Fleeting emotions

My sister and sister-in-law have several children that are the same ages as each other. Children all have different personalities, but I have also seen some trends in how these particular children act based on their mothers' parenting styles. My sister is a little emotionally detached herself and is not an overly emotional parent. Her parenting style fosters independence. Her children go places by themselves before they are in the double digits of age. The children have a lot of autonomy, responsibilities, and experience real consequences for their actions. My sister-in-law is more the typical, doting mother. She is anxious and her children live in a safe bubble of love and protection. When her children speak, we stop and listen. They get choices about certain things like what to eat for dinner, but most of the time they are being told what to do from hour to hour. It's easy to see that there is not a one-style-fits-all approach to parenting. Both approaches have their plusses and minuses.

I am grateful for the way I was raised. Some people have called it borderline (or just plain) abusive, but to me it was mainly characterized by freedom and creativity. Even the unpredictable outbursts from my parents had a use, they helped bond me and my siblings together in a way that is still remarkably tight into adulthood. We got along not just because we had to, but because we wanted to -- everyone recognized that it was better that way. We would play music together, play games together, play sports together, and do projects together -- all of which we recognized would have been impossible to do alone. Together we were better, stronger, and happier than we were as individuals. Consequently, my family does certain things very well. We're very good at subjugating our will to the utilitarian needs of the whole. We joke that we're a little like the Borg from Star Trek -- assimilation for the needs of the hive. That might sound like a nightmare for some, but it's really efficient and no one ever feels like they're held hostage to the potential drama and demands of divas and tyrants. Each member of the family has their role and expertise, and the rest of us defer to them on those points when we're together. Because this state is completely voluntary, we're also careful to make sure that no one gets overly disgruntled and opts out completely. If someone is feeling put upon, we address the issue openly and efficiently. People who cheat get informal social sanctions, typically in the form of my sister's wrath. But to make things work this way, no one is really allowed to take things personally or have "unreasonable" emotional reactions and expect to have those feelings validated. Someone can be upset and cry and no one will give him a hard time about it, but unless he can verbalize his problem and propose a solution, no one is really invested in anyone's fleeting emotions.

My sister's family is the only one that approximates this approach with her own children. The results are interesting. Her children are definitely more ruthless, calculating, and calloused than most of their peers (more than they should be?). But they're also really easy to reason with. They understand better than a lot of adults that just because they are feeling an emotion does not mean that it was caused by any particular thing or person -- that they can't control what happens to them, but they actually do have a lot of control over how they feel about things or how they interpret those feelings. They learn this from their parents. When my sister is in a bad mood, she tells her children that she's just "grumpy," so they shouldn't take her reactions personally. My niece picked up on this phrase when she was just a toddler. If you asked her why she was sad, she would frequently say "I'm not sad, I'm just grumpy." She meant that there was nothing in particular that she wanted solved, she was just not feeling happy and to leave her alone about it. My sister's family even plays at emotions, taking "grumpy" family photos the same way that some families take silly photos. They understand that their emotions are labile and often fleeting. The children are not as offended when people don't take their emotions "seriously" because they understand the difference between raw emotional reactions and actual problems that can be verbalized.

I'm sure this isn't the only way to teach children this particular skill and maybe this approach would be impossible for most parents to pull off or would harm most children more than it would help. But I thought that it was an interesting approach, and would be helpful to serve as common ground for parents of sociopaths (particularly if the sociopathic child had normal siblings). 

The all in the family sociopath

A reader writes about his sociopathic family tree and what he believes led to his own sociopathic traits:

As a high functioning, truly, highly intelligent sociopath (well aren't we all) I.... "enjoyed" your book.

I figured out years ago I was a sociopath. I have a brother who is so the definition of "narcissistic personality disorder" his picture should be next to the definition in all books. I personally always classified him as a "psychopath" as opposed to my "sociopath". 

