The Curse of the Hyper-Aware: Why Socially Anxious People Are Great at Spotting Subtle Anger (And Miserable About It)

If you walk into a room and immediately sense that someone’s vibe is off, congratulations—you might have social anxiety.

A new study in Behaviour Research and Therapy confirms what every socially anxious person already suspects: they're freakishly good at detecting even the most microscopic flickers of anger on other people’s faces.

But don’t call it a superpower. It’s more like having a smoke detector that goes off when someone lights a birthday candle three houses down.

Once upon a time, in a story you've probably never heard because it’s too subtle for Disney and too weird for TikTok, a tailor’s apprentice wandered into the woods, stumbled onto a glowing crypt, and found a beautiful woman lying motionless in a glass coffin.

So naturally, he opened it.

She woke up, thanked him, and married him.

Welcome to The Glass Coffin, one of the Grimm Brothers’ most obscure fairy tales—and one of the most psychologically revealing.

In a world obsessed with magical awakenings, this tale isn’t about love.

It’s about projection, control, and the fantasy of rescuing someone who can’t speak for themselves.

It's also an eerily accurate metaphor for certain kinds of modern relationships—especially the ones that show up in family therapy.

Once upon a time—because fairy tales always happen once, never twice, and certainly not after your therapist retires—there was a broken hearth.

More specifically, there were three survivors of a kitchen fire: a piece of straw, a lump of coal, and a humble bean.

In the Grimm tale The Straw, the Coal, and the Bean, these three relics of the cooking process escape a stove and decide to make a break for it together.

It’s not clear where they’re going.

Nor do they seem particularly compatible companions. But off they go, side by side, bonded by the unspoken code of shared trauma and the vague hope that somewhere else must be better.

Until they reach a brook.

Now, like many families in therapy, this quirky trio has already done a lot of work avoiding real danger rather than repairing from it.

They’ve escaped. They’ve projected. They’ve joked. They’ve kept moving.

But now a new challenge arises that requires not just flight—but trust, coordination, and reciprocity.

They fail spectacularly.

Once upon a time—in a kingdom not terribly far from today's algorithm-driven culture—two German brothers started collecting old stories from peasants, spinsters, and middle-class neighbors who had excellent memories and questionable motives.

These weren’t bedtime stories. They were blood-and-bone accounts of what it meant to be human when you had too many children, too little food, and no concept of therapeutic repair.

The Grimm Brothers didn’t set out, at first to entertain toddlers.

They were cultural nationalists. Linguistic archaeologists. Men with quills and a vision: to unify the German people not with flags, but with fables.

And their fairy tales—first published in 1812 as Children’s and Household Tales—weren’t whimsical. They were survival manuals stitched together with folklore, famine, and moral panic.

In the odd, overlooked Grimm fairy tale The Mouse, the Bird, and the Sausage, we meet three roommates—each with a defined domestic role.

The bird gathers wood, the mouse fetches water and sets the table, and the sausage does the cooking. Things run smoothly. Everyone eats well. Life is good.

Then one day, the bird flies out and hears some forest gossip. Other animals mock him: “You fetch wood? While a sausage just hangs out at home cooking? You’re being exploited, man.”

The bird returns, indignant and insecure, and insists they switch jobs. Everyone agrees. Equity, right?

Chaos ensues. The sausage dies trying to gather wood (long story short: he gets eaten). The mouse tries to cook but ends up boiling herself alive. The bird, now alone, falls into despair and dies too. The end.

It’s a grim Grimm tale, but one that couples therapists will recognize instantly. Behind the whimsy and anthropomorphic disaster lies a parable about roles in a relationship, the quiet stability of functional interdependence, and the deadly danger of reactive resentment.

When my son died on March 16, 2025, I was at his side. The world didn’t end—but something in me did. Not all at once. Not cleanly.

It was more like tectonic plates shifting beneath the surface, quietly and then catastrophically, until the entire landscape of my life cracked wide open.

People reached out, of course. Friends. Clients. Even strangers. They said things like “I can’t imagine,” or “He’s in a better place,” or “Let me know if you need anything.”

They meant well. But none of it touched the raw truth: I had become a father whose child was no longer alive.

