h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Based on recent things I've read I've wondered if one aspect of my problem might not be my extreme sensitivity.

Let me define 'sensitivity' first as it applies here. It means that I 'process' sensory information to an extreme degree ... and in my case also in unusual ways.

This has been a crucial factor in my struggles and yet its a thing that I could never explain to people. I've always felt that I must be completely wrong for being like this.

As a child there were a number of sensory factors that elicited extreme responses in me. The negative ones were so bad that they caused me incredible anxiety. They were:

1. Cigarette smoke. It was intolerably irritating to me, and this in a time and place where almost everybody smoked! My mother, and my father ... my father quit but my mother didn't and it ended up making it impossible for me to form a close bond with my mother. My extreme aversion to cigarette smoke lasted into my thirties ... I'm somewhat rid of it now but not completely.

2. The texture of silk stockings. This was horrific to me in a way I can't describe. What was horrendous to me was that all the girls in school had to wear these stockings in the winter. I was terrified to death of accidentally touching them. Take the sound of nails scraping on a blackboard and magnify by 1000 to get an idea of how it was for me. I mean just the texture, the 'feel' of it... I still shudder thinking back on it. This aversion ended when I was somewhat older.

3. Extrene aversion to certain tastes, most particularly mustard. My first word was also my first swear word when my grandmother had me lick jam off a knife that a while before also had been used to spread mustard, so a little bit of it was left. I cursed out my poor grandma and I was just over a year old! The aversion to mustard lasted into my twenties. Recently I've come to rather like it. Other tastes I hated included pumpkin and beet, but I won't classify them anywhere near mustard. I learnt to eat and enjoy both in my thirties.

4. Extreme phobia of loud noises. NOT HELPED by the outing to my uncle's farm where he and my father and others fired off loud rifles right next to my ears. This phobia lasted into my teens by which time I could force myself to tolerate firing guns.

5. Great sensitivity to pain, and a deathly fear of injections. And being a somewhat sickly child I had to get a lot of them. Right now still don't like pain and still am in pain a lot of the time but I've learnt some tolerance.

6. I'm still very sensitive to cold but, again, have learnt some tolerance.

7. EXTREME aversion to experiencing or seeing humans and animals suffer. I can watch very violent movies because it's not real, but I sure as heck don't like it when people around me or in the real world suffer - I want to help them or want them to be helped. Or animals. As a child, reading in magazines about various horrors drove me mad, literally. I could not believe people could do such things to each other or to animals. Cruelty to animals still gets me bad. Cruelty to humans ... I think I've become a bit bitter in that I see humans as being so bad that they perhaps deserve to suffer some cruelty sometime but really I don't like it. I identify with other people and with animals to an extreme degree. As a child I did hurt animals ... worms and caterpillars ... wanting to see if they too felt pain - I concluded they did and hated myself. But *certainly* things like cats and dogs feel pain. It is so important to me that my cat Poplap should be all right and not feeling pain. I cannot get the incredibly cruel things that other humans do. The awareness of all this is something that utterly destroys my sanity and composure and I am by now aware of so much of it I can never escape it.

8. EXTREME aversion to disharmonies of a great variety of kinds. One of the strangest perhaps for other people to understand is the extreme pain and anxiety I feel when I look at my surroundings and how much they've been altered and disturbed by humans. I expect the landscape of the Earth to look wild - wild trees and grass and bushes and animals and birds - EVERY landscape that has been majorly altered by humans is something that disturbs me because I see and feel everything that used to live there that has been destroyed for it to look like it looks now. In the fantasies I dream up to escape from this, humans all live underground, even their farms are underground, so that the entirety of surface-Earth could still be inhabited by all the other kinds of things. Humans can go to the surface but they can only follow small footpaths and they have to be careful not to tread on delicate plants or tiny animals. This is the only thought I could tolerate. I CANNOT TOLERATE the awareness of the incredible destruction wrought by humans in the real world we live in. If I did not escape into these fantasies of a different reality I would die! As a very young child I had this and it became stronger the more I learnt about nature and wildlife and also the more over the years human populations in this country expanded and the wild areas I loved as a child shrunk more and more.

