Showing posts sorted by relevance for query born this way. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query born this way. Sort by date Show all posts

Saturday, March 21, 2015

Sociopath?

From a reader:

Firstly, I'd like to tell you that I'm not a native English speaker, so excuse me, if there are any language mistakes.

I think I may be a high-functioning sociopath, but I also can find some definitely non-sociopathic behaviour. First, I have to tell you that I have cerebral palsy, but it's a light form, so I don't have much problems with it. But why i think I'm a sociopath? 

When I was a kid, I had moments in which I felt I didn't have the same feelings as other people. For example, I was never able to feel love to my parents, and therefore to say them: ''I love you'', or to be moved by a song, and I couldn't make many face expressions. Additionally, I was quite well accepted by people, but strangely I was good contacting mainly with the older ones, meaning that I was the loner at school. But I also had that period when I didn't want to meet new people and I was starting to growl and felt anger (I know that there is too much contradiction, right?). Another contradiction is that, while I was the loner at school, I also tried to be with the other kids and to communicate with them, but most of the time I was rejected. 

Later, at middle school, this tendency continued, but (another contradiction) I started chatting to some of my mates on the Internet and in 6th grade we became friends. My behaviour with them wasn't like the one that is expected from a sociopath - many times I was rude and sarcasstic with them, but it wasn't a big deal. Most of these people are still my friends. 

When I entered high school, the same story began. I tried to get in contact with people, but again I was somehow rude to them and I didn't made any friends (maybe here is the place to say that since I was a kid, I've had moments in which I had thought that I'm better without friends). At the second year, the rudeness peaked and I lost any opportunity to have friends at my class. In the summer I went to an excursion in the mountain, and met there three girls, all one year younger than me, and we became friends. On the next school year I had the idea of stay and repeat the school year, so we can be at the same class. It didn't happen, and, additionally, I started behaving extremely rude with my classmates, which worsed my relations with them (that rudeness was a theatre, but i will talk about it at another point of the e-mail). 

Now I'm 18 and I'm 11th grade, second-to-last year high school student. The relations with my classmates improved, but still I don't have friends at my class.

I think some of my problems at school are caused by my incapacity of feel empathy, gulit, fear (to a lesser extent) and remorse. For a contradiction, I have to say that I'm not very risky person, and even had regret missing some opportunities for meeting new people, for example. Another contradiction is that I don't like thinking much about important things. For example, I decided i want to learn Spanish at high school after the first episode of a Spanish TV series.

My personality is something very relative. I have never had any favourite music style, celebrity, etc. Instead I have taken parts of music styles that I like, and I have used them to try a create an image, but I have always failed. When talking with people, I immitate emotions, so I can be appropiate, but I have problem with face expressions. In last years, I have trained myself to be a good liar, and when I'm with friends, or face a problem at school, it works.

Boredom is something I have always experienced. It had led me to a number of things - changing wishes for jobs, becoming bored of people, imagining making friendships with other people, strange behaviour on the Internet (as you see, imaginary things are also a contradiction, but I will clarify this at the other part of the mail), etc.

At my family things are thew following: my parents say I was very good and sociable child, yet I've had also spend much time alone and i was selfish. Here is where my first problems at school started to influence me. At junior school I was the best student - no need to say that I loved being said that I'm smart and intelligent. But in 5th grade I started failing at maths. As my father is very good with maths, he started helping me to learn the things faster. The problem was that I wasn't understanidg anything and he started to yell at me and sometimes even insult me. After that I have always felt bad, but only for a short time. Another problem was my lying. When I had a bad mark at maths, I was lying that the results hadn't come out yet, but in few days I was ending up with an explanation and a dramatic excuse. Later I continued to lie them about other things, but it led to a paradox where in most cases when I lie, they believe me, but in some cases when I tell them the truth, they don't believe me.

I have a brother. He is 16 months old. When I heard I will have a brother, I turned to the calendar, pretending to see if it was the 1st of April, then I said: ''O.K.''
When he was born, I faked a smile at my face. I have never paid him much attention. But some months ago, something interesting happened. 

