Selections from a NY Times book review about children with unique issues:
Andrew Solomon’s enormous new book, “Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity,” is about children who are born or who grow up in ways their parents never expected.
Mr. Solomon explained that “Far from the Tree” took 11 years. It stemmed from a 1994 article about deafness he wrote for The New York Times Magazine. In the course of reporting it, he said, he realized that many issues confronting the deaf are not unlike those he faced as someone who was gay.
A few years later, watching a documentary about dwarfism, he saw the same pattern again. Eventually the book grew to also include chapters on Down syndrome, autism, schizophrenia, disability, prodigies, transgender identity, children who are conceived during a rape and those who become criminals.
Mr. Solomon said he included criminal children after deciding that society’s thinking on the subject hadn’t really advanced very much, even while it has on autism and schizophrenia. “We still think it’s the parents’ fault if a child becomes a criminal or that something creepy must have gone on in that household,” he said. He included the children of rape because he discovered that their mothers shared a lot with all the other mothers in the book. “They feel alienated, disaffected, angry — a lot of the things a mother feels about a child with a disability.”
This kind of commonality, he went on, was something he discovered only while writing. “Each of the conditions I describe is very isolating,” he said. “There aren’t that many dwarfs, there aren’t that many schizophrenics. There aren’t that many families dealing with a criminal kid — not so few but not so many. But if you recognize that there is a lot in common in all these experiences, they imply a world in which not only is your condition not so isolating but the fact of your difference unites you with other people.”
“Forewarned is forearmed,” he said. “Some things, on some scale, go wrong in everyone’s life. I think I have perfectionist tendencies, but I know you can’t go into parenthood thinking, ‘I’m going to love my child as long as he’s perfect.’ Rather, it should be, ‘I’m going to love my child whoever he is, and let’s see how he turns out.’ ”
I wonder how many parents can say that about criminal or sociopathic children -- that they appreciate the experience of raising a child with those unique difficulties and that they love their child no matter what. Still, it is a nice, aspirational thought.
Showing posts with label children. Show all posts
Showing posts with label children. Show all posts
Saturday, January 5, 2013
Tuesday, January 1, 2013
Child sociopath? Surviving Newtown
One of my associates told me the story of the one child who survived the Newtown massacre when everyone else in her class died. How? By playing dead, aided by the blood of her classmates. She waited until everything had died down and then got out of there, in fact she was apparently one of the first people to leave the school. How was she capable of accomplishing this incredible feat? God, says some Pastor.
In an interview with ABC News, Pastor Jim Solomon said the girl laid among her 15 other classmates covered in blood until she felt it was safe to leave, "She ran out of the school building covered from head to toe with blood and the first thing she said to her mom was, 'Mommy, I'm OK but all my friends are dead."
Her quick decision truly shows her wisdom and ultimately saved her life. The Daily mail reported that she was the first person to run out of the school building, "Somehow in that moment, by God's grace, [she] was able to act as she was already deceased." Pastor Solomon added, "What did she see in there? Well, she saw someone who she felt was angry and somebody who she felt was mad. "He continued, "How at 6 and a half years old can you be that smart, that brave? I think it's impossible outside of divine intervention. She has wisdom beyond her years."
Now, I'm not saying it wasn't God, and I'm not saying that she is a child sociopath... But she behaved in a way that you would expect a child sociopath to also behave -- keeping her cool, calm and clear headed under pressure, exploiting an opportunity without little regard for her fellow students, all while seemingly knowing exactly what she was doing. Just another reason why having a child who may be a sociopath may not be the worst thing in the world.
In an interview with ABC News, Pastor Jim Solomon said the girl laid among her 15 other classmates covered in blood until she felt it was safe to leave, "She ran out of the school building covered from head to toe with blood and the first thing she said to her mom was, 'Mommy, I'm OK but all my friends are dead."
Her quick decision truly shows her wisdom and ultimately saved her life. The Daily mail reported that she was the first person to run out of the school building, "Somehow in that moment, by God's grace, [she] was able to act as she was already deceased." Pastor Solomon added, "What did she see in there? Well, she saw someone who she felt was angry and somebody who she felt was mad. "He continued, "How at 6 and a half years old can you be that smart, that brave? I think it's impossible outside of divine intervention. She has wisdom beyond her years."
Now, I'm not saying it wasn't God, and I'm not saying that she is a child sociopath... But she behaved in a way that you would expect a child sociopath to also behave -- keeping her cool, calm and clear headed under pressure, exploiting an opportunity without little regard for her fellow students, all while seemingly knowing exactly what she was doing. Just another reason why having a child who may be a sociopath may not be the worst thing in the world.
Tuesday, December 25, 2012
Rethinking empathy
Journalist Maria Konnikova uses the example of Sherlock Holmes' "perspective taking" ability to put himself in the mind of others to rethinking what we might mean by (or what is truly value about) empathy. The entire article is worth reading, here is just the first few paragraphs to give you an idea of what she is talking about:
What’s the first thing you think of when you hear the name Sherlock Holmes? It might be a deerstalker, a pipe or a violin, or shady crimes in the foggy streets of London. Chances are, it’s not his big, warm heart and his generous nature. In fact, you might think of him as a cold fish — the type of man who tells his best friend, who is busy falling in love, that it ‘is an emotional thing, and whatever is emotional is opposed to that true cold reason which I place above all things’. Perhaps you might be influenced by recent adaptations that have gone so far as to call Holmes a 'sociopath'.
Not the empathetic sort, surely? Or is he?
Let’s dwell for a moment on ‘Silver Blaze’ (1892), Arthur Conan Doyle’s story of the gallant racehorse who disappeared, and his trainer who was found dead, just days before a big race. The hapless police are stumped, and Sherlock Holmes is called in to save the day. And save the day he does — by putting himself in the position of both the dead trainer and the missing horse. Holmes speculates that the horse is ‘a very gregarious creature’. Surmising that, in the absence of its trainer, it would have been drawn to the nearest town, he finds horse tracks, and tells Watson which mental faculty led him there. ‘See the value of imagination… We imagined what might have happened, acted upon that supposition, and find ourselves justified.’
Holmes takes an imaginative leap, not only into another human mind, but into the mind of an animal. This perspective-taking, being able to see the world from the point of view of another, is one of the central elements of empathy, and Holmes raises it to the status of an art.
Usually, when we think of empathy, it evokes feelings of warmth and comfort, of being intrinsically an emotional phenomenon. But perhaps our very idea of empathy is flawed. The worth of empathy might lie as much in the ‘value of imagination’ that Holmes employs as it does in the mere feeling of vicarious emotion. Perhaps that cold rationalist Sherlock Holmes can help us reconsider our preconceptions about what empathy is and what it does.
This is something that I have discussed before -- the difference between empathy and imagining what it might be like to be someone else.
The perspective taking is also an interesting phenomenon, particularly because it appears that it can be taught, as evidenced by the success of an intervention program for at risk youths, which teaches the youngsters perspective taking through the use of regular interactions with an infant volunteer (see this fascinating description).
Even though she insists that Sherlock is not a sociopath, I couldn't help but notice some similarities between the way he thinks and the way I think. For instance, a tendency to not think linearly:
But he is also a man of inordinate creativity of thought. He refuses to stop at facts as they appear to be. He plays out many possibilities, maps out various routes, lays out myriad alternative realities in order to light upon the correct one. His is the opposite of hard, linear, A-to-B reasoning.
This default of abstract thinking has helped me immensely in my own career, and the article mentions that this sort of mental flexibility also enabled "an Einstein to imagine a reality unlike any that we’ve experienced before (in keeping with laws unlike any we’ve come up with before), and a Picasso to make art that differs from any prior conception of what art can be." although also means I often have to have my thoughts translated to others or reverse engineer explanations that are more universally palatable than my own scattered thought processes. And when used in the context of imagining other people's minds, better than typical empathy?
