Is BTK serial killer Dennis Rader a Psychopath?

Confessions of a Sociopath: A Life Spent Hiding in Plain Sight author M.E. Thomas talks with Arya (psychopath) and Sam (empath) about BTK serial killer Dennis Rader, whether he's a psychopath, potential motivations for this behavior, similarities or dissimilarities from other serial killers like Ed Kemper and Ted Bundy, hypocrisies of people who want Ted to feel badly for his crimes but also want Ted and everyone that helped Ted to also die, compartmentalization, differences between sociopaths and narcissists, sexual identity and sexual self-expression, and finally whether there was anything that could have helped Dennis Rader to not kill and instead lived his truth in ways that did not involve murder.  

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.

Next Zoom Arya and Frances on the Reckoning! UPDATED TIME!

Note the time difference -- it's an hour later. Also \there's a chance that this time might change a bit either a little forward and back, so double check beforehand (I'll try to indicate an update in the subject line of the blog post). 

This one I'm really excited about, it's Arya again and her ex Frances talking about Arya's path through the "reckoning" to get back in touch with her feelings, i.e. a workable treatment!!!! Who knows why psychologists aren't talking about this, but you heard it here first!

M.E. Thomas is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.

Topic: My Meeting with Arya and Frances part 2

Time: Dec 6, 2020 12:30 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)

Join Zoom Meeting

https://us04web.zoom.us/j/75944556298

Meeting ID: 759 4455 6298

Passcode: jsM209

Shame as the root of narcissim

My sister in law has been reading "Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead" by Brené Brown and sending me quotes.

I think this one is such a good point, especially on the heels of this post on what is actually the best way to help a sociopath change their behavior. Re narcissists:

"Here’s where it gets tricky. And frustrating. And maybe even a little heartbreaking. The topic of narcissism has penetrated the social consciousness enough that most people correctly associate it with a pattern of behaviors that include grandiosity, a pervasive need for admiration, and a lack of empathy. What almost no one understands is how every level of severity in this diagnosis is underpinned by shame. Which means we don’t “fix it” by cutting people down to size and reminding folks of their inadequacies and smallness. Shame is more likely to be the cause of these behaviors, not the cure."
***

“When I look at narcissism through the vulnerability lens, I see the shame-based fear of being ordinary. I see the fear of never feeling extraordinary enough to be noticed, to be lovable, to belong, or to cultivate a sense of purpose.”

Same thing for sociopaths. Their grandiosity and self centered behavior comes from a profound lack of sense of self. They don't recognize or honor the boundaries of other people because the sociopath has no sense of his own boundaries. He was never taught to understand, respect, or make space for the vulnerability of others because he was taught from his earliest ages to stifle his own vulnerability and to take up no space, to be a cyper.

Along those lines, from the same book:

"The Wholehearted Parenting Manifesto Above all else, I want you to know that you are loved and lovable. You will learn this from my words and actions—the lessons on love are in how I treat you and how I treat myself. I want you to engage with the world from a place of worthiness. You will learn that you are worthy of love, belonging, and joy every time you see me practice self-compassion and embrace my own imperfections. We will practice courage in our family by showing up, letting ourselves be seen, and honoring vulnerability. We will share our stories of struggle and strength. There will always be room in our home for both. We will teach you compassion by practicing compassion with ourselves first; then with each other. We will set and respect boundaries; we will honor hard work, hope, and perseverance. Rest and play will be family values, as well as family practices. You will learn accountability and respect by watching me make mistakes and make amends, and by watching how I ask for what I need and talk about how I feel. I want you to know joy, so together we will practice gratitude. I want you to feel joy, so together we will learn how to be vulnerable. When uncertainty and scarcity visit, you will be able to draw from the spirit that is a part of our everyday life. Together we will cry and face fear and grief. I will want to take away your pain, but instead I will sit with you and teach you how to feel it. We will laugh and sing and dance and create. We will always have permission to be ourselves with each other. No matter what, you will always belong here. As you begin your Wholehearted journey, the greatest gift that I can give to you is to live and love with my whole heart and to dare greatly. I will not teach or love or show you anything perfectly, but I will let you see me, and I will always hold sacred the gift of seeing you. Truly, deeply, seeing you."

"What matters is behavior"

I try to read most of the comments and I saw this one that raised interesting points:

I should have mentioned: I like that video because it's message is that what matters is behaviour, not nature of experience. Behaviour is pertinent to evolution; regardless of how motivation might vary between types of individuals.

The video the comment references is here:

I recognized this belief as being the one that I had for 95% of my life. It was the one that I advocated multiple times in the book, that "what matters is behaviour, not nature of experience." And I still do believe it in so many instances. For instance, I do believe that sociopaths love, even though it is different than the way that other people experience love.

I was also just reading about Shaquem Griffin, who is a one-handed NFL linebacker. He told the story of how when he was young, there were weight minimums and maximums for the league he was playing in. At one of these weigh-ins, he was told he was too heavy, even though he had weighed himself the night before and was fine. He had his coach re-weigh him and he was within the proper range. When they confronted the official that said that he was too heavy the official confessed that it wasn't so much about the weight, the official said what he said because he was too uncomfortable having a boy play who was one-handed. This seems like a very good application of experience vs. behavior. Is he able to play? Then he should be able to play. I don't feel like someone can validly come in and say that he can't participate in all life has to offer just because others experience the same situation differently.

