Category Archives: Symptoms

inappropriate or constricted affect

What on earth does that even mean?

A quick Google search describes constricted affect as a restriction in the range or intensity of display of feelings. While inappropriate affect is the display of feelings inappropriate for the situation.

I’ve already talked some about the restriction in the range or intensity of display of feelings in Symptom: Emotionally Inexpressive.

Inappropriate affect however, I haven’t talked about at all. It’s fairly easy for me to find examples of this in my own life.

Two memories in particular stand out to me:

The first, I was younger than 15 at least. Maybe 13-14 or a couple years younger? I was in an indoor swimming pool with my dad, his girlfriend and my youngest half brother. I knew the girlfriend could swim. She would jump into the deep end and dog-paddle around. Then, suddenly she began calling for help while splashing around in the deep end of the pool. Maybe she had suffered a panic attack and forgotten how to swim. She wasn’t a very good swimmer to begin with. I didn’t understand any of this. All I saw was that this woman, who I knew could swim, was splashing around as if she didn’t and people were starting to look concerned. It was so funny to me, I couldn’t help but laugh. Being the one closest to her, I simply swam over and pushed her to the shallow end of the pool where she could reach the bottom and get out of the pool herself. Chuckling all the way. It was an indoor pool. Where was the danger? The harm? Of course, I was reprimanded by the attending life guard for laughing. She could have drowned! But she knew how to swim! I know now, that being able to swim is not the same as being unable to drown.

Looking back now, I can see how inappropriate my laughter was. But I still remember how absurd the whole situation was to me. The way she splashed around looked really funny. I just didn’t understand the gravity of the situation.

The second memory is somewhat similar. This one was in high school. The high school I attended had a proud history with not a single suicide among its students. This is significant, given the high suicide rate in Greenland. That record was broken when the school was hit with a suicide epidemic in my second or third year. 3 students killed themselves that year. Including one of my classmates.

After every suicide, the school would gather all the students and hold a memorial. 1 minute’s silence for the poor sod, every single time. By the third time, it went from horribly tragic to downright absurd. Students started asking each other: “Who’s next?” As if there was some invisible serial killer going around offing random people.

At the last memorial, I stood at the back, chuckling to myself. Laughing in the face of tragedy. This time I was well aware of how inappropriate that was. It was no laughing matter. But it still struck me as funny. 3 people, who’d suffered were dead by their own hands and all the rest of us could offer was a speech and a minute’s silence. It was so goddamn sad it was funny.

But yeah, laughing at a memorial is hardly appropriate behavior.

We tend to do odd things when we don’t know what to do. Some lash out and become violent. Others are paralyzed and overcome with their own inadequacies. Some, like me develop a warped sense of humor and laugh at tragedy.

Behavior that is inexplicable or inappropriate when looking from the outside, usually makes sense when seen from the inside. Our behavior, no matter how insane are bound by their own internal logic. Even if we can’t quite explain it, it makes sense to us. It feels natural. I couldn’t not laugh.

Reacting to horrible things by smiling or laughing isn’t actually as out there as it might sound. Laughter and smiles are mechanisms deeply ingrained in humans. They have a relaxing, calming effect. Even disarming. After all, people will like someone who’s smiling better than someone who’s frowning. It’s an excellent coping and defense mechanism. For example, we automatically laugh when we get tickled. I don’t know about you, but I don’t particularly enjoy being tickled, even though it does feel good to laugh.

So, do I laugh at horrible things because I’m a horrible person who lacks empathy? I don’t think that’s the case at all. But it’s very easy to make that assumption. If tragedy makes you laugh, you’re assumed to be horrible, if comedy makes you cry, you’re assumed to be overly sensitive and if you get angry at nothing at all, you’re an excellent target for bullying.

So, I think inappropriate affect is an expression of a divide between what goes on on the inside and what goes on on the outside. Either due to the outside stuff being interpreted incorrectly inside your head, like putting 2 and 2 together and getting chicken pot pie, or because you’re reacting to something going on inside your mind that doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the outside world. I find that spending too much time with your own thoughts tends to dull awareness of what’s actually going on around you. My point is, the inappropriate behavior has meaning and logic behind it. Just not meaning or logic that’s obvious when seen from the outside.