9. A great concern with dignity and respect. I cannot really tolerate being disrespected and treated rudely, or when others are treated with disrespect and rudeness. I mean specifically here intentional rudeness. I may myself sometimes be unintentionally rude ... sometimes because I'm in a protective mode because I feel I've already been assaulted in some way. Or because I am ignorant of social ways. But I don't mean disrespect. Personally, I don't appreciate being unfairly criticized. Fair criticism is all right. At first I'll feel hurt but then when I think I'll feel better and see the criticism as pertaining to something I can improve. But if I'm right and the other person is wrong and I'm criticized while indeed I was not wrong, then I feel I've been treated unjustly and it becomes an obsession to make sure I was really right. I am obsessed with being right not because I want to feel I am better than others but because it feels to me I am not allowed to be wrong, if I make a mistake it would be something horrible. I want to give people as little occasion as possible to hurt me. I don't want to suck ... if people tell me 'you suck' then the very least I can do is make sure I don't suck and then they've unfairly criticised me ... but if they tell me I suck and I DO suck it's so much worse! I have so little going for me ...

Anyways... these factors all started when I was a child and they're mostly still with me ... and they've made my life a living hell so far in ways I could never explain to anyone. It doesn't seem possible to be like this and still to live in a world shared with other people. Like I say these things are ingrained in me, in the way I process sensory information ... I've been able now AFTER FORTY YEARS to moderate them but they're still with me, and they made the years in which I should have learnt how to live into an actual experience of relentless horror. My psyche today is still mostly a mass of scar tissue.

Hope you don't mind me appearing & disappearing again on threads. Firstly very quickly with regard the other thread - not sure whether I mentioned teaching - when I was a kid at junior school there was a local artist that used to come in as a teaching assistant - and try to teach us how to draw. I never had a natural talent for drawing but I was impressed with the way things could be created so quickly starting with a blank paper and a pencil in the hands of a skilled person.

The other thing I mentioned about self-checking whether one is thinking clearly or not ... it was a little more difficult to come up with something when I started to think about it - I couldn't really come up with generic approaches when probably each situation would be very specific. One general approach would be try to get a second opinion from people you could trust with the information ... something you did when contacting h2g2. Another general approach would be to try to switch the perspective away from yourself somehow ... for example if the situation involved a second party ... imagine what you would do if you were that second party (& imagine all the other things that might be taking up the time & thoughts of the second party) ... then compare that with what the second party is actually doing. Then consider if that might be reasonable or not.

With regard to extreme sensitivity, point 3). You said this occurred when you were about one year old. Can you really remember that early or was it something your grandmother told you when you were older. My earliest memories I think were when I was about late two year old / three.

Did you have any allergic reactions when you where a child; skin irritation, swelling in the throat, breathing difficulties, easy to bruise?

ps Someone that I know used to self harm himself which started when he was about 7 to 8 years old and he thought it was normal at the time. I'm not sure whether the reason for it has been discovered, I would need to talk to him about it - but I think it had something to with being put into a boarding school and the split up of his parents. He also never used to eat meat because he said the texture seemed strange to him, people would try to force him to eat meat as a young child but he would always spit the meat out. He started eating meat only at twelve / thirteen years of age when someone of his own age discussed with him a different way of eating / chewing the meat. He said as a child he used to be an extremely fussy eater and that the adults around him could get quite angry with him for it. I know one or two others who were extremely sensitive to what they would eat or not.

There seems quite a lot about this on the interweb although treatment for such a condition seems to be in its early / testing phase:
The condition seems to be "Sensory Processing Disorder: Type I – Sensory modulation disorder: Subtype: over-responsivity"

The wikipage for Sensory Processing Disorder is given below: but it captures such a broad range of conditions that most of this won't be applicable: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory_processing_disorder

Some more stuff - the subject seems so broad that there is going to be a lot of hit and miss in terms of relevancy:
http://www.whattoexpect.com/developmental-delays-in-children/sensory-processing-disorder-in-children.aspx
https://www.facebook.com/sensoryprocessing4adults

Not sure if this approach would help---perhaps with the social annxiety

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-21900202


It might help to get more other attuned.

