Hi. New and glad to be here . Diagnosed Bipolar Schizoaffective (with a dash of GAD in the mix) about two years ago. I've been dealing with mental illness since I was about nine though. At first the diagnoses was Major Depressive Disorder recurrent and long story short here I am.

Anyway, I was just wondering if this illness (or whatever illness you're going through) has colored the way you feel about God, Source, etc. See, at first I didn't feel that my psychosis was a problem so I never spoke about it in bad terms. My psychosis was my connection to the spiritual. Through the rose tinted glasses of psychosis is how I viewed the world. My spirituality was my everything. And I guess the hallucinations and delusions were a huge contributor to my "spiritual" experiences. So, I never saw a problem because I was connecting to to the universe. Am I making any sense?

Anyway, lets see if I can give you a bit of my spiritual story. My mother died when I was thirteen and it was shortly after that I really started to pay attention to the supernatural. I could swear that she was coming to me in dreams and sending me signs and communicating with me in my waking life. At fourteen I became interested in the pagan/Wiccan path. I followed this path for ten years and boy were the hallucinations and delusions on overdrive during this time. I could see everything from dead people to fairies. I could talk to animals and astral project. I could do it all. My entire life centered around this psychosis. I even wanted a career as a tarot reader and occult shop owner. Then when I was twenty-four that all changed. Jesus Christ came and saved me (or did he?). I was interested in reading the Bible and as the interest grew my "spirit guides" began to become much more sinister. Then when I was lying in bed one night...I don't even remember how it started that night...Jesus Christ came and exorcised demons out of me. Now for a few weeks prior to this I believed that Jesus was around me, but he had never made himself so well known until this moment. I knew that I had to pray, but seeing as I was a pagan/Wiccan I didn't know how to pray! However, due to my early years in a Catholic school I did remember the first part of the Our Father. So, that's what I said. I repeated the little bit of the Our Father that I remembered. As I prayed I could see and feel Jesus Christ and God (who looked like two pillars of light) pulling demons out of my left side. It was probably the scariest night of my life. I looked over to my left and could see two demon faces on the curtains of the window. One, half a face with a tongue sticking out and the other (what I realized later was the demon of witches...I didn't know that at the moment he was being exorcised) was a baphomet goat head. I crept into my grandmother's room as she was sleeping and lay there on her bedroom floor scared out my mind. I stayed up most of the night as demons swirled around me tormenting me. I prayed. I prayed. I prayed some more. After that night I finally admitted to my doctors that I was seeing things, hearing things, getting "messages" and all the like of psychosis. They medicated me and by George it worked! For the most part the psychosis is gone/greatly subsided. However, after the incident I converted to Christianity. I was saved that night, or so I believed.

However, I still can't get away from a nagging question. Was it real? I don't know if it was real or just psychosis and if it was worth changing my faith over. I did things and felt the way that people in the Bible did. Such as burning all of my occult paraphernalia and the like...I found out they did this after reading the Bible for the first time. Have any of you ever felt this way? Have you ever had an experience that so drastically altered your perspective? I do feel a peace with my new found path, but I don't know if I can trust how I got here. What would you do? I know that I need faith in a higher power in my life. I've tried to just hold off and not claim a particular faith to give myself some time. However, I feel so empty when I do so. But was it real? I just don't know.