4 ms·
This isn't strange at all (at least to me). I've been misdiagnosed as bpd in facilities that were socially chaotic. People who diagnosed me were also selectivel
by s-shellfish 8y ago
This isn't strange at all (at least to me). I've been misdiagnosed as bpd in facilities that were socially chaotic. People who diagnosed me were also selectively biased to what information about me was indicative of past, present and expected behavior. It was a very traumatizing experience and the sad thing is this happens frequently in mental health care across the US to autistic individuals.
I can understand emotions in a systemized way but it requires watching patterns of every individual I interact with to learn. It also is very scary because I don't want to get to know anyone so well I accidentally mistake deep insecurities for topics to attempt polite conversation over. Thus, highly selective with individuals and how many (too many is cognitively overloading, but I've adapted fairly well on my own (somehow)) at my job, which - I'm a software developer, so although I'm not surrounded by people who have autism, I am surrounded by people who have a greater tolerance and higher sensitivity to neourological diversity.
I'm female. My mom dresses me mostly (most of my clothes are her old clothes). She's a beautician. I'm 32. Mental health care is annoying because of course BPD diagnosis has historically been highly likely, due to superficial snap judgements based on appearance. I had a coworker tell me flatly that appearances don't matter and this was very liberating. I continue to work on managing to communicate myself perfectly - great irony anticipating peculiar usage of language. Pedantry, always want to make sure the words I use are internally definitely correctly therefore used correctly (but I've been able to simplify the importance of this down to business logic definitions and computer science / programming languages / software definitions).
I am hoping I find an autism therapist that can actually help me in real life. At least with venturing out outside of working hours to create some semblance of a social life.
Systemizing is pattern matching. It's always hard when 2 people's patterns don't match perfectly. Calling it a willingness to work together or understand one another is so oversimplified with respect to the delicate balance process of developing relationships, it's not even funny.
Preference, socializing. I would say I have high preference to socialize where I have trust for both my expected pattern of behavior and people I trust - that their pattern of behavior will be relatively stable and neither myself nor they will be hurtful in any way. It never matters if it's one person or a group. Emotions run through people in groups in the same systematic way they do in individuals. Being perfectly calm all the time or just flat affect to stabilize groups that have related themselves to me in some unknown variant is really hard, and looping group behavior of 'i have an emotional outburst' - implies -> the group does generally, this drives me crazy because I can always relate it to myself therefore blame myself internally.
BPD is the same pattern mentality assuming that diagnosis was correct at one point of me (again, relative to social environment), no ability to communicate self because people have their theories they depend on for their survival (hostile healthcare centers) or control it (this is taken as hostile behavior in such places, even though the control element is really only intended to control myself and my emotions, not anyone else). Stuck in between contradictory social environments with established rules (that may contradict or conflict), either deeply ingrained behavior from the past with new context, or multiple conflicting social environments. It's a stigmatized illness. BPD is not being able to keep up with all of them, or not being able to generate/interpret rules quickly enough to manage self behavior in all, possibily unchosen social environments.
I would never want to go back into the hell that gets me labeled as BPD because it's one of the worst labels to carry. There's always the expectation that "I'm the bad one" that gets carried with the diagnosis. But mental illness labels in general, always seem pointless to me in the long term. Can always explain them all (except ASPD, that's intent to cause harm) in terms of individual behavior relative to social environmental expectations and judgements. This can all be systemized. This is probably why I get labeled as a hostile element in so called 'cattle mental health centers' (phrase comes from a PsyD I saw). Intent is never to cause harm. Everything just often turns into patterns, or systems, to me, I'd prefer to see it as a gift, not a curse. Hard rules to not systemize individuals are of supreme importance.
- sophistication 8y agoIt seems to me that BPD means obsessing about the social domain and ASD means obsessing about the non-social domain. Both obsessions are amplified by social exclusion due to being neurodivergent. Obsession leads to systemizing. Baron-Cohen's theory is a fantastic near-miss IMHO. I mean, he was clearly onto something. Women are warmer in temperament, men are more autistic, have better mechanical and spatial reasoning skills. But what Baron-Cohen may have missed is that those are symptoms rather than causes. Symptoms of a difference in innate value function in the degree to which the social domain is valued. But that's value at a very low, instinctive, perceptual level. Autists might still like socializing, but they do not get a kick out of processing social information that neurotypical people do, so their entire thinking apparatus down to low level neuronal circuits will be shaped by different optimization constraints, from birth onward.
- s-shellfish 8y agoI've personally had both since birth. Obsession with machines and computation, that understanding maps over to understanding social systems. I don't like it when it maps over to social systems. Everything gets shifted. Easier to be a coder, focus on machines, focus on words, symbols, patterns in symbols. Math, math is the bridge between both. Isomorphic. Systems are mental graphs of static points of observation anticipated to be stable/ predictable and arrows indicating direction and flow. As a female I really don't like gender binaries. Women generally, sure, but that's culture - cultural expectations.
- sophistication 8y agoI stated this in an overly mutual exclusive way. I suspect the difference is that people with BPD actually enjoy obsessing about social domain in a systemizing way, while autists don't. Autists might still engage in such obsession though, but for a different kind of intrinsic interest (interest in people vs what remains if you remove interest in people, namely mere epistemic/predictive interest).
- s-shellfish 8y ago