Victoria on long-lasting change via meditation and perspective shifts

Author of Confessions of a Sociopath: A Life Spent Hiding in Plain Sight M.E. Thomas interviews science PhD candidate Victoria about the dramatic change that's happened in her life since the last time they spoke in Part 4 of the series. They speak about why Victoria was the way she was before, how did it feel to be that way, why she thought to do the meditation program, how that changed the way she viewed the world. They also talk about identity, personhood, agency, the desire to control and shifting our desires to control from things that are not within our control to thing that are properly within our control, the difference between direct and indirect control, "timshel" or thou mayest from "East of Eden," love, process vs. outcome orientation, choosing to move from reactionary emotional to thoughtful responses, accountability for choices, personal boundaries, identity hits, ego, and self-expression.

The meditation program Victoria participated in: https://www.innerengineering.com/ 

Covey's "scarcity" vs. "abundance" mentalities: http://franklincoveystephenpearson.blogspot.com/2011/01/abundance-mentality-vs-scarcity.html 

Paul Graham's Keep Your Identity Small: http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html

Part 1 of this series:  https://youtu.be/EAujim_xKWE  

Part 2 of this series: https://youtu.be/TmL55G9xgVU

Part 3 of this series: https://youtu.be/fnFjkWsKKnk

Part 4 of this series: https://youtu.be/ZJ68szHTOPs

More from Victoria on willpower: https://youtu.be/E-IIJoei_hk 

Sick of shame?

Another month, another post about the limitations of public shaming, this time prompted by the people who seem to be confronting for the first time how to ethically oppose an ideology that you find to be abhorrent.

I've always been very vocally opposed to public shaming, even before I was the victim of it. At it's core, it uses the unwieldy weapon of mob mentality to enforce social norms, particularly those that its adherents believe have moral significance. Never mind that there is no universal morality, but rather that beliefs about morality are closely tied to such varied inputs as religion, culture, upbringing, genetics, etc. I'm not the only one who thinks that if shame had any value at all (perhaps evolutionarily or in certain smaller contexts),  although there have been other victims of shaming who still defend its applications. Most of these critiques fall under the category of the solution being worse than the problem, e.g. the self-censorship and resulting harm to open dialogue that can occur as a result.

But is it even an actual solution?

One thing that I learned in therapy is that everyone (1) is at a different stage than you (emotional, psychological, educational, etc.) and (2) that people can go through the stages in different orders, different ways, and prompted by different experiences than you did. To insist that other people go through their own progression at your pace, in your order, or in your way is just a denial of the realities of psychology. People can rarely make a lasting meaningful change in the moment. You can demand that they start doing or being something or stop doing or being another thing, but they are not psychologically capable of meeting your demand in that moment (although there is longterm hope because there is almost always possibility for real, meaningful, and lasting change in that area if they are open and committed to seeking it). So for instance, demanding that someone who has been socialized, educated, and undergone particular psychological development to the point where they are racist (at that moment in time), you cannot just demand that they stop being racist. And even if you could convince them at a certain intellectual level that there is reason to doubt their position, they need to go through whatever process is necessary for them to sort it all out in their head. Open dialogue could encourage this process, although it seems like more people on all sides are showing up to dialogues not to engage, but with already formed judgments that they seek only to make known.

Unfortunately, the shaming process does not encourage the sort of dialogue or safe space that is often conducive to people softening their opinions and being receptive to something new. What it does is foster reflexive defensiveness, further entrenching them in their viewpoint. Shame often targets the person instead of the behavior, which can lead to identity politics and culture wars:

In a guilt culture you know you are good or bad by what your conscience feels. In a shame culture you know you are good or bad by what your community says about you, by whether it honors or excludes you. In a guilt culture people sometimes feel they do bad things; in a shame culture social exclusion makes people feel they are bad.

I saw on Twitter last month this tweet regarding candied yams (my first encounter with them):

" y'all know what's going on " pic.twitter.com/25cNPIl0yz

— MOST HATED🕊 (@DuwopFrm89CG) July 25, 2017

And then subsequent chain involving a white guy ("@wwadas") who replied that he didn't recognize the candied yams. Black Twitter led him through the process of making the yams, with many praising what seemed to be an increasingly rare instance of building a cultural bridge:

Me, what's on the right?

