M.E. and Victoria on Killing Eve Finale

 Confessions of a Sociopath author M.E. Thomas and Victoria (see video links below) and Victoria's husband Victor talk about identity, diversity/equity/inclusion workshops, and what the finale of Killing Eve got right and wrong about psychopath portrayals.

https://youtu.be/oYmX9sOvA2U 

More Victoria:

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

Part 5 of this series: https://youtu.be/Is_s0fvEfp4

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

Lukav the Gay Biracial Psychopath

 It's been a while since I recorded this, so sorry the description is not more detailed!

Arya and her ex-girlfriend Frances re her BPD diagnosis

Hello friends! Sorry for the delay on this, I had to do some editing, which I'm bad at. Arya's ex Frances tells Arya that she's been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. We talk to Frances about her diagnosis, her disorder, and her experience with both in the world and in her relationships, including her experience that a lot of people view her diagnosis negatively and tell Frances that she doesn't actually have a personality disorder.

One analogy I thought about with regard to Frances and BPD in general is that if all personality disorders have issues with their personality and sense of identity/self, maybe one way to view them is in terms of how connected they are to their identity. For instance, psychopaths seem very disconnected from their identity. I came up with the analogy of a being pulled behind a motorboat in an inner tube (like I used to do when I was young). The boat is your identity. If you're way behind the boat, like 50 feet back, what the boat does hardly affects you at all, and for psychopaths if someone says something negative about their identity they rarely care because they're so disconnected. Other personality disorders seem more connected to their identity, which also means they're more vulnerable. I think of BPD as being like hanging off the back of the boat, where they're constantly being whipped around, but they're not close enough to actually be in the driver's seat, where people without personality disorders are. 

Arya and I had just been listening to a webinar on criminal sentencing and BPD right before Frances told us about her diagnosis (Arya had no idea before). We had been talking about how terrible BPD sounds like it is for the sufferer, and that we couldn't imagine living like that and no wonder the suicide rate is so high. But also I'm glad that they at least have established treatments. Although I have heard from psychopaths that the same therapies styles have helped psychopaths, so maybe the personality disorders have more in common than meets the eye. 

A girl has no name

What happens to people with personality disorders to make them the way they are? Speaking from personal experience, but also saying something that can easily generalize much more broadly, there is a genetic component but it is also triggered. When you are little, instead of developing a sense of your own identity, you learn to think of yourself as a cipher. You do it because there is no advantage to you in being a particular someone (much less the particular person you are), and every advantage in being whatever the situation calls for, in blending in with the background, in being the strings that pull other people rather than being a person yourself. Kierkegaard speaks of something similar:

For every man is primitively planned to be a self, appointed to become oneself; and while it is true that every self as such is angular, the logical consequence of this merely is that it has to be polished, not that it has to be ground smooth, not that for fear of men it has to give up entirely being itself, nor even that for fear of men it dare not be itself in its essential accidentality (which precisely is what should not be ground away), by which in fine it is itself. 

***

[But when the sense of self is lost] he may nevertheless (although most commonly it becomes manifest) be perfectly well able to live on, to be a man, as it seems, to occupy himself with temporal things, get married, beget children, win honor and esteem -- and perhaps no one notices that in a deeper sense he lacks a self. About such a thing as that not much fuss is made in the world; for a self is the thing the world is least apt to inquire about, and the thing of all things the most dangerous for a man to let people notice that he has it. The greatest danger, that of losing one's own self, may pass off as quietly as if it were nothing; every other loss, that of an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc., is sure to be noticed.

***

But while one sort of despair plunges wildly into the infinite and loses itself, a second sort permits itself as it were to be defrauded by "the others." By seeing the multitude of men about it, by getting engaged in all sorts of worldly affairs, by becoming wise about how things go in this world, such a man forgets himself, forgets what his name is (in the divine understanding of it), does not dare to believe in himself, finds it too venturesome a thing to be himself, far easier and safer to be like the others, to become an imitation, a number, a cipher in the crowd.

So a personality disordered person might lose their sense of self, but it can actually be as empowering as it is tragic. Without a self, there isn't the same potential for ego hurt -- we no longer live a life motivated largely by fear. The most vulnerable and valuable part of us has already died. What is left is a cipher, a thing that can take the form and shape of whatever is most convenient in the moment.

GAME OF THRONES SPOILER ALERT

So it's with interest that I wonder where Game of Thrones is going with the Arya plot line. The quick summary is that she is a noble born girl hell bent on revenge for the death of her parents. She's become an accomplished killer, but has also gotten caught up in this sort of cult in which she is being asked to become "no one" -- to leave her old identity behind and instead have the capability of wearing any number of masks and appearing like any number of different people, a lethal assassin. Repeatedly she is asked what her name is, and repeatedly she must answer "a girl has no name" as part of her further depersonalization.

In the books, regarding Arya it says "She could feel the hole inside of her where her heart had been" and "She would be no one if that is what it took. No one had no holes inside of her."

This video explains the psychological changes she undergoes, and how she can hardly function like a person because she cannot trust, all she knows is killing and survival.

Integrity

Along the same lines as the last post, from Eleanor Roosevelt, via Brain Pickings:

We need imagination and integrity, courage and a high heart. We need to fan the spark of conviction, which may again inspire the world as we did with our new idea of the dignity and the worth of free men. But first we must learn to cast out fear. People who “view with alarm” never build anything
***
It is becoming increasingly difficult for the individual to remember that he is himself a unique human being, and that unless he keeps the sharp edges of his personality and the hard core of his integrity intact he will have lost not only all that makes him valuable to himself but all that makes him of value to anyone or anything else.
***
Look around you at the major improvements in your life, in your world. Each of them grew out of an individual conviction and an individual ability to act upon that conviction.

Christianity has a concept of the body of Christ, and each member with its own distinct and essential function:

12 For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body: so also is Christ.

 13 For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body, whether we be Jews or Gentiles, whether we be bond or free; and have been all made to drink into one Spirit.

 14 For the body is not one member, but many.

 15 If the foot shall say, Because I am not the hand, I am not of the body; is it therefore not of the body?

 16 And if the ear shall say, Because I am not the eye, I am not of the body; is it therefore not of the body?

 17 If the whole body were an eye, where were the hearing? If the whole were hearing, where were the smelling?

 18 But now hath God set the members every one of them in the body, as it hath pleased him.

 19 And if they were all one member, where were the body?

 20 But now are they many members, yet but one body.

 21 And the eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee: nor again the head to the feet, I have no need of you.

 22 Nay, much more those members of the body, which seem to be more feeble, are necessary:

 23 And those members of the body, which we think to be less honourable, upon these we bestow more abundant honour; and our uncomely parts have more abundant comeliness.

