Tourniquetting identity leads to weak sense of self

From a reader:

I was reading your blog, specifically the post titled “Seeing things as they really are”.

On the topic of weak sense of self. I’m really curious as to how that affects people and sociopaths in general. (I would love to read a post specifically on that topic.) I was listening a song by Charles Manson called “My World” which actually mentioned his weak sense of self or lack of ego. (I’m not necessarily sure what the difference between a sense of self and an ego is) Charles Manson was considered either a psychopath or sociopath.(they never really specified, constantly using the terms interchangeably) If you don’t know about him, in a very small nutshell he was claimed to have grown a following, a cult. And then was claimed to use that cult to kill some famous people. He has also been in and out of  penitentiary's his whole life. He himself claiming that the penitentiary was his father. You should really check out his interviews, many are available on YouTube.  

On a separate matter, if you ever get the chance head down to Kentucky. Me and my friend would love to sit down and talk. I suspect myself to be sociopathic, no idea of if i am or not. I’m not going to get a diagnosis mainly because of the negative effects that can occur. But basically before preschool in daycare i made my best friend that we’ll call Sam. We both had a very  similar up bringing and have always stayed friends. About a year ago we both started researching about sociopaths, for some reason we were both naturally drawn to this. And when I say we both started researching this i mean that we were doing this separately from each other, not know that the other person even knew about the subject. And one day it popped up in a conversation some how and we both confessed. But what’s really amazing about that is that we both started researching around the same time and came to the conclusion around the same time. 

You mentioned that you’re trying to learn more about other sociopaths. I can’t say for sure that i am one, but you can make an assumption off the info that i give you. I’d like to know if i am one. Not because of the thought that “oh I’m a sociopath and I’m callous and blah blah so I’m better” but rather that I’m just very curious. Referring to a weak sense of self, i believe that i have one. People always tell me that you gotta find yourself, i guess mainly because I’m the age of 18. But i am confused by that statement because why do you need to find it in the first place? Aren’t you already yourself? And can’t you just be whatever you want? One thing I’ve said before is that “you can’t be something you’re not if you don’t know what you are.” 

Who am i as of now? I’m 18 and male, and i see the whole world as an opportunity to exploit. I feel that you can do anything that you can do. I’m a very kind and popular person. I have many friends that i got to for if i need something. I have both meaningful and meaningless bonds with my friends and family. I’m nice for one because it’s beneficial in the long run and two because it gives me a challenge for something to do when I’m bored. Which I am a very very bored person. I drive fast, take hard turns and used to drift (until i had to buy new tires ) if i could i would get a motorcycle. I play with fire a lot (or so my friends say) although it’s a lot less than i used to. But i do a lot of thrill seeking activities. I love art, dancing, and science/engineering. I draw abstract concepts of my mood and thoughts. I used to dance a lot being in on a competitive dance team that’s been to Vegas. And i build things all the time, my latest project being an electric bike so i don’t have to walk at college (I’m lazy, or as i see it being efficient). I feel as though i have multiple personalities or masks. Wearing different ones for different people, although I’m pretty sure most people do that. Here are two different examples of times where I’ve acted different. 

Ex.1 i got a call from a friend. Her voice was almost inaudible. I could tell that she was crying. So i asked “where are you?” I then drove to her car which was in a parking lot. This i found odd, but thinking to myself I knew that she was a sensitive and emotional person so i just assumed that it was just on a whim of some sort. So i hopped in her car, she had just got in an argument with her boyfriend.  She had her head on her steering wheel, her hands were clinching the wheel with intensity. She was crying very loudly tears were just pouring out her eyes. I calmed her down and reassured her. Being very attentive and holding the best facial expressions that i could( crying is always hard to deal with, since i never know how to actually act. I always wish that i could just give someone a pat on the back say “there there” and then say “get over it, you’re fine”) she was actually on the verge of suicide so i was being extra attentive marking up lies and connections, just about anything that would give her enough reasons to hold onto life. She hasn’t killed herself yet. 