Here are some other advantages according to the article:
Sherlock Holmes might be described as cold, it’s true. But who would you like on your side when it comes to being given a fair say, to being helped when that help is truly needed, to knowing that someone will go above and beyond the call of duty for your sake, no matter who you are or what you might have done? I, for one, would choose the cool-headed Holmes, who understands the limits of human emotions, and who seeks to ‘represent justice,’ so far as his ‘feeble powers allow’.
What’s the first thing you think of when you hear the name Sherlock Holmes? It might be a deerstalker, a pipe or a violin, or shady crimes in the foggy streets of London. Chances are, it’s not his big, warm heart and his generous nature. In fact, you might think of him as a cold fish — the type of man who tells his best friend, who is busy falling in love, that it ‘is an emotional thing, and whatever is emotional is opposed to that true cold reason which I place above all things’. Perhaps you might be influenced by recent adaptations that have gone so far as to call Holmes a 'sociopath'.
Not the empathetic sort, surely? Or is he?
Let’s dwell for a moment on ‘Silver Blaze’ (1892), Arthur Conan Doyle’s story of the gallant racehorse who disappeared, and his trainer who was found dead, just days before a big race. The hapless police are stumped, and Sherlock Holmes is called in to save the day. And save the day he does — by putting himself in the position of both the dead trainer and the missing horse. Holmes speculates that the horse is ‘a very gregarious creature’. Surmising that, in the absence of its trainer, it would have been drawn to the nearest town, he finds horse tracks, and tells Watson which mental faculty led him there. ‘See the value of imagination… We imagined what might have happened, acted upon that supposition, and find ourselves justified.’
Holmes takes an imaginative leap, not only into another human mind, but into the mind of an animal. This perspective-taking, being able to see the world from the point of view of another, is one of the central elements of empathy, and Holmes raises it to the status of an art.
Usually, when we think of empathy, it evokes feelings of warmth and comfort, of being intrinsically an emotional phenomenon. But perhaps our very idea of empathy is flawed. The worth of empathy might lie as much in the ‘value of imagination’ that Holmes employs as it does in the mere feeling of vicarious emotion. Perhaps that cold rationalist Sherlock Holmes can help us reconsider our preconceptions about what empathy is and what it does.
This is something that I have discussed before -- the difference between empathy and imagining what it might be like to be someone else.
The perspective taking is also an interesting phenomenon, particularly because it appears that it can be taught, as evidenced by the success of an intervention program for at risk youths, which teaches the youngsters perspective taking through the use of regular interactions with an infant volunteer (see this fascinating description).
Even though she insists that Sherlock is not a sociopath, I couldn't help but notice some similarities between the way he thinks and the way I think. For instance, a tendency to not think linearly:
But he is also a man of inordinate creativity of thought. He refuses to stop at facts as they appear to be. He plays out many possibilities, maps out various routes, lays out myriad alternative realities in order to light upon the correct one. His is the opposite of hard, linear, A-to-B reasoning.
This default of abstract thinking has helped me immensely in my own career, and the article mentions that this sort of mental flexibility also enabled "an Einstein to imagine a reality unlike any that we’ve experienced before (in keeping with laws unlike any we’ve come up with before), and a Picasso to make art that differs from any prior conception of what art can be." although also means I often have to have my thoughts translated to others or reverse engineer explanations that are more universally palatable than my own scattered thought processes. And when used in the context of imagining other people's minds, better than typical empathy?
Here are some other advantages according to the article:
- In sterilising his empathy, Holmes actually makes it more powerful: a reasoned end, rather than a flighty impulse.
- No doubt Holmes would argue that his lack of emotion gives him a certain freedom from prejudice, as much as a lack of warmth. And recent research bears this out. Most of us start from a place of deep-rooted egocentricity: we take things as we see them, and then try to expand our perspectives to encompass those of others. But we are not very good at it.
- Because he actively avoids distorting his view of others with his own feelings, "he ends up as a less egocentric and more accurate reflection of what someone else is thinking or experiencing at any given point."
- Just think how precise are Holmes’s insights into people’s characters, their whims, their motivations and inner states. . . . In our own attempts to understand others, we might think such minutiae below us — why bother with such petty concerns when there are emotions, feelings, lives at stake? — but in ignoring those petty details, we lose crucial evidence. We miss the signs of difference that enable us to walk in those shoes we don’t deign to look at closely.
- Empathy it seems, is not simply a rush of fellow-feeling, for this might be an entirely unreliable gauge of the inner world of others.
- The psychologists Ezra Stotland and Robert Dunn distinguished the ‘logical’ and the ‘emotional’ part of empathising with similar and dissimilar others. They understood the first as an exercise in cognitive perspective-taking, and the latter as an instance of non-rational emotional contagion. More recently, Baron-Cohen has described how individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder might not be able to understand or mentalise, yet some are fully capable of empathising (in the emotional sense) once someone’s affective state is made apparent to them — a sign, it seems, that the two elements are somewhat independent.
- Feelings are not entirely absent from Holmes’s empathic calculus, but they are not allowed to drive his actions. Instead, he acts only if his cognition should support the emotional outlay. And if it doesn’t? The emotion is dismissed.
Sherlock Holmes might be described as cold, it’s true. But who would you like on your side when it comes to being given a fair say, to being helped when that help is truly needed, to knowing that someone will go above and beyond the call of duty for your sake, no matter who you are or what you might have done? I, for one, would choose the cool-headed Holmes, who understands the limits of human emotions, and who seeks to ‘represent justice,’ so far as his ‘feeble powers allow’.
Tuesday, December 18, 2012
"I am Adam Lanza’s mother'
From a reader:
There's a popular blog post circulating pretty fast around from a mom who has a son with a pretty dangerous mental illness, not properly diagnosed. The message of the post seemed fairly positive, but I found myself taken aback by how she handles her kid, and then goes on to say that he could be the next massacre shooter without proper help.
Is it just me, or does this kind of thing seem inherently wrong? I watched the Child of Rage documentary, and if anyone was going to become a killer, it was that kid, but after some proper therapy and rehabilitation, she ended up pretty damn well-adjusted.
I know you've talked about the issue with labels in the past, and in light of these massacres and a new-found interest in mental health being the root issues of them, it just seems that treating a kid like an unpredictable prisoner is just wrong. I mean, if a child can't even turn to their family for support and understanding, then you've essentially isolated them mentally and emotionally. If they're that unstable, they're not going to have even friends to turn to. When the kid turns 18, he's going to cut loose, because the only people who could have helped him didn't. Considering the behavior she described, if someone doesn't find a way for him to adjust, he's going to go to prison sooner or later.
And this is exactly how they're treating people like sociopaths. Giving them a supposedly incurable mental disease label, and then just settling for locking them and throwing away the key. What life is that?
Speaking of which, currently in the States, 56% of prisoners have a diagnosed mental disorder. So much for the asylum...
I don't know if I have much of an opinion about the macro problem of mental illness. When I first read the blog post linked above I was sort of turned off for a lot of reasons, including the one the reader mentions. I thought about it for a little while, though, and re read it and realized that the mother is not really advocating anything in particular, so much as just wanting to add to (or open up) the conversation on mental illness.
The truth is that I don't really think that this can be addressed effectively on the macro level, but rather any truly effective solution/treatment, at least for children, will be better parenting or people in substitute parenting roles. It reminds me of this selection from the NY Magazine article on autism mentioned yesterday: “A lot of kids are just delayed in development, slow to talk, or anxious, or hyperactive, and a lot of kids are just terribly parented. . . . We see a lot of diagnosis-of-childhood kids, whose parents have never set limits, plus kids who are temperamentally difficult to raise."
That is not to say that parents of severely disturbed children have necessarily done anything "wrong." But I do believe in the plasticity of the child's mind and that there are ways to improve any child's behavior if one thinks creatively enough about it. This is also not to say that every parent is capable of parenting a child with these particular special needs. To the extent a label helps the helpless parent, I can see that possibly being a positive in the child's life. But to the extent that applying labels limits their/our beliefs about whether a child is redeemable or not, then yes, I believe that "labels for life" are counterproductive.
