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Dr. Bob is Robert Hsiung, MD,
bob@dr-bob.orgShown: posts 1 to 15 of 15. This is the beginning of the thread.
Posted by Existentialist on August 31, 2007, at 19:56:57
Well, I feel like my sanity has been waning over the past year. I'm one of these people who isn't a real person. I don't feel other people, I can't feel or 'see' myself or get a sense of who others are. I'm suprised nobody spots this fact, perhaps they are insane just like me, fake as well, or they would have spotted me, are they stuck in their heads too, or just so tranced out they actually believe 100% they are the identity they play in the social world?
I can't believe I've passed for normal so much of my life. If I threw away my boxes of rambling notes and insane social theory then I'd be just the same as everyone else. It'd be like I vaporized myself if I did that. I live a secret life, no one knows about my intellectual fetishes.
Is it sanity to realize before you were insane and struggle to get it together, or better to go on believing you are the only sane one in a world that seems to have lost it's freaking mind?
Posted by Existentialist on August 31, 2007, at 20:11:06
In reply to Loosing my sanity., posted by Existentialist on August 31, 2007, at 19:56:57
I feel the world is a place that is rather imposing, that it is blind to what it does, unaware. If other people are real do they know they are? I live as a solipsist. I know other people are real, but I can never see or feel them, and I can never feel myself through them. So i don't know for sure. I can't get out of my own head, I can never feel ok. I never feel safe in the world, death looms closely, which is the worst possible fate. It's just not safe. I'm a bit paranoid. I don't trust other people, if they are like me, then I can't trust them, I wouldn't trust me. Love? What is love? How can you ever feel safe and open enough to love?
Posted by Quintal on September 1, 2007, at 3:39:54
In reply to Loosing my sanity., posted by Existentialist on August 31, 2007, at 19:56:57
I suppose you've read "The Divided Self" and other selected works?
Q
Posted by rjlockhart on September 2, 2007, at 23:03:57
In reply to Loosing my sanity., posted by Existentialist on August 31, 2007, at 19:56:57
You are very similar to me in 2004-05 I had dissociative epiodes crazy.
http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20051003/msgs/562694.html
http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20050723/msgs/532446.html
http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20051008/msgs/567385.html (espeically read this one)
Listen, sleep some, ask your doctor for something for anxiety, i rerember the hell that i was in 3 years ago. Really sleep.
I had to deal wit the real feeling of going insane everyday, thinking im not real, what i was seeing was not real. Omg it was horrible.
I hated every time of that.
People kinda of forgot of what happened to me back then.
There are many other people who experienced this too, back then i thought it was all about me.
Listen i rerember what insanity feels like. And fear of going insane. Thats old news to me.
But keep me posted.
I was around alot back in 2004-2005. About what was wrong with me.
Posted by Sigismund on September 5, 2007, at 16:21:05
In reply to Loosing my sanity., posted by Existentialist on August 31, 2007, at 19:56:57
You seem sane as a bell to me (as opposed to comfortable), although "Feeling Unreal" came into my mind, but perhaps only because I've read it recently.
Posted by karen_kay on September 5, 2007, at 21:35:49
In reply to Loosing my sanity., posted by Existentialist on August 31, 2007, at 19:56:57
"the stranger" by albert camus. i don't know if the correct link comes up or not, but the character sounds similar to you (don't go walking down any beaches anytime soon, eh? poor humor is my specialty dear!).
i'm sure you've read his work, given your name. then again, maybe the other reading suggestions may be of use.
you know, i saw something on the news the ohter day that said mother teresa struggled greatly with her faith. so much so that she quit praying. it had a profound impact on me. you know, i might even believe in something now. to think, if mother teresa struggled with her own faith, maybe there's some in me too. i used to think here is all there is, but maybe not so much. then again, i'm anythign but consistent. i've at least been saying the prayers on the back on those .99 candles after lighting them. it's a start...
Posted by Existentialist on September 19, 2007, at 14:12:47
In reply to Loosing my sanity., posted by Existentialist on August 31, 2007, at 19:56:57
just a followup here. I was pretty agitated when I wrote that stuff, sort of up in my issue of being cold and clinical towards the world. The past two weeks have been nuts, and I came back and I read the responses just a few days ago, you guys are dead on about depersonalization. PGs of "The divided self" 42-46 describe me exactly.