Our early lives we moved every few years. Dad was in the military. My brother and I came from an abusive household. I the black sheep, and he the "good" brother. I was physically, mentally and emotionally abused. Mom as well. Little brother got his fair share of the latter two as I recall. Dad never broke any bones. Never left bruises where people could see them. His intention, His terror, was part of his Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for us. I could see the overall methodicalness of it even as a young child. Keeping us off balance with random acts of kindness and random (or expected acts) of terror. Molding us into what he wanted us to be at the time. Clarity comes with hindsight, I know now that in many ways I had a good teacher. He was a highly intelligent, highly functional man who worked a Top Secret job for the government. He's gone now, not that he'd have spoken to me about it, but with what I now know, I'm certain he was in that APD spectrum somewhere.

Dad not only taught me the "ways and means" of dealing with the sociopathic tendencies, but the "ways of terror" as well. Mental, emotional, physical, all fair game in our household growing up. I always found the physical violence far to easy (I'm a big guy and can physically dominate most people easily enough) and prefer the mental and emotional manipulations more; more of a challenge. More "fun". Anyone can physically MAKE someone do something (say with a gun if nothing else), but manipulating them into WANTING to do it, far, far more satisfying.

I have really never had much of a chance to actually discuss the intimate details of our "disorder" with another sociopath. All us "APD" people have similarities. A few of the similar SMALL details however, of our (yours and my and perhaps others)"condition", "blew" me away. 

The fake accent. Mine is a non-specific southern accent, "blunted" by many years of living in the Midwest; or so it sounds. Seems to instantly set people at ease. "He's just a good ol' boy." Hearing the consonants roll off your tongue. Funny enough, I used to do the "non-specific European" accent and dropped it for the "non-specific southern" accent, as it was proving to be far more useful and continues to be. I wonder if this is due to our "chameleon" abilities or is there some other underlying mental process that makes us change our speech?

The "sharp tooth". Wow. Such a small detail, but on the mark. Likely due to our "sensation seeking". Had anyone bothered to ask, I could have told them 20+ years ago I was a dopamine junkie. I truly believe we do not produce enough dopamine, which causes us to live our lives constantly searching for some sort of stimulation, so for a brief moment we can have "peace". "Feel"......"Normal"?

There were a few other small details as well that I did not expect. Playing drums and living in bad neighborhoods being two of them. Makes me wonder how much of the "us" we have is really us, not just a response to our expressed genetic heritage. I'd be curious at how many others you've communicated with have similar "accents", "sharp teeth", are good at keeping a beat and live in bad neighborhoods.

I have delved into BDSM for quite a while now. Yes, surprise-surprise, I'm a Dom. Choking, pain, asphyxiation; all can certainly be "fun". Knives are "fun" as well. 

The sexual "deviancy" and attraction to the BDSM world is more common among APD people I've noticed. As well as MANY other mental disorders it seems. A fertile playground. Not without its downside. I've had two stalkers in the last 10 years who didn't take kindly to me just dropping them from my life. Of course what really happened was I decided it was over, and manipulated them into either leaving or stepping over the "line" and doing things there was no coming back from. That cost/benefit analysis can be a bitch sometimes. Mostly for others.

In this day and age of sarcasm and violence, I often just speak the truth now. Just like the person you quoted in your book. People think I'm joking. At worst, I have a slightly "off" or "dark" brand of humor. "What are you thinking?", she asks. "I'm wondering what kind of noises you'd make if I held you down and bit a chunk out of your shapely ass." She laughs. I was telling the truth.

I'm really not sure why I'm writing this email. Certainly curiosity. I have never shared this information with anyone. 

In some way perhaps its comforting to know I'm not alone in my "uniqueness".

Flexing power

I thought this Hyperbole and a Half comic, "Menace," had hilarious parallels to the mind of a sociopath child (and even sociopath adults). My favorite insight on self-imposed limitations:

The dinosaur costume was the greatest thing that had ever happened to me. The previous Halloween, which was the first Halloween I could actually remember, my parents had dressed me as a giant crayon, and the whole experience had been really uncomfortable for me.

