Sociopaths and Compartmentalization YouTube Interview

We had such great feedback on the Brad longer Zoom that I'm experimenting with the longer format, so this morning I did one with just Arya and Elsa (the time constraint doesn't kick in unless there are multiple people on the call) and I continue to like the results. I'll probably either continue to do one on ones to avoid the Zoom time limit or just bite the bullet and buy a pro Zoom account. If I do the former, I'll upload the one on ones to YouTube and post here. I'll also do a live shorter Zoom session at least once a month. If you have strong opinions either way, let me know in the comments!

From this morning's one on one with Arya and Elsa:

Author of Confessions of a Sociopath M.E. Thomas and two 20 something female psychopaths discuss the role of compartmentalization for neurotypical people and for psychopaths. Normal people experience their self as a stable concept and when they have experiences that are inconsistent with their self, they experience cognitive dissonance. To avoid or resolve the cognitive dissonance, they can do one of three things: (1) change their behavior to be consistent with their self-conception, (2) change their belief about their self to be consistent with their behavior, (3) compartmentalize and essentially ignore the dissonance. Psychopaths do not experience these things as much because they have a very weak sense of self. 

There is a second use of the word compartmentalization, which is to keep thoughts and parts of our life separate to avoid conflict, to avoid worrying or being concerned about something, or to be more efficient. In this second sense of the word compartmentalization is something that psychopaths tend to do frequently, perhaps even better than normal people. Because of their weak sense of self, they feel less conflict from holding inconsistent viewpoints or manifesting inconsistent behaviors. 

Compartmentalizing

A reader asked me how a sociopath could seemingly feel one way about something one day and feel something entirely inconsistent another day. I responded:

Sociopaths seem to be exceptionally good at compartmentalizing, which would explain why it is possible for him both to have cared (and perhaps still care) for you very much but seem to not be at all interested in you now. A good way for normal people to understand the extent to which this works is to think of a vivid dream, perhaps an anxiety dream in which you dream of things that need to happen, projects that need to get done, problems that need to get solved. During the dream you get very caught up in the urgency of things, whatever it is that you are dreaming about becomes very important to you, you can't imagine a world in which this was not a primary concern for you. When you wake up from the dream there are still lingering feelings of the dream. Perhaps you just have the feeling that you need to do something, or maybe you actually remember specifics of what you supposedly "need" to do. Within the first fifteen minutes or so of wakefulness, however, you eventually realize that it was just a dream, that you really don't have to worry about those things at all, and so you continue living this other life and quickly forget about the dream life. That is how much sociopaths can compartmentalize. The dream world never fully goes away, maybe they remember some of it, or something will remind them of it, but for the most part it and the feelings felt are a faint memory. Those feelings associated were "real" in that they reflect how the sociopath would feel under the circumstances of the dream, but those circumstances just turned out not to be true.

I wonder whether the mechanism of compartmentalizing for the sociopath is the same as the mechanism that allows people with multiple personality disorder to have separate personalities each living essentially independent lives, sometimes unaware of each other.

The definitive sociopath test?

I was talking with a socio reader about the possibility of someone developing a foolproof method for identifying/diagnosing sociopaths (e.g. brain scans), and what that would mean in terms of our own sense of self and identity:

You know, I have given a lot of thought over the last year about whether this sociopath label really does fit or if I am trying to make it fit when it really doesn’t. As we both agree, in the end it doesn’t really matter anyway. The value of the exercise for me though, was conceptualizing my life experience in an entirely different but ultimately much more enlightening way. That is what matters.

I think the people that say that you and your readers are not sociopaths are right and wrong. They are right to the degree that people like us are indeed not like the prison/institutionalized population. Obviously. They are wrong to then surmise that the label has little to no direct link to what is referred to the suite of behaviors collectively referred to as sociopathy. Everyone assumes all sociopaths must look exactly like the ones in prison and if you don’t, the label can have zero relevance to you (or me). That assumption is based on a lack of research as well as a lack of independent thinking. I know. Even as I don’t wrap myself up with that label or identify all of myself with it, I nevertheless recognize it’s utility. I don’t have to say any of this to you. I’m preaching to the choir.

