Evil wants an evil response

One of my mantras for the past year or so is evil wants an evil response (see here). But let me back up. One thing that has always bothered me about having my particular brain wiring is that despite craving power and control, it has traditionally been so easy to push me over the edge, lose my temper, make me angry. I get caught up in power struggles sometimes and make a bigger deal out of things than they warrant because I get ego hurt or my mind just seems to crave that particular stimulus.

But in the past couple of years of trying to find a better balance in my psychological and emotional life, the mantra helps me to understand that in having that reaction of anger against something that rankles me, I am at worst playing into my opponent's hands and at best losing control and perspective. There's actually a sort of suggestion in Mormon theology that enmity is its own sort of currency -- that you can stir up and use enmity to do plenty of momentous things that not even mountains of gold would do (think French Revolution or Hitler). And so our enmity often makes us pawns as well, and in fighting people that are filled with enmity, we're often just fighting pawns. (For some of you nerdier types, it's like when I tried to explain to my little relatives that Emperor Palpatine from Star Wars was leading both sides of the clone wars, but they couldn't understand how a war (every war?) could really just be fought completely by pawns against pawns, and of the same man.)

Martin Luther King Jr. (happy MLK Jr Day U.S.!) put it this way:

"The attack is directed against forces of evil rather than against persons who happen to be doing the evil. It is the evil that the nonviolent resister seeks to defeat, not the persons victimized by the evil. If he is opposing racial injustice, the nonviolent resister has the vision to see that the basic tension is not between the races… The tension is, at bottom, between justice and injustice, between the forces of light and the forces of darkness…. We are out to defeat injustice and not white persons who may be unjust."

Or Marcus Aurelius:

"When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own — not of the same blood or birth, but of the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands, and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are obstructions."

Getting played

From a reader:

As I'm most positive you receive countless emails on the daily in regards to a request of an assessment of an individuals sociopathic nature, it still didn't deter me from sending one on my own behalf, and do hope it isn't offensive in me asking for your opinion.

I'm a 21 year old female current senior in college, from a military family composed up my mother and stepfather. I have 3 step sisters and 1 younger half sister from my biological father (who is also in the military) and stepmother.

My parents divorced when I was about 5 after years of physical and verbal endless violent fighting. My father took custody of me, but after about a year lost custody due to be being physically abusive with me (I have no memories to confirm) I do remember being in a foster home until my mother gained legal custody.

My mother soon married my stepfather who is practically identical to my bio father.

I could never view people as my equal or extend their surface of what I see beyond just a fleeting moment in my life. As I am a professional [athlete] and [public figure], currently on scholarship in college for [sport] as it is not NCAA. I've been forced into a team dynamic on a small campus for 3 years now and have since magnified my odd socializing Mannerism's that people describe as pull/push. They often say I either love or hate a person, there is no inbetween. That no one understands me, I'm just this large embodiment of mystery and the unknown scares people. That I'm emotionless and have a reputation as a whore.

I believe I encountered another sociopath on the team (if I am one) I have been diagnosed as borderline personality disorder, and I do get most my money from sugardaddies as I've cut family off since I was 16.

The other sociopath in my eyes has beat me, gained power over me, as we had sexual relations and he beat me to the cut off. I do not know how to overcome this as I am constantly infuriated and want nothing more than we snap his neck and watch his body go lifeless from my doing. In order to regain power I've made attempts to maneuver myself back into his life to only then destroy and break him, but he's left no openings since I made one mistake and slept with another guy on the team. All of our interactions since have been nothing but violent and cussing battles or complete avoidance. We have both built our close knit loyal Allies that take our side, do our dirty bidding, and be our eyes/ears when we're not around. The only opening I have now, is that he's failing on his side of manipulation, the team detest him for turning crude and openly egotistical. His allies have all dissipated but one, and that one has been heard bad mouthing him and has even made advancements towards friendship with me.

This has been my toughest conquest ever, and I can't decipher if the thirst for when I finally conquer him is love or is it the game of power still. So paired with the question of my state of being a sociopath, can two sociopaths make a great force? Do you see anyway I can conquer him or gain him as an ally? As he's proven himself quite valuable in my eyes.

M.E.:

If you are sociopathic, think yourself while you would react in that situation if you were he. Could you be persuaded by reason and logic? Even the temptation of uniting into one unstoppable force? Probably not because your interest in him is not rational, and your attempts to make it seem rational by suggesting that you were interested in him to increase your power dynamic are probably in accurate. He compels you because he compels you, the same way that you compel so many others. You were vulnerable to it in someway and he saw his opening, the same way that you are with others. Obsessive thoughts are not uncommon in personality disorders like borderline personality disorder or antisocial personality disorder. We are not immune from our own tricks.