— Will Wadas (@wwadas) July 26, 2017

Until others culled through the white guy's tweets to find good ol' boy and obliquely (if not overtly) racist content. Although some immediately tried to shame him, labeling him (not his behavior or beliefs) as being "problematic", other people were less inclined to jump to such conclusions:

It's an interesting thread, with some arguing that every instance of real or perceived injustice must be fought to avoid perpetuating such injustice and another person commenting: "Sorry not everyone is perfect, maybe he's on the way to making things right."

Of course, I may be speaking from a place of bias being religious myself, but I think religion gets it very right in this instance. From one of my favorite LDS talks from Elder Dale G. Renlund:

Just as God rejoices when we persevere, He is disappointed if we do not recognize that others are trying too. Our dear friend Thoba shared how she learned this lesson from her mother, Julia. Julia and Thoba were among the early black converts in South Africa. After the apartheid regime ended, black and white members of the Church were permitted to attend church together. For many, the equality of interaction between the races was new and challenging. One time, as Julia and Thoba attended church, they felt they were treated less than kindly by some white members. As they left, Thoba complained bitterly to her mother. Julia listened calmly until Thoba had vented her frustration. Then Julia said, “Oh, Thoba, the Church is like a big hospital, and we are all sick in our own way. We come to church to be helped.”

Julia’s comment reflects a valuable insight. We must not only be tolerant while others work on their individual illnesses; we must also be kind, patient, supportive, and understanding. As God encourages us to keep on trying, He expects us to also allow others the space to do the same, at their own pace. 

I understand that this requires forbearance from exactly those who are most likely to have been wronged, not just in this moment but from a long history of oppression. I understand this burden to be so heavy that I would not even ask it of anyone, much less demand. I would only hope to help them see, to persuade them that there is greater peace and joy there than in seeking to return the same. Or as Paul Gaugin said: "One day, you will feel a joy in having resisted the temptation to hate, and there is truly intoxicating poetry in the goodness of him who has suffered."

Resconstructing ourselves

A reader gives an update on the child with reactive attachment disorder (RAD) who was featured in the documentary, Child of Rage, discussed previously on this blog here. I always avoid using her name, but you can read the details on the link (and it's always a little shocking to me that they used her name in the "documentary" featuring her, a minor, in what seems a pretty exploitative way, showing her actual therapy tapes? How did her parents allow this?).

There is a happy ending! She recovers from the reactive attachment disorder in a big way and becomes a happy and contributing member of society. The link for the update on her life is here. The quick summary is she is a nurse, she seems to still have a good relationship with her family, and she seems like just a normal person living a normal life.

As I was looking for the documentary I stumbled upon some other child mental disorder documentaries that seemed just a little less exploitative, and then finally a clip of a "news" show interviewing a young, attractive teacher that got busted for sexual relations with a 14 year old student. She was saying that it was a mistake and she had done it because of a troubled past, including mental illness, but scrolling through the comments -- every single person continued to vilify her. Out of the millions of views, not a single one would accept her apology, either as being sincere or as her being capable of change or worthy of forgiveness.

I know that the urge to ostracize and shame others runs deep in humanity's evolutionary past, but (and I've said this literally dozens of times before, including the penultimate post) society's willingness to let self-righteous feelings to dominate their rational capacity and/or empathy to continue to persecute people for something that they did or said in the past... I just struggle to understand why it's still such a problem, and one that is rarely discussed as such. As much as you hear about anti-bullying campaigns, there seems to be an unspoken understanding amongst most people that bullying is absolutely ok if the person you're bullying is a bad person. I hear even intelligent people whom I respect defend the shaming and the shameless poor treatment of their fellow humans for real or imagined wrongs. What society does with its social undesirables is basically one step away from tattooing them with their convict number and hounding and persecuting them through the rest of their lives.


But I sometimes think, what if we talked about more examples of recovery and more stories of people being dynamic and capable of change, maybe we could educate the evolutionary impulse a little so it's not so prone to mob mentality and see our fellow humans a little more accurately -- people that weren't really the same person decades ago and won't really be the same decades from now. Like NPR's Invisibilia piece on the myth of the static personality featuring the story of Dan, a rapist turned good guy: "I'm forever going to be a criminal," he says, "which I'm not. I've become a completely different human being at this point." "I have to atone for my crime. But I realize now I'm just paying for someone else's debt. The person who committed the crime no longer exists." How can we adjust the way we deal with people who we don't want to associate with (for whatever reason) so there can still be an appropriate level of accountability or precautionary measures while also more accurately reflecting the dynamic nature of who humans are?

