4 ms·

I have schizotypal personality disorder. For me it feels like a collective, kind of like the borg. I say "me" or "I" when communicating externally, but all thou

I have schizotypal personality disorder. For me it feels like a collective, kind of like the borg. I say "me" or "I" when communicating externally, but all thoughts are actually communicated as "us". All entities speak with the same voice (what most people think of as their inside voice), but each one speaks differently, with a different pace/tone, and has its own personality, thoughts, and desires. There are a handful of dominant ones that sit in the captain's chair so to speak, and they all have a say in how we behave externally. For example one of us is a pacifist, another one loves to socialize and party, one is cautious and anxious, the other very confident, and there's one that has a severe thirst for violence and blood-lust (this one we work hard to keep in check). I've literally been in fights where immediately after knocking my opponent down, I ask if they're ok and then help them back up and let them go. Then there's hundreds of transient entities that are usually clones of personalities observed elsewhere (movie characters, celebrities, or other influential people). These transient types will actually adopt the mannerisms, voice, and even accent of the personalities and display them outwardly! Makes for very weird interactions with family and friends lol. I've yet to see anyone on reddit or elsewhere with this description of the disorder. The closest thing is DID or maybe even borderline personality disorder (which is on the same schizo spectrum), but there's no disassociation with what I have, we're all fully aware of what the other is thinking. EDIT: added further clarifications on the differing voices

