Trying to break bad internal habits

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www.hollywoodlyfestyle.com

it is kinda of inactive right now but for the most part ... we at HLS are about inner game and bettering self (awareness).

My only advice would be to practice using your eyes and thinking the thoughts ... theoretically you can send electrical impulses with your thoughts that way ... she might pick up ... but other than that i would say just lain trying and trying and trying never give up never surrender that kind of jazz...

As strange as that sounds, the telepathy thing may be the answer. Whatever you think, it gets displayed through body language and through your eyes.
It is very honest and sensual to communicate this way. Also, if you concentrate on your inner workings such as your thoughts, emotions and sexual feelings in relation to her, you will come off as more natural because you're not analyzing the situation so much as you are present in the moment.

Yes, I'm well aware and have used it a lot in my more general social situations; whether its pushing a state-change, matching modes with my more uber-guy NT friends, the first half of it is having good mirroring skills and I have that at least. The big challenge is being able to have myself in that sort of internal state more often and completely of my own propulsion rather than it being an act of mirroring, that tends to be my biggest challenge with myself and has for years; am constantly getting better but I'd like to think that there are more direct ways that I can apply to bringing myself around again (and yes, we're hitting at the very core of my original post again).

Mirroring is different. That is something that has to be done consciously. I'm talking about just recognizing your emotions and letting them flow.

Can you let your natural sex drive take over? Do you feel uncomfortable when you feel emotions?

Yeah, and it zips right over my head...


It's not that honest from where I standing... If one can't read body language (especially facial language), missing 90% of the point means I don't want to trust what people are saying...


I have almost no concept of the present. Everything I do is in relation to something in the past that I did or something in the future I plan to do. I'm constantly going over memories that are years old and contemplating possible (and some less possible) situations that could possibly happen years in the future, but I don't really think about what's going on right now...

Doing things in the "heat of the moment" seems so alien to me since I don't have the ability to process everything that's going on in real time. To be completely honest, I don't think anyone has that possibility. NT's get around that limitation on the mind by only processing certain information and ignoring the rest. Aspies, on the other hand, tend to have greater capacity for long-term memory and memory access than most NT's, resulting in the aspie taking in every detail and storing it in memory to process later...


Feeling emotion is all fine, but being driven by them is almost unbearable. Having had several serious and violent meltdowns as a child, I know what it feels like to experience almost total loss of control... I still fear that if I let my emotions rule, I'll become violent again (and now that I'm a full adult I'm liable to being charged with assault and battery, which could get messy)...

But bro ... this post was not about you

it was for and about techstepgenr8tion.

Now if you post a topic with your problems then maybe people can help you also ...

my only advice for now would be to not seem so close minded on the subject and try new things .... giving up is step one to becoming a loser.

Open minds learn, closed minds stay in the box...

I think I can explain this one but it will take a second.

Pretty much, from the time I was a teen up through even my mid 20's, I could not count on a normal reaction from women. Many were terrified of me, and the ironic thing was the more I was able to control my social skill issues the worse a lot of the non-verbal tension got. With the girls who did like me, they got thrown in a way that had them seeing something out the outside, which wasn't me, and by the time I was able to show my personality and have them see it - something was too out of sync with their first image of me.

I'll make it clear; from 20 on I've had something very approximate to NT social skills. Yes, I've had anxiety issues, I was actually doing great with them in the sense that - at 20 - I had 15 or 20 friends down my basement partying 3 nights a week through early college; these were my raver days, a lot of my friends were dj's, I did live PA at some parties, so my self-esteem was well up there. The problem was, people who don't get to know me through friends are f'd with by some superficial factors I have. I meet far more women these days who I don't quite have the dissonance with, plenty as well who I still feel like I scare; and I'll be real clear - there is no thought process I have going on that I can pin it down to and say "Well, I'm thinking this, their picking up on it, so I'll just try to get into a different internal state"; its something completely irrepresentative of what I feel.

Because even before I was 20's, and yes even now, I still have an emotional core and natural sense of direction where if I do - its not wrong, its not crazy, but, no one will get it and people will be scared by me for no other reason that, in form, it just doesn't conform to the natural flow that everyone elses has; it doesn't have to be anything more sinister than that. That's put me in a place where I realize - I have a distinct personality, a personality I'm very much proud of and should be proud of, and to defend not only my worth as a person but to make sure that there is actual clarity between the person I'm talking to and myself; I have to manually manipulate a lot of my expression for the sake of having it be understood and have it be manifested in a way they can read.

