Sociopath Lessons Part 2

The reason I don't upload these as a podcast format is because it seems time intensive to list them on all of the major podcast apps. But if you know a better way and especially maybe if you can help, let me know! 

For now, for just the audio of this and other Zooms: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1wyO6SUewBdCAy0gtf-v65iNoJ_Jsg9pI?usp=sharing

Confessions of a Sociopath author M.E. Thomas and Tony talk about Tony's application of Part 1 sociopath lessons in not caring what other people think. They continue in talking about how to not live in your "chicken feelings," i.e. how not to live a life primarily motivated by fear. They also talk about identity and not self-mutilating ourselves for the approval of others or because of fear about what might happen to us. 

Part 1 of this series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZtP4MVOIF8

The twitter thread referenced: https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1599453317884968961

Stonehenge and Bath

Ok! Finally we get around to England/London. Next rest of London, Paris, then Russia and Eastern Europe.

The first day in London I went to the British Museum, which is free like all other state run museums and open late on Fridays like most. It was really great -- the type of place where you round a corner and essentially run smack into the Rosetta Stone. Also, they have thieved great parts of the Parthenon from Greece.

I stayed just this one night at the Millennium Gloucester Hotel London Kensington, which was good and close to museums -- the National History Museum, Science and Victoria and Albert. I stayed there because I had to wake up at like 5:00 am (jet lag, what?) for my sunrise Stonehenge tour with Premium Tours. I was surprised how much I loved Stonehenge? That place is photogenic as hell. I could have stayed there forever. And definitely I think it made a big difference that we had the special early entry (can also be later entry) in which we got to actually go inside the stones. Don't touch! Don't kiss! Definitely don't lick!

The tour continued to Bath, where I was going to meet my first new friends! I don't know what I expected, but I was surprised at how young and tall S was after our conversations and his girl petite. They were both so fun. He said that he has relative empathy -- that is he could feel a sort of empathy if he himself has felt and/or had access to that same type of emotion himself. He is also high for fearlessness, with stories like driving and having the bonnet of the car pop open, but he doesn't freak out or even slow down too fast, just looks between the crack at the bottom and steers onto the next off ramp. He says that it is difficult to finish a thought because as he’s thinking all sorts of other parallel thoughts, like a static electronic ball that shoots off little electric bolts (what another sociopath called a chaos brain). He has olfactory issues, which is an odd crossover but a verified one. He can't tell the difference between coffee and orange smell with his eyes closed. He works with his hands and he does say that he is more prone to accidents than others in his profession. S was super sincere. He said one of the things he doesn't like in other people (maybe the root of his antisocial views) is the hypocrisy and lack of sincerity in others. They just wait to talk, he said. He also has interesting ways that he learns from mistakes (sort of learns caution or a sort of respect because he has internalized the physical harm he has experienced, but only after severe or repeated exposure to the bad consequence and he never gets around to fear) that I get into more some other time maybe. Sometimes I would chat with his girl alone and she would tell me that she feels badly for him because he has no one to talk to about any of this, that is why she was so excited to meet me. Yes, I do think it is often a little sad and hard for sociopaths to have no one to talk to about how they view the world. But her situation seemed just as bad, if not worse. It seemed odd to me that they would have many people they could talk to about any BDSM stuff they get up to, because that at least has earned a degree of acceptance in the world, but she will probably never be able to talk to anyone what it is like to love a sociopath.


Bath is nice too, probably worth the trip. It's made all out of the same pale yellow stone (Bath stone) and built basically at the same time in the same Georgian style. It's a little reminiscent of inner Paris that way with the Haussmanian architecture. Also the roman baths are very interesting, beautiful, and historically fun, and finally, this part you can lick!!! (the water has a very strong mineral taste that is a little reminiscent of blood.)

Sociopaths = scary?

Sociopaths are scary? From Quick Meme under the heading, "Next Time Someone Tells You To Be Afraid Of Sharks, Show Them This..."

Shifting perception

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

How to Manipulate People

This was a good Lifehacker article on how to manipulate people (quick read, worth reading in its entirety). The following are the headings from the article along with my thoughts on each suggestion:

• Emotion vs. Logic: Appealing to emotion rather than logic in manipulation is a little bit of a no brainer. Not only do most people respond better to emotion than logic, irrational people often best (only?) respond to fear. 