"Maybe we're not thinking right about who we are and what we could be," says Walter Mischel [author of the famed marshmallow study]. "People can use their wonderful brains to think differently about situations," Milgram says. "To reframe them. To reconstruct them. To even reconstruct themselves."

(The Invisibilia piece oddly excepts sociopaths from this ability to change, assuming the myth of sociopathy to be incurable without questioning it as most do. But baby steps.)

What/when change is possible

My therapist often deals with bosses, spouses, church leaders, probation officers, etc. who inquire as to whether and how fast behavioral change is possible with someone who suffers from mental problems. He tells them that change is almost always possible, it's just not often possible in that moment. For example, someone who struggles with rage issues may be able to learn to control their temper through years of training and self knowledge and growth, but they may be completely incapable of controlling their temper in any given moment. He says that this restricted ability to control behavior, where mental hardwiring meets a deficit of willpower or skill level, is really hard for people to understand who don't suffer from similar deficiencies in those areas. First, it feels like the person is cheating, coasting through life on excuses while the rest of us have to try so hard. Second, it's difficult to understand how someone couldn't just be able to make a choice in that moment to do something differently, e.g. "just relax".

A lot of people have experienced this frustration with me over the years,. Recently, though, I've had extensive experience with it myself from someone else who has a very entrenched personality disorder, but also has started suffering from major depression symptoms. For various reasons, I am to a large extent responsible for this person and must interact with him various times a week. And every week there is some new flavor of dysfunction going on in his life, despite a comprehensive cocktail of medication and weekly therapy. This week, it's an inability to get out of bed for anything but work. He is already suffering pretty serious health consequences from a lack of exercise, for which he is taking another set of medications. All of his doctors, mental and physical health, tell him to keep trying to exercise. He knows that it will improve not just his physical health, but his depression as well. He knows that he enjoys getting out and walking in nature. But it is just very difficult for him to do it, so difficult that he doesn't quite go to the trouble of trying. I have a very tough time relating to this, and after years of dealing with nearly limitless levels and varieties of dysfunction, my frustration levels can get pretty high.

The crazy thing is that I would have never had this experience at my most sociopathic self. There would be a snowflake's chance in hell that I would have continued to deal with someone like this for longer than a few weeks, maybe a few months in exceptional circumstances. So I've never actually had to confront this type of frustration at someone's inadequacies. The one great thing that has come out of it is that I now have much more cognitive empathy and understanding for what people have to deal with on the other side of the mental health problem equation -- the people without the seemingly intractable problem, but still have to deal with it on a regular basis.

But I think of a parallel -- my grandmother, who suffered a stroke and had to undergo a sequence of physical therapies. She did get better over time -- better bladder control, speech, decreased paralysis, etc. There were also some things that she didn't get appreciably better at -- lack of inhibition, sense of decorum or propriety, respect for the privacy of others, demonstrating an adult level of patience, and certain types of emotional regulation. She had in many ways the mind of a child to her death, but I bet that even in those things she could have seen further improvement -- too bad she didn't live 50 more years to reach that point in her trajectory.

And I know that as much as I have improved over the past few years -- almost no manipulation, more in touch with my emotions, stronger sense of self and identity -- there are still things I probably won't ever be able to do -- affective empathy, strong emotional theory of mind, understanding subtle emotional cues, conforming more closely to social norms and expectations, etc. Or maybe I will, it will just take some future brain surgery and/or 50 years of training. We'll see. 

Auteur

A friend recently called me an auteur. She meant that I seem to do things my own particular way, "you are so essentially you. You have such an M.E. signature. You leave an M.E. wake." It's interesting to think about it in those terms, it made me curious about the definition and origin of the word auteur, "an artist whose style and practice are distinctive." Literally meaning "author," it originated as a way to distinguish certain filmmakers whose unique style and artistic vision pervades their films, despite the many other participants in the process. Those filmmakers are the "author" of their films in ways that most filmmakers simply are not, due to lack of control or influence.

I wondered, if I am an auteur of my life, than what is my distinctive signature? I don't feel particularly definite, particularly rigid, or concrete in my beliefs or personality characteristics. My friend is right in that I do happen to have a set of preferences, though, and my choices always reflect those preferences. Although some of those preferences line up with decisions that others based on morality, I wouldn't say that it is a moral code anymore than you could say that Woody Allen's films are uniquely his due to his particular moral code, although it certainly would have some influence.