As far as the expressive problem I think its two prong; for one I do have the selective affect problems like a lot of aspies, as in I can make the overtures of expression but my face doesn't grab the nuance; I get the impression that's something where, its nothing close to consciously obvious (again, I pretty much pass as normal but...geez...something's eerie about him and I can't put my finger on it). The other part, in the past I did look youthful, had a physically immature look, and when I did look that way, combined with anxiety, it didn't matter who I was in the head or even what I was feeling; people respected me a lot once they knew me but my anxiety came from the fact that going to the mall, going to the store, driving down the street, just trying to deal with the real world outside your network, people don't know you and they will go by superficials; the dance of having a lot of women looking at me like I was this likely this ADHD loser who worked at Taco Bell and blew his paychecks on weed and videogame cleaner to huff or guys giving me smiles like "mmm, I smell p***y" and the fact that those could never be resolved unless I was in circumstances that where favorable to me and where other people knew me and could vouch for me; I kind of ended up assassinating my own drive, manually, and deliberately, wanting to for only the time being - so I could sit back, reassess myself and my mannerisms, my reactions to things, every nuance just so I could assert myself to the world and make sure that people knew what they were seeing (which yes, was a bit naive but like a lot of things, hope and unanswered drives makes you a bit bipolar when you have this kind of adversity - and I *had* to keep myself steady just to keep myself alive).

Another thing of course, 8 years on antipsychotics and antidepressants from 11 to 19, my sex drive was a lot stronger before those set in; at 20 and even now today I'd say I still have a drive but maybe its the way it matured as well; I put my brain first, only because I much prefer to have my brain in control of situations and part of it is because yes - the world didn't accept me then, still marginally accepts me now, and my natural drives (even just showing traces of them in my body language) were something people consistantly crucified me with; I didn't like giving them ammunition so I put a stop on a lot of it. Sadly, I did learn that while it was bad that *I* showed them, I had people complaining behind my back about how eerie, weird, messed up it was that I wasn't dating, wasn't looking women in the eyes in passing (though flirtation was a bit like staring directly at the sun - I've had that problem, much less now), and when I stayed crisp and confident people didn't get it; no matter what I did, I was wrong, and for some bizarre reason, still am in a lot of respects (and eerie).


I know all of that is a little disjointed, it probably even disagrees with your intuitive senses about reality - that I have to be miscalculating that somewhere, that not all of that could possibly be true, that I'm missing something obvious; unfortunately no. I've analyzed it for all of that, hoping there was something I could find and fix - not there. My friends as well, they can't put their finger on it to save their lives. At a time I really thought it was natural selection, but seeing that I'm not nearly that weak and that I'm as strong as anyone else (far more tested and hardened than a lot of people maybe); its seemed like a question without any real answers aside from me just continuing to perfect myself, get a better body, get a better attitude, hopefully learning to be more and more optimistic, learning to be emotionally alpha and like a lot of the NT's I know be able to front myself in that almost superficially infallible sort of way to NT women hoping they find it inspirational (which I'll admit, I do admire that in other people and I strive for it; because it takes an incredibly tough person to stay positive and be an 'adult').

In some ways my trials have been good because, they keep propelling me up hill and I can't just sit still in the same spot without feeling like every moment I do and yes, am still single or stuck in the same social box, means that I can still expect nothing to come my way - which means it still needs more work. Its a dynamic that yes, I'll admit, may very well be fundamentally flawed in its own ways, it is a double-edged sword as it keeps me growing, improving, and the more depth, wisdom, and clarity I can gain in life the happier I am with or without someone else in my life. On the other hand, if that propulsion or my underlying reality, whether I'm feeling confident, whether I'm feeling like I'm on top of things, or any other way, leaves some type of ultra-subtle code in my body language or in the recesses of my eyes that tells women that I'm used to being rejected and trying to pry the welds off the storm drain over my head; that may be killing it too, but, if its lack of confidence they're seeing its something that's so residual that its completely alien to both my emotions and thought processes. It could be my bottomline personality and the fact that I'm just too cerebral a person to be accepted by society, doubt that would be all of it, but, whatever it is I know there's no possible way that there aren't smoothing gradients I could still figure out to both be the best of myself and filter it in such a way that I can also date successfully rather than watching more and more years fly out the window; The "I can't help it - I have PDD-NOS" doesn't cut it for anything, never has.