And I think that was always what I was thinking about when I voiced that belief -- that behavior matters over internal experience. Because I didn't want my personality disorder to limit me in any way. I wanted to have enriching relationships and lasting and rewarding jobs and maybe even kids! (Although that last one turned out to not be in the cards for me.) So what if my risk/reward meter was always on. So what if my love was as shallow as a sandbar? These things all felt very real to me, despite not experiencing them in the same way that others did.

But my brother recently shared with my a BYU talk with the following passage:

The challenge is not so much closing the gap between our actions and our beliefs; rather, the challenge is closing the gap between our beliefs and the truth. That is the challenge.

This is more how I feel now. Because when your beliefs are based on true and right principles, it's much easier to act accordingly. When you see good and loving behavior as a natural form of self-expression, that becomes that most natural way for you to behave.

I think a related point is the question that some people have about how much responsibility a sociopath has for their actions. My pinned tweet is "I'm not saying that sociopaths aren't responsible for their actions, but they're certainly not responsible for being sociopaths." Even that gets push back from people who think that sociopaths are trying to eschew any responsibility for their actions. It it oft cited and accurate that a sociopath often knows what the morally "right" answer is in any given situation. But the sociopath does not have an actual belief in the rightness of the thing. To the sociopath, even well decided moral issues are seen as essentially social conventions. To them there's not much difference between the moral issues you fault them for and using a shellfish fork properly.

Some of you are probably less gross than I am, but at least when I was younger I remember washing my hands after using a restroom much more frequently in public than I did in my own home? Why? Because I knew it was the "right" answer, but I myself did not value washing my hands in most situations. I think everyone does things like this, even daily. But imagine the world of a sociopath in which you do things like this dozens of times per day -- always conforming your behavior without ever having the belief. If you want to know how difficult this is to sustain, look at how often sociopaths self-destructive (or how often you give up your New Year's resolutions).

I think the key to a sociopath having greater life living sustainability and being and feeling "better" is not in changing behavior, it is in changing beliefs. Unfortunately, hardly anyone in the psychological community is willing to help sociopaths change their beliefs and it's almost impossible for them to do themselves, like a game of blind man's buff.

I'll write a little more on this in the next post.

Here's the more full context from the BYU quote:

People say, “You should be true to your beliefs.” While that is true, you cannot be better than what you know. Most of us act based on our beliefs, especially what we believe to be in our self-­interest. The problem is, we are sometimes wrong.

Someone may believe in God and that pornography is wrong and yet still click on a site wrongly believing that he will be happier if he does or he can’t help but not click or it isn’t hurting anyone else and it is not that bad. He is just wrong.

Someone may believe it is wrong to lie and yet lie on occasion, wrongly believing he will be better off if the truth is not known. He is just wrong.

Someone may believe and even know that Jesus is the Christ and still deny Him not once but three times because of the mistaken belief that he would be better off appeasing the crowd. Peter wasn’t evil. I am not even sure he was weak. He was just wrong.

When you act badly, you may think you are bad, when in truth you are usually mistaken. You are just wrong. The challenge is not so much closing the gap between our actions and our beliefs; rather, the challenge is closing the gap between our beliefs and the truth. That is the challenge.

So how do we close that gap? 

How Psychopaths Work

This was an interesting podcast that a reader shared with me.


To me it started off a little self assured of itself in starting certain things as fact that seemed wrong-ish to me, or at least debatable. It reminded of listening to non-Mormons talk about the Mormon religion with such certainty or men talking about the female experience with such certainty, if that gives you an idea of what I mean.

Probably my favorite parts were about halfway to the end where they start acknowledging the very problematic ways that psychopaths have been studied, the discrepancies in psychological "knowledge" of what sociopaths are and how to diagnose them, how psychopaths are diagnosed (stressing criminal behaviors), how they're given psychological treatment or not, how they're punished for their diagnosis by the criminal systems, how they're stigmatized by society even though a psychopath is in no way responsible for being a psychopath (genetics and upbringing). They quite rightly opine that history is not going to look kindly on humanity's current treatment of psychopaths.

There was also an interesting discussion of gender bias in the way that sociopaths have been studied and the diagnostic criteria. 

Sick of shame?

Another month, another post about the limitations of public shaming, this time prompted by the people who seem to be confronting for the first time how to ethically oppose an ideology that you find to be abhorrent.

I've always been very vocally opposed to public shaming, even before I was the victim of it. At it's core, it uses the unwieldy weapon of mob mentality to enforce social norms, particularly those that its adherents believe have moral significance. Never mind that there is no universal morality, but rather that beliefs about morality are closely tied to such varied inputs as religion, culture, upbringing, genetics, etc. I'm not the only one who thinks that if shame had any value at all (perhaps evolutionarily or in certain smaller contexts),  although there have been other victims of shaming who still defend its applications. Most of these critiques fall under the category of the solution being worse than the problem, e.g. the self-censorship and resulting harm to open dialogue that can occur as a result.

But is it even an actual solution?

One thing that I learned in therapy is that everyone (1) is at a different stage than you (emotional, psychological, educational, etc.) and (2) that people can go through the stages in different orders, different ways, and prompted by different experiences than you did. To insist that other people go through their own progression at your pace, in your order, or in your way is just a denial of the realities of psychology. People can rarely make a lasting meaningful change in the moment. You can demand that they start doing or being something or stop doing or being another thing, but they are not psychologically capable of meeting your demand in that moment (although there is longterm hope because there is almost always possibility for real, meaningful, and lasting change in that area if they are open and committed to seeking it). So for instance, demanding that someone who has been socialized, educated, and undergone particular psychological development to the point where they are racist (at that moment in time), you cannot just demand that they stop being racist. And even if you could convince them at a certain intellectual level that there is reason to doubt their position, they need to go through whatever process is necessary for them to sort it all out in their head. Open dialogue could encourage this process, although it seems like more people on all sides are showing up to dialogues not to engage, but with already formed judgments that they seek only to make known.