On the micro level, I feel like the biggest opportunity for children, particularly for those who are damaged but not quite mentally ill, is for them to feel a paradigm shift in their own concept of self. Like the girl in Child of Rage who was taught to believe that "when I hurt other people I'm hurting my good self." Maybe I'll write more on that later.
There's a popular blog post circulating pretty fast around from a mom who has a son with a pretty dangerous mental illness, not properly diagnosed. The message of the post seemed fairly positive, but I found myself taken aback by how she handles her kid, and then goes on to say that he could be the next massacre shooter without proper help.
Is it just me, or does this kind of thing seem inherently wrong? I watched the Child of Rage documentary, and if anyone was going to become a killer, it was that kid, but after some proper therapy and rehabilitation, she ended up pretty damn well-adjusted.
I know you've talked about the issue with labels in the past, and in light of these massacres and a new-found interest in mental health being the root issues of them, it just seems that treating a kid like an unpredictable prisoner is just wrong. I mean, if a child can't even turn to their family for support and understanding, then you've essentially isolated them mentally and emotionally. If they're that unstable, they're not going to have even friends to turn to. When the kid turns 18, he's going to cut loose, because the only people who could have helped him didn't. Considering the behavior she described, if someone doesn't find a way for him to adjust, he's going to go to prison sooner or later.
And this is exactly how they're treating people like sociopaths. Giving them a supposedly incurable mental disease label, and then just settling for locking them and throwing away the key. What life is that?
Speaking of which, currently in the States, 56% of prisoners have a diagnosed mental disorder. So much for the asylum...
I don't know if I have much of an opinion about the macro problem of mental illness. When I first read the blog post linked above I was sort of turned off for a lot of reasons, including the one the reader mentions. I thought about it for a little while, though, and re read it and realized that the mother is not really advocating anything in particular, so much as just wanting to add to (or open up) the conversation on mental illness.
The truth is that I don't really think that this can be addressed effectively on the macro level, but rather any truly effective solution/treatment, at least for children, will be better parenting or people in substitute parenting roles. It reminds me of this selection from the NY Magazine article on autism mentioned yesterday: “A lot of kids are just delayed in development, slow to talk, or anxious, or hyperactive, and a lot of kids are just terribly parented. . . . We see a lot of diagnosis-of-childhood kids, whose parents have never set limits, plus kids who are temperamentally difficult to raise."
That is not to say that parents of severely disturbed children have necessarily done anything "wrong." But I do believe in the plasticity of the child's mind and that there are ways to improve any child's behavior if one thinks creatively enough about it. This is also not to say that every parent is capable of parenting a child with these particular special needs. To the extent a label helps the helpless parent, I can see that possibly being a positive in the child's life. But to the extent that applying labels limits their/our beliefs about whether a child is redeemable or not, then yes, I believe that "labels for life" are counterproductive.
On the micro level, I feel like the biggest opportunity for children, particularly for those who are damaged but not quite mentally ill, is for them to feel a paradigm shift in their own concept of self. Like the girl in Child of Rage who was taught to believe that "when I hurt other people I'm hurting my good self." Maybe I'll write more on that later.
Saturday, December 15, 2012
Promoting prosocial behavior
This was an interesting recent article in the NY Times, "Understanding How Children Develop Empathy," but I thought some of the parts about the source and development of prosocial behavior were just as interesting--particularly that it is not just about (or even primarily) about empathy:
By itself, intense empathy — really feeling someone else’s pain — can backfire, causing so much personal distress that the end result is a desire to avoid the source of the pain, researchers have found. The ingredients of prosocial behavior, from kindness to philanthropy, are more complex and varied.
They include the ability to perceive others’ distress, the sense of self that helps sort out your own identity and feelings, the regulatory skills that prevent distress so severe it turns to aversion, and the cognitive and emotional understanding of the value of helping.
And this part about how people can be taught to feel the rewards of prosocial acts:
Experimental studies have shown that the same brain region that is activated when people win money for themselves is active when they give to charity — that is, that there is a kind of neurologic “reward” built into the motivational system of the brain.
“Charitable giving can activate the same pleasure-reward centers, the dopaminergic centers, in the brain that are very closely tied to habit formation,” said Bill Harbaugh, an economist at the University of Oregon who studies altruism. “This suggests it might be possible to foster the same sorts of habits for charitable giving you see with other sorts of habits.”
The other theory of prosocial behavior, Dr. Huettel said, is based on social cognition — the recognition that other people have needs and goals. The two theories aren’t mutually exclusive: Cognitive understanding accompanied by a motivational reward reinforces prosocial behavior.
But shaping prosocial behavior is a tricky business. For instance, certain financial incentives seem to deter prosocial impulses, a phenomenon called reward undermining, Dr. Huettel said.
I thought that made a lot of sense, that a lot of prosocial acts stem from a greater cognitive understanding that other people have needs and goals. I feel like the more aware I have been taught to be about the inner worlds of others, the more I am naturally inclined to defer to those needs and goals, especially when it is hardly any trouble to me and means so much to them.
By itself, intense empathy — really feeling someone else’s pain — can backfire, causing so much personal distress that the end result is a desire to avoid the source of the pain, researchers have found. The ingredients of prosocial behavior, from kindness to philanthropy, are more complex and varied.
They include the ability to perceive others’ distress, the sense of self that helps sort out your own identity and feelings, the regulatory skills that prevent distress so severe it turns to aversion, and the cognitive and emotional understanding of the value of helping.
And this part about how people can be taught to feel the rewards of prosocial acts:
Experimental studies have shown that the same brain region that is activated when people win money for themselves is active when they give to charity — that is, that there is a kind of neurologic “reward” built into the motivational system of the brain.
“Charitable giving can activate the same pleasure-reward centers, the dopaminergic centers, in the brain that are very closely tied to habit formation,” said Bill Harbaugh, an economist at the University of Oregon who studies altruism. “This suggests it might be possible to foster the same sorts of habits for charitable giving you see with other sorts of habits.”
The other theory of prosocial behavior, Dr. Huettel said, is based on social cognition — the recognition that other people have needs and goals. The two theories aren’t mutually exclusive: Cognitive understanding accompanied by a motivational reward reinforces prosocial behavior.
But shaping prosocial behavior is a tricky business. For instance, certain financial incentives seem to deter prosocial impulses, a phenomenon called reward undermining, Dr. Huettel said.
I thought that made a lot of sense, that a lot of prosocial acts stem from a greater cognitive understanding that other people have needs and goals. I feel like the more aware I have been taught to be about the inner worlds of others, the more I am naturally inclined to defer to those needs and goals, especially when it is hardly any trouble to me and means so much to them.
Wednesday, November 14, 2012
More on genius
So I just noticed that the recent Scientific American issue is all about genius, including this interesting assertion about what it is like to think like a genius (and can people promote this sort of thinking in their own brains?). From the (free) summary of the (subscription only) article "Boost Creativity with Electric Brain Stimulation":
A great idea comes all of a sudden. In the depths of the mind, networks of brain cells perform a sublime symphony, and a twinkle of insight pops into consciousness. Unexpected as they are, these lightbulb moments seem impossible to orchestrate. Recent studies suggest otherwise. By freeing the mind of some of its inhibitions, we might improve creative problem solving.
The human brain constantly filters thoughts and feelings. Only a small fraction of the stimuli impressed on us by our environment ascends to the level of conscious awareness. Prior learning enforces mental shortcuts that determine which sensations are deemed worthy of our attention. Our laboratory is investigating whether we can weaken these biases and boost openness to new ideas by temporarily diminishing the neural activity in specific brain areas.
A great idea comes all of a sudden. In the depths of the mind, networks of brain cells perform a sublime symphony, and a twinkle of insight pops into consciousness. Unexpected as they are, these lightbulb moments seem impossible to orchestrate. Recent studies suggest otherwise. By freeing the mind of some of its inhibitions, we might improve creative problem solving.
The human brain constantly filters thoughts and feelings. Only a small fraction of the stimuli impressed on us by our environment ascends to the level of conscious awareness. Prior learning enforces mental shortcuts that determine which sensations are deemed worthy of our attention. Our laboratory is investigating whether we can weaken these biases and boost openness to new ideas by temporarily diminishing the neural activity in specific brain areas.
