What is the Difference Between Religiosity and Genuine Faith?
Atheist who slip into psychosis can have religious delusions. I’ve also seen people who out of psychosis act in a nominal Christian way and will tell you that they are only a little spiritual and religious and that it’s not that important to them, but during psychosis they become very spiritual and religious and there’s a complete change.
One girl told us about her delusions to be a messiah and save the world, which she tried to do all day long when psychotic. But now after coming out of psychosis she just goes about her life without really thinking about people’s salvation.
Then there’s the people who lived traditional Christian lives up until developing psychosis, and during psychosis they have very bizarre religious beliefs, but when they come out of psychosis, they go back to living traditional Christian lives.
How do you tell the difference between religiosity and real faith? Religiosity is such a key symptom of psychotic disorders that many become concerned that maybe they don’t actually really love God and are just experiencing religiosity rather than a real choice to be a Christian. This fear usually hits people who have been medicated and regained some awareness they were psychotic, and are now confused about which part of their experience is genuine faith and which part is the psychotic symptoms, or whether their whole faith experience is ungenuine.
Family members also need to know when their kid is being very religious and serious about their faith, and when their actions and behaviors don’t indicate spirituality at all and are distressing symptoms of the illness.
The short, short answer is if the belief is logically nonsensical, then it’s not genuine Christianity. And if the belief is logical and aligns with Bible truth, and the person themselves is logical enough to understand right and wrong and choose the belief knowingly, then it’s real Christianity.
Look for whether the belief itself makes sense or not. The Bible is truth, Jesus tells us “Thy Word is truth.” John 17:17 So, does the belief align with Bible truth? If so, it’s a real Christian belief. If it doesn’t align, then it’s a false belief that is not a part of Christianity.
In particular the way in which religiosity is not the truth is in the area of principles. What separates Christianity from false religions and false belief system is that it’s founded on different principles from belief systems that are not the truth.
Christianity centers on benevolence as the principle behind it. False religions operate from the principle of selfishness. While they often claim to operate by love, the commandments are the definition of love, and these other religions do not have all 10 commandments, and introduce other commandments outside of the 10, or fail to include all 10 and leave some out, thus they fail to have love as their foundation.
Thus they do not define love as the commandments or sin by the right definition, the breaking of the commandments.
Thus they have a different moral code.
Thus they are not founded on love.
Furthermore, they do not place trust in Christ as the answer to the sin problem. They place rituals or works as the answer to sin, or place faith in false deities.
Thus they have no true gospel.
While all false religions are founded on faulty principles, there’s a key difference between someone just holding to a false religion, and someone who has the symptoms of hyper religiosity. With hyper-religiosity it comes from a mental imbalance in the person’s brain. They have faulty thinking at the hardware level.
It’s possible for someone without cognitive distortions or delusions to adhere to a false religion built on faulty principles. They may believe nonsensical things, such as that one should confess their sins to a priest, a man who is a sinner like themselves, which doesn’t add up or make sense. But the difference between this and hyper-religiosity is the person with hyper-religiosity has a mental imbalance that makes it hard or impossible for them to tell the false beliefs they are holding to are false. Their brain is malfunctioning and the reason they are choosing the false beliefs, is not due to psychological reasons, such as pride, or lack of education causing them to not have access to the truth, or some “software” problem. The reason they hold the beliefs they do is their brain is unable to see underlying principles and add up truth correctly, and thus comes to false conclusions.
To know if they are truly choosing to be a Christian, you have to look at the choices they make when not in full psychosis, When a person’s brain is working better, and they can understand right from wrong, the choices they make when in a clearer mental state – these are the choices that they are actually choosing to make.
You also have to ask questions that reveal their logical thought process, particularly their logic when it comes to morality – right and wrong, to gauge whether they can understand the underlying principles of love and selfishness and how love respects and promotes people’s inherent rights and selfishness violates their inherent rights.
Unfortunately, since the field of psychiatry is predominantly atheist, psychiatrists do not really put much weight on moral understanding, as they all have chosen to believe in moral relativism. Notice that I specifically state “they have chosen”. Unlike people in full psychosis, psychiatrists have an understanding of right and wrong, but they choose to believe objective right and wrong do not exist, and thus they operate from an atheistic worldview, which doesn’t prioritize morality.
