Pronoia, Delusions with insight, or maybe Dissociation?

Hello, I have lately been attempting to navigate a particularly odd psychological phenomena where I’ve been experiencing what, from the outside perspective, must clearly be a delusion with insight.

See, I have this idea that’s been circling in my mind, regarding a conversation that a friend and I had a around the beginning of June, when I was quite drunk, which ultimately led to the end of our friendship. *Because* I was drunk (or perhaps not only for that reason, but we’ll get to that) my memory of that conversation is fuzzy at best. When I first woke up the next morning, though, I didn’t remember much of anything at all. The one thing I specifically remembered is that everything ended on a good note, with my friend asking me if I needed a ride, I said no I’d just sleep in my car, and at some point in there toward the end she said “you’re a good person.”

So it seems like it ended on a positive note. However… over the next couple of weeks I started to remember things that I said… or else… I started to confabulate, maybe, things that I *might* have said. It would *feel* like I was remembering, that I had accidentally implied that I had feelings for her beyond friendship and was trying to make a move on her, which… wasn’t true, true, but it wasn’t explicitly untrue either. It was a feeling I had that was meant to suggest that I cared deeply for her, but that I didn’t expect or need anything more than friendship from her, either— it was a position which required nuance, explanation, and understanding from both of us in order to make sense of it.

It was a conversation that I shouldn’t have been able to have navigated or articulated successfully when I was blackout drunk, and remembered next to nothing the next morning.

And yet… in the following weeks, as I kept encountering these “flashbacks” of a conversation that shouldn’t have been able to happen, it seemed like my friend was still… my friend. Like she brushed it off? But if even the slightest part of it were true, and it felt very true, then she… should not have still been able to trust me. Maybe she just blamed the alcohol, but… I don’t think, truthfully, that she would’ve been able to brush it off and go back to being friends. Or even co-workers, because we were that as well.

And then there’s another thing. This conversation that couldn’t have happened took place at work, where we have cameras, and my boss invited me out for lunch a few days after the event, said that he had doubts about me before, that he was skeptical about my intentions for a long time but that he was 100% in on me now and happy to have me there. And also (an anecdote that will be relevant later), he mentioned that he asked one of our newest employees, a 16 year old girl, whether she had gotten any weird vibes from me, and she said no. Apparently. But that also felt like an extremely odd thing for him to say to me, and also for him to be looking for in the first place, because I didn’t think that I had given off that impression to any co-workers or employees before. So it seemed out of left field.

And then I started experiencing this profound sense of Deja vu. There was one day that my boss’ plane got delayed when I was supposed to see him in the morning, and another time when my friend (the co-worker I supposedly had the conversation with) called out for three days in a row due to a sudden migraine that she hadn’t experienced in a long time. And in both of these instances (and several others that I won’t list), I had a strong sense of Deja vu, like I knew these things were going to happen.

But how could that be?

About two weeks after the original conversation I came to the alarming realization that some of the snippets of conversation that I was “remembering” involved me talking about myself in the third person. Things like my friend saying, “I feel like I’m invading your privacy,” and me responding, “it’s my privacy, and I’m telling you to do it. I need this answer or I’m going to die.”

And so now I have to explain the nature of what made this supposed conversation so particularly odd.

In my mind, the conversation that I “remember” having (probably a delusion) involved me dissociating into an altered state of consciousness (which I don’t normally do), so that I could articulate my thoughts while drunk and also protect myself from the emotional damage that the conversation was bound to cause me. Because the conversation that I needed to have involved me being open and honest about anything my friend could possibly want to know about me in order for me to regain her trust.

See… I’ve had a long-standing problem in my life of feeling like, despite being an honest and trustworthy person, and despite telling people the truth about my thoughts and feelings and beliefs, I am often rejected as being… a charlatan, I suppose. And since this friend meant a lot to me, and I was in a socially isolated place in my life, I believe that I had a flash of insight when my job, my friendship, and my life was about to fall apart over a miscommunication that caused me to dissociate in an attempt to solve the problem the only way I knew how.

And so the “delusion” that I’m having is that I dissociated, told deep secrets about myself, my ideals, my beliefs, my life, to my friend (who was there), and my boss and his wife who saw what was happening via the cameras in the shop. And to top it off, even as these “memories” came back to me, I had insight into the fact that they probably weren’t real. They *felt* real, but I was never 100% on them. I’m still not. But I can’t quite shake them, either.

Because the supposed conversation ended with me somehow actually convincing them that they *could* trust me, and then, to follow up, convincing them that *I would lose my mind* if I woke up the next morning and realized that I had such a monumental, life-changing conversation while blackout drunk. And so I have an odd memory of my dissociated self telling my friends to lie to my non-dissociated self about the conversation, and wait until I drip-fed myself memories over the next several weeks so that I could process the whole thing emotionally in my own due time.

And then I said that if they weren’t *absolutely* convinced yet, they could test me over these next few weeks— I told my friend that she didn’t need to worry about me thinking of her sexually whenever we’re together, because I don’t think about women like that in general— hence the comments my boss made about the new hire. I told them that I knew it might be hard for my friend to see me in person until I remembered everything, because it would be harder for her to lie about the whole thing— and so we decided that we should be scheduled together, but that she should call off, so that non-dissociated me wouldn’t know anything was up, but so that we wouldn’t have to see each other in person so soon.

And so the “delusion” was very tightly woven. The Deja vu made sense, the weird comments made sense, my boss’ seemingly raised trust in me made sense… and yet… could I *actually* have dissociated like that? It seems absurd.

But if I didn’t, then instead I am wrapped up in this one, very specific delusion of a conversation that I confabulated, which my mind is seemingly working tirelessly to maintain out of, I can only assume, the deep-rooted truth that if my friend and boss really did lose trust in me that night then I’m about ready to give up and off myself. And so whether I dissociated to save myself, or I formed a delusion to save myself, there’s some incredibly odd psychological phenomena going on which seems to have prioritized keeping me alive over keeping me sane.

Yet the cognitive dissonance and attempted double-bookkeeping has been maddening, so I’m not sure how well my sanity has been held on to.

And so now I’m met with this horrible back-and-forth swing from optimistic pronoia (the dissociation is true, everyone trusts me, I just need to finish remembering everything and it’ll all work out), and pessimistic reality (the delusion is true, nobody trusts you, everybody can kind of see you’re losing your shit but they don’t care enough to say anything, your brain is on its last legs and throwing out elaborate, complex justifications from your subconscious for why you shouldn’t just give up).

And reality itself seems to be giving me a bit of both. My boss and his wife *do* seem to be completely in on me still, and yet my friend, or former friend, has switched to working only the shifts when I’m not there. So it’s very odd. I don’t know which reality is real, I don’t know how crazy I sound from the outside, and I guess I’m just not sure how to navigate this.

I tried looking for case studies and info on Pronoia but couldn’t find much, so I guess that’s why I’m coming here.

(I also have been reading about the idea of delusions as a doxastic shear pin, which would help to make sense of what is happening here, assuming that I am deluded rather than previously dissociated).

I don’t know. Thoughts?

TLDR: May have dissociated, may be deluded, are my friends colluding with my dissociated self in my favor, or does everyone secretly hate me?