I thought this was interesting, that part of the key to being more genius is what is coming into our conscious awareness, particularly as a person who has forced awareness of many mundane decisions into my conscious thought even from a very young age. Perhaps even more the money quote with regards to the connection between this article on genius and sociopaths having unique insight:
Genius, rare as it is, must demand a qualitatively different view of the world than what most of us experience. Austrian physician Hans Asperger, whose name is associated with the eponymous condition on the autism spectrum suggested that, '"a dash of autism' might set brilliant minds apart. We have been investigating this hypothesis by using weak electric current to modulate brain activity in healthy people in our laboratory. The effects fade in an hour, preserving normal cognition. This method of brain stimulation is safe and portable - a 'creativity cap' - that anyone might use to spur creativity on demand.
Carrie Mathison from the Showtime drama Homeland anyone? Particularly on the tails of the recent article on how to raise a genius, I like this idea that genius demands a qualitatively different view of the world than what most people experience. Especially when that requirement is taken into consideration, it does seem a damn shame to kill off sociopathic babies once they can be identified as aberrant, no?
Tuesday, November 13, 2012
Raising genius
I really enjoyed this article by Andrew Solomon in the NY Times Magazine, "How do you Raise a Prodigy?" I thought the parallels between raising a prodigy and raising a sociopath were compelling. He first talks about his recent research in parents that raise children with special issues:
Prodigies are able to function at an advanced adult level in some domain before age 12. “Prodigy” derives from the Latin “prodigium,” a monster that violates the natural order. These children have differences so evident as to resemble a birth defect, and it was in that context that I came to investigate them. Having spent 10 years researching a book about children whose experiences differ radically from those of their parents and the world around them, I found that stigmatized differences — having Down syndrome, autism or deafness; being a dwarf or being transgender — are often clouds with silver linings. Families grappling with these apparent problems may find profound meaning, even beauty, in them. Prodigiousness, conversely, looks from a distance like silver, but it comes with banks of clouds; genius can be as bewildering and hazardous as a disability.
He then goes on to express some of the particular difficulties in raising any child who is different than the norm, particular a child who is different from the parents themselves, and how there are no easy rules:
Children who are pushed toward success and succeed have a very different trajectory from that of children who are pushed toward success and fail. I once told Lang Lang, a prodigy par excellence and now perhaps the most famous pianist in the world, that by American standards, his father’s brutal methods — which included telling him to commit suicide, refusing any praise, browbeating him into abject submission — would count as child abuse. “If my father had pressured me like this and I had not done well, it would have been child abuse, and I would be traumatized, maybe destroyed,” Lang responded. “He could have been less extreme, and we probably would have made it to the same place; you don’t have to sacrifice everything to be a musician. But we had the same goal. So since all the pressure helped me become a world-famous star musician, which I love being, I would say that, for me, it was in the end a wonderful way to grow up.”
While it is true that some parents push their kids too hard and give them breakdowns, others fail to support a child’s passion for his own gift and deprive him of the only life that he would have enjoyed. You can err in either direction. Given that there is no consensus about how to raise ordinary children, it is not surprising that there is none about how to raise remarkable children. Like parents of children who are severely challenged, parents of exceptionally talented children are custodians of young people beyond their comprehension.
I love the Lang Lang quote. It is such a great acknowledgment that different folks require different strokes. If there is anything that I hope to achieve with the blog and getting people to think about the presence and role of sociopaths in society, it is probably to preach this gospel that we're all really different from each other in ways that we too often either ignore or pretend don't exist. There's nothing wrong with heterogeneity, in fact it is probably what keeps us so viable as the dominant species on this planet. Monster babies are born into all types of family every day. But the word monster need not mean B movie horror matinees, it could also be someone more like Lang Lang.
Prodigies are able to function at an advanced adult level in some domain before age 12. “Prodigy” derives from the Latin “prodigium,” a monster that violates the natural order. These children have differences so evident as to resemble a birth defect, and it was in that context that I came to investigate them. Having spent 10 years researching a book about children whose experiences differ radically from those of their parents and the world around them, I found that stigmatized differences — having Down syndrome, autism or deafness; being a dwarf or being transgender — are often clouds with silver linings. Families grappling with these apparent problems may find profound meaning, even beauty, in them. Prodigiousness, conversely, looks from a distance like silver, but it comes with banks of clouds; genius can be as bewildering and hazardous as a disability.
He then goes on to express some of the particular difficulties in raising any child who is different than the norm, particular a child who is different from the parents themselves, and how there are no easy rules:
Children who are pushed toward success and succeed have a very different trajectory from that of children who are pushed toward success and fail. I once told Lang Lang, a prodigy par excellence and now perhaps the most famous pianist in the world, that by American standards, his father’s brutal methods — which included telling him to commit suicide, refusing any praise, browbeating him into abject submission — would count as child abuse. “If my father had pressured me like this and I had not done well, it would have been child abuse, and I would be traumatized, maybe destroyed,” Lang responded. “He could have been less extreme, and we probably would have made it to the same place; you don’t have to sacrifice everything to be a musician. But we had the same goal. So since all the pressure helped me become a world-famous star musician, which I love being, I would say that, for me, it was in the end a wonderful way to grow up.”
While it is true that some parents push their kids too hard and give them breakdowns, others fail to support a child’s passion for his own gift and deprive him of the only life that he would have enjoyed. You can err in either direction. Given that there is no consensus about how to raise ordinary children, it is not surprising that there is none about how to raise remarkable children. Like parents of children who are severely challenged, parents of exceptionally talented children are custodians of young people beyond their comprehension.
I love the Lang Lang quote. It is such a great acknowledgment that different folks require different strokes. If there is anything that I hope to achieve with the blog and getting people to think about the presence and role of sociopaths in society, it is probably to preach this gospel that we're all really different from each other in ways that we too often either ignore or pretend don't exist. There's nothing wrong with heterogeneity, in fact it is probably what keeps us so viable as the dominant species on this planet. Monster babies are born into all types of family every day. But the word monster need not mean B movie horror matinees, it could also be someone more like Lang Lang.
Tuesday, October 30, 2012
Pigeonhole diagnosis
I was reading this Wired article by David Dobbs, author of the well-known article in the Atlantic comparing children to either Orchids or Dandelions (which are sociopath children? the answer may surprise you). In this article he discusses how our society treats those with mental illnesses, specifically schizophrenia:
A large World Health Organization study, for instance, found that “Whereas 40 percent of schizophrenics in industrialized nations were judged over time to be ‘severely impaired,’ only 24 percent of patients in the poorer countries ended up similarly disabled.’ Their symptoms also differed, in the texture, intensity, and subject matter to their hallucinations or paranoia, for instance. And most crucially, in many cases their mental states did not disrupt their connections to family and society.
Watters, curious about all this, went to Zanzibar to see how all this worked. He learned that there, schizophrenia was seen partly as an especially intense inhabitation of spirits — bad mojo of the sort everyone had, as it were. This led people to see psychotic episodes less as complete breaks from reality than a passing phenomena, somewhat as we might view, say, a friend or coworker’s intermittent memory lapses.
For instance, in one household Watters came to know well, a woman with schizophrenia, Kimwana,
was allowed to drift back and forth from illness to relative health without much monitoring or comment by the rest of the family. Periods of troubled behavior were not greeted with expressions of concern or alarm, and neither were times of wellness celebrated. As such, Kimwana felt little pressure to self-identify as someone with a permanent mental illness.
This was rooted partly in the idea of spirit possession already mentioned, and partly to an accepting fatalism in the brand of Sunni that the family practiced. Allah, they believed, would not burden any one person with more than she could carry. So they carried on, in acceptance rather than panic. As a result, this delusional, hallucinating, sometimes disoriented young woman passed into and out of her more disoriented mental states while still keeping her basic place in family, village, and work life, rather than being cast aside. Almost certainly as a result, she did not feel alienated, and her hallucinations did not include the sort of out-to-get-me kind that mark paranoid schizophrenics in the West.