Unfortunately, the shaming process does not encourage the sort of dialogue or safe space that is often conducive to people softening their opinions and being receptive to something new. What it does is foster reflexive defensiveness, further entrenching them in their viewpoint. Shame often targets the person instead of the behavior, which can lead to identity politics and culture wars:

In a guilt culture you know you are good or bad by what your conscience feels. In a shame culture you know you are good or bad by what your community says about you, by whether it honors or excludes you. In a guilt culture people sometimes feel they do bad things; in a shame culture social exclusion makes people feel they are bad.

I saw on Twitter last month this tweet regarding candied yams (my first encounter with them):

" y'all know what's going on " pic.twitter.com/25cNPIl0yz

— MOST HATED🕊 (@DuwopFrm89CG) July 25, 2017

And then subsequent chain involving a white guy ("@wwadas") who replied that he didn't recognize the candied yams. Black Twitter led him through the process of making the yams, with many praising what seemed to be an increasingly rare instance of building a cultural bridge:

Me, what's on the right?

— Will Wadas (@wwadas) July 26, 2017

Until others culled through the white guy's tweets to find good ol' boy and obliquely (if not overtly) racist content. Although some immediately tried to shame him, labeling him (not his behavior or beliefs) as being "problematic", other people were less inclined to jump to such conclusions:

It's an interesting thread, with some arguing that every instance of real or perceived injustice must be fought to avoid perpetuating such injustice and another person commenting: "Sorry not everyone is perfect, maybe he's on the way to making things right."

Of course, I may be speaking from a place of bias being religious myself, but I think religion gets it very right in this instance. From one of my favorite LDS talks from Elder Dale G. Renlund:

Just as God rejoices when we persevere, He is disappointed if we do not recognize that others are trying too. Our dear friend Thoba shared how she learned this lesson from her mother, Julia. Julia and Thoba were among the early black converts in South Africa. After the apartheid regime ended, black and white members of the Church were permitted to attend church together. For many, the equality of interaction between the races was new and challenging. One time, as Julia and Thoba attended church, they felt they were treated less than kindly by some white members. As they left, Thoba complained bitterly to her mother. Julia listened calmly until Thoba had vented her frustration. Then Julia said, “Oh, Thoba, the Church is like a big hospital, and we are all sick in our own way. We come to church to be helped.”

Julia’s comment reflects a valuable insight. We must not only be tolerant while others work on their individual illnesses; we must also be kind, patient, supportive, and understanding. As God encourages us to keep on trying, He expects us to also allow others the space to do the same, at their own pace. 

I understand that this requires forbearance from exactly those who are most likely to have been wronged, not just in this moment but from a long history of oppression. I understand this burden to be so heavy that I would not even ask it of anyone, much less demand. I would only hope to help them see, to persuade them that there is greater peace and joy there than in seeking to return the same. Or as Paul Gaugin said: "One day, you will feel a joy in having resisted the temptation to hate, and there is truly intoxicating poetry in the goodness of him who has suffered."

Appealing to Cognitive vs. Emotional Empathy

From a reader:

Thoroughly enjoyed your book. I'm pretty sure you hit on the right conclusions in the closing chapters. I used to work with batterers and some violent offenders. Emotional self regulation and empathy tend to range along a spectrum. The highly emotional men (empaths - as you refer to them) that I worked with responded well to empathy. Men on the sociopathic end of the spectrum tended to view emotional displays of empathy as pathetic and useless. The sociopaths I encountered tended to be quite adept at "cognitive empathy" (the ability to model and predict behaviors from an intellectual perspective), but were blind to feeling. As a consequence, they didn't seem to perceive compassion or guilt. It took me a while to come to the conclusion that the soft, tender, vulnerable part of them just wasn't there in the same way as it often is in others. 

They were however exquisitely stunned to consequences. I learned very quickly to drop empathy as a psychotherapeutic intervention, and to focus on rewards, punishments and outcomes in their lives. They were quick to pick up the fact that kindness was often a far better long term strategy for getting what they want than cruelty. 

Pro social behaviors can be taught to children without a conscience. Parents and teachers just need to know what they are working with. I could go on and describe the manipulative games the sociopaths I worked with used to engage in, the special interest they took in manipulating their therapists, the telltale language they used to describe others, or how they game the system, but you already know these things. I liked working with them. I think I was a puzzle to them. Encountering someone who could be "touchy/feely", and who could abruptly turn off their empathy to confront them directly seemed to confuse them. I imagine that I was able to promote some interest and a sense of unease in knowing that I could see through them. Interesting people. Everyone's trying to make their way in the world.

When Your Child Is a Psychopath

A reader writes:

I’ve been keeping you in mind, particularly since lately I see more and more nuanced discussions of psychopathology cropping up. Paul Bloom’s ‘Against Empathy’, though I haven’t yet read the full book, is a particular point of interest for me. But I found out today that The Atlantic had published this article very recently, and I wanted to share it: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/06/when-your-child-is-a-psychopath/524502/

What stands out for me in this situation is the fact that the girl, Samantha, is adopted; I know that children who have been abandoned or through the foster system face greatly increased hardships in their development, which is something I find deeply troubling on a social level. It seems to me that whatever harmful antisocial traits Samantha has may have been exacerbated by past trauma, even as early as her infancy.