 24 For our comely parts have no need: but God hath tempered the body together, having given more abundant honour to that part which lacked:

 25 That there should be no schism in the body; but that the members should have the same care one for another.

 26 And whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it; or one member be honoured, all the members rejoice with it.

Some people are obviously the liver and the anus of the body of Christ, but the suggestion is that they are no less worthy or honorable than any other part. Do Christians really believe this about their fellow men?

What's you vs. the disorder?

I've heard a lot of explanations for why despite being disordered, there's still something beyond that worthy of moral condemnation. Let me unpack that a little more -- a lot of people will acknowledge that my brain has certain deficits (e.g. empathy, recognition of my own emotional states, etc.), deficits that I never asked to have (i.e. born or acquired/developing by the time I was an infant or toddler). But despite acknowledging that is true, there is something about me that is still morally abhorrent to them. So since they feel that way, they often try to come up with logical reasons to justify that feeling. I've heard a lot of variations on the theme, to list just a few: (1) I still have the power to choose, so I should (or at least could theoretically) just choose to go against all of my hardwiring, 100% of the time,  just by sheer strength of willpower (just like gay people can can choose to go against their hardwiring and act straight), (2) everybody has brain problems and we can't allow people a "get out of jail free" card for their brain issues otherwise no one would ever try to surmount their brain problems and society would collapse (although this one doesn't explain why the moral animus, i.e. why I am morally culpable, just that people think I should be economically responsible for the harm/consequences of my actions), (3) I was created evil or am some sort of devil that is inherently morally wrong. But actually the one that bothered me most at the time that I first heard it, perhaps because it was in part used to justify some very bad behavior towards me, was "it's not the things you've done, it's the way you feel about them." To this person, I had not done anything truly objectionable, it was more my lack of guilt about having done them. They said, it's not your disorder that is a problem, it's your attitude about it. I never did reply, it wouldn't have mattered at that point, but internally I yelled -- the disorder is the attitude.  

I thought about this again while watching the movie Still Alice, about someone with early onset Alzheimer's. She gives a speech about what her experience of that disorder is that I thought was remarkably like living with anything that is both part of you, and not really -- where the lines of what is you and what is the disorder blur, particularly in the minds of other people:

　 The poet Elizabeth Bishop once wrote: 

　　 The art of losing isn’t hard to master. So many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their lost is no disaster. 

　　 I am not a poet. I am a person living with early onset Alzheimer’s, and as that person I find myself learning the art of losing every day. Losing my bearings, losing objects, losing sleep, but mostly losing memories. 

　　 ***

　　 All my life, I’ve accumulated memories; they’ve become in a way my most precious possessions. The night I met my husband, the first time I held my textbook in my hands, having children, making friends, traveling the world. Everything I accumulated in life, everything I worked so hard for, now all that is being ripped away. As you can imagine, or as you know, this is hell, but it gets worse. 

　　 Who can take us seriously when we are so far from who we once were? Our strange behavior and fumbled sentences change other’s perceptions of us and our perceptions of ourselves. We become ridiculous, incapable, comic, but this is not who we are, this is our disease. And like any disease, it has a cause, it has a progression, and it could have a cure. 

　　 My greatest wish is that my children, our children, the next generation do not have to face what I am facing. But for the time being, I’m still alive, I know I’m alive. I have people I love dearly, I have things I want to do with my life. I rail against myself for not being able to remember things. But I still have moments in the day of pure happiness and joy. And please do not think that I am suffering, I am not suffering. I am struggling, struggling to be a part of things, to stay connected to who I once was. 

　　 So living in the moment I tell myself. 

　　 It’s really all I can do. Live in the moment, and not beat myself up too much, and, and not beat myself up too much for mastering the art of losing. 

It's an interesting thought -- if something has a "cure" or is "treatable" or at least alterable, does that mean it's never "you"? 

Restoring from back-up

A therapist reader wrote, among other things, this observation:

"I believe sociopathy, like any other incapacity, can be improved upon by a relentless search for truth and love through an acceptance that good and evil powers drive our lives from a deep spiritual level. We need to get used to spotting which is which and going for the good one every time. That always yields healing and always leads to happiness for us and those we influence. If we keep doing these good things, they grow in us and it gets easier. Peace, happiness and identity just roll in."

My response:

I do think that everybody has an identity, a core identity that came with us from birth and is written into our genes and would have expressed itself much the same no matter where in the multiverse "we" currently are. That identity is never rooted in any sort of evil, never corrupted by this society and its well-meaning or malicious attempts to mold people. Everyone is like a computer that has a backup version stored somewhere, not corrupted viruses or user error or anything else. And if you can just get back to that backup version and restore the harddrive to that, no more virus, no more sociopathy, no more of any type of personality disorder.

What do people think about that analogy?

Whole vs. wholesome

It's interesting to me that the word whole can mean such different things than wholesome. Wholeness is being exactly all of whatever one is. Wholesome has come to mean good, ethical, moral, etc. I think it's fair to say that society has a general preference, which is that it would rather people be wholesome than whole.

I was reading again a series of articles about Parker Palmer, articles that I know I had read before not more than 6 months or a year ago, but now that I've graduated to every other week therapy, I know exactly what he is talking about.

First, about the conflict between what society wants and what is best for the individual (to be one's true self, whole and complete and in the form that is the most true expression of one's "soul", whatever that means exactly):

For “it” is the objective, ontological reality of selfhood that keeps us from reducing ourselves, or each other, to biological mechanisms, psychological projections, sociological constructs, or raw material to be manufactured into whatever society needs — diminishments of our humanity that constantly threaten the quality of our lives.

(See above link for more on how we know that each person has a unique identity/soul.)

Why do we abandon our inborn identity in favor of a construct, made by society, and our parents, and friend, and ourselves and any other person who has ever had expectations of us to be or do a particular thing?

As teenagers and young adults, we learned that self-knowledge counts for little on the road to workplace success. What counts is the “objective” knowledge that empowers us to manipulate the world. Ethics, taught in this context, becomes one more arm’s-length study of great thinkers and their thoughts, one more exercise in data collection that fails to inform our hearts.

I value ethical standards, of course. But in a culture like ours — which devalues or dismisses the reality and power of the inner life — ethics too often becomes an external code of conduct, an objective set of rules we are told to follow, a moral exoskeleton we put on hoping to prop ourselves up. The problem with exoskeletons is simple: we can slip them off as easily as we can don them.

[…]

When we understand integrity for what it is, we stop obsessing over codes of conduct and embark on the more demanding journey toward being whole. 

Palmer tells of his own experience with this:

I lined up the loftiest ideals I could find and set out to achieve them. The results were rarely admirable, often laughable, and sometimes grotesque… I had simply found a “noble” way to live a life that was not my own, a life spent imitating heroes instead of listening to my heart.

