paranoia & disconnect

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hi.

I will try to be concise because I have a tendency to be verbose.

How is it possible to distinguish between paranoia and being disconnected from people?

Meaning:
That feeling when people (either in groups or even 1 on 1) try to communicate to you and you do not feel connected and are not sure what response you are giving off is saying to them.
I often feel as though people know that I am faking (not that they know what that is, but they know I am not really laughing w them or they know my smile is fake etc) OR that they see I am not participating or can get a vibe from me and get an animal sense that I am not there. This creates a heightened sense of dysphoria and anxiety...

to myself "What do I do? Am I smiling too little or too hard? What do I say to that? Do they think what I said was dumb or inappropriate?"

I think some of these are reasonable thoughts and not paranoia.

However, sometimes I feel paranoid thinking these things.
Do they even notice anything at all or am I making it all up?
Surely I am making it up - they probably don't even notice anything.
I think I can "pass" (like a cross dresser tries to "pass" as the other sex)

I often feel like I am in a game of deception with people.
I want to be sincere and try to be, but feel detached from common experience.

A brief story -
I was looking at some historical stuff regarding some terror groups from the 1960's.
(Fringe political groups & cults are one of my interests.)
I had to register for the sites in order to see the content.
I was concerned that my IP was being logged and recorded by the Gov't for looking at what I was looking at.
I didn't make a post in case there is such monitoring.
A few days later I was at a bank opening a new account and the customer service woman was being overly cheerful and asking me questions - how long have you lived here?
where is your street? what do you do? nice day out isn't it? etc

I was really getting messed up by her confrontational and "friendly" tone.
I began worrying that when I gave her my SS# that my internet activity popped up on her screen and now in turn my banking information was on record.

All of this stems from the inability to connect to the "real" world.

Now I don't think people are talking to me on the TV or anything so I don't think I am being "paranoid."

But all this computer information & Big Brother stuff has me worried.
I am even afraid writing here, but figure I could always say I was doing research if I was ever questioned.

Is this uncommon for this type of thinking to occur ?

depersonalization is when you feel like your outside your body looking at your life through a movie. that will cause panic. it happens to me all the time

paranioa is when you think someone is after you or is sending a telepathic messege only you can hear or understand.

panic is when you freak out and think your dying or having a heart attack

ocd is when you do things repatatively because of a nagging mental obsession leading to compulsion

1) check
2) NO
3) check
4) check

I guess I was wondering if the depersonalized experience (when interacting w others) can lead to all that mind talk & is it a common thing.
As stated, I would definitely NOT say I think there are plots or secret communications in a literal sense

I do however get led down some very intense thought trains when I have too much interaction and it makes me question my entire world and what is going on...

when your in depresonalization mode you dont feel real, infact everything feels as unreal as possible. it feels fake or disconnected. the times its happend to me i kindof feel like im in a movie. a really bad one

yes
most definitely
been happening less & less for me
I am pretty isolated now so I am on pretty solid ground so to speak.
Happened more when I was younger and in groups - school, family stuff, malls, stores etc

Auditory distortions - muffled/under water or ultra clear.
Observing myself as too large (like a giant) or too small

I can recall specific incidents of playing kickball at school - age 8 or 9 - hearing my voice and seeing myself running while kids were playing
As I got older I usually just zoned out and removed myself...made myself numb to the point I couldn't even observe - I just kept moving in good faith until it subsided

I get a sense of depersonalization, every now and again. The watching my life as a movie and things that go on around me, that trigger those memories.

you could just be projecting. you can't read other people, therefore you attribute what you are already feeling: a sense of exclusion. i do this all the time.

it can feel like paranoia, but i think if you are able to step away and examine it from other angles you are probably ok.

i think being unable to read people can give someone massive anxieties about trusting. because if you discover you've been duped, it can feel like a sneak attack. so you become wary of further such "sneak attacks."

hi katz.

that is the type of feedback I was looking for.
Good insight.
Thanks very much

to add (yes, I can interact with people for the most part if it is all business - Q: do you have such and such in stock A: let me check...no/yes.
Simple.

