The Protagonist Syndrome: Why Are You Struck in Stories?

B. You As a Protagonist

The Protagonist in Our Mind

Of course, as the protagonist is associated with stories, the protagonist syndrome is also is associated with our story brain. Our right brain is our emotional as well as the imaginary brain. We do not deal with the external world directly. Anything in the external world is infinite, non-linear, and too complex to interact with. We create a version of the external world entities in our brain and interact with the world through these objects which are called internal objects.

So any number of people you meet in life, or you observe even remotely, gets snapshotted by your brain as an internal object, like a character in the movie of your life in your brain.

Just as your brain has these characters of internal objects that represent some physical persons you met in real life, your brain also maintains internal objects of different roles you play in life through different personas.

So, for our mind, our life is a story, a story that has several characters from the outside world, interacting with the characters of our personas. Awareness is the feeling that you experience out of this ongoing story. But if you are not you, but rather different personas, then how can you experience the story? The story of your life has to have a protagonist. It is the protagonist, whose journey you can experience. Therefore the brain creates a fictional character representing you, who interacts with your other personas, who interacts with the world.

Therefore the protagonist is at the top of the hierarchy(a Pyramid) of internal objects, that connects you with the external world, and through which the story of your life is told to you by your mind for you to feel and experience yourself.

Experince the Protagonist

It is very important to understand that at this moment also when you are reading this article, there are several threads and visions that your mind is creating for you to understand this article.

Even though you are interacting with the reality of this article, in order to make sense of this reality, your brain is continuously interlinking this reality with your memory which consists of events, and internal objects.

If I command you “Remember and visualize the first prize you won in life” your brain will show you the snapshot movie of the event from your life when you actually won your first prize. You can vividly see the entire event like you are watching live. And you will experience a positive feeling as if you are winning the prize right now, at this moment.

Now because you obtained a positive feeling while reading this article, unaware of the fact that the article made you feel positive by helping you to link your positive memory to the current reality, you will start understanding the entire article better. This article would have much better significance to your brain. And due to this, you may understand the concepts better, which will give you further good feelings, which would make this article more relevant, which would make you connect to the article more.

But if you try to remember what you have read so far in this article, you will not be able to recall each of the sentences as is. Rather you may see one picture of a pyramid with you at the top and some of your personas and some of the people in your life. So the brain remembers information as a concept, as a model, as a story, and not just a sequential set of sentences or random pieces of information.

Now if you close your eyes, and think of the concept of internal objects and protagonist, you may see a completely different picture than this article. What you are seeing is your perspective of the concept of the protagonist. This concept has your feelings and life experiences attached to it. This concept is created by your imaginary brain.

It is the protagonist you who learned the concept of the protagonist, neither the father persona of you, nor the son persona of you, nor the brother persona of you. You learned this concept, the protagonist learned this concept.

You might feel happy at this moment because this article navigated you from a not-so-positive state of “unknown, curiosity, confusion” to the present positive feelings state of “clarity, understanding, learning.”

At the end of this article, the protagonist inside your brain will be enriched with more knowledge.

Now you know that even though you are playing multiple roles, there is a protagonist who is getting enriched by the experiences of your life, by the knowledge, by the events, by the feelings, by the thinking. This is your Hero, the you, your aware self, the protagonist you.

C. The Protagonist Syndrome

Syndrome

A syndrome is a name given to a cluster of psychological, physical, or pathological changes in your body due to a certain condition of mind or body. For example Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome(PCOS). Even though PCOS is identified by cysts in the ovary, there are several other pathologies like insulin resistance, Estrogen resistance, and sets of symptoms such as hair fall associated with PCOS.

A syndrome is a cluster of problems, symptoms, and changes in the mind and body that is a precursor to disease. Therefore a syndrome is a starting point of a disease. It is a temporary state and if not addressed, this progresses to a disease.

Protagonist Syndrome

So your mind has memories, current interactions with reality, enrichment of the protagonist through these interactions, feelings, learnings, thoughts, observations, and so on and so forth.

We all sit and think about our life, ruminate about our life. When we think about our life, it is the protagonist we are thinking about. And whenever we are thinking back to our life, we are essentially watching a story of the protagonist representing the core of us, navigating through our life.

As the protagonist exists in the imagination, the more we imagine our life, the bigger the protagonist becomes. Your imaginary brain now attaches independent feelings to the protagonist and slowly the protagonist starts growing as the dominant character in your life. The more you imagine, the more your thoughts and feelings are centered around this protagonist.

Whenever you interact with the world, your brain slowly fails to interact with reality, and rather every interaction is done through the protagonist. The reality slowly starts becoming an imagination. You start seeing your entire life in reality, from your childhood till this point.

Now take a pause. Are you reading this article, or merely glancing while your brain is playing a movie of your life and looking for only those parts and sentences in the article that makes the protagonist feels good?