Symptom: Emotionally inexpressive

This one I found incredibly hard to write about because it covers feelings and emotions, which I find incredibly difficult to talk about even on the best of days. I’ve written and rewritten the entire post about half a dozen times. I do hope the end result isn’t nearly as messy as my thoughts on the subject.

This is not a symptom I myself am fully aware of. I can’t tell how much or how little emotion I actually express unless others comment on it, which few actually do. And even then, they might comment on it in a sort of roundabout way, like someone might say I look more relaxed/happy after we’ve known each other for a while. I never actually realized I could be considered emotionally inexpressive until my doctor made note of it at the time of my diagnosis.

I don’t know how long I’ve had this particular symptom. For all I know, it’s something I’ve always had. Maybe it can even explain a lot of why I have such a hard time in social situations. It could be the reason I’ve sometimes felt as if there’s a glass wall between me and everyone else. It makes sense. People tend to avoid someone who’s aloof, who doesn’t mirror their own emotions. Someone who does not display weakness becomes unrelatable and unapproachable.

I can think of three main reasons why I might not express myself openly:

  1. I don’t actually know how I feel.
  2. I fear the consequences of my own feelings.
  3. I simply take a long time to warm up to new people.

First reason is difficult to deal with. I have to take the time to process physical and emotional cues to pinpoint my feelings. Sometimes, they can be very indistinct or difficult to identify.

Let’s take fear as an example. I tend to avoid social situations, but I hesitate to say that I’m afraid of social situations or have social anxiety. The behavior is the same: Avoidance. But I don’t easily recognize the telltale signs of fear: accelerated heart-rate, sweating, the feeling of unease, the worrying about what other people think of me, difficulty breathing. Some of these things do register on some level, the heart-rate and difficulty breathing in particular. But they don’t necessarily become conscious. I might realize I’m suddenly taking long, slow breaths to compensate before I register the actual signs of fear. The worry about what other people might think of me becomes internalized so I worry about what I think of me instead and I’m convinced I don’t actually care what others think of me, even though maybe I actually do on some level. Or maybe I don’t actually care what others think of me?

The emotions themselves become lost in coping mechanisms and strategies until I can’t fully tell what’s what or where the cause to my reactions lie. Maybe it’s a result of suppressing my feelings for too long? Or maybe I’m just not very sensitive to my own feelings for some reason? Maybe the connection between my brain and face muscles is just naturally weak? Maybe I just overthink everything and make it more complex than it really is?

As a result I sometimes find myself in truly upsetting situations without having the first clue why it is I find it so upsetting. It often takes me a while of careful introspection and ruminating over the whole situation before it finally dawns on me. Maybe someone said something I didn’t like and upset me, but I’m loathe to make mention of it before I know exactly what it was that upset me. Otherwise, what’s really the point? You can’t ask someone to apologize over or not repeat something you don’t even know what is. There’s very little as upsetting as being upset over nothing or not knowing what it is you’re so upset over.

On top of that, it becomes especially difficult if someone comments how I seem to feel one thing when in fact I feel something else entirely. Maybe someone would make a comment that I look more relaxed and comfortable, when in fact I’m bored out of my mind and about ready to run off screaming. It annoys me and I don’t know what to do about it. I don’t want to tell people not to voice their impression of me, quite the opposite. But what do I do when that impression is wrong? Do I correct them and say: “No, sorry this isn’t my happy and comfortable face, it’s my dying of boredom face”? Wouldn’t that make the whole thing more awkward? What if they’re right and I’m the one interpreting my own feelings wrong?

The second reason is maybe kind of complicated. In my experience, expressing negative feelings tend to produce negative outcomes. I express anger, the response is often offended and defensive, I express sadness, the response is sadness. I don’t want to make others sad! Or hurt or offended. Especially not those I care about. So, I prefer not to express those feelings. That way, I’m the only one suffering. In the short term anyways.

Because the truth is, hiding feelings doesn’t make them go away. Eventually, they’ll boil over. I know this. It’s just that it’s easier to cover them up, to wait until I’m beyond caring. The short term relief means more in the now, the long term consequences is a problem for another day.

In much the same way, I’m very conscious of not “showing weakness”, especially when I’m not quite sure about the company I’m in. I’ll avoid complaining and automatically bury any embarrassment. Embarrassment especially is something I’ve become very good at avoiding.  If I don’t acknowledge it, it’s almost as if it isn’t there at all. If anything bothers me, I’m not likely to point it out. I go to great lengths to avoid crying in front of others as much as possible. However, when I’m with friends and family, I love complaining about every little, silly thing. I’m far more talkative as well. Almost as if to compensate, letting out a little of the steam I’ve been bottling up. But only with those few I know very well and very, very rarely anything serious.

