Psy·chol·o·gy [sīˈkäləjē?]: (noun) The attempt by a sentient society to study the soul unbound by its matter. By failing this feat, we have discovered worlds of interesting behavioral and biological patterns within ourselves. It is these patterns that psychology has become. This paper attempts to explain the subjective experience of a single human being’s personal development, validated by the collection of psychological patterns commonly observed and assumed to be universal traits of human psychology.
Keep in mind: This is an early essay from 2016. I believe I was on ADHD treatment back then, so the writing is probably quite different. My perspective may also differ, though, I cannot decide if this is the case. I am definitely less certain about some of these things now.
As a child, my life didn’t seem out of the ordinary, but how could it when you are so young? The truth is, my life was not very normal at all. I had no father, for starters. This did not seem strange until much later in my life. Secondly, my mother was a bit off, or perhaps very off. To this day, I still do not understand what was off, but most likely it was something along the lines of schizoaffective disorder. This, combined with alcoholism, fueled a very chaotic household. The situation did not escalate into uncomfortable areas until about ninth grade.
Before going too deeply on that aspect of my development, we will start in earlier childhood. I distinctly remember this time at a grocery store with my mother. The Gameboy game, Pokemon – Yellow Version was at the forefront of my attention. This is an RPG game that consists of leveling up and traveling to new lands. You must save your progress, in order to return to any given point of progress. When you power the game, you load at the exact state of the game you saved in. If the Gameboy’s batteries die, you will lose all of the work and revert to the last save point. At 7 years old, I had little self-control. During this day, it was especially apparent. In a critical moment of gameplay, a debate with fate, failure, or success, I decided the risk of loss was far too much. At that moment, I irrationally dropped my Gameboy and let the game freeze. Immediately after this decision, I was filled with overwhelming regret. I was in such a flow state, the emotions were real, I was engaged, so much so that I forgot something even more critical than the gameplay at this moment: I had not saved the game for hours.
It would seem that as children, we forget a kind of temporal context. We become consumed by the present experience, that the past moments, and the future are not considered quickly enough to make effective decisions. Without considering the last time I saved my progress, I had solved the singular issue of whether I failed the difficult gameplay I was experiencing. Turning off the game could spare me the consequences of failing the gameplay, but turning it off is much worse. I reacted too impulsively, too decidedly.
Being in this state of flow is likely great for learning about your immediate surroundings, but it can be problematic when trying to make use of what you have already learned. In contrast, using applying what we have learned results in referencing memory rather than tapping into the experience fully and directly. As an adult, you have a mental library of material to refer to in everyday life, but you are somewhat blinded to the present moment, in order to maintain constant awareness of this library. In psychology, this library is known as crystallized intelligence (Siegler 299). Abandoning this flow state allows for more abstraction. Becoming an adult is about reaching deeper abstraction, at the loss of sensory awareness. As we grow, we often develop fully formed reactions to various contexts that allow us to predict where our attention should be in different scenarios.
This kind of contextual awareness is related to children’s ability to solve conservation-of-numbers problems (seen above). During these problems, a child is shown two groups of objects and asked which group contains more objects. When the experimenter changes the placement of objects, the child will oftentimes believe that the number of objects in the group has increased or decreased, despite the fact that the only change that occurred was the spacing between objects. “The same child who on one trial incorrectly reasons that the longer row must have more objects will on other trials correctly reason that just spreading a row does not change the number of objects, and on yet other trials will count the number of objects in the two rows to see which has more” (Siegler 150). In these instances, the child lacks a particular kind of consistency with their methods and reasoning for conclusions. The child seems so engaged in the present moment, that the context of the past moments may not be considered, depending on how heavily focused the child is. The reasoning of the child changes, depending on what aspect of the situation is being focused on, the other elements were erased from attention. “With age and experience, the strategies that produce more successful performance become more prevalent; new strategies also are generated and, if they are more effective than previous approaches, are used increasingly” (Siegler 151). It is a flow state that children often go into. As adults, we may learn to not habitually make use of the flow state, because of how inefficient it is for analyzing real-life situations such as these. It is similar to how scientists do not rely simply on their senses, but instead, they use microscopes and telescopes to expand their sensory limitations.
(Perhaps such a flow state is like the one that is obtainable via being totally stoned on THC)
Starting at 14-years-old, my consciousness began to expand. Enough so that I was paranoid and naïve to these new perceptions. Perceptions such as what others were thinking about me, whether they were as aware of me as I am of them. During puberty, it is thought that perspective-taking increases, and thus empathy develops as well as social awareness (Van der Graph 2014). This kind of empathic awareness led me to believe my thoughts were possibly being heard by others who were maybe even more aware than I. How was I supposed to judge the limits of awareness expansion at this time? It was a self-consciousness about my lack of awareness. Analyzing our body’s every move, with focus and with assumption. Now I needed to convince others to read me in a way that I desired to appear. I needed to prove that I was interesting, fun, cool, and beautiful. This period of life is the beginning of the end for the child-like flow state previously described.
