Self-deception

From a reader:

I’m not a sociopath, but I’m sure the sentiments expressed here can be appreciated by those who are. Somewhat recently, I came to a point of reflection in my life, and what I saw in the mirror wasn't at all what I'd thought it to be when I was younger. I'd always believed myself to be a good person--honest to a fault, and happily willing to help others in need. But after a few years of struggle, I came to realize that I was lying to myself so I could lie to others without feeling guilty. I helped others to help myself maintain my own sense of self worth through the false image I'd created.

This realization was sparked by a significant breakup that left me feeling betrayed and vulnerable, which caused my true colors to surface. I sabotaged my ex's new relationship with half-truths spoken in a heart-felt manner to her boyfriend, and I worked tirelessly to position myself in a spot where he couldn't be rid of me without coming off as an unreasonable asshole. After nearly two years of that delicate balancing act, I reached a point where I had my ex doing household chores for me at no cost, more or less whenever I requested it. I did it for the sense of power it gave me, and I relished the thought of the pain it must be causing the father of her child. Every time she came over, a large fight between them would, and still does, break out, and I loved every minute of it. After a while, he refused to hang out with me, saying that being around me made him nauseous. After further probing my ex, I found out he was having nightmares about me. It was enthralling, but even while I was caught up in the intoxication of revenge, I went through a difficult internal struggle trying to make sense of the conflict between who I believed myself to be and how much I enjoyed what I was doing.

In the end, I was forced to accept the facts. I liked hurting him. I liked controlling her. I loved the thought of her staying in a dead-end relationship, never finding satisfaction. I liked having my things done for me for free. It wasn't about righting wrongs, nor was it about friendship. The glee I felt at the thought of it all wasn't something I could just sweep under the rug. But acceptance wasn't easy to come by, because I'd always believed very strongly in the ideas of right and wrong. It was the basis of the hatred I came to realize that I felt for my ex and her boyfriend, and without those very morals which would call my actions into question, I had no way to justify what I was doing. Freedom from that conflict required a paradigm shift in my perceptions of me and the world at large.

But accepting these parts of me, and realizing that they needed no justification, caused a dramatic shift in my life. I'm calmer, more laid back, and I'm easier to get along with. I'm more prone to compromise, and little things don't bother me so much. It's hard to believe that acceptance of such dark aspects of my personality could bring me so much peace, but with it has come such a great release of anger, toward both myself and others, that I'm left feeling like I'm on a permanent vacation. When I cause pain to those who have harmed me, or symbolically trade nic-nacs for bars of solid gold, I no longer feel a sense of glee, nor am I wracked with guilt about it. I simply look at the world, and the phrase which best describes what I feel is, "All is as it should be." That feeling has brought with it many significant benefits in nearly every aspect of my life, from career all the way to romance. And to this day, my chores are still done for me by the woman who inadvertently freed me from myself. I can't imagine going back to that life of self-delusion. I only wish that everyone could learn to shed their false skins, so they could find out what lies inside and learn to truly love it. The world would be a much happier place.

Enough about religion

A reader asks about my religious faith:

Good evening ME,

Thank you for an interesting blog.

Lately you have been writing quite a bit about your religion. I am curious , do you REALLY believe in any of your religion? One of the basic traits of sociopaths is, according to Hare and others, “free from delusions” and I dare say that anyone who is not delusional cannot believe in any religion since they by definition require you to believe something that clearly cannot be true (mostly because there never is any real evidence at all, just books and pastors but also because if you look at any religion with a clear mind it is quite obvious that people believe it because others have told them to believe it in combination with that reality(there is no heaven etc. ) is unbearable for empaths).

I am not saying there cannot be grains of truths and/or wisdom in any religion but the basic tenets cannot an are not true. Do you see this?

