I visited a friend, and I finally noticed what people notice about my personality in person

Unusual Beliefs
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We were having a good conversation, and I thought it was one of my better ones as far as fulling and a decent performance. That is how I value conversations.

Eventually though I noticed that I started to have more positive data in my “personality.”

What I mean by that is that I began to assume information was not simply entering through my eyes and ears. It was entering from “the other.”

It’s real embarrassing thing to say. I seriously hope nobody is prejudice. Not everyone is the same, and I’m one of them that aren’t the same except that I come to this forum for the introspection about their experiences that are related to my experiences.

My understanding of my self is that on one hand there is information, and on the other hand there is my personality. Information affects my personality.

When I am sitting with my friend, my friend observes my personality. So when he sees my personality, he has some introspection about what must be causing my personality to “perform” or “act” like it does.

What my friend is doing in his introspection to himself about “who” or “what” he is seeing happen is he is using his “theory of mind.”

So just to add a little bit more here, friends, “theory of mind” is when a person can understand that another person is thinking, and a person can do this accurately simply by “reason of deduction.”

“Deduction” is an old word that means you figured it out with out sensing it directly. Another way of describing deduction is that you have heard bits and pieces of something, and you have seen bits and pieces about something. Then with those bits and pieces through your 5 senses you “deduce” something out of that. It means “you figure it out.”

So “theory of mind” simply means that you “figure out” the fact that someone “thinks like this or that.”

And there is a test called the “Sally-Anne Task” which tests for “theory of mind” to see if a person has it or lack it.

It goes like this:

Sally and Anne are in a room.

Sally places a cookie in a box, and the Sally tells Anne that she will be back.

Sally pulls the cookie out of the box, and then puts it into the basket.

Anne comes back into the room.

Then the test asks you, “Where is Anne going to look for the cookie at first?”

This uses images to give the test, so it is not by reading or simply by talking. And anyone that sees these shapes and the descriptions knows that the cookie is in the basket, so they immediately say it is in the basket if they have no theory of mind.

If the test taker has theory of mind, this means the test taker can deduce or “figure out” what Anne is believing about that cookie. So if you have theory of mind, you can deduce that Anne will look in the box first because that is where she placed the cookie first. She does not know Sally put the cookie in the basket because she was not in the room when Sally put the cookie into the basket.

WHAT IS MY POINT ABOUT MY FRIEND AFTER ALL…

My point is that with his apt theory of mind skills he can figure out that due to my peculiar personality quirks that I am not receiving conventional information. I’m receiving what we in the schizophrenic community call “positive symptoms” which my personality is reacting to.

It’s weird I can talk to a person for a while without a problem, and then when the positive symptoms information starts to “affect my personality,” the conversation nearly always ends very shortly thereafter.

QUESTION: What are your experiences with your personality being effected by information from your positive symptoms rather than simply what you hear and see from other people talking to you?

QUESTION: And does it bother you to know this is happening to you, or do you feel like it’s okay if it happens to you?

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Hey john cena sup my man…what are u upto…

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I experince this same thing. It seems to happen when the energy begins to leave the conversation or it becomes looser. I then begin to notice the inconsistencies and judt my weird observations and perceptions. This makes me get a very odd look on my face.

For example I was in a cabin with a group of people of various ages. I split off in conversation with a guy as others sat quietly and listened. It was a good conversation eith good energy and it was like somethi g clicked in my brain I began to feel like he was somehow trying to get me into some kind of energy lock or a controlling postion in a mental and energy type of way. I kinda freaked out inside and told them I wanted to go out for some fresh air. They blocked me in thinking I was going to run off in the woods or something. This greatly freaked me out and I began to panic and feel trapped. They eventually let me outside after I offended them enough to want me out of their space.

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John Cena? Who? I’m not him. :slightly_smiling_face:

How is it going though? It took a long time to get to where I wanted to go in life because scz. How about you? Are you getting there yet? :slightly_smiling_face:

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Did they know that you were scz? Why else would they take the position like they need to protect you from outside?

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Nah they don’t know. I was the most talkative one there and was slightly intoxicated. I grew up in the woods and wasn’t going to leave the driveway. I’m not sure why they blocked me in and was behaving like I was going to run off through the woods.