This, writes Watters in enormous understatement, “stood in contrast with the diagnosis of schizophrenia as [used] in the West. There the diagnosis carries the assumption of a chronic condition, one that often comes to define a person.”
Of course I'm not stupid about wanting to out myself completely and without proper care. Dobbs goes on to describe the complete ostracizing of a Western schizophrenic from her friends and academic community upon her diagnosis. But I do wonder what effects struggling to conform to a particular societal standard of superficial normality has had on me. Perhaps I wonder so much because my family actually is really supportive, like the family of the woman Kimwana. I often credit their support for how I turned out, particularly their religious beliefs that I would not be burdened with more than I could carry. And so my sociopathy does not define me. I wonder if society were equally supportive, what a difference that might make?
Monday, October 15, 2012
Educating children sociopaths
To me it seems a no-brainer,” says Essi Viding, professor of psychology at University College London. “Nobody’s going to get psychopathy as a present when they turn 18. Of course you’re going to see some precursors."
What might early intervention look like?
“If you’re labelling someone a psychopath, it does seem to assume that there’s nothing we can do for them, that they’re going to grow up to be a criminal, and that you might as well just lock them up,” Frick says. “But you can teach a child to recognise the effects of their behaviour.”
The lack of success in educating children sociopaths to recognise the effects of their behaviour may have more to do with using the wrong methods than it does a sociopath child's inability or unwillingness to learn:
“What [people who use social shaming as a method of punishment] assume is that children have the motivation to shift their behaviour. That their primary social motivator is the relationship,” says Warren.
She interviewed more than 1,000 children with behavioural problems, aged eight to 18. “I was beginning to see children who weren’t responsive to these interventions, who weren’t interested in what adults, parents, educators, think,” she says.
“If a child or group of children isn’t interested in pleasing someone, doesn’t care about sanctions, what they’re driven by is pleasure or reward. They will take the pain of the consequences but won’t change their behaviour.”
What does work?
The programme, called Let’s Get Smart, replaces sanctions with rewards. Some teachers were uneasy. “Some teachers felt that punishment happens in the real world; if they misbehave in the real world they will still go to prison. Why are we setting them up for unrealistic expectations?” says Jones. “Our point is that it doesn’t work.”
By offering regular rewards, perhaps three times a day, controlled by the adult in authority, it aims to provide a rational, self-interested motivation for pleasing adults where that motive is emotionally absent. “The adult becomes the clear intermediary between the child and what the child wants,” Warren says. The rewards are tailored to each child’s interests.
These children often have a strong desire for control and teachers have to resist attempts to negotiate, because any concession just leads to more demands. “I teach parents and teachers to say, ‘It’s not open for discussion, go away.’ Adults don’t like to dismiss children,” Warren says.
All this is backed by role play and other exercises that are intended to build children’s capacity to pay attention to and respond appropriately to others’ emotions. Video playback helps the children to see their behaviour as others do, often to their surprise. (“I do swear a lot,” one girl told Warren.)
What sort of results can you expect?
“These kids are still having quite significant problems: they are not cured. But they are improving. Some have gone back to mainstream school, which is incredible,” she says.
Whether children ever really learn greater empathy or just learn to manage their behaviour is not clear. “My personal gut feeling is that you can modify behaviour perhaps more readily than you can improve the empathy response,” Viding says.
There are a couple of other interesting tidbits, like this one about "circle time" type emotional sharing activities:
“(In circle time) children say what makes them scared and children who have callous-unemotional traits think, ‘This is a useful piece of information to have’,” she says.
Hilarious.
Saturday, September 22, 2012
Halo effect
The successful pedophile does not select his targets arbitrarily. He culls them from a larger pool, testing and probing until he finds the most vulnerable. Clay, for example, first put himself in a place with easy access to children—an elementary school. Then he worked his way through his class. He began by simply asking boys if they wanted to stay after school. “Those who could not do so without parental permission were screened out,” van Dam writes. Children with vigilant parents are too risky. Those who remained were then caressed on the back, first over the shirt and then, if there was no objection from the child, under the shirt. “The child’s response was evaluated by waiting to see what was reported to the parents,” she goes on. “Parents inquiring about this behavior were told by Mr. Clay that he had simply been checking their child for signs of chicken pox. Those children were not targeted further.” The rest were “selected for more contact,” gradually moving below the belt and then to the genitals.
The child molester’s key strategy is one of escalation, desensitizing the target with an ever-expanding touch. In interviews and autobiographies, pedophiles describe their escalation techniques like fly fishermen comparing lures. Consider the child molester van Dam calls Cook:
Some of the little tricks that always work with younger boys are things like always sitting in a sofa, or a chair with big, soft arms if possible. I would sit with my legs well out and my feet flat on the floor. My arms would always be in an “open” position. The younger kids have not developed a “personal space” yet, and when talking with me, will move in very close. If they are showing me something, particularly on paper, it is easy to hold the object in such a way that the child will move in between my legs or even perch on my knee very early on. If the boy sat on my lap, or very close in, leaning against me, I would put my arm around him loosely. As this became a part of our relationship, I would advance to two arms around him, and hold him closer and tighter. . . . Goodbyes would progress from waves, to brief hugs, to kisses on the cheek, to kisses on the mouth in very short order.Even when confronted, child molesters frequently get away with it because they seem so charming and likable and molestation is such a horrible thing to believe about someone, much less accuse someone of participating in:
The pedophile is often imagined as the dishevelled old man baldly offering candy to preschoolers. But the truth is that most of the time we have no clue what we are dealing with. A fellow-teacher at Mr. Clay’s school, whose son was one of those who complained of being fondled, went directly to Clay after she heard the allegations. “I didn’t do anything to those little boys,” Clay responded. “I’m innocent. . . . Would you and your husband stand beside me if it goes to court?” Of course, they said. People didn’t believe that Clay was a pedophile because people liked Clay—without realizing that Clay was in the business of being likable.
I thought this was an interesting example of the halo effect, the residual goodwill that accompanies one good trait like physical attractiveness or likability and unduly impacts the viewers ability to accurately assess other aspects of the person. The overall impression of the person as likeable blinds the viewer to evidence that the person does bad things. Take as an example Jerry Sandusky -- so successful and relatively powerful in his own slice of the world that he is able to get away with one of the most unthinkable crimes for decades.
What I don't understand is, how did humans evolve to be this way in the first place? Shortcut thinking? First impressions are actually more accurate than they are inaccurate? Not like I'm complaining. Obviously I have benefited from being able to fly "under the halo" myself.
Friday, September 21, 2012
Human garbage
Of course I don't judge him for the sexual objectification of children. If you're sexually attracted to children, there's little that you can do about it. And there is no evidence he ever acted on it. In fact, it's odd that we criminalize possession of child pornography -- seemingly the only outlet for this inclination that doesn't directly harm children (assuming there is a sufficient amount of child pornography in the world such that we do not need to continue making it anymore). Overall, I am pretty empathetic, which is why I haven't been able to stop thinking about the parallels between me and him. I've been talking nonstop with a mutual friend trying to suss out what exactly happened, looking for but hoping there are not further parallels between us and this idea of living separate public vs. private lives and eventually being outted and ostracized.
It's a raw deal, being a convicted sex offender, and his judge doesn't sound like he's sympathetic. Once he gets out of prison, he is basically human garbage, as far as everyone else is concerned. The Woodsman is a really good film that deals with some of these issues. Also this article:
I would like to point out one other thing: our natural resistance to believing the worst of someone. And "child molester" is the worst. It is literally the most horrible thing you can do in our society; morally, the child molester sits above only the child molester/serial killer who rapes and kills children. That makes an accusation of child molesting an extraordinary claim. And as the saying goes, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Imagine that your best friend was accused of stealing office supplies from his company. Now imagine that he was accused of molesting a neighbor's child. The first one isn't very hard to believe; almost everyone takes a pen or two home occasionally, and most companies go through printer paper much faster than they produce actual documents.