Bottom line for me anyway, is that I wouldn’t be shocked to discover that my brain looks normal. It really could be that those psychopaths whose brains look different are different in precisely those ways that gave rise to behaviors that landed them in prison to begin with. It might go back to the whole primary versus secondary psychopath distinction. The primaries may be the way they are because of their brains while the secondaries may be the way they are because of social/childhood issues. Maybe you and I would fall under the secondary category. Who knows? Although I do think it would be interesting to have more scientific research done on this, research involving an entirely non-institutionalized population of would be sociopaths. There would be many correlations between the two groups I’m sure (prison verses non-imprisoned), but I imagine there would also be some interesting and maybe even startling differences. While we’d share traits like a relative absence of conscience, low empathy, shallow emotions, an aptness for deception and manipulation, grandiose sense of self, etc, all the traits that set us apart from the psychological average, there might be some very important reasons why you and I aren’t in prison while the prototypical sociopaths are. Has there been any research done in this particular area?

Having said all of that, an exciting possibility that the naysayers brings up is that maybe we are so different that no one has thought of a label for us yet. Maybe we aren’t sociopaths at all. Maybe we represent undiscovered country, psychologically speaking. Who knows?

In any event, finding out your brain looks perfectly normal wouldn’t change a thing about your life experience up to this point, would it? It would be like a homosexual (I like using homosexuals as examples) discovering that his brain looks precisely like a heterosexual’s would. So what? Would that knowledge change him into a hetero? Would he suddenly start liking women? Would the results of this scan invalidate everything he’d been through his entire life? Would he have to force himself to like women because a brain scan indicates that his preference for men may have more to do with how he grew up and less to do with his genes and hormones? I don’t think anyone would seriously suggest that other than the religious fundies. I think it would be similar for you (and for me). Ditto for Hare’s checklist. I have already surmised that I wouldn’t score high enough on his list to justify labeling me as a Hare psychopath. I’m guesstimating that I’d get somewhere between a 22 and 26 tops and in the US, you have to score 30. What would it mean to have that guess proved right if the test was administered to by Hare himself? Not much.

I asked myself why I did the verbal diarrhea thing with this response. It’s because your email struck a chord. I spent so many years trying to be normal. I kept thinking that if I found my calling or found my true love (that was back at the beginning of my search phase, in my early twenties… my ex-wife quickly disabused me of that fantasy), found god, found spiritual enlightenment, I would then be full of all those emotions I lacked. I thought it was the absence of these things that created the absence, the vacancy, I saw within myself. That’s what movies and books and TV and my family and friends all told me in one way or the other. I was stupid and blind enough to believe them. It wasn’t until a few years ago, when the search began to look like the dead end it was, that I finally started giving up hope. During that winding down period I had my “wow, I have went about my search in an entirely self centered way” insight. You know the drill, seducing, manipulating, then abandoning once I discovered that the other person or persons didn’t have what I was looking for. I hadn’t thought of it that way at all up until that moment of insight. I suppose that in a very real sense, I discovered that I was a bit of an emotional vampire. A year or so later, I found your blog and for the first time, someone else had my experiences. Someone else knew what I had gone through because they had gone through life in a very similar way. Even down to the moment in your childhood when you knew something had changed and that you couldn’t go back! I’d never told any of my closest friends or family that, yet you’d been through it yourself! Finding out my brain looks normal wouldn’t alter any of that. Not one single bit. In fact and if anything, it would only deepen the mystery. If we can’t point to any specific neural distinctions, then what the hell created the differences? Why do I not understand guilt on an emotional level after all these years? Why are my emotions so superficial? Why don’t I have a stable sense of self? Etc.

Ok, I’ll stop now. You just got me thinking for a bit, that’s all. What would it mean to you to discover that per your brain scan or per Hare’s checklist, you can’t possibly be a socio/psychopath?

It's funny, how we're always going on about self-awareness and self-knowledge, trying to ferret out or at least understand any delusions. Sometimes I wonder if so much self-introspection can actually create delusions, though. I know how easy (sickly easy) it is for me to compartmentalize and have one part of me trick the other part. I've done it in the past and lived lies for years. Am I currently in the middle of a delusion? Is everything I think I know about who I am and what sort of world I live in completely delusional? Including being socio-leaning?