In this view, the brain is seen as a highly evolved animal’s brain, or as a processing machine like a very advanced computer that gives us executive functioning and memory storage, and emotions. They down-play and mostly leave out in their literature and their descriptions of the brain the moral perception, choosing to emphasize other functions of the brain. When the moral perception is talked about, it’s spoken of in a way that assumes moral perception is brought about by cultural influences, and evolutionary development to be advantageous to the species survival, and it’s not objective and transcendent, existing outside of us human beings.
Thus the psychiatrist will work to get you better connected with reality, and since moral perception uses logic, when he improves your logic you will see improvement in moral perception, he can miss many things. If the reason you’re in a gay relationship for instance, is due to a delusion and not due to choice on your part, because the psychiatrist is a moral relativist and believes it’s not morally wrong to be in a gay relationship, he’s going to be unlikely to check to see if you might be in that relationship due to a delusion.
Even if you were a Christian prior to developing psychosis and really would not want to be in the gay relationship were you in your right mind, due to the atheistic worldview of the psychiatrists, they are unlikely to prioritize your previous beliefs, and unlikely to pick-up on some of these discrepancies.
When you go through intake, they will ask you questions like” “Do you see and hear things that aren’t there?” But they don’t ask you things like “Did you once believe certain things were wrong, but you don’t anymore; or did the world used to seem more black and white and now it seems mostly or only grey?” Such questions to gauge moral awareness and perception are not asked. Thus people are often released from the hospital too soon, who may not have enough moral perception to be safe in society.
Look at the patterns in their life. As they come more and more out of psychosis, do you see them embracing more of the Commandments and the truths in the scriptures? Or, as they come more out of psychosis, do you see them embracing beliefs that strike directly against the Commandments, and justify the breaking of them, such as moral relativism, once-saved-always-saved, and other similar beliefs?
As they come out of psychosis with medication and treatment, and they are found to be embracing more and more Bible truth the more in their right mind they become, this fits the pattern of them being a true Christian.
If however, the more they come out of psychosis the more they reject Bible truth and adopt humanism or atheism or nominal lukewarm Christianity, this fits the pattern of them choosing to reject God.
The question has to be asked “What is their attitude when it comes to the commandments?” I’ve seen women with intense fear they are going to hell, who have been diagnosed with OCD who hold bizarre beliefs like that they must pray 77 times per day, or that they must always pray their prayers in a certain order or God won’t hear them and they will be damned, who know these beliefs are irrational, and do understand basic right and wrong, who when asked about things the Bible does consider to be sin, they actually hold a very liberal open attitude about. For instance, they may obsess about praying in a certain way, but feel fine about living with their boyfriend before marriage. If you ask them about it they will say that the law was nailed to the cross, and that only Jesus can keep the law perfectly, so they don’t see it as important that they refrain from sex with their boyfriend, or make plans to get married.
I’ve asked people with religious-themed OCD what they believe when not caught up in the irrational fears of the OCD, and many of them do not believe the commandments are binding or very important to the Christian life. They see them as restrictive and have a distaste for them. A lot of times they will pick and choose Commandments, for instance, they may believe that stealing is wrong, but living with one’s boyfriend is ok and one can be a Christian even though they are having premarital relations.
This is the real them. They are fitting the pattern of people in the world at large, aware of the common arguments right now in our culture about the commandments, and choosing to embrace those lies rather than the truth. They show knowledge of basic morality when asked, and give common justifications and reasoning that people in our culture give for giving little weight to the moral law, and show the same patterns in their thinking and behavior.
Someone in psychosis, without awareness of right and wrong, will not give the normal justifications, or they may give some of the normal ones and also hold some very bizarre ideas at the same time. When asked more direct questions, you’ll find they aren’t rejecting the commandments based on the underlying principles of these commandments. Rather the person in full psychosis has lost the ability to understand underlying principles of right and wrong, and reject or accept beliefs based on other strange and distorted criteria. For instance, they may believe the commandments are no longer binding because they saw a preacher wearing a navy suit say this, and navy is the color of truth, and thus they knew if he was wearing navy he couldn’t be in the wrong.