I was playing with him (very rare thing) an suddenly put my hand on his throat and I felt a crave to kill him. But I stopped for a second, started thinking, and then I felt horrible. The idea of doing it was horrible. But I continued imagining it and I got into a point when I liked the fantasy and even started asking myself: ''If I kill him, would I feel better?'' But I didn't do it. Now I don't have this fantasy. And it wasn't the first time I had experienced it. When I was a kid, I used to imagine myself killing my then baby cousin, and when I was holding a knife, I've had a craving to kill the person against me, and I even was asking myself: ''What it would be if I do it?''

With my relatives I have generally a good connection. The only real bad thing I have done was when my grandma died. She died in front of my eyes. firstly, I didn't feel anything, then I forced myself to cry, and cried for 15 minutes. At the funeral I wasn't crying and I was thinking: ''What's wrong with me?'', but, at the end, I forced again myself to cry and thought: ''I cry, so I'm normal''.

The non-sociopathic part of me is related to my behaviour and there are 2 crucial characteristics. The first one is my imagination. With this one I had fulfilled many of my time, and I still continue to do it. It's very various and includes things both from the real and from fictional worlds. I've had fantasies about making friendships with people, having talents like singing, I invented a parallel government of the youth people in my head and was the primr-minister for a while, I've had imagining ideal love and ways to get to know my crushes, etc. The other one is related with something which I call hyperactivity, and the others are calling it extra energy. It consists in constant walking, or jumping, or running inside and outside with stick, pen, pencil, or whatever similar, and it is a way to express the little bit of emotions that I have (a contradiction to what I've said above, but true), because this emotions are the power of this hyperactivity. I even do it in class if I'm bored (it happens almost all of the time) and is something that people around me know that is a part of me, but some of them, like my parents, are annoyed from it and try to stop me doing it. Recently, emotions aren't the power of this movement, because they don't exist, or if they are, I have to think about an emotion to be able to feel it.

There are two less important characteristics, as they are more recent. One of them is that I was a hypohondriac and had diagnosed myself with diabetes, AIDS, schizofrenia, paranoia, etc. Because of the schizofrenia thoughts I started visiting the school psychologist. Now she knows that I think I'm a sociopath, but doesn't believe I am one. The other one is something that I know is very non-sociopathic. I have a problem with my sexual orientation. When i was 11 I found out that I'm gay (I'm a boy) and as I knew that I find out boys as more beautiful than girls, I was O.K. with that. My friends (they are all girls), also. My crushes were boys from school, mainly younger than me. The only year I had crushes older than me was the first year of high school, as I was among the youngest. The feelings were always different, the time - not too much, and they all were boys that I didn't know personally. However, with the last two of my crushes I had strong feelings and I liked them for a longer time. My last crush was from the class of my friends and even started dating one of them. I was hurt, but overcame this for 2 days.

But even of the time when I liked my second-to-last crush, I had the thought that I may like a girl. It wasn't very important, so I forgot it after a while. But recently I realised that since then there was an emerging feel towards girls, which I still want to eliminate. Now I'm in a situation where I find many boys cute, I even have a crush, and it's a combination of jealous when I see him with another girl, and the knowing that I'm hetero.

That's it. I have more information, but maybe I will post it on the comment section of the blog.

Friday, May 27, 2016

How Empaths can Attain Sociopathic Abilities

From a reader under the subject line of the post title:

I think one of the most seductive features of your blog is the sense that people are getting this window into this world of having immense social power. It's certainly how it's been for me. Partly by reading your blog (and similar material), I really developed a strong interest in actually having such abilities.

Now, I am rather good at a few unnamed things. What I've learned from those things is that practice is the only way to get better. Sociopaths aren't born with social talent. They develop it by having no inhibitions, and as such have a constant feedback loop where they are stimulated by extrinsic rewards (power, favors, etc.) instead of intrinsic rewards (love, fun, connection). Having that intrinsic reward loop shut off turns on a completely different reward system. Learning is very closely related to reward, so sociopaths learn very fast and from a very young age how to manipulate people.

For empaths, reading books (i.e. 48 Laws of Power) is a start. It doesn't actually help you much right away - it raises your awareness level, but if those books don't already seem intuitive, you're going to struggle for a while at first. Books like that build that framework of extrinsic rewards obtained from social interactions and help scaffold learning in everyday interactions. To truly train yourself, however, you need more.

