Strange behaviors as a child

[Nightingale121]

I used to be weird about colours, it's really hard to explain though and even when I think about it now, it sounds crazy. Basically, I didn't like to have certain colours next to each other, so if I had colouring pencils for example I would have to put them back in their box so that they were in an order where certain colours were not next to each other. I still do this now, when I'm sewing and I put pins into fabric before I sew, I'll have what I consider a 'boy' colour, then a 'girl' colour and so on. So, blue, pink, white, red, green, yellow, black and so on. I also can't have like, two reds next to each other. Yeah, sounds even weirder when I put it into words.

I get that and actually did the same with my colouring pencils as a child. I always had them in the right order next to each other. I also liked to draw patterns with the colours in the right order of the colours (the order thay were placed next to each other in the box).
When someone asked to use a pencil from me at school, I always took care to place it exactly at the correct place afterwards and rather did that myself than let the other child put it back (I didn't want anyone to do it wrong, i.e. put the wrong colours next to each other).

 

[biblophile]

I did this too, and I'm really into martial arts so especially then, but being a little kid in the 80s rather than 90s, I was and actually still am obsessed with cartoons from that era.

If any of you are, look up Kidd Video on Youtube.

It's a non-NT/Aspie's dream come true if you like cartoons haha.

Music videos from the 80s embedded into cartoons haha.

I was really into king kong and godzilla movies or with any movie where someone was fighting I would jump up and down in front of the TV and ring my hands in excitement.

I used to swing things around, anything that was good to swing, usually it had to have a string or rope of some kind or be flexible for this.

My parents affectionately called them my "swingy thingies" haha.

When I was only 4 years old I was REALLY into looking at this big book of famous paintings, something WAY beyond most kids my age would be into, and one of them TERRIFIED me and gave me nightmares and to this day, even though the picture no longer scares me, I have wanted to fully explore with therapists what that truly means.

I was told by the inventor of Family Systems Therapy who visited my college that it was an "exiled" part of myself...and I'm still searching for answers on that one but haven't found a FS therapist to explore it with...It was a BIG deal for me.

I also used to walk around thinking in my own world, still am off in my own world a lot.

And one very odd thing I found out I said when I was very young, which my parents only told me I did a few years ago, was that when I was about 5 years old I either asked them or one of my teachers (not sure which) "do people know that they are going to grow up to be strangers?"

While I am sure they still warn kids about "not talking to strangers", for some reason I think that message was especially prominent in the Reagan area and some commercials about watching out for "strangers" scared me that I still vaguely remember...or at least the general theme in TV of those days...

My parents said that at first a few people laughed at the strangeness of my comment, but that then when my mother told her therapist friends (she is a Psychoanalyst) some of them said "WHOA...that's not really funny, that's pretty serious"....that I was concerned with "growing up to be a stranger..."

I find that quite fascinating to this day...as I sort of feel like I am one lol...and part of me likes that, and the other part of me doesn't...I'd say I like some of my "stranger" qualities and not others...

I don't TECHNICALLY have Aspergers, but I am VERY likely on the spectrum, and my last therapist was CONVINCED I have Non Verbal Learning Disability/Disorder which is supposed to be VERY closely related to Aspergers (also Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Depression, some mild OCD and possibly some other stuff...)

I don't even think it is in the DSM yet, and hasn't been fully recognized, and I'm REALLY hoping someone on this site has NLD or knows someone who does so I can talk to them.

But some of the stuff you guys are mentioning DOES make sense to me.

If someone wouldn't mind responding to this post in some way that would be great, as I like the conversation and not just posting and not getting a response...but then again, I'm new here, and not everyone has the time to respond to a random person's posts haha...

I used to look obsessively through art books as a child in fact I still do. Do remember what the name of the painting that gave you nightmares? I was freighted of The Scream by Munch when I was a kid, despite my fear I would look at the painting for hours. I still find it disturbing, but I understand my fear now. I am that figure, screaming silently to my self.
I remember all those Stranger Danger commercials, they always filled me with dread. It might be at the root of my current suspicion of people unknown to me. I also remember my Mother going through my Halloween candy looking for evidence of tampering, and the sad, printed faces of the kids on the milk cartons.

 

[NLD?]