[…]

My youthful understanding of “Let your life speak” led me to conjure up the highest values I could imagine and then try to conform my life to them whether they were mine or not. If that sounds like what we are supposed to do with values, it is because that is what we are too often taught. There is a simplistic brand of moralism among us that wants to reduce the ethical life to making a list, checking it twice — against the index in some best-selling book of virtues, perhaps — and then trying very hard to be not naughty but nice.

There may be moments in life when we are so unformed that we need to use values like an exoskeleton to keep us from collapsing. But something is very wrong if such moments recur often in adulthood. Trying to live someone else’s life, or to live by an abstract norm, will invariably fail — and may even do great damage.

What is the damage in this?

Afraid that our inner light will be extinguished or our inner darkness exposed, we hide our true identities from each other. In the process, we become separated from our own souls. We end up living divided lives, so far removed from the truth we hold within that we cannot know the “integrity that comes from being what you are.”
***
Here is the ultimate irony of the divided life: live behind a wall long enough, and the true self you tried to hide from the world disappears from your own view! The wall itself and the world outside it become all that you know. Eventually, you even forget that the wall is there — and that hidden behind it is someone called “you.”

How an external standard of behavior, no matter how "ethical" or "good" is not a longterm, stable solution (substitute "vocation" for any other externally imposed restriction on behavior or self-expression):

If the self seeks not pathology but wholeness, as I believe it does, then the willful pursuit of vocation is an act of violence toward ourselves — violence in the name of a vision that, however lofty, is forced on the self from without rather than grown from within. True self, when violated, will always resist us, sometimes at great cost, holding our lives in check until we honor its truth. Vocation does not come from willfulness. It comes from listening. I must listen to my life and try to understand what it is truly about — quite apart from what I would like it to be about — or my life will never represent anything real in the world, no matter how earnest my intentions.

What is the solution?

Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you. Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent.

Do this even at the cost of ruffling feathers, of not conforming to what society demands, of being persecuted and hated for who you are, yes -- and speaking form experience, there really is no other viable choice.  

Probably puberty

I've been trying to get to some of my very old backlog of emails from almost two years ago. It's interesting because most people no longer care about whatever they wrote me about (e.g. my sociopath boy/girlfriend/boss/ex/parent/etc.) Some of the most interesting replies, however, are coming from people who wondered if they weren't a little sociopathic themselves. (By the way, I have stopped opining myself on this question from people -- I don't feel like I'm anywhere near a credible source, but I realize that most people who ask me do not have access to professional psychological help so I figure we can try to help a little by crowdsourcing our experiences. I know some of you hate those posts. Sorry, but as long as I think it helps people to figure things out even just a little bit, I'll probably keep posting them, as it is literally the least I could do. Compromise? You can skip reading them and I promise I won't have my feelings hurt?)

Probably not surprising to most, there's a good portion of these am-I-a-sociopath people that no longer wonder because they no longer experience those tendencies. To put it perhaps too broadly, it was just phase. I actually have been enjoying hearing back from these people because I think it helps put things in perspective for those people who are currently where they were almost two years ago.

For example, from a reader in answer to my question if he would still like a substantive reply from me:

Haha no it's all good. Long time passed, lessons learned. To be honest, I just wanted to be different and the label of sociopath was a good excuse at the time. I realized that I'm not a sociopath, I'm simply amazed by the sociopathic type. I learned that I'm fixated with welcoming the unknown. I find a melancholic beauty in things considered taboo, immoral, dark, forbidden and sadistic (such as death and dying). Even though a sum of people consider me to be a source of emotional comfort (I get really deep really fast and find out things, that some people tell me they don't tell people), I enjoy watching people suffer in almost anyway possible but! It tends to be a win win thing. so what I'm doing isn't considered wrong even though sometimes I do question my own motives but! You don't need to be a sociopath to feel comforted by death. But thank you kindly for replying haha I'm a little surprised that you did

PS. I'm in the process of acquiring a degree in psychology (feel free to tell me to fuck off, feel free to not reply) but if I ever have to write a paper on sociopaths, mind if I send you some non-relative to this conversation questions?

PPS. It probably was puberty.

Good luck to all of you out there trying to figure it out. 

Graduating to every other week therapy

I've never been to summer camp. The closest I got to the experience was sixth grade camp, when as an 11 year old I went up to the mountains (snow! cold!) with all of my classmates for a week. I still have so many vivid memories of it. Everything I know about recognizing constellations I learned there, camp songs, a love/hate relationship to the hot dog, making snow survival shelters (we surely would have died if actually required to live in ours) and what seemed to be the startling amount of trust and freedom I enjoyed in leaving my family and any real responsible adult supervision and running amok in the mountains with a 15 to 1 ratio of camp counselors (barely more than children themselves) to children, and with knives and other sharp tools. Even though it was just a week, I came back from camp a changed person. Not to say that the person I was before was bad or even that I needed to change in that particular way in order to mature. Nor to say that the person I changed into was any less me than the person before. It's hard to describe the sensation, but whatever it was I was ok with it because for whatever reason I still recognized the person I became.

I recently graduated from every week therapy to every other week therapy. The change was precipitated by me reaching and maintaining a certain level of awareness and understanding about myself, other people, and the world. I feel the difference, but I also don't feel that different. I recognize who I am. I just feel more proficient, like if I had always been only a music sight reader and then finally learned how to play by ear, or vice versa. And naturally I understand the world in a more fuller and richer way, simply because now I engage with it in more ways than I did previously. Everyone has a blindspot. That was always my special talent to know growing up. Now I know better my own.

The most interesting development has been my more nuanced view of self. How is it that I am the same person I was as a too-aggressive child, a manipulative teenager, a scheming young adult, a risk-taking 30 something, and now someone who has graduated to every other week therapy. But even odder to realize is that during the periods that I was "truest" to "myself", those were when I was most engaged and satisfied by life, no matter my financial situation or family situation or anything else that may have been weighing me down in the world at large. It turned out it wasn't the fact that I was born/made a sociopath that caused most of my problems. It was actually my ill-informed adaptations to the world that I had picked up along the way that made my heart shrink and blacken. Some of you will understand what I mean and I apologize for not being able to explain better, but it was the societal emphasis and rewards based almost solely on appearances, end results, and bottom lines that created all of the wrong incentives -- versus a focus on the process over the outcome and learning through making mistakes = ok and understanding that society will (and must) adapt to you sometimes, it can't always be you adapting to it, and how to know when is when and what is what. Self-awareness about my sociopathic tendencies didn't make me better, it made me worse as I came to internalize how unpalatable that was in society. That's when my behavior became so aggressive, passive, hollow, desperate, and impotent. That's when I started wearing masks basically all of the time. Sayonara to my sense of self. I may have hurt others a little less but it was accomplished by hurting myself much more. Because I could always fit square pegs into round holes, even if it got a little ugly and I got dirty doing it. And it felt like that was the solution -- that was what was being asked of me as part of my faustian deal to make things go down easier for me, to avoid having to deal with any negativity or fall out based on anyone's disapproval.