It’s not hard to imagine that this kind of thing would affect my relationships a great deal. I have easy, comfortable relationships with all of my immediate family and my closest friends. But the minute they start digging into the serious things, the relationship crumbles and I can’t get away fast enough. But family and friends are supposed to be the ones that can handle the serious stuff. Those who’ll stick around for the bad as well as the good.

But then, there’s very little as painful as the realization that you can’t actually trust someone you thought you could rely on, that you’re supposed to be able to rely on.

I’m lucky in that my family and friends are all loving and supportive. I know I can rely on them. But there’s always that little doubt. Because we’re all only human. We have faults and I’d rather live in faith than truly test it and risk rejection. I’m afraid that if I told someone that I truly needed them and they couldn’t be there, I’d break. It’s easier to tell myself that I don’t need to say it, that of course they’ll be there if I need them, but I don’t need them that much right now.

Lastly, it’s very likely that this symptom has not only affected my existing relationships, but the forming of new relationships (or lack thereof). I warm up extremely slowly to new people. If I don’t know them, I don’t know if they’re worth spending time with, but I can only know them by spending time with them. And if I lack emotional expression, it’s likely it would put a great many people off. After all, why would you spend time with someone if you can’t even tell if they’re the least bit happy to spend time with you?

Mulling over this symptom and the possible problems and after talking to a social worker about how she connects with the people she works with, some interesting questions came to mind: Why do we find some people more genuine, approachable and relateable? Not because they’re perfect. We tend to resent people who seem to do so much better than us, seemingly without effort, do we not? However, when we see someone with flaws, someone who has to work hard for every, little victory, we can sympathize. They become more human to us. They become like us.

Everyone struggles with something and the struggle is something we can usually bond over. Things like embarrassment, frustration, fear, sadness, feeling inadequate. Most, if not all of us have been there one way or another. It invokes sympathy. I think we like being able to sympathize with those we’re with. But we tend to hate being sympathized, it quickly becomes pitied and patronized. I certainly do.

But then, by refusing to show weakness, by pretending nothing at all bothers me, I may inadvertently tell people, that I’m superior to them, that I wouldn’t be able to understand their flaws, that we have nothing to talk about or bond over. Essentially that I surely wouldn’t give them poor, faulty mortals the time of the day.

I’m often described as very intelligent and seem very mature and competent, but in truth I often feel so very far from all those things that the compliments sometimes end up seeming like outright lies to me. Me, intelligent? Hurr-durr, thanks I guess? I can’t seem to work out even the simplest of problems though. Competent? Yet routinely defeated by a pile of dishes. Mature? LOL.

I like being praised and admired, even if I can’t quite believe the admired traits truly are ones I possess. It’s certainly better than pity or resentment. I want those around me to see the good, not the bad. So I tend to cover up the bad. Perhaps with time and practice, I’ll be able to open up more and then I’ll learn that I truly don’t have to be lonely.

Symptom: Social Withdrawal

Social withdrawal is a negative symptom of Schizophrenia and can be present in Schizotypal disorders as well. It is when a person shuns social contact and spends large quantities of time by themselves, largely ignoring the world around them.

I think, for much of it, this tendency is closely tied to social anxiety. After all, we tend to avoid what we fear and brings us discomfort. But that’s not the whole reason behind it. At least for myself, sometimes I just get so tired or so distracted that social interaction becomes more of a burden than a pleasure. It simply takes too much effort. My brain, like a sore muscle, screams out for rest so it can recuperate.

For myself, I often have periods of time, a day or two usually, sometimes up to several weeks, where I can’t stand the thought of looking at another human being. During those periods of time I find communication, even by text, extremely difficult.

Usually, these periods of isolation coincide with depressive periods. I’ll huddle in my room, in front of the computer, immersing myself in fiction. Sometimes I’ll spend days just playing video games. Other times I’ll binge-watch TV or anime series or Youtube videos, or spend every waking hour just reading mindless, fluffy romance novels. Just anything that keeps my mind turned off, away from reality. If one pastime fails to distract me well enough, I’ll move on to another before I have to think too deeply on what it is I’m doing.