I used to look obsessively through art books as a child in fact I still do. Do remember what the name of the painting that gave you nightmares? I was freighted of The Scream by Munch when I was a kid, despite my fear I would look at the painting for hours. I still find it disturbing, but I understand my fear now. I am that figure, screaming silently to my self.
I remember all those Stranger Danger commercials, they always filled me with dread. It might be at the root of my current suspicion of people unknown to me. I also remember my Mother going through my Halloween candy looking for evidence of tampering, and the sad, printed faces of the kids on the milk cartons.

Yup, sounds like were a kid of the 80s as well.

Yes I remember the name of the painting, I still have it in a book at home, but it is not a painting you or most would probably find scary if you looked it up.

It's called "Lady Jean" by the painter George Bellows, and she was his daughter and he painted many pictures of her I later found out, but this was the only one I'd seen as a kid.

Actually, I looked her up about 10 years ago and found out the actual woman he painted was still alive and at that time was 89 years old and living in California!!

But regardless, the fear had nothing to do with the actual person, and I know some of what my fear was about, but it's complicated and I want to learn more.

She's just a little girl in the painting, dressed up in the dress of that era, as I believe it was painted around 1912, not sure if that's the exact date, but the very early twentieth century.

She has a very serious look on her face, and to me she always looked very sad.

I saw this painting for the first time when I was 3 or 4 years old and I've never felt a feeling of intense and all-encompassing simultaneous terror, sorrow and dread as when I saw it.

It was the kind of fear only a little kid can experience seeing that kind of thing: an adult can't experience that sort of fear from a painting directly like that, and I had several nightmares about the painting as a kid, and would be compelled to look at the painting anyway even though it morally terrified me and then I'd look and be totally freaked out.

Since this could get long, I will explain to you what I found out about what it might have meant in as few words as possible, but it still might get long:

In college I took a psych. course on a type of therapy called Internal Family Systems Therapy developed by Richard Schwartz.

In this system he says that people have 3 essential parts: 1) managers 2) firefighters and 3) exiles.

Managers are the part of us that maintains control, keeps our daily affairs in order, act confident and help us stay out of trouble.

Firefighters are the part of us we call when problems in our lives get out of hand and we get upset or scared and behaviors firefighters might engage in are drug or alcohol abuse to quell our fears, or even maybe being a workaholic to keep our mind off problems but to a destructive extent, or go punch a punching bag for 2 hours to stop thinking about the problem, etc.


Now exiles, they are the part of us that supposedly not EVERYONE has, which is a part of us which feels trapped, scared, lonely, hopeless, helpless, depressed and just utterly alone.

Firefighters and managers try to keep the exiles from coming out, because the exiles can't defend themselves and are the weakest part of us.

They are like injured or abused children (metaphorically speaking).

His system of therapy is used to help people deal with their exiles through a sort of meditation of sorts...not sure if that's what it would be called, but sort of like going into a state of semi-hypnosis to locate our inner parts.

I have often felt very lonely and scared in my life at times, even as a child.

So in reading this book and reading about exiles, I started thinking about the painting and my childhood reaction to it, and wondering if that had something to do with the exiles Schwartz was talking about.

I got my chance to ask him when he gave a lecture at my college and in front of everyone I asked him "have you ever heard of a person very suddenly coming into contact with a part of themselves through a work of art like a piece of music or a painting?"

He responded "yes, those are exiles, and usually that's very scary when it happens. Did that happen to you?"

And suddenly realizing all eyes in the room were on me and I didn't want them to realize this deep personal experience of mine I just said "no, no, I was just wondering" LOL

He of course realized that it HAD happened to me.

I wanted desperately to talk to him about it one on one, and I REALLY want to have a Family Systems Therapist, and my mom is even a psychoanalyst who WORKS with someone who IS ONE!!

But no, she won't let me see her, saying it would be a conflict of interest because she works next door to her, and this REALLY pisses me off cause this is kind of like a deep trauma I have and she won't freaking let me talk to this women and I can't find anyone else who does it!!!

Anyways, when I got back to class everyone and the teacher were asking me about what I said in the lecture and one guy was trying to act like he knew the experience I'd had but he really hadn't I could tell from how he spoke.

I wouldn't talk about it cause it was too personal.

My therapist said "they couldn't understand you cause you were speaking the language of childhood and they were speaking in the language of adulthood".


So...I know that for SOME reason, whatever it is, I have this traumatized part of myself that I was able to recognize at the age of 4 in this painting.