There isn’t a proper word in English for that. We have “widow,” “orphan,” but not this.

Not for a parent who has lost a child. Just a silence. A hole.

And then I came across a line that pierced me straight through:

“Grief is praise, because it is the natural way love honors what it misses.”
—Martin Prechtel

Grief is praise.

Not a flaw. Not a diagnosis. Not a personal failure to “cope.” But praise.

That stopped me in my tracks.

In a marriage where one partner is neurodivergent—autistic, ADHD, or otherwise neurologically wired with nonstandard issue firmware—things don’t just get complicated.

They get misinterpreted. Sometimes pathologized. Often, ignored. Especially by couples therapists trained exclusively on the neurotypical (NT) template.

Let’s start with a real-world example.

A colleague once told me a story about when he was participating in a high-level training for couples therapists recently.

A case was presented involving a husband described as self-absorbed, emotionally flat, rigid in routine, and indifferent to his wife’s emotional needs. The therapist confidently diagnosed narcissistic personality disorder.

To anyone in the room trained in standard diagnostic frameworks, this probably seemed apt.

But to those of us familiar with autism spectrum conditions (ASCs), it was a red flag of a different color.

In one of the most resonant cultural fusions of therapy-speak and meme culture, a single sentence has begun to circulate like wildfire:

“Healing the inner child while raising one.”

It’s shared on Instagram carousels with warm pastels, stitched into TikToks showing exhausted parents tearing up during tantrums, and turned into tearjerking Substack confessionals.

This meme is doing something rare: speaking simultaneously to our personal pain and our collective desire for progress.

It also points to something deeper: a quiet revolution in how we understand family, identity, and emotional inheritance.

In a discovery straight out of speculative fiction, neuroscientists have confirmed that the human brain emits light—yes, actual photons—that pass through the skull and shift depending on what you’re doing or thinking.

This new study, published in iScience, reveals that the brain produces ultraweak light signals that not only exist, but may correlate with mental states like rest, alertness, and sensory processing.

It’s called ultraweak photon emission (UPE), and while it doesn’t exactly make your head glow like a lightbulb, it could launch an entirely new era of non-invasive brain imaging—a technique the researchers cheekily call photoencephalography.

What Is Ultraweak Photon Emission—and Why Is Your Brain Doing It?

It starts with a baby. That’s the part we expect.

What no one prepares you for is the moment, two weeks in, when your body still hurts, your mind begins to drift into strange territory, and everyone around you wants to hold the baby—but not your fear.

No one warns you that after giving life, you might feel like your own is falling apart quietly in the background.

They call it “the baby blues.”
You suspect it’s something deeper.

But it’s hard to know for sure—because no one’s saying it out loud.

You didn’t Google “my husband hates me” for fun.

You're here because something in your marriage feels off—maybe devastatingly off.

Maybe he rolls his eyes when you speak. Maybe he sleeps on the edge of the bed like you're radioactive.

Maybe he hasn’t said “I love you” since your last anniversary dinner, which you planned, paid for, and cried in the bathroom halfway through.

If you're here, it's because you're wondering something painful and unspeakable: Does he even like me anymore?

As a couples therapist, let me say this first: You are not crazy. And you're not alone. That phrase—"my husband hates me"—shows up more often in therapy than most people realize.

It's a placeholder for exhaustion, distance, resentment, rejection, and disconnection. And behind it, there’s often a deeper story waiting to be uncovered.

This blog post is for anyone who’s whispered that phrase into a pillow, typed it into a search bar, or heard it echo in their own mind.

Let’s talk about what it really means—and what you can do about it.

If the Coolidge Effect explains why the average neurotypical brain gets bored with sexual familiarity, imagine what happens when the brain isn’t average.

Imagine it’s wired for intensity, pattern detection, hyperfocus—or has trouble with impulse control, reward delay, or sensory overload.

Welcome to the quiet war between neurodivergence and long-term desire, where dopamine isn’t just a pleasure chemical—it’s a survival mechanism, and sexual novelty can feel less like temptation and more like neurological stabilization.

Gentle reader, this post explores how the Coolidge Effect might collide with ADHD, autism, and other forms of neurodivergence.