Anyway, if you’re so inclined, please read it, and I hope you can take away something useful from it!

Incidentally, concerning the earlier stuff I mentioned about anime - have you ever heard of PSYCHO-PASS (yes, the title is in all caps)? It’s a speculative science fiction series specifically about psychopathy and preemptive judgment in criminal justice. You might find it interesting.

One of the more interesting things for me in the article was this paragraph on low resting heart rate (mine is always just barely hitting 60 beats per minute):

Psychopaths not only fail to recognize distress in others, they may not feel it themselves. The best physiological indicator of which young people will become violent criminals as adults is a low resting heart rate, says Adrian Raine of the University of Pennsylvania. Longitudinal studies that followed thousands of men in Sweden, the U.K., and Brazil all point to this biological anomaly. “We think that low heart rate reflects a lack of fear, and a lack of fear could predispose someone to committing fearless criminal-violence acts,” Raine says. Or perhaps there is an “optimal level of physiological arousal,” and psychopathic people seek out stimulation to increase their heart rate to normal. “For some kids, one way of getting this arousal jag in life is by shoplifting, or joining a gang, or robbing a store, or getting into a fight.” Indeed, when Daniel Waschbusch, a clinical psychologist at Penn State Hershey Medical Center, gave the most severely callous and unemotional children he worked with a stimulative medication, their behavior improved.

And regarding the ineffectiveness of punishment or bad experiences in terms of modifying behavior:

Faulty brakes may help explain why psychopaths commit brutal crimes: Their brains ignore cues about danger or punishment. “There are all these decisions we make based on threat, or the fear that something bad can happen,” says Dustin Pardini, a clinical psychologist and an associate professor of criminology at Arizona State University. “If you have less concern about the negative consequences of your actions, then you’ll be more likely to continue engaging in these behaviors. And when you get caught, you’ll be less likely to learn from your mistakes.”
***
This insight is driving a new wave of treatment. What’s a clinician to do if the emotional, empathetic part of a child’s brain is broken but the reward part of the brain is humming along? “You co-opt the system,” Kiehl says. “You work with what’s left.” 



The article also talks optimistically about the possibilities of treatment, with this caveat:

No one believes that [the boys in treatment] will develop true empathy or a heartfelt moral conscience. “They may not go from the Joker in The Dark Knight to Mister Rogers,” Caldwell tells me, laughing. But they can develop a cognitive moral conscience, an intellectual awareness that life will be more rewarding if they play by the rules. “We’re just happy if they stay on this side of the law,” Van Rybroek says. “In our world, that’s huge.”

Resconstructing ourselves

A reader gives an update on the child with reactive attachment disorder (RAD) who was featured in the documentary, Child of Rage, discussed previously on this blog here. I always avoid using her name, but you can read the details on the link (and it's always a little shocking to me that they used her name in the "documentary" featuring her, a minor, in what seems a pretty exploitative way, showing her actual therapy tapes? How did her parents allow this?).

There is a happy ending! She recovers from the reactive attachment disorder in a big way and becomes a happy and contributing member of society. The link for the update on her life is here. The quick summary is she is a nurse, she seems to still have a good relationship with her family, and she seems like just a normal person living a normal life.

As I was looking for the documentary I stumbled upon some other child mental disorder documentaries that seemed just a little less exploitative, and then finally a clip of a "news" show interviewing a young, attractive teacher that got busted for sexual relations with a 14 year old student. She was saying that it was a mistake and she had done it because of a troubled past, including mental illness, but scrolling through the comments -- every single person continued to vilify her. Out of the millions of views, not a single one would accept her apology, either as being sincere or as her being capable of change or worthy of forgiveness.

I know that the urge to ostracize and shame others runs deep in humanity's evolutionary past, but (and I've said this literally dozens of times before, including the penultimate post) society's willingness to let self-righteous feelings to dominate their rational capacity and/or empathy to continue to persecute people for something that they did or said in the past... I just struggle to understand why it's still such a problem, and one that is rarely discussed as such. As much as you hear about anti-bullying campaigns, there seems to be an unspoken understanding amongst most people that bullying is absolutely ok if the person you're bullying is a bad person. I hear even intelligent people whom I respect defend the shaming and the shameless poor treatment of their fellow humans for real or imagined wrongs. What society does with its social undesirables is basically one step away from tattooing them with their convict number and hounding and persecuting them through the rest of their lives.


But I sometimes think, what if we talked about more examples of recovery and more stories of people being dynamic and capable of change, maybe we could educate the evolutionary impulse a little so it's not so prone to mob mentality and see our fellow humans a little more accurately -- people that weren't really the same person decades ago and won't really be the same decades from now. Like NPR's Invisibilia piece on the myth of the static personality featuring the story of Dan, a rapist turned good guy: "I'm forever going to be a criminal," he says, "which I'm not. I've become a completely different human being at this point." "I have to atone for my crime. But I realize now I'm just paying for someone else's debt. The person who committed the crime no longer exists." How can we adjust the way we deal with people who we don't want to associate with (for whatever reason) so there can still be an appropriate level of accountability or precautionary measures while also more accurately reflecting the dynamic nature of who humans are?

"Maybe we're not thinking right about who we are and what we could be," says Walter Mischel [author of the famed marshmallow study]. "People can use their wonderful brains to think differently about situations," Milgram says. "To reframe them. To reconstruct them. To even reconstruct themselves."

(The Invisibilia piece oddly excepts sociopaths from this ability to change, assuming the myth of sociopathy to be incurable without questioning it as most do. But baby steps.)