"One is threatened with the possibility of becoming no more than a thing in the world of the other, without any life for oneself, without any being for oneself. In terms of such anxiety, the very act of experiencing the other as a person is felt as virtually suicidal."
This has probably been going for me for greater and lesser extents my whole life. Even the way I approach people online, I still fear giving people the credibility of 'being real'.
I've spent the past 2 and half years basically living my life on the basis of a sort of neurosis of self perfection and seeking immunity from the world through perfecting some sort of strange hardcore social engineering and detatchment from the world. I'd write my thoughts on the need to "Be in perfect control and fake everything" and it worked to an extent until really flying apart and me becomming basically completely dysfunctional by 22.
Even just two days ago I can't make it to a class discussion because I'm so torn with forcing myself to go, and being petrified of being seen, because I get in this mood where I feel I've lost control and can't go in and fake it today, and that terrified me, to actually possibly be seen. So I just sat in my towel after getting out of the shower playing video games to feel safe. And I'm 22, and for a long time thinking how much more helpless I've become since I was 18, actually going backwards in my life.
Posted by Quintal on September 19, 2007, at 19:46:12
In reply to Re: Loosing my sanity., posted by Existentialist on September 19, 2007, at 14:12:47
I'm glad you find "The Divided Self" helpful. I haven't read it myself, it was recommended by my consellor, so I suspect I'll probably recognize parts of myself in it when I do.
Q
Posted by Existentialist on September 24, 2007, at 0:24:52
In reply to Re: Loosing my sanity., posted by Quintal on September 19, 2007, at 19:46:12
It's actually pretty bad right now, I don't get things anymore. I don't get other people and I feel I can't be normal. I used to get the show southpark, well, I watch it and I don't get it, I don't get it when other people talk to me, and I don't get it when I talk to them, it never comes out right at all. I watch people on TV and I don't get it, why anyone cares, or why they say what they say. I think they don't feel, or not like me, like they could never get me, or feel me, or know what I know. And likewise I don't get them, I can't imagine what it's like to be them. So this condition, it tests sanity.
I have no relationships in which anyone knows my whole story or anything about me, and I never approach it in a way that I might tell them the truth, I approach it like I have to lie, and not just lie to 'protect myself', but protect them from seeing me as I am, because it would freak them out and they'd run. They need someone simple and easily understandable, like them. They could talk to me for years and never get anything out of me.
And not only that I don't trust them. I trust only to react according my predictable mental model, that they are devoid of any inner substance or caring or capable of even understanding their own life. They seem unconscious to me, I know when I trance out and go around just like them I feel unconscious. They're just regular joes and I'm a hardcore atheist with Marxist sentiment who at the least despises the the unconscious and uncaring consumer society that domesticates us and strips us of any real feeling. I always think if they only knew what I knew they would weep over the tragedy of it all, and cry over their own victimization when they realized the truth.
Personally I'm strongest in my nihilistic moments when I say F it all, and disregard the whole thing and everyone in it as unknowing, helpless victims to societies machinations. It's a lonely world.
Posted by Quintal on September 24, 2007, at 11:34:42
In reply to Re: Loosing my sanity., posted by Existentialist on September 24, 2007, at 0:24:52
How high is your emotional intelligence?
Do you have good intuition?
How often do you try to help other people?
Do you ever take life too seriously?
Are you able to laugh at yourself?
If any of these things were to change, do you think you would feel any better?
Do you know how to change?
Do you want to change?
Is it worth the effort?
Do you think there is some advantage in staying the way you are?Q
Posted by Existentialist on September 25, 2007, at 1:03:50
In reply to Re: Loosing my sanity. » Existentialist, posted by Quintal on September 24, 2007, at 11:34:42
Hey I wrote some long ranting response earlier to that, but then decided to wait and see how I felt about what I wrote later, as it always strikes me as so odd sometimes. I'll be totally honest, for all time I spend developing my intellectual tastes with Critical Social Theory for example, it offers no way out. If I try and fall asleep without ambien or something, I start to remember other times when I used to be a real person before all this, lying after sex and having open conversations about anything, making eye contact, kissing. Now it's unfathomable, I can't imagine being open like that or being a real person again. I feel too sickened in body and soul, and yet that's the only medicine that would be any good again, I need something to shock me out of my coma is how I feel.
