Hi Robert. I hope I have caught you early in what can become a very destructive period in a person’s life.
I am a former “Targeted Individual.” I once believed that I was being targeted and subjected to an organized campaign against me. Those beliefs eventually cost me almost everything. I became isolated, homeless, and increasingly detached from reality.
So I am going to tell you something that you probably do not want to hear:
There is a very real possibility that you are experiencing persecutory delusions.
When this first started happening to me, I went online looking for explanations. I found an enormous amount of material about gang stalking, targeted individuals, MKUltra, directed-energy weapons, V2K, government experiments, and countless variations of the same basic conspiracy.
At the time, some of it seemed remarkably convincing because I could compare what people were describing with things happening in my own life. In retrospect, however, I was reading accounts written largely by other people experiencing the same kinds of paranoid and delusional thinking that I was.
The internet did not help me understand what was happening to me. It helped reinforce it.
That is why one of the most important things I can tell you is this: stop researching gang stalking.
Get away from the forums, videos, websites, and online communities devoted to it. The more I researched the subject, the more evidence I seemed to find, and the more elaborate my explanation for what was happening became. It turned into an obsession. Every new piece of information could be incorporated into the belief.
I have schizoaffective disorder. My particular delusions did not involve V2K or hearing voices. I believed that I was being used as a subject in illegal psychiatric research. Other people who identify as Targeted Individuals have completely different explanations for essentially the same experiences.
That enormous variation should tell you something.
One person believes the government is responsible. Another believes it is neighbors. Another blames law enforcement, a former employer, intelligence agencies, organized crime, secret technology, or something supernatural.
The explanation changes. The pattern of persecution remains remarkably similar.
Persecutory delusions can occur with schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, bipolar disorder, delusional disorder, severe depression, substance use, and other psychiatric or medical conditions. A person can also become psychotic without realizing that anything is wrong. That inability to recognize one’s own illness can sometimes be part of the illness itself.
You have mentioned problems involving your neighbors in some of your other posts. Something else worth considering is that if you are visibly frightened, suspicious, watching people closely, confronting them, recording them, or otherwise behaving unusually because you believe they are involved, your neighbors may actually begin reacting to you.
That reaction can then feel like confirmation.
You think, “See? I knew they were watching me.”
Meanwhile, they may be thinking, “Why does this person keep watching us?”
That can create a terrible feedback loop.
I know how convincing these experiences can be. When I was deeply delusional, simply telling me that I was wrong accomplished almost nothing. Everything could be explained away. Evidence against the conspiracy could become evidence of how sophisticated the conspiracy was.
Eventually, I had to consider the possibility that the problem was not the world around me.
It was my interpretation of it.
A few things helped me:
1. Stop feeding the belief.
Get away from gang-stalking and Targeted Individual material. Do not spend your days collecting evidence, watching your neighbors, researching surveillance technology, comparing license plates, recording strangers, or reading other people’s theories.
Instead, deliberately put your attention somewhere else. Get outside. Exercise. Make something. Read about an unrelated subject. Find a hobby. Talk to people who are not part of the Targeted Individual community.
You need information coming into your mind that does not reinforce the same belief over and over again.
2. Ask yourself what your theory would actually require.
Try temporarily assuming that your interpretation is wrong and work backward.
How many people would have to participate? How would they communicate? What would motivate them? How much time would they have to devote to you? How much would it cost? Why would dozens of ordinary people continue participating without anyone producing clear, independently verifiable evidence?
Most people are overwhelmingly occupied with their own problems, relationships, jobs, money, families, and lives.
You are the central character in your own experience, as all of us are. But that can make unrelated events feel connected to us when they aren’t.
3. Talk to a doctor or mental-health professional.
You do not even have to begin by agreeing that you are delusional. Tell the doctor exactly what you believe is happening and why you believe it. Give them the opportunity to evaluate you.
Medication became an important part of my recovery. I do not particularly like taking psychiatric medication, and I have experienced side effects from it, but there was a period in my life when it was necessary. Treatment gave me enough stability and distance from my beliefs to begin examining them differently.
