# I'm unaware of how people percieve me, and I dont understand "social context/understanding of people"



## thatguy (Nov 8, 2011)

Does anyone else feel like this?

1) I use to have an ego, very aware of how I protrayed/was being perieved by others, now I have no idea how people percieve me. Its like ive lost the ability to read/understand how a normal person thinks/feels about me, or anything in that matter. I feel like im a spirtless, personalityless shell, I dont understand whats poilte, whats funny, what acceptable. Like I have no social fibre, all these "being polite" and reacting so heavily to emotions and certian things make me feel weird and strange, because it just seems so fucking irrelevant in the realm of life. But also what makes it enjoyable. I use to be SOO intact with social "fibre" of life, I could fake any emotion, could make people believe what I wanted them to think of me upon meeting them. Was very mallable socially. I could have been a good politican so to speak.

2)This makes me feel very alien. I literally feel like ive lost functioning in the frontal region of my brain, everytime I walk by a mirror I catch myself and see how bizzare I must look to other people on a regular basis, but I dont realise it. I use to be hyper aware of how other people percieved me, its strange. I also lack emotional judgement/responsiveness, like im running on intellect only. When people protray emotions, I dont register them, I respond on knowledge, not feeling. I also dont understand the "context" to social settings or conversations, like whens someones trying to hint something, like they want to go home or engage in something with you for example. I simply just dont pick it up. Everythings black and white, I wont understand what your "trying" to imply unless you straight the fuck up say it. Like other peoples higher emotional intellect have this sense of "softness" so they implicity hint something to you, hoping you pick it up and understand them without having the look blantent or cruel. While on the other hand i CANNOT do this, I can't "hint" things emotionally, because I dont have emotions. I just straight up say what needs to be said, and have NO idea how this makes the other person feel. Also, I can look people straight in the eye sometimes and just have no feelings about it, people have this natural respect when they "enter your world" socially so to speak, I dont. I can just stare and look stupid, with no idea of what theyre intentions are. Like people have this respect/life/understanding when they look at you, certian eye movements, and things they display, I just stare/sit blank, and just comment on what they say, completely unopinionated and mindless. While they display different tones of voices, and like emotional interest im just blank.

3)As if the emotional centre of my brain is down. I just cant bear how sub-human i must come across. I also don't realise how I emotionally sound to other people, like I feel like I sound cold or bossy, but dont quite understandhow people feel about this, and it makes me feel guilty, and cold.

4)When I look in the mirror I look like this low-functioning dull person who seems to have no thought process about anything.

5)But the worst part, is its not anxiety, its numbness and its unbearable beyond belief.

6)The ONE big thing I noticed, is that when I use drugs, they no longer give me the effect it use to, its like ive lost that higher functioning part of my brain that drugs stimulate. For example, coke usually rushes me with thoughts, and emotions, but not it just makes me stiff, and my brain doesnt respond to it, like a very dulled down response, and I get no intellectual kick from it, same with weed.

7)I also lost my creativity and verbal/grammatical fluency/intelligence. I cant comprehend things well, I have a bad memory, no episodic memory, no stories to tell. Im just very stupid and lost my wit.

8 ) I CANT display emotions/feelings on to others. Like I use to be able to unverbally communicate/protray how I felt through eye language, and how I composed myself/looked at people, like display this energy on to someone else, now I cant what so ever. Like i've lost my instinctive none verbal communcation skills, for example I no longer have ANY eye language, theyre the same no matter what. Just dull and stuck in a "blank stare". As if their hollow.

9) Voice sounds monotone alot, like I dont have these pitches that connect what im sying to how I feel (probably because I dont feel), like peoples voices have these ranges. Mine is just the same most of the time, cold, defensive, robotic answer. Like my brain doesnt know how to display interest/emotions through what Im saying to sound engaged to what the other persons saying. Makes me seem cold and uninterested.

As a note, I use ecstasy like 10 times in 4.5 months, about 15 pills. THe last two experiences I had a bad trip because of realtionship problems, and I feel like iver permanetly damaged my brain, which is why ive lost these skills... If some of you out there have the same problems not related to neurotoxic drugs it would be very comforting to hear. Such things like trauma or bad weed highs or such.