I had forgotten entirely about the painting from around age 7 to age 14 when as a teenager I suddenly remembered it and pulled out the painting and looked at it and ALL the old terrifying feelings flooded back into my mind and I remembered EXACTLY how it felt as a child and had to close the book and look away.

But since then, I've looked at it many times and the scared feeling won't come back, it can't scare me anymore as an adult, but I'll never forget what it felt like as a child: nothing more than a PURE expression of fear and sadness looking at this picture.

And I can recognize the feelings portrayed by my mind in the painting in myself and see how this has a lot to do with how I have often felt about myself, but I've never been able to more deeply explore it with a qualified psychologist...


So...yeah, sorry for the long winded response, but it's a complicated story I still don't have all the answers to, and I couldn't say it in fewer words.


One answer I'm looking for is: is this particular kind of an experience, whether it's with a painting or something entirely different, more common for Non-NTs and Aspies than NTs and if so...why??

 

[biblophile]

Your answer was not long winded at all, I found it very interesting. The part about exiles really got me thinking. I have always been moved by music, art and literature, but certain works always put me in touch with that vast feeling of loneliness. There is a piece of music By J.S Bach from St. Mathieu' s passion that besides being a beautiful piece of music is filled with such deep sadness that I can become distraught while listening to it. There is a short story by Anton Chekhov called : Beauties" about a young man whom during two separate periods of his life came across two beautiful girls,. One in the desert, and one in a crowded train station. These girls instead of filling him with joy, or desire filled him with a terrible, profound loneliness, not just him but others around him would feel regret, and sadness at the sight of these girls. when I read that story I too was filled with the same aguish. Did the Author of the story come in contact with his own exile? It is interesting to ponder. I often dream of young children who are in trouble and I am unable to save them. I think those children must be myself, my own exiles.
Maybe all art that is able to move us comes from that same source, the exiles speaking from a deep lonely place inside us, from the abyss of our subconscious.

 

[NLD?]

Your answer was not long winded at all, I found it very interesting. The part about exiles really got me thinking. I have always been moved by music, art and literature, but certain works always put me in touch with that vast feeling of loneliness. There is a piece of music By J.S Bach from St. Mathieu' s passion that besides being a beautiful piece of music is filled with such deep sadness that I can become distraught while listening to it. There is a short story by Anton Chekhov called : Beauties" about a young man whom during two separate periods of his life came across two beautiful girls,. One in the desert, and one in a crowded train station. These girls instead of filling him with joy, or desire filled him with a terrible, profound loneliness, not just him but others around him would feel regret, and sadness at the sight of these girls. when I read that story I too was filled with the same aguish. Did the Author of the story come in contact with his own exile? It is interesting to ponder. I often dream of young children who are in trouble and I am unable to save them. I think those children must be myself, my own exiles.
Maybe all art that is able to move us comes from that same source, the exiles speaking from a deep lonely place inside us, from the abyss of our subconscious.

Interesting.

Now I feel like I might like to read that Anton Chekhov story, because that is kind of the feeling I'm describing.

But experiencing some of those feelings as a young kid instead of an adult is I think key to really having the same EXACT kind of experience I am describing, because I don't think I'd be capable of having that same kind of feeling again now as an adult...but that doesn't mean one couldn't possibly make a connection with that kind of feeling as an adult.

For me at least though, the feeling I had when looking at the painting was one that had to have a kind of "crossing over into another world" type of quality that can't happen when you are an adult and are fully 100% conscious that a painting can't have a life of its' own.

As I remember it, the feeling of looking at the painting was as if it had a life of its own and it was DIRECTLY communicating with me these feelings of loneliness and terror in a way that I don't believe most adults could experience, certainly not myself.

But that doesn't mean adults can't have deeply profound experiences through art that might tap into these exiles...I'm just of the general opinion that I couldn't right now.

That's why for me the feeling was something I couldn't capture looking at it again as an adult, except for that very first time I saw the picture again after many years at age 14, because having gone so long without seeing it I suddenly remembered how it felt to look at it when i was a kid, but once I'd forgotten that feeling, I could never experience it again.

But still, that image you have of not being able to save little children is the same kind of image I would describe as having to do with an exile from what I learned about the idea, and I have no doubt this kind of idea has influenced many artists.

It's something I want to research more and understand more about, but looking it up online never leads to anything other than back to things in that system of psychology.