Reader:

You're right, I've never been on this side of the  game, he's won and will no longer allow for openings. Have you ever been overpowered? Ive even lost interest in the other targets and new targets to my toying and manipulation. Its the most constant unsettling feeling, every time I encounter him around campus and team events I always try to regain my power but it feels ineffective and I become more infuriated.

M.E.:

Buddhist people would look at us and think the advantage to is is a lack of sense of self, in the sense that we're not bothered in an ego hurt way about things that happen to us. Where you're at right now, that's probably your best bet?

POSTSCRIPT: Drafting this post, I just remembered a crazy crush/obsession I had on/with one of my students that I thought was going to be the death of me. I think I even posted about it at the time, that I knew it could suck me in and under. I also remember getting another inappropriate crazy crush/obsession on/with one of my classmates -- but only after I had graduated. That last longer than any rationality of it could have explained. I actually don't mind this feeling of being enthralled, it's exhilarating. But I think it's important to remember these moments -- what hold they had on you at the time, and how little you think of the person now (I actually had to search through my emails for like 20 minutes before I could actually remember who this person was). And even though I now remember the person and the situation and how much time and thought I devoted to it, I honestly can't even imagine how or why I felt anything like that. Attraction is such a mystery. 

Power and obsessions

A reader asked me, "I enjoy having power over people, and I think that this power will help me in life, however since it is important to me I worry about the possibility of losing it. What are some ways you have lost power or what are ways that I could end up losing power?"

I responded: Interesting question. Probably the most common way for me to objectively lose power is to suffer some sort of defeat or loss, like an accident or getting fired, but usually those don't bother me too much. The losses of power that bother me more are the personal ones.

The most unpleasant loss of power to me is being rejected by someone as a despicable human being. I hate that, it makes me very very angry to the point of a violent all consuming rage, which is its own form of loss of power.

Another form is having an obsession or an itch that can't be scratched. There are a few people that have somehow planted themselves in my mind. To them, I am nothing. I don't even know how they got there in my mind, except that to some extent I invited them there. I wonder about them, what they think about, what they do. They are my playthings in a different way than most -- they're fun and interesting to me because they are *not* mine, and the game is to acquire them. It's not unpleasant, this feeling of obsession. It actually gives me some insight into how to do that to other people -- burrow my way into their minds and take up residence there. There have been times when the obsession starts to get out of control, though. If it gets bad enough, I have learned to talk myself down from the obsession by remembering that they are not really the person that exists in my mind, that I am really obsessed with a figment of my imagination that I have populated with the image of that person. So there's both control and powerlessness in an obsession. Have you seen the movie Vertigo? A delicious depiction of obsession, my favorite movie for how unapologetic it and the characters are about indulging their respective obsessions (and for Bernard Herrman's exquisite score).

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

The older I get, the more my obsession with efficiency and decisionmaking provokes me to behave in quirky ways, giving me every appearance of suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder (emphasis on compulsion).

Every month or two I make a small trek to a warehouse store. At the store I buy the same approximately 20 items in various quantities (small amounts of hummus, large amounts of palm hearts). I eat these items in a particular order, prioritizing the fresh fruits and vegetables in order of their spoilage, shifting then to baked goods that have a slightly longer shelf life, and finally to canned and frozen foods until I am able to make another trip to start the cycle over again.

My approach to shopping at the warehouse store is a ritualistic self-indulgence of the extremes of my desire to control. Because I am never sure what fresh fruits and vegetables will be available, I start there (what I am able to acquire in fresh fruits may alter slightly my choices in the frozen foods section, and finally in the dry and canned goods section). Even though I have a list and even though I buy nearly identical items at each trip, I still spend approximately 2-3 minutes with each item, even more for produce. I look at the quality, looking for flaws, looking at spoilage dates, comparing the item I selected with other identical items to determine slight variations. I do this carefully and methodically, trying to remain focused as my body suffers through the artificial chill of the produce section’s walk-in refrigerator. I then do the same for each other type of food, frozen foods, dry and canned goods, as well as any paper goods. I walk fastidiously through each aisle, paranoid that I will neglect some forgotten need and have to go without for another month or two.

As I stand in line to pay for my purchases, I sometimes smile at the odd picture the bizarre array of foods makes, each one of them a carefully chosen trade-off between convenience and nutrition, taste and perishability, versatility and diversity. Are people more likely to believe that I am throwing a theme party (assorted beverages and ethnic foods) or that I have Asperger’s (16 jars of palm hearts)?