List which of the lucky 9 you have. Plus I have all the visual, unreal, low sensory integration, "not here" feelings that all describe so theres no point in me including them in the list, cause chances are if you have DP, you have those.


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## lil P nut (May 7, 2011)

I feel about the same way. You did very well at describing the social part. It's very hard to judge anything or relate to what the FUCK is going on. I used to think of funny shit to say all the time but now irl I just act like a robot. makes suicide feel like a good option


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## kate_edwin (Aug 9, 2009)

i keep asking people, because of course i feel weird so i assume other people experience me as different, but apparently they dont. i know it's hard to get your head around that, but for the most part, people will see most of us like we dont have anything wrong, course I dont make much eye contact and may react differently to things, startle easy etc........ but otherwise, people can't tell if we dont feel connected to them


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## Walkingzombie (Jul 7, 2011)

My social skills have gone to shit since DP. I've basically become a mute and can't converse with any of my family and friends.


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## noname (Sep 23, 2008)

Ive always been this way (about social akwardess).
Next great things you discuss come in addition with DP.


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## gill (Jul 1, 2010)

Do you know how I perceive you? And even if you asked, how would you know for sure my perception was absolutely true? Like I said on another thread, it's not so much about being unaware, or not knowing, it's the fixation with not knowing for sure, an obsession and the anxiety which comes with that....


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## thatguy (Nov 8, 2011)

gill said:


> Do you know how I perceive you? And even if you asked, how would you know for sure my perception was absolutely true? Like I said on another thread, it's not so much about being unaware, or not knowing, it's the fixation with not knowing for sure, an obsession and the anxiety which comes with that....


I don't know about you, but before all this I was very intact with how I was "percieved" to be by some, mainly friends. Clearly you can't read minds, buy surely you can intergrate the body language, eye language, passiveness, and tone (if ones speaking to you) of how your actions/presence is affecting someone else, it comes with nature. Just like a mother can determine how her child is feeling by simply looking at them and their expressions. Is it not hard to determine if someone feels uncomfortable around you?

I'm not saying I COMPLETELY lack the skills I listed above, but surely i'm very negated on alot of them. It's like my senses have been dulled, and takes pretty blatent signs, or retrospect to analyze how you may have come across. Clearly its subjected, by tell tale signs are pretty basic in knowledge.

Or maybe it could be due to complete lack of confidence that i'm even thinking about how i'm being percieved, while as before I just acted, but was still aware/knew how to respond maturely, with a good understanding of moral fibre.


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## baking_pineapple (Apr 27, 2011)

Could have written that myself... for me too the higher socio-emotional brain centers seem like they've been catastrophically interuppted. The only emotions I experience now are anxiety and fear, basic primordial stuff. Today I was in the library and had to sit across from someone. They could see me. I kept telling myself "you can do this! they pose no threat... they don't care about what you're doing."... no avail. Then I tried a little "inclusive therapy": "it's okay to feel afraid, you can make mistakes... they're not judging you". My fear response continued, unabated, as if she was a menacing predator hungry for a snack rather than the friendly-looking stranger she seemed, objectively, to be. I don't know if she noticed my awkwardness... I tried my best to hide it, cowering behind my computer monitor or looking around sheepishly at nothing in particular. Still, despite my coping, I would emit these strange involuntary shudders or odd facial expressions, which I felt certain she noticed.

I'm a young, fairly attractive guy... nobody wants to see a full-grown man acting like a scared little child on the first day of school. I sense their projections with paralyzing acuity... I know how they expect someone like me to act because I know how I would expect someone like me to act... but I feel incapable of disguise... me, the once master of the mask, possesor of preternatural abilities to camoflauge and conceal his interior life, to spontaneously merge his persona with the dictates and norms of the social moment... reduced to a feckless anomaly, an ephemeral blip of static on an otherwise clear social frequency. I am a walking, talking imposition on geniality and social trust, a freakish stranger to the hominal race, tormentented by what I grasp but cannot reach. If only I could sense other people rather than sense them sensing me. I feel them feeling me, but there is no substantiating content, just a nominal, inacessible something. This reminds me of a case of a woman who after suffering damage to the "Wernicke" area of the brain, finds herself unable to name objects. When shown a picture of an apron, she stutters, "Um... you see I can't, I can I can barely do... no, no, its something." When told its an apron, she immediately recognizes it.