I don't know how I acquired my value system. I imagine that every aspect of it was once a choice, although it has been so long since I made those choices that I have long since forgotten how or why they were made, or even the very fact of a choice being made in most cases. I guess I just chose to be the way I am because I preferred it over all other options, at least at the time. There's nothing objectively hierarchical about my choices, no inherent judgment as to the choices of others. It's just what happened to happen due to a confluence of events (and genetics).

Recently I was flying over wooded areas demarcated by winding rivers. I wondered at the lack of logic that informed the flow of these rivers. Some of their path was obvious, avoid a hill here, follow a low land there, but some of it was absolutely random. I wondered at the initial water drop that moved in one particular direction over another, making a bend in the river. Maybe a little pebble forced it one way instead of the other, maybe even something as transient as the foot of an animal. The moment before was a universe of possibilities in which the water could have gone any number of directions. After, the cohesiveness of water molecules combined with the ease of repetition meant that every other water molecule would follow suit, self-reinforcing ad infinitum until the universe of possibilities added up to exactly one result.

We talk a lot here about what certain things must mean about a person. If you look at the end product without analyzing the process, you might be tempted to infer any number of different "truths" about a person, project any number of generalizations based on your own experiences, despite how paltry they are when compared to the universe of possibilities. The truth is that human behavior so often defies definition and explanation that any attempt to take such a pursuit seriously seems ill-fated and ignorant. I have been realizing lately that this futility in achieving real understanding applies equally (if not more so) to attempts at acquiring self-knowledge.

In other words, the more I learn about myself, the more I realize how little I know about everything.

Quote: Excuses

“The concept of disease is fast replacing the concept of responsibility. With increasing zeal Americans use and interpret the assertion "I am sick" as equivalent to the assertion "I am not responsible": Smokers say they are not responsible for smoking, drinkers that they are not responsible for drinking, gamblers that they are not responsible for gambling, and mothers who murder their infants that they are not responsible for killing. To prove their point — and to capitalize on their self-destructive and destructive behavior — smokers, drinkers, gamblers, and insanity acquitees are suing tobacco companies, liquor companies, gambling casinos, and physicians.”

― Thomas Szasz

James Fallon's Life as a Nonviolent Psychopath

I've been meaning to do a post on the Atlantic's interview with James Fallon (Life as a Nonviolent Psychopath) about his new book, "The Psychopath Inside: A Neuroscientist's Personal Journey into the Dark Side of the Brain." Both the book and the article are worth reading in their entirety.

My favorite part in the article was Professor Fallon describing his relationship with his close associates, wife and sister:

I started with simple things of how I interact with my wife, my sister, and my mother. Even though they’ve always been close to me, I don't treat them all that well. I treat strangers pretty well—really well, and people tend to like me when they meet me—but I treat my family the same way, like they're just somebody at a bar. I treat them well, but I don't treat them in a special way. That’s the big problem.

I asked them this—it's not something a person will tell you spontaneously—but they said, "I give you everything. I give you all this love and you really don’t give it back." They all said it, and that sure bothered me. So I wanted to see if I could change. I don't believe it, but I'm going to try.

In order to do that, every time I started to do something, I had to think about it, look at it, and go: No. Don’t do the selfish thing or the self-serving thing. Step-by-step, that's what I’ve been doing for about a year and a half and they all like it. Their basic response is: We know you don’t really mean it, but we still like it.

I told them, "You’ve got to be kidding me. You accept this? It’s phony!" And they said, "No, it’s okay. If you treat people better it means you care enough to try." It blew me away then and still blows me away now. 

My second favorite part was on the possibility of change:

I think people can change if they devote their whole life to the one thing and stop all the other parts of their life, but that's what people can't do. You can have behavioral plasticity and maybe change behavior with parallel brain circuitry, but the number of times this happens is really rare.

Interestingly, I've felt like with my life being somewhat ruined by publishing the book, I have plenty of time now to do this very thing. I'm curious where it will take me.

Other topics include how sociopaths have a Zen Buddhist perspective, the difference between someone who becomes a violent sociopath and someone who does not, how and why treatment of infants and small children is critical to their development, and why sociopathic traits might not really "mature" until the adult brain has matured.