An Introduction to Psychopathy

I am still surprised by the amount of disagreement about psychopathy, sociopathy, antisocial personality disorder, etc. that you'll get from any source -- academic, pop psychology, etc. With that small caveat (nothing is definitive), I found this article on psychopathy to be a good overview with academic cites (and links in the original). Here are some selections:

While it is past antisocial behavior that is particularly important in predicting future criminal activity (Walters, 2003), it is CU (callous unemotional) traits that are at the core of developmental trajectory associated with psychopathy (Frick and White, 2008). The disorder is developmental. It has been shown that CU traits in particular and the psychopathy more generally are relatively stable from childhood into adulthood (Lynam et al., 2007; Munoz and Frick, 2007). In addition, the functional impairments seen in adults with psychopathy (e.g., in responding to emotional expressions, aversive conditioning, passive avoidance learning, reversal learning, extinction) are also seen in adolescents with psychopathic tendencies (see later).
***
Psychopathy is not equivalent to the psychiatric conditions of conduct disorder (CD) or antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) as defined by DSM-5 or their ICD-10 counterparts. The diagnostic criteria for these disorders focus on antisocial behaviors rather than on etiological factors such as the emotion dysfunction seen in psychopathy (Blair et al., 2005). As such these psychiatric conditions describe individuals with difficulties in executive dysfunction (Moffitt, 1993), as well as individuals with symptoms stemming from CU traits. Consequently, individuals with psychopathy are a more homogenous group than those individuals meeting the criteria for CD and ASPD (Karnik et al., 2006). It should be noted, however, that DSM-5 includes the specifier for CD ‘with limited pro-social emotions,’ which stem directly from research on youth with CD and CU traits (Pardini et al., 2010; Pardini and Fite, 2010). Furthermore, the diagnosis of ASPD now includes components of psychopathy (APA, 2013). While the disorder of psychopathy will still not be equivalent to the DSM-5 diagnoses of CD and ASPD, there will be greater overlap in diagnostic conceptualization.

Psychopathy is characterized by an increased risk for antisocial behavior (Frick and Dickens, 2006; Hare, 2003). While several psychiatric disorders and neurological conditions, including CD and ASPD (APA, 2013), confer an increased risk of reactive aggression (Anderson et al., 1999; Leibenluft et al., 2003), psychopathy is unique in that it conveys increased risk for instrumental aggression (Frick et al., 2003). 

Interestingly, an article that was cited included this assessment of treatment options: "While treatment recommendations are currently sparse, recent work has shown that previous assessments of treatment amenability in this population may have been overly pessimistic."

Also, because I had to look this up too:
"A classic measure of stimulus-reinforcement learning is aversive conditioning -- the individual learns that a particular stimulus is associated with threat. Individuals with elevated CU traits show marked impairment in stimulus-reinforcement learning. Indeed, an individual's ability to perform aversive conditioning at 15 years has predictive power regarding whether that individual will display anti-social behavior 14 years later (Raine et a., 1996)."

Acknowledging yourself

I got a lot of emails from people with sociopathic tendencies or other personality disorders asking me what to do about re-connecting with their sense of self. I kind of don't know how I did it, because it was mainly my therapist guiding me through it? But I thought that this article -- How to Become Yourself -- described it in a generally accurate way, particularly re the uncertainty and time and energy required:

Becoming yourself is hard. In theory it’s easy. You do it by looking very closely at the person that you’ve been, digging out bad behaviors by the root and by letting go of anything that holds you back. It’s hard because the You of Before will make a fuss, it won’t give itself up easy. It has gotten used to not doing the good and terrifying things that make life extraordinary. It wants to stay put, it wants to stay shadowed and safe and out of sight. Even once you’ve decided that you want to be different, want to be braver and more yourself, it doesn’t happen at once.

You take the first few steps and think you’ll just keep going like that until it’s done and you’re changed and everything’s better and you feel whole. But it’s not like that. You take a step, you pause. You agonize, try to go back the way you came–find the road blocked, find in some cases it’s gone completely and ahead is something you can’t yet contemplate going towards. You hang stricken in empty space, between states, between the way you’ve been and the way you’re going to be. Between almost-happy-but-not-quite-happy and beyond, to somewhere great, somewhere where it’s not necessary to ask Is this it? Is this all there is?

It’s like in werewolf movies, one self is not big enough to hold the other, more monstrous self. In your case it’s not a monster, but a bigger and more lethal you that comes bursting out of its old way of being. Don’t be afraid of this. It’s okay to be lethal in the ways you fight for your life. Be lethal in your demands for joy, respect, progress. Step out of what is used up and useless, be lethal and unmoved in your certainty that there is peace ahead. But how to get there?
***
By slowing down
We end up in so many shitty situations by not thinking things through, by not recognizing the pull of our own toxic behaviors or the tell-tale signs that someone is bad news and won’t to leave us better than when they found us. Take a minute. Follow the map back. In the past you did this, then this, then this, and ended up here, without anything. Nod like you’ve discovered something, even if you’re just as confused. Decide in the future to buy a new map, and mark with an X places where you are celebrated. Where you’re safe and happy and strong. These are the places most worth visiting. Go to them as often as possible.

