Isolationism

I live alone, and I rarely see anyone or even speak to anyone on the phone. I guess this is by design because I don’t trust myself in social situations as yet being as how I retain certain childlike mannerisms that are embarrassing. They aren’t anything I can turn on and off like a switch either; they just happen out of the blue, and when they do, people who have grown-up sensibilities tend to shy away from me. Its almost as though I’m overly gregarious, like a puppy dog, and I just can’t help myself. So I end up isolated and lonely like I am now. Does anybody out there ever feel the same way? Any ideas?

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Haven’t meet too many people who didn’t like puppy dogs…could you just be to hard on yourself?
Those kind of people that have grown up sensibilities, they don’t sound like they’re any fun to be around anyway.

Good points you make. I’ve been living inside a protective bubble for a long time, but I guess part of it too is not having a lot of cash to spend on things to do to go and see people. Maybe that’s another excuse, I don’t know, I just find it so hard to go anywhere. The truth is I’m afraid of “other people”. Jean-Paul Satre, the great philosopher said that, “Hell is other people.” What he meant is that when we emphasize the other-ness of others, we alienate them, and I as a schizophrenic feel more like I’m from another planet than most folks probably do.

Intelligent isolationism if all your needs are being met is totally rational IMo. Some attention goes a along way tho

I had a drinking and drugging problem, so I joined AA and NA. The social environments there provided me with the support, distractions and re-training of my mind that I needed to get up off my personal pity pot. There are now all manner of 12 Steps groups one can look into for a lot more that alcoholism or drug addiction. See…

and

That is an interesting concept because it could be that I am bothered not because I am alone, but because I see a factitious gulf between the amount of human contact I have, as compared to the amount other people I know have. When I “see” this gulf as a real thing to behold, I take it as a deficiency, when in actuality, I receive enough contact already; any more would be a bother.

BEWARE:

12-Step programs are manipulative, mind controlling cults. I have 36 years inside experience in Alcoholics Anonymous, and ten years outside investigative work into these destructive organizations, and their phony claims. Heed my warning. If you or a loved one is suffering from a drinking problem, an addiction, or a processes for which a 12-step program has been devised - stay away. Seek help from a scientifically verified treatment modality. The danger is very real, and indeed may be fatal to you or someone you care about.

Most sincerely, mikee

Not in general. The vast majority of AA, NA, CoDA and ACA meetings I have been to since 1977 are not cults. BUT… I have been to a few groups that call themselves “AA” or “NA” that definitely are. Perhaps you stumbled into one of those.

In whatever event, the single defining characteristic of paranoid sz is… paranoid, negativistic projection of threat where there isn’t any.

I have a similar problem with mannerisms that are hostile, even degrading. Like you, I can’t turn them on or off at will. I’ve had this problem for thirty-four years of my fifty-six year old life. This problem has cost me a lot, just about everything. People are surprisingly tolerant of it. Sometimes I initially get some hostility returned my direction, but then people realize it is something beyond my control and they treat me with kindness. Nevertheless I isolate a lot because of this problem, which I think is a relief for many of the people around me.

Well, crimby, finally a kindred spirit. Yea, sometimes I come from the planet Jupiter or Pluto and people don’t know what to make of me. Sometimes I’m too forward - not because I mean to be rude, but because well, I just don’t seem to know any better in those moments. But like I realized just a little while ago: I’m not an isolationist except in comparison to certain other people, and that is a completely arbitrary judgement. Intelligent solitude is rational, provided my needs are being met, and I do, in fact, get enough human contact, which isn’t as much as one would expect. Hell - these forums are great!

You are in deep. When you joined A.A, you took the red pill. Now, do you ever question anything A.A, teaches? Do you even dare? Do it openly at meetings and see what happens to you. Do you really believe that the first drink gets you drunk? Because if you do you are in grave danger, being in possession of one of the most dangerous logical fallacies in the whole A.A, schema. If you do take a drink, how easy it is to remember your firmly held belief and say, “I’ve taken the first drink - now I must drink until I am drunk!” I watched, year after year as men and women literally killed themselves with alcohol by virtue of this kind of clap-trap in A.A. And the worst part is - it doesn’t work…not at all! Look at the numbers man! I have. The algorithm of A.A. attendees success rate is actually in the negative numbers because of fatalities. So don’t tell me or anyone what is and is not a destructive cult when you don’t know what you’re talking about.

And it is a low blow to shoot me down because I levied my critique of A.A. on a site where you just happen to know about my personal affairs. But as they say, and I know in this case how true it is - Just 'cause your paranoid don’t mean they’re not really out to get ya. A.A. was created by a New York stock examiner who was interested in making a lot of money. He devised the oldest gimmick in the book - snake oil sales, and he hit it big. Keep buying friend, one day you will realize that “serenity” is too far over the rainbow for any real human to bear.

An Excerpt from An Article by Laura Thompson:

"If you go to an AA meeting they will tell you the only requirement is a desire to stop drinking. They will then require you to announce and declare to the room and God that you are an alcoholic. You are an alcoholic who will never recover. You must never pick up a drink again. They proceed to put you in a no-win position of pronouncing that you are an alcoholic at the beginning of every meeting, and every time you speak at all for that matter. Even if you are announcing that the cookies are running low and you need more money for the bad coffee everyone is swilling, you must announce that you are an alcoholic. A paragraph from Chapter 5 of the AA book is read aloud.

This is what most of my clients hear: Follow us or you will fail. If you do not recover, you are a dishonest and unfortunate idiot, and you were born a dishonest and unfortunate idiot. You will die painfully, full of shame for your innate inability to be honest with yourself. Even worse, if you are mentally and emotionally ill (which is highly probable), you will only recover if you follow our path completely and do not rock the boat."

