The natural born chameleon?

My friend recently told me, "I think it's funny that you are so impressionable, that you think of yourself as a void, because you are one of the strongest personalities I know. You are so distinctive and peculiar."

I could see what she meant. Everyone who knows me for longer than a few hours realizes that I am "quirky." I say all the right words and do all the right moves, but don't quite have the social fluency to seem completely normal. I can also be very lazy about maintaining a mask, particularly in low risk situations or with people who don't matter. Despite seeming distinctive and peculiar, however, I am still extremely impressionable.

Some of the psychologists that I have talked to via the blog have expressed surprise that I consider impressionability and the related weak-sense-of-self to be sociopathic traits. I don't know why they would be surprised. There must be some reason why we are so good at being chameleons, I always just assumed that it was instinctive, a symptom of who I am. Blending in has more or less been a reflex for me as long as I can remember, as it has been for most sociopaths I have known. For instance, this reader:

I moved a lot as a child. I knew how to adapt a fresh persona and ways to gain friends in an expedient fashion before I knew my long division. I also was obliged to lie, convincingly so, about who I was. For years I wasn't even allowed to use my own name and acknowledge where I was from.

When you speak of impressionability, that for me was sort of a survival tactic. America has many different cultural microcosms that vary so much, if they didn't speak English you'd guess it was a different country. I had to learn the local social norms and adapt to them quickly, and also their accents and local lexicon. Even more lizard-brain style mannerisms would be local, like specific body language gestures. In that case, I guess it isn't necessarily lizard-brain, but you understand.

I essentially spent years learning how to be other people. So much so, that I had no idea who I even was when I was allowed to be Me again. I still don't even know if I have a real Me. And it doesn't bug me, either, if anything, it entertains me.

I know for a fact that I did some very odd antisocial behavior, like practice emoting in front of a mirror, accents, etc. but when I was that age, I didn't realize that everyone came with their own emotional cheat-sheet, and I was the only one that had to study for the test.

When I read things like this or think back on my own early experiences, I wonder -- do we learn how to be chameleons? Is it learned behavior to subjugate who we "really are," perhaps as a survival tactic? And maybe after we've pretended for so many years we just forget who we used to be? Or are we born with our shapeshifting abilities? Maybe we're like liquids or gases, always taking on the shape of our environment. Because we do have some finite qualities, we just have no where near the rigidity of the typical empath.

Substituting you for me

A pilot friend of mine was describing to a dilettante friend of ours the process of obtaining a pilot's license. He talked about what it means to "fly blind," or fly relying solely on the instruments, not being able to see anything out the windows of the cockpit, or at least not looking. Obviously you wouldn't want to fly blindly if you had the option to also see outside, but the point is that sometimes you don't have that option, or sometimes what you are seeing with your naked eye can be deceptive.

While he was describing the sort of psychological self-mastery it takes to ignore everything that you think you know about your situation and instead put all of your trust in fallible tinker toys of gauges (which you may not even understand how they operate), I couldn't help but think of the way I struggle to ignore meaningless but strong impulses or emotional hallucinations.

I have talked before about relying on a prosthetic moral compass to compensate for my lack of conscience. I have also talked about my understanding of the utility of trust. By that I mean, substituting someone else's judgment for my own -- particularly principled people I know who have managed to achieve a stable sort of success and happiness.

A small example of an exercise of trust involves a relative of mine. He is a lover of technology, a proud first adopter. I have never really been a gearhead of any sort, so I always have him choose my set-ups. He is not my advisor for buying/adopting tech type stuff, he actually makes decisions for me. I was talking with a work colleague the other day about it. I told him I admired his laptop, to which he replied I should just buy my own. I explained to him that my technologically more sophisticated relative hadn't told me I should/could, and that he makes all my tech decisions for me. When my colleague suggested that I just do it anyway, I realized he misunderstood the nature of me "trusting" someone else to make decisions for me. If I just bought whatever I wanted when I wanted, then he would no longer be making decisions for me, he would be making suggestions to which I could either follow or not follow, or at best he would be making demands that I could veto. That would defeat the whole point of me putting him in charge of that aspect of my life.

To the extent I believe that there is value in things like "faith" or "trust," it is that you ignore your own ideas about what you think you know and rely on something, not because it is infallible, but because it is a different sort of fallible than you. That's why I don't understand people who say they have faith in something, a religion perhaps, but only when it's convenient or it happens to coincide with how they would have chosen anyway. Maybe this is a downside to my personality, the ability and willingness to just follow blindly. I don't think it is always a good thing, and it certainly has its downsides (as does deciding yourself). But to the extent it is useful at all, I believe it is only in this way.

Missing you

A lot of people ask me why a sociopath who has ended a relationship would still go through a great deal of effort to ensure that contact is never cut off completely.

When sociopaths are involved in any serious relationship, they become a special version of themselves just for that person. I think the sociopath's desire to check in is a desire to reconnect with that person that he once was, the same way that people might nostalgically flip through photo albums, even if the photos are only of themselves. Why to people go to a reunion? Is it really to catch up with old friends, or more to remember who they used to be?

And why can't we be multiple things to multiple people? I've been thinking recently whether I collect other people, or whether I allow myself to be collected. Even worthless junk can become priceless in the hands of the right collector.