By learning to be by yourself and for yourself
It seemed clear growing up that the only way to experience love was to surrender to it. Put up your hands and step off the edge. Be consumed, or else you’re not doing it right. Be captured, or else what’s the point? Be eaten whole by it. Two life changing heartbreaks down the line and I’m starting to think it isn’t true. Because good love’s not a dinosaur. It’s an exchange of light, it’s two people doing right by one another again and again and again until the last time they speak. That’s what I think anyway and I’ve seen at least two cartoons on the subject.
***
By being better
You cannot be a better, gentler you until you start doing better, gentler things. I don’t mean you have to brush a unicorn’s hair or tuck a snake into bed. But you do have to tread more lightly through your life. You have to make calm and brave decisions about what you would like to happen and you have to take the appropriate actions to make those things most likely. Life is a choose-your-own-adventure. Will I be something? Answer yes. Will I end up where I’m supposed to be? Answer yes again, with as much conviction as you can manage. Will I be happy? Answer yes for the last time, as loudly as possible. But it’s haaaaaard. I know. But not forever. It will be easier. Eventually you’ll forget the way it was–the old ache of it; your heart quiet in its bed, your dreams dragging behind you like a tattered parachute. It will be good. You will be good.

I am aware that most people have either done this or have put off doing this for all sorts of reasons, so I am not sure who the target audience for this post is. But for those of you who have put it off but are still considering doing it, maybe just a quick endorsement from me that it's difficult and it's uncomfortable and even painful to own certain parts of yourself, and things often get uglier and more sideways before they get any better. But it is a really stable, safe, happy, and powerful place to be. There's a sort of confidence in knowing that you're living a life of integrity that is even more powerful and secure than the confidence the sociopath manifests in not caring about anything. (See also Montaigne on this subject) So it's worth it, in my opinion. Although if you do try it, I think it's best to be super committed to it, otherwise you might end up in a worse off position. 

Bonding over bullying

I've been meaning to post about this Invisibilia episode for ages, and also saw this comment from a somewhat recent post that made me want to post it again, and finally have gotten around to it.

So the Invisibilia episode is worth listening to fully, at least the first half of it. It talks about a woman who has always been treated badly, bullied, and even villified, and she had no idea why. She's high functioning -- a doctor -- but she found social interactions to be very difficult. She describes the worst of many similar episodes of bullying:

The worst thing that ever happened was, I was at summer camp, and I don't know what I did. I have no idea. But they actually bound and gagged me and took me out of the cabin at night in the rain and put me outside, and it was just awful.

Here's why: "Kim's brain is not great at seeing emotion. When she looks out at the world, she physically sees all the things that most people see. It's just that much of the emotion is subtracted. Though for most of her life, she didn't realize that, and so her interactions with other kids could be difficult."

She undergoes TMS, transcranial magnetic stimulation, which some of you may remember from Wisdom of Psychopaths: "Basically in TMS you take this very fancy magnet, hold it to the scalp and send pulses through the skull to get brain cells to activate in a different way. They typically change for a very short period of time - between 15 and 40 minutes."

During TMS, she experiences for the first time an awareness of the emotional world, and realizes that this whole time she has been missing out on millions of emotional cues from the people around her. She says that she would have otherwise had no idea that such a world existed before, because she had always just believed that the way she saw the world was the way the world actually was (sound familiar to all of you out there?).

I thought the hosts had an interesting reaction to her realization that the world was different than she thought it was -- as if maybe she would have been better off not knowing. But she doesn't see it that way at all:

But even though TMS has not changed Kim's ability to see long-term, she says she's still happy she got it. She says she thinks a lot about one of the videos she was shown. In it, two employees were saying mean things to a fellow employee named Frank. And Kim says the first time she watched it before the TMS, she couldn't answer any of the questions the researchers were asking about it. But afterwards, she understood not only the video but also one of the big mysteries that had dominated much of her life.

KIM: It never made any sense to me as to why people would be mean to somebody else. Why would you be mean to somebody? And what I saw is that when the two employees were there and were talking together and then were giving Frank a hard time, the primary thing was not that they were trying to be mean to Frank.

The primary thing is that they were bonding, building a bond between the two of them. And it was simply the means to do it was to be nasty to Frank. And then I was like, oh, maybe that's what these kids were doing when they were bullying me.

SPIEGEL: It's much easier to live in a world which makes sense, where people are mean not just for fun but because they, like everyone else, want to belong and feel safe. Now that's the world that Kim lives in. 

This same phenomenon of bonding over bullying was referenced in the comment I mentioned above:

But I also made the experience, that the team spirit in a group is rising if there is a common "enemy/victim". Well it's at the victims expense but for the rest of the group and their friendships it is something positive... Anyway, I don't know if this phenomenon is also visible in a group consisting of various sociopaths.

The point of the podcast was that everyone has blindspots -- everyone has a certain viewpoint that by its very nature is limited. As much as Kim was blind to emotions and sociopaths are blind to morality, empaths are also blind to the random things they get up to -- like bonding over bullying. The key is to have just a little bit of intellectual humility to admit the possibility that the way you see the world may not be 100% accurate. 

What/when change is possible

My therapist often deals with bosses, spouses, church leaders, probation officers, etc. who inquire as to whether and how fast behavioral change is possible with someone who suffers from mental problems. He tells them that change is almost always possible, it's just not often possible in that moment. For example, someone who struggles with rage issues may be able to learn to control their temper through years of training and self knowledge and growth, but they may be completely incapable of controlling their temper in any given moment. He says that this restricted ability to control behavior, where mental hardwiring meets a deficit of willpower or skill level, is really hard for people to understand who don't suffer from similar deficiencies in those areas. First, it feels like the person is cheating, coasting through life on excuses while the rest of us have to try so hard. Second, it's difficult to understand how someone couldn't just be able to make a choice in that moment to do something differently, e.g. "just relax".