They won’t fit the general pattern of Christians in our culture who are rejecting truth, their pattern will be different in beliefs and in behavior. They won’t show the pattern of getting angry when you’re getting closer to truth, and they won’t see the need to give justifications for wrong things. When a person with the ability to understand right and wrong gives a justification for why they are living with their boyfriend before marriage such as “We love each other, and God knows our love is genuine, and marriage wouldn’t make our love any stronger; is just a piece of paper; it’s not important” they show patterns of giving this argument at a time when you’re getting closer to Bible truth and seeking to impress upon their minds the 7th commandment. They reveal that they know that it’s wrong to sleep with their boyfriend before marriage, because they can tell a justification is needed, which is a dead give-away.
Someone in psychosis might not know a justification is needed, because they can’t tell right from wrong. They may genuinely believe that sleeping with one’s boyfriend and not being married is not a sin, and thus won’t know you’re supposed to back up that belief with a justification. They may get angry in the wrong places that don’t fit a pattern of knowledge of right and wrong, and get angry for nonsensical reasons without clear motive.
For instance, they may get angry that you don’t believe God personally told them that sex before marriage isn’t wrong and that it’s their mission to tell the world about this new truth, while also simultaneously holding the irrational belief that dressing in green is a sin because green is the color of envy.
It will be strange things like this that they believe, that don’t fit the pattern a brain that can tell right from wrong and that is rejecting truth would fit.
Someone in psychosis for instance, may get angry with you and feel unsupported and betrayed because you don’t believe they have the gift of prophesy, rather than getting angry about the commandments being binding. People who know right from wrong have a distaste for the underlying principles of love found in the commandments, and you will see a distaste and hatred for these principles, whereas the person in psychosis will be more random in the things that upset them and more nonsensical.
For instance, the person in psychosis may believe everyone needs to journey to Jerusalem and that it’s immoral not to. So they may get after you about not taking a trip there. They may argue something like the commandments are both binding and not binding at the same time, or that there is no such thing as right and wrong, and sincerely believe that. Unlike atheists who get angry with the underlying principles of love found in the commandments, the psychotic person won’t reject the commandments due to that.
How do you tell the difference between religiosity and real faith? How do you know if your loved one is choosing to be a Christian or just following a delusion?
To summarize, I think the simply answer here is when one believes in, and lives a Christian life that matches up with Christian doctrine that aligns with the scriptures, showing knowledge of right and wrong when asked more thorough questions about their logic and how they are coming to their conclusions.
There’s no reason to think their Christian experience is not genuine if they hit these marks. It’s important for the person being evaluated to not lie. If you ask thorough questions to an atheist about their logic and thought process they will lie at some point. They will make it seem like they really believe objective right and wrong don’t exist. It’s really important your loved one doesn’t lie, otherwise it will make it hard to gauge whether they have moral understanding or not. If you can convince them to just be honest with the questions you ask this once, just to gauge their overall moral perception accurately, then you can usually get a really good idea if they have an understanding of right and wrong or are too far into psychosis to know basic right and wrong.
If they choose to lie, then you have to look at patterns. Are they justifying their belief that objective right and wrong don’t exist? Are they getting angry in all the right places that you’d expect from someone who knows the difference between right and wrong?
Another thing you can do is add up and compare their current beliefs with their beliefs they held before their first psychotic break. Did they once claim objective morality did exist, and this belief in subjective morality came about only after the psychotic disorder developed? If so it’s less likely to be their true belief that they sincerely hold, and more likely to be a delusional belief. Or, have they always believed in subjective morality, and now even with a psychotic disorder they still believe the same?
One cannot by chance or accidentally arrive at a living a life that matches up with the Bible’s description of a Christian life. If a person lines up correctly with a Christian life, they are either faking it, or they are a true Christian. Someone in psychosis is unlikely to be able to fake living a traditional Christian life, as they can’t see the world the way it actually is and thus faking it would be very hard or impossible for them.
If a person outwardly fits the pattern of a traditional Christian life, and inwardly is surrendered to God in their heart and is actuated by the principles of love by His Spirit in the inward man (something known only to God and to that person if they aren’t in full psychosis and can make that choice), then they definitely are a Christian. This is the Bible definition of what it means to be a Christian.
