Victoria on long-lasting change via meditation and perspective shifts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fearing the ego assault

I have a person in my life who I am helping to be able to do well on a particular standardized test. Part of doing well on this particular test requires a high level of critical/rational/logical thinking. This person struggles in a very consistent way at this type of thinking, filling in gaps with inferences and facts of his own creation -- a sort of magical thinking, really, but not a rare struggle. We two can spend a good deal of time on a question, debating until he finally sees where he went wrong. But 30 minutes later he makes the same error. At first he came up with reasons why he might be doing it. Now he doesn't bother to come up with any explanations or excuses, he's just frustrated. More than that, he's a little afraid of what it all means. The last time it happened he said, "I just wonder, have I been doing this the whole time?" It's like when you realize that you have a piece of spinach on your teeth, and now you rewind through the whole day, mortified, thinking who must have seen it and said nothing. As much as people say they don't like change, perhaps the most difficult part of deciding you were in error and changing is to acknowledge the error and the ego death that comes along with it.

Excerpts from "Art of Living", regarding the philosophy of stoic Epictetus, via Brain Pickings:

 The wisest among us appreciate the natural limits of our knowledge and have the mettle to preserve their naiveté. They understand how little all of us really know about anything. There is no such thing as conclusive, once-and-for-all knowledge. The wise do not confuse information or data, however prodigious or cleverly deployed, with comprehensive knowledge or transcendent wisdom. They say things like “Hmmm” or “Is that so!” a lot. Once you realize how little we do know, you are not so easily duped by fast-talkers, splashy gladhanders, and demagogues. Spirited curiosity is an emblem of the flourishing life.
***
Arrogance is the banal mask for cowardice; but far more important, it is the most potent impediment to the flourishing life. Clear thinking and self-importance cannot logically coexist.
***
The first steps toward wisdom are the most strenuous, because our weak and stubborn souls dread exertion (without absolute guarantee of reward) and the unfamiliar. As you progress in your efforts, your resolve is fortified and self-improvement progressively comes easier. By and by it actually becomes difficult to work counter to your own best interest.

By the steady but patient commitment to removing unsound beliefs from our souls, we become increasingly adept at seeing through our flimsy fears, our bewilderment in love, and our lack of self control. We stop trying to look good to others. One day, we contentedly realize we’ve stopped playing to the crowd.

This is maybe just the sort of thing that someone would read and say, sociopaths are not capable understanding or thinking these sorts of thoughts, and perhaps not if the particular sociopath lacks self-awareness. But doesn't it seem more likely (at least in a way) that someone with a weak sense of self would brave the ego assault that is self-introspection than someone with a rigid sense of self?

The Black Prince: Empathy and ego

I've been reading The Black Prince, by Iris Murdoch. I thought this was an interesting reflection from the protagonist on having helped out his sister, whom he does not like, but feels that he must “do what one has to do,” and how that is motivated ultimately by a self-love:

That human beings can acquire a small area of unquestioned obligations may be one of the few things that saves them: saves them from the bestiality and thoughtless night which lies only a millimeter away from the most civilized of our specimens. However if one examines closely some such case of ‘duty’, the petty achievement of some ordinary individual, it turns out to be no glorious thing, not the turning back by reason or godhead of the flood of natural evil, but simply a special operation of self-love, devised perhaps even by Nature herself who has, or she could not survive in her polycephalic creation, many different and even incompatible moods. We care absolutely about that which we can identify ourselves. A saint would identify himself with everything. Only there are, so my wise friend tells me, no saints.

And one more about ego, the nature of being "good," and the role of "morality" (or at least "duty" or "habit") in a functioning society:

The natural tendency of the human soul is towards the protection of the ego. The Niagara-force of this tendency can be readily recognized by introspection, and its results are everywhere on public show. We desire to be richer, handsomer, cleverer, stronger, more adored and more apparently good than anyone else. I say 'apparently' because the average man while he covets real wealth, normally covets only apparent good. The burden of genuine goodness is instinctively appreciated as intolerable, and a desire for it would put out of focus the other and ordinary wishes by which one lives. Of course very occasionally and for an instant even the worst of men may wish for goodness. Anyone who is an artist can feel its magnetism. I use the word 'good' here as a veil. What it veils can be known, but not further named. Most of us are saved from finding self-destruction in a chaos of brutal childish egoism, not by the magnetism of that mystery, but by what is called grandly 'duty' and more accurately 'habit'. Happy is the civilization which can breed men accustomed from infancy to regard certain at least of the ego's natural activities as unthinkable. This training, which in happy circumstances can be of life-long efficacy, is however seen to be superficial when horror breaks in: in war, in concentration camps, in the awful privacy of family and marriage.

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.

Sociopath fortune cookie

"Modesty is the art of enhancing your charm by pretending not to be aware of it."

Immune to insecurities

I am dating someone who has loads of insecurities, body image issues, career dissatisfaction, etc. The insecurities are not to the point that they're annoying, they're just there and in ways in which this person readily accepts about themselves. The whole thing is actually pretty attractive to the sadist in me. But it has also gotten me thinking about what it means to be insecure. See, I don't think I've ever been insecure. I know it sounds absurd. It’s not like I think that I am the best at everything. I am well-aware of my many failings. I guess it’s just that they don’t bother me, and I certainly don’t identify with them in this bizarre, fixated way that I often see people do.

I was talking to my friend about this, because she often suggests that I am overly secure with myself. We had the following conversation:

M.E.: I think you're the one that's really made me realize that I am basically not insecure about anything

Friend: If anything you're oblivious

M.E.: Oblivious?

Friend: To others reactions or positions which in turn insulates you and makes you immune

Very insightful, I thought. I do seem to have the ability to be targetedly oblivious to things. I know in the abstract that there are people who hate or judge me, but I probably wouldn't be able to name specific people. Is this the origin of my confidence? Is it really because I don't care what people think, or that I think they're wrong, or maybe that I just am blind to others disapproval.