But being a dinosaur felt natural.

And powerful. 

The feeling had been slowly intensifying ever since I put the costume on that morning, and, as I stood there in the middle of the classroom, staring off into the distance in an unresponsive power trance, it finally hit critical mass.

I had to find some way to use it. Any way. Immediately.

The other children screamed and fled. The teacher chased me, yelling at me to stop. But I couldn't stop.  I was a mindless juggernaut, a puppet for forces far greater than myself. I had completely lost control of my body. 

All I knew was that being a dinosaur felt very different from being a person, and I was doing things that I had never even dreamed of doing before.


Of course, I had always had the ability to do these things — even as a person — but I didn't know that. I'd just assumed that I was unable.  As a dinosaur, I didn't have any of those assumptions.  It felt like I could do whatever I wanted without fear of repercussions.

The repercussions were also exactly the same as they were before I became a dinosaur.

I just experienced them differently. 

On why in order to fully feel our power, we often feel the urge to destroy or wreak havoc:

The thing about being an unstoppable force is that you can really only enjoy the experience of being one when you have something to bash yourself against. You need to have things trying to stop you so that you can get a better sense of how fast you are going as you smash through them. And whenever I was inside the dinosaur costume, that is the only thing I wanted to do.

On losing the power of the dinosaur costume:

I was infuriated at the injustice of it all. I had become quite dependent on the costume, and it felt like part of my humanity was being forcibly and maliciously stripped away.  I cursed my piddling human powers and their uselessness in the situation. If only I could put on the costume . . .  just one more time.

Parent to a sociopath (part 2)

While I was watching We Need to Talk About Kevin, I thought several times about Andrew Solomon's book Far From the Tree, in which he writes about outlier children (i.e. children who are quite different from their parents, e.g. deafness, dwarfism, disability, genius, criminality, etc.). He discusses the difficulties that such children present to their parents, who have hoped to see their own unfulfilled promise attained vicariously through the lives of their children, and the great disappointment that can accompany the realization that their child is not who they imagined he would be (via Brain Pickings):

In the subconscious fantasies that make conception look so alluring, it is often ourselves that we would like to see live forever, not someone with a personality of his own. Having anticipated the onward march of our selfish genes, many of us are unprepared for children who present unfamiliar needs. Parenthood abruptly catapults us into a permanent relationship with a stranger, and the more alien the stranger, the stronger the whiff of negativity. We depend on the guarantee in our children’s faces that we will not die. Children whose defining quality annihilates that fantasy of immortality are a particular insult; we must love them for themselves, and not for the best of ourselves in them, and that is a great deal harder to do. Loving our own children is an exercise for the imagination. … [But] our children are not us: they carry throwback genes and recessive traits and are subject right from the start to environmental stimuli beyond our control. 

The most directly applicable We Need to Talk About Kevin quote:

Having exceptional children exaggerates parental tendencies; those who would be bad parents become awful parents, but those who would be good parents often become extraordinary.

Solomon also looks at the unique struggles of children who are born to parents that do not share the same defining traits. He first identifies the distinction between vertical identities, those we inherit from our parents like ethnicity or religion, and horizontal identities:

Often, however, someone has an inherent or acquired trait that is foreign to his or her parents and must therefore acquire identity from a peer group. This is a horizontal identity. Such horizontal identities may reflect recessive genes, random mutations, prenatal influences, or values and preferences that a child does not share with his progenitors. Being gay is a horizontal identity; most gay kids are born to straight parents, and while their sexuality is not determined by their peers, they learn gay identity by observing and participating in a subculture outside the family. Physical disability tends to be horizontal, as does genius. Psychopathy, too, is often horizontal; most criminals are not raised by mobsters and must invent their own treachery. So are conditions such as autism and intellectual disability.

(A quick note, I think the reference to psychopaths is hilariously demonizing, especially given Solomon's great care to withhold normative judgments of "bad" or "good" for the other outlier characteristics he discusses. To illustrate, imagine if he had used a similar negatively slanted statement for gay horizontal identity "most kids are born to straight parents, so must invent their own perversion.")