Any time I find myself under any kind of pressure, I risk lapsing into this isolation tendency. Exam periods were especially harrowing. I had to retake a couple exams, but somehow I managed to get through them in the end.

Too much social contact can also be a serious strain. I get exhausted just by being around a lot of people, even when I don’t have to talk to anyone. Talking to a lot of people over a period of time seems to be especially draining though. Even just spending too much time with family can leave me exhausted and irritable, to the point where simply having another person just quietly breathing in the same room becomes unbearable.

I’m extremely introverted by nature, and so I actually need some time to myself, to recharge and relax.  Otherwise I end up mentally exhausted and stressed out. Generally, a day or two a week, without social obligations is enough to keep me going, so I try to plan around that.

My most recent bout of social withdrawal, was likely brought on by too much social contact. I just simply couldn’t bear the thought of seeing, let alone talking to another human being. I felt almost like I’d shatter, if I did. Thankfully, usually after a couple days, or sometimes a week or two, depending on my level of exhaustion, I perk up again and become able to face the world once more.

I think, there are several points to keep in mind about social withdrawal. One is personality. If you have an introverted personality like mine, you might benefit from more time alone. But too much time alone isn’t good for anyone, regardless of personality.

During my worst time, I spent weeks by myself, hardly speaking a word to anyone. During that time, I found my speech greatly deteriorated. When I finally did speak, I spoke slow and haltingly, spending more time searching for words. My more psychotic symptoms became more pronounced, I felt increasingly detached from my body and the world around me. The more time I spent alone, the harder it became to simply set foot out the door. I was “lucky” enough that my local supermarket was open 24/7 at the time, and so I’d do my grocery shopping in the middle of the night to avoid other people as much as possible. I could hardly function day to day and that’s when I finally realized, I couldn’t keep going at the rate I was.

This leads me to another point to keep in mind: Day to day function. If your social withdrawal impacts your day to day life negatively, if you find your mood deteriorating, find tasks such as grocery shopping, cooking, cleaning, showering etc. increasingly more difficult, that’s obviously a big problem. Any time you spend alone isn’t in and of itself a problem, as long as it doesn’t affect your quality of life and your relationships.

If you can, holding up your behavior before and after getting sick can also be a good idea. Were you much more social before you got sick? If so, then the social withdrawal most likely due to your illness. As with any symptom, proper treatment might greatly reduce, if not completely eliminate it. Although, it goes without saying, that restoring a ruined social life is very hard work. Like most any course of recovery, it takes time and practice. You don’t generally start running the moment the cast is off your broken leg either.

Like our muscles, our brain requires use to function properly. This includes the parts of our brain governing language, speech and social skills. The more they’re used, the better and easier it becomes.

Since my biggest bout of isolation, I’ve come a long way, simply by interacting with the people around me, weekly talks with my psychologist, frequent visits to my dad and the like. I was also very lucky to get into a social skills training group, where we meet every week and take up various problems we face in social interaction. We’ll take a problem one of us faces and together discuss strategies and ways to overcome it.

For instance, maybe someone is facing a pending family gathering and is nervous about seeing family members they haven’t seen or talked to for ages. So then we’ll talk about what makes the person nervous, the negative thoughts they face like: “They’re not going to like me” or difficult questions like: “What do I say if they ask how I’ve been?”, “do I tell them about my illness?”, “if I don’t want to talk about it, what do I say if they ask?”

Usually, by the end of it, we’ll have a plan of action for the person and a whole host of good tools and ideas for everyone else.

To summarize: Social withdrawal may be a symptom of illness, but it’s only a problem if it’s bad for your relationships and quality of life. If it does become a problem, it can be treated with training and working out good strategies. Cultivating good relationships is crucial for a good quality of life regardless of illness, health or personality.

 

Lastly, these are, as always simply my own thoughts and experiences. I am by no means an expert and my experiences may not completely reflect yours. Take what you can use and leave the rest.

Symptom: Paranoid Thinking

When asked whether I suffer from paranoid thinking, I’d say no. I don’t really think the people around me want to deliberately hurt me. I don’t automatically think the worst of other people or assume anything about their speech or behavior without good evidence. Not that I’m aware of, anyways.