My number one training activity of social interactions is to imagine myself as another person, with all of their different feelings, interests, etc. What's it like to be them, in a normal situation, with their own thoughts, insecurities, emotions, self-delusions of superiority, etc. This is like learning perspective, form and lighting for art - the scaffolding on which you build your toolkit.

Meditation helps you get to a state where this actually becomes easier, and your gut instinct about others becomes better because you gain a much more nuanced version of all of the little subconscious things happening in your brain. Likewise, you can start to sense these nuances in others.

Applying this gut instinct, cognitive empathy and meditation gets results. Each month I look back and wonder how I was so clueless in the previous month, like my learning is so rapid that I'm gaining years of average improvement in the time span of two weeks to a month.

It's been an incredibly transformative experience. I hardly recognize myself a couple years ago, and cringe when I imagine it.

Monday, May 24, 2010

An empathy exercise

A lot of the empathy-challenged have expressed an ability to "imagine" what it would feel like to be another person going through a particular situation. I was explaining this to someone and they asked -- isn't this empathy? If it is, then I guess I'm an empath too. But first let me describe what it feels like using an unusual analogy that I hope works.

Imagine that you are having sex with someone. Better yet, imagine that you are engaged in foreplay, attempting to stimulate a reluctant lover. This is your first time. You have been on an island, grown up there alone, and one day another island dweller like yourself appears. Your experience so far has been auto arousal. You are very familiar with the ins and outs of your own equipment but have had no other exposure to sex other than what you have seen in wildlife. As you attempt to elicit a reaction from your partner, you think of everything you like to do to yourself and try that first. The more similar your partner is to you, the more accurate and effective your actions will be. But what if your partner's equipment looks nothing like your own? In that situation, the best you could do is extrapolate from your own experiences to imagine what it might feel if you had equipment more like your partner's, and act accordingly.

The process may seem very artificial to you at first, like when you scratch a part of your skin that has been numbed by anesthesia and feel only the scratching, not the being scratched. But the more similar the situation is to something you have experienced yourself, the more you can rely on your own personal experiences. Even if the other person is rather different from you, if you have done a decent job data-mining them you should be able to come up with a relatively accurate picture of them. And just like with the sex analogy, you would be getting positive or negative feedback indicating whether you are on target. If you engage in this imaginative exercise enough you can get quite good at it, the same way a professional pianist is not born with the ability to play, but can make it seem like he was with the ease with which he manipulates the keys. As I tell my loved ones all the time -- I don't understand you, but I can predict you very well.

If this is empathy, then I feel empathy. If empathy involves some automatic response to the emotions of another, though, or vicariously experiencing the emotions of another, then probably not. I don't feel vicariously what another feels any more than I vicariously feel the pleasure that I give someone else. Or maybe empaths don't feel empathy either. Maybe they think they are feeling what another feels, but really they are just projecting their own emotions on another.

Rejoinders, empaths?

Sunday, February 7, 2016

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. 

Monday, February 24, 2014

The adaptable brain

If you believe that there is at least some genetic component to sociopathy, is it possible to find a workaround? This recent Oliver Sacks article from the New York Times discusses the incredible adaptability of the brain:
While some areas of the brain are hard-wired from birth or early childhood, other areas — especially in the cerebral cortex, which is central to higher cognitive powers like language and thought, as well as sensory and motor functions — can be, to a remarkable extent, rewired as we grow older. In fact, the brain has an astonishing ability to rebound from damage — even from something as devastating as the loss of sight or hearing. As a physician who treats patients with neurological conditions, I see this happen all the time.

For example, one patient of mine who had been deafened by scarlet fever at the age of 9, was so adept at lip-reading that it was easy to forget she was deaf. Once, without thinking, I turned away from her as I was speaking. “I can no longer hear you,” she said sharply.

“You mean you can no longer see me,” I said.

“You may call it seeing,” she answered, “but I experience it as hearing.”

Lip-reading, seeing mouth movements, was immediately transformed for this patient into “hearing” the sounds of speech in her mind. Her brain was converting one mode of sensation into another.