Hello Stone Aart, no worries - drop by anytime you want! I am still puzzling on getting reliable feedback. My problem is that I honestly don't know how I can trust most 'sane' people I know ...

The story about the mustard and me cursing my grandma isn't something I can remember, my mom told me. But I do know I hated mustard for most of my life until I was adult.

And I do have memories going back to when I was one year old or even less. I can remember walking around in a 'walking frame' and my baby bed in which I used to sit, I am fairly confident about remembering my first birthday and how proud I was of having been one year old. I didn't realise there would be any further birthdays, I thought I had pretty much 'arrived' and achieved everything there was to achieve in life!

Thanks for those links. Elektra, I am actually not socially anxious ... just socially inexperienced. But I don't know ... my society is so messed up that it seems to me there is no way to really get along with people in general. I need to find people out of this messed up bunch to whom I can relate and who can become good friends to me and accept me for what I am ... and I will do the same for them. But it's a lost cause, in my opinion, trying to become close to people who would condemn me for what I am. I need close friendship ... superficial friendship is not worth much to me and feigned friendship even less. But I am going to try something ... I am going to call someone I know who I believe is also lonely and whom perhaps I should pay more attention to.

I also came across this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highly_sensitive_person

But that is a mostly positive take on the issue ... not mentioned how it can make life hell. Also most of this 'hypersensitivity' speaks of children ... not mentioned how it can last into adulthood and cause problems for adults, too.

I am still trying to figure it all out. Back when it started when I was a child I had to create all sorts of coping skills out of nowhere. I 'hacked' my brain and tried to rewire it with no idea what I was doing and what other problems I was creating in the process. By the time I was going to school I was assuming I was just weird and like no-one else. By the time I was in high school I often just wanted to die and felt worthless and like life was just a nightmare. I grew to adulthood with the idea that there's no point in wanting good things in life, that life simply was a lot of struggle and pain and that I didn't deserve anything anyways. Because of this I hardly ever thought of seeking *help* with my problems. They were just my cross to bear and since no-one else had anything like them there wouldn't be anyone who knew anything about them anyways.

In a way I was right ... in my childhood and most of my adulthood there honestly didn't seem to be any awareness that these things constituted problems for anyone. All of my teachers and mentors seemed to not give a fig about whether I or any other children were happy and well-adjusted. In my society there seemed to be no concept of mental illness or health. When I finally cracked up completely I still had great difficulty trying to explain to the psychologists and psychiatrists what my problems were ... they genuinely didn't seem to understand or appreciate what I was telling them no matter how I tried.

For this reason I sort of gave up on psychiatry and tried to find out more myself. And it does seem to me I'm finding out a heck of a lot more on my own than any psychiatrist or psychologist ever told me. But still there's always a danger when trying to self-diagnose ...

But also I found out I am not so unique, other people have similar problems. This has been the most important discovery. This also means that by understanding my own problems better, I might be able to help others. I really think we *all* could do with a better awareness of mental health.

Slight aside: this tells the story of an autistic child who was basically ignored until he was taught a means of writing - he then wrote a book about his condition that was a complete revelation to the adults that read It - giving an extraordinary insight into the way his mind worked. The BBC have serialised his book in a radio broadcast (the second link). Not sure whether or not you can access it from S. Africa.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-reason-i-jump-by-naoki-higashida-sceptre-1099-8686174.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/radio4/posts/The-Reason-I-Jump-Book-of-the-Week



I'm away for a few days now. If you go back to the third link of a previous post of mine ... the facebook one, I think there are sections in there that include adults who have the condition.