I do have this sense that I mustn’t show weakness, or show if I’m nervous/afraid/uncomfortable, that if I show other people that they can hurt me, they probably will. It doesn’t register to me as an actual fear. I simply quietly avoid it, let it pass me by without a conscious thought. And so, when people inevitably hurt or disappointment me, I know it wasn’t on purpose, because if they’d known, then surely they wouldn’t have said or done what they did. Maybe I’m afraid to find out that if I did give others the opportunity, that they would want to hurt me deliberately? So it’s better to hide and forgive any accidental toe-stepping.

I’ve heard that sometimes people suffering from schizotypal disorder can have small, momentary paranoid delusions, or maybe paranoid stray thoughts. They might be very self-conscious about it and feel that the thought is silly, that “of course my friend isn’t a government spy” or “bodysnatchers isn’t real and mrs. Jensen down the hall isn’t actually an alien in disguise” but… Often, such thoughts are fairly quickly and easily dismissed.

Sometimes, the idea might feel all too real and even if they sound silly to others, they make perfect sense to the person experiencing them. Those tend to enter the realm of full-blown paranoid delusions. Thankfully, I’ve never experienced this myself, that I can remember. I’ve enough in worrying that my subjective reality isn’t quite the same as objective reality, or the reality experienced by everyone else, so that there’s no chance I’ll ever be able to truly understand what others are talking about, or make myself understood. Could that be considered a paranoia?

Paranoid thinking could also be things such as, if a friend takes a little longer to reply to a text, “it’s because she’s angry or doesn’t like me”, or “everyone at work hates me,” even though there’s no real evidence for it. It could also be the immediate assumption that if someone says something hurtful, it’s deliberate, or interpreting general comments as referring to you personally. I heard a story of a man once, who, while suffering from paranoid delusions, became convinced that the happy smiley faces staff members left on whiteboard messages for general use were in fact caricatures of him, which the staff drew purely to mock him. It might sound like a silly, little thing, but it’s truly deeply disturbing and hurtful for the one experiencing it.

Mostly, my own fears are never so concrete or focused, although I’ll admit I’m absolutely terrified of ghosts (even though I don’t really believe they exist, I can’t say they definitely don’t exist either). It’s usually just a vague sense of “I’m not safe”, “I’m alone, but it feels like there’s someone else here” or “I’m completely, utterly alone in a cold and uncaring world”. I’m aware the latter is an incredibly ungrateful thought, that I have people close to me who care a great deal about me. But well, they have their own problems. They have their own lives to worry about. They don’t and can’t possibly understand what I’m going through. Although in truth, I’m sure they understand and recognize a great deal more than I’d think.

I hate this part of me, who thinks this way. Like an overly dramatic teenager. But I can’t quite get rid of her. It’s silly and stupid, but it’s the way I feel, and feelings aren’t so simple to change. The fact I feel ashamed for feeling this way in the first place makes it all the harder to admit to and discuss, even just with myself.

I don’t know what to do about the vague feeling of being unsafe. Mostly, I just try to ignore it, distract myself, turn on the lights so I can see around the room, play some music, read a book. But this often ensures I won’t get much sleep that night and I’ll be tired and cranky the next day.

Sometimes, if I catch myself thinking or feeling something negative, I use techniques from CBT (That’s Cognitive Behavior Therapy, not the… kinky one) and try to challenge the thought or feeling using reason. I’ll ask myself things like: Where am I? Have I ever experienced something bad here? How likely is it, that this thought/feeling is true and reasonable? If I’m feeling alone, maybe I’ll challenge the feeling by texting a friend. She usually texts back. Maybe I’ll line up examples in my head where my bad expectations were justified versus where they were proved wrong and usually I’ll find just enough examples to put my mind at ease. I can use this technique to determine the likelihood of a thought being true as well. Like, “if Mrs. Jensen down the hall were an alien, what’s the evidence for it? Could there be other, more likely explanations? Maybe she just had a bad day and goes back to normal soon enough?”

 

I’d love to hear if anyone else experience anything like what I’ve described and how you deal/cope with them.

Symptom: Unusual Perceptual Experiences

This is perhaps one of the more insane-sounding symptoms, but also one of the hardest for me to correctly understand and identify. In fact, it took me many years to realize what they were.

Sometimes, when I’m really stressed, I see shadows, either flickering out of the corner of my eye or appearing and disappearing from one blink of an eye to the next. They were always so brief they weren’t really worth paying much attention to. Easy to ignore and forget. At most, they might weird me out a little, but I got over them quick enough.