But now I wonder, what to say to everyone? How do I respond to people who email me? How can I communicate this adequately to others so that they won't make the same mistake -- won't wait until there are decades of barnacles of garbage encrusting them, until they finally cease being recognizable to themselves, before they realize that who they are is not a problem that needs fixing. I want my little relatives to know this, you all, anyone who also will wonder about the meaning of the lyrics to Landslide or wonder what does it feel like to keep living (and most paradoxically keep changing) after you feel like you've finally discovered who you really are. To know how to resonate with this life, both so maddeningly static and so dynamic. And to learn what one must never, never sacrifice, even just to get by, even if it seems like that is what is being required of you to do. 

The self-violence of conscience

This ("Against Self-Criticism") was an interesting Adam Phillips piece in the London Review of Books about the harm that conscience often causes in the bearer due to self-judgment. Excerpts:

Lacan said that there was surely something ironic about Christ’s injunction to love thy neighbour as thyself – because actually, of course, people hate themselves. Or you could say that, given the way people treat one another, perhaps they had always loved their neighbours in the way they loved themselves: that is, with a good deal of cruelty and disregard. 
***
‘The loathing which should drive [Hamlet] on to revenge,’ Freud writes, ‘is replaced in him by self-reproaches, by scruples of conscience, which remind him that he himself is literally no better than the sinner whom he is to punish.’ Hamlet, in Freud’s view, turns the murderous aggression he feels towards Claudius against himself: conscience is the consequence of uncompleted revenge. Originally there were other people we wanted to murder but this was too dangerous, so we murder ourselves through self-reproach, and we murder ourselves to punish ourselves for having such murderous thoughts. Freud uses Hamlet to say that conscience is a form of character assassination, the character assassination of everyday life, whereby we continually, if unconsciously, mutilate and deform our own character. So unrelenting is this internal violence that we have no idea what we’d be like without it. We know almost nothing about ourselves because we judge ourselves before we have a chance to see ourselves.

Freud is showing us how conscience obscures self-knowledge, intimating indeed that this may be its primary function: when we judge the self it can’t be known; guilt hides it in the guise of exposing it. This allows us to think that it is complicitous not to stand up to the internal tyranny of what is only one part – a small but loud part – of the self. So frightened are we by the super-ego that we identify with it: we speak on its behalf to avoid antagonising it (complicity is delegated bullying). 

Like a malign parent it harms in the guise of protecting; it exploits in the guise of providing good guidance. In the name of health and safety it creates a life of terror and self-estrangement. There is a great difference between not doing something out of fear of punishment, and not doing something because one believes it is wrong. Guilt isn’t necessarily a good clue as to what one values; it is only a good clue about what (or whom) one fears. Not doing something because one will feel guilty if one does it is not necessarily a good reason not to do it. Morality born of intimidation is immoral. 
***
Just as the overprotected child believes that the world must be very dangerous and he must be very weak if he requires so much protection (and the parents must be very strong if they are able to protect him from all this), so we have been terrorised by all this censorship and judgment into believing that we are radically dangerous to ourselves and others.
***
The first quarto of Hamlet has, ‘Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,’ while the second quarto has, ‘Thus conscience does make cowards.’ If conscience makes cowards of us all, then we’re all in the same boat; this is just the way it is. If conscience makes cowards we can more easily wonder what else it might be able to make. Either way, and they’re clearly different, conscience makes something of us: it is a maker, if not of selves, then of something about selves; it is an internal artist, of a kind. Freud says that the super-ego is something we make; it in turn makes something of us, turns us into a certain kind of person (just as, say, Frankenstein’s monster turns Frankenstein into something that he wasn’t before he made the monster). The super-ego casts us as certain kinds of character; it, as it were, tells us who we really are; it is an essentialist; it claims to know us in a way that no one else, including ourselves, can ever do. And, like a mad god, it is omniscient: it behaves as if it can predict the future by claiming to know the consequences of our actions – when we know, in a more imaginative part of ourselves, that most actions are morally equivocal, and change over time in our estimation. (No apparently self-destructive act is ever only self-destructive, no good is purely and simply that.) Self-criticism is an unforbidden pleasure: we seem to relish the way it makes us suffer. Unforbidden pleasures are the pleasures we don’t particularly want to think about: we just implicitly take it for granted that each day will bring its necessary quotient of self-disappointment, that every day we will fail to be as good as we should be; but without our being given the resources, the language, to wonder who or what is setting the pace, or where these rather punishing standards come from. How can we find out what we think of all this when conscience never lets go?

I know plenty of people who have this relationship with their consciences. It's kind of sad but more disturbing.

And finally a fascinating support of different forms of expression and the interpretations thereof:

After interpreting Hamlet’s apparent procrastinations with the new-found authority of the new psychoanalyst, Freud feels the need to add something by way of qualification that is at once a loophole and a limit. ‘But just as all neurotic symptoms,’ he writes, ‘and, for that matter, dreams, are capable of being “over-interpreted”, and indeed need to be, if they are to be fully understood, so all genuinely creative writings are the product of more than a single impulse in the poet’s mind, and are open to more than a single interpretation.’ It is as though Freud’s guilt about his own aggression in asserting his interpretation of what he calls the ‘deepest layers’ in Hamlet – his claim to sovereignty over the text and the character of Hamlet – leads him to open up the play having closed it down. You can only understand anything that matters – dreams, neurotic symptoms, people, literature – by over-interpreting it; by seeing it, from different aspects, as the product of multiple impulses. Over-interpretation, here, means not settling for a single interpretation, however apparently compelling. The implication – which hints at Freud’s ongoing suspicion, i.e. ambivalence, about psychoanalysis – is that the more persuasive, the more authoritative the interpretation the less credible it is, or should be. If one interpretation explained Hamlet we wouldn’t need Hamlet anymore: Hamlet as a play would have been murdered. Over-interpretation means not being stopped in your tracks by what you are most persuaded by; to believe in a single interpretation is radically to misunderstand the object one is interpreting, and interpretation itself.

Different children and identity

An LDS person with two children on the autism spectrum asked me both about LDS reactions and about what sorts of things I would be careful about with my young people who are different (kind of, she asked something slightly different but I obtusely missed it and answered that question instead).

My response:

I've actually had mostly good reactions from other LDS people. I once had a relief society president in one of my wards flip out on me about it, but she tearfully apologized for it the next week, giving me a hug. When the book first came out, I read some amazon reviews, etc., and some mormons were a little down on that, said I couldn't really be mormon or had a terrible understanding of mormonism (and I'm sure I didn't understand certain things very well, and my understanding has constantly evolved, but isn't that true of everyone and do we usually judge people because of it?). I have had a couple mormon friends that may not keep in touch with me because of it, or maybe they're just busy and I'm imagining things. Overall the reception within the church has been much better than without the church. To the extent that things got a little ugly here and there (you probably know what I'm talking about), I can sympathize with what people thought they had to do. I think me writing the book put a lot of people in a bad position personally because it came as a surprise and they very naturally perhaps wondered if I am a practiced liar, what did they really know about who I am. They were stuck between feelings that they had to rush in to defend themselves or others or institutions against a perceived threat and the reality that I've always been basically the same person, pre and post book, I'm just much more open now.