Not to mention that years and decades of this torment leads to intense depression and other situational problems that can be solved by meeting cessation and psychotherapy.

Did I? Or did your mind interpret it that way because it was brainwashed to believe that there’s “evil lurking behind every door?”

You don’t know what I think. You don’t have a clue.

You’re just another person who believes in the ■■■■ your whacked parents injected into your mind.

I don’t actually care now if I get tossed from this fester pit of insanity, though I would miss the few here who are struggling to climb up out of it.

You seem to trace back minimally some trends in schizophrenic thinking, and possibly the whole condition, back to the parents of the patient often, specifically to certain parenting-styles. This in itself makes a lot of sense to me, for it is our parents that initiate us into the world, train us how to deal with it etc. Although some responses to the world may be innate, many are build upon these by being drilled into certain ways of acting by our caregivers. From another perspective, which is what I am working on, I see the parent-child relationship as the first and most important instantiation of interpersonal trust the child is engaged in. Which can be thought to play a crucial role in the constitution and maintanence of one’s experiential world, (these issues are not unrelated, of course).

What I am interested in is how you see the role of the patient’s consent when it comes to identifying this or that parenting-style in his upbringing. Does it matter how the patient perceive(s/d) of his caregivers? I am asking for, looking at my own upbringing, of course my parents had their own personality, about which things could be said, but I do not perceive anything radical there. I am quite happy with how things went when I was young.

I see so few people a week and talk so little that I wonder if one day I’ll lose the power of speech. Although I am isolated and at times feel lonely there’s a part of me that balks from really trying to engage with people as I get anxious if people get too emotionally close to me.

This is just the kind of paranoid response I expect from an avid A.A, member who is actually terrified he will die if he speaks against the party line or even entertains the idea that there might be a problem with his cherished thought system. THAT is brainwashing, and it is what they do in A.A. at every meeting, and in every A.A. book. It is the most fear based mode of therapy - if you can call it that - there has ever been devised. I suffered needlessly under its weight for 36 years because of family pressures to do so. Not any more as I use AVRT to deal with any remaining addictive thoughts. This is very effective and, it is actually the method I’d been using since 1990, even though I was attending A.A. to appease my family. I have no fear, but apparently this poor soul, and a lot of people who still attend A.A. do.

I wouldn’t worry about losing my power of speech, I’m beginning to think online forums like this one are preferable to face to face communications anyway. People can get really opinionated and even hostile about it at times, and that;s what worries me.

For the information of all those who visit this thread and read the debate about A.A., it will be essential for you to know that A.A. conforms to all 17 of the FBI’s criteria for cults. They are as follows:

  1. Religious Orientation, Supernatural Beliefs
  2. Irrationality, Rigidity, Anti-Intellectualism
  3. A Charismatic Leader
  4. A Hierarchical, Authoritarian Structure
  5. Submission of the Individual to the “Will of God”
  6. Dogmatism, the Ultimate Truth
  7. Separatism
  8. Exclusivity (The Only Path To Salvation)
  9. Self-Absorption (Primary Focus Is the Cult Itself)
  10. Economic Exploitation
  11. Possessiveness (Go To Great Lengths to Retain Members)
  12. Mind Control Techniques; Intimidation
  13. A Closed, All-Encompassing Environment (Physical)
  14. Deceptive Recruitment Techniques (Deception; Set Up “Fronts”)
  15. Manipulation Through Guilt
  16. Millennarianism (The End Is Near)
  17. Violence and Harassment

I have seen most of these attitudes and behaviors in and around A.A. for a 36 year period, including several stays in indoctrination centers during the 1980’s when the “treatment center” movement was in full swing. I suffered from the Stockholm Syndrome to some degree as the result of these centers. These centers produce results at the rate of the Stockholm Syndrome or 8%. That is, 8% of people in hostage situations will manifest the Stockholm Syndrome, and this is the same figure seen coming out of the Alcohol and Drug treatment centers where the modality is A.A. based. When I was in treatment I was intimidated, abused, and tormented relentlessly by sadistic staff people, while A.A. people came from the outside and showed magnanimity, which produces identification with the abusers. The treatment centers are the money making arm of A.A., and have been for many decades.

In the United States Stanton Peele, a psychologist and lawyer, has encouraged legal action against mandated attendance of twelve-step programs, stating an objection to the courts and other government and tax-supported agencies mandating attendance at meetings run by organizations with spiritual or religious content. They interpret state-mandated twelve-step program attendance as a violation of the Establishment Clause within the First Amendment. The First Amendment’s Establishment Clause prohibits the government from making any law “respecting an establishment of religion.” This view has been upheld in:

  1. Griffin v. Coughlin,
  2. Grandberg v. Ashland County,
  3. Warner v. Orange County Department of Probation,
  4. Kerr v. Lind, and
  5. O’Connor v. State of California

A.A. is NOT a “spiritual” program. It is a “new religious order” that is in competition with legitimate religions for resources, human and otherwise. As you can see, this is a matter of legal precedent. I, for one, shall not submit to the will of a shallow religion that was fictitiously invented for the purpose of profiting on repeated human suffering and death. Its time this secret society be drawn into public controversy - regardless of their “traditions” to the contrary. They’re just gonna have to bite it, because their number is up.

Finally, to answer my sad friend, who seems so angry with me for my low opinion of A.A.: There isn’t danger around every corner… but there is danger. I am happy if he goes to A.A. and I am happy if he does not go to A.A., it doesn’t matter to me. He accuses me of reading his mind when what I did was read 36 years of A.A, attendance back to him. I know what he’s in for. All I can say is, good luck chum.

@mikee What made you so anti AA? Were you a member and had a very bad experience? Personally I couldn’t be doing with the God angle as a part of getting help and support but it seems to help some people.