Seeing and not seeing

Unusual Beliefs
1

I have come to figure out that one of the most disabling feature of schizophrenia for anyone close to them…is this peculiar and endlessly disturbing quality of seeing stuff in parts and not as a whole.

This has happened with my roomie a thousand times or more, and I have read about it and have noticed it with other kinds of symptoms too. When a man with schizophrenia sees a face of a beautiful woman he will see the hair texture or shape of the nose or tone of the skin but never the whole picture.

Something like this happened again tonight where I was trying to explain what frustrated me about his behavior and I was trying to explain concretely as usual, and finally I just looked at him carefully and saw that blank staring expression again and I asked him what he was looking at and instead of hearing him say something like “what gets you so bloody mad at me when I’m not doing anything?” or “you look so blankety-blank when you get bothered at me!” he just said “your face”.

He was looking at my face but he was NOT looking at the thwarted unacknowledged spirit that made up my whole visage and being. Because that would have meant he was not a frustrating creature and probably NOT schizophrenic. And when I’m feeling great he never cares about the source of my happiness but might stare me down because he feels flattered to have a pleasant looking creature supposedly taking care of him. And never anything more. I’ve checked out this stuff with him too.

I hate to say it but these people do the opposite of normal people when they encounter something or someone. They take the life out of the person (or thing). They render the spirit into a mere THING and turn things that are always connected up with other things to form something more significant…into nothing.

Maybe that’s why they can’t seem to clean up their personal space or organize stuff effectively, because if they can’t connect stuff with anything else, how would they know if something is out of place at all?

If I had asked him what he meant when he gave me that answer “I’m looking at your face”, I am positive he would have said something spiritually invalidating because that’s all he ever does. And needless to say he never understood tonight what was frustrating me so about him.
Why don’t people discussing schizophrenia talk more about this stuff?

I believe schizophrenia is kind of an existential death-in-life (notwithstanding even a possibly pleasant, agreeable demeanor…) just because of behaviors like this and many adjacent behaviors. Maybe that’s why people have so much trouble, as I do, empathizing or even grasping what must be going on, outside the most superficial surface aspects.

If he thinks I am a “thing” I will never ever accede to this. If he thinks HE is a “thing” I will never allow him to think he is right. To that extent I will be succumbing to his delusion. Never ever will I do this. But how can I make him understand that things are CONNECTED and people are SPIRITS??? Any ideas?

My roomie does not do the humanities, music art or literature. Nevertheless I have tried to come up with a thousand ways to demonstrate the difference between spirit and matter and all he can remember is the idea I am dividing something up and not the idea I am trying to convey. This work is SOOOO heartbreaking and spirit breaking that’s why I reached out 2 days ago on my original post.Can anyone try to help with this one???

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Maybe he’s a atheist?

What is he into?

3

You sound crazier than him lol.

Maybe he’s not spiritual and you are, and you are over analysing and over thinking. And maybe he really is just looking at your face?

:slight_smile:

I see people as people but I’m not spiritual. I do notice finer details than most though

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why do you think I was talking about religion? BUMP!

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This is why our Mid’s eye doesn’t see…

Edit: Correction… Mind’s eye not Mid’s eye…

Recently I’ve been making lots of typing mistakes/errors or just typo? or typo errors? I’m not sure. I just don’t know.

6

He does this stuff with everything. Everything loses it’s meaning, connection and vitality with him. It’s all sterile and devoid of substance. NOTHING to do with just this one example. He pulled the same thing when I asked him what the song “Who Do You Love” meant? (bo diddley version) The song is really like a Rorschach…and he left out elements conveniently,never referred to the song as a whole, and had no idea what it all might have meant except as possibly a nonsense song. And more importantly, I never get this sterile feeling from anyone else in similar contexts. It’s like an instinctual thing, he just doesn’t know about the life of ideas or the life in life itself. He never ever comes to me with an original idea about anything. Very rarely talks first about anything. I’ve also known him forever and it’s never been any different. He does this when pretending to respond to me, it’s either total silence or the answer to a forced-choice question, like “door # A or B?” Then no followup.
What I mean is It’s just surface “form” elements and he can never ever guess what I mean when I say anything. If I say cup hooks he thinks ceiling hooks. If I say low calorie eggnog the hi calorie stuff gets bought.You know that old classic image of the two vases that look like two faces sometimes and then just two vases other times? Well he only ever sees the two vases.And even more importantly, he literally makes me feel as if I am not here, like everything was noticed except the human element with me. BUMP. My first post is on this forum too. Will you also tell me that stuff is all in my head?

