So at times, my brain grabs a random face from the crowd (or my mother's, if the topic permits), gives the face a strawman argument or insult, and basically makes me run a simulation against a hypothetical person with a view who is unwilling to change said view, but willing to rant at me at length about it, and I have to respond. Debunk arguments, yell back, stand my ground, etc. Think WBC or tumblr black&white thinking, that's what my brain is throwing at me, and I can't shut it off. A topic comes up, or I feel insecure for a second on public transit and basically wait for anyone to make a snide remark about the way I dress or whatever, or my brain just randomly grabs a topic that goes a bit closer to home, and throws me into the ring with the strawman. And while I have gotten better at actually arguing my point, even if the strawman is utterly fucking stupid, and my inherent punch first yell second make an argument third while you've had time to run the argument setupscript in the background impulse is becoming less prominent, it's pretty tiring and annoying. I know RL arguments of that kind usually come without warning, but on the other hand in situations like that (I had a few of those) I just tell them to fuck off if they touch my boundaries, no need to justify myself. (The justifying impulse is my mother's fault, because I always had to justify myself to her. And then I got kicked out of a social group because I did not know that that's something you don't (need to) do and no one ever told me. Everyone just assumed I knew stuff. blrgh. NOT PSYCHIC FFS) And the people who actually are interested in a discussion are lots more mellow and not as openly hostile as the strawmen my brain keeps chucking at me. And I enjoy civil discussions, because counterarguments are interesting (.... with exceptions. There are some that are plain fucking stupid, and I have to remind myself not to voice that sentiment because people tend to get offended by it.) - they make me think about stuff! Also learning new stuff, usually cool (unless you're my mom, who uses it as a Discussion End I Win instead of something that changes the discussion because of a new viewpoint / new information. This happened, I even remember the topic of that conversation). At the moment (or at least, until I started typing this post, which was when my brain stopped the simulation) this strawman has the face of my mother and the setting of a confrontation between us re: she fucked up, and the strawman makes theatrical concessions I didn't ask for and paints itself as the poor wronged battered victim who does not know what to do, but does not actually listen to my points and me trying to explain that there is miscommunication going an. The strawman just accuses me of lying and having it out for them. My point being, at this point? I don't know how much of my perceived relationship with my mother is actual hard facts, and how much of it is residual fabricated strawman that has melded with it. My brain seems to believe every confrontation with my mother The Abuser will end in accusations and Raised Voices, and also takes every instance of my mother and I civilly talking about something as a pointer that my memory is wrong. I know that some things happened, but I do not know how much is just my brain taking one instance and making a pattern out of it. Or if the things that happened that are Not Completely Identical add up to a pattern. I don't know what my brain is trying to do with this. Anyone any ideas? I could guess it's (at least partially) my brain not wanting to idle, but couldn't it just start up the plotting script? I had such a nice string of ideas re the magical system of my setting last night, why can't I work on that instead, brain? Addendum: I feel like I have articulated this before somewhere, like a vague feeling of deja vu, but of course my brain does not supply me with where that was. Blrgh.
my brain really likes to do that, and it used to keep me awake with these simulations all the time. your brain knows your conflict resolution skills could use improving, and has zero sense about WHEN to practice. i.e. its answer is "all the time!!!" which is not the right answer. getting it to stop, as with all intrusive thoughts, requires you to be in the weird position of boundarying up against your own brain. it's throwing a what-if at you that you don't want to explore, and the best defense is the Great Wall of Nope. brain: what if your mom flipped out like this and like this, what would you say???? you: nope, not doing this. brain: but what if???????? you: nope. brain: but????????????????? you: nope. of course, to do this, you have to acknowlege that you are allowed to nope out of conflicts. a lot of us have trouble with that, due to past situations where doing so was dangerous or physically impossible. but hey, upside is you have a way to practice authorizing yourself to walk away from a troubleface without putting yourself in danger, because the troubleface is a simulation being run by your own imagination!
Wait other people do this? For sometimes it´s also a kind of internal venting, where I really want to yell at someone so my brain decides to create a strawman to yell at. Seconding Jesse´s advice about noping out. If you have the problem I do where walking away from an argument feels like admitting defeat, make that nope as calm as possible, and imagine you strawman looking after you in stunned silence. Basically you´re going for "I´m too cool for this" (Not a useful reaction to show, but helps to think to oneself)
The trying to nope out and refocus tended to end with my brain going lolnope im not letting you, and the only thing that helped was letting it run its course ::/ but i'll keep trying. with @littlemissCodeless suggestion, i might even surprise my brain long enough to refocus to something i want to focus on. surprise and all that. why am i plotting strategy against my own head.
because your head is fucking with you. it takes persistence and time to convince your brain that YOU are the boss, not your anxiety. yeah, it'll push back. it'll try to punish you for taking control. hold the course. you are stronger than your anxiety.
