Zoom Interview with RT Part 1

 Here's another one on one video I did with RT:

British man RT talks about his sociopathic lifestyle, what led to him choosing to go to therapy, and his experiences in therapy. He's been able to maintain a steady job in tech, mostly because the nature of the job has allowed him to travel on assignment and start over when he gets a new client/assignment. He's also managed to remain married, no kids. He is not close to his family. He is very intelligent. And he recommends therapy to all other people on the sociopath spectrum.

Acceptance and healing

From a reader:

Confessions of a Sociopath has changed the way I look at my profession and indeed, the way I look at my life – and I am in the retirement zone! For me, the book is seminal and is an extraordinarily well written piece of work. How can I thank you?

I am an integrative person centred counsellor and absolutely love my work- because people come in miserable and go out smiling. In that role I am a grateful catalyst of health. In some of the exploits of your life, you seem to have been a catalyst of sickness – but I do not blame you. We do not make ourselves. Neither nature nor nurture is in our power.

As a counsellor, I help those whom the psychiatrists have given up on. Everyone can get happier. That is my job. Together, client and I just have to tap into goodness at a deep and spiritual level. Unfortunately, you appear to have been tapping into evil- but it’s not really your fault. You seem to say you love your parents and that they were good to you. They may have intended well. And we all want figures to love. But the way we are treated creates the persons we are, and I can see a lot of damage done in your childhood. From that learning, you went on to hurt others in like manner. And you may find that the reason for this is your parents were also mismanaged. Yes, your DNA will have directed your responses, but children need consistent love and security to become healthy adults and your story tells me otherwise. As such, you may never have seen emotion in the colour I see it. We all have to navigate our emotional selves through lives which include others’ emotions, and if we don’t read them well, we will do a lot of harm. Then we try and get out of the consequences, with more issues. 

I don’t believe that your intelligence, creativity and even gender ambiguity are necessary facets of my view of sociopathy. I see myself as a thought rebel, but I sense and care for others’ feelings well. I have to for my job!  I maintain no-one is a sociopath per se, implying a single shape for which change is impossible. But I do say many people have sociopathic tendencies in varying degrees. And whilst sociopathic people are part of our current society, I don’t believe sociopathy is essential to it- not in my world anyway! Sorry!

My mother is sociopathic and does not know it. She had 4 children and wrecked 5 lives, one terminally. I have spent all my life rebuilding unstable foundations to the point where I believe that my brain is rewired. Now, life just gets better and better.

Your religion showed you how to become accepted in society, but I do not see any real ‘born again’ people on your book, except possibly Ann, whether she was religious or not.  Her love seemed as unconditional as humanly possible, and I think she sparked the light of goodness which is in you and is in all of us. Others who have then loved you too, have enabled you to produce your invaluable book.

Truth and love are fundamental to my work. Religion is a rather flawed vehicle which I use to develop those values. I practice an extraordinary powerful but simple Buddhist type breathing meditation, but I am not a Buddhist. I find love in Christianity, but I don’t believe in the humanoid god presented therein. I am intuitive rather than impulsive. I am able to refer to a deep and good level before acting, but can sometimes be both fast and powerful. I can be ruthless with those who harm me or those I love.

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.

I would love to take you as a client, but England is a big commute.

M.E.:

I probably agree more with you now than the book would suggest, particularly this:

"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."

I do think that people have an identity that is not rooted in any sort of evil, like a computer has a backup that is not corrupted by a virus. If you can just get back to that version and restore the hardrive to that, no more virus, no more sociopathy, no more any personality disorder.

Reader:

I got it that the place you are at now is substantially on from some of the episodes you have related in your book. Indeed, you would not have written it otherwise. I absolutely admire you for the courage in giving us the bad stuff. If we gloss over that, we get nowhere, and none of us is squeaky clean. We all need to look at what goes wrong and attend to it. And we all benefit from that in ourselves. We don’t need to say it’s just for others. 
I like your resetting the hard drive. It is my absolute faith that there is a common and good centre to which we all naturally gravitate given the opportunity. Indeed, this was Rogers’ philosophy when he developed his person centred counselling  