Yeah, I realize that a lot of people don't understand, or don't like, or don't like reading about how I relate to religion. And I'm sorry if it seemed like I over-posted about it before. I don't mean to inundate readers with anything they'd rather not hear about. I started posting more about religion when the book came out because I was no longer as worried about hiding certain aspects of myself from being used to identify me. Before that, I intentionally kept most of what I posted generic, both for the identity purposes and so people who shared those traits could project their own experiences onto what I wrote to be able to relate better. After doing that for several years, I thought that it might be interesting to change it up by giving people a more fleshed out portrayal of someone who has been diagnosed with this disorder. I know some of you didn't like that change, just like someone of you didn't like any of the other changes that I've made or things that I've done in the public eye. But I don't really know what I'm doing or have a master plan. I just try things out and sometimes they work ok and sometimes they are disasters.

But yeah, after the book came out I started talking more about things I had been quiet about before: being female, more about being in my particular profession, and more about some of my other specific formative life experiences.  Because I do feel like a lot of the way I think and present to the world is influenced by these things: growing up in a big, smart, (a little trashy) Mormon family; being female; studying and practicing law; being American and a Californian; being a classically-trained musician; etc. I don't think those things necessarily have much or anything to do with sociopathy, but they do have something to do with the sorts of choices I make in how I live my life. And I realize that a lot of people (most?) are not interested in me as a person, and I realize a lot of you believe that I am a narcissist for various reasons (maybe even narcissistic personality disorder? which I definitely show signs of), including that I talk about myself a lot (and use the word I and me a lot and seem delusional, or as my friend puts it, like a megalomaniac). But thanks everyone for your feedback and I hope to do better. But also sometimes I wrote posts more for niche audiences (or at least hope to), because although I understand that not everyone is interested in certain topics or certain aspects about me, I think others are? Maybe other Mormons, other musicians, other INTJs, or other people who have been diagnosed as having Asperger's (as my most recent therapist suggested, funnily enough). And often I just use this blog as sort of a journaling project to write about the things that are on my mind, not knowing whether they will appeal to outside audience or not. So feel free to skip the posts you find boring or inapplicable, and hopefully we'll pick up with something more to your liking in a later post.

But here is what I replied to this reader:

This is an interesting question. First, I think that everyone suffers from delusions because we cannot correctly perceive or understand reality. So when they say free from delusions, I think they are largely making the distinction that sociopaths do not suffer from psychosis. There may also be a small distinction between other personality disorders like narcissism, which seem to be a little more out of touch with reality than sociopathy manages to be?

In response to religion being delusional, we are always being delusional in some unknown way. We used to believe that homosexuality was unnatural and a mental illness. We used to bleed people. We used to think the world was flat. I do not flatter myself that I would have been immune to any of those delusions had I lived in those times and with that knowledge. I'm aware that the things we don't know vastly exceed the things we do know. So believing, perhaps delusionally, in religion is not a problem for me.

If anything, it has helped me to manage having a personality disorder. For instance, although I don't really feel like I am any particular person or have a strong sense of self, my religion teaches me that I am, I have a soul, and so does everyone else, and our main job in life is to become more perfectly who we were meant to become and to help others to do the same. My religion teaches me that just because I have done bad things does not mean that I am a bad person who is incapable of ever changing or doing good things (or my dad, or anyone else who has hurt me in the past). My religion teaches me that my brain and other physical defects can distort how I see the world, who I believe myself to be, and how I act in a way that is not really "me", and I can do things to minimize those effects and (eventually) become free from those. My religion also teaches me rules of morality are not determined by consensus and that I shouldn't worry about the judgment of other people so much as the judgment of a more perfect arbiter, so I try to focus on the big stuff, like achieving enlightenment, and not necessarily on the small bad stuff that currently happens to be most controversial in the world. My religion teaches me that although I can change, I have been given certain gifts that are essential to humanity, that no one is trash or sans value, and that all of us have a specific role to fulfill as part of the body of Christ. I'm sure some or all of this sounds ridiculous, but the net effects of believing it are good for me, and so I (like everyone else in this world?) maintain certain beliefs that are good for me that may otherwise seem entirely specious.

