Have you ever experienced the feeling that your mind was being misread? So, it was like people were reading your mind, but they were reading it inaccurately/incorrectly.
How did this misreading happen? Did it happen a lot? What was it like? How did you cope with it?
I don’t think I have ever experienced this, but I have experienced people stealing my thoughts.
The media does it more than anybody else, but they have plants in the general public so it can happen when I’m on the tram to work or at a shop.
I cope with it by doing a counting/breathing exercise my psychiatrist gave me. I could backwards from ten really slowly and deep breathe with each number.
That stopped working because I don’t like the number 6. So I changed it to counting down from five then back up again.
My psychiatrist wants me to feel ok about the number 6 again so he changed the exercise to counting down from five, up to six then down from six then up to ten then down from ten.
And it kind of works because then whoever is around stealing my thoughts will only be able to steal numbers and they are useless to thought theives.
Well it seems to be working turtle because I wasn’t trying to steal anything from you and I still ended up with numbers in my head. Thanks for that.
lol, you’re not a media plant. You’re safe. Most people on this site are safe.
I’ve experienced something like this. I recall being around a group of people (happens a lot when you’re in the US Military), and it appeared they were picking on me by asking certain questions for anyone in the group to answer, but indirectly directing the questions to me. So, they seemed to expect me to have an answer; however, my mind tends to be empty-minded: rely on the unconscious plus the lack of neurotransmitter communication plus slow generation of thought/speech. They don’t understand and I didn’t understand (none of us knew about Sz or knew I had Sz) at that time. But looking back in retrospect (learning I had Sz after being discharged from the Army), I see now that that is what caused the problem.
What would occur is they would answer the questions, whimsically, as if trying to read my mind (trying to assume those are the answers I would verbally provide). But, my mind was blank. Theirs weren’t blank. They would assume I think like them. Usually, their answers would not have been my verbal answers, if they gave me more time to think or answer myself.
It’s like they were trying to steal my thoughts but there were no thoughts to steal.
People misread me all the time because my face is paralyzed most of the time.
So, yes, that’s how I have experienced (not often) in the past others trying to read my mind or trying to predict answers I would provide to questions in a group setting. Usually, those weren’t the answers I would’ve actually provided if they gave me more time (I usually need more time to verbally answer questions than normals would). So, they were misreading my mind, reading/predicting inaccurately.
I enjoy living a socially isolated lifestyle, these years, so definitely doesn’t happen in recent years. When I had to be around people a lot, it was weird to cope with my mind operating differently than “normals.” Made me different but didn’t really mind unless they were implying insults.