Sometimes I think to myself, if my life depended on it, would it be easier for me to prove that I am a sociopath, or that I am not. Interestingly, I think it is my "sociopathic" traits that would make either scenario seem about equally likely or unlikely. There does seem to be something to it all, though, something consistent between me and other people that find me at this site, although I'm not wedded to the term "sociopath." Sometimes it's creepy what I discover in common with those who email me. Whatever I am, there must be a lot of others like me.

Psychopaths feel emotions

This is an interesting interview with psychopath researcher and University of Wisconsin professor Joseph Newman in which he basically asserts that psychopaths feel the same breadth of emotions that normal people do, but that they do not attend to the emotions as others do so they do not experience them as other people do.

For those of you who want to skip around:

6:00: Non criminal psychopaths are characterized by weak urges breaking through even weaker restraints.

9:10: What happens when "guiding light" is absent is not necessarily consistent across all psychopaths, so psychopathy cannot necessarily be defined by behavior; behavior will depend on gender, age, social role, etc.

10:32: "The ones who break the law or who are violent, or commit criminals acts, those are the ones that are going to make it into my studies"

11:00: Do psychopaths experience emotions? If they do, are they less "deep" emotions? Sociopaths say they have emotions, will go out of their way to help others, capable of responding to affective materials.

13:53: Conventional wisdom regarding psychopaths and emotions being that psychopaths are fearless, incapable of emotions or general emotion deficit.

14:07: Newman's "attention deficit" theory -- "emotions don't have any power if you don't attend to them," psychopaths are not attending to the emotional cues that would elicit certain emotional responses.

16:12: "Emotions are there, to some extent, to the degree you pay attention to them"

16:48: Sociopaths are not obsessed in that the drive to do something is so strong, it's just that they are not considering other contrary info; but "if you can get them to pay attention to this information, they'll use it."

21:51: Treatment options using fear conditioning.

Newman thinks psychopaths are in some ways more likely to help a stranger than a normal person, which I think is correct in that the psychopath is just as likely to act impulsively doing good things as bad, and certainly doesn't see things in terms of "good" and "bad" anyway. (I talked a little bit about this lack of distinction here). I also think that there may be something to his theory that a lot of the emotional differences between psychopaths and normal people stem from the way that emotions are dealt with or attended to. If I focus on an emotion, I can greatly amplify its force far beyond what it should be. I frequently do this with pleasant emotions, but will also do this with "negative" emotions because there is pleasure in pain and I want to keep a flexible emotional repertoire (emotional yoga). For feelings that I don't care to feel, I just tune them out. I'm so good at compartmentalizing that it's easy to ignore anything I don't care to consider.

This video showed up on LoveFraud recently, leading to the following insightful comments from "Redwald" (excerpts):

It’s easy to understand this idea with an auditory or visual analogy. Suppose we’re in a room where a party is in full swing and there’s lots of noise. Now and again the noise can “interfere,” but on the whole the auditory signals are strong, and we can discern multiple signals. We can not only hear what a companion is saying to us, but we can also pick up snatches of other conversations around us, besides identifying any music that’s playing. In the visual field, we can easily recognize several people we know in a group of people nearby. There’s Ted, there’s Tom, there’s Sally. We can see all of these multiple people clearly and individually.

Conditions are different if the signals are “weak.” If there’s music coming from somewhere in the distance, and murmurs of conversation from the next room, we’ll have a harder time recognizing what’s being said, or played. More relevant here, trying to recognize it calls for an effort of concentration. If we’re straining to hear what’s being said next door, we may not even notice there’s music playing somewhere else. Or if we’re trying to hear the music, we may not notice the conversation at all, let alone make out what’s being said. Similarly, if we spot a group of people some way away, they may be hard to recognize at a distance. Quite possibly we’ll focus on one person who looks vaguely familiar and ask ourselves “Is that Ted or isn’t it?” But while we’re focusing on him we’re not focusing on the other two, so we may never recognize them. In short, we only pick up some of the many things going on around us, and miss others altogether.

Regardless of how strong (or weak) the emotional signals are in absolute terms, much of the problem with psychopathic behavior is still how strong (or weak) these signals are in relation to one another. If psychopaths’ perception of their “urges” is weaker than in normal humans, bad behavior can still result if their “restraints” (such as “conscience”) are weaker still.

