It's confirmed: I must get undiagnosed: how?

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^^^
I'm not sure but it's possible that the hyper awareness came from you having problems with these things yourself (because of NLD or ASD or whatever) and becoming more consciously aware of them than most people and then being able to see the flaws in others because of the hyper-awareness. Basically NT's are aware of these things only unconsciously in themselves and others for the most part but you had to train yourself to have normal prosody, facial expressions ect and were successful so you notice the problems in other people. I know of a girl who had AS (diagnosis) and was told she didn't meet criteria for it any more as an adult and she's hyper aware of other people's social mistakes. I thought of this because in the thread about looking scary you had insight into other's prosody problems but then you said you also used to have prosody problems. The jealousy.......I'm not sure....NPD could explain it but a lot of things could.....it doesn't even have to be a disorder.....it might just be an emotional issue/problem you have because of your past experiences.

I still have prosody issues. Some of these things I judge about others go to other things with which I don't have trouble. Many, many others are related to what I fear of others currently or in the future seeing in myself. Sometimes, it's just gloating over issues I used to have but no longer do. Honestly, this is why I still go to aspie meetups even though I have nothing in common with anyone there. It's because being around people who are poorly dressed and make lots of social mistakes makes me feel better about myself.

I am troubled by my inability to connect with others, or to have any real friends, but I often wonder if it's something I really want, or if there are other reasons.

My therapist asked: "Are you lonely?" And I was like "I don't know."

But I feel empty, weak, and not powerful when I cannot be around many people and make connections with at least some of them.

As far as my voice/relating skills as they have been harmed by NLD: I can't stand to feel weak and inferior; therefore, I must develop better social skills.

"Do you want close relationships with people?"

"I honestly don't know"

"Maybe I just want to have more control over my environment and the people in it. I guess that requires having relationships to an extent."

In a way, I do get my identity from other people--hopefully from people who make me feel powerful and useful. If I'm with someone whom I realize reflects badly on me, I get very distressed and typically turn on the person or cut them off. I've had several relationships where I was dating perfectly nice girls and treated them horribly for these reasons.

It's this fear of being alone too much, having atrophying social skills, and, thus, having the imaginary observer view me as a "loser" like those lonely crazy old men who go to clubs and creep out all the women. This drives me to go to social events, parties, etc. at least try to make friends (though I only succeed on the most superficial of levels) and be in a romantic relationship (I have been in 8 lasting two months or more, at age 26, so average?).

At a deeper level, most people make me very uncomfortable. Do I even really want to have friends to to be in a relationship? Do I even like sex, or do I just do it because that's what guys are "supposed" to do? I honestly don't know. I sometimes feel like I can't stand people and hate sex. I never know what I want anymore, or what is being done to please an imaginary observer who sometimes takes the shape and characteristics of my father.

I often feel judged by one or more--I don't know what else to call them--"imaginary observers" (not delusions since I know they are imaginary, but it's a way of thinking) which often find me pathetic and inadequate, which causes lots of reactive behavior, anger, anxiety, and depression. Then, I feel judged for that.

I'm very critical of others and blame others for my problems. So, helpful people like my immediate family members probe deeper to find out if I am avoiding dealing with my problems simply because I am blaming other people. Then, they learn that I am equally hard on myself. And vice versa: people who think I'm too hard on myself quickly learn that I'm vicious and ruthless when it comes to judging others.

It's like I have an intrinsic ability to judge the "value" of people, including myself. I don't even know what the value is in respect to, certainly not always usefulness to myself since it's typically far more abstract than that. I don't know anyone else who thinks of others in this way. I think of people as an entity with a number signifying social value. And I often worry that my number is too low for various reasons.

Honestly, the reason I sought help initially was because of issues in a personality interview in my professional program that kind of shut me out of the top jobs in my field and sent me into 3 months of deep depression.

Thank you littlebee. Thank you. I get it now.
http://blog.donnawilliams.net/2010/12/2 ... -multiple/

Also this

Okay , well that kind of judging and blaming others does sound more like NPD. Actually, I forgot about this but I know a girl with that diagnosis too-she's my friend's cousin and I've only met her in person twice but my friend has told me a lot about her. She does have some other problems , she's also diagnosed with OCD. She is very openly critical of others , she complains a lot that her co-workers are slow and stupid and she talks about how she sits in meetings doing calculations for her personal fiances because she's so bored at work and how she can get her work done in half the time as the others. She tells her cousin she's fat and criticizes how she looks/dresses openly.