As a separate thought I just have, I wonder whether you are able to dissociate your own sense of "self" and "feelings" when talking to someone, i.e. whether you have the ability to just concentrate on what is being spoken about as something completely separate from yourself, and examining whether or not what is being spoken about makes rational sense. In academia one is taught to dissociate self and personal feelings with what is being spoken about ... in an attempt to consider the subject matter in an "objective matter". Some people even talk about themselves in the third person. The person who is able to do that, is in a position to better able to cope with personal criticism etc.

"objective matter" --> should have been "objective manner". There are a few other minor errors in my writing ... but hopefully the essence of what I am trying to say can be understood

Willem, you are most definitely not unique, at least not in the problems you have. I know one person who has very similar problems and I am aware of many others.

I don't think psychiatrists and psychologists have the answers, and over here at least they do not have the time to delve in to our Psyche.

Soldiers coming back with severe PTSD are not getting the help or understanding they need, and many other people with such problems are more or less dismissed after a few sessions, having achieved nothing.

I can understand you have difficulty finding people you can trust, I know someone else who fears everyone is against him. With a wide circle of friends it is easier to sort the 'wheat from the chaff' put we all come unstuck at some stage.

Good luck with your self diagnosis, after all no-one knows you better than you know yourself.

Websailor

No problem Stone Aart, I am at any rate having to think long-term when it comes to these problems.

The thing with trying to view something objectively is that it is impossible! You cannot disconnect from your own mind. If there's a problem with your mind, you cannot distance yourself from it because it affects absolutely everything. You can go to other people for advice, but you're still filtering everything they say through your own mental filters. You can 'imagine' yourself standing outside yourself, you can imagine yourself as another person, but you're still using your own mind to do that - you're still yourself with all your shortcomings, biases, misconceptions and insecurities. You can learn logic and rationality and reasoning as much as you can - and I have gone in depth into all that - but in the end you're still using your own mind. You can try for a connection with the cosmos, with the Universe, you can broaden your outlook as much as possible, but in the end you're still stuck inside your own head.

In this context: criticism (the kind that concerns me) means there is something wrong with my mind - now I know that - but the thing is I have to fix that, and to fix a broken thing using the same broken thing is the problem! That's why I get upset. It's not because I 'take it personally' it's because I see no way out.

But thanks for those links at any rate. I can to a degree relate to Autism and Asperger's Syndrome. I have some of the characteristics: spinning for instance - I still do that (but only in absolute privacy). I walked on my toes as a child (something often mentioned with Asperger's). There are many other similarities but I don't completely match either Autism or Asperger's.

Thanks Websailor ... but there is always a problem with self-diagnosis. It relates to what I said above. I might easily miss things a different person would pick up. I'm looking at myself but can't look at myself 'objectively'. I'm looking at myself with biased senses and interpreting myself with a flawed mind. But if you think about what I say above, I wouldn't be able to know if any psychiatrist or psychologist is really helping me 'right' ...

Yes, I do understand that Willem. You are not sick enough to accept yourself as you are, as some people can and that must be dreadfully frustrating.

The battle against your own mind I can understand as I have seen it in others, and in the past have felt the same myself. In fact on some things I still do. For most of my life I never felt I fitted in with others, but maybe that was being an only child, or the child of much older parents with very old fashioned views, or maybe I too have mild undiagnosed problems.

Then again, as you have said before 'what exactly IS normal'?

Websailor

How about we ask what SHOULD be normal?

Now with my limited abilities and all ... I think what SHOULD be normal is that people should not be plagued by so many fears and insecurities that they are paralyzed and hamstrung. That people should have friends and loved ones - people they love and who love them back. That people should know lots about the world and lots about science ... that they should believe what makes sense and be critical of what doesn't, whether inside or outside of mainstream science. That people should know logic and how to reason, and that they should have opportunity to exercise reasoning - opportunities to engage in friendly and respectful discussions and debates on everything. That people should most of the time feel happy or at least not profoundly unhappy ... that they should have a stable and unperturbed 'ground state' from which they can think clearly without too much distress. That they can make forays into sheer ecstasy, experience transcendent visions, and return safely from these to the ground state. That they also can experience sadness when sad situations arise as they inevitably will, but again return from these to the unperturbed ground state without too much difficulty. That they will have the opportunity to develop their talents and potentials, and that they have the opportunity to have dreams and ambitions and to follow them. That they have control over their lives and fate. That they recognize their responsibilities to their fellow human beings - that they spend time helping themselves and others - but that they also have enough free time for creative pursuits that perhaps don't immediately and directly, materially benefit anyone. That they have compassion with humans and non-humans, that they feel a connection to the world and the Universe.