If I had advice to give to anyone dealing with children who are different, it would be to try to be very careful to not damage their identity or suggest that they need to be any different than how God created them to be. My current (LDS) therapist says that the best way that we can worship God is to be precisely the being that he created in us. Questions of identity are tricky, of course, because sometimes we associate with attributes that are just coincidentally related to our socialization, experiences, etc. But I think that's all the more reason to be very careful with how we interfere with people's expression of their identities, because we never know what is truly core to who they are.

I'll give you a quick example of what I think to be bad interference. My 5 year old nephew is differently minded. One of the things he does (did) is pull the front part of his hair, particularly when he was thinking analytically (which he loves to do). It drove his mother a little crazy, so she buzzed his hair. I talked to him about it, and he seemed really sad, thought it would take forever for his hair to grow back, and also felt like it was a punishment or because he was bad for pulling his hair. A week later he told his mom, "See, I pull on my lip now like this [demonstrates] because you cut off my hair. And if you cut off my lip, I'll just do this with my ears [plays with ears]." It wasn't accusatory, and it wasn't critical of her. He just realized that there was a reason why he did the things he did, and that they were so important to him that he had already come up with another contingency plan if he lost the ability to do that thing.

My therapist on this topic says that even things that aren't closely associated with identity, like pulling on hair ticks, can still implicate identity in dangerous ways. He says that although things like certain types of anxiety can and should be confronted in people's lives, if you try to get a child to do it at too early of a stage, it will not only affect the anxiety but the child's other aspects of core identity. 

"My experience of you" vs. "real you"

It's funny once you become aware of something and it's on your radar, you start both (1) seeing other instances of it and (2) you understand what's going on in those instances. For instance, I remember at one time in my life not understanding the meaning of the Fleetwood Mac song Landslide, and I also remember there being a very specific (although I've forgotten it now, ha) moment in which I suddenly understood it and it applied perfectly to my situation at that time.

I've always liked this Bjork song, but a few months ago I finally understood it:


I watched the first episode of the Netflix comedy Grace and Frankie, sort of an odd couple dynamic between two women whose husbands leave them for each other. Frankie is hippy dippy, Grace is rich white lady. But it also had an example of the sort of defining someone's identity that I mentioned in the last post:

Frankie: I lost my best friend. You don't even like Robert. 

Grace: You have no right to judge me. You don't know us. 

Frankie [clears throat] I'm sorry, I was judging by my experience of you, not the real you. That was wrong of me. 

I thought, that's a good distinction to make -- judging by our experience of a person versus whatever the real them is. We would never assume that we know all there is to France and French people after watching a French film or visiting Paris. Why do we feel so sure of ourselves in terms of our ability to judge someone's character after seeing a similar small sliver of the real them.

How identity changes behavior (part 2)

The reader continues:

Thanks for your reply. The idea is interesting and I will try this over the next few weeks and see what conclusions I come to. 

Over the last few weeks I have started seeing a psychologist - I feel like I actually need to know what is "wrong" with me - although not sure that I really feel like anything is wrong - things just are. He seems inclined to think that I've got antisocial personality disorder or that I possibly am a sociopath. 

I know in your book that you mentioned one time when a guy told you off for walking down a closed escalator on the underground in Washington you had this "snap" when you followed him with the purpose of assaulting him. I've also had several "snaps" like that but have always snapped out of them before anything has actually happened. The most serious was when I was 21. A friends of mine had been dating this guy who worked as a tram driver. They broke up and one day when I was waiting for the tram at my stop the tram approached and slowed down and I could see that he was driving. I was alone at the stop and he slowed down - just to then not stop and drive off to piss me off I guess. As I stood there the tram slowed down (the next stop was just within sight from where I was standing) and I realised that there was another tram on that stop (probably having issues closing the doors or something) and before I knew it I had jumped down on the track and ran after the tram and all I could think of was that I had to kill this guy. I managed to catch up with it and get onto it just as the doors were closing. I rushed through the tram to the front where I started shouting at the driver (my friends ex) and tried to get the door open. Suddenly someone started shouting at me asking what I'm doing and I turn around and realise that there are 2 police officers standing there looking at me, clearly they had been on the tram and I had missed this as I was so focused on killing him. And then I snapped out of it. The police officers was about to arrest me but the driver talked them out of it explaining that he knew me and what had happened. 

I guess my main concerns with incidents like that is that it's something I don't have control over. Don't get me wrong, they don't happen on a weekly basis, but when they do I feel like I'm not my everyday self, like it's something I can't control. Even though I know I shouldn't act on it, when these moments come all reasoning stops and all that exists in my mind is that focus on killing that person. Do you have any method to control these urges/impulses?

M.E.:

Yeah, I know what you mean. For me, the thing that things that contribute to a feeling of being out of control (1) part of me feels like that's who I really am so I can't/shouldn't fight it, (2) part of me feels like I want to do that thing, (3) I can't really predict when they will happen -- sometimes something like that will trigger me and other times not, (4) I think I really do have attentional issues that make it easy to get locked on to a thought the way a pitbull locks on to its prey, (5) it's often irrational, so I feel like it wouldn't do any good to try to reason with myself, and without reason what else could stop me but physical force, I wonder? (6) the feeling that it isn't me, or at least not everyday me gives me a feeling that I am out of touch with myself.

And other reasons, probably. But I have found the previous exercise is really helpful for all of those things. It doesn't necessarily address them directly, but I feel like it is like the swimming drills I love to do -- doing things differently or even awkwardly often makes you aware of things you are doing wrong much better than if someone told you you were wrong over and over again, if that makes sense?

I have always sort of struggled to identify and track my own thoughts and feelings. I think I always felt like my identity was a moving target. And I used to not care to understand myself, at least not actively. In fact, for a long time I felt like at least a part of me was actively trying to hide certain aspects of my identity from myself. Recently, though, I have realized how much I don't know, and it has started bothering me.

So these sorts of exercises are what I am working on in therapy currently. It's not super pleasant. Little things bother me that used to not, e.g. hopefully this is just a passing phase, but it really bothers me to think that other people know me better than I know me (especially when they say as much).

