shanzeek wrote:What about when you're at fault or make a mistake? Do you own up to it or would you cover it up with dishonesty? (I'm asking because you said you're prone to lying about parts of yourselves you can't deal with at the moment, but never about things that have direct impact on others - this kind of fits both categories)
When I make a mistake and know I've made it I tend to admit fault immediately and present a plan of action to however to fix it or ensure that it never happens again. If I were to lie it would be moral cowardice. Generally the approach cuts down on nonsense although I get then feeling that sometimes those who like to berate others for personal reasons feel it deprives them of the opportunity.
The times which are difficult are when I am at fault but believe myself to be correct. My innate distrust of others may mean I fight tooth and claw to defend my position and may have to withdraw and calm down to see the issue clearly and reassess my behaviour.
I just imagined what it would feel like not trusting a single person I know, and perceiving threats everywhere I go, always looking behind my back and never feeling "safe" (is this exaggerated? it's at least how I picture it in my head)...it doesn't sound like a pleasant life.
Think of it in the same way that a wild animal feels about people, it's an emotional sensation of non specific threat which can drive paranoid thinking. Unlike the proper paranoids my reality testing is still good so I'm not subject to their kind of delusions. So yes going to the supermarket or walking round town are remarkably stressful both in terms of hyper vigilance and sensory overstimulation.
It's not quite as simple as that though, Emotional intuition is the primary means through which I experience the world. If I am with someone safe with whom I have an emotional connection their presence will sooth my vigilance, equally if I'm able to form an emotional connection with someone else the sensation will reduce. It's difficult to explain really, it's probably best if it's broken down into cognitive and affective components.
When I'm alone in an unsafe environment, the cognitive read for other people is fine but the affective component is registering hostility. Equally my own emotions become jarring and need to be suppressed. If you were to think of it like music it's like it's discordant and out of phase with the nice part of the range cut out, like a 12 year old learning the cello in a manner which terrorises the local feline population. An emotional connection to someone else acts like a reference point bringing the music back into phase so that it's like a being played by Pablo Casals or someone similar. It's broadly the same tune but the delivery makes all the difference. Safety in this context is not about someone being untriggering, soft or non-abrasive but really is just a euphemism for emotional connection.
I wrote a long answer to this yesterday but it was something of a ramble and going extremely off-topic (not that I'm not usually anyway).
This stopped being solely "my" thread, I don't mind sharing it. Feel free to share it if you still have it saved, I wouldn't ask if I wasn't interested to hear it.
This answer took me quite a long time to write, mostly because it requires me to talk about sensitivity and my internal emotional experience which as we've seen in the past I am not particularly good at and it always makes me sound like one of the cranks. It's also been written after a week of sleep deprivation and many of the mechanisms involved I do not understand well. However it's allowed me to get straight in my head many of the things which were said to me several weeks ago, so thank you for the question and I apologise for the ramble.
Sensitivity problems are really where this all began, as a child I had severe issues. To give a few examples I had to be taken out of school and homeschooled for 18 months, the next year I spent in a special needs class and I did my year five work (grade 4) in a year four class specifically to keep me with a teacher whom I worked well with. This was for behavioural problems like shaking or crying quietly in a corner (I have never been one for big emotional outbursts) when other children were disciplined. There are obviously a lot of other events involved, including a somewhat difficult confrontation with a Baptist preacher who got in a strop after I reacted badly to the cruelties of the bible, but that should give you an idea of the severity. I also mentioned this to explain that like anything taken to extremes it becomes a maladaptive trait. At some point to protect myself I learned to dissociate as a defence mechanism, although in a controlled manner to begin with.
When I spoke to curiousjane regarding friendships (and to a degree to yourself) I described the intuitive affective response as akin to walking into a static field or sensing someone's aura. To be clear that is clearly not what is actually happening, it is simply a predisposition for sensory nuance which is being delivered as emotional intuition. However it has always been an extremely effective tool, both in terms of creating things like my unusual friendship group as well as in some aspects of my professional pursuits. It has several drawbacks, the first being that because it is such a powerful tool for me I am over dependent upon it and my cognitive empathy is comparatively underdeveloped. It realistically requires interpersonal contact, or at least something like a phone conversation where there are nuances to be detected. It can resort in a kind of 'morally' focused vision that detracts from the overall experience, for example your clip from the herzog film which everyone else seemed to think impressive all I saw was a monkey in distress on a crucifix and had to wait a couple of hours to stop being annoyed about it. And finally the largest problem is ease of overstimulation which feeds in to my hypervigilance and is often perceived as threat.