Shifting perception

This NPR post is a good follow-up to the previous post about certainty -- how and why people change their minds about something. The set-up is simple, a man shot photos of huskies playing with migrating polar bears. In 1994 he published the shots in National Geographic, but people hated the photos and the photographer:

[The] photographer Rosing "was besieged by angry faxes and phone calls," from people who thought the photos couldn't be real, that the dog was probably put in the bear's path, "chained up as bait for the white monster." This wasn't play. This wasn't innocent. This was the prelude to a kill — "a sinister trap." The bear, they said, was about to spring and bite the dog; when the pictures stopped, the bear pounced. The dog, they imagined, was probably terrified. No one wanted to look at these photos, Rosing told Jon. "People just couldn't believe it," so he didn't try to sell them. He just stashed them away.


In 2007, the photos were reposted online. The reactions were flip-flopped. More modern audiences were enchanted:

What happened? How could people, maybe the same people, just 13 years later stare at the same pictures and feel so differently about them? Mooallem has a theory. In 1994, he thinks, polar bears were still thought of as proud, dangerous, scary animals. A decade earlier National Geographic put out a polar bear video called "Polar Bear Alert" that begins with a young couple pushing a stroller through Churchill, while Jason Robards, the narrator, describes the town as the "one place in the world where the great white bears roam the streets, dangerously immune to the presence of their only enemy ... man." The dad had a rifle around his shoulder. He needed to, because these bears attacked.

NatGeo's film was rich with bear clawings, bear murders. . . . This film made a particularly deep impression — that these animals were instinctive killers. Knowing that, feeling that, the sequence in Brian Ladoon's backyard made no sense. Vicious Lords of the Tundra don't nuzzle dogs.

Thirteen years later, polar bears hadn't changed, but our sense of them had. By 2007, most people had seen scenes of weak, starving bears struggling to stay on shrinking hunks of melting ice. The earth was warming and polar bears had no place to go. Suddenly, they were vulnerable, heading to extinction. Animals, says Mooallem are "free-roaming Rorschachs." We see them through the heavy filter of our own feelings, our own needs. And our filter for polar bears had flipped. Animals who'd once been proud and vicious had become "delicate, drowning" victims, lonely animals — who now just might need the companionship of a friendly husky — who might come to a backyard, looking for a hug.

Jon Mooallem believes that the stories we tell ourselves about animals totally color how we see them. "Emotion matters. Imagination matters, and we are free to spin whatever stories we want about them." The wild animals, he says, "always have no comment." 

Sociopaths have long had no comment either on the way they are portrayed. I wonder what will change now, if anything, about the public's perception of them. From the comments section of the NPR post:

"Seems to me that MOST hatred.................is based on ignorance."

Or rather, a limited perspective, which we all have. It isn't such a broad term or loaded phrase, but is the same idea. Comes from the popular wisdom that hate comes from fear, which in turn comes from a lack of understanding, especially when we are talking about people fearing/ hating other people. I agree that this is in large part the problem, a human problem. We all have a limited view of the world, and try to judge based on our understanding of our own reality. It takes someone, not necessarily with charisma, or money, or a great idea, but someone with a deep understanding of people, who can be the type of leader to bridge us past this hatred to empathy and understanding instead. Only then can we move on to solutions.


I, too, wondered if the polar bear in the first photograph was going to eat the dog, but it didn't fill me with hate. That would be totally natural. But seeing it in context with the playing is pretty phenomenal.

More on flexible sense of self (part 1)

I used to be terrible at writing. I got terrible marks on it in school, but I never understood what I was doing wrong. In high school I got by having my mother read my papers and edit them. Sometimes she would ask, "you're actually learning something from this, aren't you? I'm not just doing your work for you?" And I would say yes, but I wasn't. It wasn't trying to shirk, I just honestly didn't understand or value it enough to learn. In college I just got bad grades in paper classes, so I avoided them. I stayed terrible into law school, where I learned a highly technical version of writing that finally made some sense to me. I even became an editor, but I still struggled. Only recently have felt like I finally understand writing to the point where I can recognize how/when my writing is flawed. It's been really crazy to have the book published. It feels sort of like maybe having a stutter all of my life and then becoming an opera singer out of the blue. Now I sometimes edit my brother's papers that he is trying to get published. His writing is terrible in all of the same ways that mine still inclines and so I often have the chance to reflect on how much my writing has changed.