Whenever I stare at a blank wall, more often than not it will begin to waiver, wriggle and squirm as if it were alive. This happens so often it hardly registers as unusual. I know the wall is completely inanimate and that it’s just my eyes creating the illusion, so I can just ignore it.

Sometimes I’d hear my mom calling my name in this really annoying voice, even when she wasn’t. But I haven’t heard her calling my name since I moved away from home.

Phantom noise or cries is fairly common and not necessarily a sign of insanity. Parents to infants might experience hearing their baby crying even when it’s not, or perhaps they’ll hear a random noise, like a bird call or the like, and it’d sound like their baby crying. I suppose the stress of too little sleep and too much awful noise can get to anyone. But knowing this, I never really thought of my ‘hearing’ things as anything unusual or a cause for concern. In the end, it was easily ignored and soon became little more than background noise.

I’ve had problems with neighbors playing too loud music because the walls are stupid-thin, but sometimes I felt as if I was just hearing things. As soon as I left my room to complain to my neighbor, I wouldn’t be able to hear anything at all. Usually, there’d be a window or door open and that’s what made the sound carry. Other times the music would be loud enough to hear from outside as well. To this day, I don’t know if some of the noise was created solely in my head just out of the stress created by the actual noise. But that period of about two years was the one period I felt the most insane in all my life.

The worst case of seeing something that wasn’t there, that I can remember was when I was still living at home. One evening I saw a girl sitting in the corner of my room. But it wasn’t exactly how I’d thought seeing things was like. I could see the empty corner clearly with my eyes and knew she wasn’t there. But at the same time, I had the feeling she was there and I could see her clearly in my mind’s eye. Even though I knew she wasn’t actually there, I just couldn’t get her out of my mind. I had to leave the room and go sit in the living room for a while. I was obviously upset and worried my mother, but I couldn’t explain why or what happened to me. How do you explain seeing something, but not really? I never saw it as “seeing things”. Because it wasn’t exactly at the level of A Beautiful Mind, now was it?

When I was first questioned by a doctor on whether I heard or saw things that weren’t there, I said no. Because the squirmy walls, the shadows, the strange girl, the phantom noises, those weren’t “seeing” or “hearing” things, they were just a trick of my over-active imagination. They weren’t the signs of a mental illness. I was depressed, not insane.

It wan’t until much later, when I attended a lecture by a woman suffering from Schizophrenia and she described hearing voices as very similar to having a song stuck in your head, that my view of my own experiences began to change. As she said, most people have experienced a catchy song continuously playing in their head. She said that the voices were like that, but talking instead of playing music. And a lot more oppressive, upsetting and disruptive.

She described how she learned to cope with the voices, identifying when they grew worse, which was usually when she was especially tired or stressed out. They weren’t just always there. Knowing when and why they appeared helped her overcome the negative voices. Then, instead of being a torment, they became a reminder to take better care of herself.

Hers is the best advice I’ve found to cope with unusual perceptual experiences. The shadows and phantom cries aren’t the first warning sign that I’m starting to get overwhelmed and stressed out, but they’re probably the most obvious and easily identified.
These days, shadows hardly appear in the corner of my eyes, but when they do, I try to pay more attention to what I’m doing and how I’m feeling.

Occasionally, when I’m really tired, I’ve also started to ‘hear’ a whole crowded restaurant in my head, full of broken pieces of conversations, fragments of sentences that make little sense. It makes thinking or focusing on things really hard. Luckily, it doesn’t last very long and it’s not something that actually keeps me from sleep.

The unusual perceptual experiences I’ve described here may not sound very severe and in most cases are fairly easy to ignore. But when they start to chase you out of a room, keep you from going out the door or drive you so much to distraction you don’t have any attention left for the things you need or actually want to do, they can become very debilitating indeed. Like a hundred little streams that become a large river.

In summary: Unusual perceptual experiences can be small, almost trivial and little more than a distraction. But if that distraction is actually really upsetting or disruptive, it may be worth it to pay more attention to the situations in which they arise. The nature and experience of the unusual perceptual experiences can vary greatly from person to person. Some may not be able to distinguish them from reality, which is upsetting enough all on its own, whereas others may experience them as a figment of an over-active and out of control imagination. The point is, it’s not something you can control.
Reducing stress can reduce the impact of unusual perceptual experiences significantly.