Ex.2 it was New Years. I went to a friends party. It was a smaller group of 15 people. But one girl one having too much to drink, on purpose it seemed like to me, i think she needed an excuse to act reckless. But she was very insecure and very unstable. Constantly letting people know that she loved them and that the world loved them as well, some how i guess that helped her feel like she was loved. But she was getting too drunk and dropped a glass that shattered onto the floor. She attempted to go clean it up and almost fell into the glass. As a reference from your book it seemed to me as she was flirting with death. So they stopped her and cleaned up the glass. We all moved out of the basement and to the upstairs cause there were still shards laying around. She stayed down there desperately Singing and moaning for attention. Annoying everyone at the party. I walk to the basement door and from the top of the steps i yell “SHUT THE FUCK UP” she then was quiet, i walked into the room where everyone was and they all were at awe. They slowly began to laugh quietly, because they knew it’s what they wanted to do but wouldn’t. She latter came upstairs, projectile vomited, got on her knees(which were now in the vomit) and proceeded to scoop up her vomit with her hands. It was disgusting, embarrassing, and enthralling to watch. Then she took a shower, went into the kitchen and grabbed a knife and was about to kill herself. I sat on the couch and watched, somebody stopped her. This is by no means extreme in anyway, simply the fastest experience i could think of. 

For as long as i can remember I’ve always felt apart from the crowd. I’ve never been a part of something. I never belonged to a group of friends or my school or even to my best friend Sam. I believe that i will always feel alone and isolated. How i act is also heavily affected by my mood. I mainly have three moods. One is where I’m irritable, aggressive, impulsive, blunt, callous(more than normal). Two is where I’m very calm, quiet, reflective, rational and calculating. Three is my neutral where I’m in the middle of the two. I have a little bit of high energy great for interacting with crowds and talking to people. The perfect twist of impulsivity and calculating. But perfect mood for doing anything i need done. One thing i find odd is how being nervous affects me. It affects me physically with increased heart rate and maybe a little bit of jitteriness, but i don’t feel that it actually gets to me, my mind is perfectly calm. A difference between me and you is that i don’t have a grandiose view of myself. However that seems to slowly be changing as I’ve become aware of how stupid other people are. It took me a lot longer than you to realize this. I figured this out around the age of 12 or something like that. I believe that’s because my mother tried to me make believe that i was worse than everyone else so i always felt stupider and didn’t judge other people. But i grew out of that perspective and am confident and smarter than most ect. 