That's how I feel when I'm around other people... "um, errr, there's something there, uhhh, I don't know what, you see I can't"... It's just like that. I know someone is there but I can't locate them, I'm incapable of tapping into their experience... there's no theory of mind (i.e., our mental model of the other) for me to access. However, if someone told me who this person was and how they were experiencing life at that moment, I would undoubtedly say, "oh yes, of course that's how they are feeling and thinking... how dense of me".

This uncertainty and ambiguity activates, as has been demonstrated empirically, the amygdala, the subcortical structure responsible for our fear response. If I focus my attention on anything other than typing or the display on the screen or some other tangible object in the environment, I'm immediately faced with this implacable, nameless fear of... of whatever that something is which lives inside her. For all my amygdala knows, that could be a blood-thirsty t-rex in front of me... and until it finds out what the fuck that mysterious "thing" in the environment is, it's going to keep signaling importunely, "threat, threat, THREATTT".

The very fact that she perceives a "me" is unsettling as well because I have no sense of what such a "me" consists of... and thus, through the same mechanism just described, I feel fear towards this unidentifiable thing that is me. It is only once I take attention off me and off her, and turn it to the inanimate world of things that I feel my fear temporarily subside.

Unlike some people on here, I still have thoughts, but its like they've been deprived of the "regulating principles" (kant) that emotions provide. They still have structural coherence (i.e., they're gramtically and semantically correct)... but there's absolutely no pragmatic--i.e., social/contextual--sense to them. In some ways, this has made me all the more logical, since my thinking does not occur within social frames of references, which are inherently designed to filter out the material from consciousness that threatens one's belonging or status in the group. Therefore, I am free to think anything I want, with no regard to the social, moral, or emotional imputations that bind most people to particular streams of thought. However, with thought unfettered from its emotional correlates, there is really no reason to think anything at all. After all, the brain promotes most vigorously (via neurotrophins) the connections between neurons that lead, either directly or indirectly, to reward. It also promotes those that are active (far less vigorously though), which I'm pretty sure is the only thing ensuring the survival of my higher cognitive functions. There's a lot more I could say, but I'm tired and a bit depleted, so I'll leave it for now.


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## TenStepsBack (Dec 4, 2011)

Walkingzombie said:


> My social skills have gone to shit since DP. I've basically become a mute and can't converse with any of my family and friends.


a fucking men


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## SSJ3Lotokun (Nov 21, 2011)

I definitely feel you there. Had a lot of people recently tell me that they're going to miss me/how much they like me/care about me, and it just puzzles me. What's there to like or miss or care about? And I don't really feel anything like that for them. Of course I don't actually tell them these things.


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## Anla (May 1, 2007)

My latest counselor explains it thus: Emotional functioning does affect social functioning. So, since dp/dr negatively affects emotional functioning, social functioning is also negatively impacted. In my case, it is very difficult to find the energy to develop new attachments, since the feelings just are not accessible now.


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## Midnight (Jul 16, 2011)

BUMPING THIS THREAD

*I know it's 2 years old but man the OP's experience is exactly the same as mine, it's almost disturbing! *

Not being able to pick up on social cues, inability to read others, not feeling when speaking, not feeling when socializing, monotone voice.

Drugs as well... this person is the only one on this forum who has spoken about it - they don't DO anything anymore. Coke and weed used to give me rushes of emotion and thought, but now nothing, I just become more stiff and more socially awkward. It has made me feel so much better just to know that someone experiences it the same way i do

HOW DO WE GET OVER THIS?


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## Francis (Sep 17, 2013)

Feel completely the same, but I don't do drugs, haven't touched them for years.

Really frustrating talking to people about how the self is perceived and them just dismissing it. Was reading about it not too long ago, knowing how we project ourselves and self image is an integral part of social stuff. Working on a DP level is pretty much alien for those who have never experienced it.