I think the point being made is that because psychopathic behavior is not well regulated emotionally in any constant fashion, it tends to be impulsive. One characteristic of “impulsive” behavior is that it’s likely to be inconsistent from one time to another. It may even be somewhat RANDOM in the direction the impulse takes from one occasion to the next. The psychopath is a “loose cannon” whose behavior may be hard to predict.

Given this built-in inconsistency, it’s credible enough, at least in theory, that a psychopath acting on impulse could behave helpfully, even generously toward others at one time, and at another time, acting just as uninhibitedly on a very different impulse, be guilty of an act of sheer cruelty or predation.

For the reason I mentioned above, people observing these contrasting behaviors are likely to discount the psychopath’s acts of helpfulness or generosity and characterize him or her chiefly by the acts of cruelty. But people go further. They attempt to see (as Polonius put it) “method in the madness,” where sometimes there may not BE any “method”! People expect “consistent” behavior out of others, and they look for a pattern. If a psychopath appears helpful and generous to them at first sight, they’ll start off believing “this is a kind, caring person.” If the psychopath then turns round and treats them badly or exploits them, eventually they’ll decide “this person is a villain after all.” But they may still try to reconcile the contradictory behaviors in their own mind by trying to find a common motive or purpose behind both. Then they may conclude that the behaviors they saw as “kind” and “caring” were deliberately contrived by the psychopath in order to “take them in” and “put them off their guard.”
That may well be true in some cases, but in other cases it may not be true at all. The contradictory behaviors may be largely random and impulsive, not part of any greater “scheme” or purpose.

Collapsing upon abstraction

The clip below is interesting. It is relatively easy for me to think abstractly, which also makes it very easy for me to compartmentalize. As a child I used to practice abstract thinking all time. I always liked to keep in mind the big picture. Even when I was very young, I wanted to know what was going on, and I kept a mental map of where i was at all times. In school when we discussed a new concept, I would constantly flash between the forest and the trees. Visually I would practice finding diamonds in chain link fences, trying to build bigger and bigger diamonds by forcibly expanding my vision. This facility with abstract thought allows me to hold two opposing viewpoints because, as the video clip makes clear, at a certain level of abstraction it all collapses.

When I first learned about the distortions that occur on maps of the world vs. globes, I found it fascinating: you take three dimensional concepts and try to represent them in a two dimensional world, but it never looks quite right. Similarly, I don't think I have ever believed that there is such things as a completely accurate truth for anything. It is not that I believe that truth is relative because I do think there is absolute truth. We just have a flawed ability to perceive it or completely comprehend it.

Pit stops

I was stuck on a very long flight recently without any reading material, so I ended up reading the inflight magazine cover to cover. One of the articles was about Danica Patrick, former Formula One racer, current NASCAR driver. In an interview she was talking about how the racing styles are very different because stock cars are not race cars:

A NASCAR RACE CAR IS NOT really a race car at all, which is what makes the sport so tough. It has almost no downforce to keep it on the pavement; with 850 horses under the hood, it’s way overpowered; and the rest of the 43-car field is always bearing down on you.

I thought -- this is like me. Over the years, I have fine tuned my brain to be super efficient and as powerful as it can be. But the rest of me still has the same limitations -- fancy race car engine under the hood of a normal stock car. I have been thinking recently that for the first time I have more time than I have mental energy. Little errands that used to bother me like shopping are now welcome mindless tasks (as long as I can keep them mindless). This realization might even induce me to have a committed relationship and family?

Another analogy to NASCAR -- pit stops. I will just do nothing for weeks at a time. I used to think this indicated that I was a lazy person, to just take off to some exotic location every six months or so. Now with this NASCAR analogy, I realize that these might be necessary pit stops. It seems odd that it is actually faster to race like mad, then come to a complete stop for several minutes, then repeat. Wouldn't it be faster to just go slower and be easier on tires? Conserve gasoline? I guess not, not at least for NASCAR and it seems plausible that not for me either.