• Master Your Own Emotions: Mastering your emotions means essentially two things -- being able to divorce your emotions from what is happening externally (look at this article for helpful suggestions of how) and being able to project the right emotions in the right circumstances to create the desired illusions. 

• Be Charming and Flirt Often: I love to flirt. I flirt with everyone. I used to flirt only with people that I could see myself wanting to seduce, but then the person who first called me a sociopath famously told me that she flirts with everyone, gay or straight because everyone likes positive attention everyone wants to be seduced.

• Overcome Trust Issues and Heal Doubt: Building trust with your target is often critical, see number 2 here (does Lifehacker read this blog? or have a sociopath on staff cluing them in?)

• Conceal Evil in Altruism: This step means pretty much what it says and is super popular with celebrities, billionaires and politicians.

• What to Do If You're Discovered: In addition to backpedaling and creating doubt in your target's mind as to whether you were actually manipulating them, I also suggest starting a counter insurgency campaign against them where you are spinning the message to favor you and disfavor them (Oliver North is a good example of this) if they're an enemy, or possibly proposing some sort of alliance if they're a friend or loved one (think Skyler White in Breaking Bad). Of course the best course of action is to prophylactically insure against this by building an actual, legitimate reputation for good (at least in certain areas) for people to cross-reference. 

Also, beware the anti-seducer, for they cannot be manipulated.

Fear leads to anger

This is an interesting quote from the movie "A Single Man." In the movie it refers to the gay population, but I think it works equally well for any persecuted minority, whether an ethnic minority in Africa targeted for genocide, or people whose minds work a little bit differently. I think it's a bit of an exaggeration to say that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, but it's not much of one.

The Nazis were obviously wrong to hate the Jews. But their hating the Jews was not without a cause… But the cause wasnʼt real. The cause was imagined. The cause was FEAR.

Letʼs leave the Jews out of this for a moment and think of another minority. One that can go unnoticed if it needs to.

There are all sorts of minorities, blondes for example, but a minority is only thought of as one when it constitutes some kind of threat to the majority. A real threat or an imagined one. And therein lies the FEAR. And, if the minority is somehow invisible……the fear is even greater. And this FEAR is the reason the minority is persecuted. So, there always is a cause. And the cause is FEAR. Minorities are just people. People……like us.

Fear, after all, is our real enemy. Fear is taking over our world. Fear is being used as a tool of manipulation in our society. Itʼs how politicians peddle policy and how Madison Avenue sells us things that we donʼt need. Think about it. Fear that weʼre going to be attacked, fear that there are communists lurking around every corner, fear that some little Caribbean country that doesnʼt believe in our way of life poses a threat to us. Fear that black culture may take over the world. Fear of Elvis Presleyʼs hips.Well, maybe that one is a real fear. Fear that our bad breath might ruin our friendships… Fear of growing old and being alone. A fear that we’re useless and no one cares what we have to say.

Nothing more than feelings

I've been really busy recently and my jaw has started to ache. I grind my teeth. I have ever since I was young, but it got noticeably bad in a particularly stressful year of graduate school. The funny thing was, I didn't realize that I was particularly stressed until I felt my teeth ache. I am anal about my teeth, so of course I made an appointment with the dentist as soon as possible, who told me that it was my jaw hurting, not my teeth.  [Bruxism, of course is quite common. A dentist has suggested that 9/11 changed the face shape of the average New Yorker -- the increased grinding built up the masseter muscle, giving everyone a more square jaw appearance].  Ever since then I've used mouthguards, which shield my teeth but my muscles still get a work out when I'm stressed, like now.

Stress to me is only expressed in physical symptoms.  Without a sore jaw or finicky stomach, I wouldn't realize that I was actually experiencing stress.  Instead of thinking stressful thoughts first then having those thoughts cause the physical symptoms, I feel the physical symptoms which then indicate to me that I am stressed.  My theory is that although I am mentally fine with risky, high stakes situations, my lizard brain still responds with additional adrenaline and cortisol that takes its own toll on my body.