On post 7, C.G. Jung remarked that he believed in giving his patients all the psychology they could handle.

I've always preferred that outlook and approach to one founded on mysticism and obfuscation.

I always mistrust the expertise and ethics of people who go in for that approach.




On the other hand, if one has a problem one wants to solve, the first step is to learn all one can about it, making that the foundation of the effort to solve the problem.

Since everyone lives in a larger social milieu, the opinions of others are a part of the larger picture, wrong-headed though they may be at times.

Sometimes care on issues of appearances can greatly ease an otherwise tense and difficult situation.




You mentioned your age, if I understood correctly, as circa 40.

That's an age at which one goes through a critical transformation of outlook, the 'plastic' intelligence characterizing youth, the kind of intelligence one uses to learn new things, giving way to an outlook founded in 'crystallized' intelligence, the kind of intelligence one uses to organize what one already knows.

(You'll find both those terms, 'plastic intelligence' and 'crystallized intelligence' in the standard psychological text books, along with the term 'critical stage', below.)

Its only a shift in relative dominance of the two kinds of thinking, but I must say that going through that 'critical stage' myself, it made marked improvement in my emotional equilibrium.

I've been much more comfortable with myself and much more forgiving generally, since.

"The thing with trying to view something objectively is that it is impossible! You cannot disconnect from your own mind ... but in the end you're still stuck inside your own head."


The difference between dreaming and the wakened state is that for the latter state you have access to external points of reference. Accessing those external points of reference helps to objectifying thought. One means of objectifying one's own thoughts - is to write them down on a piece of paper. In the written form, you can read and begin to analyse what has been written as if analysing something external to yourself. This can be considered a first step. This is why it is said that writing down your own thoughts can be helpful.

When people are in a wakened state where they are unable to determine whether or not they are thinking clearly or "right", then accessing those external points of reference can be helpful (e.g. accessing other people one can trust or accessing previously written instructions). For example people involved in emergency services or people involved in the army (soldiers) undergo intense training such that external instructions are drilled into them. In times of extreme stress, when the mind can begin to "breakdown" in terms of thinking straight, it is said that their "training kicks in" - they access internalised external instructions.

Hence one can do better in the wakened state to objectify thought than in the dream state.

ps on the medical side of things straight forward chemical imbalances in the brain can lead to altered perceptions and thoughts. It may be that some aspects of your condition can be simply controlled through use of drugs to correct for those chemical imbalances. Unfortunately I am not a medical doctor and I do not know enough about brain chemistry and its treatment to comment properly on this aspect of the matter. However I am aware of others that do receive medical drugs to control their condition ... but of course each case has to be considered individually.

There used to be a few medical doctors on h2g2 but they seem to appear less often nowadays.

Just a short post, for now:

I will write down some of the stuff that bugs me, Stone Aart ... in fact I'm writing some of them here. Any difference writing them on the 'net and writing them on paper???

I am taking antipsychotic medication right now.

I do think I need to see a psychiatrist for perhaps 'updating' my treatment ... but I don't know how to find one.

I'd simply ask for a referral the next I saw my regular physician, or call their office and ask for a referral if waiting that long would
mean an excessively long wait.

I find it strange that you do not have access to a psychiatrist but as that isn't the case I suppose the only way is through your GP. Your circumstances are so different now from when your parents were alive that I would have thought a Review would be essential. Over here monitoring isn't perfect but it sounds a great deal better than where you are.



Websailor

ITIWBS and Websailor ... I don't have a GP either. I'm pretty much out of the entire loop.