[Y]ou wouldn't need much evidence to believe [your friend] steals office supplies. Nor would you care much if he did. . . .
Now if a kid said that your best friend touched their genitals . . . well, if it's true, and he did it deliberately, you're pretty much going to have to end the friendship. His life will, of course, be completely destroyed. And you face knowing that this person you thought was your best friend did something indescribably evil. You're going to want quite a bit of proof. And if the action is ambiguous--like maybe his hand accidentally grazed the area in question while doing something quite innocent--you're probably going to err on the side of believing your friend (although you might also supervise your kids more closely when they're around him.)
The problem with this sort of wholesale rejection of a person based on one characteristic is that if you really did have a best friend who was a pedophile, there's really no one that he can talk to about it. My friend thinks that, consequently, my pedophile work friend must have been living a completely double life. Whereas my life, he says, is just "complicated:
"I think you have a lot of confliciting issues, a lot of things pushing and pulling you but a double life involves total deception. Like maybe you could have become something like him if you didn't find people who love and accept you as you are because you would've felt a need to hide it and secret indulgence is the most cancerous."
Because I do have friends like this that know pretty much everything about me, because my family is relatively accepting of how I think and what I choose to get up to, because I have found relatively pro-social ways to indulge and incorporate my predilections into a pretty normal life, am I immune to having my life absolutely collapse and being labeled human garbage? I hope so.
Monday, September 17, 2012
The outsider
I’ve never thought of myself as a predator because I’ve never raped or killed anyone. But looking back, I wonder if the internal understanding of my outsider status combined with the instinctive sense that I had to carefully observe other people in order to both survive and thrive is how the human predator thinks. I’ve always known that I wasn’t one of them, them being most of humanity. This wasn’t a choice; it was a realization. I didn’t know terms like "sociopath" or "psychopath." But I did know that since I wasn’t an “insider,” I had to figure out what to say and how to behave in ways that would guarantee a place among them as their leader. In other words, as a child I knew I had to wear a mask, one that would grant me power. Again, as a child, I could not articulate any of this and did not have the psychological sophistication to comprehend what I was. I just knew this is how the world worked, and how I had to work within it.
If you’re new to this blog and you’re wondering if you are a sociopath or have sociopathic tendencies, ask yourself if this story describes your experience. That’s not to say that thinking or behaving this way as a child and a teenager proves beyond any doubt that you are a sociopath. It could, however, serve as a starting place for further investigation and a validation of how you experienced your childhood.
If you were always on the outside looking in, separated from the other kids and maybe even from your family by a wall of emotions that they seemed to feel effortlessly while you did not; if you could instinctively get a sense of how power flowed between various cliques, between the students and the staff and within your family; if belonging never meant anything to you yet you found you could easily enter and then manipulate any group at will; then maybe, just maybe, you were a tiny wolf in lamb’s wool, a young sociopath without knowing it.
Wednesday, September 12, 2012
Guest post: The Next Generation
I've long been struck by the idea of childhood diagnosis of sociopaths--of exactly how early and easily we can be spotted. I, myself, was pretty aware of my own differences at an early age. Couldn't describe it back then, but I always saw the difference, that desire to compete fiercely, and even humiliate, break, and if possible, injure the competition in a way that never led back to me, all while playing adults like fiddles. Because of this history, I recently recognized another small sociopath with absolute clarity.
Recently, my wife and I were on vacation visiting friends of ours from grad school. They have a five-year-old boy. It was like looking at a little version of myself. Seeing this kid take joy in first playing with his puppy, and slowly but surely escalating the play and contact to the level of inflicting intentional pain. I recognized on his part that he knew precisely when he was crossing a line--looking up, causing the pain when he thought no adult was looking, and the false regret in his voice but clearly not his eyes when caught. It was like looking back in time into a mirror. He didn't reserve his violence and force for his pet, either, but also targeted both his parents and my wife and I. When his parents tried to use the old parenting canard of "you're hurting mommy and daddy" which usually reduces kids to crying, mewling shame-balls, their son only grinned.
If seeing his joy at this weren't a recognition of my own childhood feelings when I caused physical or emotional pain, the cinch was seeing his uncanny understanding of social dynamics, and the privileged role that most kids occupy in society which saves them from adult wrath. In other words, this child was manipulative beyond his years. Again, something familiar to myself.
By looking at him, you wouldn't think he's growing up in a nurturing, progressive, yuppie household where both parents hold doctorate degrees (or on second thought, maybe you would). His parents were oblivious to their little 'angel' and the intentionality of his aggression. Or at least have developed a practiced obliviousness.
But what surprised me most was how quickly a weekend around a small version of myself stirred up territorial feelings. Those feelings made me think of the practices of male lions direct towards a competitor's cubs. Good thing I live half a country away.
Recently, my wife and I were on vacation visiting friends of ours from grad school. They have a five-year-old boy. It was like looking at a little version of myself. Seeing this kid take joy in first playing with his puppy, and slowly but surely escalating the play and contact to the level of inflicting intentional pain. I recognized on his part that he knew precisely when he was crossing a line--looking up, causing the pain when he thought no adult was looking, and the false regret in his voice but clearly not his eyes when caught. It was like looking back in time into a mirror. He didn't reserve his violence and force for his pet, either, but also targeted both his parents and my wife and I. When his parents tried to use the old parenting canard of "you're hurting mommy and daddy" which usually reduces kids to crying, mewling shame-balls, their son only grinned.
If seeing his joy at this weren't a recognition of my own childhood feelings when I caused physical or emotional pain, the cinch was seeing his uncanny understanding of social dynamics, and the privileged role that most kids occupy in society which saves them from adult wrath. In other words, this child was manipulative beyond his years. Again, something familiar to myself.
By looking at him, you wouldn't think he's growing up in a nurturing, progressive, yuppie household where both parents hold doctorate degrees (or on second thought, maybe you would). His parents were oblivious to their little 'angel' and the intentionality of his aggression. Or at least have developed a practiced obliviousness.
But what surprised me most was how quickly a weekend around a small version of myself stirred up territorial feelings. Those feelings made me think of the practices of male lions direct towards a competitor's cubs. Good thing I live half a country away.
Saturday, August 11, 2012
Using babies to teach empathy
We know that humans are hardwired to be aggressive and selfish. But a growing body of research is demonstrating that there is also a biological basis for human compassion. Brain scans reveal that when we contemplate violence done to others we activate the same regions in our brains that fire up when mothers gaze at their children, suggesting that caring for strangers may be instinctual. When we help others, areas of the brain associated with pleasure also light up. Research by Felix Warneken and Michael Tomasello indicates that toddlers as young as 18 months behave altruistically. (If you want to feel good, watch one of their 15-second video clips here.)
This was something that I didn't know, that we are programmed to help. The clips are fascinating, for instance this first one, where the researcher drops a clothespin just out of his reach. The 18 month old child crawls over to the clothespin, picks it up, works himself to a standing position so he'll be tall enough to give the researcher back his clothespin, which he does (to his own apparent delight).
I wouldn't necessarily call it altruism, though, at least not from my superficial understanding. To me, the impulse seems rooted more in a drive for efficiency (am I projecting my own thoughts here?). In each of these videos, the toddlers help out in a task that obviously requires cooperative effort for success -- a situation in which it is obvious that someone needs help with something, for instance opening a door when someone has their arms full. Without the toddler's help, the door never gets opened and that person never gets to their location, or they do so with much greater cost in terms of time and effort. By helping the researcher, even where there is no immediate promise of reward, the toddler is still engaging in value maximizing behavior that he can hope to benefit from in kind in the future.
This is clearly an evolutionarily advantageous trait, particularly to help out within a particular group or tribe of people. It expands the our ability to consolidate resources in order to scale particular operations. Just like the modern legal fiction of a corporation allows us to pool resources (via stock purchases) to create business entities that no one of us could finance independently, a natural inclination to participate in cooperative tasks promotes the overall well-being of society, which improves our own lives.