In a similar way, blind people often find ways of “seeing.” Some areas of the brain, if not stimulated, will atrophy and die. (“Use it or lose it,” neurologists often say.) But the visual areas of the brain, even in someone born blind, do not entirely disappear; instead, they are redeployed for other senses. We have all heard of blind people with unusually acute hearing, but other senses may be heightened, too.
***
The writer Ved Mehta, also blind since early childhood, navigates in large part by using “facial vision” — the ability to sense objects by the way they reflect sounds, or subtly shift the air currents that reach his face. Ben Underwood, a remarkable boy who lost his sight at 3 and died at 16 in 2009, developed an effective, dolphin-like strategy of emitting regular clicks with his mouth and reading the resulting echoes from nearby objects. He was so skilled at this that he could ride a bike and play sports and even video games.

People like Ben Underwood and Ved Mehta, who had some early visual experience but then lost their sight, seem to instantly convert the information they receive from touch or sound into a visual image — “seeing” the dots, for instance, as they read Braille with a finger. Researchers using functional brain imagery have confirmed that in such situations the blind person activates not only the parts of the cortex devoted to touch, but parts of the visual cortex as well.

One does not have to be blind or deaf to tap into the brain’s mysterious and extraordinary power to learn, adapt and grow. I have seen hundreds of patients with various deficits — strokes, Parkinson’s and even dementia — learn to do things in new ways, whether consciously or unconsciously, to work around those deficits.

That the brain is capable of such radical adaptation raises deep questions. To what extent are we shaped by, and to what degree do we shape, our own brains? And can the brain’s ability to change be harnessed to give us greater cognitive powers? The experiences of many people suggest that it can.
Can my brain adapt too?

Thursday, December 22, 2011

Connect the dots

Remember those games you used to play in primary school where the teacher would give you a bunch of clues and you had to guess what the person or thing was?  From a reader:
I'm wondering where I fall on the sociopathic spectrum, and what if anything I should do about it.
I was born into a troubled family - mother is was paranoid schizophrenic & father is narcissistc. Grandfather was a sociopath (he was sadistic, transgressive and super low-empathy). I spent most of my childhood (mildly) abused or neglected. I was a bedwetter. 
I tend to interpret peoples' actions the way a paranoid would, although I know rationally that I'm often wrong. 
I'm low-empathy. I have trouble reading the emotions of others. I often say things that bother people. Unless I'm paying a lot of attention, it is easy for me to offend people. When I offend people, I try to make amends (as a practical matter).
I tend to take things literally. I have a hard time with jokes. I speak bluntly. 
I'm generally quite honest, although when I want to lie, I take great delight in saying something that is literally true, but misleading.
In general, I'm bold. If I want stuff, I'll try to get it. I very much feel like my life is slipping away; there's no time to waste. I get bored easily.
As a kid, I didn't abuse mammals, but I was tough on slugs and snails. I took them apart, tortured them, etc. In my adult years, my job had me doing terrible things to mammals. They'd scream for a long time. I didn't like hearing the screams, it bugged me. If anything, they pissed me off with their screaming, because I had a job to do. Sometimes I'd get so pissed at them for screaming at me that I'd hurt them more. My sense is, I don't abuse animals for fun, but if I've got goals and to reach them I have to hurt stuff, I'll do it. If the things I'm hurting make my job difficult, I'll hurt them more after I get angry at them.
I've got something of a conscience, but not like most people. I do feel bad if I hurt people I love. I don't steal. But I do trespass, snoop, cheat on my taxes, smuggle contraband when it suits me, etc. I regularly do things that could get me arrested. 
If people cross a line, I consider extra-legal retribution essential. I've broken the law, repeatedly, to get revenge. It involved killing animals. I did it without remorse. I've gotten good at it.
I enjoy internet trolling, particularly by expressing un-PC thoughts. 
I'm sadistic. I really enjoy hurting my enemies. 
I've got ethnocentric/racist sensibilities. I think the world would be a better place if we got rid of people not in my racial group. If making that happen required me to volunteer, I'd do it happily. In this way, I'm altruistic. I'm not totally selfish. Then again, I don't love everyone in my racial group (or family, etc). If there were important enough goals, I'd think it reasonable to kill them for the cause.
If I could kill people and get away with it (or get approval, by being on a death squad), I'd jump to sign up. I'm kinda hoping we'll get a race war before I'm dead, so that I can hunt some humans.
I'm very manipulative and calculating. I lie. I do this even with the people closest to me. I kind of delight in doing it.
I transgress. When I do "bad" things, I don't have remorse. I do have fear of getting caught, and a deep hatred of authority figures. I know that if I was in the middle of a crime and a lone law enforcement officer caught me, I'd kill him in an instant if it meant the difference between getting away or being punished.
That said, there are some transgressions I feel are wrong, so I don't do them. If I do them, I feel guilty. Yet for someone who hates authority, when people disregard my wishes or authority, I feel they deserve the maximum punishment.
I get lonely. Rejection hurts and pisses me off. I want to be adored. When I've been rejected, I've thought of stalking, attacking or trespassing the person rejecting me. Or I think of re-seducing them, so that I can dump them to punish them.
My general sense is that I can't be a sociopath; I have something of a conscience. But then there's only about 5 people in the world I care about in non-abstract terms.