My child hood.
In my child hood i was high in Conscientiousness. I remember being just tall enough to reach a door knob as i thought to myself “i wonder what happens to you when you die, does anything happen or are you just dust?” I always would enjoy them moment and try to be one with my surroundings. Or i would sit down and just think, walking around the hallways of my mind for what felt like hours. My cousin that we’ll call Nate introduced me to fire and other things. I remember one memory where me my sister Sabrina and my cousin Nate were all sitting around this green slide in the heat of the summer. The sun was very intense. We grabbed worms one at a time and put them at the top of the slide to watch them wiggle their way down as they turned into crisp. Me and my cousin did things like this a lot. Snails and salt, watching in awe as the snail would bubble and fizz. Me and Sam would go out at night killing fireflies with our hands, tennis rackets, swords, and a can of hair spray with a lighter. We also found a snake in his yard one time, we both grabbed sticks and started beating it to death. It was a fun game dodge the snakes bites, after it couldn’t move we then cut off its head and put it in a bowl of salt in his shed so that we could keep the skull. There were a bunch of other things too. One time me and my Sabrina (as toddlers) walked down the neighborhood to the river, grabbed some rocks and started throwing them at ducks. The police cars siren turned off and told us to stop. I’ve always wondered how different i would’ve been i had started the habit of abusing smaller animals(this event with the ducks happened years before the event with snakes and Sam), because up to then it was just bugs. I was emotionally and mentally abused throughout elementary school and possibly before that (can’t remember that far, all those years just blur together to me) i have a good family, i recognize that I’m very fortunate and that what i experienced is nothing compared to others. My mother was mainly the antagonizer. She’s bipolar and possibly has borderline personality disorder. She loved me when it was convenient, when she needed me to do something, and constantly lied to me. One moment i was the best child in the world and then next i was the worst. And I’m not exaggerating  that at all.  She was very emotional, she taught me that emotions were unreliable and so was love. I was only with my father when i was helping with one of his projects. When there was a complication or obstacle he would always get furious and yell and cuss. It was always so annoying and made me mad. I didn’t want to be like that so i taught myself how to hide my anger. I was never physically abused. However my mother would always yell at me calling me things like worthless and good for nothing. And her face was red and she was very loud stomping through the house making noises by slamming doors, drawers,pans, pots, everything. She always tried to make me feel bad about myself.  there was a time when i cried myself to sleep every night in a row for a month. One time i watched a movie where the person said “being yourself is enough” so i asked my mom one day. Isn’t being myself enough? She glared at me with anger and said no. The sadness she made me feel became anger and somewhere along the line i created a dissociation from my self. Life didn’t feel real and i was just like another one of my games.(life still doesn’t feel real) but as i grew up i realized that my mother only acted that way because she was just very unintelligent, insecure, and living a life she didn’t want. I used to hate her but after realizing that i forgave her. This doesn’t mean that she doesn’t  aggravate me, she does. But instead i feel indifferent towards her. I was unpopular in elementary school, mainly because i didn’t fit in or understand people. So when i went to middle school i mimicked the popular people and added bits and pieces to my arsenal of personas. Then i became popular and people loved me. I watched a plethora of psychology vids trying to understand people as much as i could. That’s mainly why i got into psychology and am now planning to major in it. 

Thank you so much if you read all that. I’d love to hear back from you. 

My response: 

I’ll try to write about sense of self again sometime, but I think you already understand how and why it happens to us — we take enough psychological hits to our identity that we just dissociate ourselves from it, like a tourniquet cutting off blood flow to a damaged limb. I think (through usually professional help) we can restore some function to that damaged limb, but it isn't super easy, it's not intuitive, it's hard for us to even have a vision of what it might look like to do something like that, and it's a bit like being lost in the woods trying to find our childhood home that we only remember faintly. And certain things will never be back the way they could have been. I still don't experience affective empathy and probably never will, despite finally graduating from therapy. 

Appealing to Cognitive vs. Emotional Empathy

From a reader:

Thoroughly enjoyed your book. I'm pretty sure you hit on the right conclusions in the closing chapters. I used to work with batterers and some violent offenders. Emotional self regulation and empathy tend to range along a spectrum. The highly emotional men (empaths - as you refer to them) that I worked with responded well to empathy. Men on the sociopathic end of the spectrum tended to view emotional displays of empathy as pathetic and useless. The sociopaths I encountered tended to be quite adept at "cognitive empathy" (the ability to model and predict behaviors from an intellectual perspective), but were blind to feeling. As a consequence, they didn't seem to perceive compassion or guilt. It took me a while to come to the conclusion that the soft, tender, vulnerable part of them just wasn't there in the same way as it often is in others. 

They were however exquisitely stunned to consequences. I learned very quickly to drop empathy as a psychotherapeutic intervention, and to focus on rewards, punishments and outcomes in their lives. They were quick to pick up the fact that kindness was often a far better long term strategy for getting what they want than cruelty. 

Pro social behaviors can be taught to children without a conscience. Parents and teachers just need to know what they are working with. I could go on and describe the manipulative games the sociopaths I worked with used to engage in, the special interest they took in manipulating their therapists, the telltale language they used to describe others, or how they game the system, but you already know these things. I liked working with them. I think I was a puzzle to them. Encountering someone who could be "touchy/feely", and who could abruptly turn off their empathy to confront them directly seemed to confuse them. I imagine that I was able to promote some interest and a sense of unease in knowing that I could see through them. Interesting people. Everyone's trying to make their way in the world.