I think my NASCAR life has less to do with me being a sociopath and more to do with me doing high level brain tasks all of the time for my profession. But maybe the sociopath plays into fact that I have never felt guilty shirking work in some tropical location, which has actually been a boon to my productivity over the years -- a personality quirk that has actually given me a competitive advantage amongst my colleagues who are also regularly running their brains at over-capacity to the point of exhaustion. (Or maybe they're not also running their minds to exhaustion but are just smarter than me. If true, maybe my laziness has allowed me to be one of the stupidest people in my career field while still remaining competitive).

Living in the moment

I read this NY Times column and thought it was an interesting and hopefully relatable example of how (I believe) sociopaths think most of the time, in terms of compartmentalizing fear and living in the moment.  The author is describing how liberating it feels to ride a bike in busy, traffic-ridden New York because he is plagued by a vague sense of anxiety, but is rather focused and in the moment:


Natural selection has made us hypervigilant, obsessively replaying our mistakes and imagining worst-case scenarios. And the fact that we’ve eliminated almost all of the immediate threats from our environment, like leopards and Hittites, has only made us even more jittery, because we’re now constantly anticipating disasters that are never going to happen: the prowler/rapist/serial killer lurking in the closet, a pandemic of Ebola/Bird Flu/Hantavirus, the imminent fascist/socialist/zombie takeover. The disasters that do befall us are mostly slow, incremental ones that seem abstract and faraway until they suddenly blindside us, like heart disease and foreclosure. So we go about our days safer and more comfortable than human beings have been in five million years, constantly hunched and growling with a low level of fight-or-flight chemicals in our bloodstreams. My doctor assures me that this is the cause of most of our chronic back and neck problems; my dentist says nocturnal tooth-grinding became so endemic in New York after 9/11 it actually changed the shapes of people’s faces by enlarging their masseter muscles. He sells a lot of night guards.

Which is why it’s such a relief, an exhilarating joy, to break the clammy paralysis of worry and place yourself at last in real physical danger. Even though it’s the time when I am at most immediate risk, riding my bike in Manhattan traffic is also one of the only times when I am never anxious or afraid — not even when a cab door swings open right in front of me, some bluetoothed doofus strides into my path, or a dump truck’s fender drifts within an inch of my leg. At those moments fear is a low neurological priority that would only interfere with my reaction time, like a panicky manager shoved aside by competent, grim-faced engineers in a crisis. I doubt that the victims of sudden violent accidents die terrified; they’re probably extremely alert, brains gone pretty much blank while their galvanized bodies try to figure out what to do. I don’t think our minds are designed to accept that there’s no way out. Based on my own close calls, I suspect that if I am killed while biking, the state of mind in which I am likeliest to die is extreme annoyance. And at least it won’t be by drowning.
***
When I’m balanced on two thin wheels at 30 miles an hour, gauging distance, adjusting course, making hundreds of unconscious calculations every second, that idiot chatterbox in my head is kept too busy to get a word in. I’ve heard people say the same thing about rock-climbing: how it shrinks your universe to the half-inch of rock surface immediately in front of you, this crevice, that toehold. Biking is split-second fast and rock-climbing painstakingly slow, but both practices silence the noise of the mind and render self-consciousness blissfully impossible. You become the anonymous hero of that old story, Man versus the Universe. Your brain’s glad to finally have a real job to do, instead of all that trivial busywork. You are all action, no deliberation. You are forced, under pain of death, to quit all that silly ideation and pay attention. It’s meditation at gunpoint.

I’m convinced these are the conditions in which we evolved to thrive: under moderate threat of death at all times, brain and body fully integrated, senses on high alert, completely engaged with our environment. It is, if not how we’re happiest — we’re probably happiest in a hot tub with a martini and a very good naked friend — how we are most fully and electrically alive. Of course we can’t sustain this state of mind for too long. People who go through their whole lives operating on impulse tend to end up in jail. We are no longer purely animals, living only in the moment; we are the creatures who live in time, as salamanders live in fire, prisoners of memory and imagination, tortured with dread and regret. That other, extra-temporal perspective is not the whole reality of our condition. It’s more like the view from the top of the Empire State Building, of people as infinitesimal dots circulating ceaselessly through a grid. Eventually we have to descend back to street level, rejoin the milling mass and take up our lives; you lock up your bike and become hostage to the hours again. But it’s at those moments that I become briefly conscious of what I actually am — a fleeting entity stripped of ego and history in an evanescent present, like a man running in frames of celluloid, his consciousness flickering from one instant to the next.