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Sociopaths speak out

Sociopaths describing how it feels to be them:
The main reason sociopaths don't usually seek help from their fellow human beings is that they can't trust, rather than that they like being as they are. Plus, they can often sense exactly what sort of a response any call for help on their part is most likely to elicit from professionals and lay folk alike. Sociopaths are not breezing along in paradise. It isn't all a game. It's a truly miserable existence. And it can be made better. It may not be "curable" yet, but it most certainly isn't as hopeless as so many people say. There is therefore nothing to be gained and much to be lost when therapists and lay folk try to ostracize sociopaths from the human race entirely! Sensationalism and superstition will only prevent progress.
Another quote from Wikianswers, along a similar vein:
Sociopaths, though born that way, are people too. To avoid an entire group of people is absurd. That's like saying, "Since these people have dark skin, everyone should completely avert themselves from them." I am a moderate sociopath, and though part of me doesn't want to change, another does. Many times it is really entertaining to see how stupid people can be, especially when they're so gullible as to believe every word that mellifluously flows from my lips. Yes, I am parasitic, but even so, there are some people I would like to stop hurting. I can't find any websites that can provide a way to help my sociopathy. Maybe people like you should stop your self-victimisation and start trying to actually help people like me!
And another, in response to a list of sociopathic traits:
umm... i kindof am one... just so y'all know, it's not so much fun being one either. i read that sentance up there, "Incapable of real human attachment to another." i don't even know what that is, i see it, i approximate it... it's like being outside a door looking through a dirty window and watching re-runs of people i've seen in love or with children or with friends, and scratching, sometimes banging at the glass to get in and... nothing. i'm fond of people in every sense of the word, their little quirks and habits, the way they see life, except if they went away it wouldn't bother me much other than finding someone else to be fond of. i don't have friends, i only date military men because they're ok with only having a girlfriend for a couple months and i tell them in advance i won't wait for them... i don't know what else to do to limit the damage i inflict on others just as a result of them knowing me, short of moving to the mountains... but i still move between 2-5 times a year :( it's kindof hard walking around knowing i'll never have what i see making other people so happy and running when i can tell someone is getting close just because i don't want to hurt them more later down the road... i'd like it alot to settle down, i WANT to be able to feel more with people, but it's hard to miss what you never had. i want what i THINK it would feel like... it'd be easy to give in and let someone stay because i'm so lonely... but hey, i've written enough, just know i try to be a responsible little sociopath, i won't ever get married or have kids, i practice safe sex, i won't stay in one city for long... everything you all take for granted i will never let myself have just because i WANT to take it for granted. being like this won't go away so hopefully i can limit the amount of hate thrown my way by limiting my interaction with people, i don't know what else to do. and you all might not belive this, but i am sorry, hopefully i can speak for the other people who have damaged your lives.

Wednesday, June 8, 2016

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.   

Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Raising genius

I really enjoyed this article by Andrew Solomon in the NY Times Magazine, "How do you Raise a Prodigy?" I thought the parallels between raising a prodigy and raising a sociopath were compelling. He first talks about his recent research in parents that raise children with special issues:

Prodigies are able to function at an advanced adult level in some domain before age 12. “Prodigy” derives from the Latin “prodigium,” a monster that violates the natural order. These children have differences so evident as to resemble a birth defect, and it was in that context that I came to investigate them. Having spent 10 years researching a book about children whose experiences differ radically from those of their parents and the world around them, I found that stigmatized differences — having Down syndrome, autism or deafness; being a dwarf or being transgender — are often clouds with silver linings. Families grappling with these apparent problems may find profound meaning, even beauty, in them. Prodigiousness, conversely, looks from a distance like silver, but it comes with banks of clouds; genius can be as bewildering and hazardous as a disability.

He then goes on to express some of the particular difficulties in raising any child who is different than the norm, particular a child who is different from the parents themselves, and how there are no easy rules:


Children who are pushed toward success and succeed have a very different trajectory from that of children who are pushed toward success and fail. I once told Lang Lang, a prodigy par excellence and now perhaps the most famous pianist in the world, that by American standards, his father’s brutal methods — which included telling him to commit suicide, refusing any praise, browbeating him into abject submission — would count as child abuse. “If my father had pressured me like this and I had not done well, it would have been child abuse, and I would be traumatized, maybe destroyed,” Lang responded. “He could have been less extreme, and we probably would have made it to the same place; you don’t have to sacrifice everything to be a musician. But we had the same goal. So since all the pressure helped me become a world-famous star musician, which I love being, I would say that, for me, it was in the end a wonderful way to grow up.”

While it is true that some parents push their kids too hard and give them breakdowns, others fail to support a child’s passion for his own gift and deprive him of the only life that he would have enjoyed. You can err in either direction. Given that there is no consensus about how to raise ordinary children, it is not surprising that there is none about how to raise remarkable children. Like parents of children who are severely challenged, parents of exceptionally talented children are custodians of young people beyond their comprehension.

I love the Lang Lang quote. It is such a great acknowledgment that different folks require different strokes. If there is anything that I hope to achieve with the blog and getting people to think about the presence and role of sociopaths in society, it is probably to preach this gospel that we're all really different from each other in ways that we too often either ignore or pretend don't exist. There's nothing wrong with heterogeneity, in fact it is probably what keeps us so viable as the dominant species on this planet. Monster babies are born into all types of family every day. But the word monster need not mean B movie horror matinees, it could also be someone more like Lang Lang.

Monday, January 18, 2016

Evil wants an evil response

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

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

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

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

Or Marcus Aurelius:

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

Saturday, December 20, 2014

If it feels this good getting used...

I thought this recent comment on an old post was an interesting perspective:

You act like ALL sociopaths are abusers. That ALL of them are born to hurt and kill. You don't even considered human. ERROR! The whole reason why I'm alive right know is a sociopath. I've had a terrible and abusive life, but because of many reasons my sociopath friend is interested in me. The moments I was about to kill my self he told me "No. Why do you want to die when you know me?" I tried explaining to him all the benefits my death would bring him, but he comely explained that all of it's short term, where me living would be long term. This may seem so terrible to you, but I have PTSD and it's not for me. To me I don't have anything good about me, I suck at everything. I only harm everyone I'm around. To him I'm full of opportunities to benefit him in some way. To him I'm useful. To him it's a game of seeing how long he can hug me before I flinch away because of sexual abuse that happened to me. Sure, his motives isn't like yours or anyone else because they have motive but it's enough to help save a life. How could someone be evil who's keeping me alive at this moment in time?

Thursday, March 6, 2014

Manipulation 105

How to turn a hater into a fan, Benjamin Franklin style, from David McRaney's "You Are Not So Smart: A Field Guide to the Brain's Guile". First he talks about how our flawed perception of the world provides ample opportunity for us to be fooled:

The last one hundred years of research suggest that you, and everyone else, still believe in a form of naïve realism. You still believe that although your inputs may not be perfect, once you get to thinking and feeling, those thoughts and feelings are reliable and predictable. We now know that there is no way you can ever know an “objective” reality, and we know that you can never know how much of subjective reality is a fabrication, because you never experience anything other than the output of your mind. Everything that’s ever happened to you has happened inside your skull.