I'm not sure about the imaginary observer thing, I could imagine that being associated with NPD though it's not in the criteria.

SOme other things about her so you can compare yourself: She casually calls herself brilliant or hot in conversations. She proudly proclaims herself a bigot and says there are too many coloured people where she lives........but some would call her "coloured", she;'s Chinese. When she's ignorant about something she acts like that thing is not important. When I mentioned Ann Frank she said she didn't know who she was and just said "I'm not a very historical person". At first I thought she was a superficial idiot because of these things.....speaking of judging others quickly and harshly ....... The thing is she's actually quite brilliant in some ways. She's sought after for jobs and offered positions because she really is one of the best at her job..she's an actuarial scientist and she graduated top of her huge class at Waterloo in Mathematics. She's very hard working and productive.....even though she ostensibly tunes out in meetings (maybe she can afford to). She's also very pretty and skinny and she's obsessed with her appearance and self image. She wouldn't take her OCD meds because of the possible side effect of weight gain even though she's about 110 pounds. She can be manipulative....she used to flirt with a guy so that he'd do her homework for her in a particular class she found boring and again-she proudly proclaimed it. The thing about her that seems unlike you is that she doesn't seem to be critical of herself at all -although she does apparently self injure to punish herself - so maybe she goes through bouts of depression and is very critical of herself then. I'm not sure.

Anyway, you do seem to have some features of these personality disorders but you're being very honest about yourself and what might be wrong with you and you seem to feel guilty about treating others poorly in the past (worrying about being a good person). I don't think you're a bad person.

I think you should discuss these things with a psych as soon as possible though. Like I said, psychiatry is not an exact science , psychology maybe even less so, and they're based on behavioral symptoms which are subjective. You won't get a guarantee of what's wrong, what caused it or what you can do to fix it, unfortunately. Still, it's not as if psychology has no value, IMO, and a professional can help you better than I can or anyone else on this site IMO. You're going to obsess and drive yourself crazy if you try to find a disorder that fits you exactly. Let a professional try to figure out what the best fit is or best fits are (don't expect every little symptom to match or for it to explain every idiosyncrasy you have) and what the best solution for your problems might be. If you see what they say as somewhat reasonable -not complete quackery, I'd advise to give it a try.

Could this explain the differences?



I had also read that, even within these types, the most common form of NPD is "covert narcissism." Anyway, I have much less to offer the world than your friend, it sounds like, so maybe mine is just less directly expressed and is the "compensatory" type, as opposed to the "unprincipled" type, which sounds like your friend.

What do you think?

^^^
Yeah, you'd probably best fit the compensatory one and maybe she'd fit the elitist and/or unprincipled.

Also, you probably have more to offer the world than you realize (once you get your life together). You did make it into law school and you have a good work ethic.

Thank you.. I was starting to wonder if I even get it myself.

This is a good thread, but why? It is a social interaction and who made this thread? Tyrion.

So what drives the interest in this thread? People are interconnecting by looking to discover something interesting which presumably that can be applied to an understanding of not only Tyrion but also oneself. So Tyrion is the external focus, but he is also in some sense the internal connection point, as the way he is interconnecting with "himself,' whoever that is, is interconnected to the way in which we are interconnecting with ourselves, and those interconnections are continuously interconnecting, disconnecting then reconnecting, but primarily interconnecting. So a grid with many alive points creating an always new and living circuits, a group mind.

Now what is this mind looking for? I venture to suggest it is integration and the substance integration creates which is akin to a tactile sensation. Every human being is looking to be touched in some way, be it symbolically or literally. However there is for some of us the threat of total disconnection, meaning by this--being severed, either literally, or figuratively by (the loss of) meaning.

I don't know exactly where I am going here, but something about representation--so will finish later.