walleeee 4y ago
Do "you" identify with one entity, as is often reported among tulpamancers, or do "you" stand apart from them all? When you hear one or another of your internal voices, or become aware of an entity's thoughts, is it from the perspective of another, perhaps depersonalized agent observing the rest? Do "you" have equal access to all entities or is it more accurate to think of yourself as one among them with a privileged perspective? Thanks in advance for any insight you might be willing to provide. I hope these questions are not too invasive, your comment is of great interest to me.
- y-c-o-m-b 4y ago
  Good questions and no they're not invasive, so no worries. Each day (and sometimes each interaction) the person acting as "me" is just one of the entities taking over, so effectively there's no central "me" at all if that makes sense. Today it's introverted family-man, but if we attend an event in the evening for example, the more social personality takes over and listens in on the conversations from family-man and others. Let's say the social one is currently active and sitting at the bar with friends having a great time, the family-man will say "we should text our wife and let her know we'll be home late" to which the social one may respond with "nah, we'll do it later" or "yeah that's a good idea, we'll do it now". EDIT: to answer your last question about "equal access", we share thoughts and deliberate, but one can't exert control over the others nor forcefully take over. The active person at any given moment depends on the outside environment and what we decide is best for the situation, so it's kind of a democratic process; not sure if that can be defined as equal access or not.
  - markk 4y ago
    This is interesting. So is the person writing here is one of these personalities? Or are "you" watching one of these personalities writing? If the former, are there any personalities that are not aware they are one of many?
    - y-c-o-m-b 4y ago
      The person writing here is one of the entities/personalities yes. We're all aware of each other, so that's what makes this different from DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder) or at least it was different back during the initial diagnosis of schizotypal personality disorder in 2001.
  - nier 4y ago
    Did you do training to have your parts communicate with each other? I tried imaginative meditation with the goal of for example bringing my collective to sit around a cosy campfire, become friends and ask for each other’s advice. But in my case I always had a strong sense of a single me and only recently discovered that due to stress or an overwhelming feeling of happiness one part of that whole becomes very dominant. In that regard, what you describe as an entity taking over sounds very familiar to me. I want to get better at integrating my personas and am wondering if meditation is the only way forward. Any tips?
colechristensen 4y ago
Thank you for sharing. There are philosophical theories of mind that say we are all essentially like this but generally in a much less explicit way. The label “disorder” gets put on a person when the divisions become more explicit and come to the surface or when the darker aspects get control instead of being appropriately moderated by the rest. I have been close to people who absolutely had a different consciousness take the wheel so to speak during extreme stress and entirely believe this division of mind is real.
- y-c-o-m-b 4y ago
  Interesting point you bring up on the "disorder" label. I usually tell people that are newly diagnosed and freaked out about it that the label in itself is insignificant. It's only a "disorder" if it's disrupting your life in a negative way. I have delusions, "magical thoughts", the occasional paranoia, and I prefer being alone. 95% of the time though those things don't cause any disruptions to my otherwise normal life. I have a wife, kids, and work at a FAANG without issue. I've had this "disorder" for over 20 years now and I only took anti-psychotics for maybe 3 months in the beginning. I'm on low-dose (100mg) Welbutrin to manage ADHD and minor depression, that's it. All that said, I've had a pretty successful and fairly normal life, so fixating on the "disorder" part of things is pretty much pointless. Saying I'm schizotypal is more about explaining to people that I think differently and observe my environment differently.
- mxkopy 4y ago
  I've had experiences on psychedelics where my consciousness gets peeled back like an onion, with each layer being manifested by the drug as a separate voice. Things that we don't typically associate with an inner voice, like appraising some object or forming a reaction, became very explicit dialogues between influences in my mind. The loud ones were friends that I remember fondly. Some of them were comedians (LSD puts me in a silly mood). Some of them were even characters in books, and they were much quieter, but I could still feel their "grammar". The eeriest thing is realizing why the voices are there mostly during the come up, and then get magnified to magical characters like gods and aliens as the trip progresses. I'm convinced LSD exposed aspects of my conscious processing to myself, and these voices weren't part of some creative hallucination. That all of us, psychologically, are just amalgams of influences, of which the human sort are usually the most direct, makes a lot of sense. Still, its eerie thinking that those voices are always there, just that in moments of inner cohesion they all work and therefore seem as one. And I will say, being in that state of such explicit awareness of self was beneficial. I could say "no, don’t say that" to the voice that was saying "[morbid thing] was funny", for example. If someone thought like that all the time, I think it would be a disorder only to the degree that they wouldn't be able to communicate with others or whatever neurological overhead it incurs (maybe the brain needs some sort of central clock?).
ConfusedDog 4y ago
Out of curiosity, do you believe souls exist? I have asked myself if it is possible that all living beings do not technically have been "assembled" before "shipments." A person is really just a conglomerate of low level functions (souls) that assembled based on genetics and environments. The soul disperses and recycled after death. Low level programs remain, data (memory) most likely not.
- y-c-o-m-b 4y ago
  That's an interesting philosophy. One of the personalities is spiritual and believes in souls yes. You should read "The Holographic Universe" if you haven't yet. It kind of dives into some of these concepts.
  - ConfusedDog 4y ago
    Cool, I will check it out.
MAMAMassakali 4y ago
Crazy Jane from Doom Patrol
kgeist 4y ago
I don't know if I have a disorder or anything, but I've always felt since childhood that the actual "me" is a silent observer with little control over anything, and my body and thought processes are largely controlled by a different entity (much smarter than me) coexisting in my head. And that other entity wants me to believe it's all my decisions/actions, not theirs, and I'm in full control. It started with the realization that whenever I look at a problem, for example, a math problem, it just "clicks" with no actual effort on my part, as if someone else works hard solving it and just gives me the final answers, and all I do is take credit for it. Maybe it's not a disorder per se, but a very peculiar kind of self-perception. If someone knows if it's a known phenomenon in psychology, I'd like to hear more about it.
- djmips 4y ago
  That sounds familiar - I usually say that I must be an idiot savant or something. But I don't really have the sense of an 'other' - I more think of it as a co-processor.
- sweetsocks21 4y ago
  I think that's could be focusing too much on the "inner voice" and assigning that the "you" label. At least for me I have a normally chatty inner voice, and usually think of that as "me", but if I step back I realize there is a lot more to "me". There's other thoughts/knowledge/processes happening that can bubble up. At least my interpretation is the voice is just the aggregator, but there's really multiple systems coming together. If I switch tasks and do something very creative, say playing music or drawing, the inner voice goes away and I can enter a "flow" or meditative state where things just happen. It's a very different mode where it's just feelings/emotions/imagery and no language based thoughts. Also when I get really really tired, but power through it, I have a "recursive observer" where I kind of view myself on a delay and analyse everything I do, it's kind of annoying.
  - patmorgan23 4y ago
    I think people's psyche are less integrated than we realize. We're a bundle of emotions/desires all cohabitating. Some peoples subcomponents have good stable relationships with each other, others are chaotic and dysfunctional.
plutonorm 4y ago
This indicates DID, the schizotypal stuff is orthogonal to DID, you can be both. Most people choose and have chosen all their lives to group all their thoughts into one unitary personality. Others haven't. It's all an illusion anyway in my humble opinion. There are only chains of thoughts/feelings and we associate with those chains a feeling of "I" or "other", but the reality is it's just a meandering walk.
- y-c-o-m-b 4y ago
  > This indicates DID, the schizotypal stuff is orthogonal to DID, you can be both. You know what, you might be right... got curious because of your post and went searching, then found out about OSDD-1b which is a sub-type of DID: https://did-research.org/comorbid/dd/osdd_udd/did_osdd https://did-research.org/comorbid/dd/osdd_udd/did_osdd > In some cases, OSDD-1 parts can be highly distinct and have strong independent senses of self. What separates these individuals from those with DID is that they do not black out or lose time. They may or may not have dissociative amnesia for aspects of their trauma history, and they may occasionally experience episodes of amnesia due to extreme stress or reminders of trauma. However, they do not experience memory disruptions between parts during their normal daily life. An individual with OSDD-1b has a subjectively continuous memory; different alters do not have different versions of their history for daily life because all relevant information is accessible to all alters. Thank you!
hoten 4y ago
What did you think of Jane from Doom Patrol?
- y-c-o-m-b 4y ago
  Not familiar with it, sorry.
sexy_panda 4y ago
Having Borderline personality disorder is nothing like that.

