While many of the effects you describe of living with how your mind works ring familiar to me, I harbor grave misgivings about any clinical industry’s capacity to stamp labels on how anyone’s mind functions, and then to have the intrusive effrontery to claim they have “treatments” for them, or even the arrogant presumption of one person asserting to another that something about them needs to be treated.
I take it as a given that nobody is “normal.” The ways and means of behaving as if one were are pretty much trained affectations having more to do with the requirements of one’s surroundings and social settings than with how anyone really regards reality from within themselves.
And of all the sorts of people I would potentially trust to help guide me in a good direction on that score, every last one of these “mental health” people I ever encountered would be at the very bottom of that list. Their training and orientation toward what is “normal” and what is a “disorder” are completely rooted in cultural presumptions toward what is and is not “appropriate” in how people ought to behave. The very concept of “appropriate” suggests that all social interaction in their world view is basically theatrical in nature, and that everyone must adapt themselves to playing the roles expected of them by whatever means available. They’re just trying to live the high life with you paying for it, by pretending they have those means. THEY DON’T.
Only it turns out, some folks apparently just don’t care for or see the need to behave in such a way as to please everyone else, and relieve anyone of the suspicion of their having some “disorder.” If a type of job requires me to act some part that grates on me and offends my very conscience to try and act it, I’ll find some other way to make a living. If a group of acquaintances is so narrow-minded as to think that only one code of interpersonal behavior is acceptable, I could hardly think of them as worth sucking up to just for the sake of not being alone instead.
I find that beyond a very basic and easily-executed code of etiquette for no more reason than to treat everyone with respectful regard and thus signal my own golden-rule intent toward how I expect to be treated in turn, I have no motivation whatsoever to act in any other way that anyone might just find more “normal” and less “dysfunctional” of me. I can’t say I ever met another living soul who couldn’t be “diagnosed” with some “mental health issue” if those voodoo practitioners ever got them alone in an office; I just steer all the way clear of such con-artists, and of anyone who thinks other people’s way of dealing with the world is any of their damn business to rearrange more to their preferences.
My core query is, whose business is it how people act or think or see the world through their own eyes, anyway? If a person experiences social difficulties of one variety or another owing to their simply exhibiting their own true natures unedited and unadorned, other folks’ not liking that is THEIR problem. If that person feels isolated or shunned because of these indoctrinated reactions by others, they may well benefit from realizing that with friends like that they won’t need any enemies. They’re better off without them to begin with.
Most behavioral conditioning over entire lifetimes has to do with forcing people into molds that have been set for them by the needs of others than themselves, and some people just don’t have or care to apply what it takes to fit into them.
SO WHAT?
Submitting my will to these quacks and charlatans who profit from convincing people they need some kind of “help”, and then sustain the arrangement indefinitely by means of the help never helping and only becoming its own addiction, is the last thing I would ever consent to do just because somebody whose business it is none of might object to some trait in my character.
I’d rather figure out how to live on my own terms in my own way, and accept the social costs associated with the bargain as just how life is.
But NOBODY gets to tweak on my brain and go stamping labels on how it works, whether they approve of it or not. Who says I approve of how theirs does, or of how they arrived at their pseudoscience guesswork conclusions about things no two people can ever really know about each others’ minds and how they work?
You are dallying with a dangerous racket of profiteering snake-oil peddlers, in my view, by accepting at face value these alphabet-soup summations of people’s innermost personal business, the most private things about anyone in existence. Let them start monkey-wrenching on your concept of reality, and they will begin tampering with your most intimate self in ways you may never have been willing to let them had you known, but you may not see it until it is too late. Ways that serve THEM, not you.
To hell with these head-shrinkers and their useless nomenclatures and their cyclical, self-referential fake confidence in their improvised and extemporaneous nonsense.
The so-called “science” behind it changes constantly, depending on what charlatan wrote what paper or gave what speech at what conference, and even when the fashion trends of the industry shift you’ll find that no two of them even agree with each other about what it all means. It is simply bad manners among that mob to try and pin any of it down to any sort of common-sense, real-world understanding that people are just different from each other, and that this is where our greatest strengths can be found.
Psychology and psychiatry are all about subverting the will of the individual as God made each of us, and re-working us all into acceptably manageable roles that are not necessarily in anyone’s true interests other than those who retain the power to order masses of humanity in whichever direction they care to, namely governments and advertisers, the two worst enemies any human being has. If keeping those forces and factions where I can do my business with them on my own terms and not theirs makes me crazy, hey, call me crazy. Again: SO WHAT?
I don’t care what might be a “disorder” about who and what and how I simply am. It isn’t anyone else’s business to decide that, and never was. I’ll make my own terms with life in my own way, and the head-shrinkers can just stay the hell away from me, as they are some of the most dangerous people on earth. I’ve been seeing to that my entire life, even though their witch-doctoring has been aimed at me as a weapon, way more than once.
As for this “deficient visualization”, I spent ten years among mostly Chicano people in New Mexico [American-born Hispanics with heritage north of the Treaty of Guadalupe line that now forms the US southern border]; there was nothing wrong with how their brains worked and some of them were among the smartest and wisest people I ever knew.
But after a year or two of those blank stares and confused reactions whenever I used a metaphor, simile or visual depiction as a conversational device, it finally dawned on me that for whatever cultural reasons, these people simply don’t think in the same pictographic terms I do. I might have said, for instance, that as an Anglo in Hispanic country I felt “like a fish out of water”, a readily-applicable image over much of the English-speaking world. But the reaction would be more based on the idea that among a people who do a lot of fishing, the only reason one would be out of water is if they had caught it on a hook and pulled it out, against its will. They would think I meant somebody caught me and forced me to live in New Mexico, which was not what I had meant at all. (And mystified why some gringo was comparing himself to a fish, at all…)
The upshot: not visualizing doesn’t mean something is wrong with you. It just isn’t how some folks do their thinking. More folks than any of us probably even realize just don’t visualize at all nor have any reason to think they should. Some, might even see those who do as the ones with a problem, which is what all those blank stares in New Mexico seemed to be saying. I felt like a lot of those fine folks just pitied me for the way I seemed to always be thinking in pictures and symbols instead of just what they saw as common sense.
We’re just all different. Can we not leave it at that, and skip all the playing doctor over just the plain facts of life among humans?
