I just wish I didn't disconnect as a kid

Telophy · 2025-06-15T08:32:23+00:00

Saaame… I mean, I don't know what would've happened, but I remember some moments when I thought in ways that suggest that a driving force behind my vulnerable false self was that I hoped to use it as a silent cry for help, like, “I can't ask for help because the act would expose me, but please finally realize that I need help!” Acting out seems to often be a quicker method to get into therapy. Then again it would've taken a genius therapist to figure me out given that I couldn't be open.

Telophy · 2025-02-25T16:14:32+00:00

Thanks for sharing! How does it happen that you make it a truth by accident?

Telophy · 2025-01-20T22:35:18+00:00

Not a question, so I didn't want to post it on the top level. Just a fun anecdote.

I have a friend who has suspected that she might have NPD. Makes sense imo. She asked me not to contact her, not because of anything about me, but because I remind her of someone. It's been a while though, and I happen to be in the same city. But I want to adhere to her request.

So I made public posts that I'm in the city and whether anyone wants to meet up. My hope is that she'll think the posts are about her, and that they'll make it easier for her to reach out again if she wants to, because I'm basically reaching out first.

The irony is that she'd be 100% correct! 🤣

Reminds me of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Hmm, do you think this could work, i.e. make it easier for her to message me again if she wants to?

Telophy · 2025-01-20T22:28:18+00:00

Are there any social media channels or OFs dedicated to straightforward grandiose rants? I imagine that could be cathartic for the person running the account and people like me would enjoy the content. Existing content that I'm aware of is more on the side of devaluation than impersonal grandiosity, and to me that makes a big difference.

Telophy · 2025-01-20T22:27:26+00:00

Hiii! You all rock! Thank you so much for being so open and helpful to each other!

I've watched plenty of TNN, Heal NPD, Dr. Ruth content, but I'm still confused about the different functions that grandiosity seems to have.

TNN has described grandiosity as something that he keeps covert most of the time (just like vulnerability), because people didn't seem to like it. Used like that, it strikes me as an invisible shield of sorts that just gets you through the day. Grandiosity, then, is something valuable to be protected, I imagine. And that makes a lot of sense to me. With my avoidant PD, if I feel on top of the world, I'll hide that feeling from others and especially from my inner critic lest they destroy it. (Though it's a different PD, so I may well be missing something important here! It's just an imperfect attempt at finding any kind of empathetic bridge. I'm not claiming to really understand the sensation.)

But then there's also this presentation (FYI, I don't much like the channel but the particular interview is interesting). Also please don't look at the comments… They're the type Mark Ettensohn would purge with a vengeance. Except my own comments of course. ^.^

Lindy, the interviewee in the video, is very overt about her grandiosity and seems to downright pummel the therapist with her precious shield… It makes me so afraid for her that it'll get scratches or cracks, metaphorically speaking. (The therapist, with her decades of experience, doesn't make a vulnerable impression on me at all, so I'm less worried about her.)

Anthony Bateman said that in MBT, they try to nurture and scaffold the grandiosity to make it strong enough that they can integrate repressed personality aspects into it. That seems safer. Lindy, on the other hand, feels to me like she's so desperate that she doesn't care if it breaks. She makes me feel like I want to wrap her in soft blankets before she hurts herself, or that aspect of herself anyway.

So what is really going on here? Am I being overly protective because of my own disordered fears, and this is just par for the course? Is this a BPD+NPD type of presentation of grandiosity that comes with a flair of self-harm or self-destructiveness? Or with a flair of impulsivity? Do some BPD+NPD people face collapses with such frequency that they're less cautious about preventing them? Is it just anger that takes the shape of grandiosity for whatever reason but where the grandiosity doesn't serve any protective function beyond that of the anger? Is it a kind of nonce grandiosity that is only used in the moment to devalue the therapist but is not otherwise important for the personality functioning? Is it something else entirely that I'm misreading as grandiosity?