I've had other similar experiences. Becoming self-aware of who I am (manipulative, ruthless, unempathetic, etc.) was a watershed moment. I even used to be terrible at music, particularly jazz improvisation, until one day it just clicked and I can play solos over any sort of chord changes. Again, both of these changes were huge. It's as if one day I woke up being able to slam dunk a basketball or run a five minute mile. And I worked for all of it, but there was some sort of cognitive block keeping me from really internalizing the concepts until suddenly there wasn't.

In some ways I guess this is why I am so bullish on the possibility of living my life one way and then finally discovering a new way to live. It's one of the hidden benefits from having a weak sense of self --  there's not that much of an attachment to who I currently am. Maybe one day I will have changed so much that I no longer identify as a sociopath? Because even that identification did not really come from within, but from seeing the way people reacted to me -- their expectations of me and the way that I met, failed, or exceeded those expectations. I liked this quote from Annemarie Roeper about this from her book "The 'I' of the Beholder":

We don’t really understand our Selves or what life is. It is a mystery, and this fact is hard to accept. Humankind has developed many theories about you and believes they are facts, but in the end, all we can see is your behavior, your reactions to the world around you, and the world’s reaction to you.

So not only are we constantly changing (and have such an incredible ability to change), but our sense of self changes as the world changes, and consequently our reactions to the world and the world's reaction to us. I wonder what most sociopaths would look like if the world's reaction to us were more positive.

What the Grinch Teaches us About Good, Evil, and the Possibility of Change

I love the Grinch story/movies. For those that haven't experienced them, the Grinch is a bad guy (or tragically misunderstood?) who has a turnaround and his heart grows three sizes. How does it grow three sizes? It wasn't because he was shamed.

I got some pushback on my dislike of shaming as an enforcement method in the recent post "6 Surprising Findings About Good and Evil." (Some people found the scientific findings so surprising, they flat out disagreed with them.) People did not like my suggestion that we stop using gossip and public shaming as blunt instrument enforcement mechanisms for ensuring conformity of moral and social behavioral standards. And this was even before the Justine Sacco fiasco, where a Sarah Silverman style joke was the impetus for people who had never given half a thought to the AIDS crisis in Africa to judge her worthy of the equivalent of public social stoning.  One person's criticism: "Your solutions are always based on the whole world changing, but not you. . . . This is the self-delusional part of your diagnosis that has to change in order for you to see a change in how the world accepts you." I think the gist of that comment is that people could simply avoid being shamed by always acting properly (or that social change is not possible or not desirable in this instance?).

The problem is that no one behaves properly all of the time. Whether it is a tasteless joke, or a deeply held belief that is politically unpopular, every single person has done, said, or thought something that, if widely publicized, could ruin them. So often these people who have been shunned by society are not necessarily better or worse overall than most people, they are largely just unlucky (or have too much integrity to change their values due to the pressures of the crowd?). And for that lack of luck (or abundance of virtue however misguided we believe their virtue is?), we collectively destroy them. And I think this is wasteful, unnecessary, and suggests that people must really enjoy shaming to do it as often as they do because that seems to be the major benefit.

I think ruining people's life over one thing they did is generally a bad idea because people are dynamic -- they change their beliefs and their loyalties and their values many times over their lifetime. Think of the violent criminal who mentors and assists his fellow prisoners while incarcerated or the Grinch whose heart grows three sizes. Society is also dynamic -- an idea that was once politically unpopular becomes the norm and vice versa. You may think you're very right in the moral judgments and punishments you invoke against strangers, but so do the people who publicly stone people for otherwise consensual adultery. I'm not saying that society is wrong or needs to change to accommodate me. I'm just saying, these are some of the easy and not even original to me critiques of the prevalent and severely effective blunt instrument that is social shaming to ensure compliance of social norms. Furthermore, as I previously posted, shaming doesn't work how people would like it to. If someone shamed you, would you change your heart or just try to stay more under the radar? There is actually evidence that restorative justice is actually more effective than retributive justice (like shaming and the subsequent social fallout), both in terms of victim satisfaction and offender accountability. For instance, wasn't it because the Grinch was the recipient of restorative justice (allowing him fully back into society after he brought back the Christmas he had stolen) that he was able to change his heart? Or do we no longer give people the benefit of the doubt or even acknowledge that they have the power to change? Maybe we would have preferred for the Grinch to live his life in isolation in his cave, forever shunned from polite society?