I get really confused and disoriented around the customer service type people who are overly "friendly" and sing song talking w HUGE smiles.
Intellectually I know they are trying to be nice and make me feel good as a client, but it makes me very uncomfortable and I end up feeling patronized or like they really see my "alienation" - I simply cannot make eye contact in those type of situations. Which makes me feel like I am doing something criminal or trying to conceal something (which I'm not!)
My Mom, on the other hand holds court!
She lights right up and exchanges little stories and strangers like her and laugh all in a few moments

Last edited by pency on 03 Jun 2010, 8:11 pm, edited 1 time in total.

you're welcome. it took me a lifetime to figure it out.
i give it to you for free.

I've been told several times I could possibly have a diagnosis of paranoia. If they were bullied non stop for years and years too, I think they would be as well. I can't leave the house with out my bearded dragon with me and one time locked myself up in my bedroom for over a year and only came out to use the bathroom. The bathroom and my bedroom were only seperated by a wall and if some one cut a space in the bathroom "closet" and put a door there so I would never have to leave my bedroom at all.

I've always felt more connected to animals than other people. Forget gender dismorphic disorder or body dismorphic disorder, I have species dismorphic disorder. Even as a toddler, I felt I was born the wrong species. I remember telling my parents God made a mistake because I was supposed to have been a cat.

pency, I'm in the process of creating an open research project on treating autism. Your post touched on a number of things that I'm working on, so I figure that I'd respond to your message as a test of communicating my knowledge.

(Note that I'm not trying to just treat autism, I'm really trying to cure myself. So any feedback you have I'll gladly take.)

The primary social pathology of ASD patients is limitation of socialization due to in an ineffective theory of mind. When functioning correctly in NT individuals, theory of mind grants the individual knowledge of others' emotions and motives, leading to successful socialization. The proximate cause is likely due to non-cognitive sensory overload, common in ASD patients for non-social problem domains. This sensory overload likely results in an inefficient S/N (signal to noise ratio) of non-cognitive affective sensations, leading the ASD patient without enough information to correctly predict the mental state of others. The ultimate result would then be the inability to emotionally evaluate others, similar to the Capgras Delusion though not as severe.

If this is true, your inability to connect to other people may be due to interpretation problems. My personal experience is similar, as I used to think other people were all robots when I was young, and even today I celebrate surrealism, absurdism, and other non-logical mindsets.


Situations like this are likely due to a co-morbidity often associated with ASD: SPD (schizoid personality disorder). Since ASD patients tend not to socialize successfully, this results in social isolation and SPD. Effective treatment of the underlying ASD, and thus improvement of the outcome of socialization, would likely result in the quick elimination of the co-morbid SPD. In the short term, SPD could likely be treated with psychological counseling, which I recommend for your case.

Is counseling primarily meant to orient someone, who has not yet acknowledged these tendencies in himself?

I'm not clear on how emotional detachment would be helped.

I predict behaviors and rationale, very specifically, with few cues.

But, I'm not good at discerning the emotions, which go with these things.

I know the what, and the how, but not the why.

Counseling is treatment, meant to alleviate symptoms. The first part of counseling is self-evaluation, as you mentioned. But the second part is behavior modification, which is where the actual work is done.


Neither do I, but then I'm not a psychologist. Therapy hasn't worked for me (so far), but there's no reason to conclude that it won't work for you.


If my hypothesis is right, I would assume that disconnection is a state of emotional blindness, which is inconclusive inference based on lack of sensory detection. Who knows... maybe I'm wrong. I'll get back to you later on this.

Are ASD's considered to be flexible coping mechanisms, which can be unlearned?

Or, are people being taught to live within the confines of a permanent state of mind?

From what I've read in the literature, and from people here on WP, it appears that ASD can never be cured. Instead, we can learn to live with it and treat the co-morbidities often associated; i.e. we can learn how eye-contact works, etc.

Emotional detachment can help, because when you become detached from the emotion you don't react to it automatically, and can choose a better reaction. That doesn't mean repressing or negating emotion.

We can unlearn a lot of the habits that we construct to deal with our lives. Some things can't be changed, but there's tons that can.