It is not a mechanism by which I think about the world but rather one by which I experience it. Emotional dissociation however, either as a result of unsafety or overstimulation, cuts it out. I still retain the ability for sensory nuance (i.e. having two very similar sized balls on a table and cognitively recognising that they are two different sized balls) but the emotional aspect used for dealing with other people and animals is lost. The best way I can think of to describe it is to think of it as the distinction between watching a movie in the normal fashion and watching a movie with the sound turned right down and subtitles on. You can still follow the plot but an important aspect of the experience has been lost.
I think because of the necessary isolation in which I often found myself when I was young I developed quite a complex internal fantasy world. This really was simply accentuated by the trauma (just like the dissociation) and became a maladaptive behaviour. It is all about emotional connection. When under threat or overstimulated I dissociate and thus lose my emotional connection to the world, I am often severely indifferent to my own pain (physical or otherwise) and just plough on regardless. The heavily dissociated form of my personality runs constantly on the two emotions which remain, fear and primarily anger. While my compulsive nature means that there are no outbursts of either, operating in this way is extremely exhausting and means that I quickly reach burnout point. This is exactly what happened to me during CT specialty training, in an extremely competitive and partially narcissistic environment I quickly reached the point of nervous breakdown where I felt I had to choose between suicide, some sort of professional implosion or a change of path. For obvious reasons I chose the latter. However my internal fantasy world is something to which I am always emotionally connected, in some ways there have been times in my life where I have been more emotionally involved with people in my own head than with people in the real world.
Where the masks or personas come into it is that they are a behaviour adapted to combat the issue of emotional dissociation. The personas are versions of me drawn from my somewhat complex internal fantasy world. They are me, but a me that never was. I.e the me that had a normal happy childhood, or the me that became a lorry driver etc. They exist for many reasons: they allow me to operate in situations where I don't feel I can be 'me' either due to anxiety or self hatred, to prevent over stimulation (that's a big one), to deny information that could harm me from someone I don't trust, to allow me to stabilise my own internal paranoid hostility, they allow me to actually live a little not constantly shackled to my past etc. However their primary function is to to provide an interface through which I can emotionally engage with the world in a hostile situation without emotionally dissociating. They're not like a false self however which is a grandiose construction which someone with npd buy's into, though there are some parallels, I know full well they aren't real and can discard them without injury.
If I become comfortable with someone and can emotionally engage with them I tend to discard a persona if one is being used. They're more like the antisocials mask in that sense, but the purpose is not so much to deceive you (although occasionally that happens) but to deceive me and provide a conduit through which I can interact with the world. I am deliberately blurring the distinction between roles in the internal fantasy world and roles in the external world in order to emotionally connect and function (which I believe is why the specialist spoke about them as proto-alters).
With some irony the personas are often less grand in terms of wealth or qualifications than my real self, although for some reason that can upset people more. They aren't the sort of thing which come out in professional or academic life as work is generally a safe environment, and they come with predefined roles for me to play should dissociation become an issue. They're the sort of thing which gets used in an unsafe, overstimulating social environment, such as the person on the supermarket till striking up a conversation (although I usually order in if I can), or if when I'm hiking with the dogs another dog walker tags themselves onto me. In such cases it's not that my own emotional responses are not honest but I need to take on a role in order to interact. 90% of the time there are no issues as the disparities between reality and the character never come up, so the role play exists only in my head. Everybody presents a persona to the world to some degree, none of us present our true selves straight out of the box. Therefore the first moments of meeting me are something of a fantasy role-play. In a sense I guess they are manipulative, as their purpose is to fill in the time in which it takes for someone else to become more relaxed and open and for me to stop perceiving them as a threat. Initially when I was first back and recovering I utilised the personas a lot and the characters were typically more outlandish. However for the last 12 years or so the distinction between real and fantasy has become extremely sutle so as to be perhaps the difference between myself who was having vigilance problems in the cafeteria, or a happy person in the same role who had just had a cheerful conversation with one of their colleagues. In this regard I suspect that however bizarrely they may have begun they are now pretty similar to the personas use by others.