Well I did save the old reply, it get's pretty much into a lot. As far as the tone it's written in, I don't like it, I write a lot, but like anything i write, I never like it. It always sounds like I'm going somwhere if it were an intellectual work, but then go ranting on to something else. I write because I just get too worked up I can send you some of my day's writing if you want to get into analyzing some of it perhaps.
here's the kind of writing I'm doing on a daily basis.
"I realized finally, this tall posh looking girl, a decked out LA mallfly, goes strolling past me totally acting out her image for me and the world. She is that. They are so totally controlled by it. To them... that is THE totality of what life is. Suddenly all the big bad people scampering around me were seen to be totally controlled by it. I thought to myself, "This guy needs his suit and shoes and position in life or he has nothing, he probably needs to believe in god too" "If these kids can't believe in their youth identity and MTV good times what are they to otherwise believe? That the world is sh*t and hates them? They would be anarchists ready for revolution, fighting back for their dignity, but how marvelously they are instead controlled and marginalized is an understatement, not just marginalized but eating the poison the trusted hand feeds them."That was the sock value part of it, that they really did trust it. It wasn't some neutral ambivalence where they weighed the pros and cons and lack of good alternatives, but they assumed that was how it SHOULD be. Apparently someone - to personify the whole propaganda machine - had done a very good job. It was of course the technology that existed today that lead to a trusting populous, the government and corporations had obviously fixed their game in the 37 years since the last signs of rebellion. 9/11 and subsequent media and social changes led to an evolved game..."
Posted by Quintal on September 25, 2007, at 2:53:07
In reply to Re: Loosing my sanity., posted by Existentialist on September 25, 2007, at 1:03:50
> Hey I wrote some long ranting response earlier to that, but then decided to wait and see how I felt about what I wrote later, as it always strikes me as so odd sometimes.
Was this meant to be a reply to the questions in my last post?
>I'll be totally honest, for all time I spend developing my intellectual tastes with Critical Social Theory for example, it offers no way out.
Do you know why you keep on doing it?
>If I try and fall asleep without ambien or something, I start to remember other times when I used to be a real person before all this, lying after sex and having open conversations about anything, making eye contact, kissing.
What happened to make you cease to be a real person?
>Now it's unfathomable, I can't imagine being open like that or being a real person again. I feel too sickened in body and soul, and yet that's the only medicine that would be any good again, I need something to shock me out of my coma is how I feel.
>
> Well I did save the old reply, it get's pretty much into a lot. As far as the tone it's written in, I don't like it, I write a lot, but like anything i write, I never like it. It always sounds like I'm going somwhere if it were an intellectual work, but then go ranting on to something else. I write because I just get too worked up I can send you some of my day's writing if you want to get into analyzing some of it perhaps.If you think it would help.
> here's the kind of writing I'm doing on a daily basis.
Why do you do it?
> "I realized finally, this tall posh looking girl, a decked out LA mallfly, goes strolling past me totally acting out her image for me and the world. She is that. They are so totally controlled by it. To them... that is THE totality of what life is. Suddenly all the big bad people scampering around me were seen to be totally controlled by it. I thought to myself, "This guy needs his suit and shoes and position in life or he has nothing, he probably needs to believe in god too" "If these kids can't believe in their youth identity and MTV good times what are they to otherwise believe? That the world is sh*t and hates them? They would be anarchists ready for revolution, fighting back for their dignity, but how marvelously they are instead controlled and marginalized is an understatement, not just marginalized but eating the poison the trusted hand feeds them."
>
> That was the sock value part of it, that they really did trust it. It wasn't some neutral ambivalence where they weighed the pros and cons and lack of good alternatives, but they assumed that was how it SHOULD be. Apparently someone - to personify the whole propaganda machine - had done a very good job. It was of course the technology that existed today that lead to a trusting populous, the government and corporations had obviously fixed their game in the 37 years since the last signs of rebellion. 9/11 and subsequent media and social changes led to an evolved game..."And this was a reply to the questions in my last post?