I have spent most of my life trying to work out a formula for living which could make sense of the programming I received from parents in the context of the world I have found myself in. I found religion, Christianity in particular, to be helpful on the one hand but misleading on the other. Its bases, love and truth, are unquestionable for me, but the delivery by its practitioners is seriously in question.
My secular counselling practice has forced me to push my thinking to a conclusion so that I could reach deeper spiritual levels with clients who had no religious beliefs, and even those who had been alienated by them. That led me to develop Circle Diagram. It works a treat, and other counsellors find it useful too. It is intended to help a client understand himself. I enclose the article I wrote on it. It attributes a nature to the centre of the circle, our being. The inference in the conclusions is that we gravitate to a centre which supports truth and love. And that reflects your proposal that we all have an identity rooted in good and not in evil. I see evil as negative blobs coming in from outside my circle and my job is to help my clients resolve these blobs which mess up their lives and that of others around them. One of the concepts of the circle centre is that it is the person you were always meant to be before the blobs appeared. And that is part of the aim of the counselling process – get to that perfect being. Again, this correlates with your concept of resetting with the original back up. So far so good. The next bit is the challenge. It is that the reset only comes as a process of resolving the blobs. Clients need to get that the initial change is one of direction and not position. In other words, when you have got the formula, then the hard work of healing then starts. And it proceeds at its own pace, regardless of conscious intent, just as the injured body will heal at it’s own pace. Then persistence is required. But the rewards are amazing.
I also enclose my published article ‘The Sound of Silence’ which proposes a particular type of meditation which I offer and which is available across the planet as far as I know in Buddhist centres. If Rogers’ methods are good, this stuff is amazing. It has to be taught absolutely correctly but then it works wonders.   

Needing things to go a particular way

A reader asks me about this selection written by another reader that I featured in a recent post: "I have learned that with happiness, comes sadness... and to not block either emotion. Emotions are like yin and yang and you cannot have one without the other."

I had heard that one before, and I'd absolutely disagree with the yin and yang portion. I've had the, opinion, that feelings are without meaning and importance, but the positive ones feel good so I focus in on them, and the negative ones don't feel good so I think my way out of them as much as possible. If we are to maximize pleasure and minimize pain, that system seems to be the most efficient. Or maybe that's what I do because of the general lack of good stuff in my life for right now and the following few months due to the responsibilities and obligations that come with having future goals, as well as the anxiety of the ambiguity my future holds.
What's your approach to feelings currently, every-other-week therapy person? (Asks a rather depressed reader, I guess.)

And by the way, the way you tagged the Bill Burr video surprised me. You can probably easily see that he is not at all an actual sociopath, far from it actually. 
Anthony Jeselnik is probably the only sociopath comedian I know of, if he is one. He's at least as 'sociopathic' as I am, and openly calls himself one at occasions. You'd probably enjoy him if you haven't heard yet. (Spotify/Netflix)

My response:

Ha, for whatever reason I am bad at detecting sarcasm. I didn't really know who Anthony Jeselnik was before you mentioned him, except I was vaguely aware he dated Amy Schumer. I could see sociopath, and he's the type that also probably likes to see the sociopath in others as well.

As to the second part, I don't think you really can think your way out of negative emotions. I think you can avoid them, but they kind of stay there? Like no rational person would think that you can just ignore having to file your taxes and that by you ignoring it, the obligation to file your taxes would disappear too. I don't know why exactly this magical thinking is easy to believe with regard to emotions. Maybe it's possible to never notice an emotion, like those women who don't feel fear (http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-02/researchers-scare-pants-previously-fearful-patients), but even with those people, it appears that their body registers the emotion, and some place in their brain does, just not their conscious selves.

Have you ever remembered a situation associated with a negative emotion and felt the emotion again? If not, maybe you're much better at eliminating negative emotions than I am, but my guess is also no if you're depressed. If yes, this suggests again to me that ignoring the negative emotion does not actually eliminate it, but rather just forces it deeper into the subconscious, but still very active and possibly affecting everything you do.

For me, my every other week therapy approach has been to change the beliefs underlying a lot of my emotions. My most common belief along those lines was "I need things to be a particular way to [feel good]" Feel good could have meant a lot of more specific things over my lifetime -- feel happy, or feel satisfied, or get good sleep, or whatever. And then if you're this way and if things don't go that particular way, you not only don't feel good, you feel like you don't control your life and maybe even that no matter what you do you won't ever be able to ensure that you'll live a life of feeling good more often than not. And you're right in a way, because no one can guarantee or ensure that things will go a particular way. But if you learn to feel good without things going a particular way, that's a trick worth learning.

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 cruise ship story

I know this post is going to sound random to most people and morose to some people and everyone can agree it probably belongs in the category of navel gazing. But there is one story (probably not true, because I think I heard it at like a cousin's graduation or something) that I have heard that inexplicably haunts me. In fact, I'm surprised I have never said anything about it because I feel this strange compulsion to re-tell it to people, like the movie The Ring (which I thought was such a great metaphor for so many things in life, by the way).