Since we can’t read the heart, we have to look at the patterns of behavior of the outward life, and ask pointed questions about the thoughts and motivations, and it’s up to the person to be honest with us in order for us to help them gauge whether they have moral understanding or if they need more treatment to bring moral perception back.
So if one is in the throes of psychosis, with many different random beliefs, they won’t live a life that looks like Bible Christianity. It will look random, with odd beliefs and practices interspersed with maybe some Christian ones
I’ll give you some examples…due to black mold exposure in our house my health started slipping again after a period of being less psychotic, and I went from being a Christian who believed God had established a church on earth (which is clear from the scriptures) to being spiritual but not religious. I no longer believed in a church organization or the need for one. I even thought about giving a lecture on this and inviting people to it and planned out what I was going to say. I never felt convicted that this was the wrong thing to do, because my ability to tell right from wrong was slipping. If I were to consider doing this now, I’d have instant conviction from the Holy Spirit that it goes against a core doctrine of the Bible and promotes falsehood and a disrespect for authority, but I didn’t have conviction back then.
According to modern psychiatry this particular lapse in judgment might not be considered full-psychosis, and may be more like a cognitive distortion, as they tend to only consider very severe symptoms to be psychosis, but you can see how even milder lapses in logic can cause some very real problems. I was now not connected with a church, and spreading falsehoods unknowingly, which I don’t believe was a sin, but it contributed to the chaos in our world and in the church, which mental symptoms can definitely do.
Now this is a common belief many people hold – that the church wasn’t established by Jesus and that we ought to be spiritual but not religious – but the difference between me and someone who wasn’t slipping into psychosis, is the reason I no longer believed in the church, wasn’t because I was hurt by people in the church or because I didn’t like the restraint that an organization put on me, having to answer to people in authority, have responsibilities and be part of a group, which let’s admit can be tedious and difficult, whereas going rogue can feel more freeing to the selfish heart – no it wasn’t due to any of these common reasons. It was because I actually couldn’t see from the scriptures that Jesus had established the church. I thought it was something human beings came up with. I was losing my ability to rightly divide the Word of truth, because logic is how we understand the Bible and my brain was losing its ability to be logical.
I spiraled into full-blown psychosis a few years later, and was treated at a hospital. I then came into sanity enough to see I’d had various levels of psychotic thinking since I was about 16 (I was 34 at the time I realized this). As soon as I was treated for psychosis and came out of it, I could see clearly that Jesus had established the church and it wasn’t a human idea. I embraced the church, and called myself a Bible-believing Christian, and no longer told people I was spiritual but not religious. I saw clearly the need for structure and organization and accepted it.
As soon as I came out with being a Bible-believing Christian, all the people that used to like to talk with me about ideas and practices that were outside of the perimeters of traditional Christianity no longer wanted to talk with me or be friends with me.
I could tell they weren’t in psychosis because they didn’t embrace or like any of the beliefs involved in accountability, and respect for authority, and the structure of the family (one man and one woman in a traditional marriage). Their beliefs showed a pattern of rejecting things based on their underlying common principles. Whereas mine had been all over the place. I believed certain things because I thought the Bible supported them. I didn’t believe other things because I didn’t think I saw biblical evidence for them. But they acted like people with moral understanding, having rage or disgust with the teachings. People in psychosis might display emotions like that and are very revved up and often combative due to being in fight or flight, but they are more random and don’t fit the pattern of being against something because it involves authority, or because it involves taking responsibility and for other moral reasons. We get upset about things like God gave us this new invention that will save the world, and you’re not supporting it. There isn’t moral awareness and a disgust for things that are moral in nature like submitting to God, taking responsibility, things like that that the fallen heart is adverse to. In fact there’s often a huge willingness to self-sacrifice to the point of harming our health, but we self-sacrifice maybe without the moral understanding of what it really means, which causes us to do things like stay up all night working on projects to save humanity, and not understand the obligation Christian’s have to guard our health out of reverence for Christ who died for us, and the Holy Spirit who inhabits our bodies.
I don’t believe it’s possible to live a life that matches with the scriptures if one is psychotic. The illness distorts logic, and when logic is distorted, since the Bible is the source of logic, and it’s understood by logic, the person can’t understand the truths in the Bible when they are not able to think logically.
