Can't stop obsessing over things I don't want to obsess over

Post Reply New Topic

When I have arguements, I think about them long after they pass. Just...for hours and hours I keep arguing in my head about it, sometimes with myself and sometimes with how I'd imagine the person I was arguing with would respond. It's not so much about disagreement. I can disagree. I just...I always have to understand the other person, but it's not about empathy. It's just annoying because nobody can ever really explain their opinion to me in a way that sates the brain. I can't focus on anything else because my brain just won't shut up.

Just today I had a seriously bloated conversation with my best online friend, about music. It started when she expressed her hatred for Nine Inch Nails, which is a band I have kinda mixed feelings about. I love some songs, hate others, so I could definately understand where she was coming from. However, one of her favorite bands is A Perfect Circle, which was strongly influenced by NIN. I brought this up, adding that NIN basically revolutionized/reinvented the Industrial genre, and had a pretty big impact on the music world in general. This was something I'd garned from reviews, bands that have listed their influences, common knowledge, etc. And she argued against this, without any real evidence to back herself up. And I was like, "You're arguing with FACT," because it's basically regarded as fact by a lot of music experts, and she said it was an opinion. And this was really what got me. I don't understand how it can be an opinion...I mean, isn't it considered a fact that the writing from the Enlightenment period influenced the French and American revolutions? Isn't it considered a fact that Alfred Hitchcock had a huge impact on the horror/thriller film genre? (Aside: I don't even like Hitchcock, but I can't deny his importance to the history of cinema.) So this went on with a lot of miscommunications and misunderstandings as all arguements must always have, and...well, I still don't know how she can consider NIN's influence in the music industry an opinion rather than a fact, and it's still driving me nuts and I don't think I'm going to be able to sleep tonight because my brain's going to keep on ranting and raving and spitting and splattering like a chained up bulldog. And what was really stupid was that it turned out she did actually think that NIN had quite a bit of influence on the music industry, she just didn't consider it a fact, but rather an opinion we shared. What really drove me nuts was that, after arguing with me so much, she said that she didn't even care. How can you NOT care about something but still argue about it for two hours?

What this boils down to is this: I've always been like this, and since I'm 18 and it STILL happens...I just don't know what to do. I can't be like this as an adult; I hate arguing and HAVE to learn how to let go of things and stop obsessing about things that haunt, confuse, or enrage me. I can't choose what I think about. Everyone else seems to be able to; all the time people around me seem to have this magical ability to just not think about what they don't want to think about, but I don't have it. I can't "empty my mind." I can't make my brain shut up. I can't make it not show me images I don't want to see. And I can't make it stop ranting and keeping me awake at night, stalling me in the shower and preventing me from focusing on reading because of its constant and chaotic ramblings. I don't want to keep arguing with people who don't want to argue about stupid things, just because my brain is so irritatingly angry all the time.

Yes and I have tried to stop even posting on certain online groups too late in the evening because I will just keep going on and on about it to myself and keep myself up all night. I also do not understand how people think they are at liberty to argue with fact - and I'm not talking about different theories here - but just stating their opinion as fact regardless of how little sense it makes. I would post more but I was so stressed out tonight that I just feel kind of not too precise.

After a fight or big disagreement I get the exact same way, I can't let the situation go! My mind wanders and I keep thinking about what could have happened, trying to rationalize everything in my head... I think one way, then I think the other way, going back and forth, endlessly, hopelessly, it utterly sucks.

If you figure out a way to be able to stop doing this, please let me know!!

I don't know how you can fix it, but the good news is that there's still hope. If you went back in time to when I was 19 and told me what kind of person I would become, I would not have believed you. Hopefully this tendency will decrease as you mature.

Maybe she aspires to become a politician.

my brain never stops. unless i'm sleeping. then when i actually sleep it only continues down the path of wonderland with the bizarre indescribable content of my dreams. i wake up confused/ not refreshed and always groggy. my days are ususally a mix of robotic procession of work. with brain detached from body mode. and thoughts meandering aimlessly only to keep me inattentive and up way too late at night. some think that it is add. others say bipolarism. i'm quick to spit judgements ...lest ye be judged (harshly critical of myself, yet too distracted to make good progress/changes) opinionated to say the least.

i can relate to the too much thinking thing. sometimes so much that it makes actual physical completion impossible.

i find that the oldest habits are the hardest to break.

I have exactly the same problem and tend to veer away from possible arguements. I seem to have a musical memory and often end up being able to recall any music I've heard in the day; same problem; cannot get head to stop thinking / playing music. I seem to be able to recall music while thinking about something else at the same time... so it gets worse..