Wow. This is very frustrating. Every problem has a solution. You sound like the guy I am in love with so I really want to sort this out. Do you come across as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde too?

You're right, this is incomprehensible. Is there a way to be in a relationship despite this? It seems unlikely if there is not a connection, something that bonds people together.

Can I ask you questions to try to solve this riddle? You can PM me if this gets too personal but I hope you can be honest in your answers.
I've read about Avoidant personality disorder, schizophrenia, love-shyness, narcissistic personality disorder, sociopaths, psychopaths, etc. in an attempt to figure this out. I think my head expanded in the process of trying to understand this type of behavior.

First question:
Do you have violent sexual fantasies?

I did... I said in a thread months ago that I need to know a woman before I date her... nobody was able to help me... unless the friend zone is abolished I'm never gonna get anywhere...

Actually my temperament is very controlled, I'll have my passing irritations like anyone but I rarely if ever shell it back on someone else unless the situation really requires it. I think probably one of traits that can be a little off-putting to some people is I have an introversion tendency to just hang back and opt out half the time; I'm a blast when I'm drunk and I'm a warhorse when it comes to taking down shots, but that has brought another problem that I had in the past which will offend some people a lot more - as I get drunk I really have to fight myself from wanting to have really deep and intelligent conversations with people; I get more articulate with more liquor, some people are like that and I try to scout that group out, otherwise anymore I just keep it simple or try to kick back and chill with my drink.



What I have noticed is that there are certain personality types where some women can very quickly scan me, seem to get me, and seem to like what they're seeing. The traits they tend to have in common are that they're more on the reflective and analytical side (regardless of their walk of life - they think their way through things and don't fall for the traps; I think wise is a good word for it, not even just street wise but have a lot of common sense and conventional wisdom) and they tend to be well-grounded in reality.

I was talking to a friend of some friends a couple nights ago, they were trying to hook us up (a little too hard), we had a chat about it, laughed, but got into discourse about a lot more stuff; unfortunately we aren't attracted to each other on that level but she's definitely intelligent. As we were just comparing stories and things about eachother, she was mentioning a couple things that seemed salient, that a) I seem like I'd need someone intelligent because I would get bored otherwise (true, I need someone to share the deeper emotions and thoughts of life with - its kind of dry and ungratifying otherwise); also b) I seem to respect sexuality and women a lot more than guys do; that one's a little weird just because like a lot of guys I have to sort of quell my own static to take it as a compliment but I guess its true, just that the way I'd rather look at it is I care a lot more about myself and life than having my lower brain control my happiness (and yes, I think to an aspie or someone who's PDD that's vital).



I generally tend not to. I will have fantasies about being dominated but its rarely a direct physical dominance (more a mutually understood difference of power), and never a (successful) ego dominance. I think most of what it revolves around for me is being able to relinquish the 'act' of role (both tiring and unrefreshing when it needs to be 'forced') and be myself but also being with someone who doesn't need to siphon my self-assurance but rather has it in spades herself.

Now I'm more confused. It seems like you have it all together now. Is it possible that you dodge any attempt to get close to someone.
I mean, even if all goes well with a girl, do you somehow manage to sabotage it? Do you lose interest in a girl after she is interested?

It seems like there is a problem but you can't pinpoint it. You said earlier that you don't think that you internalize things appropriately.
How is it that you tend to "weird out" girls? Looking back at a time when you think you came off as creepy, can you explain the scene?

To Toadofsteel, we're not ignoring you. I don't think you get the whole internal world of emotions and instincts either. Do you have any similar experiences with being misinterpreted. Also, do either of you tend to give off mixed messages to everyone, or just a potential partner?

And to Zane, you seem like you surmounted some hurdles, maybe you can help read between the lines.

That much is a bit of a dead end; no sabotage, no need to chase (in fact I hate chasing). One thing I can say is that my comfort zone, between being bored and being intimidated, has historically been a bit thin; I think that's getting better little by little as my own security with myself increases.



I definitely notice that there are some self-fulfilling elements; ie. if I'm in a situation where I feel awkward or creepy - its tough to counteract. That sort of feedback loop is usually pretty easy for a self-aware person to scrap, only problem is I'll get it often enough when I'm not feeling self-conscious that it re-instills that tendency even when I devote effort to stopping it.

