I have a theory of my paranoid self-awareness (is there a savvy psychoanalysist who can factcheck it please?)

[noname223]

I elaborated on it with my therapist and self-help group. They agree that the theory is very plausible. It was developed with the things the quantum physics professors told me about my mental health issues. I think he read neuroscientifical studies where people with my biases were portrayed. This happened 5 years ago which could make it difficult to interpret it. Hindsight bias you know. But I fed chatGPT and other AI with the things he said. And let it elaborate on the cognitive biases in people with psychosis, autism and ambiguity intolerance. I always tried to anaylze the mind of the quantum physics professors which made him pretty angry. He would probably hate the fact that he is literally haunting my mind. I am not sure what exactly pissed him off about it.

Here the theory: Many people tell me they perceive me as very self-aware, self-conconsious. and reflective. However, this is not the full truth. My self-awareness is borderline (not the condition) paranoid. I tend to a negativity bias. I project my own anxiety and self-hatred into other people. In social environments where there is a lot of ambiguity in how to read the situation. In my head I struggle to enure uncertainty and I overcompensate that. In my mind instead there is a certainty in what is going on in another person. I try to read their mind. And in my mind I have overconfidence in what is going in in the other person. I am not sure how good I am in reading other people. People tell me I am very empathetic and that I have high emotional intelligence. But my self-awareness is partly paranoid. Way too often I interpret my environment to be hostile. And I tend to the bias jumping to conclusions. There is not a lot of information but I am way too early way too confident in what the other person thinks. And my biased interpretations of my enviornment make me really anxious. It is like a hamster wheel of paranoia and anxiety.

I have liberal acceptance bias. A low threshold to consider things to be true. And I have metamemory distortions which means impaired confidence in one's memory, such as excessive certainty in false memories. This is caused by psychosis.

Autism instead caused black white thinking. Catastrophizing. Mind reading and emotional reasoning. I confuse felt truth with objective reality.

Ambiguity intolerance: Ambigous situations are perceived as unpleasant or threatening. Increased tendency toward rigid thinking.

With the jumping to conclusions bias: I rather accept a negative interpretation just for the sake to have certainty even if this interpretation feels bad and has a negative impact on my mental health.


Is there an actual benefit to know all of this about my mind? I think it does not change the fact that I am a mental wreck. And these biases are way too strong in my daily thinking to solve them. I think I need less confidence in my interpretations especially if they are catastrophizing. I do this so often. In some ways it is also a self-fulfiling prophecy. I should think more my statistical likelihoods instead of absolute truths.

I think all of this drives me really anxious. These pathologies. The thing is knowing all of this won't give me money. It won't make me able to work. In social interactions these pathologies are way too strong. Going to college courses was like drinking 4 liter poison to my mental health on a daily bases. I even was aware how paranoid I was. But I was unable to do anything against it.

I noticed when I fully trust people like my closest friends these biases don't control me as much. This is probably why these social interactions aren't that draining.

I think I am obsessed with intelligence and maybe I can use that. The current way of thinking is not smart. It is fast and emotional thinking. But I can really get rid of that? I think one reason why people still consider me to be pretty self-aware despite my psychoses is that I do a lot of rational thinking. It is true all of that is emotional thinking but I analyze my thinking rationally and I accept feedback. There is the bias against disconfirmatory evidence. Difficult revising one's assumptions despite contradictory evidence. But I listen to other people's theories. The thing is my therapist does a horrible job and rather reinforces all of these issues. My friends get that I am often very paranoid. I struggle to accept contradictory evidence when it is something which scares the shit out of me. But it does not change that my analyises are made with the help of others. I try to get feedback of other people.

And I cannot be that bad in reading other people. Otherwise I could not be that reflective despite my psychoses. I know a lot of people with psychoses who cannot think straight anymore. I seem to be somehwat self-aware.

There is something. With my friends I can also discuss paranoid thoughts. When I am in my self-help group instead I don't talk about paranoid thoughts usually I suppress them. I know when there is a potential paranoid thought. And I tend to avoid speaking about them. I think I am a very paranoid person and this ambiguity intolerance is probaby a pre-stage of paranoia. But in college noone knew shit. I could hide all of what was going on in my head.

