Posted by hyperfocus on April 25, 2011, at 21:10:31
In reply to Re: hp + all here, questions re: SP » hyperfocus, posted by floatingbridge on April 25, 2011, at 10:35:53
One bit of psychological/philosophical theory I read about a long time ago had to do with the trauma of children realizng that a perception of themselves existed separate and outside their control. Do you remember how as a child you could stare innocently at people every day, not really knowing or caring that they could see you? As if the world were just one big movie screen and you were just part of the audience? And then at some point you lost your innocence and realized that the people you were looking at could see you too and there was nothing you could do to keep them from forming judgments about you and hurting you. Like you also existed in somebody else's perception and they could see all your faults and flaws and all that was wrong with you and they could cause you to feel shame.
I also read about what's called 'magical thinking' wrt social phobia. We have a broken coping mechanism of trying to reduce our surface area to avoid other people looking at us. Like we don't ever make eye contact with people under the magical theory that if we can't see someone then they can't see us. Or we have a huge investment in always blending in with the crowd - no dressing or hair-stylng or putting on makeup to stand out - as if this can make us invisible to other people. The theory is broken in two ways: other people CAN see us whether we look at them or not, and it really takes a huge amount of effort by someone to be noticed and truly stand out anywhere.
If you put a group of 100 or 200 people in a room under observation, you'd be hard-pressed to pick out the ones with SP though. Many of us have this calm, emotionless affect we've perfected to cover up the churning inside. I guess this what your friend has nurtured. But also, we fail to remember that there's nothing to make us stand out from anybody. You have to try really, really hard to standout anywhere and be noticed by anyone. It's funny how we look at teenagers at the mall - with their insane hairstyles and makeup and piercings - and feel that they just fit in perfectly, while we will never.The trauma of standing out and feeling shame can be devestating. Our brains have a different experience from other people. Our brains keep cycling the times when people made us feel we stood out and it will do literally anything to prevent that happening again. But I guess it's possible to develop SP without trauma. SP could be a secondary symptom of depression or some type of dissociative or obsessive disorder. One thing I'm learning is that despite the best efforts of doctors and researchers, mental illness continues to defy classification and labelling and seems to exist on a huge continum that surfaces as multiple clusters of symptoms. There may not be a direct cause-effect relationship between an experience and the development of SP.
poster:hyperfocus
thread:983100
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20110418/msgs/983748.html