Medication alone did not rebuild my thinking. That took time.
4. Be willing to entertain one uncomfortable possibility: “What if I am wrong?”
You do not have to immediately convince yourself that everything you believe is false.
Just leave the door open.
Ask yourself: If this were a psychiatric problem rather than an organized campaign against me, how would I know? What evidence would distinguish those two possibilities?
That question is much more useful than endlessly searching for additional confirmation of what you already believe.
5. Stay away from communities that reinforce the belief.
This is especially important.
Online Targeted Individual communities can function as echo chambers in which one person’s delusion validates another person’s delusion. Someone posts an ordinary event, another person interprets it as surveillance, and soon everyone has supplied an explanation for it.
That does not mean those people are stupid or dishonest. Many of them may be genuinely frightened and sincerely describing what they believe is happening to them.
I was sincere too.
I was also wrong.
I am embarrassed by many things I did and believed during that period of my life. I was involuntarily hospitalized several times. I became homeless. I isolated myself. I lost years of my life fighting an enemy that I now understand was not there.
That is why I am taking the time to write this.
I cannot give you instructions for defeating the people who are supposedly gang stalking you, because I do not believe those people exist in the way you currently believe they do.
But I can tell you that there is another way out.
Talk to a professional. Get away from the conspiracy material. Stay connected to ordinary life and ordinary people. And, most importantly, remain willing to question your own explanation for what you are experiencing.
I wish someone had gotten through to me much earlier.
Maybe someone can get through to you.
Kerns, you are deflecting from reality. What is your reason? Are you pro-gangstalking? You are attempting to normalize gang stalking in our supposedly free society. Since America is on the path to hyper-communism (communism aided by highly sophisticated machinery to monitor citizens), you are encouraging citizens to tolerate the snake machinery. Gang stalking must be for life, organized harassment bc it is part of communism- the group (communism) controls the individual rather than the group serving the individual, invested in the TI’s welfare as in a democracy.
I could not disagree more. The only way to survive being gang-stalked is to keep notes of the encounters and publish, publish, and publish the patterns. Targeted individuals who are receiving intense assaults in the street theater, businesses, institutions, and the workplace are most likely in it for life. Sorry. Having strong faith in God is necessary. The TI must keep notes of the encounters and publish, publish, and publish the patterns. Please don’t listen to such commentators as above; most likely, they are working for the snakes, rogue social scientists who want to normalize the snake assaults upon the TIs’ lives.
The snakes are displacing our democracy with hyper-communism, which plans to use a virtual mind of each citizen in America to control their thought-life and predict their movements. Why are there even confrontations in our supposedly free society, meaning there is no longer a free society in America? Democracy is being replaced with hyper-communism. “Hyper” is added to the root to account for the incredible advancements in technology since the 50s for surveillance, monitoring, storing and recalling data, using supercomputers, and monitoring each citizen in America.
We TIs have already been thrust into hyper-communism, causing a loss of our free society and privacy, leading to the destruction of the TIs’ lives – constant harassment becomes the norm, thereby creating a state of hyper-communism.
I think your response actually demonstrates one of the dangers I was trying to describe in my answer.
Look carefully at what you are advising someone who believes they are being gang stalked to do.
You are telling them that they are probably “in it for life.”
You are telling them to continually monitor their surroundings.
Keep notes about encounters.
Look for patterns.
Publish those patterns.
Then publish some more.
Interpret harassment as evidence of an enormous political and technological system being constructed around them.
And apparently distrust people like me who suggest another explanation because we may be “working for the snakes.”
Think about how much of a person’s life you are asking this belief to consume.
If somebody follows your advice for the next twenty years, how many thousands of hours will they spend watching strangers, recording encounters, analyzing coincidences, documenting license plates, studying people’s behavior, searching for patterns and publishing their findings?
What happens to their career?
Their relationships?
Their hobbies?
Their ability to relax?
Their ability to trust people?
Their ability to walk into a grocery store without analyzing the behavior of everyone around them?
At what point do they simply get to live?
I know something about this because I did spend years interpreting my environment through a persecutory framework.