But it definetly set me off because I do not like to be stuck and feel trapped. I said some pretty rude things and I’m sure I appeared crazy but not until after they wouldn’t let me outside

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Maybe they realized that you were drunk, so they were hesitant about letting you go. Or maybe they pitied you thinking that you might have a kind of scz quirk that they noticed about you.

At times when I’ve had personality quirks which people have seen in me, they would would become kind of “day care-ish.” Kind of pitying me as an infirm handicap.

I noticed 3 kinds of reactions from people:

  1. They ignore and completely shutter me.
  2. They become negative and manipulative sort of like an experimenter trying to see if they can make me make more mistakes or what kind of other reactions can possibly occur.
  3. They pity baby me in a weird, obvious way.

The one I experienced the least of all was #3. Most of all was #1 but quite a lot of #2 in the metro.

I’m being honest here . Because I had to survive I had to build up a wall and learn when to bulldoze into situations and when not to as a survival skill. My personality which they saw was so badly damaged that I constantly had to compensate for it with other effects, and I had to compromise lots of things to except when it came to winding up with the #2 people.

When with #3’s I would be insulted. I had built my ego up so much in the metro because of all of the ones and twos. My personality wasn’t working, so I was extremely protective and untrusting.

I’m not like that much any more because I don’t mess around with people out there any more at first by necessity of my job, and now by choice. This is so much better, and I have a lot more control of my thoughts and moods this way.

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Where r u from and how old are u …!!!

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You sound alot like me. The social stuff is ehat I’m working on. I still get bombarded with things when I try to shrink . I never show the real me when u feel attacked when alone.

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I respectfully decline to answer that kind of specific online. :zipper_mouth_face:

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Right now I’m not working on social stuff to be honest. I’m just working on self improvement like learning things online and how to make a means for myself. There’s a good reason. lol When I talk to people, I blow up personalitously like a hot air balloon burst into flames. It is not only bad for relations, but it is just as bad afterwards when I’m alone. It never simply ended when I tried make relationships or had to deal with people in my life before. It came home with me. That is how scz goes. Fortunately since my life has been online full time now occupied with self education, it doesn’t follow me because it never starts.

Internet has been a real break for me since I can hear or see anyone, and they can’t hear or see me either making my personalitous mistakes.

I do socialize online, but it’s more like people teaching each other things not like pals having good times in the movies and TV shows.

I think if I can own my own home and have money to spend, I can do the social thing. It makes more sense that way, but after living scz, I’ve seen the “unimaginable,” and so a lot of what I know is true and typical without being delusional or a “mysticist” at all, many people cannot relate with me. I’m always going to be the guy with a huge red thumb that I hammered that way, and it’s not how others have known themselves nor other people in their lives.

Another peculiarity about the scz life is that I have essentially been gone for the past 20 years because of scz while everyone else has participated in their families and friends families, carried jobs, weddings, parties, did all of the basic things like big payments on cars and homes etc. They have never ever in their wildest dreams imagined anything like what an scz has.

But this is the “how it is,” and it’s up to me if I want to get my home, money in order, so I can get my social life in order not up to anyone but me.

Are you almost over scz, or are you just starting it? It’s very different at first than it is later.

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7 years. The stuff I’m dealing with now seems to be a cycle of the things I experienced early on. Things I’d already suffered and moved on. I hadn’t had ehat feels like my personal private space in my home invaded in a few years until a couple months afo. The voices and that feeling of having someone else’s awareness hanging over me is quite obnoxious and gets in the way of my self growth and my process. I deal with alot of gas lighting and people making problems and crossing my boundaries

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I found a few videos good that kind of gets to that kind of problem. It’s about a book called The Chimpanzee Paradox. Basically they explain the brain a regular person’s way, and the basis of it is that the problem part of you is “one of your brains.” It sounds weird at first, but to be honest I think that is what scz is. It’s one of the brains.

So you have probably thought something like “what is this crazy stuff happening to me,” and “why is this even something that can happen to me?” Stuff like that is basically where you’re inside, and this scz stuff is happening to you, but it’s not you because it’s not something that you choose to do on your own volition. From the outside people see it’s all you, and that’s what we think as scz’s, but from the inside it seems like it’s “me and it/them.”