To Tyrion:You do realize, I presume, that to those participating "you" represent something subjective and personal that is other than what you perceive (in any given moment:-) as yourself, so this gives a big pallet to experiment and create with. Primarily we have a situation, as in any situation, where everything overlaps in various ways with everything else, dependent upon our interpretations, and the interpretation, the interpretING is the pivot. It can be either a sword or a shield, but probably not both at the same time, so if a person is using both sword and shield in order to fight an important battle, not just for himself but even for others to be able to survive, then the mind which is using sword and shield needs to be comprehensive, and the degree of attention required in such a situation is extraordinary, but one thing that can happen in battle is that as a person begins to fatigue his mind becomes dull and starts to function by repetition without being able to input new information.

I think this is what happens with trauma. A person, say a child (or an adult but really the child within) is struggling to find meaning, to survive in such a way that is connected both to intention and curiosity, but then, if the struggle is too big for him, the mind cannot comprehensively process the data but begins to repeat. How is meaning accomplished? It is done by making an icon in that the meaning of one thing becomes connected to the meaning of everything. and the icon or label functions as a bridge. Interestingly, the primitive external representations of such an icon often looks like a shield, but if one loses the sword of attention, then the mind begins to fragment and deteriorate. In life, as in a battle, the next step is interconnected with everything, much in the way a diagnosis is connected to a possible solution, but is the diagnosis the actual solution? No, in that in order to take the next step, it is necessary to think a step ahead, and this loops back to where one is standing, and what the entire experience represents fuels ones energy supply, and when the mind becomes depleted of energy, then the movements become repetitive and ultimately the shield loses its protective power. So to be a hero does not require to think about being a hero, but rather to think in a new way.

This is kind of philosophical, but need to take a rest stop before I go in the talk about BPD and DID.

Great thoughts, guys. As far as the Dissociative Identity Disorder/Multiple Personality Disorder goes, I think it may have some truth to it but is probably not the correct diagnosis. The personas are not split enough, and they are too predictable and in line with narcissism with borderline traits.

Here's why -- I looked at my childhood videos again. I was CLEARLY autistic at one point. There is no question about it. It was even bad enough to lead my super religious parents to consider it demon possession and subject me to several exorcisms over the years (one as a 4-year-old which supposedly worked and then once as a 17-year-old at a quack ministry in Georgia).

So misdiagnosis of Asperger's in adulthood? Maybe not.

The thing about Narcissistic Personality Disorder is you have a hyper-idealized image of yourself. And then, one's life is built on striving to put the actual self in the position of the idealized self. This really fits me very well. We are also hyper sensitive to the judgments of others. In fact, I even have imaginary people who judge me constantly; some take the image of my father. Some are completely fictional or take the forms or composite forms of others who have judged me over the years (not in the delusional sense, as far as I know).

Thus, given my obsessions with feeling powerful and respected and my extreme obsession with public image, this led to lots of self-awareness of how other people perceived me, which caused me lots of distress, but also had some positive impacts in terms of forcing me to change not only my autistic behaviors, but also my autistic thinking.

I didn't quite achieve NT thinking. But it wasn't autistic thinking either. Kind of my own version developed to achieve my narcissistic goals. Very much the "black and white" thinking associated with Borderline Personality Disorder also. I initially identified strongly with some aspie women on this form, including kjas and deltafunction who may have had a similar process of forcing themselves to become more NT. But really, our motivations were quite different, even if they share some similarities. While many aspie girls are obsessed with fitting in and developing relationships, forcing them to stress themselves to no end to change themselves, I cared little about fitting in and not at all about developing relationships with people. At my core, what I want is power, respect, beauty, and image. To get there, however, requires help from other people, so I strive to improve my social skills and public image, which requires rewriting a lot of autistic behaviors AND thinking. These things motivated me to join the military -- where I went through 3 years of hell but came out much more NT.

Here's the problem: there's a paradox in that, the more I succeed in becoming NT, the harder it is to make friends and, especially, to connect with people. For one thing, I'm so obsessed with my narcissistic goals that it's very hard to develop normal hobbies and interests (I think my aspieness helped this special-interest thing along: I CAN tell you everything about brain chemistry, and I can tell you about all the different kinds of IQ tests and the theories behind them; I can also tell you about all the scientific and sociological theories behind Dale Carnegies models, as well as multiple things about speech and brain pathology, as well as politics and image and message-related stuff in political science -- but who wants to discuss this? ), and I know much better than to talk about my obsessions with others. This not only leaves me little material with which to connect, the rewriting of my brain caused me to lose my sense of identity and to become fragmented into several poorly-formed identities.