It goes for most life experiences methinks, unless you have a good imagination and are empathetic a lot of stuff that happens outside your sphere will be too abstract to comprehend. Fortunately DP suspends thingy of belief so at least it's easier to tune into more of life's experiences...once you get past the numb stage anyhoo's.


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## Midnight (Jul 16, 2011)

baking_pineapple said:


> Could have written that myself... for me too the higher socio-emotional brain centers seem like they've been catastrophically interuppted. The only emotions I experience now are anxiety and fear, basic primordial stuff. Today I was in the library and had to sit across from someone. They could see me. I kept telling myself "you can do this! they pose no threat... they don't care about what you're doing."... no avail. Then I tried a little "inclusive therapy": "it's okay to feel afraid, you can make mistakes... they're not judging you". My fear response continued, unabated, as if she was a menacing predator hungry for a snack rather than the friendly-looking stranger she seemed, objectively, to be. I don't know if she noticed my awkwardness... I tried my best to hide it, cowering behind my computer monitor or looking around sheepishly at nothing in particular. Still, despite my coping, I would emit these strange involuntary shudders or odd facial expressions, which I felt certain she noticed.
> 
> I'm a young, fairly attractive guy... nobody wants to see a full-grown man acting like a scared little child on the first day of school. I sense their projections with paralyzing acuity... I know how they expect someone like me to act because I know how I would expect someone like me to act... but I feel incapable of disguise... me, the once master of the mask, possesor of preternatural abilities to camoflauge and conceal his interior life, to spontaneously merge his persona with the dictates and norms of the social moment... reduced to a feckless anomaly, an ephemeral blip of static on an otherwise clear social frequency. I am a walking, talking imposition on geniality and social trust, a freakish stranger to the hominal race, tormentented by what I grasp but cannot reach. If only I could sense other people rather than sense them sensing me. I feel them feeling me, but there is no substantiating content, just a nominal, inacessible something. This reminds me of a case of a woman who after suffering damage to the "Wernicke" area of the brain, finds herself unable to name objects. When shown a picture of an apron, she stutters, "Um... you see I can't, I can I can barely do... no, no, its something." When told its an apron, she immediately recognizes it.
> 
> ...


This is probably the best post on DP I've ever read on this forum... it describes my experience of life with DP so succinctly and in such detail. Astonishing, really.

Also he talks about something that noone on here these days acknowledges - the fact that he talks about trying to calm himself down and get past the DP but it *doesn't work*, with:-

"I kept telling myself "you can do this! they pose no threat... they don't care about what you're doing."... no avail. Then I tried a little "inclusive therapy": "it's okay to feel afraid, you can make mistakes... they're not judging you". *My fear response continued, unabated"*

*Man, this post is so money! I've tried a million and one things, acceptance, trying to get more anxious, trying to rationally convince myself that there is no reason to be anxious and feel so spaced out.... nothing works!*

"I know how they expect someone like me to act because I know how I would expect someone like me to act... but I feel incapable of disguise... me, the once master of the mask, possesor of preternatural abilities to camoflauge and conceal his interior life, to spontaneously merge his persona with the dictates and norms of the social moment... reduced to a feckless anomaly, an ephemeral blip of static on an otherwise clear social frequency."

That is such good writing. That was me before, the social chameleon, but DP/DR rips away all your defenses and leaves you totally vulnerable!


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## Guest (Oct 28, 2013)

Midnight said:


> This is probably the best post on DP I've ever read on this forum... it describes my experience of life with DP so succinctly and in such detail. Astonishing, really.
> 
> Also he talks about something that noone on here these days acknowledges - the fact that he talks about trying to calm himself down and get past the DP but it *doesn't work*, with:-
> 
> ...


I think most of your problems comes from the fact that you expect instant gratification or at the very least quick results. Acceptance works, it just takes months, and the results are subtle. You can't practice acceptance and expect any noticeable difference that day, that week or maybe even that month. The same thing goes for any way to handle anxiety, it takes time and patients, but you want quick noticeable results and it doesn't work that way.

Secondly, I notice you have a tendency to gravitate towards limitations and things outside of your control. In order to recover you need to be patient,dedicated to a solution, and not limit your self.


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