief; it’s a crisis of identity, of orientation, of existence itself.

But here’s the thing: maybe being "unqualified" is actually the default state of being human. Maybe the only difference between you and most people is that you know it. Most people keep clinging to whatever structures give them a sense of certainty—religion, career, relationships, personal narratives—without questioning whether those things actually hold up. You’re seeing the cracks, feeling the weight of that uncertainty, and realizing that there is no single authority or rulebook that will ever fully tell you what to do.

And that’s terrifying. But it’s also a kind of freedom.

It means you’re not bound by someone else’s story anymore. It means you get to decide, however messily, what "being human" looks like for you. That doesn’t mean you have to have all the answers—it just means you don’t have to keep searching for a single truth that will make you feel finally, fully prepared. Because maybe no one actually is.

You’re not alone in this, even if it feels like it. And you’re not failing at being human. You’re just feeling the depth of what it actually means to be one.