Yeah this happened to me too! I'm still in disbelief about how my life ended up. It's not absolutely great, but I've done a lot of things already that make many people, AS and NT alike, go "wow!! !"

On the downside, though, I don't have faith that this happens to all AS people. For example, this one AS guy I know, he's 18-19 and is intellectually 18, but in a social capacity and maturity level he's maybe 10. He has no understanding of people when people talk to him. I don't think he even understands the concept that other people have memories and minds of their own. And to top it all off, he is old enough to want to be independent (just like almost all older teenagers). So that just results in the fact that he has a ton of problems, but he won't accept it if anybody tells him about the problems, or possible ways to fix the problems. This is even if he asks for help. He keeps causing the same problems over and over, but doesn't see that he's the cause of them, and won't listen to anybody who tries to help him, because he "thinks he has control over things." Sh!t, if he thinks he has everything under control, then he shouldn't ask me for help and tell me about his problems!! ! Telling me problems "to make conversation" (which he later said he was doing) is just wasting my time! He also hates being AS and refuses to accept it, it's too bad that he is trying to cover up his AS with rather poor copies of NT behavior. Sigh.

Last edited by Stinkypuppy on 19 Oct 2006, 12:30 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I think I have a musical memory as well. It seems to take the form of a memory of something that happened while a particular song is playing in the background. Most of the time, the memory is of something very good and fun, or unique, or extremely bad like a fight. Then every time I hear the song, a flood of memories come streaming back. I do this intentionally when I want to think of something very soothing (the song itself may not actually be soft) and relaxing. In a way, I'm no different from Pavlov's dogs!

Veresae, I see myself in you and in Stinkypuppy's friend. Maybe because I can't shut off the internal arguments I also can't control my spending or the problems that I cause myself. I'm over 40 and I'm still doing it and I wonder why I don't treat people violently the way my mother did. Of course, I don't have any children of my own either. I"m not violent with anyone else but myself. Children are extensions of one's self.

It seems perfectly logical to me that even though I am desparate to get into something, I have to cut myself off from the group that is involved for very important reasons. I have spent a lot of life energy arguing against them in my head. It hasn't been good for keyboards or mice either because it's become tied up with rage. It's the unsolvable problem that I can't stop myself from trying to solve. Even though this thing is legal and in my mind one of the most moral things that people can do, it has, by the people who are affected the worst by it, been tangled up in a morass of stupidity.

Having a plan for fighting it is important. People have told me to exercise "self control" but they haven't the slightest idea how to teach someone to do that. They don't have it either. They just don't care.

Today I am leaning towards the idea that sometimes there are people who can solve a problem and who must solve that problem. I think that Aspies are problem solvers by temperament and native abilities. One of the reasons that I am obsessed is because I think that the problem can be solved and that I can solve it, even after all the time I've spent trying to break myself down. Don't you feel that, like whatever is bothering you, however intractable it appears to be, it still can be solved? Know how to fast and how to wait and it will come to you.

Perhaps you saw what your mother did and made a commitment to yourself (conscious or not) not to be like her. My father (whom I think has AS, but has not been diagnosed) used to be extremely abusive when I was a lot younger, and I made a conscious decision to avoid things that he did, so that I would not be like him.



Unfortunately, you're quite right about this. With regard to my aforementioned friend, I used to get so upset with him because of the fact that his decision-making processes were so illogical; he decided everything based on his gut feelings, even though he couldn't really put those feelings into words. I once told him that he HAD to make decisions based on logic, but in retrospect, I don't think he even knew how to think logically. He has a logical mind, but logic can only be developed with an understanding of what are "reasonable," "logical" consequences of a certain event. Since his experiences were so limited to start, his logical thinking skills were severely underdeveloped. You could think of him as a robot who is missing most of his programming code. It was my fault that I did not tell him at the time how to think logically. I did not give him some programming code with which he could process new situations. In that way, I still ended up similar to my father; my father had a habit of telling me to do this and that, without any explanation of why to do it that way, or how exactly to do it. Now that I know better (i.e. specifically) what my father did poorly, I don't have to repeat the mistakes my father did. However, that doesn't necessarily mean that I have to serve as a father figure to my robot friend. He's missing some code, but doesn't want anybody to give him any code. He wants to obtain code for himself, although he doesn't yet have the programming to be able to obtain code from new situations/problems!! !



OMG you hit the nail on the head there!! I can't let go of a situation until I figure it out. Honestly my life got so much better when I was able to solve or at least rationalize all of my life problems. I felt as though I had much better understanding, and subsequently control of my own life. My life improved and eventually many of the problems I used to have subsided, and it was only then that I was able to mature and be independent. As for my teenage friend, he's got a long way to go. At 18 I was a lot more experienced than my friend is now, a lot more skilled socially and intellectually, and I did not have the exceptionally bad self-esteem problems that my friend has. Even then, I considered myself to be behind the NT social curve by a couple of years or so. My friend is a lot further behind. Either that or he was just trying to be an emotional leech off me. If there's such a thing as a narcissistic AS, he would be it.