Honestly, I don't know how self-aware I actually am. It is interesting I might reached a new level of self-awareness only with the help of AI and the quantum physics professor that haunts my mind. However, he highly recommended me not to analyze his mind and that this is stupid thinking. But there lies the irony. He is the only person who realized that. None of my therapists did. He was extremely intelligent and knew a lot about cognitive biases. So is my thinking now smart or stupid? I realized my pattern of thinking only by analyzing his mind. And I realized the dangers of my thinking while actually thinking in these patterns. Lo. I know that's paradoxical shit. There are a lot of paradoxes in these analyses.

I think my thinking is highly pathological. I should not be too confident in this analysis. I have to do way more research on human biases. And I don't feel too well about the fact that this analysis is built on conversations I had 5 years ago with him. And some points AI delivered for me.

I wish someone really savvy could check if I made mistakes. I elaborated on all of this to my therapist. I had to simplify it so that she understands it. I tend to think too badly about her. Sometimes she was helpful. But let's be real she does not have the sauce that it needs to fix my issues. The quantum physics professor had such a high trust in therapists but mine made many mistakes thus far. Wrong diagnoses. My therapist was pretty impressed by this analysis. But it was only a simplified one.
Which feels bad. In my self-help group I could elaborate on this more thorough analysis. One dude was like WTF I don't know. The other two women told me most of what I said fits in the way they perceive me. And they consider this analysis to be pretty good.

 

[Hvergelmir]

I wouldn't call myself a savvy psychoanalyst, but I too rely on quite a bit on logic and raw intelligence to navigate things.

I fail to see any factual errors, as you present multifaceted views, and acknowledge uncertainty.
I read more of a collection of observations, than a theory.

Is there anything you're particularly uncertain about?

 

[noname223]

I wouldn't call myself a savvy psychoanalyst, but I too rely on quite a bit on logic and raw intelligence to navigate things.

I fail to see any factual errors, as you present multifaceted views, and acknowledge uncertainty.
I read more of a collection of observations, than a theory.

Is there anything you're particularly uncertain about?

Thank you for your feedback.

I thought it is a theory in the sense that it explains how my psyche functions.

The strongest uncertainty is about: whether my reasoning aligns with what the quantum physics professor meant. He probably knew way more about cognitive biases.

And there is uncertainty in how self-aware I actually am. Or if most self-awareness is not actual self-awareness.

And I don't know whether ambiguity intolerance is the strongest bias in this equation.

 

[Hvergelmir]

The strongest uncertainty is about: whether my reasoning aligns with what the quantum physics professor meant.

I don't even know what he really said, except that your attempt to apply psychoanalysis on him was misguided ("stupid thinking" if I understood you correctly).
I speculate quite a bit, trying to find an underlying meaning here: If you instead of responding to my arguments, where to respond with an analysis of my underlying intentions and drives, that would just be a pointless side track.

And there is uncertainty in how self-aware I actually am. Or if most self-awareness is not actual self-awareness.

What even is self-awareness? I don't think it's practically quantifiable. We're both clearly self-aware to some extent, but I don't think it's possible to compare one self-awareness to another.

Lots of people have ambiguity intolerance. Accepting uncertainty is hard. Many retreats to irrational and rigid belief structures.

 

[noname223]

I don't even know what he really said, except that your attempt to apply psychoanalysis on him was misguided ("stupid thinking" if I understood you correctly).
I speculate quite a bit, trying to find an underlying meaning here: If you instead of responding to my arguments, where to respond with an analysis of my underlying intentions and drives, that would just be a pointless side track.


What even is self-awareness? I don't think it's practically quantifiable. We're both clearly self-aware to some extent, but I don't think it's possible to compare one self-awareness to another.

Lots of people have ambiguity intolerance. Accepting uncertainty is hard. Many retreats to irrational and rigid belief structures.

I am not completely sure if I understood your post.

I have some theories why He was that pissed. I had the tendency to make predictions about his behavior. It was part of the ambiguity intolerance. He was an expert in predictions and maybe my habit to do predictions all the time felt Really annoying. Maybe something epistemological because my predictions relied mostly on Intuition and were based on only few Information. Maybe this was one part. Doing good predictions is extremely difficult but I did them without caring much without end.