When all of your peers are like this, it tends to create a strange social dynamic where everyone involved grows defensive. Someone will start by offending someone else in a paranoid defense, which is then perceived as hostility by others, eventually perpetuating into the cliche of the self-conscious teenagers of puberty. Even the slightest sense of negativity or judgment will escalate in a ping-pong fashion. For example, you may feel judged about your bad hair, so you begin to judge the other person on their appearance, they become aware of your judgment and then judge back. The other will be more self-conscious about their appearance now and either try harder or give up trying. The person you judged here, may actually notice that you felt judged, and then try to appear less judgmental as well. It depends on which way is more beneficial to the self. These two directions that can be taken may be the result of using either cognitive empathy or affective empathy. “Cognitive empathy, or perspective taking, can be defined as the awareness and understanding of another’s emotion. Affective empathy refers to the vicarious experience of emotions consistent with those of the observed person and often results in empathic concern, which involves feelings of sorrow or concern for another” (Davis 1983).
Moving beyond this period of my life, I entered a new phase of madness. Beginning high school I did not develop close enough social security that could have aided in my own self-reflection and confidence. I was no longer overtly upset about perceived judgment, but now I embraced it and used it to fuel my own deviant character. I felt secure by being in control of my own judge-able character, so I had pink hair and socially rebellious tendencies. I felt alone in the presence of others. I aligned more with adults than my peers. I hung around unbiased with my clique selections. My own style remained the same, but I crowd-hopped into all the imaginable cliques that occur in most high schools.
Eventually, these behaviors led me to separate from the social loop. By existing outside of an intimate social environment, I developed social misconceptions, miscommunications, a lack of identity, and a lack of behavioral consistency. I was missing vital social feedback. This kind of thing is seen in schizoid and schizotypal personality disorders. With the schizoids and schizotypals, they find that social isolation leads to less of an ego. They can change their minds without thinking about others’ judging them on inconsistency. An old-cat-lady syndrome. Your weirdness will perpetuate your isolation, and thus fueling your weirdness and dissociation from society. Other’s will notice the strangeness of your behavior, and it will be too risky to associate with you. Something led you to loneliness, and if they associate with you, they may also reach a lonely state.
When you lose touch and consistency, your mind becomes trained in a much more strange way. You are supposed to form habitual patterns that sort of solidify your sense of self, your identity. By losing touch, your perception will no longer be guided by social feedback. And by not exercising or habituating social attention, you may struggle with more general problems, such as learning and attention (Rosenbaum 1988). In schizophrenia, this trend even extends to disruptions in basic body-image, a phenomenon known as body dysmorphia (Lenzenweger 1989). We form relationships so that we can be judged and alter our thoughts and behaviors to align with a more empathic perspective. We attempt to relate to our teachers in order to become intellectually closer to their level. When we do not form social circles, there is nobody to judge us, nobody to align with. We may get into the habit of learning on our own, which means we will not learn the same things as our peers. This will further dissociate oneself until they begin to lack self-criticism, in other words, critical thinking skills. The individual at this point will be too loose in their assumptions on reality. Too much open-mindedness. Also, the mind will be constantly engaged in sensory learning as opposed to social learning. This will cause sensory stress and it will be exhausting. Eventually, the decay will lead to very poor performance in society and total disconnection. Being broad means you are more naïve to the details. Missing out on details so constantly, you may mistakenly overlook concepts of common-sense, such as physical laws. One may not even realize they are overlooking details and context. This is when it crosses over into psychosis. Too broad for one’s own good.
Quick Update: The confirmation biases observed in schizophrenia when defending their delusional ideas would seem to be very much closed-minded. Though, I think one cannot actually simplify this open or closed mindedness as a trait. It seems to be contextual. The schizophrenic may be open to exploring strange ideas but closed to the people suggesting that they are wrong, out of some conditioned defensive tendency from prior experiences. The defensive response may not even be particularly exclusive to schizophrenia, although the tendency to be on the defense could be. Schizophrenia is often defined as holding beliefs contrary to the popular culture, so defensive may simply arise from holding beliefs that contrast others’. Normal people exhibit this stubborn closed-mindness in the face of political conflict.
Rather than a schizophrenic being open-minded, they may be free from culture.
Anyways, let’s move on.
