Hypervigilance

In a previous post, I mentioned that I didn't like the word "hypervigilant" because it sounds like a person is on alert every moment. It evokes the image of a soldier scanning the horizon with intense scrutiny for enemies, ready to react at the smallest sign of invasion. Because of my sense of the word, I have generally rejected it as a description of myself. It turns out that I was wrong. I am hypervigilant.

For those who don't know this word, it often applies to people who are much more sensitive than average, read meaning into small things, and tend to spin out theories and ideas about things to an extent that others may not. A lot of people would tag them as "over sensitive", thin-skinned, and too easily "worked up" about little things. They would also be people who may get hung up on some small comment or action and take it very personally.

I've spent many years changing myself so that I am less of all of the qualities mentioned in the previous paragraph. In fact, I've spent quite some time trying to build emotional Teflon. One of the ways that I've done this is to accept myself for who I am and to gain as close to total self-awareness as possible. I know I take things seriously and that bugs people. I know that I can come across as harsh and intellectual and that can be off-putting. I know that the way in which I embrace complexity and can often "win" arguments or debates by making more points (due to my education and reasoning) annoys people. I know I'm fat, have a big nose, and my skin is drooping and wrinkly. I'm okay with all of these things because I know me and accept me now. Note that "accepting" myself is not the same as being 100% happy. I continue to try to improve, but I no longer experience self-loathing about points that I wish were different and I no longer take offense if people "attack" me or note these points. It took a lot of work, but here I am. You can't attack me with these facts if I don't find them unacceptable truths about myself.

With all of that being said, I'm still hyper-vigilant. I don't dissect every word someone utters to see if I'm being insulted or ruminate on whether people are trying to tell me something in a round-about way. Part of the reason for this is that I know what people are doing without having to wring my hands and perform an internal debate. It's not something that involves much process anymore. When an acquaintance of mine who was an acupuncturist who I accidentally pissed off told me that he thought all of my stress registered in my stomach, I knew he was doing that to try and hurt me by letting me know he noticed that I was fat. I didn't have to analyze it. I knew. However, it didn't matter because it's now a Teflon area of my psyche. Insult understood. Insult ineffective. Move along.

I've done some research on hypervigilance as a result of my misophonia (which is getting better thanks to various behavioral techniques - it's not over, but it's improving pretty quickly). I learned that people who have it often develop it because they grew up in "unsafe environments". I grew up verbally abused at home, in public, and in school. I was bullied, often quite badly, everyday for most of my life between the ages of 10-20. If it wasn't my mother shrieking and telling me I was a horrible person for not safe-guarding her emotions at every moment, it was kids taunting me at school or on the bus. If it wasn't kids laughing at my bulky clumsiness, it was a gym teacher who smirked as I struggled to cross a balance beam (surely, a sadistic device) without falling off. Once I crossed the threshold to puberty, it was men and boys screaming insults from their cars at me.

I grew up feeling completely unprotected by everyone around me. The bus driver didn't stop kids from taunting me during the 90 minutes of time I spent on his conveyance each day. My mother didn't stop making me feel as if it was my fault that everything that upset her happened and that made me a terrible person. My teachers didn't stop kids from making fun of me. There was not one person who protected me when I was growing up. Is it any wonder that I wanted to kill myself when I was 15 and put a gun to my head? Obviously, I was too scared to pull the trigger.

Living in that environment is what cultivated my ability to "read" people rapidly and fairly accurately. If you are constantly under siege, you learn to find a way to survive. To reduce the chances that I'd be harmed, I had to detect the signs of attack. The better I could read a crinkle in the corner of an eye or the change in the set of a jaw, the faster I could get out of harm's way. Friends who weren't really friends or kindness that was a mask for an act of cruelty could be determined with tone of voice or the set of the brow. My mother's moods and whether she was interested in lashing out at me could be picked up by tone of voice or volume. I didn't have to wait for her to reach the point of frustration. I could see it coming from the start and escape in some cases before she built up a head of steam.

These days, I'm not walking around in a state of fear, but I realized that I still have all of my hypervigilant abilities. I read people and situations fast because I can't not see what I see. I had so much practice that it is a transparent and automatic behavior now. And, as I said before, I don't necessarily enjoy it.

However, I realize now that the reason that I wouldn't want to live without these skills is because I'm afraid not to have them. They continue to be a form of protection against a world that I will never trust because the only one who protects me is me. There is only one person that I am safe with and that is my husband. That is the legacy of the bullying and bad upbringing that I endured. No amount of understanding or awareness will strip me of these feelings. I can't simply "get over it" now that I'm free of the environment because this is how my brain has been wired through years of experience. While I may have escaped the neuroses, I'll never lose the hypervigilance and the skills that came with it.