An escort's unbiased perspective of the spectrums (part 3)

The Swedish escort's final thoughts:

Understanding social meanings and values (as objective facts) in a situation, and understanding the relevance of social meanings and values (as emotional facts) in a situation, is according to my experience what differentiates aspergers, borderline/bipolar/narcissists and sociopaths, although their actual behavior in many situations might appear similar.

But I have to give them each of them different kinds of communicative feedback, depending on if it is their perceptive understanding of the actual situation/interaction, or their emotional understanding of the relevance of the actual situation/interaction, that is the problem in our interaction.

What they all share in common, is that there is no use in pointing out eventual lapses and mistakes as something like personality characteristics or intrinsic qualities to these persons. It is much better to only focus on the specific behavior, like, “what you just said could be interpreted as mean and humiliating from my point of view”, “this thing that you want or expect is not reasonable within the deal of our date, and it is not anything I deem as enjoyable”.

I do of course have a certain unusual power position as an escort here, since my situation as a sexworker (in my niche regarding level of education and good looks) in the egalitarian welfare states of Scandinavia is one where demand is much greater than supply. And I still have a price level where I can pick and choose among clients, and deny anyone I don’t like, and the clients kind of know that.

So even if some of the people that might be labeled sociopaths in other situations might not care that much about whether an escort girl likes them or not (for its own sake), they usually find my intellect and our oftentimes unique conversations fascinating enough, that they are willing to modify their behavior so I stay with them and they can see me again. (I’m actually like a Scheherazade of sorts, to many of my clients.)

And that interaction with me can then function as something of a learning platform, so they can better modify and be attentive to their behavior in regular life, and so they can better manage relationships with friends, family and co-workers. Because the same mechanisms apply on a date as they do everywhere (the deviant is ultimately excluded as punishment), it is just that it is delayed (people put up with small things over time, and then punish by withdrawal or by getting other people to participate in mobbing of the deviant).

And that mechanism of delay is what kind of makes a trap for otherwise very smart individuals; like that of a boiling frog, they don’t adjust their behavior in good time enough to avoid the social punishment that is heating up for them.

Out on a professional date however, everything is much more simplified, transparent and outspoken, and the feedback is more direct. Because there are no common social ties, there's no use in keeping up facades for potential future pay-offs; there is no common nor competitive agenda reaching further than that of talking, dining and having sex together. The relation is kind of distinctly suspended from normal life and all normal implications, and so the communication is much more clear and direct, which can be very useful and informative for people that have problems with normal relations. It's a sort of platform for training social skills.

I actually keep on getting Merry-Christmas emails from several old-time clients (mostly from aspies though) that now are in functioning relationships, who thank me for teaching them better social skills and better ways to understand women. (Which kind of is funny, as I myself have had a long road to go to improve my own social skills, and partly feel ambiguous about my own gender identity as female in the emotional and psychological sense.)
So obviously my theory and methodological approach do not only help me out as an escort, but do actually help some of my clients to improve their lives.

So I have been thinking that this little theory about perceptive and emotional attention, and what it implies, maybe should be of use to people in more legitimate therapeutic professions. I’ve been thinking that both me and my clients may be getting a better practical understanding of their actual interaction abilities, and what problems they might have than “real” therapists get.
Because I actually do practical activities with my clients (usually dining and sex, and discussing all kinds of subjects), instead of only sitting and talking introspectively with them about themselves. And humans learn better if they “learn by doing” than if they just sit and try to analyze what they have done (there they both miss out other people’s perspectives on them, and might not remember exactly the very things they did not understand already).

Self-medication

I've been thinking recently about things that have helped me without me intending or even realizing it. I'll give you an example of what I mean. I used to watch the television show House. He would always ask the person if there was anything about their life that changed. Sometimes the change was a healthier change, like stop drinking so much. But a frequent plot point of the show was that the patient had been unwittingly self-medicating an underlying condition, so when there was a lifestyle change (even to a seemingly more healthy habit), that triggered a flare up of the underlying condition.

