An aspect of my mental illness that it benefits me to pay attention to comes in the form of dissociative thinking. I think of dissociative thinking as applying the interactions with and observations of other people as I go about my day to day life to a very specific context that has something to do with my deepest, most private self. I can walk down the street on my daily walks, and if a man smiles at me and says hi, I often think he KNOWS things about me I may only confide in with close friends. I categorize such grandiose thinking as visceral, gut-based thinking that has little to do with reason or logic. I have such feelings and thoughts every day of my life, as far as I can tell. A good deal of my thought process consists of parsing out which of those interactions of that nature have any basis in reality to what I think about and which of those interactions have no basis in reality.
The most constructive approach I've come up with in the area of interpersonal relations in these past couple of months still consists of the token reward system I've come up with. Briefly, I give myself a sticker at midnight every day if I feel I've tried to get along well with and be nice to those it would profit me to get along well with and be nice towards. On the first and fifteenth of every month, if I conclude that my efforts merit it, I reward myself with an inexpensive, easy to acquire CD, normally of music that I wouldn't normally buy. Right now I'm listening to a Barry Manilow CD that I ordered earlier this month. Good songwriter.
Am I a super-genius who finds himself beset by a perpetual confederacy of dunces, or am I just a mentally ill person who gets easily confused in his thinking along the lines of how I've outlined my day to day thought processes in the previous paragraph? Regardless, I feel these thoughts and feelings as a kind of social heat I draw. The token rewards might not answer those questions once and for all, but I can commit to a course of action and behavior that those around me and I myself find acceptable. My own restrictions on what I can write about on this day of the month prohibit me from getting too specific, but I hope to try this token reward system on several people in my world sometime in the foreseeable future.
The most constructive approach I've come up with in the area of interpersonal relations in these past couple of months still consists of the token reward system I've come up with. Briefly, I give myself a sticker at midnight every day if I feel I've tried to get along well with and be nice to those it would profit me to get along well with and be nice towards. On the first and fifteenth of every month, if I conclude that my efforts merit it, I reward myself with an inexpensive, easy to acquire CD, normally of music that I wouldn't normally buy. Right now I'm listening to a Barry Manilow CD that I ordered earlier this month. Good songwriter.
Am I a super-genius who finds himself beset by a perpetual confederacy of dunces, or am I just a mentally ill person who gets easily confused in his thinking along the lines of how I've outlined my day to day thought processes in the previous paragraph? Regardless, I feel these thoughts and feelings as a kind of social heat I draw. The token rewards might not answer those questions once and for all, but I can commit to a course of action and behavior that those around me and I myself find acceptable. My own restrictions on what I can write about on this day of the month prohibit me from getting too specific, but I hope to try this token reward system on several people in my world sometime in the foreseeable future.
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