I guess it's easier for me to see the negative aspects of shaming than the positive because I have seen so many people in my life make radical changes -- it's why I don't hate my parents for things that happened in my childhood and why I have an appreciation for the redemptive power of spirituality and religion in people's lives. 

Conscientiousness

I thought this was an interesting sentiment that supported a concept that I have long found helpful in terms of directing your behavior for both sociopaths and non -- imagining the effects of your behavior on your future self.

The tendency to live in the here and now, and the failure to think through the delayed consequences of behavior, is one of the strongest individual-level correlates of delinquency. We tested the hypothesis that this correlation results from a limited ability to imagine one’s self in the future, which leads to opting for immediate gratification. Strengthening the vividness of the future self should therefore reduce involvement in delinquency. We tested and found support for this hypothesis in two studies. In Study 1, compared with participants in a control condition, those who wrote a letter to their future self were less inclined to make delinquent choices. In Study 2, participants who interacted with a realistic digital version of their future, age-progressed self in a virtual environment were less likely than control participants to cheat on a subsequent task.

This supports sociopath researcher Stephanie Mullins-Sweatt's assertion that the main personality trait separating successful sociopaths from the less functioning ones is conscientiousness, or an awareness of and distaste for unpleasant future consequences. In other words, a dynamic version of a cost-benefit analysis. As one sociopathic reader described it:

the only reason i don't act upon my urges is the knowledge of reprisal. i don't necessarily fear consequence; i simply acknowledge it as being more inconvenient than some short-lived gratification. as a matter of fact, the inconvenience of consequences is the only thing that holds me back from my desires. the wants themselves run the gamut of importance... sleeping with a woman who isn't my wife is not ethically or socially objectionable to me. overall, the impact on the world because of 'cheating' is incredibly minimal. the risk-analysis of temporary physical enjoyment Vs long-term stability is more effective in decision making than any kind of ethics. refusing to slow down at an intersection, when i have the right-of-way and someone pulls out in front of me, is not ethically or socially objectionable to me. however, going to jail and being locked in a cage seems especially repugnant- not to mention the hassle of repairing my vehicle.

Getting better (part 2)

From reader (cont.):

I've seen you say that no sociopaths have reported being helped by your advice and that surprises me, but since you don't think that's what I am, I'm not sure how valuable my feedback will be. None the less, I've appreciated being able to read your experiences and pull what I can from them. 

For example, your observations on emotional hallucinations was kind of revelatory. So, in the past few months I feel like I've had a major shift in perspective, in part thanks to you. I was raised with a very rigid view of myself that was preventing me from examining my own actions and it's such a relief to be able to put that aside. A lot of things are falling into place as a consequence. So, thank you.

I'm sorry to hear your friend isn't coming around. I thought while reading the post that he should get a life coach, maybe for social skills, but it sounds like that's what you're trying to do for him. Maybe you can't teach people who aren't ready to learn, but people who are willing and just haven't had information presented in a way that they can understand might be better bets? I don't know. My projects are generally people who are failing spectacularly and they're easy to motivate once I get them pointed in the right direction. All I have to do is remind them how much pain they're in. (I know, I shouldn't say that, but it's true.) Your projects sound more subtle than I can manage. 

I don't think you can teach someone to be a sociopath, if that's what you meant. It would be about as effective as wishing someone had self-respect, which I would hand out if I could. I'm more concerned with fitting in better and being more likable. What you said today about hitting the wall rang very true. But I don't have an issue compromising, not if it will make the difference between winning and losing. It's not a matter of trust for me, just willingness to take a calculated risk, if that makes sense. 

I doubt I'll take up another instrument and I've been steadily killing every plant I bring home. I've been cooking more but I don't think it has the same effect. I'm planning to go to church regularly because I think it will help me be more likable. Other than that I don't really have a plan. 

May I ask what your friend told you to do? I'd love to hear your adaptations too, if you ever have time to write about it. I'm sorry, I'm asking very personal questions. You know I totally admire that you were able to identify / accept what you are and then figure out what to do. 

For me, I've realized I was seeing people around me as either possessions or enemies. I should stop doing that, of course, but I don't know if that's the primary thing I should be paying attention to. I'm trying to be responsive but I'm concerned about myopia, you know. Maybe finding out the steps you took could help me trace a similar path, if we're talking about the same things. 


My response:


Good question. She's staying with me now for the weekend and I just asked her what she made me do:

"Stop hurting people. That's a good start, if you had to start somewhere."