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I don’t understand the connection between this Sagar Gorijala quote and what I said. This is not about my attitude. It’s about the fact that I’m in a long-term roommate situation for the first time in my life and there’s no one here but me. And I reached out here because I have been slammed by everyone I have ever reached out (about this particular human situation) to until I came to this forum…
And I am healthy myself and really know what is going on in my world, and this stuff I see in my house is valid and happens “out there” too. I believe this emptiness characterizes schizophrenia in general. I read somewhere once that I am correct in my perceptions.People like this engender the form-over-content anguish but only the observer feels it. I have also read that schizophrenics can’t trust anyone.

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I was trying to read your post to see if I could help you, but with all the generalizations and wrong assumptions you make about people with sz it just made me frustrated and annoyed, so much that I had to stop reading before the end. I get that you are in a stressful situation but it really seems to me like you are taking your anger out on us by generalizing and talking like you know us better than ourselves. And frankly a lot of what you said is just wrong. It doesn’t seem like you have a good perception of what schizophrenia actually is. You should start with the basics and stop assuming we are all the same.

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Maybe schizophrenia is something so misunderstood by most of us that you are just mad at me for having these realities and truths and having the nerve to reach out here instead of dying in despair. Because your attitude is pretty common. I see it all the time in my life and I have seen it endless times in trying to reach out in other ways about this one situation…Nobody wants to be challenged in ways that might make them really take a much closer look at something. I apologize for your reaction but I did not cause it.

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How do you realise this without also realising it is your behavior that evokes this attitude in others? Seriously. I am not mad at you, I am annoyed by your arrogance and presumptuousness.

As I said I get that you are in a stressful situation and I honestly wish you the best.

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re: “annoyed by your arrogance and presumptuousness.”
I apologize for YOUR attack but I did not cause it.

Gee, I assumed you people could get into the deeper issues but I am wrong. Reactionism is not especially a schizophrenic trait but maybe the whole society has become like this. I’d bet my life on it actually. I should have known better than to reach out on the internet. There are actually real people not here. Maybe they are the ones who know what I do…
Bye bye.

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This site is full of musicians, artists, writers, lovers of the humanities. It’s full of people who see the vases as well as the faces. Your observations may be correct about your roommate, though they’re so broad and overreaching that I question whether you see him or just your projections and rationalizations, but they have very limited application beyond that.

I’m going to echo levelj1 here - perhaps you’re just very frustrated, but your posts sound very aggressive and out of touch with reality.

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Nope.
I have asked to be removed from this forum, which reminds me of so much other stuff on the internet…paralleling what really goes on out “there”. The emptiness of society is very schizophrenic. And so is this man.
But I am not him so soon I will be free of this.

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Sorry that I made you feel like I was attacking you. That was not my intention, I am just very annoyed by your posts.

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Your roommate is just your roommate.

I hope you find yourself in a more comfortable situation soon.

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Work on your own social skills instead of coming on here to rant. You come off aggressive so people will not listen to you.

If I was your roommate I’d look at your face like it’s just an object too if you acted like that all the time :slight_smile:

Good day kind sir.

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Yes, I don’t need to give a long answer because other posters have already written what I was thinking about your post. But just to emphasize the point I will say that you are making sweeping generalizations about schizophrenia and people who have schizophrenia.

Also, just for the record, When you use the phrase “these people”, it borders on disrespectful and insulting. Maybe you don’t mean it that way and I am taking it out of context so I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume it was innocent.

I almost agree with another person who answered this post. I know for a fact that you are not crazy but your spiritual beliefs are a little “out there” and if the people on these forums said those same things we would be called delusional.

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I am the mother of a young man with sz and your description doesn’t fit my son at all. In fact, I strongly suspect that you are projecting your own issues onto your roommate because it is far more typical of people with sz to overinterpret events, people and environment than to strip it of meaning. Just because your roomie doesn’t give things the SAME meaning as you, it doesn’t make him wrong and you right. You come over as a bit control freaky, what with the importance if your own point of view and the low-fat egg nog and all.
Your roomie must be very patient and tactful.

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I am annoyed at the fact that chief editor of this forum J Megginson Hollister (from USC) , also understands, just as I do… that the schizophrenic “brain damage” is often from childbirth trauma, and that is true with my housemate and it’s also true that the way to reach someone with schizophrenia is to keep trying to reach him, like any other person would want to connect with any other. That would be annoying to people who have made a science of shutting out others.

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thanks but so far I have not. I intend to make a positive difference here before I go.