Second, the Benjamin Franklin method of messing with another person's mind:

Franklin set out to turn his hater into a fan, but he wanted to do it without “paying any servile respect to him.” Franklin’s reputation as a book collector and library founder gave him a standing as a man of discerning literary tastes, so Franklin sent a letter to the hater asking if he could borrow a specific selection from his library, one that was a “very scarce and curious book.” The rival, flattered, sent it right away. Franklin sent it back a week later with a thank-you note. Mission accomplished. The next time the legislature met, the man approached Franklin and spoke to him in person for the first time. Franklin said the man “ever after manifested a readiness to serve me on all occasions, so that we became great friends, and our friendship continued to his death.”
***
When you feel anxiety over your actions, you will seek to lower the anxiety by creating a fantasy world in which your anxiety can’t exist, and then you come to believe the fantasy is reality, just as Benjamin Franklin’s rival did. He couldn’t possibly have lent a rare book to a guy he didn’t like, so he must actually like him. Problem solved.
***
The Benjamin Franklin effect is the result of your concept of self coming under attack. Every person develops a persona, and that persona persists because inconsistencies in your personal narrative get rewritten, redacted, and misinterpreted. If you are like most people, you have high self-esteem and tend to believe you are above average in just about every way. It keeps you going, keeps your head above water, so when the source of your own behavior is mysterious you will confabulate a story that paints you in a positive light. If you are on the other end of the self-esteem spectrum and tend to see yourself as undeserving and unworthy [and] will rewrite nebulous behavior as the result of attitudes consistent with the persona of an incompetent person, deviant, or whatever flavor of loser you believe yourself to be. Successes will make you uncomfortable, so you will dismiss them as flukes. If people are nice to you, you will assume they have ulterior motives or are mistaken. Whether you love or hate your persona, you protect the self with which you’ve become comfortable. When you observe your own behavior, or feel the gaze of an outsider, you manipulate the facts so they match your expectations.

This is why volunteering feels good and unpaid interns work so hard. Without an obvious outside reward you create an internal one. That’s the cycle of cognitive dissonance; a painful confusion about who you are gets resolved by seeing the world in a more satisfying way.

By the way, a while ago I posted something about Benjamin Franklin possibly being a sociopath, and people vehemently disagreed:

Like many people full of drive and intelligence born into a low station, Franklin developed strong people skills and social powers. All else denied, the analytical mind will pick apart behavior, and Franklin became adroit at human relations. From an early age, he was a talker and a schemer, a man capable of guile, cunning, and persuasive charm. He stockpiled a cache of secret weapons, one of which was the Benjamin Franklin effect, a tool as useful today as it was in the 1730s and still just as counterintuitive.

Maybe he was not a sociopath, but he certainly had many sociopathic traits. 

Friday, May 20, 2016

A girl has no name

What happens to people with personality disorders to make them the way they are? Speaking from personal experience, but also saying something that can easily generalize much more broadly, there is a genetic component but it is also triggered. When you are little, instead of developing a sense of your own identity, you learn to think of yourself as a cipher. You do it because there is no advantage to you in being a particular someone (much less the particular person you are), and every advantage in being whatever the situation calls for, in blending in with the background, in being the strings that pull other people rather than being a person yourself. Kierkegaard speaks of something similar:

For every man is primitively planned to be a self, appointed to become oneself; and while it is true that every self as such is angular, the logical consequence of this merely is that it has to be polished, not that it has to be ground smooth, not that for fear of men it has to give up entirely being itself, nor even that for fear of men it dare not be itself in its essential accidentality (which precisely is what should not be ground away), by which in fine it is itself. 
***
[But when the sense of self is lost] he may nevertheless (although most commonly it becomes manifest) be perfectly well able to live on, to be a man, as it seems, to occupy himself with temporal things, get married, beget children, win honor and esteem -- and perhaps no one notices that in a deeper sense he lacks a self. About such a thing as that not much fuss is made in the world; for a self is the thing the world is least apt to inquire about, and the thing of all things the most dangerous for a man to let people notice that he has it. The greatest danger, that of losing one's own self, may pass off as quietly as if it were nothing; every other loss, that of an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc., is sure to be noticed.
***
But while one sort of despair plunges wildly into the infinite and loses itself, a second sort permits itself as it were to be defrauded by "the others." By seeing the multitude of men about it, by getting engaged in all sorts of worldly affairs, by becoming wise about how things go in this world, such a man forgets himself, forgets what his name is (in the divine understanding of it), does not dare to believe in himself, finds it too venturesome a thing to be himself, far easier and safer to be like the others, to become an imitation, a number, a cipher in the crowd.