A lot of people have experienced this frustration with me over the years,. Recently, though, I've had extensive experience with it myself from someone else who has a very entrenched personality disorder, but also has started suffering from major depression symptoms. For various reasons, I am to a large extent responsible for this person and must interact with him various times a week. And every week there is some new flavor of dysfunction going on in his life, despite a comprehensive cocktail of medication and weekly therapy. This week, it's an inability to get out of bed for anything but work. He is already suffering pretty serious health consequences from a lack of exercise, for which he is taking another set of medications. All of his doctors, mental and physical health, tell him to keep trying to exercise. He knows that it will improve not just his physical health, but his depression as well. He knows that he enjoys getting out and walking in nature. But it is just very difficult for him to do it, so difficult that he doesn't quite go to the trouble of trying. I have a very tough time relating to this, and after years of dealing with nearly limitless levels and varieties of dysfunction, my frustration levels can get pretty high.

The crazy thing is that I would have never had this experience at my most sociopathic self. There would be a snowflake's chance in hell that I would have continued to deal with someone like this for longer than a few weeks, maybe a few months in exceptional circumstances. So I've never actually had to confront this type of frustration at someone's inadequacies. The one great thing that has come out of it is that I now have much more cognitive empathy and understanding for what people have to deal with on the other side of the mental health problem equation -- the people without the seemingly intractable problem, but still have to deal with it on a regular basis.

But I think of a parallel -- my grandmother, who suffered a stroke and had to undergo a sequence of physical therapies. She did get better over time -- better bladder control, speech, decreased paralysis, etc. There were also some things that she didn't get appreciably better at -- lack of inhibition, sense of decorum or propriety, respect for the privacy of others, demonstrating an adult level of patience, and certain types of emotional regulation. She had in many ways the mind of a child to her death, but I bet that even in those things she could have seen further improvement -- too bad she didn't live 50 more years to reach that point in her trajectory.

And I know that as much as I have improved over the past few years -- almost no manipulation, more in touch with my emotions, stronger sense of self and identity -- there are still things I probably won't ever be able to do -- affective empathy, strong emotional theory of mind, understanding subtle emotional cues, conforming more closely to social norms and expectations, etc. Or maybe I will, it will just take some future brain surgery and/or 50 years of training. We'll see. 

Avoiding seeing red

My peacemaker brother was telling me today about some of the weird things he'll do, like park his car somewhere else after he's done pumping gas but needs to go inside the store for something, because he's worried that people will be put out or upset, or a handful of other weird things like that they seem almost overly considerate and polite, or maybe abnormally concerned about upsetting people. I actually identified with the general theme of his behaviors, though. I also try to avoid conflict, but not because it I fear confrontation. I explained to him that it's more that I worry about losing control in situations in which someone might try to confront me about something. The classic example is the DC metro worker story from the book. If someone tries to correct me or shame me about some behavior of mine, that is the most predictably reliable way to make me see red. This is a weakness, as it has big potential negatives for my social capital and clean criminal record, and there are essentially no advantages. So I've noticed that as I have gotten older, I've gotten increasingly more polite and considerate in an attempt to reduce the number of situations in which this might happen.

I thought this recent comment was interesting, along the same lines, with another good potential suggestion for avoiding them:

My rages have dissipated to very rare status the older I have gotten. Might happen to you too. Seems to be the norm according to research. A good way to deal with them is to recognize when you are triggering, keep a journal if you must. Then when you see/feel a trigger coming on step back from the situation, acknowledge it, control your breathing, try to break your focus. The focus break is important since we achieve that hyper focus state and when we reach that BAM in the zone. See if there are any physical triggers too. Low on nicotine or blood sugar drop, dealing with too many idiots in short period of time, frustration, and physical pain like you mentioned. I hit the trifecta day before yesterday and almost went off but I knew what was causing it and managed to clear my triggers before i did to much damage. On an amusing note I appear to have inadvertently trained the people I work with to spot my triggers and they will take a look at me and send me out to have cigs and food when I present symptoms. This benefits everyone. If you can train people around you to be spotters like this and let give you some detox moments then you can usually avoid the meltdown. 

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.   

Fulfilling the measure of your creation?

I was recently at this pep talk directed partly at teenagers. The motivational speaker was talking about how everyone should always be theirselves, show up as themselves, make sure that no matter what else they do in life they be true to themselves and don't allow anything to come in the way of that. There was a noticeable discomfort from their teachers at this point. The teachers apparently didn't want the students to be themselves. In reaction, the speaker added a little caveat, "within the appropriate boundaries of the situation". And that makes sense, I guess, if you think about it. Being yourself at someone else's wedding might be a little bit more subdued than being yourself at your own, for instance.

But I do think it's safe to say that there is a lot of pressure on people to be something other than what they are. If society hasn't figured out a way yet to benefit pretty directly from what you have to offer, they're not so interested in you being yourself. Of course, we have scores of examples of geniuses, artistic and otherwise, whose true selves and true thoughts were rejected, whose social sphere pressured them to mightily conform, but they were such forces of nature that they never did. And we get to reap the benefit of that failure.

But we still love to preach the doctrine of conformity. When teenagers saying that they are going to be an artist and don't need college, or an entrepreneur and don't need college, etc., many will still attempt to interfere in that person's life in an attempt to dissuade them from pursuing their dreams/passion/drive.

Similarly, even from many people who seem a little more open-minded about sociopathic identifying individuals still an inherent, there is often a trailing "but" or "as long as they behave". Like the mixed messages given to children and young adults, the true message being preached is that society has no real desire to accommodate or adapt to you, you must accommodate or adapt to the majority or suffer consequences.