Solomon, who actually is gay with straight parents (but apparently feels that he did not invent his own perversion, unlike sociopaths), came up with his theory on vertical and horizontal identity when he noticed that he shared common identity issues with deaf children of hearing parents:

I had been startled to note my common ground with the Deaf, and now I was identifying with a dwarf; I wondered who else was out there waiting to join our gladsome throng. I thought that if gayness, an identity, could grow out of homosexuality, an illness, and Deafness, an identity, could grow out of deafness, an illness, and if dwarfism as an identity could emerge from an apparent disability, then there must be many other categories in this awkward interstitial territory. It was a radicalizing insight. Having always imagined myself in a fairly slim minority, I suddenly saw that I was in a vast company. Difference unites us. While each of these experiences can isolate those who are affected, together they compose an aggregate of millions whose struggles connect them profoundly. The exceptional is ubiquitous; to be entirely typical is the rare and lonely state.

I have noticed (and mention in the book) that there has been a lot of push back on labeling people, particularly the pathologizing of more than half the population. How could it possibly be that fewer people in the population are normal than abnormal?! But which seems more plausible -- that we are all cookie cutter neurologically the same? Or that we are all on a bell curve of myriad different human traits, our particular blend making us both completely unique (we actually are neurologically all special snowflakes, it turns out) and yet share identifiable traits in common across the entire swath of humanity. And that's a good thing. Charles Darwin remarked on the great variety of the human species:

As the great botanist Bichat long ago said, if everyone were cast in the same mould, there would be no such thing as beauty. If all our women were to become as beautiful as the Venus de’ Medici, we should for a time be charmed; but we should soon wish for variety; and as soon as we had obtained variety, we should wish to see certain characteristics in our women a little exaggerated beyond the then existing common standard.

Despite the many advantages of diversity, many families (and society) tend to treat horizontal identities as disorders that we would hope to eventually eliminate from the species:

In modern America, it is sometimes hard to be Asian or Jewish or female, yet no one suggests that Asians, Jews, or women would be foolish not to become white Christian men if they could. Many vertical identities make people uncomfortable, and yet we do not attempt to homogenize them. The disadvantages of being gay are arguably no greater than those of such vertical identities, but most parents have long sought to turn their gay children straight. … Labeling a child’s mind as diseased — whether with autism, intellectual disabilities, or transgenderism — may reflect the discomfort that mind gives parents more than any discomfort it causes their child.

(Is Solomon correct here? I think there are actually a lot of people who think that white Christian men are superior to other races/genders/religions, gay people are an abomination, autistic and disabled people are a drain to scarce social resources (same for sociopaths), etc. And perhaps their beliefs are not wrong, or at least it would depend on what measuring stick and set of values you use to judge.)

But I don't think it's the labels that are harmful, necessarily. Indeed, labels can be a boon to all outsiders forming their own horizontal identities. Rather, the problem seems to be the xenophobic system of enforcing social norms that encourages expressions of repulsion and shaming at what is too foreign to be relatable, whether it is feelings of disgust regarding gay people (especially gay people who do not feel the need to hide or tone down their "gayness"), the practices of other cultures (especially things that our own western culture has outgrown, like arranged marriages and modest clothing for women), or the backwards beliefs of religious "cults" (whereas our own religious beliefs are seen as perfectly plausible and normal).

Finally, Solomon describes what eventually happens to the mother in We Need to Talk About Kevin (and a hopeful statement for all parents of sociopathic children):

To look deep into your child’s eyes and see in him both yourself and something utterly strange, and then to develop a zealous attachment to every aspect of him, is to achieve parenthood’s self-regarding, yet unselfish, abandon. It is astonishing how often such mutuality has been realized — how frequently parents who had supposed that they couldn’t care for an exceptional child discover that they can. The parental predisposition to love prevails in the most harrowing of circumstances. There is more imagination in the world than one might think.