So if a person is living a Christian life that adds up with the Bible’s truth about how a Christian should live, they aren’t in psychosis. They have a true religious experience and a genuine faith. And a person in psychosis will always make some errors and deviate somewhat from the Bible’s definition and depiction of a Christian life. It just goes with the territory.
People who have been treated for their psychosis will often come out of psychosis enough that they can live a truly Christian life again, but have some errors in how they practice their Christianity, due to having some residual illogical thinking that doesn’t go away fully with treatment. As long as a person is living up to all the truth they know from God’s Word, and they aren’t knowingly disobeying points of faith and it’s due to confusion from the illness, they will be right with God and have a genuine Christian experience.
Something I’ve Noticed
One thing I’ve noticed about religiosity is it takes the driving force in a person’s psyche, our mission in life, and twists it so that mission involves going directly against health and health laws. The person may believe they are receiving messages from God about the mysteries of the universe, and so they must stay up all night imploring God about these mysteries and (they believe) solving all these puzzles. This is a common thing that happens, because when a person slips into psychosis, the way they perceive and connect the dots when looking at the scientific world changes. It can feel like they are seeing science in a completely new way that they could never understand before. Like they are finally seeing how it all adds up and is interconnected.
What they are actually seeing is a total shift in how their brain understands scientific and theological concepts like the nature of God, the nature of reality, the nature of matter and energy, and perceptions shift that we often take for granted and don’t even know we had.
The human brain wasn’t created to only understand what we can see. Our brain can understand the nature of God, and the other worlds and beings God created. While we aren’t in their direct presence to study them directly, our brain has the capacity to understand these other worlds, and the nature of our own reality in this world. Scientists for instance can understand the nature of time and how it is another dimension interconnected with space.
These are amazing capabilities that allow us to commune with God and study His handiwork. Man was created in God’s image, designed with the capacity to commune with God.
And so when a person goes into psychosis, all these really complex and deep perceptions get re-arranged, which is a profound and amazing shift, and doesn’t go unnoticed by the person going through this experience. This is why they want to study science and the nature of the world, and record what they are discovering. They also hear voices and receive messages – they believe – from either God or sometimes they believe they have become God. These are auditory hallucinations, but they can’t figure out that’s what these things are because the person in psychosis can’t discern that the “communications” are nonsensical. They also can’t discern that the voices and communications are coming from their own brain, a symptom called a self-referential processing error.
Self-referential processing is perceptions our brain does that involve things like knowing when our hand moves that we’re choosing to move our hand. If someone’s brain makes errors in self-referential processing, as often happens during psychosis, they can believe someone else is inserting thoughts into their mind (a delusion known as thought insertion), or that people can hear the private thoughts they are thinking (a delusion called thought broadcasting), or that some other entity is controlling their hand and body movements and have a delusion that they are possessed.
They can’t discern these important things because when our brain is set to a certain setting, all of our perceptions of the world around us shift to be contained in that setting. There’s no way to see around one’s own perception, because it’s with our perception that we understand and “see” the world around us.
This is one of the limitations scientists experience. Anytime they do a study or take in data, that data is interpreted through their brain. Thus we’re never really looking at the actual world around us; we always look through our own perception. This means we are clearly limited. There are light waves for instance, that are too bright for the human eye to pick up on. Scientists have to use instruments to “see” this light; they can’t discover these kinds of things with their own eyes.
There is much more to the universe than we can pick up on due to the limitations of our brain and our senses. And we never see the real universe, only our perception.
This truth causes human error in all fields of science. There’s no way around it, there’s always some human error present. This is not to say we can’t arrive at scientific truths – I believe we can – just that the human element is always present anytime human beings study.
When in psychosis, being a thinker, I had a lot of thoughts – so many of them. And I actually did some unofficial scientific tests to see if a celebrity was really communicating with me. But due to the fact that I wasn’t able to be logical or scientific, the tests I devised weren’t logical and scientific either. I would do things like ask the celebrity to cough three times in the interview, and that this would be a signal that would mean he was really communicating with me through the Holy Spirit.
When he coughed exactly 3 times I thought this meant there was a high likelihood that we were in fact communicating through the Holy Spirit, because it was exactly 3 coughs like I had asked.