I have, at times, had obsessive fixations on public characters who match more traditional narcissistic tendencies. For example, the character Neal Caffrey in White Collar, as well as Mitt Romney. I ended up voting for him even though I completely disagree with most of his political positions just because I was obsessed with him as a person. The things the media criticized about him, these made me admire him more.

1.Person 1: I'm full of myself, a high achiever, and cocky. Many women are attracted to this identity. But it rarely lasts more than a week or two.

2. Person 2: I'm a raging maniac when I feel like I can't succeed and everyone is judging me. Some women are attracted to this as well. This may last up to a month.

3. Person 3: I am depressed, emotional, and suicidal. It's very easy to make women friends (non-romantic) in this state. This typically lasts 1-2 months.

4. Person 3: I'm hyper-focused and restless and care little to be around people or to interact with them beyond a superficial level. I'm very intensely searching for something and trying to improve myself to reach my narcissistic goals. This is probably my default and often co-exists with the other three.

So, yes, I have multiple personas. Is this DID? Maybe. I think it could also be an outgrowth of NPD, perhaps made more extreme by the influence of Asperger's and NLD causing me to fall further short of my idealized self than an NT with NPD would, leading NPD to be a more severe social and functional impairment than it would be for an NT.

So what are the correct diagnoses?

I will find out shortly. However, what I think is that they are:

Nonverbal Learning Disorder
Narcissistic Personality Disorder
Borderline tendencies
Autistic tendencies
Sociopathic/Oppositional Defiant Disorder tendencies
Dysthymia

Part of getting well will involve developing a more forgiving attitude of myself, which will, hopefully, allow me to have respect for others as people, rather than value-added entities or tools.

Interesting. This sounds a bit like me and could fit with either DID/MPD or NPD, or even BPD for that matter.

Would it matter whether or not I had DID if the root cause was Narcissism?

It sound like you know your are problems though:



I think this may be what they call imaginary audience.

Yes, you're supposed to get over it as a teen though, from what I read. However, in me it didn't even appear until I was in my late teens.

Yes, excellent said. I agree. There are moments when the internet is verging on becoming an universal mind. And when we've all moved on from this thread it will still be left just as vibrant as when it was created. I originally came here to watch - for my sake - as I have no good advice for Tyrion. I'd love to be able to say more, but I'm not feeling OK right now.

Well, I still do a lot of things that are supposed to be normal for teenagers or children but not adults. It could just be emotional immaturity-you say you're sure you have NVLD and that can impact social/emotional development. An example:talking out-loud while problem solving is normal "up until a certain age" and then it's supposed to become internalized. Well, I'm 28 and I still have to talk aloud to work out problems. Anyway I think you're right that you at-least have autistic tendencies so that diagnosis wasn't way off. Your tentative conclusions seem pretty reasonable but when you take these things to a professional you should be open-minded -which you seem to be-you're considering lots of possibilities.

The main thing, I guess, is to get help with some of the above problems - that's really the point of the diagnosis. I would take this list of things you want help with and add to it if you think of anything else.

It seems like there are a lot of people with AS who don't feel like they ever truly become an "adult" emotionally, whatever that is supposed to mean. It's not exactly unique though as it's also part of ADD/ADHD and BPD. I think having the intelligence, reflectiveness, and overall experience of being an adult while having the emotional intensity of a teenager is frustrating. You constantly have this worry that people aren't giving you the respect or taking you seriously the way you deserve. At least that's the way I feel a lot and it leads to tension with family members and some people.

Mild BPD sounds like the right diagnosis to me. The problem is psychologists might treat you like a hypochondriac if you come right out and say you suspect you have this or that so it might be better to just play dumb and mention the symptoms without being too obvious at what your hinting at, at least at first. Definitely if you had time to go through everything in depth they wouldn't doubt you, but sometimes there's only so much time you have at a single session. There's also some that aren't comfortable dealing with BPD patients due to the stigma so you might have to shop around.