There are a lot of things that, albeit indirectly, have helped me immensely in terms of maintaining decent mental health and behavior control:

• I'm a musician. I didn't choose to be a musician. Music did not initially appeal to me, nor did I have a natural talent for it. At one point I wanted to stop music studies to focus on other things that I was better at. My parents refused. I went through the motions for a couple more years until I finally achieved a level of fluency that allowed me to understand and later communicate musically, connecting with people in an unmediated way that I had never experienced in normal social interactions. I have since studied music seriously, which was probably the first hard thing I made myself do. I learned a lot then about my limitations and how to incentivize myself or trick myself into doing things I normally would not. I still play. The abstract logic of music is very good for my mental health and the social aspect of music makes me be nicer to people. Music, to me, is humanity's most redeeming feature and has made me interested in the stability of the human race because a destabilized society means no more music generation. 
• I have a low sugar diet. A lot of food makes me sick, so I mainly eat the same things over and over again, mostly protein and fiber. This also happens to be the most stable diet for mental health -- no sugar spikes, no twinkie-defense, no need.
• Being a woman. I've never really had my megalomaniac fantasies indulged that much because I'm a woman. Men do not consider women a viable threat and women often look down on other women. So even though I felt like I could do absolutely anything, I never had anyone echoing that sentiment, which has forced me to be a little more realistic than I otherwise may have been. Also experiencing hormal swings has taught me that I can feel things that aren't real (emotional hallucinations). And girls are sort of evil with each other, so I could get my kicks through emotional manipulation and not through other riskier behavior.
• Being Mormon. Yes, there is the moral code, but I think some of the more important things about growing up Mormon for me were the endless primary lessons trying to get us to understand our emotions, the emotions of other people (e.g. he hit me, which made me mad, so I hit him back, and now he's sad). and that we can control our emotions ("turn your frown upside down"). I got the sort of "this is a happy face, this other one is a frowny face" explicit emotional instruction that I feel is largely lacking in a lot of formal education nowadays, with our focus on mathematics and reading. And I had to learn to interact with all ages, races, and backgrounds of people.
• Writing in a journal. My religion encouraged it and my narcissism wanted to document the early life of a genius (actual entries in my childhood journal). The side benefit was that it forced me to contemplate who I was and to realize some of the consequences of my behavior.
• Being smart. There are an infinite number of ways this has affected my life, but for now let me just say that being perceived as being smart allowed me to get away with all sorts of things I otherwise would not have. Teachers gave me the benefit of the doubt, even when I was caught redhanded. I was given all of the social goodwill of a "good kid" simply because I scored so well on tests. 

There are other things that I feel lucky for -- a middle class upbringing with its de-emphasis on material goods, self-interested neglectful parents who largely left me alone, a superficial but straightforward culture which largely prized surface attributes and accomplishments that made it easy for me to mimic, and being a middle child who benefited from watching the failures of older siblings and was in a prime position to be a powerbroker, both between siblings and between parents and children.  

So when people ask me things like how do I maintain my life like I do, I don't know. The answer is complicated. I don't really expect people to learn a musical instrument or convert to Mormonism. But I don't know what else to say besides, it couldn't hurt?

Sociopath quotes: fitting in

Sane people did what their neighbors did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.

-- George Eliot, Middlemarch

Outrageous behavior

I can lose my temper sometimes. When I do, it can flip me from normal, even easy going, into someone possessed by a murderous rage. It's not hotheaded, it's coldhearted. It's also predictable, to an extent. Like everyone, it happens more when I am tired, frustrated, or distracted. Through the use of sleeping medications, I force myself to sleep more than my body naturally wants to, partly to keep a more level head when I am actually awake. I also try to avoid situations in which someone may unpredictably provoke me, typically strangers who don't know me or my triggers, and I am careful to schedule in a lot of downtime and alone time in which to decompress. I've gotten so good at this, it's been a while since my last rage attack. And all of the recent ones have been while I am traveling, when I am most likely to be forced to deal with strangers.