"if free will didn't exist we'd still be better off believing in it."
— M.E. (@sociopathworld) April 11, 2014

Sorry for all of the recycled posts. I'm on vacation.

Also, this Brene Brown video on returning to religion as a researcher.

Fictional sociopaths: Smerdyakov?

For some reason I found this to be so funny. From a reader:

I am 70 years old. I posted to the forum on your website but got a very nasty response from the denizens there. I thought maybe it was because saying I looked forward to finding a community of like minded people was a faux pas. But you say the same thing so I guess it was alright. 

I think I'm a sociopath/psychopath but I am different from you in some ways. You describe yourself as a chameleon in who you are around different people. I have been a different person at different times and places in my life but my identity has been driven primarily by fantasy. When I was 13, I identified with Smerdyakov in The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky. Since he killed himself at the end of the novel, I decided to kill myself. But I didn't succeed and ended up in a mental hospital instead. While my parents were finding the right place for me and I was getting interviewed, I felt my fantasy shifting from Smerdyakov to just a suicidal mental patient. I saw myself as the director and author of a play in which I was also the star. It seemed everyone acted accorded to the role I assigned him/her. I liked that. I was in the nut house for about two years. At some point, I read about teenaged "thrill killers" and decided I wanted to be one. So I selected a victim who was convenient and tried to kill her. I had nothing against this girl, a childhood friend and neighbor, actually. I hit her over  the head with a heavy,  blunt object. She got away and, luckily for me, I was already a mental patient so I didn't go to jail. I just went through my adolescence in the hospital and was discharged around the age of 15, finished high school and went through college and managed to have a pretty normal life since then. 

I discovered I was a sexual masochist, was adventurist, worked in offices, dropped out to be a hippy, joined a cult (Maharaj Ji), co-founded The Eulenspiegel Society, S/M liberation, etc. At 70, I'm in a stable relationship, 24 years. I'm on Social Security and am pretty mellow and laid-back in my old age. I'm pretty happy about the life I led, I don't feel guilty about much of anything although I realize some of the things I did were pretty shitty. I don't know. Blame it on the old amygdala. 

Hilarious, Smerdyakov really? And why is the Brothers Karamazov so popular with sociopaths?

The truth, the whole truth, and maybe some other stuff

An IM conversation with a friend about the nature of the blog.

Friend: [after many questions about the blog] Does it disturb you that I am reading your blog now? And commenting in real time? If so, I will stop.

M.E.: No it’s fine, if you’re interested, I’m interested.

Friend: All this stuff is very self-aggrandizing, but it seems consistent with your analysis of sociopaths, which I think you should address somewhere because I bet it is a major critique of clinicians.

M.E.: What do you mean?

Friend: The generalizations, the pronouncements about tendencies, reasons, etc., they are dubious, and so clinicians must be like, ugh, I dont think so. But the point is that sociopaths are nuts.

M.E.: Yeah, I can see that. I write so self-assuredly, answering people’s questions as if I have all of the answers and the clinicians must be thinking that I’m deluded or just plain wrong. But you’re right, that’s part of the portrayal, I think. Everything is just my point of view. This is how I see things, and if my opinions are deluded, they are deluded in an interesting way, I hope.

Friend: Right.

M.E.: I'm not trying to go for balanced info, I'm just talking out of my ass basically.

Friend: Yeah, I think that is the best rebuttal. You never really sell yourself as a scientist or whatever. Honestly this makes me question psychological diagnoses in general.

M.E.: Why? By the way, I am too, they seem sketchy. But then they are better than thinking we are all the same.

Friend: I don’t know, they seem like a random collection of symptoms.

M.E.: Right, it's not clear to me what being a sociopath really means, e.g. whether it's just a personality type, or caused by low fear response or shallow emotions or whatever, what the boundaries are, the outer limits, the root causes. That's why it would be impossible for me to give a whole and accurate account of what a sociopath is. I can just write about what it feels like to me.

Friend: Yeah.