Nobody is actually aware of the split, but some people have control of the “chimpanzee brain.” And basically we scz’s have allowed our chimpanzee brain to rule our lives while our “rational” brain suffers all of the financial and social losses which is only a scratch of the surface of what we lose in life.

So for me it’s like my CB or “chimpanzee brain” does listen. I mean it is responsive. I know how “non-orthodox” that is to 99% of the people in the world or less. My voices are that thing, and even when I don’t believe in telepathy or any of the other positive effects, “he/it” does. My “CB” is kind of a like the Lyre Bird which can imitate anything machine or other animal, anything at all, perfectly. I hear women, men, children, on and on, and I just know that it’s not real, but the emotional reactions are powerful. That Book says that the CB is 5x more powerful than the rational brain, so you have to coax and trick it for the most part, or you have to learn to discipline it how you see fit.

I actually was listening to Allan Watts on youtube before I remembered that book, and then I youtubed the video outlining that book. The Allan Watts videos I was listening to was about Tao and Zen which I really needed to hear and understand about myself. It isn’t about supernatural or mysticism anything, but it is about the realistic state of what is what in us, and how it works optimally.

All of that stuff goes together really well. I’ll post the videos if anyone wants them. I think it’s allowed in the forums.

Oh, and the last thing is that when they meditate the real meditaters are actually disciplining their chimp brains because despite what people are telling us, they have problems with theirs too, but it is not so drastic as ours with scz because theirs don’t believe that the world works with telepathy. So theirs is “easier to tame” so to speak.

And so when you feel wary and all about that “awareness that is hanging over you” and “your home is invaded like,” that’s the CB. My best understanding is it creates a feed back loop, so that it believes there are telepathic signals “religiously,” and when it creates them, I “hear them,” so then it just practices reacting to them and crazy kind of like a chimpanzee or other monkey if you’ve ever watched them behave before. They’re weird. It’s extremely social and territorial like it wants a home to call its own. So when “social and territory” are not inline, then it acts up which gets in the way like you said, “with self growth and our process.”

Do you ever think back to the days before you had any thought of scz? Can you remember?

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Awesome post. Relatable. Wish I had the energy to conjure up a half-decent reply.

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I was given a battery of test called mental status exam once several years ago. It was by a state goverment department for disabilty services for work.

My paper said it would be 4 hrs long. It only took an hour. I thought it odd. I later started poking round (on the internet) and it was a shorter version called a mini status exam, like screening test.

I remember doing the SallyAnne Task Test. However, there was no picture. He only spoke the story, like you did. Later, I found out the test did not matter anyway. It was just done to go through the motions, as its purpose was to deny me services of a job recruiter. They refused to give me the name of what I was falsely “diagnosed” with.

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This chimpanzee brain stuff sounds like a pop psych version of the age-old tacit/explicit, effortful/automatic split in ways of thinking. It’s usually called system 1 and system 2 now. Research shows that people with schizophrenia are more likely to make decisions too quick and with too little information. I don’t think schizophrenia can really make you better at system 2 thinking (slow and effortful). Cognitive difficulties are at the core of schizophrenia, and cognitive difficulties translate directly to problems with system 2 thinking.

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Here’s the Wikipedia article about these kinds of theories in general. The name “dual process theory” is a little ambigous as it is sometimes used for other things too, though.

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Are you at the beginning or the late in life part of your time as an scz?

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I get the idea and how you sum d up your talk with your friend after.

But maybe you where just having a deep ponder about things, and like from his point of view it was just a chat, external, objective line of thought of things etc.

And your was like going into deep thinking,
Different/complex/uncommon thought processes,
about things like let’s say when doodling a school paper, normal people do that But not like 24-7, and they can switch out of it naturally.

Not to say you can’t think that way, they say people like us with our illness can think of some really deep introspectives of life and it’s workings.
its just how I’d sum up your convo.

They say the internal thinking to external thinking the switch is broken in schiz.
Can’t turn that one to another, and with schiz you are always in your head and like have a second self in your mind it feels like.

Just being oneself, objective thinking and out there living,
Is a simple thought of norm.
Not the tyraids of dealing with a force in your head, self depictions of it, divergent thinking, not feeling like your thoughts are your own, two selfs, delusions etc

Think your friend was just having a chat sound self external and you where the doodling in a deep ponder thinking at all angles.

I think it was a cool introspective still though.

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What do you mean?