The most predictable aspect of these rages, though, is when someone "calls" me on something that I have done "wrong" when I feel like I have done nothing that would warrant their disapproval. I get angry at the flight attendant who tells me to turn off my electronic device, the metro worker who tells me to not use a particular set of stairs, etc. I know why, I feel like it is underhanded, that they are trying to force me to follow a particular set of rules that I think don't acknowledge, for whatever reason.

The particular set of rules, I realized, are called "social exchange rules." From a Wall Street Journal article about why folks throw temper tantrums when these rules are broken (try Googling the title "Big Explosions, Small Reasons" to get past the subscriber only):

Researchers at Duke University, in a yet-to-be-published study, looked for explanations of why people melt down over small things. Their findings suggest we are reacting to a perceived violation of an unwritten yet fundamental rule. It's the old, childhood wail: "It's not fair!"

Researchers call these unwritten laws of behavior "social exchange rules." We're not supposed to be rude or inconsiderate; we are supposed to be polite, fair, honest and caring. Don't cut in line. Drive safely. Clean up after yourself.

"We can't have successful interactions in relationships, mutually beneficial to both people involved, if one person violates these rules," says Mark Leary, professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke and lead author of the study. "And we can't have a beneficial society if we can't trust each other not to lie, not to be unethical, not to watch out for our general well-being."

What makes my losses of temper different, I wondered. Am I the same as these people? I behave civilized, even charmingly. I say please and thank you, wait my turn in line, etc., but largely because this is the best way to get what I want. These are some of the most obvious social rules, whether kept or broken, so I am sure to be seen as a rule follower particularly for these little niceties.

No, when I lose my temper, it's not because I feel like someone has not held up their end of a social bargain, it is because I have been reminded about how powerless I am. The flight attendant has power over me. I try to pretend that we are equals and I could ruin her if I wanted to, but ultimately she could get me kicked off a flight and I would have no recourse. The metro worker looked like God's mistake, but he also has a certain sort of power over me, power to tell me where I can walk and where I can't or else he'll call security. I hate feeling like someone has power over me, hate it so much that I will almost always try to flip the power dynamic in whatever way I can. And apparently get really angry about it when I'm reminded how many people have control over me in countless ways in my daily life. I don't know, it was interesting seeing how the reasons I lose my temper are both similar and different from the way that other people lose their temper. And now I know better how to provoke people (or not) when I choose.

Misreading the signs

In this post I talk about successfully sparring with sociopaths using emotional misdirection. I got the following response dismissing the effectiveness of that tactic:

Just because one person feeds you indirect or false information does not mean they will win. What about the other hundreds of people observed before? A sociopath doesn't learn when they've done something wrong because they either gain pleasure from it or honestly see no wrong in it, but this does not mean that they simply do not learn.

Lying to a sociopath and thinking you will win is stupid. What has the sociopath been doing his or her entire life? Lying. Unless they end up falling into a highly-narcissistic lifestyle, they are going to recognize a liar and will immediately trump them due to their amount of comfort and experience with lying that an empath would not have.

Your "battle tactics" seem more like a way of defeating you rather than sociopaths as a whole.

Right, that last sentence is probably the most true. But am I really so alone in that? I mean, other empathy challenged individuals like aspergers and autistics also frequently misinterpret emotional cues and are easy to trick. I make emotional/social errors like that in the weirdest circumstances. For instance, this conversation with a friend:

Friend: Why do black men always scream at me? Like, whenever in the street? It's a weird social thing, no?

M.E.: They scream at you?

Friend: Well, like, at the grocery store today, I walk past this black man who was just buying groceries and he starts yelling: hey girl? shopping? shop til you drop, I know you can! And on and on until I got into the store. And this happens a lot. It's a weird racial thing, no? The whole yelling thing. Black men do this.

M.E.: I guess they do. I just always felt like they were my friends, but thinking back on it now, they were strangers.

Friend: The screaming black men?

M.E.: Yeah

Friend: No, strangers.

M.E.: Yeah, I don't have any male black friends then. That's too bad.

EDIT: not like I ever thought these people were friends or acquaintances. I mean that there was an emotional/social illusion such that I forgot they were strangers yelling at me.