The (Wo)Man Who Knew Too Much

Throughout not small amount of my relationship with my husband, I have had a problem making him understand something that has been the case for me for as long as I can remember. I know what people are thinking. I can predict what they are very likely to do. I can read their emotional reactions to nearly anything and discern their attitudes. I do all of this within minutes, sometimes seconds, of meeting them.

My ability to do this has only gotten "worse" over the years. That is, it's gotten faster and more accurate, but I have a record of my predicting the future for one of my childhood friends when I was in my early 20's. I told her that I knew she'd marry young, poorly, and because of an unplanned pregnancy. This was when she was still in high school and I was in my early years of college. Sure enough, three years later, she did all of those things.

That sort of prognosticating isn't as granular as what I tend to do more often these days. I can tell if someone is lying, their degree of self-awareness, confidence, seductive nature, aggression levels, and intelligence from a glance or two. This is not magic, but the result of an instant calculation of a person based on a plethora of signs that we can all see, but tend not to think twice about. No one signal is sufficient to tell you a larger character trait, but a few are more telling than others.

For many years, I would meet someone and tell my husband that so-and-so felt this or that or likely would do this or that in the future. His reaction was, 'You can't know that.' If he was not told something explicitly from the involved party, he wouldn't believe me, especially if what I said flew in the face of a preferred explanation or perspective on the party we were talking about.

The process that I was using was something that was invisible to me. My husband has explained it as being like someone who can do math calculations at lightning speed in their heads, but can't explain how they do them to a teacher. I couldn't "show my work." I knew I was right, but I couldn't explain why.

After years of this sort of difficulty, I finally decided that I needed to find a way to break the process down so that my husband would assign more credibility to what I was saying. While I was very often correct, he still found it hard to believe me when I couldn't explain things. I learned to deconstruct the elements in order to make him see that this wasn't wild speculation based on some prejudice or desire to see a person in a particular way playing out.

For instance, I could read a woman's general attitude toward the world as being open, seductive, or aggressive based on how she walked. Women who were more seductive and looking to gain attention were more likely to swing their hips when they walked. Women who were more defensive or aggressive were likely to swing their shoulders. Those who were more open and neither trying to draw in attention or encourage people to back off tended to be more equal in both of these motions. These were not deterministic, but coupled with other factors (facial expression, eye contact, how the hands were held, etc.), my degree of accuracy in "reading" someone was very high.

I've spend much of the last several years deconstructing and teaching my husband how to read people. Since he is working toward becoming a licensed therapist, this not only is good for our relationship as he has come to believe me now that he knows more fully where my predictions come from, but it will also help him in his career. It has been an immense relief to me that he no longer questions what I say to any great extent. That is not to say he never questions me in any way about anything, but he knows that what I speculate on and the degree of accuracy that I possess are related to something measurable and not merely my whims. It is a skill that can be taught and learned. He does question, and quite reasonably so, the probability of my predictions being true. This is actually rather "fun" to speculate on and I will often assert my certainty with percentages. Since he's a fan of numbers, he likes this way of solidifying how sure I am.

This psychological reading ability is one that I'm sure palm readers and fake psychics have known for eons. I'm told that my ability to do this may relate to being "hyper-vigilant", a state that I may have acquired in childhood due to the horrific and constant bullying and emotional and verbal abuse I endured both inside and outside the home. I don't like the term "hyper-vigilant" because it evokes an image of someone who sits on the edge of her chair watching intently, attending carefully to everything around her. I don't try to see what I see. In fact, it was such a transparent process for so long that I wasn't even aware that I was doing it. I just "knew". I wasn't trying, but my abilities are likely rooted in trying since childhood to read intent, personality, etc. and to escape or mitigate harm.

In the past three years, I've become more and more involved in consuming documentaries and non-fiction books. Unsurprisingly, they are often about various aspects of humanity including psychology and human biology. You can, if you pay attention, often tell if someone is suffering or enduring a health issue. Doctors do this all of the time. They see a shuffling walk or the way someone doesn't fully lift an arm while doing a task. They see someone lean on the post with the pedestrian crossing light button while they wait to cross. They see a lump here or there on a body or a discoloration of the skin.

All of the content that I've been reading lately has only expanded my ability to "read" people into newer and deeper levels. Today, I was doing a volunteer job that I started three weeks ago (and will write about soon) when I noticed the way in which one of the women, someone in her mid 30's to early 40's by all appearances, tended to sit and walk in a slightly hunch-shouldered manner. I realized that she had exhibited this posture since our first meeting. Today, it suddenly occurred to me that she probably has ankylosing spondylitis in its early stages. The fact that this is likely and that I recognized it disturbed me greatly.

The truth is that I have gotten no joy whatsoever from any of my perceptual capabilities and I do not feel that I am in any way "gifted" or superior to others. In fact, I have often likened my ability to a horrible scene in a pretty awful 60's version of "The Man with X-Ray Eyes" in which he is driven mad at the end because he can see through everything. The final scene of the movie has him going into a church in his madness and the church-goers start chanting "pluck (it) out" encouraging him to pluck out his offending eyes and give himself peace (around 15:45 in the linked video clip). The message is that it is better to be blind than to see too much. This is actually truer than many people know.

Knowing too much about people too fast has become an incredible burden for me. I don't want to know that someone is likely being beaten by a significant other, was sexually abused as a child, or has a degenerative disease. I don't want to know they are likely to fail at their career, or worse, harm other people as they do it badly and destructively. I don't want to know that someone is smug and superior because he or she is incredibly insecure underneath it all.

I don't want to know too much, especially from people who I see for a moment and never see again in some cases. It's a way of being too involved in their emotional lives and it can be overwhelming and painful, especially when the messages are so often sadness, anger, pain, defiance, and rejection. To me, people are wearing too much on the outside all of the time and I just don't want to be a part of it sometimes.Today, when I realized this new person I met likely suffers a painful and debilitating disease, it just made me feel as if I suddenly had invaded her privacy and knew too much about her past, present, and future. I know too much too fast, but there is nothing I can do about it.