It's odd. I've always believed that if truth relative, or at least the perception of truth is. But in order to maintain the belief that I am connecting to some basic truths about myself, I have had to believe that there are basic truths about me -- things that are true about me no matter what the situation, even if I close my eyes to them, even if we all agree to pretend they don't exist. And that is starting to seem more "true" to me than my previous beliefs about myself. Because even if I ignore them or convince myself that these little "secrets" about me don't matter, they're still there. And they affect me and my life in ways that I am still hazy about. And I think that's a major reason why it has traditionally been hard for me to learn from experience -- why I have historically kept making the same mistakes over and over again. To the extent that I have deluded myself about who I am, I have also remained willfully ignorant of the causes to a lot of the effects I experience.

This must be true for almost everyone, I imagine. And maybe it is disturbing for everyone -- for empaths because they have such a strong sense of identity that may or may not encompass all actual truths about themselves. For someone like me, the disturbing part about not knowing myself is the lack of control I feel and the sense that others can exploit that knowledge gap against me.

Maybe this is how we get sociopaths to care about things that they don't naturally care about?

How identity changes behavior (part 1)

I thought this conversation with a reader was a good illustration of what effects a sense of identity (or lack of) has on behavior. From a reader:

Thank you for your excellent blog and lovely book. I started reading the blog a few months ago and finished your book a few weeks ago.

Though I've never been diagnosed with any form of disorder I recognise myself in what you're writing. I've always known that I was different but until I started reading your blog I didn't realise how I'm different.

The first time I actually realised the extent of my odd-ness I was 16. There was this girl who went to the same class as me, we were friends growing up and we lived in the same street. When she was 13-14 or so she turned a bit wild and we weren't really friends after that. I just found her nasty and disgusting. When she was 16 she one night took a drug overdose and died and the next day in school we were told about it. I remember everyone being upset and crying except me. The only thing I though about it was that she had done the world a favour - after all she would probably have grown up living on benefits having loads of babies just like her mum and the rest of her family had turned out, so actually it saved us all the inconvenience of having to pay for it via our tax. And I couldn't understand why nobody else though of it like that - I really didn't understand why people seemed upset and kept crying. Later in the evening when my mum got home she asked me about it - and me at that stage not having realised how inappropriate those thoughts were in the eyes of most people - I said it straight out, exactly what I felt. I have never seen my mum reacting that way, although she of course knew I didn't really respond emotionally as most people (such as laughing at the movie Schindlers List aged 13 which made my teacher a bit nervous) she probably had not realised just how cold I actually am. My mum's face went pale and she didn't know what to say, she just stood frozen for a few minutes and then walked away and we have never discussed it again. And that was the moment I realised how different I am different from most people and I started censoring myself more.

Something I've been wondering about is your being Mormon. I've always been very interested in religion - quite randomly since my family is not religious at all. And I've always wished I was religious. I did my degree in Sociology of Religion and did very well - I was offered doing a PhD but after spending 5 years wearing the mask I had to get away and put on a new mask, so I moved abroad instead and now I live in London having a successful job. I therefore know more than most people about the LDS church and I kind of get what you mean that it is quite a sociopathic religion. I wish I could commit to a religion, I would probably choose Christianity (a desperate hope that even a cold hearted sociopath like me would be shown some mercy on the day of judgement?). And even though I can on an intellectual/philosophical level accept that there is a God - I simply can't motivate myself to follow it. Any attempts I have made to believe in God or practise a religion fails as I eventually loose interest in it. I guess it's because I struggle with long-term goals, I just can't motivate myself to do it when I don't see any result after a few weeks/month. I read your blog about how to break goals down to smaller pieces and I found it very useful. Do you think it's possible to do the same with religious goals? And in that case how? Because ultimately the rewards for religions is something beyond here and now, and even beyond this life. Would be very keen to know your thoughts.

My response: Interesting question. I have the added benefit of religion being pushed upon me by my family and little religious community, so that does make it easier. Maybe it would be best to start with what you believe. I know that is often hard for us to dig into, but I think that we (like everyone else) have beliefs that we aren't really aware of. Take for instance, some little thing that annoys you. Do this right after it happens. Mark a piece of paper with four columns. In the first, describe the situation. In the second, write the most irrational thought that you had as a result of this situation (e.g., this person doesn't deserve to live or I'm the best). Identify whether this belief seems to be related your conception of your own identity, your role in life (or your beliefs about the purpose of life), or your sense of individuality (not typical with sociopaths). In the third column, write down any personal conclusions, e.g. the other thoughts you had that weren't irrational. In the last, write down your reactions for these three categories: emotional, physical, mental, if any. Don't do this more than a couple of times per week. I think you will discover some beliefs that you didn't realize you had.  

Female sociopath: fact or fiction?

Merve Emre writes for Digg ("The Female Sociopath") on the popularity of the female sociopath in fiction (TV/books, etc.), and the reality. Worth reading in its entirety, the first little bit:

If you don’t know who Rosamund Pike is, you will soon. In October, she will appear in David Fincher’s film adaptation of Gone Girl, one of the most popular and addictive novels of the past decade, as Amy Dunne — the beguiling and cerebral housewife who stages her own murder and frames her philandering husband. Amy’s creator, the novelist Gillian Flynn, has proudly described her character as a “functioning sociopath,” which she is quick to distinguish from “the iconic psycho bitch.” The iconic psycho bitch, Flynn explains, is crazy because “her lady parts have gone crazy.” Think of Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, so consumed with desire for Michael Douglas that she boils his daughter’s pet rabbit to death; think of Sharon Stone and Jennifer Jason Leigh (and Kathy Bates and Rebecca De Mornay) chasing men through dim rooms with sharp objects. 

Unlike these women, the functional sociopath isn’t “dismissible” as a slave to her emotions. She is not outwardly violent. Patently remorseless, clear-eyed and calculating, she is chameleonic in the extreme, donning one feigned feeling after another (interest, concern, sympathy, simpering insecurity, confidence, arrogance, lust, even love) to get what she wants.

And why should she feel bad about it?

For M.E. Thomas, author of Confessions of A Sociopath, such affective maneuvers are tantamount to “fulfilling an exchange.” “You might call it seduction,” she suggests, but really “it’s called arbitrage and it happens on Wall Street (and a lot of other places) every day.” Whatever you choose to call it, its appeal is undeniable when linked to the professional and personal advancement of women. “In general, the women in my life seemed like they were never acting, always being acted upon,” Thomas laments. Sociopathy’s silver lining was that it gave her a way to combat that injustice, in the boardroom of the corporate law firm she worked for in Los Angeles, but also in the bedroom, where she marveled at how her emotional detachment let her commandeer her lovers’ hearts and minds. Somewhere along the way, pathology became recoded as practice — a set of rules for how to manage the self and others.