But I want you to think, you normal people, how toxic it is to your soul when someone, some situation, or some institution has denied you authentic self expression. How terrible is it to you to not be able to be yourself? Also, think about how pressure to conform unnaturally is likely what leads child sociopaths to develop in such grotesque ways.

Famous runner Eric Liddell (of Chariots of Fire fame) famously said "I believe God made me for a purpose, but he also made me fast! And when I run I feel his pleasure." Mormons have a similar concept, that every living thing is to fulfill the measure of its creation -- the lions are meant to predate as much as the lambs are to graze. How can it be that some people get to live an authentic and purposeful life filled with meaningful self expression, except sociopaths? Maybe for those proposing solutions to the so-called "sociopath problem," ask yourselves what you're really demanding of sociopaths and ask yourselves whether you would be fine with those terms if the roles were reversed.

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.

Restoring from back-up

A therapist reader wrote, among other things, this observation:

"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."

My response:

I do think that everybody has an identity, a core identity that came with us from birth and is written into our genes and would have expressed itself much the same no matter where in the multiverse "we" currently are. That identity is never rooted in any sort of evil, never corrupted by this society and its well-meaning or malicious attempts to mold people. Everyone is like a computer that has a backup version stored somewhere, not corrupted viruses or user error or anything else. And if you can just get back to that backup version and restore the harddrive to that, no more virus, no more sociopathy, no more of any type of personality disorder.

What do people think about that analogy?

Whole vs. wholesome

It's interesting to me that the word whole can mean such different things than wholesome. Wholeness is being exactly all of whatever one is. Wholesome has come to mean good, ethical, moral, etc. I think it's fair to say that society has a general preference, which is that it would rather people be wholesome than whole.

I was reading again a series of articles about Parker Palmer, articles that I know I had read before not more than 6 months or a year ago, but now that I've graduated to every other week therapy, I know exactly what he is talking about.

First, about the conflict between what society wants and what is best for the individual (to be one's true self, whole and complete and in the form that is the most true expression of one's "soul", whatever that means exactly):

For “it” is the objective, ontological reality of selfhood that keeps us from reducing ourselves, or each other, to biological mechanisms, psychological projections, sociological constructs, or raw material to be manufactured into whatever society needs — diminishments of our humanity that constantly threaten the quality of our lives.

(See above link for more on how we know that each person has a unique identity/soul.)

Why do we abandon our inborn identity in favor of a construct, made by society, and our parents, and friend, and ourselves and any other person who has ever had expectations of us to be or do a particular thing?

As teenagers and young adults, we learned that self-knowledge counts for little on the road to workplace success. What counts is the “objective” knowledge that empowers us to manipulate the world. Ethics, taught in this context, becomes one more arm’s-length study of great thinkers and their thoughts, one more exercise in data collection that fails to inform our hearts.

I value ethical standards, of course. But in a culture like ours — which devalues or dismisses the reality and power of the inner life — ethics too often becomes an external code of conduct, an objective set of rules we are told to follow, a moral exoskeleton we put on hoping to prop ourselves up. The problem with exoskeletons is simple: we can slip them off as easily as we can don them.

[…]

When we understand integrity for what it is, we stop obsessing over codes of conduct and embark on the more demanding journey toward being whole. 

Palmer tells of his own experience with this:

I lined up the loftiest ideals I could find and set out to achieve them. The results were rarely admirable, often laughable, and sometimes grotesque… I had simply found a “noble” way to live a life that was not my own, a life spent imitating heroes instead of listening to my heart.

[…]

My youthful understanding of “Let your life speak” led me to conjure up the highest values I could imagine and then try to conform my life to them whether they were mine or not. If that sounds like what we are supposed to do with values, it is because that is what we are too often taught. There is a simplistic brand of moralism among us that wants to reduce the ethical life to making a list, checking it twice — against the index in some best-selling book of virtues, perhaps — and then trying very hard to be not naughty but nice.

There may be moments in life when we are so unformed that we need to use values like an exoskeleton to keep us from collapsing. But something is very wrong if such moments recur often in adulthood. Trying to live someone else’s life, or to live by an abstract norm, will invariably fail — and may even do great damage.

What is the damage in this?

Afraid that our inner light will be extinguished or our inner darkness exposed, we hide our true identities from each other. In the process, we become separated from our own souls. We end up living divided lives, so far removed from the truth we hold within that we cannot know the “integrity that comes from being what you are.”
***
Here is the ultimate irony of the divided life: live behind a wall long enough, and the true self you tried to hide from the world disappears from your own view! The wall itself and the world outside it become all that you know. Eventually, you even forget that the wall is there — and that hidden behind it is someone called “you.”

How an external standard of behavior, no matter how "ethical" or "good" is not a longterm, stable solution (substitute "vocation" for any other externally imposed restriction on behavior or self-expression):

If the self seeks not pathology but wholeness, as I believe it does, then the willful pursuit of vocation is an act of violence toward ourselves — violence in the name of a vision that, however lofty, is forced on the self from without rather than grown from within. True self, when violated, will always resist us, sometimes at great cost, holding our lives in check until we honor its truth. Vocation does not come from willfulness. It comes from listening. I must listen to my life and try to understand what it is truly about — quite apart from what I would like it to be about — or my life will never represent anything real in the world, no matter how earnest my intentions.

What is the solution?

Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you. Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent.

Do this even at the cost of ruffling feathers, of not conforming to what society demands, of being persecuted and hated for who you are, yes -- and speaking form experience, there really is no other viable choice.