I was reading a Scientific American blog about anxiety and how it was not acknowledged by the Greeks as an actual disorder, then only became a purely physical illness starting with the Romans, then only recently has been seen as a primary mental affliction.  I understand that there are people who suffer from anxiety disorders, but for garden variety anxiety felt as a result of simple stress, is anxiety primarily a physical phenomenon?  A natural, but largely physical reaction, perhaps?  A poignant reminder from the part of our brain that is primarily (or only) concerned with our survival that we need to get out of harm's way sooner rather than later?

I'm interested in this topic because I have grown increasingly susceptible to the effects of anxiety over the years.  The shift is particularly dramatic given my previously almost non-existent levels of anxiety.  My friends wonder what happened to me.  And sociopaths are not supposed to be anxious.  But actually, sometimes they are.

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.

Fear of the unknown

Regarding why empaths seem so wary of sociopaths, a theory from a reader:


So I pretty much boiled down why I think empaths are afraid of sociopaths.

It's the fear of the unknown.

Let me explain.

When I was at the zoo a few years ago, I casually asked a zoo keeper why the giraffes don't choose to escape. They don't put up a fence high enough to prevent the giraffes from simply walking out of the enclosure. All there is a little ditch and a tiny wall. The zoo keeper explained to me that the reason the giraffes never leave is because they can't see what's in the ditch. Since they don't know what would happen if they tried to step over it, they choose to stay in their enclosure instead.

This is pretty good analogy for humans and death.

If God were to go “After life you get to be in heaven and it's perfect,” to everyone after they were born, people would throw themselves off of cliffs as soon as they were able to walk.
The reason people generally don't run around killing themselves is because they have no idea what happens after death.

So how does this relate to sociopaths? 

People eventually  had to come up with unspoken rules that would prevent people from hurting each other. Not because they cared about the other people, but because they didn't want to be killed themselves. They didn't want to face the unknown.

And thus we have “empathy” which is really just the fear of something that has happened to someone else either affecting you or happening to you. 

What's really scary to an empath about sociopaths is that they have no idea what they're going to do next. Their thought process is completely foreign, since empaths have always functioned with, well, empathy. 

Even if you explain how a sociopath thinks to an empath, they're still a little bit afraid. They have no idea what a sociopath will do, or maybe do to them, because they do not function under the normal silent rules humanity came up with. The sociopath's thought process is still relatively unknown to the empath. 

So for an empath, trying to understand a sociopath is kind of like the giraffe trying to see what's in the ditch. You can kind of tell what's down there, but because you don't really know what, you'd prefer to stay away.

I hope that makes sense. 

-Thoughtful empath

Empaths, see also this post for the answers to some of these questions. 

Anxiety vs. fear (part 2)

There was an interesting article in the NY Times about the difference between fear and anxiety a little while ago.  Here is how they described it:

You are taking a walk in the woods ― pleasant, invigorating, the sun shining through the leaves. Suddenly, a rattlesnake appears at your feet. You experience something at that moment. You freeze, your heart rate shoots up and you begin to sweat ― a quick, automatic sequence of physical reactions. That reaction is fear.

A week later, you are taking the same walk again. Sunshine, pleasure, but no rattlesnake.  Still, you are worried that you will encounter one. The experience of walking through the woods is fraught with worry. You are anxious.

Human anxiety is greatly amplified by our ability to imagine the future, and our place in it.

What is the difference between anxiety and fear?

Scientists generally define fear as a negative emotional state triggered by the presence of a stimulus (the snake) that has the potential to cause harm, and anxiety as a negative emotional state in which the threat is not present but anticipated. We sometimes confuse the two: When someone says he is afraid he will fail an exam or get caught stealing or cheating, he should, by the definitions above, be saying he is anxious instead.
***
The automatic nature of the activation process reflects the fact that the amygdala does its work outside of conscious awareness. We respond to danger, then only afterward realize danger is present.


Every animal (including insects and worms, as well as animals more like us) is born with the ability to detect and respond to certain kinds of danger, and to learn about things associated with danger.  In short, the capacity to fear (in the sense of detecting and responding to danger) is pretty universal among animals.  But anxiety ― an experience of uncertainty ― is a different matter. It depends on the ability to anticipate, a capacity that is also present in some other animals, but that is especially well developed in humans.  We can project ourselves into the future like no other creature.