But after years of this self-indulgence I can’t go to a normal grocer’s anymore; at least I can’t go and feel satisfied about the experience. My datamining mind chokes on the sheer amount of data involved for choosing each item: the unknowns (taste, quality, perishability, nutrition, price, etc.) multiplied by the number of options. People say “a whole aisle of bread,” like it is a good thing, but to me it is horror.

The last time I went to a grocery store was a whim—I needed to kill time waiting for an appointment so I thought I would buy rye bread because I love it and my warehouse store does not stock it. When I walked into the bread aisle, I was aghast. There were 8 different types of rye bread. I looked at each one, comparing the descriptions of taste, comparing the color and feel, comparing the nutritional information and the ingredients list. After 20 minutes and about to become paralyzed with indecision, I picked one loaf of each—all 8 different types of rye bread. (I am still eating rye bread from that trip, the loaves suffering serious freezer burn.)

And that is why I like to shop at the warehouse store. There are not 100 different types of bread, there are 5. There are not 20 different types of yogurt, there are three. There are only two types of bacon, regular and turkey, and only one type of egg whites in tetrapak. Going to the warehouse store is a satisfying experience in which I am quite certain that I can make the best possible choices given my options. Given my love/hate relationship with food and my particular dietary needs, I avoid going to a large grocery store for the same reasons I avoid going to a used car lot .

UPDATE: Interestingly, James Fallon said that he was at one point diagnosed with both an anxiety disorder and OCD. 

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.

Song: Lana Del Rey's Serial Killer

Wish I may, wish I might
Find my one true love tonight.
Do you think that he
Could be you?
If I pray really tight,
Get into a fake bar fight,
While I'm walking down
The avenue.
If I lay really quiet,
I know that what I do isn't right,
I can't stop what I
Love to do.
So I murder love in the night,
Watching them fall one by one they fight,
Do you think you'll
Love me too, ooh, ooh?

Baby, I'm a sociopath,
Sweet serial killer.
On the warpath,
'Cause I love you
Just a little too much.
I love you just
A little too much.
(Much, much, much).
You can see me
Drinking cherry cola,
Sweet serial killer.
I left a love note,
Said you know I love,
The thrill of the rush.
You know I love,
The thrill of the rush.
(Rush, rush, rush).
(You send me right to heaven),
Sweet serial killer,
(I guess I'll see him over).
Do it for the thrill of the rush,
Love you just a little too much, much.
(You send me right to heaven),
Sweet serial killer,
(I guess I'll see him over).
I love you just a little too much,
Love you just a little too much, much.

My black fire's burning bright,
Maybe I'll go out tonight.
We can paint the town
In blue.
I'm so hot, I ignite,
Dancing in the dark and I shine.
Like a light I'm
Luring you.
Sneak up on you, really quiet,
Whisper "Am I what your heart desires?"
I could be your
Ingenue.
Keep you safe and inspired,
Baby, let your fantasies unwind.
We can do what you
Want to do, ooh, ooh.

Baby, I'm a sociopath,
Sweet serial killer.
On the warpath,
'Cause I love you
Just a little too much.
I love you just
A little too much.
(Much, much, much).
You can see me
Drinking cherry cola,
Sweet serial killer.
I left a love note,
Said you know I love,
The thrill of the rush.
You know I love,
The thrill of the rush.
(Rush, rush, rush).
(You send me right to heaven),
Sweet serial killer,
(I guess I'll see him over).
Do it for the thrill of the rush,
Love you just a little too much, much.
(You send me right to heaven),
Sweet serial killer,
(I guess I'll see him over).
I love you just a little too much,
Love you just a little too much, much.
(Just have fun), wanna,
Play you like a game boy.
(Don't want one), what's,
The thrill of the same toy?
La la, la la la, la la,
La la lie down, down.
(Just have fun), wanna,
Play you like a game boy.
(Don't want one), what's,
The thrill of the same toy?

Song: Everytime you go away

I heard this song the other day out and about and thought that it was oddly applicable.  Every time someone leaves me, they do take a piece of me with them.  That's why I fight so hard to get it/them back.



Baby, if we can't solve any problems
Why do we lose so many tears?
Oh, so you go again
When the leading man appears
Always the same theme
But can't you see we've got everything going on and

Everytime you go away
You take a piece of me with you

Go on and go free
Maybe you're too close to see
I can feel your body move
But does it mean that much to me
I can't go on singing the same theme
"Cause you can't see we've got everything
Baby, even though you know that

Everytime you go away
You take a piece of me with you
You just don't care