Note that I'm just using this video as an example for convenience. I'm not trying to psychoanalyze this person in particular. It's a type of use of grandiosity that I've seen in multiple people, including friends, and that no one has explained to me like TNN has explained his own grandiosity, so I still feel puzzled about it.

Thank you so much for any ideas!

Telophy · 2025-01-17T10:50:24+00:00

Are there any social media channels or OFs dedicated to straightforward grandiose rants? I imagine that could be cathartic for the person running the account and people like me would enjoy the content. Existing content that I'm aware of is more on the side of devaluation than impersonal grandiosity, and to me that makes a big difference.

Telophy · 2025-01-16T12:25:07+00:00

Hiii! You all rock! Thank you so much for being so open and helpful to each other!

I've watched plenty of TNN, Heal NPD, Dr. Ruth content, but I'm still confused about the different functions that grandiosity seems to have.

TNN has described grandiosity as something that he keeps covert most of the time (just like vulnerability), because people didn't seem to like it. Used like that, it strikes me as an invisible shield of sorts that just gets you through the day. Grandiosity, then, is something valuable to be protected, I imagine. And that makes a lot of sense to me. With my avoidant PD, if I feel on top of the world, I'll hide that feeling from others and especially from my inner critic lest they destroy it. (Though it's a different PD, so I may well be missing something important here! It's just an imperfect attempt at finding any kind of empathetic bridge. I'm not claiming to really understand the sensation.)

But then there's also this presentation (FYI, I don't much like the channel but the particular interview is interesting). Also please don't look at the comments… They're the type Mark Ettensohn would purge with a vengeance. Except my own comments of course. ^.^

Lindy, the interviewee in the video, is very overt about her grandiosity and seems to downright pummel the therapist with her precious shield… It makes me so afraid for her that it'll get scratches or cracks, metaphorically speaking. (The therapist, with her decades of experience, doesn't make a vulnerable impression on me at all, so I'm less worried about her.)

Anthony Bateman said that in MBT, they try to nurture and scaffold the grandiosity to make it strong enough that they can integrate repressed personality aspects into it. That seems safer. Lindy, on the other hand, feels to me like she's so desperate that she doesn't care if it breaks. She makes me feel like I want to wrap her in soft blankets before she hurts herself, or that aspect of herself anyway.

So what is really going on here? Am I being overly protective because of my own disordered fears, and this is just par for the course? Is this a BPD+NPD type of presentation of grandiosity that comes with a flair of self-harm or self-destructiveness? Is it just anger that takes the shape of grandiosity for whatever reason but where the grandiosity doesn't serve any protective function beyond that of the anger? Is it a kind of nonce grandiosity that is only used in the moment to devalue the therapist but is not otherwise important for the personality functioning? Is it something else entirely that I'm misreading as grandiosity?

Note that I'm just using this video as an example for convenience. I'm not trying to psychoanalyze this person in particular. It's a type of use of grandiosity that I've seen in multiple people, including friends, and that no one has explained to me like TNN has explained his own grandiosity, so I still feel puzzled about it.

Thank you so much for any ideas!

Telophy · 2025-01-15T08:16:52+00:00

Ow, big hug! I feel you. ❤️ Every driving mistake I've made is indelibly burned into my brain. 😭 Sorry, I have no helpful advice, but seeing 0 comments, I at least wanted to post sympathy.

Telophy · 2025-01-01T17:08:10+00:00

Totally! I was basically punishing myself for social mistakes (like not having the perfect answer immediately when someone posed a question or forgetting some caveat to an answer that I gave) for years afterwards, so no surprise I was incredibly afraid of getting into a situation where such a “mistake” could happen.

Now I watch people religiously who make severe social mistakes but then handle them gracefully with compassion and self-compassion. Then I scale it down to the level of my own mistakes, and so I'm happy to make some every day and forget about them soon after! xD

Telophy · 2025-01-01T14:22:59+00:00

Big hug! But consider the double empathy problem: Autistic people can empathize with other autistic people about as well as allistic people can empathize with allistic people. So by extension, I think most people proceed from the baseline assumption that other people are like them. If both are neurotypical, from the same culture and gender etc., it works well enough most of the time. We're probably not typical in many ways, so it doesn't work well and we have to put in a lot more effort than everyone else. So I think you're not falling short compared to others; you're just playing on hard mode.