Maybe I'm reading too much into all of this, but I've always wondered where my compulsion for efficiency comes from, which will override almost any other impulse. Could it be related to this?
It could also be that the toddler is just trying to pull his own weight, starting to realize that he is a suck on social resources, and wants to avoid getting left in the jungle to die. Which is actually a risk for us all, in some ways. So be good everyone! Or else!
Saturday, July 28, 2012
Should a sociopath have children?
I just happened on this website a few days ago and have been devouring it over the past few days. I have come to realize that I am a "sociopath". I don't like the terminology and its scary the way people seem to think about this term. nevertheless, i have learned from reading the various posts to finally understand what I know was going on with myself for years. language was always intentional to me. I have always felt like the social sphere is work for me. work that I can be good at, mind you, but work nonetheless. i am very promiscuous and have a difficult time being faithful to my partners. etc. etc. My question though is: can i have children? Or the better question: should I have children as a sociopath? One the one hand, I feel as though my strength is that I am very deliberate and intentional in my interaction with anyone and I would be a very deliberate "loving" parent. I worry that the stress of juggling my life along with children will make me vulnerable to some bad behaviors as a parent. I have noticed that impulse control can be a problem but have learned over the years to take time to act on fear and anger or get out of the situation. I usually need lots of time to talk to myself to come down from an angry situation. I don't think a young child would necessarily bring these out in me since I am pretty good at redirecting these feelings. Nevertheless, that is the big question that I have for the group. I am not worried about being a criminal because I am not a violent person and I see the risks of that way of life pretty clearly. I have made moral mistakes at my job in the past and I have learned to lead in the open and with consensus at my job. My relationship, thankfully, is going ok despite the fact that I can't be faithful sexually.
Anyway, that is my question: should a sociopath have children?
I've also thought about whether I would be a good or a bad parent. I think the answer is just that I would be a different parent. I would want any children I have to be around other people who are more emotional, more loving, so they get used to that. I would still want them to be like me, but bilingual. Basically, I would want them to be able to turn my way of thinking off and on.
Monday, June 25, 2012
Young at heart
They say that sociopaths mellow with age. The other day I was remembering some of my more stupid escapades, realizing that it has been at least a few years since I have done something whose stupidity is almost wholly due to stunted emotional growth. I read recently in the New Yorker that even Tucker Max, one of the founding authors of the genre "fratire" and widely known and loved for his immense immaturity, has given up his former partying life, takes yoga classes, and is seeing a psychotherapist in the hopes of finding balance. [Is Tucker Max also a sociopath? According to his website: I get excessively drunk at inappropriate times, disregard social norms, indulge every whim, ignore the consequences of my actions, mock idiots and posers, sleep with more women than is safe or reasonable, and just generally act like a raging dickhead.]
Interestingly, the people who have fallen in love with me (as opposed to obsession) have essentially fallen in love with the child in me. People associate childlike qualities with a certain innocence. And there is something charming about a grown person, brilliant and successful, ruthless and hard, also showing the sometimes naïveté and guilelessness of a child. There was something about that contrast between the unyielding me that the rest of the world sees versus the soft me that most were blind to that appealed to my lovers' protector/nurturing instincts.
In the book The Little Prince, a pilot, long at odds with the seriousness of the adult world, gets stranded in the desert and meets a boy prince who is able to see past the unimportant details of life that cloud grown up eyes and see what is most essential about the pilot. In a Scientific American blog post entitled, "The Big Lesson of a Little Prince: (Re)capture the Creativity of Childhood":
Saint-Exupéry’s larger point about creativity and thought is difficult to overstate: as we age, how we see the world changes. It is the rare person who is able to hold on to the sense of wonderment, of presence, of sheer enjoyment of life and its possibilities that is so apparent in our younger selves. As we age, we gain experience. We become better able to exercise self-control. We become more in command of our faculties, our thoughts, our desires. But somehow, we lose sight of the effortless ability to take in the world in full. The very experience that helps us become successful threatens to limit our imagination and our sense of the possible. When did experience ever limit the fantasy of a child?
The article goes on to describe an experiment in which the control group was asked to respond to the writing prompt, "imagine school is cancelled for the day", while the experimental group was asked to respond to the same prompt while pretending they are 7 years old. Those writing as a 7 year old showed significantly more originality of thought: "Imagining yourself a child, it seems, can quite literally make your mind more flexible, more original, more open to creative input and more capable of generating creative output."
Interestingly the full Baudelaire quote suggests that the ideal is a childlike state of mind with all of the experience and knowledge we have gained as adults: "Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man’s physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed." I hope this is what is meant by sociopaths "mellowing" as they age.
Tuesday, May 29, 2012
On becoming a sociopath (female)
In terms of ASPD: I still am, to a degree, but I am much less inclined to that disorder than I was as a child. For the high-functioning sociopath, it is mandatory for him to have a relationship with himself. He lacks any sort of internal social inhibition, and therefore, he doesn't automatically incorporate the majority ethics. As a kid, I was at my most impulsive. Until I came to develop a code rooted in reason, rather than guilt, I was all over the place. People take for granted "right" and "wrong,” and many don’t question the ‘why’ behind it until they are much older, because they may cruise along on autopilot with the common knowledge that stealing is bad, and that they feel bad. If the sociopath can't introspect, however, he'll grow into a dangerous criminal as he hits adulthood and gains the means. For the sociopath, he has to mature early in, or face possible legal consequences for the rest of his life. Although being a female and a sociopath is unique, I am fortunate in this respect. If I were a man, there’s a great chance that I would not have made it.
I hate to sound sexist, but it’s the truth: men are typically stronger than women. At the age of eight, I was already fantasizing about sex crimes. I remember thinking, verbatim, that it wasn’t “enough to love. You have to rip apart.” For me, cuddling and kissing could only go so far before the emptiness sank in. The threshold was reached, and boredom stirred. A man, or woman, could satisfy with soft whispers and affection to a point. Then, to overcome that boundary, sadism came to play. The only way I felt that I could truly share something with another human being, was to torture and to push him over the edge. There was excitement in this, and my own brand of worship. I didn’t realize that my desire was abnormal. For a long time, I didn’t realize that others weren’t like me. I observed them, and I thought that we were putting on a show, and so I acted, too. I watched and waited, half-expecting an explosion as one of us broke. It never came. Every now and again, I saw them clearly and was slammed with questions. "Is this real?" I wanted to capture their faces, to make them look at me. I lived in denial.
Bottom line: I stayed out of prison because I lacked the brute muscles to kill, and the dedication to go through with plans (I had constructed a motif in my head). Twice, I snapped on human beings and did everything in my carnal power to injure them, craving their expressions, because the fear and shock filled up a void within me. It was a foreign substance, and, as such, I took it as a druggie.
I was let down in my weakness. I didn’t go after children my age, but lashed out against men who I perceived as strong. I wanted the triumph of breaking them, and I fell short. It was humiliating to have revealed and lost. Thus, I retreated to my intellect, and became the cult-starter. I manipulated without touch, and although, in the end, the new approach could have proved even more dangerous than the corporeal given my structure, I was appeased by little stunts, and, thankfully, came to my senses before moving onto greater defeats. Honestly, I just grew up, and trust me when I say that if I had waited even another year, given the crowd that I had gathered, things would be different. I have formalized legal opinions now, and a definition for good and evil, but I don’t possess the faculty of remorse. I can regret: regret meaning, I can find the consequences of something not to my enjoyment, and I can wish that I had acted otherwise, but, if not caught, I don’t have remorse, in that I don’t feel guilt for doing what I see as justifiably illegal. Hence, my version of “right” and “wrong” revolves around what is good for me, psychologically. Unrestrained, I slip and intentionally perform acts which I reject, lawfully, when statistics suggest a lapse in capture, but I do try to avoid this more often than not, because, regardless of how good I am, it’s never surefire.
