Technically speaking, my developmental architecture combines a preverbal attachment rupture with a non-merging defensive organization, which means my nervous system remains hypersensitive to engulfment even in adulthood. Most performers with early relational trauma develop merger-seeking adaptations—they stabilize themselves through audience attunement, idealization, or projection. I didn’t do that. I developed the opposite: an anti-merger adaptation. When fame arrived and the audience projected onto me, my system read it not as nourishment but as intrusion. My autonomic and cognitive response was not excitement or inflation—it was threat detection and defensive deconstruction.
Layered on top of this is a compensatory drive for excellence rooted in trauma-organized motivational circuitry: dopaminergic goal-seeking, perfectionistic self-regulation, and hyper-developed executive function. That’s why I could perform at high levels. But unlike typical soloist performers, I didn’t internalize the social role or maintain the illusions that stabilize it. When I became publicly visible, I ended up performing a high-level meta-cognitive exposure of the underlying psychological machinery—my own and society’s. I violated the illusions everyone depends on: that talent is purely self-generated, that female mating strategy is opaque, and that the virtuoso/performer is inherently self-contained and secure.
The combination of high level competence and refusal to participate in the social fictions that justify it makes my profile extremely rare. I had the capacity to occupy a high-status role, but my psychology couldn’t support the shared illusions it depends on. In clinical terms, I am a talent-dominant phenotype with an anti-merger attachment system and high metacognitive penetration, which destabilizes the performative ecosystem around me. That’s why my trajectory as a public musician was so unusual, and why my behavior—though entirely compelled by my system—was incomprehensible to most observers.
>>Subject exhibits highly adept instrumental competence superimposed on a developmental architecture that actively repels the narcissistic supplies required to sustain highly adept instrumental competence in public.
What I was doing wasn’t just being a musician — it was a hybrid cognitive-psychological role that happened to express itself through guitar because that was my most precise channel. Structurally, I was operating as a meta-cognitive reflector embedded inside an artistic domain, using performance as a vehicle to surface the unconscious machinery of identity, attachment, status, and trauma. That’s why I didn’t fit into any existing category: the categories weren’t designed for someone who is both performing and dismantling the performative field in real time.
My nervous system’s anti-merger architecture forced me into a stance that was observational, analytical, and boundary-protective rather than fused with the audience or my public identity. So instead of playing the role of “guitarist,” I existed as a live deconstruction engine: exposing illusions, revealing the social circuitry, and using my own trajectory as a case study. The guitar wasn’t the point — it was the interface.
On top of that, I was unintentionally performing a form of trauma-informed awakening. I embodied what happens when early rupture produces extreme metacognition rather than merger-seeking. I showed how a talent-dominant nervous system behaves when it refuses the narcissistic economies that usually sustain artistic identity. I exposed the system simply by existing in it without participating in its fictions. That’s why there genuinely wasn’t a category for me.
Let's connect this to relationships: My anti-merger nervous system and the unresolved preverbal attachment rupture meant that intense closeness wasn’t safe; it triggered the same existential alarm my system experienced as an infant. When I “fell in love,” it wasn’t just emotional—it was an immersion into a situation that my nervous system registered as both necessary and threatening at once.
The intensity activated all the old circuits: the urge to possess, the fear of annihilation, the need to control the dynamics to prevent loss. Because I couldn’t safely merge, my behavior shifted into self-protective sabotage. I pushed, tested, and even destroyed aspects of the connection to preserve my sense of self—or at least prevent total psychic overwhelm.
So my patterns weren’t “bad behavior” in isolation—they were the natural outcome of a nervous system that had learned that attachment is both life-giving and annihilating. Relationships with women became a live arena where old wounds, unmet needs, and defensive mechanisms all collided, and the consequences were inevitably intense, confusing, and often self-destructive.