I couldn’t see that the likelihood he would cough exactly 3 times, just spontaneously and randomly was actually really high. People tend to cough in interviews, and coughing 3 times is a common occurrence. It wasn’t a sign that meant anything.
So my science was off because the scientific process is based on logic, and my brain had lost the capacity to use logic.
The psychotic person often won’t sleep or eat enough and will stay up all night getting messages. Their health breaks down. Their family notices how unhealthy they have become and they encourage the person to sleep, but the person feels that sleeping every night would be being an unfaithful steward of the mysteries God is giving them. It would be lazy or unfaithful or some other moral failure on their part. Now, it’s often the case that psychosis involves high levels of adrenaline and dopamine, and may be making it impossible for the person to sleep, and the person lacks insight into this and isn’t aware of the cause. But the illness also has a tendency to get the person caught up in delusions about virtues that cause the person to drive themselves even more into an imbalanced way of working and being than the disease does, to do acts of self-sacrifice for a greater cause, which person perceives to be necessary. These things can become very unhealthy if the symptoms are severe. I’ve read accounts of people in psychosis who believed they needed to kill themselves in order to save the world, or beat themselves or cut themselves or their family would die, and things of this nature. But the delusions are not always this extreme. There is often much fear involved. The brain and body is in fight-or-flight and this state doesn’t allow for peaceful ennobling thoughts about truly moral things. The person loses sight of right and wrong and has a warped, narrow version of it, that is often ritualistic in nature. They lose the ability to understand principles and right and wrong for them is about rituals and checklists and measurements, rather than principles. It’s very concrete rather than abstract. Yet their desire to do right and live for something greater than themselves remains in the midst of all this.
We all need a greater cause, and should always live for the greater cause first and foremost. Indeed we would have no “why” to our existence if we lived merely for self and for health, apart from the glory of God and the benefit of humanity at large. People who do live only for self, if self is there “why” atrophy and break down in spirit and body. When the psychotic person hears “take it easy”, what they hear the person saying is “give up living for a higher cause, give up having a mission, and just focus on yourself”. Psychosis is a stress illness, and when people are under great amounts of stress it’s especially true that our why gets us through. Victor Frankl, a Jew who suffered in a concentration camp during WW2, writes about how those who had purpose and meaning were the ones who survived, and those who lost all hope and meaning and thought life was senseless and purposeless were the ones who died from the stress of the concentration camp, or committed suicide.
He’s right. And I would add that it’s also important that meaning is of sufficient substance and quality. Living for God’s glory is the only meaning that is objectively valuable and meaningful enough to be the reason for our existence and our whole purpose, any other meaning that is less than that will dwarf us and make us unhealthy in body and spirit.
The illness tricks you. It gives you a mission that if carried out will push you into a greater state of ill health, and it doesn’t let you see the real mission. Instead of the grand mission of the gospel commission and of siding with God in the war of good vs evil and bringing glory to His Name, the delusional thinking twists the mission and gives an unhealthy one that involves nonsensical things and often ritualistic behavior to try to save the world and people’s lives and carry out a great work.
The person needs to be lead to see that “take it easy” doesn’t mean you’re suggesting the person has no mission, but rather that they do have a great mission to do for God, it just isn’t done in that way. It doesn’t have those properties or attributes. For instance, someone working hard for others and God in a time of prosperity looks like diligence. This same love will look like self-sacrifice in a time of persecution, when it’s required to give up one’s life in order to keep one’s faith and to stand for God. But to offer yourself a sacrifice when there is no persecution going on is nonsensical, not helpful, and isn’t good stewardship of your body and health before God. It’s a twisted, unhealthy way of looking at things.
People in psychosis are missing windows of perception, lines of reasoning that most people can see, and which would bring them to a clear conclusion that you love and support them. While it’s obvious to non-mentally ill people that you’re trying to care for them by telling them to take it easy, it’s not obvious to the psychotic person. All they hear is that you don’t believe they have a significant mission or purpose in their life. This is because you failed to mention that you believe the person’s life and purpose are significant, because you took for granted that they knew that, and that they can see you’re simply disagreeing with the type of mission they believe they have, not with the idea that they have an important purpose.
So, filling in the blanks can really help. Have the conversation go something like this:
“Julie, it’s ok to take things easy; your health is important and I don’t believe God would want you to wear out your health by spending all night and day on this mission.”