Monday, May 14, 2012
Kid sociopath
- “We’ve had so many people tell us so many different things,” Anne said. “Oh, it’s A.D.D. — oh, it’s not. It’s depression — or it’s not. You could open the DSM and point to a random thing, and chances are he has elements of it. He’s got characteristics of O.C.D. He’s got characteristics of sensory-integration disorder. Nobody knows what the predominant feature is, in terms of treating him. Which is the frustrating part.” . . . . Following a battery of evaluations, Anne and Miguel were presented with another possible diagnosis: their son Michael might be a psychopath.
- Currently, there is no standard test for psychopathy in children, but a growing number of psychologists believe that psychopathy, like autism, is a distinct neurological condition — one that can be identified in children as young as 5.
- “If they can get what they want without being cruel, that’s often easier,” Frick observes. “But at the end of the day, they’ll do whatever works best.”
- “This isn’t like autism, where the child and parents will find support,” Edens observes. “Even if accurate, it’s a ruinous diagnosis. No one is sympathetic to the mother of a psychopath.”
- “As the nuns used to say, ‘Get them young enough, and they can change,’ ” Dadds observes. “You have to hope that’s true. Otherwise, what are we stuck with? These monsters.”
- “They’re not like A.D.H.D. kids who just act impulsively. And they’re not like conduct-disorder kids, who are like: ‘Screw you and your game! Whatever you tell me, I’m going to do the opposite.’ The C.U. kids are capable of following the rules very carefully. They just use them to their advantage.”
- Their behavior — a mix of impulsivity, aggression, manipulativeness and defiance — often overlaps with other disorders. “A kid like Michael is different from minute to minute,” Waschbusch noted. “So do we say the impulsive stuff is A.D.H.D. and the rest is C.U.? Or do we say that he’s fluctuating up and down, and that’s bipolar disorder? If a kid isn’t paying attention, does that reflect oppositional behavior: you’re not paying attention because you don’t want to? Or are you depressed, and you’re not paying attention because you can’t get up the energy to do it?”
- Most researchers who study callous-unemotional children, however, remain optimistic that the right treatment could not only change behavior but also teach a kind of intellectual morality, one that isn’t merely a smokescreen. . . . “I try to tell him: You’re here with a lot of other people, and they all have their own ideas of what they want to be doing. Whether you like it or not, you just have to get along.”
- “I’ve always said that Michael will grow up to be either a Nobel Prize winner or a serial killer.”
Some of these selections are regarding a clinical study/camp for these youngsters. That was probably the most entertaining part--seeing how they interact with each other.
- The study had a ratio of one counselor for every two children. But the kids, Waschbusch said, quickly figured out that it was possible to subvert order with episodes of mass misbehavior. One child came up with code words to be yelled out at key moments: the signal for all the kids to run away simultaneously.
And this little vixen:
- Charming but volatile, L. quickly found ways to play different boys off one another. “Some manipulation by girls is typical,” Waschbusch said as the kids trooped inside. “The amount she does it, and the precision with which she does it — that’s unprecedented.” She had, for example, smuggled a number of small toys into camp, Waschbusch told me, then doled them out as prizes to kids who misbehaved at her command. That strategy seemed particularly effective with Michael, who would often go to detention screaming her name.
Thursday, February 16, 2012
Like father, like daughter (part 3)
I'm actually amazed that you have intuited so well how best to deal with your daughter. I always advise parents of sociopathic leaning children to stay extremely consistent, don't get emotional, don't be critical to the extent that they feel like you are rejecting them or will reject who they are, don't punish -- incentivize and make the child see what's in it for them.
I think that sociopaths (particularly young ones) actually feel happier and thrive better in a world of clearly defined boundaries and rules that are so consistently enforced, the child will just start to take them as a given. I think having simple cause and effect rules/boundaries that have clear and predictable outcomes for acceptance/violation encourages the young sociopath to think of life as an interesting puzzle that can be gamed. As long as the young sociopath believes that he or she can acquire some advantage through skillful planning and execution (and finds some measure of success, which I feel is almost a given), they will stay committed to the structure of the game you have set up. It's why sociopaths can be ruthless businessmen fiercely defending the principles of capitalism.
The worst thing that parents can do is to be inconsistent. It makes the child sociopath think that the game is rigged and it doesn't matter what he or she does, except to the extent that he or she can outcheat the cheater (the parent). Other big mistakes are being emotional (it's insulting to the child and he or she will lose respect for you). If you react emotionally and negatively to the child, the child will perceive it as a clear betrayal and one that will instantly dissipate any trust in the relationship.
This is a very important topic you have raised. Would you allow me to publish this exchange? I can redact out any information that you believe is too personal.
Sunday, December 18, 2011
Sociopath = broken brain?
The question of nature vs. nurture for sociopaths is controversial. Arguing "nature" seems to give sociopaths a free pass--being "born with it" somehow makes them more pitiable and acceptable by society. Whereas arguing "nurture" suggests that sociopaths can one day reverse their condition through hard work and therapy, or recruit more of their kind by abusing children. Scientists think that sociopathy is a mixture of both nature and nurture, but the real mystery is whether the sociopath's brain is actually physically different from the empath's. I don't have anything more than anecdotal evidence regarding sociopaths specifically, but we know that the brain learns different things at different stages. If you miss the window to learn a particular skill or concept (e.g. empathy), you may never be able to "catch up" or "become normal."
One example of brains missing their learning windows is feral children. This article discusses the story of a 7 year-old girl who was found living in her own filth in a closet. The girl wore diapers, was nonverbal, and was unable to feed herself. Essentially she lived like a big toddler with minimal human contact. The girl had a "normal" brain, no sign of genetic mental retardation, but she behaved as if she were severely mentally handicapped. This girl will never be normal. When she was found, no one expected her to ever learn to speak. The best that could be hoped for is that she would become potty trained, learn how to feed herself, understand simple communication. Her brain had missed too many windows of opportunity--too many neural connections were never made.
Does the feral child story sound like this comment from a reader?
One example of brains missing their learning windows is feral children. This article discusses the story of a 7 year-old girl who was found living in her own filth in a closet. The girl wore diapers, was nonverbal, and was unable to feed herself. Essentially she lived like a big toddler with minimal human contact. The girl had a "normal" brain, no sign of genetic mental retardation, but she behaved as if she were severely mentally handicapped. This girl will never be normal. When she was found, no one expected her to ever learn to speak. The best that could be hoped for is that she would become potty trained, learn how to feed herself, understand simple communication. Her brain had missed too many windows of opportunity--too many neural connections were never made.
Does the feral child story sound like this comment from a reader?
I stumbled across this site while trying to define my own personality traits. I certainly exhibit a fair number of the associated traits of a sociopath, so maybe I am one.
The thing is, I never used to exhibit these traits, in fact as a child i was very empathic - this changed when i went from a loving home to living with an abusive and largely uncaring stepfather, and a mother who just didn't want anything to jeapordise her relationship with said stepfather.
What happens when you systematically abuse an empath?
The answer is simple - they stop empathising and start lashing out once it gets too much. In my opinion, and i could be wrong on this, but the medical definitions don't take into account the complexities of the human soul, sociopathy is simply a natural instinct for survival and even revenge on those that destroyed part of their psyche. I never got justice for the wrongs that were done to me, my child brain at the time "toughened" itself to deal with the situation and went about exacting revenge in lieu of justice provided by those that should have been protecting me from such harm. The problem is, how do you stop?
Having been in such a psychological torment for the formative years of childhood, how do you become "normal" when you've never really known normality?
The moral superiority exhibited by sociopaths was once just that, they did once hold the moral high ground, they knew right from wrong and they knew wrong was being done to them and nothing was being done about it so they adapted their views of the world accordingly - it's difficult to feel empathy for anyone when no empathy is shown to you.
So in my view, and this is just my opinion, a sociopath is probably just a scared child in an adult body, trying to protect themselves from the harm that has been visited upon them by "normal" people. Once the walls go up, it's damn hard to bring them down again and each negative response just adds another brick to the wall - more proof that they are right to mistrust the world and treat it with contempt.
There may be genetic factors involved, differences to the brain even, but largely I think that society itself has created sociopaths and the reason they fear sociopaths is because of the skeleton in society's closet that sociopaths represent.
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