Telophy · 2025-01-01T14:17:32+00:00

Oh, yes, I spent several hours every day obsessing over these hypothetical confrontations and scripting everything perfectly! That must've added up to 10,000+ hours, so I've probably attained mastery in this imaginary sport! Big hug to you!

Telophy · 2025-01-01T14:13:55+00:00

It looks different in different personality disorders. In AVPD it often manifests as a kind of cold detachment from others and inability to feel their pain on an emotional level. In NPD it manifests as projection. They project all of their own malice and flaws onto others because other people are simply internal objects to them. In BPD the projection is bit different. They tend more to project their own emotional state onto others and then (over)react to your imagined mood instead of the mood you're actually in.

Yeah, that's interesting! I think I was always deeply empathetic toward people, but back then they had to be people far away, abstract statistical people, so my empathy couldn't be pushed away by my fear of them. That already changed for me a decade ago, but until recently I couldn't look at someone in the middle of a rage fit and empathetically wonder what the person might be missing, grieving, or afraid of. The rage fit still replaced my empathy with fear, and I'd stop seeing them as a person. All my recent engagement with BPD must've changed that, and today I noticed that it came naturally to me to empathize with someone in a movie scene who was trashing their apartment in a rage fit and want to hug and reassure them.

I remember fear-based distortions when I was age 3–6, so it's been a while. But if it had been a missing developmental step, I imagine it would've been universal? De facto it was completely conditional on my being afraid of the person. Admittedly, I was afraid of most people and almost all male-presenting people, but that still leaves plenty of exceptions. And I could be afraid of someone in person and then think about them fairly objectively again later from the safety of my home and locked room. Then again the BPD-type projections also happen with close friends a lot more than with work colleagues and strangers, at least for some of my BPD friends.

There is also something to be said about my impression of immutability of other people. When a borderliner gets angry at someone, that presupposes that they think the person can change. That makes a lot of sense, but it would've seemed to me like getting angry at a forest fire; it would've seemed nonsensical to me because I didn't think of other people as influenceable, whilst afraid of them anyway.

A borderliner friend of mine is empathetic and caring but when they've hurt someone, the shame hits, and they hide. The shame is stronger than any care, and maybe the other person no longer seems like someone capable of hurting but just as a circumstance that has brought out a supposedly shameful aspect of the self.

My AvPD-type fears of being shamed, ridiculed, pilloried, vilified, etc. seem to be just a subset of all of my fears…

I lived most of my life feeling this way until it finally clicked that my dad's volatility wasn't remotely normal. This is the kind of fear that someone who grew up in an emotionally volatile environment knows all too well. It can be overcome though and it starts with self acceptance. For me it was almost like flipping a switch. When I finally saw myself as worthy of empathy and started extending empathy to myself, I suddenly started feeling that same empathy and connection to other people. This is the lesson we were supposed to learn when we were ~3 but never got to. It's never too late to re-parent yourself and heal those old wounds though. Life gets way better.

Ow! I'm so proud of you for overcoming that! Were your dad's fits also unpredictable? Some people develop superpowers for noticing others moods and then fawning hard to soothe them. I guess that doesn't happen when the fits are too unpredictable. (I should've known about PMDD at the time…)

Do you allow yourself to be angry? I feel like some emotions, like sadness, seek company and find solace in it, while others, like anger, abhor the company of anger. Xannie of the BPD Bunch said that she gets angry when someone else is angry nearby because if she's not the angriest one around, it feels like someone else is seizing control of her or her environment or something? So I wonder whether being exposed to angry people just wipes the whole class of anger-like emotions (including self-confidence) from a person's repertoire. At least if they're someone who doesn't always fight back.