The story: some lady wants to go on a cruise, but she is not financially well off. So she saves all of her money for years and finally has saved up enough to go. But she doesn't have a lot of money to spend on the cruise, a budget of $20 a day. So she figures she'll just bring along some food with her (saltine crackers and cheese) to save money. Now for whatever reason, this story makes me cringe. Because I haven't even cruised before, but my impression is that the standard cruise is all-inclusive. Some more upscale restaurants may charge additional fees, but at least the entry-level restaurants meals are included in the price of the cruise ticket. And of course this is true of the cruise in this story, except the lady doesn't realize it. Instead she has a great time, participates in the activities and goes to the different locations. The last night of the cruise she decides to treat herself and dine in the restaurant. She orders whatever she wants and she loves it. At the end of her meal, she waits for her server to bring the check. After a while, she flags someone down and asks for her bill. The server, surprised, tells her that there is no separate cost for her meal, it's included in the price of the cruise.

I feel like I should tell my therapist this story because maybe there is some deep seeded psychological issue behind the story for me (read here for a similar real life experience). Or maybe I should email my brain doctor, because he's good at dream interpretation and this seems similar. But I actually thought about it again tonight possibly in connection with the reason I keep thinking about it -- I thought about it in relation to my general lack of attachment to life or this world. I've simply never found life to be that compelling. Kind of like a tv show that maybe I might find myself stumbling upon on Netflix and watching the first season or so, but ultimately not getting that caught up in it. Like I don't hate it, and I like it well enough to sit through it and enjoy it, just not enough to keep wanting a bunch more of it. It's oddly a family trait. My brothers would also say that they welcome death, or at least that they have no fear or dread of it and that it will have elements of release or relief to it. (One of my sisters-in-law used to complain about it, worry that it would mean that he would abandon his kids by not trying hard enough to survive a disease or other injury. Interestingly, now she feels the same way about take-it-or-leave-it life and can't remember how she ever could have felt any other way, so maybe it's contagious). But even though I've always had a friendly stance towards death, I think I've always wondered if I wasn't just eating saltine crackers and cheese in my closet of a room rather than dining at the all-you-can buffet. And I think that more than anything else has been a secret wish or hope of mine. But I feel a little funny admitting that now because I've been in therapy with a great therapist for over two years now and have made a lot of reconnections to emotions and letting go of some of the more problematic personality disorder thinking patterns, have actually started finding fulfillment in my career, have better relationships with my family the last few years than I had in any other few year span in my life. But if anything, I feel even less thrilled about life than I ever have. Maybe it was the cutting back on the shenanigans. Maybe feeling my emotions more really and deeply is making me overall less satisfied with life. Or maybe I thought that I'd have found the way to the buffet by now if it existed, but the fact that I'm still here eating cracker sandwiches suggests that maybe this is it and I have to get better at appreciating what I have? I don't know, it's kind of hilarious because I feel like for the first time I am starting to have problems that only normal people have, but I haven't yet learned all of the coping mechanisms that go along with them.

Sociopathic savior

When I was growing up I had such insight into the psyches of others (and when I was younger, not enough of a filter from saying creepy things to people's faces), that people would tell me that I should be a psychologist. Often I feel like people either seek me out because they are interested in having me see through them or someone else they're trying to understand, or at the very least it contributes a lot to what my friends seem to get out of our relationships. That's why I thought this email from a reader was an interesting take on the reasons why a sociopath might choose to help people:

First of all, I just wanted to thank you so much for Confessions... I personally have several male sociopath friends (we just attract each other!), but no fellow female sociopaths have ever come my way. As such, I was naturally curious how other women display their sociopathy, and how the display of my own characteristics "measured up" to other females. I'm happy to say that much of your book felt like stream of consciousness coming from my own mind. There were even a couple of adages or quotes I found within your book that I've been saying for years, haha. It was a pleasure to read.

All gushing, flattery, and gratitude aside, I wanted to take a chunk of my own life and throw it to the wolves, as it were ;) I'm not asking for clarity on whether or not I'm a sociopath (I know I am, and I don't need "reassurance" for such things), but I suppose I would like to initiate a bit of discussion among your readers as to how sociopathy can play out.