The Virtues of Cold Blood

Sam Harris interviews famous anti-empathy researcher and author of the book "Against Empathy" Paul Bloom in his podcast. They start with the basic premise of Bloom's book, that most people see the benefits of empathy as being too obvious to even warrant any sort of justification, although the perceived value of empathy is highly suspect, and get into several other related areas.

The first hour or so goes into the limitations of empathy and our understanding of empathy. Bloom says that he is very careful to refer to what is essentially affective empathy, that is feeling the way someone else feels. He is also careful to distinguish between this and a general theory of mind (or the ability to imagine the feelings of others and why they would feel that way) and other sort of warm and fuzzy concepts like compassion, selflessness, social adroitness, sensitivity to the needs of others, etc. It turns out that when you isolate empathy as a concept and a personal characteristic, it actually doesn't do much at all. In fact, Bloom mentions at the end of the podcast that there have been meta analyses of studies done in which there is no apparent correlation between someone's degree of empathy and how nice or good of a person they are. In fact, they specifically mention someone's capacity for empathy and research done regarding the validity of the PCL-R which indicates that empathy does not really predict any sort of behavior, either good or bad behavior. Instead, other traits like past behavior and low or high impulse control do.

What empathy does accomplish is to make people susceptible to certain cognitive biases that lead them astray in their moral reasoning. This is discussed in probably the most relevant (and best) part of the discussion in the last 27 minutes or so, where Bloom addresses the question that many have raised to him -- ok, maybe empathy isn't the panacea that some claim it to be, but there's nothing wrong with it, is there? He mentions a few ways in which it can be very harmful. For instance, he argues that empathy is the reason why people will get so riled up over certain atrocities to the point where they want to commit other atrocities, e.g. a costly and violent war. Empathy is also the thing that will make those same people argue against the war that they voted as they hear stories of the collateral damage the war is causing. So essentially, high empathy people are just easily pushed from one extreme to the other with carefully selected personal stories that are designed to tug at heartstrings.

Empathy can also be highly irrational. For instance, he argues that in certain countries like India, the child beggars are almost all associated with huge criminal enterprises that exploit and even sometimes intentionally maim the children for financial gain. When people give money to these children, they're facilitating these efforts. Bloom tells the story of relating this to someone on a radio show, to which the woman responded essentially "but I like giving to children -- it makes me feel good. I feel connected to them". His rejoinder -- it depends on what you want, if you want these children's lives to be better, then don't give to them.

The first and last parts of the podcast are good. In the middle, they go off on this really random tangent in which Bloom seems to be contradicting his own argument. Specifically, Bloom argues that he wouldn't want to feel an expansive universal love, the type to which many buddhist meditation practitioners (such as Sam Harris) seek to achieve. Bloom explains that although love may not have limits, everyone has limited time and resources to spend, and if Bloom loved everyone, maybe he wouldn't spend as much time and effort on his own family. The argument is so odd because he is essentially arguing that the feelings of preferential love are necessary for him to behave in this way that he has prioritized for himself, i.e. preferential treatment of his family over starving orphans in Africa. But this is almost exactly the argument that empathy proponents make about empathy -- that it is a useful or necessary emotional tool in getting to a desired outcome of good behavior. Bloom's position is that empathy is not necessary or even that helpful because rational behavioral constructs and choices are much more efficient at achieving the desired outcome of moral behavior. But if one can just think their way to moral behavior, how couldn't one think their way to giving preferential treatment to their family, despite loving the whole of humanity equally? Oddly he doesn't seem to see any contradiction there. Am I just imagining one? Another odd thing, he basically kills his own argument by arguing that rational thinking (e.g., in this situation, utilitarianism) could easily come up with his desired outcome of preferential treatment to his family because it is more efficient for him to feed his own children than orphans in Africa. Still, he doesn't budge on his position. Does anyone have any insight into this? It truly makes me think less of him and his arguments and academia in general, so if someone has a better explanation for what he is trying to say, I'd love to hear it.

