Minichan

For example, we might avoid things with out realizing it and that means we are avoiding it unconsciously. We could go on with our days as normal while doing quite a lot of avoiding, the schizotypal person would however be aware there's something he's been avoiding and he'd feel it too that some places or some people make him uneasy but he wouldn't know why and when you don't know why you'd be very pressured to make any sense of it but you can't because the reasons are unconscious.

Just saying. Geeez.

it's like, IN THE MIND man

@1,043,041 (A)
> the schizotypal person would however be aware there's something he's been avoiding

Doesn't being so in touch with your unconscious thoughts that you are aware of them just makes them regular conscious thoughts again?

@1,043,231 (Sheila LaBoof)

It's too bad you don't have a interest in whatever it is I'm doing but never was the point to emphasize how thoughts are in our minds.

@previous (C)

They wouldn't be unconscious thoughts if you were conscious of them, but they aren't conscious of the thoughts but rather they are conscious of something else than their conscious mind and its the counterpart but they don't know what it is and magical thinking is a way to deal with that.

perhaps you are speaking of THE INNER MIND

@1,043,244 (A)
You might be on to something. I would guess the magical thinking and paranoia are the result of paying attention to thoughts and suspicions that would normally get filtered out or discarded more or less unconsciously. Those silly little thoughts in the back of your mind that are always trying to make some tenuous connection between events get amplified. A stray suspicion that someone did something because you were thinking about it may lead to further paranoid ideas about mind control or thought reading. Wondering if someone just looked at you as they passed by can turn into obsessive ruminations on whether you are being spied on. Those stray thoughts that most people quickly dismiss for lack of evidence get picked up and bounce around causing more bizarre thoughts along the way until you are trapped in a hall of mirrors where the line between cause and effect starts to break down. When each social interaction has the potential to release a cascade of complex scenarios that draw you ever inward, you tend to pull into yourself. Comorbidity with depression, paranoia, social phobias, and avoidant behavior would all make sense in this context.

@previous (C)

Normally people don't go around dismissing psychotic or delusional thoughts because they lack evidence. Instead delusional and psychotic thoughts stay unconscious but they are still there, you might dream them for example. In our dreams we often take what's happening to us at face value, we might be a little confused at times but we move on, i think waking life is a lot similar for us. Suddenly a coworker seems lazy and stupid after he got a promotion for example and that's just how he looks like to us now as we are unaware of our envy for him. With the schizotypal person? It's a bit different, the schizotypal person dislikes his coworker suddenly and he knows it, but he doesn't know why, he doesn't have those simple ego tricks that we use and so he has his imagination instead to try and explain why.

@previous (A)
> Normally people don't go around dismissing psychotic or delusional thoughts because they lack evidence.

I don't think they start out as full blown delusions though. I'm guessing they start out as perfectly normal idle thoughts and expectations. They just snowball in a way that they don't in a normal person. Maybe some resentment for a coworker getting a promotion will boil over into finding fault with their actions or combine with an impression of them as a lazy person. It's pretty normal to have resentful feelings in a situation like that and nurse them a bit by looking critically at them and viewing their actions through that lens. Well adjusted people can have those thoughts, and with a bit of introspection, realize that they might be being overly critical because of jealousy. The kind of paranoid, magical, or self-absorbed reasoning a schizotypal person might display may be the result of the same feelings taken to extremes, fixating on finding meaning in the coworker's otherwise ordinary promotion or entertaining more and more elaborate ideas about why the promotion happened in the first place. It's the difference between introspective self-discovery of one's thoughts and emotions and seeking to rationalize those thoughts by any means even if one has to hypothesize imaginary causes for them. I'm guessing it's that unchecked indulgence in trying to explain why that becomes the problem.

@previous (C)

Yeah that does make sense. There's a dog i know that really dislikes the sounds of curtains being moved but when she's done barking she moves on like nothing happened. I think we are a little bit like that dog. We can become emotional or upset and we move on without having actually known why, we just blame the trigger or we excuse ourselves, like it was extra warm that day or whatever. A schizotypal person would be more observant, he knows it wasn't so hot that day and that the car/trigger is just a ordinary car. Then it begins, is it maybe not a ordinary car? How could a car not be ordinary? It wasn't hot that day, but it was Friday the 13th and so on and on. In this way, the unconscious isn't so easily covered up like with the rest of us. It gets probed in a rather unsuccessful and pathological way unfortunately.