walleeee 4y ago

Do "you" identify with one entity, as is often reported among tulpamancers, or do "you" stand apart from them all? When you hear one or another of your internal voices, or become aware of an entity's thoughts, is it from the perspective of another, perhaps depersonalized agent observing the rest? Do "you" have equal access to all entities or is it more accurate to think of yourself as one among them with a privileged perspective? Thanks in advance for any insight you might be willing to provide. I hope these questions are not too invasive, your comment is of great interest to me.

y-c-o-m-b 4y ago
Good questions and no they're not invasive, so no worries. Each day (and sometimes each interaction) the person acting as "me" is just one of the entities taking over, so effectively there's no central "me" at all if that makes sense. Today it's introverted family-man, but if we attend an event in the evening for example, the more social personality takes over and listens in on the conversations from family-man and others. Let's say the social one is currently active and sitting at the bar with friends having a great time, the family-man will say "we should text our wife and let her know we'll be home late" to which the social one may respond with "nah, we'll do it later" or "yeah that's a good idea, we'll do it now". EDIT: to answer your last question about "equal access", we share thoughts and deliberate, but one can't exert control over the others nor forcefully take over. The active person at any given moment depends on the outside environment and what we decide is best for the situation, so it's kind of a democratic process; not sure if that can be defined as equal access or not.
- markk 4y ago
  This is interesting. So is the person writing here is one of these personalities? Or are "you" watching one of these personalities writing? If the former, are there any personalities that are not aware they are one of many?
  - y-c-o-m-b 4y ago
    The person writing here is one of the entities/personalities yes. We're all aware of each other, so that's what makes this different from DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder) or at least it was different back during the initial diagnosis of schizotypal personality disorder in 2001.
- nier 4y ago
  Did you do training to have your parts communicate with each other? I tried imaginative meditation with the goal of for example bringing my collective to sit around a cosy campfire, become friends and ask for each other’s advice. But in my case I always had a strong sense of a single me and only recently discovered that due to stress or an overwhelming feeling of happiness one part of that whole becomes very dominant. In that regard, what you describe as an entity taking over sounds very familiar to me. I want to get better at integrating my personas and am wondering if meditation is the only way forward. Any tips?

colechristensen 4y ago

Thank you for sharing. There are philosophical theories of mind that say we are all essentially like this but generally in a much less explicit way. The label “disorder” gets put on a person when the divisions become more explicit and come to the surface or when the darker aspects get control instead of being appropriately moderated by the rest. I have been close to people who absolutely had a different consciousness take the wheel so to speak during extreme stress and entirely believe this division of mind is real.

y-c-o-m-b 4y ago
Interesting point you bring up on the "disorder" label. I usually tell people that are newly diagnosed and freaked out about it that the label in itself is insignificant. It's only a "disorder" if it's disrupting your life in a negative way. I have delusions, "magical thoughts", the occasional paranoia, and I prefer being alone. 95% of the time though those things don't cause any disruptions to my otherwise normal life. I have a wife, kids, and work at a FAANG without issue. I've had this "disorder" for over 20 years now and I only took anti-psychotics for maybe 3 months in the beginning. I'm on low-dose (100mg) Welbutrin to manage ADHD and minor depression, that's it. All that said, I've had a pretty successful and fairly normal life, so fixating on the "disorder" part of things is pretty much pointless. Saying I'm schizotypal is more about explaining to people that I think differently and observe my environment differently.
mxkopy 4y ago
I've had experiences on psychedelics where my consciousness gets peeled back like an onion, with each layer being manifested by the drug as a separate voice. Things that we don't typically associate with an inner voice, like appraising some object or forming a reaction, became very explicit dialogues between influences in my mind. The loud ones were friends that I remember fondly. Some of them were comedians (LSD puts me in a silly mood). Some of them were even characters in books, and they were much quieter, but I could still feel their "grammar". The eeriest thing is realizing why the voices are there mostly during the come up, and then get magnified to magical characters like gods and aliens as the trip progresses. I'm convinced LSD exposed aspects of my conscious processing to myself, and these voices weren't part of some creative hallucination. That all of us, psychologically, are just amalgams of influences, of which the human sort are usually the most direct, makes a lot of sense. Still, its eerie thinking that those voices are always there, just that in moments of inner cohesion they all work and therefore seem as one. And I will say, being in that state of such explicit awareness of self was beneficial. I could say "no, don’t say that" to the voice that was saying "[morbid thing] was funny", for example. If someone thought like that all the time, I think it would be a disorder only to the degree that they wouldn't be able to communicate with others or whatever neurological overhead it incurs (maybe the brain needs some sort of central clock?).