Long ago on two occasions they were used in a manipulative fashion which I feel I should mention for completeness. Comically men of a more narcissistic bent are usually the victims. In the first case when I went to college (16-18) I encountered someone whom basically dominated people by bullying. In response I took on what I think of now is an outlaw role and in that role distorted his view of the world so that he was not comfortable using those tactics on me. I used the authority of the role to condition him with a moral system basically working on honour principles. Last I heard of him, which is about five years ago now, I was told he still sounds like me at 19 talking about doing the right thing in very loaded language. The second time was the first few years of my chemistry degree, during which with the loss of my friendship group I was constantly self-medicating with alcohol. Again that was a very amoral group of people and I used an authoritarian somewhat priestly persona. Again it was used to inflict my highly moralised view of the world on this group of people. The second time round it was not as effective. Some members were still lacing joints with ketamine to effectively date rape women, while one other in particular was using MySpace to groom young girls. All I really achieved was to make them do it outside of my sight. Ultimately it was the latter problem which caused the group to fragment as I chose to report him to Law enforcement, a choice which many viewed as a betrayal. After that I came back to my original group of friends and would basically live as a recluse during the week at uni.
People like my friends, my boss (who is basically what you would get if you gave Santa Claus a medical degree and shave) as well as some of my other colleagues who I know well enough, act like an anchor. An emotional connection to the real world which keeps me tethered in the here and now, not running into a fantasy world for my protection or being tormented by my paranoia, hypervigilance and emotional flashbacks. I think it is probably the reason I have so many critters as well (through emotional bonding parental role I take for them), including the feral rabbit at the bottom of the garden, and also the reason I find bumming around the countryside so inherently soothing. They are all processes by which I emotionally connect to the world and prevent the kind of creeping intrusiveness of the paranoia, dissociation and anxiety. In the case of the naturalistic elements I think it is something to do with the sensation of being connected to something larger. I have found mountainous, wilderness or other areas where there has been little human impact, are particularly effective.
As to how I feel about the personas, that is very difficult. Obviously I would like to feel connected to the outside world all of the time, but unfortunately trauma disorders do not work like that. That I have phased them out naturally over time is probably indicative of a certain level of improvement on my part. What will happen when I finally recover from this porphyric crisis I cannot say, I suspect that they may be used slightly more heavily again as I get used to dealing with strangers once more. To be honest I have never been certain where the line between healthy persona and these more elaborate creations really lies. Given that these days all I'm really doing is covering the effects of the damage done, I do not see them as particularly harmful to others but more an issue of my own dependency which needs to be removed.
Maladaptive Daydreaming, like the schizoids I have a complex internal fantasy world (several in fact) which I can dissociate into. It's just a trauma defence mechanism.
I did hear about this, a close friend was describing what she does in free time and it seemed slightly out of the ordinary lol so I googled it and found this. She hasn't suffered any trauma as far as I know, it's just a coping mechanism for dealing with reality to her.
This might come as insensitive, but I actually wouldn't mind having this ability (especially in relation to what I'm studying), as long as it's under control and not interfering with your everyday life. I do have this ability, partially, but it doesn't come close to what my friend described.
Btw, I'm kinda confused to how someone with such complex inner world and imagination could possibly lack creativity? Were you being completely honest with yourself when saying this?
That I lack creativity? Yes probably. I meant that I lack the skills to create. I won a couple of prizes (minor youth things) for my stories when I was younger, but to be honest my imagination is all getting plowed into the internal world. I have tried to write them sometimes since but I can never do it justice and attempting to make the internal world, external, takes away it's magic. It's mostly because I am an integral part of them. I tell them to Matt's kids from time to time which due to their heavy mythological component they seem to enjoy, but I do it in the first person, like recounting a memory and that they seem to survive. Though quite why Matt is prepared to allow the distorted tales from a damaged mind like mine to be inflicted on his kids, is more of a mystery. If I try to make them into a construct, they disintegrate. Also writing them as anything other than clinical description requires external emotional engagement which can at times be tricky.
I was actually thinking of giving it another go but I doubt it'll get off the ground, in all honesty writing requires a lot of tangible skills I lack. Eloquence for one.
In my experience the mmpi is a much better self test, that flagged most of my problems.
Sounds like something I should look up. Just have to first find out what it is exactly, as I've never heard about it lol.
https://www.psychforums.com/antisocial-personality/topic188636.html
) but not the 
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