You are what you eat

I am very impressionable. I am so impressionable that the self that I call mine seems to be no more than a hodgepodge collection of everything I have thought, everything i have experienced, everyone I have been around. I used to be very reckless in my youth with what I did, what I chose, what I thought. I wanted to try everything and everyone, wanted to know what else was out there in the world. Everything I did changed me, though, for better or for worse. I didn't realize it at the time, and didn't really realize the extent of it until relatively recently. That thought has made me more circumspect.

I feel like this must be true of non sociopaths as well, but maybe to a lesser extent. Maybe they just don't acknowledge the inherent fluidity of the self? It's interesting to me to think that my body is made up of everything that I have eaten. There is literally nothing about my body that I haven't ingested at one time or another -- not my brain, not my heart, not my lungs, not my eyes or teeth... it's weird thinking that I am made up of cheeseburgers.

People want to know why sociopaths have a hard time letting go sometimes. Some of it may be the thrill of the hunt, the sting of defeat, or vindictiveness. I think for me it is mainly because everyone that has ever been close to me has become a part of me. Like that Paul Young song, every time they go away, they literally take a piece of me with them.

Right and wrong

While I was in the bush, one of my companions had an object lost and likely stolen at one of the lodges we stayed at. Our guide was really angry about it, much more so than my friend. He was very religious and was constantly talking about "that is a very bad thing" (was it?).  At one point he said that he also had been tempted to steal objects from his clients that would have been the equivalent of a week's salary or more for him, but that he had never stolen anything in his adult life. And in that moment, I swear to you, I thought, "yeah, neither have I," despite having spent one year on such a shoplifting spree that I stole more days than not, among other exploits. Of course as I kept thinking about it, I remembered my career as a thief but still found it hilarious that I was nodding along with my uber-moral guide about what a bad thing stealing was.

I have written about this before (and forgotten about it, which is too funny given that the last post was all about how I have a tendency to forget anything shady from my past), but more in the terms of self-awareness. Which doesn't necessarily explain what happened shortly after.

I was watching what essentially was a morality play for children. There was a scene about theft, nearly identical to how I used to steal most frequently. One of the characters had stolen and I felt this anxiousness for him. When his friend suggested that they actually pay for the item, I wanted him to do that. I actually felt that stealing was wrong in this situation. I had a moment where I thought to myself, I am cured! I have a conscience. And then I remembered all of the stealing I had done (again) and asked myself, "why do you think that this instance of stealing is wrong but you never were capable of recognizing it before?" Was it because this children's program had simplified the subject enough and given sufficient cues such that even I was able to pick up on the wrongness of the stealing? Am I fine understanding the abstract concepts of right and wrong, just mixed up on the real world applications? Was the program inherently manipulative, my pangs of .... whatever more a tribute to my easy suggestibility than to having successfully birthed a conscience? Was it because the situation was so parallel to my own past, a past that I had to basically negative condition myself out of, Pavlovian aversion therapy style, in order to get myself to stop and to start leading a more legit lifestyle? I still don't know.

Misanthropy

I was searching for a particular old email recently and stumbled across an interesting discussion between me and a friend.  To give you some insight into my friend's view of humanity, this friend had one time suggested that it was easy for me to be so happy-go-lucky about humanity because I had more "faith" in love than she did.  It is weird for me to read things like this because I don't feel this way anymore--I am not as enamored with humanity as I was even a few years ago.  Then I saw this email (again, from several years ago) to the same friend about how I had been helping out with the political cause of a mutual acquaintance--a political view that this particular friend abhorred.

I'm very impressionable it is true. And yes, I did pick a conclusion first and then come up with ways to justify it to myself. I didn't realize that I had done such a poor job that you could see through me so easily.  

Anyway, this is how I have always been. I don't really think things are morally abhorrent. I usually don't think about stuff that way. I really am pretty much a blank slate. I just like people, I don't mind adopting their values on things and fighting for those values. It's like the Naomi character in the bible saying, "where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. your people shall be my people, and your god my god." People are my beliefs and alliances, you included. If the other side had gotten to me first, maybe it would be a different story and a different set of justifications. I can understand people not respecting that or not thinking it is a legitimate way of living, but I don't know. It seems alright to me. But I am not entirely surprised that my justifications didn't make sense to you. Don't be sad, though. I'm ok. I'm not about to join a cult or anything.

It's weird for me to read something like this. It's odd to see certain very familiar things about myself (i.e. weak sense of self, impressionable, people pleasing), but I also realize that I used to like people much more than I do now. It's as if my love and interest in humanity was a passing phase--a bit of a personal fad, like the careers or other exploits that I have picked up and dropped just as suddenly over the years. I think I exhausted the potential upside with people and then it became (and still is) just maintenance. There's no longer the same thrill that I used to get in interacting with people.

My current relationships take so much more effort than my previous relationships did.  When I was younger, I would just burn through relationships.  I confessed to one that I was using him like a paper napkin, to be disposed after I was done with him.  After a while I got a little tired of the drama and upheaval that went along with these aborted relationships.

Now I have a general rule that I don't mess with my intimates, only with people to whom I do not have many ties.  It's basically a policy of not defecating where I intend to eat.  There are real benefits in living my life this way, but there are also definite costs.  Now if I am fed up with someone, I don't blow up or try to hurt them, I distance myself from them and spend some recovery time alone.  Sometimes I have to spend the equivalent of several hours alone in order to be one hour of my well-behaved, solicitous self around certain people. It's odd, but the nicer I have become to my intimates, the less goodwill I have for the rest of humanity.