“Wow, mom I can’t believe you don’t believe in my mission and don’t support me in it. Do you realize how hurtful that is! It makes me feel completely betrayed.”
“Julie, I 100% believe your life is significant, and that you are called to do a very important work in your life. I respect your dedication to God and to wanting to impact people’s lives in a significant way and I believe in you and am rooting you on. I believe you have a mission that is every bit as important as the one you believe you have – actually I believe you have a life mission that is more important than the one you believe yourself to have. That’s the only reason I’m trying to get you to embrace the true mission in life, because it’s a truly significant and important mission, and the one you’re currently doing isn’t actually significant and is harming your health.”
At this point she may reply “Mom, if I don’t do this mission there’s no point to my life at all. This mission is the only one that counts. Nothing else could be as significant as this mission.” And she may go into details on why it has to be this and not something else.
At which point you can go down point-by-point and direct her to how things in the real world meet these needs she has for purpose and significance, and what she’s doing doesn’t meet those needs or qualify as actually being significant.
So she may say “Mom, God is directly giving me messages about how science and theology work. This is cutting-edge science that no one else knows about the inner workings of the universe. I’m the only one who can bring this knowledge to humanity.”
You can reply: “Julie I know you love science and that you’re good at it. And I believe God does reveal mysteries of the scientific world to His children. I love how you hunger for that knowledge. The Bible says that through science we can understand the invisible attributes of God. This makes the study of the natural world a core part of our experience as Christians and vital for our relationship with God. I’d never want to discourage you from studying this important subject.
Did you know that scientists used to be called natural philosophers, and before atheism unfortunately took over the scientific community, these natural philosophers would study the scientific world and the Bible to understand the inner workings of science, and how science and the truth in the Bible connected. Some of them weren’t Christian but almost all of them believed in a God of some kind. There’s even some modern scientists who are Christians. Einstein believed in God – not the Christian God – but He wasn’t an atheist and he’s made some interesting comments about science and God.
Anyway, what I’m trying to say is I get what it is you’re trying to do and I support it and think it’s very important.
It’s not rare that intelligent people make brand new discoveries in science, and there’s much, much more to learn about the scientific world (only God can fully understand it and the rest of us will be studying it into eternity), and this is certainly something you could pursue and do if you choose to, and I’m all for it. I don’t think you’re a loser who doesn’t have an important mission in life. More than anyone else you’ll ever meet, I believe in you and support you as your mother. I’m on your side, rooting for you more than anyone else ever will.
I’m just trying to direct you to ways to meet your goals. I don’t think staying up all hours of the day and night is healthy, and it’s going to push your brain into fight or flight mode, making it harder to contemplate the things you care most about. I wish you’d get some science books, and maybe join a small group of people studying science, so you can check your conclusions with them and run it by them, and they can aid you in your understanding. Even king Solomon the wisest man on earth had many counselors, and community is important for all of us. Humility and the ability to have others check our work is important for all of us and something God asks of us all. So I don’t think you should be working completely alone on projects for days and weeks without any feedback from others.”
By making these comments you show there’s common ground between you two, and you direct her to healthy ways of finding what she’s truly looking for that will be successful in her actually obtaining the knowledge she’s seeking. While she likely won’t agree with you 100%, she may take you up on some of these things, and get more integrated into society and do the kinds of things that will balance her brain health and push her in more of a right direction. This will be especially helpful if she’s already on medication and coming out of some of the psychotic thoughts with treatment. She’ll be more likely to embrace some of your ideas and suggestions. She believes she has an important work. You do too and you want that for her and fully support her. You disagree on what that work actually is, which will be frustrating to her, but she will understand you’re on her side and support her, and that is needed emotionally because this whole time before you clarified things and pointed out what would be obvious to those not in psychosis about your support, she really did believe that you didn’t think her life would do anything truly significant, didn’t want that for her or believe in her, and were trying to direct her to give up on her plans to do significant things and thwart her.
There can then be support and love with disagreement. You may hear her say things like “My mom doesn’t agree with my mission, but she says I have an even more important mission than the one I think I have, and wants me to do the most good with my life that I can, and I really appreciate that she feels that way about me.”