The other theory was. I projected my own self-hatred into him. It was clear that the way I approached education was diametrical to his values. And I noticed that and assumed how much he must hate me. I think though very intelligent don't like such thinking patterns. Intelligent people know that biographies shape people. Only because I was raised in a completely different environment also with violence I am like that. And I insinuated He secretly despises me but supresses it with this intellectual approach which I just laid out. I legitimized my own self-hatred by guessing his gut instincts.

 

[-Link-]

It sounds reasonable to me, umm... as a relatively-informed layman... as far as explaining what could be going on in your mind.

Couple things do occur to me here.

I think I am a very paranoid person and this ambiguity intolerance is probaby a pre-stage of paranoia.

I'm seeing a lot of references to paranoia in your post.

Generally speaking, someone who is paranoid wouldn't make a post outlining all their thought processes and identifying what's going wrong. Basically, if you're aware of the unreasonableness in your worries, and if you experience relief (even mild and fleeting) in response to reassurance about those worries, then it's safe to rule out paranoia as a factor in that moment.

While you definitely want to monitor for the early signs of psychosis, I think it may benefit you if you were to avoid the labels of "paranoia" or "paranoid", when you can.

Whether it's paranoia in the figurative sense or in the literal sense, there is benefit in shifting away from the label and instead looking at the presentation of symptoms. This would be the difference between, "I'm being paranoid," and, "I'm worrying about what those people might be thinking."

Sometimes when people continually emphasize a label (eg. "paranoid") in their own mind, they can inadvertently adopt the label in such a way that it becomes ingrained and conditions their brain to presume it untreatable or unmanageable. This happens usually without conscious awareness of the process, and the damage will tend to be cumulative and makes it harder for them to buy into the possibility of improving their functioning. And in any mental health treatment, the less faith the patient has in their prospects of improvement, the less their chance of that actually happening.

Is there an actual benefit to know all of this about my mind?

Certainly.

I don't know your status in therapy, but if you look at analysis as a first step, then the next step would be using this information in establishing a treatment plan and moving forward with it.

What that can look like: Working with your therapist to set some practical goals -- both short-term goals and long-term goals. Then with the guidance of your therapist, looking at coping strategies you could practice and incorporate into your day-to-day life. This, towards learning how to better manage your symptoms and alleviating some of their burden on your daily functioning.

You've identified what's going on. The other part of this is now doing something about it.

I think all of this drives me really anxious.

It sounds like you're kind of stuck in a persistent "hyperanalysis" of your own mind and the environment around you.

I'll always remember what one psychiatrist advised me, and I feel like the same may apply to you as well. I can only paraphrase, but here it is: Set limits on how much time you allow in a day for self-analysis, hold yourself to those limits, and otherwise try to focus on actually living your life rather than analyzing it and compiling knowledge about it.

So, for you, maybe a long-term goal could be trying to reach a point where you can just live... or just be... Like, maybe your racing thoughts will always be there, but what if you could reach a point where those thoughts are more akin to background noise rather than the heavy burden they are now.

If your heightened self-awareness/self-analysis is partly to keep watch for psychosis warning signs, you could ask your therapist or doctor if there's anything you could safely change about that. For instance, if you currently monitor individual thoughts and situations, maybe it would be OK to instead watch for patterns or trends (eg. instead of, "I'm distrustful of this person in this specific situation," it would be, "I've been feeling more distrustful over the past week"). Or maybe you could set limits on how much time you dedicate to monitoring (eg. instead of monitoring continuously through the day, spend 5-10 minutes in the morning and 5-10 minutes in the evening and set it aside otherwise). To use an analogy, think of it as checking the weather forecast once a day rather than constantly checking the radar maps. (But definitely check with your therapist or doctor before changing anything about your 'early warning detection' for psychosis.)

I think it does not change the fact that I am a mental wreck. And these biases are way too strong in my daily thinking to solve them. I think I need less confidence in my interpretations especially if they are catastrophizing. I do this so often. In some ways it is also a self-fulfiling prophecy. I should think more my statistical likelihoods instead of absolute truths

You are not a science project, @noname223.

Always remember: You are a human being with feelings, needs, and desires. You are loveable. And you are worth it.