I don't know if anyone has read the book by Don Miguel Ruiz -- THE FOUR AGREEMENTS -- I believe it came out several years ago but it surely has timeless relevance, especially for those of us in recovery or fighting for it.

I was recently hospitalized for three weeks, due to voices, seemingly insurmountable, telling me not to speak and to prepare to set myself on fire. The stay was horrendously difficult as my paranoia ran wild as did the voices, which I did not even recognize as such and so suffered the more because I believed real people were talking to me. THe one thing, the only thing, that got me through, and that eventually got through to me were Don Miguel's Four Agreements, or at least my understanding of them.

What follows is a brief discussion of my understanding of them. 

The first is: Be impeccable with your word. Now I won't go into his discussion of this, only tell you that this does not mean just to be honest and forthright and so forth, No, it means specifically to be decent and good to yourself with your words. Do not tear yourself down or punish yourself endlessly with self-flagellating words because you made a mistake. Instead, forgive yourself. Treat yourself with love and with good words.

That one is very difficult for me to accomplish. In fact, it may be the hardest one, even though Don Miguel puts it first on purpose, as the sine qua non, the Agreement that stands behind all the others.

That said, the other three are vitally important as well, and struck me as particularly relevant to anyone who has ever been paranoid, as I have been (and am so chronically). #2, then, is Don't take anything personally.  The idea behind this is that everyone is in their own world, thinking the world revolves around them, and in fact they don't care about you, except insofar as "you" or their picture of you, impinge on their world, their needs, their desires in their universe.  In a word, they are too busy taking everything in their world personally  for you to complicate things by believing that you are the center of their world: each person is the center of their own world. They are each in their own bubble. If they say something to you -- You are stupid, for instance -- it is from their own world, their own feelings and needs and circumstances, and says NOTHING about you at all. They might just as well have said, You are a genius, which also says nothing about you! Remember that. It will save you a lot of grief.

THen we get to #3, which really follows naturally from #2: Don't make assumptions. Instead, you are allowed to ask questions, as long as you wait for the answers and accept whatever answer you get (though you can still ask more questions).

I have gotten into so much trouble making assumptions, and it was almost always because I took things personally. But isn't paranoia based fundamentally on making assumptions, however outlandish? And aren't the "ideas of reference" which I experienced constantly-- even the TV was talking about me --  "taking things personally" to the absolute meximum? But if you know you can ask questions first, you can check out what you do not know. Before you make a decision about what is going on, baselessly, you might find out the truth, the facts, rather than building an elaborate air castle or haunted house, rather, out of what you fear might be the case. So don't make assumptions -- ask questions and find out the facts  first.