ConfusedDog 4y ago

Out of curiosity, do you believe souls exist? I have asked myself if it is possible that all living beings do not technically have been "assembled" before "shipments." A person is really just a conglomerate of low level functions (souls) that assembled based on genetics and environments. The soul disperses and recycled after death. Low level programs remain, data (memory) most likely not.

y-c-o-m-b 4y ago
That's an interesting philosophy. One of the personalities is spiritual and believes in souls yes. You should read "The Holographic Universe" if you haven't yet. It kind of dives into some of these concepts.
- ConfusedDog 4y ago
  Cool, I will check it out.

MAMAMassakali 4y ago

Crazy Jane from Doom Patrol

kgeist 4y ago

I don't know if I have a disorder or anything, but I've always felt since childhood that the actual "me" is a silent observer with little control over anything, and my body and thought processes are largely controlled by a different entity (much smarter than me) coexisting in my head. And that other entity wants me to believe it's all my decisions/actions, not theirs, and I'm in full control. It started with the realization that whenever I look at a problem, for example, a math problem, it just "clicks" with no actual effort on my part, as if someone else works hard solving it and just gives me the final answers, and all I do is take credit for it. Maybe it's not a disorder per se, but a very peculiar kind of self-perception. If someone knows if it's a known phenomenon in psychology, I'd like to hear more about it.

djmips 4y ago
That sounds familiar - I usually say that I must be an idiot savant or something. But I don't really have the sense of an 'other' - I more think of it as a co-processor.
sweetsocks21 4y ago
I think that's could be focusing too much on the "inner voice" and assigning that the "you" label. At least for me I have a normally chatty inner voice, and usually think of that as "me", but if I step back I realize there is a lot more to "me". There's other thoughts/knowledge/processes happening that can bubble up. At least my interpretation is the voice is just the aggregator, but there's really multiple systems coming together. If I switch tasks and do something very creative, say playing music or drawing, the inner voice goes away and I can enter a "flow" or meditative state where things just happen. It's a very different mode where it's just feelings/emotions/imagery and no language based thoughts. Also when I get really really tired, but power through it, I have a "recursive observer" where I kind of view myself on a delay and analyse everything I do, it's kind of annoying.
- patmorgan23 4y ago
  I think people's psyche are less integrated than we realize. We're a bundle of emotions/desires all cohabitating. Some peoples subcomponents have good stable relationships with each other, others are chaotic and dysfunctional.

plutonorm 4y ago

This indicates DID, the schizotypal stuff is orthogonal to DID, you can be both. Most people choose and have chosen all their lives to group all their thoughts into one unitary personality. Others haven't. It's all an illusion anyway in my humble opinion. There are only chains of thoughts/feelings and we associate with those chains a feeling of "I" or "other", but the reality is it's just a meandering walk.

y-c-o-m-b 4y ago
> This indicates DID, the schizotypal stuff is orthogonal to DID, you can be both. You know what, you might be right... got curious because of your post and went searching, then found out about OSDD-1b which is a sub-type of DID: https://did-research.org/comorbid/dd/osdd_udd/did_osdd https://did-research.org/comorbid/dd/osdd_udd/did_osdd > In some cases, OSDD-1 parts can be highly distinct and have strong independent senses of self. What separates these individuals from those with DID is that they do not black out or lose time. They may or may not have dissociative amnesia for aspects of their trauma history, and they may occasionally experience episodes of amnesia due to extreme stress or reminders of trauma. However, they do not experience memory disruptions between parts during their normal daily life. An individual with OSDD-1b has a subjectively continuous memory; different alters do not have different versions of their history for daily life because all relevant information is accessible to all alters. Thank you!

hoten 4y ago

What did you think of Jane from Doom Patrol?

y-c-o-m-b 4y ago
Not familiar with it, sorry.

sexy_panda 4y ago

Having Borderline personality disorder is nothing like that.