When a person’s reality comes under attack, the person will go to great lengths to defend his reality. This situation is called “cognitive dissonance”, the presence of two conflicting explanations for the same reality trying to exist at the same time in one poor little brain, resulting in very dramatic emotional responses. The clash provides a dramatic conflict of rationality. A poor subjective reality will sometimes clash with a better alternate reality. But where does the nervous breakdown come into play?Īt some point, a person in one particular subjective reality will be confronted with an alternate version of that reality. Perhaps you could say I was functional, yet delusional. My brain was operating under the rules of a reality that was badly programmed into me since childhood. I took the reality I perceived, and added too much useless and erroneous information. I perceived the same events, same behaviors as other people, but I filtered the information in ways I didn’t understand. I was operating in a perceived reality that was highly incompatible with most other people’s reality. You see, my nervous breakdowns were a result of being out of touch, away from reality. And when you’re out there, without careīut it wasn't because I didn't know enough Both realities stem from the same identical blog text.
#I lost my mind full
Others are in a reality where you think I’m full of it. Which filters do you apply? Which version are you watching? If you don’t believe it, consider that right now some of you are in a reality where you perceive that Eric has some interesting ideas.
#I lost my mind free
All you have to do to see the other version is to put on your free sympathy glasses. In another objectively identical version of the movie, the villain is a sympathetic character and the real hero is a supporting character, not the star. In one, the villain and hero play out their standard roles. It’s as if you’re at the cinema and there are two, or more, movies playing out in front of you on the same screen. Scott Adams of Dilbert fame, has an interesting analogy. For all of us, reality is subjective, yet we successfully use our subjective realities to explain the way the world works and to live out our lives. Only robots can perceive objective reality. The filters and biases we apply are so ingrained into our psyches we don’t even know they’re there. The trouble is that we seldom know which filters we’re applying.
Everybody interprets reality differently. These biases and filters that distort the information we perceive in sometimes subtle, sometimes drastic ways. We each view the world through personal biases and mental filters. The subjective realities are very much different because they are based on different senses and different information. Is reality the same to a blind man and sighted man? No. Each individual perceives reality, but perceives it using his or her own senses. On the other hand, reality can only be evaluated when we, as humans, perceive it. Maybe it is, maybe there is a single objective reality. We tend to think reality is perfect and absolute. In order to understand nervous breakdowns, we need to look at one particular theory of reality, or should I say realities. I feel I understand them better nowadays, and that makes me more resilient to life and able to avoid them. I’ve had some interesting lessons recently about nervous breakdowns. I didn’t think of it this way in the moment, but looking back I can see “crazy” much better as “nervous breakdown.” Perhaps calling it a nervous breakdown is more like it. For a musical artist like Cee Lo, crazy might be a pleasant place for creativity, but my emotions in that crazy space were very unpleasant.Ĭrazy is a vague term and encompasses too much odd behavior. Each one had a name: Vicki, Robin, Lora, and Rita. I think there were 4 times in my life I went crazy, and not in a good way. There was something so pleasant about that placeĮven your emotions have an echo in so much space I remember, I remember when I lost my mind I know crazy when I see it, even if I only see it in hindsight.
The song is Crazy, not by Patsy Cline, but by Gnarls Barkley, as written by Cee Lo Green. A few years back I found one that resonated with me. A song that’s memorable, or touches you in some way, is a rare find nowadays. Most pop music is formulaic and repetitive It might have a good beat, or be danceable, but it’s nothing special. I Remember When I Lost My Mind A Lesson in Cognitive Dissonance
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