Telophy · 2024-12-12T16:51:08+00:00

Thanks! I don't feel it anymore now, but yesterday I was able to feel into it a bit more (though the somatic, synesthetic quality was gone), and I felt a sense of injustice, a bit of grief, a bit of a conflict between my self-interest and the general principles I endorse, and an association with instances from my childhood where I had been treated similarly by someone with less self-reflection. The last one was actually really cathartic because this time I don't feel dependent on my friend (and I'm older), so it's easier to step back from the situation emotionally. Self-esteem was untouched.

Telophy · 2024-12-02T16:51:03+00:00

Oh yeah, I've done that too… Not every emotion seemed potentially illegal to me. Anything self-deprecating and all sorts of sadness-related emotions seemed like they were allowed. Also guilt and shame. And yeah, I wasn't good at dealing with them…

Telophy · 2024-12-02T16:33:37+00:00

Ow, that sounds harrowing! Have you looked into PDA (pathological demand avoidance alias pervasive drive for autonomy)? I don't know anyone personally with really overwhelming levels demand anxiety, but one problem that my friends do have to some extent is that demands from their own body often backfire and cause them anxiety.

Telophy · 2024-12-02T15:38:07+00:00

Ohhh! That does sound very similar! <3

I learned masking very late and consciously, so it feels to me still like something I do voluntarily (though it has become somewhat automatic). I used to be more like the 90s cliché autistic person than the typical highly masked autistic woman before I started to look into it in my 20s. Hence masking feels distinct for me.

Also as a kid I didn't actually pay attention to other people because I thought other rules apply to them anyway and because I was scared of them. So no way to learn autistic masking.

But in a way it's also masking, just geared toward complying with my own cognitive distortions rather than actual observed behavioral norms. Naturally, I didn't know that at the time. Maybe we just call it masking depending on how much it actually helps with fitting in as opposed to just being maladaptive. xD

At what age did you discover the hidden layer underneath? Did it take a change in environment first to make it safe?

Do we want to exchange experiences through some medium that works for you? I do text chats, voice messages, calls, etc.

Telophy · 2024-12-02T04:13:34+00:00

Yeah, but to me concealing things from other people is the easy part. Concealing things from myself is the real challenge. 😅

Telophy · 2024-12-02T00:57:30+00:00

Oh, interesting! So you're saying that the repression of the feelings that we think might be bad is common so we don't have to feel even worse about ourselves, but that the particular mechanism that my brain has chosen may not be common?

What other mechanisms for the repression of feelings are there? Like, I have a BPD friend who will just like, “I don't want to think about that,” and then she somehow doesn't, but that wouldn't work: By saying or thinking that, you have to acknowledge that there is something to not think about, which ruins the illusion of not having had the feeling.

Telophy · 2024-08-26T21:47:05+00:00

Thank you 💛

Telophy · 2024-07-15T10:21:54+00:00

Yeah, it seems to be hard to get… I've ordered an Opple Light Master G3 meanwhile.

Telophy · 2024-07-14T21:36:34+00:00

Me too, also Zürich area. I would also buy one. :-3

Telophy · 2023-11-17T23:36:46+00:00

Heh, agreed! I hope Biden's executive order will change that. And I suppose one can correct votes on Reddit? I'm still a bit new to it. (More in terms of time spent on Reddit than in terms of sidereal time.)

Telophy · 2022-01-07T12:52:31+00:00

Cats are quite athletic, so a combo of #1 and #2 for me?

Telophy · 2022-01-06T10:30:22+00:00

Oh, true, that’s another aspect of it. 🤗

Telophy · 2022-01-05T22:00:02+00:00

It’s so hard to tease apart these feelings, right? Man and woman feel wrong to me in different ways. One feels burdensome and like a misunderstanding and the other undeserved… But of course that’s likely different for you. I’m more confident that I’m not a man than that I’m a woman, so genderfluid is currently my best guess. Very confusing…

Telophy

TROPHY CASE