Unfortunately (depending on how you look at it), I reached this kind of point. I would read up on strange concepts in quantum physics and new age things. By this time I already began to ‘practice’ telekinesis and I had visual distortions and hallucinations somewhat frequently, especially in my nightly hypnagogic states. This hypnogogic state and low-level of awareness would often extend during the daytime. Chronic sleep deprivation and unfitting psychiatric medications would only compound the issue. I never believed my hallucinations, but I did have strange ideations. And of course, I never really gained telekinetic abilities, instead, I gained a (possible) diagnosis of schizotypal personality disorder.
This occurred during the ninth grade of high school. My home life was deteriorating with my mother using alcohol to cope with an abusive boyfriend. She would often blast music at 3 AM, or start some kind of drama. It has been shown that growing up in this kind of environment may be linked with schizotypal diagnoses (Berenbaum 2008).
I showed you old pictures of myself, this is vulnerable so please subscribe.
As an example of my strange state, one time, at a friend’s house, I believed that I saw my uncle in one of their family photos. It was a friend with no relation to my family at all. I found this experience to be casual. It took me a while to realize how unlikely or strange this would be. I simply thought to myself “Oh wow, this is such a nice photo of my friend’s family and my uncle”. I would often have experiences such as this, where I would not realize what is likely, or even very unlikely. It was the loss of my social-norm context. To escape this I needed to judge and be judged, to increase awareness of what is normal, and to increase my criticality.
Another time, at night, there was a golf cart driving in a field. I was at a distance that prevented me from seeing clearly this golf cart. For a split moment, I had believed it was some illusory creature. I did not hallucinate, but rather the object was too far to make it out, and upon driving closer, I was able to realize it was a golf cart. This is very similar to Gestalt imagery, where an image can be perceived with two different perspectives. My brain required more information in order to make better guesses. My brain was not critical or judging enough to realize how extremely unlikely it was for a strange creature to be roaming around. The issue seems to come from a lack of context-awareness. Because socializing requires a heavy amount of context to understand, it strengthens your contextualizing abilities. Being isolated results in less contextualizing abilities and thus psychosis and strange behaviors. When you are not confronted with social problems, the main focus of your existence becomes almost entirely a perceptual one. In other words, your understanding is more sensory-centric. The problem is our senses are not good enough to be used to fully understand the world. Especially the social world and the scientific world.
Despite all of this intensity, I developed mostly well off. No longer do I hallucinate, I don’t even reach hypnogogic states much. After moving away from my mother, and emotionally dealing with her eventual death, I am more at peace. My only current issue is that I often feel disconnected from life, something like depersonalization, personal numbness.
BONUS RANT: If you consider that individuals with schizophrenia lose critical thinking towards the self, then a different kind of critical thinking is lost with social integration. Trust for other’s perspectives and ideas becomes too great and we are no longer critical of others, but only ourselves. This may lead a person to conform, with humility. The creativity seen with psychosis may be the result of transcending these common social biases, in other words, escaping common sense. Thinking outside the box, where the box is defined as a social circle, a clique. We develop religion because this box is comfortable, much more so than the painful reality that the schizophrenic may see. We develop science when we feel suspicious of religion and wish for comfort in both worlds: the real world and the social world. We suppress our empathy because death is inevitable, for everyone. We develop psychotic transcendence when we disregard science, and trust our senses too much. Then our perception degrades into true sensation. The problem with true sensation is that it is far too limited. The degradation of our normal perception begins as we lose feedback that would otherwise help solidify a coherent perception. We become too open-minded. We can no longer interpret our senses within the framework of the human collective.
The problem with religion is they lose critical thought towards others, trusting their ideas and thinking critically only towards themselves. In psychosis, it is the opposite. They are critical towards others’ ideas and trust their senses too greatly. Religion is the disease of empathy, psychosis is the disease of loneliness.
Hysteria is social psychosis; Psychosis is individual hysteria.
Are you a crazy person too? I’d love to hear your response and experience.
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Works Cited
Berenbaum, H., Thompson, R. J., Milanak, M. E., Boden, M. T., & Bredemeier, K. (2008). Psychological trauma and schizotypal personality disorder. Journal of abnormal psychology, 117(3), 502.
Davis, M. H. (1983). Measuring individual differences in empathy: Evidence for a multidimensional approach. Journal of personality and social psychology, 44(1), 113.
Lenzenweger, M. F., & Loranger, A. W. (1989). Psychosis proneness and clinical psychopathology: examination of the correlates of schizotypy. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 98(1), 3.
Rosenbaum, G., Shore, D. L., & Chapin, K. (1988). Attention deficit in schizophrenia and schizotypy: Marker versus symptom variables. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 97(1), 41.
Siegler, R. S., DeLoache, J. S., & Eisenberg, N. (2003). How children develop. Macmillan.
Van der Graaff, J., Branje, S., De Wied, M., Hawk, S., Van Lier, P., & Meeus, W. (2014). Perspective taking and empathic concern in adolescence: gender differences in developmental changes. Developmental psychology, 50(3), 881.