Just a dick?

In what has become an impromptu series of "Sociopath, or just _____?" (e.g., sociopath, or just puberty? Sociopath, or just smart? Sociopath, or just depression? Etc., a reader wonders:

I'm well aware you get hundreds of emails from people who are desperate to become sociopaths, so they tell you how unfeeling they are and how they don't care about anybody. And after reading your blog for over a year a question began to fester in the back of my brain and I crave an answer. Why would people, at the slightest lack of empathy, jump to the conclusion that they are a sociopath? And the reason i bring this up is, i used to feel like them. At some point in my life i just decided, i love to hurt people, so i must be a sociopath. I now realize that i'm just a douche. I still enjoy seeing people crumble before me when i attack all of their insecurities at once, but I'm not a sociopath or a psychopath. But what i'm confused by is, why is it so hard for people to come to the realization that they are just dicks?

M.E.:

I think you may be confusing lack of empathy with sadism. Some people don't care about other people, but they have perfectly intact empathy. Other people know that they don't connect with people, and it looks (internally) and feels a lot more like what I would imagine autism would feel like. Their brain is not capable of processing empathy the most people's brains (apparently) do. They can pretend that those empathy and emotional connections things are going on, in fact, they can pretend so well that no one else suspects what's really going on.

Although there's certainly bound to be overlap between empathy-impaired people and dicks, a diminished capacity for empathy is different and doesn't necessarily lead to enjoying exploiting people, or even just taking a special pleasure in your own agenda at others expense. So which are you? 

"What is it Like to Never Have Felt an Emotion?"

Asks the BBC in this article of the same name sent to me by a reader about alexithymia. It makes some interesting points. I'll highlight a few.

The causes:

Today, it seems clear that there may be many types of alexithymia. While some might have trouble expressing emotions, others (like Caleb) might not even be conscious of the feelings in the first place. Richard Lane, at the University of Arizona compares it to people who have gone blind after damage to the visual cortex; despite having healthy eyes, they can’t see the images. In the same way, a damaged neural circuit involved in emotional processing might prevent sadness, happiness or anger from bursting into consciousness. (Using the analogy of the Russian doll, their emotions are breaking down at the second shell of feeling – their bodies are reacting normally, but the sensations don’t merge to form an emotional thought or feeling.) “Maybe the emotion gets activated, you even have the bodily responses, but it happens without you being consciously aware of the emotion,” he says.

Along these lines, a few recent fMRI scanning studies have found signs of a more basic perceptual problem in some types of alexithymia. Goerlich-Dobre, for instance, found reduced grey matter in areas of the cingulate cortex serving self-awareness, potentially blocking a conscious representation of the emotions. And André Aleman at the University Medical Centre in Groningen, the Netherlands, detected some deficits in areas associated with attention when alexithymics look at emotionally charged-pictures; it was as if their brains just weren’t registering the feelings. “I think this fits quite well with [Lane’s] theory,” says Aleman – who had initially suspected other causes. “We have to admit they are right.”

Interestingly, this connection to other physical disorders:

Further work could also pin down the puzzling link to so-called “somatic disorders”, such as chronic pain and irritable bowel syndrome, that seem to be unusually common in people with alexithymia. Lane suggests it’s down to a kind of “short-circuit” in the brain, created by the emotional blindness. Normally, he says, the conscious perception of emotions can help damp down the physical sensations associated with the feeling. “If you can consciously process and allow the feeling to evolve – if you engage the frontal areas of the brain, you recruit mechanisms that have a top down, modulatory effect on bodily processes,” says Lane. Without the emotional outlet, however, the mind could get stuck on the physical feelings, potentially amplifying the responses. As Goerlich-Dobre puts it: “They are hypersensitive to bodily perceptions, and not able to focus on anything else, which might be one reason why they develop chronic pain.” (Some studies, have in fact found that alexes are often abnormally sensitive to bodily sensations, although other experiments have found conflicting evidence.)