Growing up, I had all of the classic symptoms of a sociopath. I used my parents' divorce to manipulate, guilt-trip, and ultimately profit from both parents, I would get in fights at school, covering up quickly by claiming the other child wanted me to hit them because they wanted to see what I was learning in martial arts, I learned how to fake guilt in that "I guess I took it too far," with crocodile tears to boot. I would lie about the most mundane of things, like whether or not I had brushed my teeth a particular morning, and sometimes I would lie just to create emotional outbursts "for the fun of it" (ie: I was homeschooled by my stepmom, who I despised entirely, so occasionally I would come to my dad in tears, confessing I had "failed" a really important test, that I felt like I wasn't taught any of the material covered. In reality, I always got very high marks, but I gained a sort of satisfaction in watching my dad blow up at my stepmom for "ruining my education.")

All of this took a turn when I was sixteen, when my dad, in one of his outbursts, killed my stepmom, baby sister, and himself. (I was also shot, but survived.) I was "sentenced" to court mandated therapy, which was entirely necessary as I was having flashbacks, nightmares, etc. But my therapist noticed something: aside from my dad--who, at very least, had sociopathic tendencies, though his primary dx was bipolar... he was incredibly intelligent, however, and through his own wits and ways of "bending the law," he went from being a high school dropout, son of a hooker to a multimillionaire by his early twenties. I still admire and respect him, probably more than any other person--aside from my loss of this influential role in my life, I did not grieve. I was not concerned for my losses, except the man I saw as most contributing to my education and growth (he spent hours every week teaching me about social manipulation, business strategy, etc)--someone I had seen as "useful." My therapist chalked this up to a delay in grief caused by shock, but five and a half years later, I have never been so much as concerned to think of the others. 

Though I was not grieving, being in therapy taught me how I "should be" grieving. My therapist used a lot more suggestive questions than she probably should have, likely to try to draw me "out of my shell" or to help me put a name to emotions I was "experiencing," but didn't "understand." So I created a persona based on this "grieving me." My performance won me a full-ride scholarship to college, many families opened their homes to me, and I noticed something odd--people came up to me, seemingly out of the blue, to talk to me about their problems, thinking "if anyone could relate," it would be me.

Having been in therapy, and having keenly observed my therapist, I simply played counselor to these people. And they would look at me and tell me how much I inspired them and gave them hope... Several told me, eventually, that had it not been for me, they would've killed themselves. The power and influence I had over these people was astonishing--and I loved it. 

So I used my education to get my BA in psychology, and in the near future, I will be pursuing a MA in Grief and Trauma Therapy. I currently volunteer once a week at a grief center for teens (I specifically work with teens who have lost someone to suicide, which earns me double points for 1. working with "the toughest cases," and 2. for being "strong enough to open up to relate in such a personal way to these teens"). I also work at a residential treatment center for adolescent girls who have been through trauma and abuse. Everyone I tell my persona's story to gushes at me in admiration, and more often than not, opens themselves up ever so completely to me. They trust me, in many cases, more than anyone else they've ever met. Trusting someone is laying down your defenses completely and being bareboned honest, fearless of the consequences. People trust me so much as to let me in where no other may go. I saved their lives, and in essense, now control their lives. The power of that is incredibly intoxicating.

So, yes: these days, I help people. And I am damn good at it. But I'm tired of hearing so many people (mostly empaths and wanna-be-sociopaths) tell me that no "real" sociopath would want to help people the way I do. Even some sociopaths are skeptical. But the display of sociopathic behavior is rooted in what we want. We want power. For me, I've found the most success in gaining power through letting people trust me on what they believe to be their own terms. Yes, I could ruin them, and that is a delicious fantasy (and one, admittedly, I play out now and again with lovers)... but if I did so with clients, my reputation could be ruined more than it would be worth. By being "responsible" with my power, I gain more of it. 

I'm curious what you and yours would remark on my endeavors. I don't help people because I feel "compassion" or any nonsense like that. I don't feel any sort of "trauma bond" either. Simply, I'm good at something, and people admire, praise, and depend on me (to the point of stopping themselves from suicide) for that. Any other "savior sociopaths" out there? (After all, being a Savior entails being someone's God...)

"When the Ether Stares Back" (part 1)

From a reader:

Dearest M.E.,

Let me start by saying I am incredibly grateful for your book and website.  

In true ironic fashion, what drew me to buy your book is almost comical.  I despise how dramatized and one-dimensional most fictional socio/psychopathic characters are portrayed on TV... But my empathic partner at the time would constantly correlate me with the likes of Sherlock (from the popular British TV show), Dr. House, Nick Naylor (from Thank You for Smoking), Doctor Who (cerebral narcissist who is rarely wrong and plays god with glee), and even said he saw me capable of the kind of dispassionate violence of Dexter or Hannibal.  