New code has to "integrate" with old code for either to function properly. I know this about computers, that if any code is not "polite" to the rest of the code, the computer stops running right. A truly advanced operating system can supervise the threads of code so that when there are problems the supervisor can sort them out. I don't know if the analogy ever breaks down.

Even if "treatment" is successful in the short run, if it damages the supervisor functions to accomplish its goals then it defeats itself unless disruption of the personality is its goal. When I was in "treatment" they talked like they would tear me down to build me up again, which was frightening because I wouldn't trust them to open a can of beans if it was already open. Another apt analogy because brother, this can of beans was open. The cats with their funny little tools and ideas couldn't tell the difference.

They suppressed the part of me that pulls it all together. They disrupted it. My own self is like a ghost in the machine. It is sometimes like a voice in my head. It's just me, though.

That's true too, if the new code seems incompatible with the old code, the robot will reject the new code. I'm not really sure if that's the case with my friend though. Specifically, he kept getting into the same problems over and over, and he would try to think of the causes. In the end, he came up with causes that were irrelevant, and reflected a poor understanding of how people react (e.g. telling people that he used them, and not understanding why they were upset about that). I tried to tell him what some of the causes were, but of course this invariably meant that I had to point out some things that he was doing poorly. Being incredibly sensitive with very poor self-confidence, he got defensive and immediately stopped listening to me. Eventually, he would tell me that I was right, but would then make some angry remark against me. He told me that he felt that I was trying to hurt him on purpose, so I was left with the impression that he wasn't really listening to me.

I did not like being put in that father figure role; I got stuck with it, because I act like a giant teddy bear to people and help them out with their problems. He asked me for help with his problems, so I helped him as best I could at the time.

Stinkypuppy, I am so like your friend in many ways that it isn't funny. I have my own robotic mode. It has screwed me over in many ways. I can look back and see where I have resisted conducting myself in a rational manner. Very honestly, I don't interface well with "society." It's really hard to get past being appalled at the rampant misconduct of other humans. It's hard for me to get past the way they verbally minimize massively destructive acts and then put my pecadilloes under a microscope to make them look bigger. It doesn't take much more than that to put me into a morose state where I run all this garbage through my head over and over again. You may have seen some of my ramblings.

Another problem is that the things that I "obsess" about actually happen.

Remnant,

What you just described there sounds just like I was when I was a teenager. Thinking that most other people were very hypocritical and just plain stupid, I eventually felt like not being a part of society. There were many times when I simply complained about how society just didn't make sense, and what a piece of crap a lot of the world is. To a large extent I still think that many, if not most people in the world are stupid, or that their superficial opinions about unimportant things are trivial. I didn't care at all about participating in anything that everybody else did, basically because it didn't seem like there was a point to it. However, I think that this was a great thing for me to do as a teenager growing up, in that I was comfortable pursuing my own interests and maturing at my own pace, while not dragging my self esteem through the dirt. It was quite the opposite; I got pretty good at the things I wanted to do, and doing well in high school really boosted my confidence a lot.

For me, it is a little scary to think that you might be like my friend. I say that because, although he asked me for help with what are basically his AS-related problems, he would get angry at me for trying to help him. As time went on, not only did he get angry at me, he also began to lecture me about my AS, and that really shocked me. After developing an assorted range of social skills, I had gotten pretty good at small talk and making/keeping acquaintances, and in the online game where I met my friend, I had developed an outstanding reputation based on my being the protective, supportive teddy bear. I attribute those traits and many other traits to either AS directly, or as a response/compensation for having AS. My friend, however, sees nothing good in having AS, and devotes almost all of his energy towards appearing normal. He wants a "normal" life, but it means abandoning what he really is. This is quite evident when a lot of the people close to him notice how "wishy-washy" he was, always seesawing back and forth. I would argue that that aspiration of his is like an obsession, but it's not quite an obsession, it's more like a reaction to not being able to accept his AS.

You seem to understand how specifically AS affects you, even if your experiences thus far might be not so great. My friend, however, was diagnosed with AS maybe 8 years ago or so, and did not acknowledge that he even had it until three months ago when I mentioned AS to him. Even now, I doubt that he fully understands just how strongly AS affects him. It's just that I don't think he'll be able to improve his situation, without realizing first that it's not his fault for having AS, and then learning how to enjoy life with AS.