No wonder the female sociopath cuts such an admirable figure. Intensely romantic, professionally desirable, she is the stuff of fiction, fantasy, and aspirational reading. And while actual female sociopaths like Thomas are rare, and sociopathy isn’t even recognized by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the female sociopath looms large in our cultural imagination. Amy Dunne may stand as the perfect example — a “Cool Girl” on the outside, ice cold within — but she is not alone. Of late, she has faced stiff competition from fictional females like Lisbeth Salander, the ferocious tech genius in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, or Laura, the shape-shifting alien who preys on unwitting men in Under the Skin. Network television has been even kinder to the female sociopath, placing her at the center of workplace dramas like Damages, Revenge, Bones, The Fall, Rizzoli and Isles, Person of Interest, Luther, and 24. Here, she has mesmerized audiences with how nimbly she scales the professional ladder, her competence and sex appeal whetted by her dark, aggressive, risk-taking behavior, and lack of empathy.

And so we lean in to the cultural logic of the female sociopath, for she is the apotheosis of the cool girl power that go-getter “feminists” have peddled to frustrated women over the last half-decade. The female sociopath doesn’t want to upend systems of gender inequality, that vast and irreducible constellation of institutions and beliefs that lead successful women like Gillian Flynn to decree that certain women, who feel or behave in certain ways, are “dismissible.” The female sociopath wants to dominate these systems from within, as the most streamlined product of a world in which well-intentioned people blithely invoke words like arbitrage, leverage, capital, and currency to appraise how successfully we inhabit our bodies, our selves. One could easily imagine the female sociopath devouring books with titles like Bo$$ Bitch, Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office, The Confidence Gap, and Play Like a Man, Win Like a Woman to hone her craft — to learn how to have it all. From atop the corporate ladder, she can applaud her liberation from the whole messy business of feeling as a step forward for women, when it’s really a step back.

The result is a self-defeating spectacle of feminism that finds a kindred spirit in Rosamund Pike on the cover of W, erasing her own perfect face to reveal that what lies beneath might be nothing. Like Gone Girl’s Amy Dunne, who confesses that she “has never really felt like a person, but a product” — plastic, fungible, ready to be consumed by anyone, at any time — the female sociopath is a product of a broken promise made to women, by women. She is a product poised to disappear into the immense darkness from which she came. 

One of my favorite parts of studying music was learning that the representation of women in professional orchestras skyrocketed when they started doing blind auditions (i.e. the judges couldn't see who was performing). When I taught, I told my students to use their initials on their C.V.s and résumés, because it seems like every year there is another study that shows that everywhere in every field there is gender and racial bias. Sometimes I wish we could do the equivalent of blind auditions everywhere. Maybe we shouldn't out any sort of name on our résumés. Maybe we should make that illegal, like it is illegal to put your name on a standardized test. Because why should it matter?

When I first started writing this blog, it was like a blind audition. No one knew who I was, only what I wrote. I didn't realize at the time how great that felt, what a respite from my normal life that was. Without realizing even to what extent, I had been swimming against the current all of my life, until I was allowed to just be me. And then when I came out as being female there was a certain significant portion backlash that wasn't really explainable apart from being a reaction to my gender. (See also, popular science blogger Elise Andrew who got a cyclone of hate only after it was discovered that she was female.) There was probably as much backlash in my sociopath life for being female as there was in my normal life for being a sociopath. And now when I write or say things, it is seen through a different, distorted lens of my perceived femininity. I used to never get accused of the typical "oh man, you won't believe how crazy my ex-girlfriend was" type behavior -- "classic female traits" like self-harm/cutting, attention seeking, jealousy, vanity, histrionics, woman-scorned flavored vengeance, man-hating flavored vengeance, or anything else that is likely to get a woman slapped with the term "crazy". Now I get them all of the time. Which was sort of a surprise to me. Why did it bother people that I had been given the diagnosis "sociopath". Because it really seemed to. They took what I said and twisted it to fit something else, until I was "just borderline." as if the biased-female diagnosis was lesser than the sort-of male equivalent. Until I was "just crazy". Until I was something or someone that could be dismissed as a nobody nothing. Because that's how we marginalize people, I guess.

See also SNL – Red Flag | Katabatic Digital

Disgust (part 1)

In celebration of American mother's day, This American Life episode, called Tarred and Feathered (well worth a listen in its entirety), features a very inspiring mother/son relationship. The show discusses a young boy (they call him Adam, currently 18 years old), who realizes around the time of puberty that he was attracted to small children -- a pedophile. He starts watching child on child pornography, which didn't seem too unusual to him because he was close to their ages. As he grew older, however, he realized that he was still attracted to that younger age range. He eventually becomes totally turned off of child pornography when he sees a clip involving an 18 month old baby. From the narrator:

He began reading up on child abuse and was upset at what he learned. He decided he wanted to stop watching child porn, and he needed help if he was going to do that. For that help, Adam turned back to the internet. He posted on a mental health forum, explaining his situation and asking for advice. Two women who were child abuse survivors befriended him. With their help, Adam says he stopped watching porn. But in its place grew a deep depression.

It wasn't like he'd stopped having sexual thoughts about kids. He says he felt like a monster for having viewed the videos, but also just for having the attractions. Some days, he thought about killing himself. He didn't know what else to do. He was 16. He wanted to talk to someone. So he started with a cautious letter to his mum.

Dear Mummy, it begins, I'm writing this letter to you, as I cannot bring myself to say what I need to say to you to your face. It would simply be too painful for me. I am always overshadowed with feelings of depression, guilt, and shame. I'm really sick and tired of covering these feelings up. I want you to let me see a psychologist. I understand you probably have a lot to ask me. But I need some time to get my head wrapped around things. Love, Adam.

He didn't explain the source of the problem, and his mother never asked. Instead, she made him an appointment at a local therapist for a week or so later.

The therapist at first didn't believe him, then made excuses, then she showed disgust. She told him that she couldn't treat him. She told him that she had no one to refer him to. She told his mother against his wishes. He tells how his mother took it:

You know, my mother, I'm sure, reacted the best I really could have hoped for. She kind of put her arm on my shoulder and squeezed a little bit. She seemed to be supportive. I'm sure she was in shock, probably kind of horrified, but at least she was able to hide that. And the fact that she was able to do that, it meant so much to me.

The mother continued to be supportive, and apart from the few subsequent therapists that have seen Adam. She hasn't even told her husband.

The parallels to sociopathy are fascinating. There is basically no scientific understanding of what to do with a pedophile ("It is a gigantic black hole in science."). There is no treatment for a pedophile that has not offended. Because therapists don't know how to handle them, they often get caught up in mandatory reporting laws, which caused the number of self-referrals to drop precipitously "because folks are too afraid to reach out for help. The consequences are too high." And none of the panic/paranoia related to pedophiles is actually scientifically supported:

"Another thing that has not been researched in-depth is if having an attraction to kids makes it more dangerous to be around them. On its face, it seems obvious. But there is no evidence to support it."