(To this day I despise these rather caricatured versions of those with a sociopathy diagnosis.  It tries to make people with the disorder into something they are not.)

A while back I had been to a psychologist who had suggested something in the Cluster B category of anti social personality disorders, strongly leaning on and suggesting sociopathy.  Like you, I never put much thought into it.  Why did it matter? It all seemed so droll... and that it might work against me in the grand scheme of things, were I to move forward and pursue a formal diagnosis.  

I have a history of great success and plummeting failure for my young age.  Usually due to becoming bored or being mindlessly vindictive to entertain myself.  Today I am an entrepreneur making my place in the tech and marketing industry. My customers claim it's like I can see the soul of their business and reveal it to the world as it truly is.  Making money and strategic associations/networks has been a natural talent of mine since I was a young girl.

I am quite good at working a crowd and eliciting trust and confessions from strangers.  People constantly claim it is like I have always known them, though I reveal little about myself.  I have been berated for my "intense" eye contact, and am known to seduce or terrify people without much effort or even intention.

I don't typically have thoughts of violence... But I adore being a social predator.  There is nothing more delicious to me than the idea of emotionally ruining someone and making their feeble little world collapse on them. 

On a day-to-day basis, I don't feel much of anything except for a sense of neutrality and an empty roving hunger and boredom.  Though I am an adept cognitive empathizer (through conscious and deliberate effort), I don't have automatic or bodily affective empathy.  And the moral worlds of other people is endlessly fascinating to me.  I have moved through several sects of religion and philosophy, in an attempt to truly grasp why this is of such grave magnitude to most people; the "inherent" nature of such an abstraction is lost upon me. 

And as you can probably ascertain from this long diatribe... I have a very sincere form of narcissism. 

When I finally read your book, I ate it up with endless mirth. Not out of spite or because I found it to be perfunctory. Quite the contrary. You were the first author who wrote about WELL HIDDEN (or as the neurotypicals cutely coin it, “functional”) sociopaths who blend seamlessly in the world without having a tangible/traceable history of crime or malevolence. Finally someone I could relate to that was multifaceted... And actually existed!

It inspired within me two things.  One, I wanted to learn as much about this "condition" as possible, so that I could utilize it with even more accuracy than before.  Which leads to Two, my committed attempt to be more constructive, rather than destructive, with my personality and power.  If I cannot change this thing that I am (which is the first form of foundational self I can honestly say I've ever truly perceived), then I might as well do the most with it. 

Please accept my sincere gratitude for sharing so openly.  Even if half of it is lies or greatly masked, your story has made the first indelible impact on my life that I have ever had the immense pleasure of experiencing. 

That being said, I am looking to you for your perspective.  

Recently I have began to initiate a relationship of sorts with someone whom is also appears to be sociopath.  Both of us are aware of our "condition". And both of us have committed to not play games, and to be painstakingly honest with one another.  Believe it or not, I find him endlessly fascinating and have a strange respect for him, as I see him as one of my few equals.  We have similar goals of being as functional as possible... But we also greatly enjoy relaying our daily hunting and games to one another. It's an unspeakably delicious outlet.  Not to mention the level of attention/adoration between us is unlike that of an empathic relationship, where I can easily and without intention hurt that person (and subsequently watch it disturb my life and plans—what an inconvenience). 

Being honest with one another, we have not made any commitment or exclusiveness... And in fact this honesty only seems to increase the sense of intimacy between us.  Another first in my life--this person has inspired some kind of bodily feeling of emotions in me... And he reports that I have much the same effect on him.  It's been overwhelming and at times uncomfortable. We've been experiencing this together, and trying to talk it out... Leading to more research.

Funny that you recently posted regarding the body-mind connection associated with emotions, and not being able to identify them.  Have you read "The Growth of the Mind and the Endangered Origins of Intelligence" ?  

There is an excerpt on pages 78-80, regarding a woman who "acted" on emotions, because she could not express them.  And in fact, she could not even describe or process the bodily experience of an emotion. I think you'll find it quite valuable:

“Something as simple as a child saying ‘I want to go outside’ can be responded to with a yes or no on the one hand, or, on the other, ‘What do you want to do outside?’  The latter response helps the child reflect on his wish, while the former only gives in to it or inhibits it.  Reflection fosters the use of symbols, and, more broadly, the ability to think, while inhibition or immediate giving in both foster only a tendency  toward action.