It seems elusive as a concept otherwise and something that is hard to pin down or define.

Also, who painted that painting in your sig?

It's pretty cool.

 

[WereBear]

I don't think it is considered strange to read them but to read a reference book cover to cover when it is designed to be a dip in, dip out reference, maybe is

Encyclopedias. A-Z.

 

[xDominiel]

I would disappear from school all the time, they gave me the nickname "the mysterious" because of that.

I would tell people that my living situation at home wasn't good and they would tell me to stop saying such things.

I would hang out at a graveyard in the woods to get away from everything. It was so peaceful, sitting on that bench and hearing the sounds of the wildlife in the morning.

Oh, and I used to read encyclopedias too, from front to back~

 

[biblophile]

Interesting.

Now I feel like I might like to read that Anton Chekhov story, because that is kind of the feeling I'm describing.

But experiencing some of those feelings as a young kid instead of an adult is I think key to really having the same EXACT kind of experience I am describing, because I don't think I'd be capable of having that same kind of feeling again now as an adult...but that doesn't mean one couldn't possibly make a connection with that kind of feeling as an adult.

For me at least though, the feeling I had when looking at the painting was one that had to have a kind of "crossing over into another world" type of quality that can't happen when you are an adult and are fully 100% conscious that a painting can't have a life of its' own.

As I remember it, the feeling of looking at the painting was as if it had a life of its own and it was DIRECTLY communicating with me these feelings of loneliness and terror in a way that I don't believe most adults could experience, certainly not myself.

But that doesn't mean adults can't have deeply profound experiences through art that might tap into these exiles...I'm just of the general opinion that I couldn't right now.

That's why for me the feeling was something I couldn't capture looking at it again as an adult, except for that very first time I saw the picture again after many years at age 14, because having gone so long without seeing it I suddenly remembered how it felt to look at it when i was a kid, but once I'd forgotten that feeling, I could never experience it again.

But still, that image you have of not being able to save little children is the same kind of image I would describe as having to do with an exile from what I learned about the idea, and I have no doubt this kind of idea has influenced many artists.

It's something I want to research more and understand more about, but looking it up online never leads to anything other than back to things in that system of psychology.

It seems elusive as a concept otherwise and something that is hard to pin down or define.

Also, who painted that painting in your sig?

It's pretty cool.

I agree most adults, myself included could not feel the same connection to an object, or painting, or what ever it was that allowed us as children to see the unworldly aspects of things around us. we have lost that quality of acceptance, that suspension of disbelief that is necessary. I remember giving personalities to things in my bedroom as a child. My teddy bear bed curtains seemed friendly, and warm to me, while one corner of my room seemed sinister some how. I do not think there was any thing paranormal in this. I think I was merely projecting aspects of my self on the objects around me. When I think about these things I feel joy, or a sense of loss, or fear, but it is the memories of those feelings, like ghosts of those feelings. I sometimes feel sad that I am no longer open enough to see things in that way, do you ever feel that way?
I think I would be willing to feel fear like that again if I could also feel the same open hearted joy I felt as a child alone in my room.
Have you ever read any books by Carl Jung? He wrote about the anima, and the animus and the shadow, archetypes of the subconscious which one projects on to things or people. He said; "Projections change the world into the replica of one's own unknown face." I always found that quote to be fascinating, and true.
The drawing on my sig is called the weeping spider by the symbolist artist Oldion Readon.

 

[biblophile]

I would disappear from school all the time, they gave me the nickname "the mysterious" because of that.

I would tell people that my living situation at home wasn't good and they would tell me to stop saying such things.

I would hang out at a graveyard in the woods to get away from everything. It was so peaceful, sitting on that bench and hearing the sounds of the wildlife in the morning.

Oh, and I used to read encyclopedias too, from front to back~

I used to run away to the cemetery as well I always found it be quiet, the headstones and architecture always intrigued me.

 

[xDominiel]

I used to run away to the cemetery as well I always found it be quiet, the headstones and architecture always intrigued me.

I've always felt almost like I left a piece of my soul behind there. I imagine that younger version of me still sitting there, just wondering why the few who were supposed to be there for him, weren't. Because the one who kept going, did so with a hole inside, that innocence gone.

And that pain *still* eats away at me, all these years later, even though I keep thinking I've managed to move on and get over it.

Excuse my depressing stuff at the moment.