While anxiety is defined by uncertainty, human anxiety is greatly amplified by our ability to imagine the future, and our place in it, even a future that is physically impossible.  With imagination we can ruminate over that yet to be experienced, possibly impossible scenario. We use this creative capacity to great advantage when we envision how to make our lives better, but we can just as easily put it to work in less productive ways — worrying excessively about the outcome of things. Some concern about outcomes is essential to success in meeting life’s challenges and opportunities. But at some point, most of us probably worry more than we need to.  This raises the questions: How much fear and worry is too much? How do we know when we have skipped the line from normal fear and anxiety to a disorder?


And of course the line between fear and anxiety is not always clear either.

I thought that the article made an interesting point about the human ability to predict the future.  It's odd that I have cast myself in the part of oracle in my life -- an amateur fortune teller.  I guess it's because I thought it would be powerful to know the future.  I've gotten better over the years to the point where now every time that I get burned in a prediction it's been because I've failed to take into account how truly unpredictable other human behavior can be.  The more burned I become, the more reluctant I am to stick my hand in the fire.  I can't decide whether that is a good thing or a bad thing.    

Sociopaths = the good stuff

I posted this a while ago about a study suggesting that sociopaths have excessive amounts of dopamine. Another recent study done at Vanderbilt University has linked the excess dopamine in sociopaths to a hypersensitive reward system that releases as much as four times the normal amount of dopamine in response to either a perceived gain of money upon the successful completion of a task, or to chemical stimulants.

The researchers then suggest that the overactive reward system is to blame for a sociopath's impulsive, risk seeking behavior because "[t]hese individuals appear to have such a strong draw to reward to the carrot that it overwhelms the sense of risk or concern about the stick."

Really?

Apart from this conclusion seeming like a huge stretch, a blatant attempt to try to shoehorn scientific findings into one of the "known" "universal" "traits" of a "sociopath," this just seems wrong. From personal experience, I feel like my risk-seeking behavior stems from a low fear response, or a lack of natural anxiety in potentially dangerous, traumatic, or stressful situations. If I am not afraid of something, I am probably going to take more risks, just like those children who can't feel pain so end up shoving fingers in their eyes.

A hypersensitive reward system could explain why sociopaths are allegedly sex fiends, at least compared to the rest of the population. It could also explain why you'll see them at the top of their field, professionally speaking. Sociopaths are probably contributing to society in all sorts of random ways in order to trigger an enormous amount of dopamine flooding through their brain. Risk takers, though? Maybe we are, but I don't think because of this, particularly because an earlier study at Vanderbilt showed that low amounts of dopamine were highly correlated with risk taking and drug abuse. Or maybe we have to be goldilocks-esque about this and make sure dopamine levels are just right?

Psychopaths = mentally handicapped

One researcher has found that psychopaths may be more aggressive than the average population because they do not assign meaning to the fearful faces of their victims:

In her groundbreaking work funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, [Abigail] Marsh and her colleagues have been exploring how “callous and unemotional” individuals tend to show a very specific cognitive deficit: namely, they are especially poor at recognizing, processing and responding normally to the facial expression of fear on other people’s faces (a “normal” response being ceasing an assault on the frightened person or offering aid). Curiously, their trouble in this area is not due to a problem with facial expressions in general—they do perfectly well deciphering the look of disgust, anger, happiness and so on on other people’s faces. In contrast, autistics have trouble with pretty much all facial expressions of emotion, suggesting that, for them, this generalized difficulty is meaningfully linked to their broad social disfunction. Rather, it’s only the look of fear that puzzles diagnosably antisocial people (and to a somewhat lesser extent, sadness). Thus, in a converted boathouse on Squam Lake in early July, Marsh discussed several key studies, all indicating a fear-specific facial processing deficiency in children and adults with persistent antisocial behavioral tendencies. That is to say, “behavior that violates the rights and welfare of others or breaks important normative rules.”
. . .
Marsh relayed a chilling anecdote about a colleague of hers, University College London psychologist Essi Viding, who was going through a task with a psychopathic murderer in which a series of faces with different emotional expressions were laid out before the woman. When the murderer saw the picture of the fearful face, she scratched her head and said: “I don’t know what that expression is called, but I know it’s what people look like right before I stab them.”

Interestingly, another study found that the people who can recognize fearful faces recognize them faster than any other "emotion" face. I guess that makes psychopaths literally "slow."