@littlemissCodeless I absolutely do this too. I use the faces of people who have hurt me and use them as strawmen to say horrible opinions and I vent at them in my head. Right now it's my ex featured in there, but I've also often had my sister there. (She was abusive towards me in my childhood and tried to use me against my mother) I'll try the 'noping out there' jacktrash suggested, maybe that will help! But I'm awful at conflict and I freeze up and my brain obviously thinks "well, NEXT time you should say this and this" which is stupid because there is no next time where the conversation will be played out in exact the same way and this time I'll be prepared! I guess it's like rehearsing for a play you're never going to perform?
I do this all the time when my hypervigilance kicks up for no reason. I'll be at home, with no reason to feel on guard, and my brain will conjure people who've hurt me before and make me confront them in my head. I have to defend myself against all the usual shit, and I end up getting upset and angry for no reason. I guess because I've never really felt resolved about the things that happened, they just stopped happening. I wasn't the one to make them stop, so I feel like it could start up again and when it does I'll have to shoot it down ~properly~ to make it Stop For Real. So I'm always waiting for the other shoe to drop, for things to turn to shit again, and I have to be prepared when it does so my brain keeps doing the worst, shittiest training exercises where I have to keep confronting it all over again. Maybe I can nope out of it because most of it is over and the one thing left can't be handled this way because it's way more delicate a situation. Mostly I go with it because being able to articulate my hurt, even to the ghosts in my head, does feel kind of nice. Even if the anger and stress that comes with it is not so nice :/
the ironic thing is, 'nope' is actually a more effective and practical response to real life conflicts than most of the cathartic but impractical things that come up in mental strawman sessions. i suppose an intermediate stage would be to nope at the strawman instead of noping at the intrusive thoughts. i haven't tried that, though, since i figured it out after i'd already trained my brain out of doing it. ...mostly. sometimes i catch it happening when i'm half asleep. but by now it's a reflex to just be like "no that's BORING i want to think about sharks/cake/space/whatever instead."
Yeah I've managed to put up a bit of resistance where where brain-me goes "I don't wanna have this argument" except it/I kind of do so I usually get pressed into giving one anyway. I need to be firmer with myself. Which is really ironic when you think about it. I have to be firmer with myself so I can stop being pointlessly firm with my Imaginary Brain Ghosts.
I think it might help to give that part of your brain a name and just shout it down like an asshole kid poking your arm repeatedly for no reason. I named my intrusive thoughts Brian. Brian likes to give me thoughts of 'what if knife in your hand somehow found its way INTO YOUR EYE' the common answer to that thought that actually kind of helps is 'what if you shut the fuck up, brian?' just seriously. giving that bullshit a name so you can tell it to shut up is really helpful for me
Have been considering that, since I get violent self-harm intrusive thoughts, except they're mostly flashes of imagery rather than words. I'm already pretty good at making it not-me though, so maybe I can equate it to someone shoving pictures in my face to get a reaction. Just... move the picture out of my view and go "yeah no not into that, thanks."
mine doesn't have a name, but i think of it as 'the douchebag voice' and sorta visualize it as a frat boy, the type of frat boy who simply cannot seem to comprehend that you don't want to drink fourteen plastic cups of shitty keg beer and then go piss on people's lawns and drop cinderblocks off of overpasses. you can't reason with someone like that, you just have to be a brick wall.
Hmmm. That's kind of the sort of person I'm always going up against in my head. If I can start thinking of the strawmen as fingerpuppets of the Asshole Frat Boy in my head and start brushing him off instead of fighting the straw-man-on-a-stick I can actually make them shut up. I don't think I'd have been able to make the connection on my own without that description. Thanks.
Belated, but thank you, everyone, for your kind responses ::) New anecdata: my brain also runs more "normal" conversations, I've discovered. I don't always catch myself when that happens, and while they are not as bruteforce WHAM as the strawman arguments, it's very easy to get swept up in them even if they're not real, and I have a hard time pulling from them in the cases in which I notice it happening, because "they don't make me angry, so they can't be that bad, right?".