My neurotherapist actually suggested that what I perceive to be food allergies (I basically eat the same 10 foods for 90% of my nutrition) might actually be emotional distress that I am not aware of but that is still registering physically in these negative ways. 

The way one of the sufferers connects with emotions is often an academic exercise:

Physical sensations certainly seem to dominate Caleb’s descriptions of difficult events, such as periods of separation from his family. “I don’t miss people, as far as I can tell. If I’m gone, and don’t see someone for a long period, it’s a case of out of sight, out of mind,” he says. “But I do feel physically a kind of pressure or stress when I’m not around my wife or my child for a couple of days.”
***Caleb, too, has visited a cognitive behavioural therapist to help with his social understanding, and through conscious effort he is now better able to analyse the physical feelings and to equate it with emotions that other people may feel. Although it remains a somewhat academic exercise, the process helps him to try to grasp his wife’s feelings and to see why she acts the way she does.

And finally the obligatory knock on sociopaths, because heaven forbid someone confuse your total lack of emotions and affective empathy with something as so way different as psychopathy:

Ultimately, he wants to emphasise that emotional blindness does not make one unkind, or selfish. “It may be hard to believe, but it is possible for someone to be cut off completely from the emotions and imagination that are such a big part of what makes us humans,” he says. “And that a person can be cut off from emotions without being heartless, or a psychopath.”

Acquired hyper-empathy (or a surgical treatment for low empathy?)

This is an interesting Wired article (link to the full study) about a woman who had part of her temporal lobe removed as part of a treatment for epilepsy and after acquired what her doctors described as a "hyper-empathy":

The researchers are careful to make some distinctions – they say there are two forms of understanding other people’s mental states (an ability known as Theory of Mind): a cognitive variety, which allows us to represent the beliefs and intentions of others; and an affective variety, which allows us to represent their feelings and emotions. They further explain that empathy is separate from Theory of Mind and is about feeling other people’s emotions. The finding from their tests is that Susan has heightened “Affective Theory of Mind” – that is, an enhanced ability to recognize the feelings and emotions of others; and heightened empathy, in the form of an intense response to other people’s emotions.

The tests

The researchers arrived at these conclusions after subjecting Susan to various neuropsychological tests. One of these tapped her Affective Theory of Mind by asking her to rate her agreement with statements like “I am good at predicting how someone will feel”; another tapped her empathy levels by asking her to rate statements like “I get upset if I see people suffering on news programmes”. More objective was use of a French version of the Reading The Mind in The Eyes Test, which involves identifying a person’s current emotions purely from looking at their eyes. Susan excelled at this test compared with ten healthy control women. The researchers also tested Susan’s Cognitive Theory of Mind using a false-belief task. This takes the form of short stories and the test-taker must deduce which character knew what in each scenario. On this, Susan performed no better than controls.

Richard-Mornas and his colleagues conclude that theirs is a “fascinating case of a patient with a hyper empathy associated with exceptional performance in a task of affective theory of mind after right amygdalohippocampectomy [that is, partial removal of the amygadala and hippocampus]”. They note that the regions where brain matter was removed are part of a neural network, together with the prefrontal cortex, that is involved in understanding other people’s minds and feelings. “The present case report suggests that a new permanent cortical organization of attention and emotion processes has developed in our patient that may be responsible for an enhancement of affective theory of mind,” they said.

The article goes on to suggest reasons to be partially or even highly skeptical about the woman's largely self-reported and unverified claims. The author's main argument seems to be yes, it is possible this happened, but we can't be sure it happened to this woman in this way to the extent she says.

But I kind of want to believe it because I started doing a little neurofeedback this summer (I'll try to write more on this when I get a chance), and a large part of the treatment was focusing on stimulating the temporal lobe to get me more up to speed on things like being connected with my feelings and empathy for others. And at least during certain times of the treatment, I did feel an unusual degree of affection and love for the my loved ones -- extremely high for me certainly, and probably high for anyone, give their reactions to my feelings? Or maybe they were just surprised that such expressions of love were coming from me. :)