Lived Experience Forum

[skyburial]

I have had this issue since I was in preschool, maybe before (I'm 24 now).

I have asked multiple sub reddit's (pertaining to my possible diagnoses, schizotypal PD, schizoid PD, schizophrenia, avoidant PD), I've googled multiple different phrases/questions and nothing shows up, no one related to this issue. 

I haven't interacted with anyone besides doctors and my mum in 7 years, until recently but that made the feeling worse, because I was interested in a person that I went on an outing with (a group of people mixed with social workers) and I've never been interested in anything my whole life, be it person or object/pursuit. It just feels very unhealthy and immoral, the interest that is. I honestly do t think I can't get a job with this ailing me. 

I'm here to ask if anyone has a similar issue. 

My case manager keeps going on about exposure therapy, but this doesn't feel like anxiety at all, it upsets me but I don't worry about anything in particular, it just feels immoral/profoundly wrong/unhealthy. 

And I fear that it's getting worse...

[greenpea]

@skyburial  Hi skyburial and welcome to the forums. Firstly I love your name. I want a skyburial be it Tibetan or native american .... anyway you are a bit vague but I also understand you have to write within the guidelines so sometimes it makes it difficult to express ones self. Life can be difficult particularly in relationships. Does this person know that you are interested in them? It is nigh impossible to go on a date as such atm with the virus constraints that we are all living with but maybe grabbing a coffee and going for a walk in the sunshine .... 

I have schizoaffective disorder and am much older than you so I really dont know much about dating anymore and really dont want to know lol .... personally I would be talking to a psychiatrist about this .... do you have one? a good one is important. One that you click with.  I will tag @outlander  into the conversation as she is about your age and will possibily be able to help more than me. Take good care of youself. greenpea

[skyburial]

I do have a psychiatrist, I have told them all about this and they don't know what to tell me/ they won't tell me anything really. 

I've only seen this person twice (this was a month and a bit ago), then the social worker group stopped because of the virus, we talked very briefly and it went okay. I wouldn't dare express my interest as the title of the thread says. 

[skyburial]

I forgot to mention that this feeling is worse with friends and family, hence why I haven't had friends for close to 7 years. 

[chibam]

Hi @skyburial,

As @greenpea said, your original post is a little vague in places, making it hard to understand your meaning sometimes.

Do you have any idea how you might've come by your values (i.e. right/wrong) on this subject? Do you think it might be a religious thing, or perhaps rooted in upbringing? Do you think you might've inherited these values from a role model of some sort?

Can I ask how does it feel when others interact with you? Does it feel differant to how it feels when you interact with someone else? What about how it feels when you witness others interacting with one another? Do you feel like they are acting immorally?

Personally, I feel it's wrong to intrude unsolicited into another person's life, which is why I need a third party to orchestrate meetings/engagements with others, so that there can be an impartial third party cross-checking that the interaction is indeed desirable to both people (i.e. myself and the other person) involved. Sadly, finding someone to arrange friendships/romantic connections/employment when you need them is all but impossible these days, unless you just happen to know someone who is so inclined.

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@skyburial wrote:

I forgot to mention that this feeling is worse with friends and family, hence why I haven't had friends for close to 7 years. 

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I can relate to this very well - though I'm not suggesting our reasons will be similar.

In my case, it's because my "friends" and family just aren't the right people for me. Their values, their ambitions, their customs, their tastes - they are just all off base with what I need and value. They don't embody the sort of world I can understand anybody genuinely wanting to live in; quite the opposite, in fact. So having them in my life makes me more attracted to suicide, not less. To make matters worse, there's no way (as far as I can tell) of making interactions with them productive in any way. And lord knows, I've tried.

[skyburial]

@chibam 

I have no idea where this issue stems from, but I've recently linked it very loosely to my issue with pride, I'm not religious but pride (it happens to be a sin as well) bothers me a whole lot. 

I've also very recently realised that every interaction I have is completely empty, well it seems to go well on their end, but from my end it feels very empty and I don't know if that may be a reason why I see it as "immoral". 

It feels identical if I interact with them or if they interact with me, as far as I've noticed. 

I'm not sure why it's worse with "friends" and family, I don't think of people as being "wrong for me". 

I'm not sure if you know the video game "Animal Crossing" but that game brings these feelings up as well, which is very weird. 

[chibam]

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@skyburial wrote:

I'm not sure if you know the video game "Animal Crossing" but that game brings these feelings up as well, which is very weird. 

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I've never played it, but I'm loosely familiar with it. Is it the whole game that brings up these feelings for you, or just certain aspects of it? Do you feel differantly about the interactions between yourself and the NPCs then you do about player-to-player in-game interactions?

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@skyburial wrote:

@chibam 

I have no idea where this issue stems from, but I've recently linked it very loosely to my issue with pride, I'm not religious but pride (it happens to be a sin as well) bothers me a whole lot. 

I've also very recently realised that every interaction I have is completely empty, well it seems to go well on their end, but from my end it feels very empty and I don't know if that may be a reason why I see it as "immoral".

I think I can understand that. I, too, see unflatterring connections between self-confidance/pride and interactions. A lot of the bad encounters I've had with others have been fuelled by the other person's pride. There were always these connotations that I should act greatful/blessed to be "graced with their presence", and there were always punishments to follow if I failed to convincingly pretend that I was delighted to have had to endure them for whatever length of time they had decided to haunt me.

I also can't ignore the fact that my own pride/self-confidance has done a lot of dammage as well. Once upon a time, I believed that I was strong enough to make a differance, to make the world a better place. But I was wrong about everything. I was too self-confidant. In the end, my interacting with others only ever did more dammage, I think.

IMHO, so many of us (i.e. humans) seem to genuinely believe that we are god's gift to humanity, when really we are a massive drain on everybody who has the misfortune to know us. So yeah, I get how one can see a connection between self-confidance/pride and an immorality in human interaction.

And I can understand why you see a connection between empty interactions and immorality.

Image you trudged all the way up a steep hill to fetch a bucket of water from a well, but by the time you got home you discovered all you had to show for it was an empty bucket. You would feel "wronged", wouldn't you? You would instincively feel that they whole ordeal was "wrong".

Most of us have an internal moral code where we believe that hard work ought to be repaid with justified reward. When that reward doesn't come, we feel cheated, we feel wronged. So when we interact with others and we get nothing out of it - or when the encounter is "empty" (to use your words), it makes sense that the whole process would seem "wrong"; just as if we fed $5 into a vending machine and nothing came out - that would feel "wrong", too, wouldn't it?

[skyburial]

It's mostly the interacting with NPC's that causes issues for me, I don't really know why though. Doing all the activities in in the game, then the eventual interacting with the NPC's makes it feel unhealthy. 

It's not other people's pride, it's my own, I try to be humble as I possibly can. And I think that just puts unneeded pressure on me, but I don't see another way of going about it since I value it so much. It's pretty much the only thing I value. 

The emptiness thing can go both ways, but it's mostly coming from my end. When I'm apart of the equation it just becomes empty for some reason. Even though almost everyone I have interacted with seemed to genuinely enjoy it. 

The emptiness I noticed is a new thing, it may have been there for a while, but I'm still trying to link it with the "immoral" feeling, at the moment it adds another dimension to the whole feeling but it doesn't seem to be the cause at the moment, I'll have to stew on it for longer it seems.