I can say in the past I had involuntary mutism at times over anxiety and when I had to try and force my way through it, it became clear and evident that something was wrong with me. I'm not sure exactly what makes me Norman Bates more than another guy in that regard, its not like I'm walking around like the kid in American Beauty and at worst my eye contact is fleeting. My only idea as to what really sets women off from that, a thought that just hit me now, is that maybe the fact that my persona doesn't fit the whole hat - I look shy but don't look enough like a geek or look like I should be a computer nerd but a lot of pieces don't fit that either; its like something's disturbingly incongruent (which I'll admit, my core personality is a bit incongruent to my PDD and my life experiences have been too; as a result I'm almost unpeggable aside from when I'm dealing with NT's who have personalities closely tangent to my own).

BTW Magnus, I'm getting the idea that your a bit of a hobbyist with relationship psychology (or at least your building that reputation with some people); any good books you'd recommend on personality types, what types of behavior tend to be warning flags, or anything like that?

I ask because while I think my radar is pretty decent I still hate feeling like my intuition may be shutting good things out and at times I may very well be either being too overprotective of myself or being vexed by situations where I missed the queues that someone's adverse reaction to me was actually a good thing on my part (and yes, my past tendencies have been to fill in my knowledge gaps by beating on myself for social underperformance which seemed like the safe way out in the past but now I think its just bad for me if I want to be a man about things and take appropriate control of past insecurities).

I'm not so much of a relationship hobbyist. I'm just trying to figure out my own dilemma. It seems like you are hiding inside the persona you show.
Maybe you are too attractive and this draws unwanted attention.

I'll give you my perspective of a similar situation:
There is an aspie guy who has affected my life and as much as I want to understand, it's taking a toll on me. He is very intelligent but can't express his emotions. He is a so called nice guy but has this dark side too. I don't think either one of them are real. It seems like he was damaged at getting at the age 11 after receiving a diagnosis. I believe he was forced into playing a role that wasn't himself and expected to be perfect like his father.
Living with this manufactured persona, it is impossible to relate to others meaningfully. On a superficial level it is fine and he can pass as normal.
For anyone to get close to this damaged aspect of his real nature is nearly impossible because he feels ashamed and never had his real personality nurtured, accepted, and loved. Love is a learned emotion. If there is no self acceptance, there is no basis on which to love.

The problem I have is that I have been trying to figure this out for almost 2 years and all I really learned is that it's best to stay away.
Once in a while, he'll seem to open up and then gets freaked out and hides again. I'm really upset that who he is was squashed by society and expectations that was placed on him by his family.

He is also very good looking and has told me that he can't handle the stress of the attention. I'm sure girls get a kick out of watching his awkward response to their flirtations. It's a very bizarre situation that I'm in. I'm just waiting for him to come around and trust me enough to be himself.
I feel like Dian Fossey.

For me its not even as cut and dry, the side of my self that I've really embraced is an authentic side of myself, if anything its my highest emotional ideals and quite naturaly I've been very highly propelled to chase them. There really is no shadow self to speak of, whatever there was of it was a lot weaker and at the most, the worst of my aspiness again just comes from the fact that I can feel one way about myself but somehow in visual - and when people need to bring their take on someone's externals into a Saved By the Bell type worldview; its automatically seen at my slightest unease that I'm the grossly insecure guy; as in somehow my mannerisms reflect something far more vividly than I ever feel it and when I don't the slightest wrong movement creates this illusion. As I've aged I'm at least not looking so much like some young punk, at 28 I'm at least looking closer to mid-20's so people's desire to disrespect me just on looking youthful is going out the window (and frail, the weights are helping that as well).