Stop. Answer this question. Are you reading this article to understand every bit, or while you were reading, your brain was playing various snapshots from your life and was looking for a correlation with the article?

At this point, you may realize that you deviated way away from this article, and the article has merely become a mine where the protagonist in you is looking for bits that are relevant to it, that provide it good experiences and feelings. Even though you think you are interacting with the article, you are not, you are simply interacting with your imagination which is looking at reality to pull anything that is beneficial for the imagination.

D. Do you have Protagonist Syndrome? If so, how severe?

Answer the following as true or false. Every true answer gets 1 point. If the total points is more than 7, then you are high on the spectrum of the protagonist syndrome.

1. When you close your eyes and look back at your life, do you feel your life has been rather unfair to you?
2. Sit still with your eyes closed for 30 seconds and imagine nothing. Did you see thoughts and imagination crossing your brain and you failing to remain in a blank state?
3. Do you feel that people have not reciprocated the good you have done with people?
4. Do you feel that most of the people in your life have taken advantage of you, betrayed you, used you, and appreciated you as long as you kept doing for them?
5. Do you think as a child you did not get as much love and care and emotions as other children get from their parents?
6. Do you feel that whenever you expected something even small from life, life has unjustly denied you even those small expectations?
7. Do you feel that one day even your life will be good and you will be happy in the future?
8. Do you feel that you could do so much more in life, but the circumstances prevented you from achieving your full potential?
9. Do you feel that you want everyone to be good and want everyone to live a happy life?
10. Do you feel one day you will meet a soul mate in life who will understand you, care for you, love you, adore you, and admire you?

How is your feeling? When you were trying to answer the questions, did you see life events that meet those statements? Even though the events were negative, you are feeling positive?

If your score is >=7 on this test, and you feel the above statement is true then you are high on Protagonist Syndrome.

E. Symptoms of Protagonist Syndrome

We know now that whenever there is a syndrome, there will be clusters of symptoms. Because a high protagonist syndrome simply means living in your imagination more than reality, you may experience the following symptoms.

1. A general sense of negative feelings most of the time.
2. Problem with digestion or constipation.
3. Very active brain during sleep and difficulty in sleep.
4. Thinning hair.
5. High irritability and anger for some people.
6. Feeling as if life and days are either too fast or too slow.
7. A sense of energylessness.
8. Feeling bored in your current life and desire to travel or find new experiences in life.
9. Getting stuck in the chain of thoughts.
10. Loss of attention and focus.
11. Loss of memory and difficulty in recalling things fast.
12. The urge for social media scrolling.
13. Lack of interest in doing something that needs high attention, rather than a desire to do exciting things.
14. Increased desire of taking more risks with life.
15. A general loss of taste.
16. Feeling cold most of the time and desire to eat or drink cold beverages or food.
17. Addiction to mobile and other devices.

What is the correlation of the protagonist syndrome with the symptoms?

You see protagonist syndrome is all about you. If you go back to the questionnaire, you will see the questions are merely about your feelings.

Because a protagonist only exists in a story, and because the role of the protagonist is to navigate from negative feelings to positive feelings, remaining in the story makes you need to be in a negative feeling state all the time, so that any new experience can bring positive feelings for you.

Now glance at the article one more time from the top. Did you see how your eyes are picking up the section of the article with more contrasting colors, than merely the black and white texts? That is because when you start living in your imagination, you look for only the contrasts in life. Absolute things are insensitive and less relevant to you.

F. Progression of the Protagonist Syndrome

Nothing but you matter

In your imagination, you think about yourself, your bad feelings, your good feelings, and your experiences. Other people in your life are in reality small tiny actors in your story. Even your other personas like your father/mother persona and your son/daughter persona are tiny. The reason you feel others are less kind to you than you are to them is that your brain is insensitive to anything that is absolute.

You are good, others are bad

Because you are the protagonist, the protagonist has to be good, kind, caring, intelligent, emotional, and empathetic. And because your brain can only comprehend contrasting feelings, it will be sensitive to only the negative events in life and acts of people that are negative to you.

And because you stay in the negative state on average, anything you do will become contrasting and you will feel positive to the others.

Unhappiness

Nothing will make you happy and you will always convince yourself “If I get that, I will be happy,” and will keep running after different things in search of happiness, without even realizing that you are in a story, and your ultimate happiness will come only at the end of the story. If you keep remaining happy, it is the end of the story.

Dissatisfied life

So you will start living a dissatisfied life, with complaints against other people(because you have contrast, you will tell yourself that I have no complaint against anyone), envy, jealousy, hate(and because you have contrast, you will feel I don’t hate anyone. You will become irritated with the slightest of things that don’t give you good feelings. You will lose patience very fast. You will try hard to appear happy(and because you are in contrast, your face and eye will be like dead when you try hard to smile and laugh).