About the lack of research:

For years, Letourneau has been trying to change all this, to get money for research, and for prevention programs. But there's not much money for that. Funders don't want to be associated with pedophilia research. The stigma is too great. Even someone like Letourneau, who wants to do this research in order to prevent children from being abused, has been called a pedophile sympathizer, simply for advocating these programs.

Elizabeth Letourneau
If we can prevent this, we can prevent a lot of harm and a lot of cost. And we just don't. It's nuanced. It's difficult to wrap your head around. It's a lot easier to say these guys are monsters. Let's put them in prison. Let's put them on a registry. Let's put them in civil commitment facilities. And forget about them.

Even the numbers are similar to sociopathy: "1% to 3% of men would meet the diagnostic criteria for pedophilia".

After searching online for any help with his condition and finding nothing, Adam started his own support group:

Everyone I've spoken to has a story about how the group saved them. A 22-year-old college student told me this one.

Anonymous College Student
There was a time when I was really running out of hope for the future. I was unemployed, and I felt like no one was going to give me a shot. And I felt like I had literally no shot in life. And I kind of wanted to kill myself. I didn't do it. The first thing I thought of was especially Adam, in specific, but the rest of them as well, that I couldn't let them down like that.

From the narrator: "In a different world, this person would be talking to a professional, not a 19-year-old with no training at all. Or maybe this person would just be in prison" beca
use there are no current ways of dealing with people in this situation. But the very fact that they exist suggests that pedophilia isn't necessarily un-manageable. It has prompted at least one researcher to talk to the members of the support group in order to devise possible early prevention and other treatment programs.

Can you imagine finding out at some point in your life that you are different, and for the type of different you are there is no help or sympathy but only disgust?

Truth serum?

I had dinner with some doctor friends of mine who were relating stories about how people react under anesthesia. My favorite story was about a 14 year old kid started hallucinating and feeling like he was being kidnapped by his doctors. When the doctors told him, "No, we like you, we're your friends."

The kid screamed back, "You like me?! You want to rape me?!"

After like 10 minutes of trying to calm him down, they decided to give up on the procedure for the day. The patient had stopped screaming enough for the doctors to explain that they were about to get his parents, and that seem to relax him. While the doctor was in the waiting room explaining to the parents about the child's adverse reaction to the drugs he heard a nurse yelling, "He's running!"

The child had apparently faked compliance to trick his captors into thinking he would cooperate with them. Really, he was just biding his time to escape. Unfortunately, as he sprinted away from the clinic, he seemed to be headed directly for a busy street and was still in his impaired condition. The doctor kicked off his clogs and started running after him in his socks. When the kid saw the doctor behind him, he freaked out again, running even faster. Finally the doctor caught up with him and tackled him to the ground before he ran out into the busy intersection.

But the stories that I thought were most interesting from a philosophical point of view were the stories about patient reactions to the drug Versed/Midazolam. Apparently it is a psychoactive drug with some funny side-effects. From Wikipedia:

In susceptible individuals, midazolam has been known to cause a paradoxical reaction, a well-documented complication with benzodiazapines. When this occurs, the individual may experience anxiety, involuntary movements, aggressive or violent behavior, uncontrollable crying or verbalization, and other similar effects. This seems to be related to the altered state of consciousness or disinhibition produced by the drug.

From the doctors' stories, it seems that the most common manifestation of this in female patients is to cry. For the male patients, a very common manifestation of the verbalization is to turn into complete perverts. One of the female doctors was telling me that it was really eye-opening to her to have this uptight conservative businessmen come in for their procedures and then say raunchy-as-hell things once the Versed gets flowing.

I asked them perhaps the age old question, which is the real them? is the Versed version the more authentic version of the patient? (In vino veritas?) Or does the Versed alter their natural thought patterns? The doctors seemed to think it was definitely the former. As an example, one doctor told me about one of her patients that seemed so inappropriate on Versed that she looked him up online afterwards and found out that he was a relatively prominent public figure who had a history of sexual indiscretions and cover-ups. The thing about Versed is that it also causes temporary amnesia, so the patient doesn't typically remember how they behaved on the drug.

I, of course, thought that an enterprising unethical doctor should start taking video of these patients and using the tapes for blackmail. What better way to ruin someone's life than to shame them in the court of public opinion, right? And they deserve it too, I bet. Best case (?) scenario, the patient/target is not aware that he has these particular flaws and we're doing him/her a favor by letting him/her know about them in no uncertain terms. Worst case scenario, the patient/target already knows about his/her character flaw and has been working overtime to mask it from the general public. Fakers. We should not have to tolerate this level of deception and/or hypocrisy from our fellow humans. These people deserve to be outted. If they are innocent, harmless, or if there is nothing really wrong with what they're doing then I'm sure they'll be fine. If bad things happen to them, then they obviously must have gotten what they deserved. 

Quote: Education

“Black and Third World people are expected to educate white people as to our humanity. Women are expected to educate men. Lesbians and gay men are expected to educate the heterosexual world. The oppressors maintain their position and evade their responsibility for their own actions. There is a constant drain of energy which might be better used in redefining ourselves and devising realistic scenarios for altering the present and constructing the future.”

― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

More on flexible sense of self (part 2)

I was once in a forest of extremely tall trees. They were centuries old, and most of them looked majestic but some of them looked odd because they were growing in such an awkward position. Some were growing in the middle of a rock, maybe, with roots stretched out over the rock, or on the edge of a cliff, roots all exposed. Probably it was not smart for these trees to choose to grow in those locations, but of course trees do not know any better. They do not have eyes. They do not even have the ability to choose where they grow. They're just growing blind. They don't know what they look like or understand even what they're supposed to look like. All they do is encounter the world and adapt  -- blindly, but in the only way they know how. It reminded me of this Annemarie Roeper quote from her book "The 'I' of the Beholder"

You have your own agenda, your inner mandate. This mandate originates from all sorts of sources. It moves in all sorts of directions but functions as a unit. It becomes a life force. You are destined to grow a certain way, as is the flower and all living beings. Sometimes flowers persist in growing even between hard rocks. Their life force can compel them to grow in unexpected places, but they cannot grow well if they aren’t nurtured. Sometimes they get crippled and unhappy and cannot grow much. But other times, persistent strength may move the rock out of their way.

This is exactly the fate of human Selves when they encounter the world outside. They must follow their agenda. So, yes, there is a plot, but the course of this plot is not predictable, because we don’t know how interaction with the world changes its course. It is the greatest drama in the world.

Sometimes I look at my Down Syndrome relatives and try to imagine what they would look like with identical genetics but without the extra chromosome. Do people wonder that? Who would I be if I were raised in some primitive culture on an island somewhere? Or raised by actual wolves? I always ask my musician friends whether they think they would have stuck with it as much or even gone farther if they had just chosen a different instrument to play. It's sort of odd to me, these people who have a very strong sense of self. Do they not feel the arbitrariness of that self like I do?