Q
Posted by Existentialist on September 25, 2007, at 13:17:47
In reply to Re: Loosing my sanity. » Existentialist, posted by Quintal on September 25, 2007, at 2:53:07
yeah I can see how that response is likely very confusing. I wrote it during the dysopria of waiting for the ambien to kick in...
but here's the original response, that I wrote in pretty logical cold sort of mood. It's me talking from inside my issue when I wrote this response, that's why I didn't want to post it. I looked it later in the day and thought it wouldn't be that helpful, but that's part of the problem with me, I want control and perfection, and am a huge misanthrope, and yet that's what makes my world empty, but to me it's justified because I'm convinced it's really that bad, and not even 'bad', I just see it as unfortunate. But, well here I am again rambling, but here's my original response.
How high is your emotional intelligence? low, small things can really screw me up.
Do you have good intuition? I can
How often do you try to help other people? they need help too?
I'd probably make it worse by making the swallow the same 'truth' I do. I suppose if I really move to their level and care about the things they do, I can feel more empathy, but it's by dissolving part of myself to do it. I've dealt with all my emotions privately my whole life, if not I'd probably be an anarchist throwing rocks at police, that sort of thing. My docile nature really betrays me.Do you ever take life too seriously? There's a lighter side?
Are you able to laugh at yourself? No, that's probably the worst part, I can't laugh anymore in a real way. I can laugh, but I'm not laughing on the inside.
If any of these things were to change, do you think you would feel any better? Yeah I'd feel great in a world where joy and love existed, and we could laugh openly and trust one another. My hardcore realism never trusts anyone. I trust them to the extent where I always maintain my skepticism and assume my behavior might cause trust-like behaviors in them, but psychically I can't cross the line to actually trusting them.Do you know how to change?
Not so much, I don't know how to be 'a real person', like them, no one ever taught me. I lived in the shadows even when socially I made the cut, had a social life, had a sex life. When I used to have sex, it was never guilt free, or without concerns of doing it right. I feel like I had sex plenty of times without actually having sex. I want real sex. I sometimes have fantasies about being a real person, or full honesty or full surrender to something, like a sort of purifying sexual experience, or a drug experience where I merged with nature and gave up my materialist perspective.Do you want to change? I do, to an extent. I'm not sure someone like me can change, I can't change fully, I've made this reality, this intellectual space I occupy, like any intellectual or atheist I'm excluded from believing. I extend my atheism to the social as well, I don't worship the 'social gods'.
Is it worth the effort?
I work at it every day. It's what keeps me going, to find some shred of something which can be a hedge against nihilism. With drug experiences it was a sort of redeeming beauty, usually I see no beauty, I see a world whose social conditions are terminal, and that I can make a model that predicts the outcome, like a math equation that might show how a cancer takes over a body. That's how I see it. I see something truly dangerous about the times we live in, I think the social system and inherent control games will come to dominate everything, there's certainly nothing standing in it's way that I can see.Do you think there is some advantage in staying the way you are?
Plenty. To me it's a control game. If I can get my social aspects together enough to be charismatic and the right kind of person who can be trusted and accepted, then I can play an important role in life. Carrer wise, I plan on doing computers and business. Both are control games where being human is a sin. Here the goal is to build a better business model to better have profits, to have more market, and do it better than anyone else. The goal of software is the simplest route to solving the problem and reducing the problem to a series of steps and variables values which are the conditions for decision making.
Posted by Quintal on September 25, 2007, at 17:05:47
In reply to Re: Loosing my sanity., posted by Existentialist on September 25, 2007, at 13:17:47
>No, that's probably the worst part, I can't laugh anymore in a real way. I can laugh, but I'm not laughing on the inside.
Yes, that's evident in your posts.
>Plenty. To me it's a control game. If I can get my social aspects together enough to be charismatic and the right kind of person who can be trusted and accepted, then I can play an important role in life. Carrer wise, I plan on doing computers and business. Both are control games where being human is a sin. Here the goal is to build a better business model to better have profits, to have more market, and do it better than anyone else. The goal of software is the simplest route to solving the problem and reducing the problem to a series of steps and variables values which are the conditions for decision making.
Are you saying you want to be a professional sociopath? There seem to be a few red flags here.
Q
Posted by Quintal on September 26, 2007, at 20:49:34
In reply to Re: Loosing my sanity. » Existentialist, posted by Quintal on September 25, 2007, at 17:05:47
A few articles to consider, if you are interested in pursuing that path:
http://www.bullyonline.org/cases/case4.htm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1462339,00.html#article_continue
http://www.charmaineyoest.com/2006/04/the_manager_as_sociopath_a_12.phpQ
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