I think the hardest part for me is that because of what I've gone through I also have a certain mode along which I would really like to express love, my way of projecting it, my way of going about it, but I really can't find many people who are ready to receive it. When I talked about what it was like in my early 20's, being a bit hardened on the inside but looking like a disney character on the outside; the real problem with the positive attention I did get was that when women did size me up as that, see me as adorable, some of them even giggled themselves to tears over that gawkiness that came out autonomically, they had no place for the real me when they saw it - the real me was too antithetical to what they thought they were seeing. Because of that factor as well as my friends trying to toughen me up and even cracking on me about it after a while, sometimes when I woke up in the morning and felt like I was in a childish-chipper geek type emotional state I was so reviled that I just start punching myself in the stomach as hard as I could, thinking the hardest thoughts to myself about what that made me, thanks to relatives who tried to toughen me up back in my earlier years behind my parents back it came to be that I had something almost like Denzel from Training Day (probably because that was their general presentation style when dealing with me on this) that I had in my own mind and I was opting to bully myself as much as I felt that I needed to in order to change out of this kind of thing. Anymore, I don't do that because for one I don't feel the need to, the emotional changes I wanted to occur did so with time, but also I had to make peace with the things I couldn't change just because one day a couple years ago, it really hit me that I'd surpassed all good I could possibly do with that bullying, it had not only served all positive purpose it could but if anything I was doing nothing more than just breaking myself down. And no, it was only when I was about 21 or 22 that I really had vitriol toward myself on that level, it got more replaced by desperation over the things that didn't seem like they'd change at all.

The one thing I can say about that emotional dynamic, I know it was me rather deliberately overstearing the truth, taking aggressive action, and I knew it also did damage - which I've done everything I can to undo where I thought it had a negative or dehumanizing effect on. Really my whole goal has been to develop the part of myself that I like a lot and always have, the part of me that kept me going in life rather than letting it all go and yes, probably ending things. I still have an innocent-cute presentation but its tempered with enough appropriate guy behavior to where its not outside the norm and I don't feel like I've been misread as disney-ish in at least a few years.

My biggest obstacle now is the fact that I feel like, for the most part, something about the way I want to feel love, give love, and the relationship level I'd want to be on - is too esoteric. I know that I'd still further need to evolve my presentation just because, I still feel like I have enough hangups of not looking like who's on the inside and not being able to consistently express it in my social mode that the type of woman who I would best have that connection with is still superficially out of my league. I don't know what to do about that one aside from knowing that just like how I got here in terms of vanquishing the aspects of myself that i couldn't stand and which only led to blatant disrespect from a lot of people (much of which I haven't gone into and don't want to blow up the thread with it) I'm trying to recreate the side that I essentially destroyed but the way that *I* would like to have it, not the way that my nervous system, genetics, or upbringing mandated as being part of my inherent wiring. I do realize as of my mid 20's at least just how much we as people (anyone - AS, NT, doesn't matter) really do have malleability problems and if you feel the need to change everything, you may be willing to put an almost inhuman amount of work into it and yes - sometimes its that painful of a problem that its justified - but you do pay a price from manually trying to pry, bend, and brake things. I count myself very lucky that I've come to have a healthier and healthier emotional adjustment and that has been my new project in place of all that, still, I see where this will be a very complicated road for me to follow and I will be testing the very limits of my cognition quite often and analyzing things far deeper than most people have ever dreamed of, just to tack down more of the intangibles and get those in line as best I can. At the same time though, I really care about putting as much knowledge of people away as I can; I'm rarely blind-sided much by human nature anymore but still, in relationships I know it pays to be able to see potential problems before they come, know how to deal with them, and I know that my nature - neither being right or wrong in the more problematic aspects - is a problem of style and people's ability to read or understand me appropriately, I try to do all that I can to make myself more transparent but the biggest killer in that I think still seems to be my nonverbal feng-shue.

Magnus, one more thing just related to your guy. From what your describing, I think part of why he's as tightly wound as he is may have some thing in common with my being that way. For him the most destructive thing in his life has been (I'm guessing) flightiness of women; for a lot of guys, especially when it happens every time they open up, it does something to them where its almost impossible for them not to blame themselves for opening up and letting it happen again (particularly when they've been fooled so many times that being fooled, as an automatic consequence, almost seems like a no-brainer).

At least in my own life I don't think that aspect is really going to be a problem as I can tell who has it together and who doesn't; still if I found someone who I was attracted to and I ended up with the feeling that they really did love me for me, that's something that would probably move me to tears. It does sound like you've put a lot of effort into doing that for him though so at this point your right, you can't blame himself, he has to be ready to meet someone half way and it takes not only some time to heal but for the paradigm to change enough in his own mind where instead of feeling the fear of someone fleeing he feels more the fear of wasting his life fleeing from people who are trying to love him and ruining some of his life's best opportunities; that's the trick.