Meanwhile, the child's concomitant neurological growth helps his repertoire of symbols multiply rapidly.  The nervous system allows for quicker learning now, and he accumulates words and ideas with growing ease.  He can imitate almost any sound or word and does so regularly.  This is still not automatic, however.  New words take on meaning and become part of the child's vocabulary only when attached to the emotion or intent.

Memories are formed that involve not only images of patterns of action but also emotions, intentions, and desires.  Without these affective components, memory would be a mere computer screen that showed pictures by rote, without meaning or structure.  Because of them, however, memory becomes part of the expression of the individual self.  Meaning and purpose, in other words, together with remembered sensations, form the dual code that is essential to our humanity.  

When a child lacks nuanced relationships or cannot for neurological reasons learn from them, the images he develops contain less detail and complexity, his personality less differentiated, and his later ability to form relationships is much reduced. Many adults have never sufficiently mastered the ability to form images.  

One such person, Susan, came into therapy in the hope of saving her deteriorating marriage.  Her husband was spending increasingly long hours at the office, and their relationship was becoming more and more acrimonious.  Whenever Jim's work hours lengthened, she would complain and criticize, which naturally made him spend even more time working--which in turn only stepped up her complaints.  Try as she might, she lamented to the therapist, she could not get him to pay her the attention that she needed and deserved. 

Susan couldn't connect the couple's problems to her own feelings. She knew only that she felt generally "bad" but couldn't find words to describe her state of mind or the root of her trouble.  Nothing she tried seemed to break the pattern that was driving Jim away. 

Her intense orientation toward changing Jim's behavior alerted the therapist to the fact that had great difficulty representing many of her feelings symbolically rather than simply acting on them.  When he asked her for more details about her feelings, she said that Jim's refusal to come home made her behave coldly toward him. She would describe her actions or tendency to act a certain way, but not how she felt.  The therapist, hoping to help her focus on her feelings, asked her first to attend to her physical sensations. She began by describing her muscles as tight and tense. Over time her descriptions hinted at emotions: for example, her body felt as though it were ‘getting ready for an attack.’  Only gradually did feelings like anger and furry emerge more clearly. 

Eventually Susan learned to identify the bodily manifestations of fear and loneliness as well as anger.  She came to realize that she felt vulnerable, helpless, and lost.  Never before had she discussed her anger of feelings of loss; she had only sensed a vaguely defined, overly inclusive state of panic. Once she learned to talk about her sense of loss, she was able to connect her anxiety to Jim's absence to similar terrors she had felt as a child.  Whenever Susan had became needy, her stubborn, domineering mother responded by rejecting her emotionally.  Distant and controlling, her mother had refused to brook any communication around issues of vulnerability, helplessness, or loss. Anger was completely taboo. Thus she had prevented the little girl, and the woman she had became, from learning to represent herself the feelings that surround rejection and abandonment. Unable to abstract and understand the painful feelings Jim's angry absences evoked, Susan could only act them out and experience a global state of distress.”

Now, in my case, I would be acting like Jim... But I digress. I thought this would further help your hypothesis.  Personally, as I begin to write out the physical sensations I undergo in given situations, it helps me identify and even parse out something that may be affective.  Some food for thought.

To continue on my dilemma... While things are going quite well between myself and this man, there is something I've noticed.

Overall we are quite good at mutually driving each other to our very best in everything.  We foster an interest to understand each other. It helps our behavior become less erratic. 

However, when one or the other of us grows apathetic, as we tend to do when we have subdued acting on impulses/destructive desires... It tends to rub off on the other.  We are at least cognitively empathetic toward one another, but obviously it's quite hard to feel much distress for one another when we otherwise don't feel distress for anything but an extreme or rare basis. It seems apathy breeds apathy, as we look to one another for some sort of solace in an otherwise dull world.   

Have you ever heard of sociopaths in an intimate/meaningful relationship with one another?  

We don't have very much motivation to destroy or manipulate one another. If anything, we may egg each other on to act on our impulses at times.  The reward in acting and moving forward with one another, without the usual neurotypical baggage/expectations, is much greater. Being largely without affect, we can offer one another advice that is mostly sound.  But it seems that even though we commit to not mirror one another, we still can't escape our natural inclination to do so, at least in this particular instance. Perhaps due to our very small sense of self?  That we have conditioned ourselves to do such things and aren't sure how to do otherwise?

What is your take on this?

Thank you for your time and thoughts. 

Much adoration and respect,

Artemis