How does the sociopath accomplish this in daily life?  I believe through extreme compartmentalizing, that actually allows him to quiet all of the mental buzz clogging up most people's neural pathways and hyperfocusing on the moment.

Sociopath - pain = no empathy?

A reader asked this very interesting question:

I learned in a psych class that living things (or mammals, at least), thanks to the magic of mirror neurons, do not distinguish signs of distress in another creature from their own distress. You mention in your one post that you have a very detached stance to pain. What if what we think of as empathy is tied directly to the perception of pain? What if sociopathy is not primarily a lack of empathy, but a greatly altered perception of pain both in oneself and in others? Would it be possible that if an empath's normal neurological responses to pain were tampered with, they would experience less empathy? Could the reverse be true for sociopaths?

I always like these sorts of explanations that somehow tie together different, seemingly unrelated aspects of sociopathy together -- e.g. so insightfully perceptive (enough to be exceptionally manipulative) but lacking empathy?  It's really an odd disorder, with a suite of traits that so consistently present amongst sociopaths and yet seem so scattershot.

One of my favorite unifying theories from a psychologist named Joseph Newman is the idea that sociopathy is largely an attentional disorder, where the sociopath is getting all the right input but is just not paying attention to them in the same way that everyone else is, so they are meaningless to him.

[One of my own pet theories is that a lot of the sociopaths traits (charm, manipulation, lying, promiscuity, chameleonism, compartmentalization, mask wearing, lack of empathy, lack of strong gender, racial, social, sexual or other identity) is largely attributable to a very weak sense of self.  I believe that all personality disorders share a distorted/abnormal sense of self, that that is essentially what makes them a "personality" disorder, and not something else.]  

I also like the one the reader suggested above -- that to the extent sociopaths do not feel things like pain the same way empaths do, the mirror neuron cues are just falling on deaf ears.  But I wonder.  A lot of sociopaths have complained that they have in fact felt something akin to empathy in isolated incidents, particularly if they happen to be feeling something similar at the same moment and happen to recognize that same emotion in others.  This seems to me to be more attentional, but I don't know.

Game theory

A reader writes about game theory:


I find that I approach life through classic game theory (even before I learned what game theory was). Everything in life is a series of pro's and con's; a constant evaluation of the better outcome. "Love" is the same way, regardless of limerence. I see the pro's and con's of being with a particular person over another person, or over being alone and choose accordingly; approaching marriage in the same fashion, of course. I am engaged, actually; she loves me, and I see no outright "con's" to being with her, I know her (by the same measure of being able to "peer into her soul" as from the blog), and I am generally happy with her presence. While I am not aware that she knows of my sociopathy (although, she is quite familiar with with my agitation towards people, preference to solitude, quiet and observant nature, etc.), I am also sure that should she label me as such, she would not cause me undue stress. That, finally, is one of the major things (a keystone "pro," if you will), is that whatever event I am weighing, I will most always choose the event likely to cause me less hassle and stress.

For me, not only is Game Theory one fashion of handling life, but the concept of compartmentalization.  As many people have commented, trying to keep everything in order (in regards to the lies, half-truths, manipulations, "games," etc.) would be exceedingly difficult.  And it would be, if the sociopath's mind operated as a normal person's.  Everything in my mind is organized sort of like folders and folder groups that you might find in, say, Windows Explorer; everything has its place.  When a situation presents itself, or I am with a certain friend(s), I simply "open" up that folder and behave accordingly.  When one's mind is organized in such a way that no thought co-mingles with others, you don't have the problem of "remembering all of the lies," because you have everything you need neatly stored away, waiting to be accessed at the right time.  This same concept of compartmentalization applies in all walks of life, whether it be love, friendships, work, etc.  Another quality of this is enabling oneself to keep track of friend circles and ensuring that none of these circles cross in any way; this can allow for you to more easily adapt to any number of given situations per friend circle: a different personality, find another lover (in addition to, or instead of, one you may already have).  I find that I am in many different circles, but almost as a ghost; I can walk in and out of these circles almost unnoticed and not missed.  I was once described by a teacher as, "a loner who is never alone."