You will shed tears, but can’t cry, can’t feel sadness, because in your story you are starting every event from negative feelings, and any sad event is not in contrast to what you are already in.

Because of this inherent negative state, and because you are in contrast, you will see everyone else’s life more positive and sorted than yours. Slowly you will be disconnected from everything, every reality, everyone, and will get stuck in your imagination story.

The Rescuer Syndrome

Because you are in contrast and are in the story, you will feel good only when you find a more miserable person than you and are able to rescue that miserable person. This miserable person is another protagonist struck in his/her story. In your interaction, you will feel like rescuing the other person, and the other person will feel the same. Then when you try to share your happiness with the other person whom you rescued, you will be shocked to hear the other person saying how you are being rescued.

Now you will feel another person cheated and betrayed you and has not acknowledged your good deeds(without realizing that you were with the person to feel good by becoming a rescuer in the first place). You will feel horrible, and go away from this person, looking to rescue another person.

The victimhood syndrome

When you fail to become a rescuer in your story over and over again, you will feel like a victim of life. You will now start seeing life as the villain, the Kauravas, the Humbaba who is doing injustice to you, is imprisoning you, and will be praying to God to send you a hero to rescue you. You will hope like Cyndrella that someone comes to your life and rescue you from this state. After all, even Krishan was also troubled by the Kauravas. After all every protagonist will also suffer, and somehow some divine power will come and rescue the protagonist.

If at someone comes into your life to give you good feelings, you will be attached to this person with extreme feelings. This is trauma bonding. You are in a state of suffering, and this new person is the divinity sent for your rescue.

The all-powerful protagonist rises again

And when you come out of your state of misery, you will no more able to connect to your savior. because your savior was not a human being, was a tiny little actor sent by God for your rescue, because you are the protagonist, the most important person in the world. You will start getting irritated by this savior. He wouldn’t be needed now, as he was just a help to the protagonist, that the protagonist anyways deserved!

Now you will again try to help people, care for them, uplift them, and do things that a hero does. But because you are in your story, and everyone in your life is in their stories, and just like you, everyone deserves your help because you are just a divine intervention they desired and they deserved, even after all the heroics, no one will talk about you, hailing your heroics.

The way you did not learn to appreciate anyone, they did not learn to appreciate anyone, and thus everyone keeps chasing a situation where everyone appreciates them and acknowledges the heroics of their protagonists.

The conflict stage: the dark side of the protagonist

All right, people have not understood your good deeds. People have not acknowledged your heroics. People and life have been unfair to you. It is time to “get real” and show the world what you can do. Because your story is now completely negative, and the story is not at all moving, and because you are in contrast, you would be looking for friction, in reality, to get out of your negative story.

Now your brain will search for conflict in real life. It will search for a villain to take on. You don’t have to search. Everyone in your life is the villain. You will start picking up silly but violent fights against people whom you think you loved(in reality hoping to rescue). You will act aggressively and you will “stand for yourself” (but because you are in contrast, you can not realize the absolute state of standing for yourself as long as you don’t see others fall), and so will do everything to bring them down.

You did not get attention by positivity, but as you are causing negative feelings, and threatening to damage the “reputation” of others, you will draw their attention and then you with other people will get entangled into a reality of battle.

In your imagination, you will plan, scheme, and strategize a victory in this battle. Now your brain is doing something positive because it is using all its knowledge(in reality the stories from the past) to make you victorious.

If you lose the battle, you will feel validated for your victim syndrome, and if you win your protagonist will get validated. In such a fight, win and loss both are yours. But the protagonist is caring and can not hurt anyone.

The good person syndrome

So when you see that you have hurt and harmed the one you once cared for, you will again feel pain, and feel bad about yourself. All right, you have again come back to the starting point of your story of feeling bad in reality, and now you will have a chance of feeling good.

Now you will get closer to “spirituality” and away from “strong and standing for yourself” you will feel guilty and ashamed and will take your steps to become a “good human being.” You will never hurt anyone and only will love others.

G. You wish you did not read this article

You were very enthusiastic and optimistic about the article as you thought that you are learning something new. However, by this point, your entire feelings have changed and you are feeling horrible to find so much similarity with your life. This article showed you a reality without really telling you that you will.

However, when you were reading the previous section, you were aware that you were reading things that are real and you were not feeling good, and yet you kept on reading or glancing through the sections. This is because your story has a negative starting in each chapter, and the negativity is an addiction.

Now try to forget this article, as this is negative. But you can not. That is simply because this has connected you with your feelings more than many things have done in the recent past.

However, because you are still in the stories, as you continue to live your life, you will forget this article, as you are not living life, but living a story. Because this article, like many events in life, was not really special you will forget anything that you read here and learned.