"But I still hurt people."

"Yeah, but you're more selective now. You don't just do it for everyday pleasure on people you love. Like you're not addicted anymore. You're just channeling better."

"What else?"

"If you can tap into the ways that empaths love and understand what love means to them, you can be contented with your offers. Even if they're not satisfying to you, you can recognize them as something that has value. Tell her that there is no cure. You just have to learn other people's languages so you know what they're talking about, you can understand and appreciate that there are valid perspectives other than yours. Everyone wants to be heard, you know? That's why you have this blog."

She helped me to be able to accept arbitrary frameworks, like religious codes, and just try them out and see if I liked my life better with them rather than just immediately dismissing them as something that could never work for me (like my friend who is struggling with is life right now does). So oddly, she made me have a more open-mind about things. I remember she made me see that even small behaviors had longterm consequences. She made me always be polite to strangers, which thing I had done only off and on before. And I liked it better, things seemed to go smoother. And to not play games with those closest to me, to not say or do whatever I felt like doing. I think she largely just helped me to broaden my perspective, you know? Another friend was telling me today that her stepson said that he can't imagine ever being truly happy unless he had a T-Rex to ride. I thought, I can see how this is a legitimate opinion for him to have, but really it's because he has incomplete information about himself and life, so he is likely to be wrong. And I guess that's how I used to be too -- it wasn't like I was wrong in my opinions or they were irrational, but they were just very ill-informed in a juvenile sort of way -- like all I could see was myself and everything else in terms of how it directly affected me. I didn't understand that people were so different from me and in particular and interesting ways. I didn't realize how much they hated certain things I did. I didn't realize how much richer my life could be if I sometimes looked beyond myself. And when I finally tried it, it was obvious and revelatory at the same time. Maybe like the first time I realized that I could float, after having understandably believed that I would just sink.

I wonder if this helps (again).

Hitting a wall

I thought this was an interesting recent comment on an older post that deserved to be read:


I've reached the point where I'd like to get some help for my impulsive traits. I'm' saying "impulsive" rather than "psychopathic" because I'd like to focus on what I see as the problem.

You could say that I'm a high-functioning psychopath. I'm Machiavellian, narcissistic and psychopathic. 

I've apparently got enough impulse control (and intelligence) to get me what I need. But I sense that there's a gap. I'm missing something.

In the past, I wouldn't have done this because I was too proud. I wasn't able to admit that I was behaving "badly" or had a problem. And I was young enough that I was substantially getting what I wanted. 

Now that I'm middle aged, that isn't happening. Perhaps because I'm not getting what I want, I can see I've behaved anti-socially, and it has cost me. E.g. I'm heading into old age, and no matter how optimistic I'd like to be, it is clear that it is going to get harder and harder to have sex with women in their twenties. And eventually I will die, no matter how much I fight it.

Have any commenters, motivated by the same sense of "oh shit I'm screwed" sought help? How'd it go? 

Like many life situations, I can sort of tell how old someone is by their attitude about things -- even younger and older sociopaths. I think that a lot of sociopaths eventually hit a wall of ceasing to be functional in whatever life they've set up for themselves. Some react by just riding it out until it's gory conclusion, to be taken out in a blaze of glory without ever having to have compromised whatever it is that they didn't want to compromise about themselves or their lifestyle. Others adapt. I hit mine really early, I think, my very early twenties. I think that makes my experiences a little different than most -- more like Magic Johnson's HIV and less like orphans' in Africa -- i.e., my symptoms have never had much of a chance to flare up and allow me to flame out. I am not an obvious sociopath to strangers, the way that maybe my grandfather was with his scarred face and philandering and scamming ways. You probably wouldn't even notice something was wrong with me, unless you are one of the ~2% of the population that does. But it is interesting to think what would have happened if I hadn't encountered such early opposition and had to change. Would I be hitting my wall right about now?

Guest quote: expanding consciousness

"If you have a golf-ball-sized consciousness, when you read a book, you'll have a golf-ball-sized understanding; when you look out a window, a golf-ball-sized awareness, when you wake up in the morning, a golf-ball-sized wakefulness; and as you go about your day, a golf-ball-sized inner happiness.

But if you can expand that consciousness, make it grow, then when you read about that book, you'll have more understanding; when you look out, more awareness; when you wake up, more wakefulness; as you go about your day, more inner happiness."

David Lynch