Symptoms: Odd Thinking

I figured, rather than just copying the many pages describing schizotypal disorder, I’d take my time going through each symptom and just give my own perspective on them.

So let me start with the one that might be the most obvious when reading this blog: Odd thinking and speech (or in this case, writing).

The Encyclopedia of Mental Disorders I found here writes this: “People with schizotypal personality disorder may have speech patterns that appear strange in their structure and phrasing. Their ideas are often loosely associated, prone to tangents, or vague in description. Some may verbalize responses by being overly concrete or abstract and insert words that serve to confuse rather than clarify a particular situation, yet make sense to them.”

It’s a bit iffy and looking from the outside, it might be a bit hard to put your finger on exactly what it is that makes the speech or writing sound weird exactly.

Seen from the inside, I’m not actually sure myself that my thinking or speech really is that odd compared to anyone else’s. I make perfect sense to my own ears. The only clue I have is the way other people react to the things I say and do, which don’t always make any sense to me. As if they heard something completely different from what I said. Although it’s pretty rare.

In conversation and writing, I think I tend to turn to metaphors and allegories a lot when trying to explain things and depending on how complex the topic is, I might never actually manage to get to the true core of the matter. But it’s not something I’ve ever registered as a problem myself. I can imagine how it might become a little tedious for some.

Sometimes in conversation, I’ll taste test words, trying to gauge whether it fits the thought or feeling I’m trying to describe. If I’m writing, Thesaurus can be a big help finding just the right word. In speech, I’m stuck with my own memory and gut feeling.

Whether in speech or writing, it takes me a lot of time to organize my thoughts. The harder the topic, the longer it takes. On top of that, when I get nervous or insecure, my speech becomes very slow and halting. I’m sure you can imagine how that might make conversation a bit tedious and uncomfortable for everyone.

Most times, this symptom is really more of an annoyance than an actual problem for me, but it can get in the way of communication and thus personal relationships. It does tend to build up over time and the negative experiences stick out more in my memory than the positive experiences.

The little misunderstandings sometimes makes me hesitant to talk. Especially when I’m already in a mood or tired. Then it’s easier not to say anything at all rather than risk talking myself into a mess and waste time and resources I don’t have.

The misunderstandings unfortunately aren’t only one way. Sometimes, people have this annoying habit of not saying what they actually mean. Like for instance, someone might say: “It’s really hot in here.” And apparently that’s supposed to translate to: “Can we open a window?” Except sometimes, it’s really just an observation, not a request, and how on earth is anyone supposed to tell the difference?!

It takes me a while to realize when someone wants me to do something when they don’t tell me outright what they want and more often than not, it’ll be much too late when I finally realize what they actually meant.

Flirting and banter is perhaps the most difficult for me to deal with, because I get confused easily and end up doubting my understanding of the other person. Then, what’s supposed to be fun and lighthearted becomes a scary minefield at the flip of a coin.

The better I know a person and the longer I’ve known them, the easier it is to understand them and make myself understood. I have pretty good, close relationships with my immediate family and I have two very close friends whom I’ve known for ages. But I haven’t really managed to form a decent friendship with anyone since 7th grade, maybe barring a single internet friend. Even though the relationships I do have are generally good, misunderstandings can still make problems sometimes. The good thing about the old, close relationships is they don’t break so easily.

The problems with misunderstandings has made me very concerned with word choice and whether or not they mean the same to others as they mean to me. I’ll often agonize over word-choice and end up not saying what I wanted to say, because I’m afraid of hurting others’ feelings. In my most hopeless moments, I’m convinced that words really don’t mean the same to others as they do to me and that I’ve no hope at all for properly communicating my thoughts and feelings to anyone, ever.

My point is, communication becomes a whole lot more complicated and anxiety-inducing than it needs to be. It’s exhausting and so it’s so much simpler and easier to just – not.

The problem with this symptom isn’t that my brain’s a little funky in the way it works. When it comes right down to it, it’s not as if it’s all that alien. Everyone differs in their thinking one way or another. The problem is the isolating effect it has on my life.

It’s easy to imagine that my thinking and writing style might turn out to be a problem for what I’m trying to do with this blog. I try to keep on point and my posts are pretty heavily edited before I publish them. But things do slip. Sometimes, a digression doesn’t register to me as such. So I’d appreciate any loose threads pointed out to me, or if something comes out unclear. I do want my writing to be both legible and if not at all entertaining, at least useful in some way.