And there is a particularly serious problem with constantly collecting “evidence”: once you start looking for patterns everywhere, you will find them.
Human beings are extraordinarily good at finding patterns.
If you record enough cars, eventually the same model will appear repeatedly.
If you write down enough license plates, numbers and letters will repeat.
If you watch enough strangers, some will look at you.
If you study enough conversations, somebody will say something that seems unusually relevant to your situation.
If you monitor traffic long enough, somebody will follow you for several turns.
If you photograph enough people, somebody will appear in more than one place.
The question isn’t simply whether you observed something.
The question is whether the explanation you assigned to that observation is actually supported by evidence.
That distinction took me years to understand.
Something else about your comment is even more important.
I told my story openly. I said that I have schizoaffective disorder, that I spent years believing I was being targeted, that those beliefs contributed to me becoming isolated and homeless, and that treatment and years of examining my own thinking eventually led me to conclude that I had been experiencing persecutory delusions.
Your explanation for me is:
“Most likely, they are working for the snakes.”
Do you see what just happened?
You don’t know me.
You haven’t presented evidence that I work for anybody.
Yet instead of allowing my experience to challenge your theory, your theory simply absorbed me.
Someone agrees with you:
They understand what is happening.
Someone disagrees with you:
They may be working for the people doing it.
A psychiatrist says you’re experiencing delusions:
The psychiatrist is helping cover it up.
Medication reduces the experiences:
Perhaps the perpetrators temporarily backed off.
The experiences return:
The targeting resumed.
You document a coincidence:
Evidence.
You fail to document anything:
The operation is covert.
What could possibly happen that would cause you to conclude that your explanation is wrong?
That is not a rhetorical question.
I think it is one of the most important questions anyone who identifies as a Targeted Individual can ask themselves:
“What evidence would convince me that I am mistaken?”
If the answer is “nothing,” then you are no longer investigating a hypothesis.
You are defending a belief.
And telling frightened people that they must spend the rest of their lives documenting that belief may be doing them enormous harm.
There is another sentence in your comment that I find particularly troubling:
“Targeted individuals … are most likely in it for life.”
Imagine telling that to someone who has only recently begun believing they are being followed.
Maybe they still have a job.
Maybe they still have a home.
Maybe their family is still trying to help them.
Maybe they haven’t started confronting strangers.
Maybe they haven’t spent their savings on cameras, electronics, moving expenses or supposed counter-surveillance.
Maybe they haven’t become isolated yet.
You are effectively telling that person:
This will never end. The people around you really are involved. Devote your life to watching them and documenting them. And be suspicious of anyone who tells you otherwise.
I am telling them almost exactly the opposite.
Before you sacrifice your life to this explanation, investigate another one.
Learn about persecutory delusions.
Learn about ideas and delusions of reference.
Learn about paranoia, hypervigilance and psychosis.
Talk openly with a qualified mental-health professional.
And most importantly, give yourself permission to consider the possibility that you could be wrong.
I was wrong.
That realization was painful because I had spent years accumulating what I believed was overwhelming evidence.
But discovering that I was wrong didn’t destroy my life.
It gave what remained of my life back to me.
I no longer have to document strangers.
I don’t have to decode ordinary encounters.
I don’t have to wonder whether someone disagreeing with me is secretly part of an operation.
I don’t have to spend every waking hour fighting an invisible enemy.
That is freedom too.
And I would much rather encourage someone to preserve their relationships, housing, career, money and connection to ordinary life while seriously investigating what is happening to them than sentence them to a lifetime of surveillance of their own surroundings.
Before you tell someone that they are “in it for life,” consider the possibility that the thing keeping them in it for life may be the advice never to stop looking for it.
Shockingly, 99% of contributors to this favorable website to TIs cause ignore the elephant in the room for fear of the organized snakes, rogue social scientists, or pro-snake actors operating in the fusion centers.
Apparently, you are pro-snake. I don’t believe that you have been stalked. We TIs must dismiss your comments as ignorant.
Will Myers
Intelligent Design and Biblical Scripture 