So a personality disordered person might lose their sense of self, but it can actually be as empowering as it is tragic. Without a self, there isn't the same potential for ego hurt -- we no longer live a life motivated largely by fear. The most vulnerable and valuable part of us has already died. What is left is a cipher, a thing that can take the form and shape of whatever is most convenient in the moment.

GAME OF THRONES SPOILER ALERT

So it's with interest that I wonder where Game of Thrones is going with the Arya plot line. The quick summary is that she is a noble born girl hell bent on revenge for the death of her parents. She's become an accomplished killer, but has also gotten caught up in this sort of cult in which she is being asked to become "no one" -- to leave her old identity behind and instead have the capability of wearing any number of masks and appearing like any number of different people, a lethal assassin. Repeatedly she is asked what her name is, and repeatedly she must answer "a girl has no name" as part of her further depersonalization.

In the books, regarding Arya it says "She could feel the hole inside of her where her heart had been" and "She would be no one if that is what it took. No one had no holes inside of her."

This video explains the psychological changes she undergoes, and how she can hardly function like a person because she cannot trust, all she knows is killing and survival.

Monday, November 21, 2011

Guest post: schizophrenic sociopath

From a reader:
Schizophrenic sociopath: a joyous autoportrait of Pabaisa
And they worshiped the dragon [the prototype of Pabaisa] which gave power unto the beast [the archetype of Pabaisa]. And they worshiped the beast, saying: "Who is like unto the beast? Who is able to make war with him?"
- The Revelation of John, 13, 4
Pabaisa – the Immoralist, the Antichrist, the Anarchist, everything, that is opposed to civilization, the breaker of codes and rules; the man with the strength of a giant and the brain of a child; the soul contract Terminator and the wish fulfilling Mephisto. Pabaisa imagines himself as a green-skinned, sharp-toothed, bird-of-prey-nosed, hatty, sabotted and with dingy purple dusters, even if no one is afraid of him outwardly and react to his grotesque smile neutrally. The blind, who don’t see the accursed wickedness and consider him as a friend. The feelings of abandonment, terror and lost identity spring from the degenerate’s inner being, his projection of himself as a despicable demon, who looks at his own reflection in pond like Narcissus, and cannot see himself truly, so he rolls away from his Olympian mountain of solitude and seclusion, and engages on a journey through dark, naked forests and barren, scorched deserts, searching for something, which would give him an identity, an understanding and a shelter. The beast does not look aggressively in reality, even on the contrary, like a sociopath, like all the rest, maybe even a perfect replica of a human. The intra-speciary predator is unfazed by the hunters in this regard.
The problem of Pabaisa‘s sexuality: Pabaisa is only partly a man. At least, he doesn‘t perceive himself as one. Due to accidental meiosis and gene selection, his body was born as a man. Pabaisa doesn‘t see himself as a woman, either. There is no hidden desire to be a woman, no secret jealousy. For all he knew, it didn‘t matter, if he‘s a man, a woman or both. Things like sex and sexuality didn‘t matter, from an abstract perspective to life; he could become any with the circumstances. He was a man, but he could easily become a woman any time he wished, if he felt, that the circumstances demanded it. The mastery of disguise.
First metamorphosis: Schizophrenia and split-personality disorder. Five different voices in his head and 1 = ½ + ½, or A = B + C. A as the state before Lucifer gets thrown out of Heaven, like a pure state, B and C as different embodiments of “evil”, annihilators of “good” and destroyers of life, i.e. chimeras and killers with the thirst for power and the hate for weakness. Question: Why? Answer: The man’s becoming a half-man, or two half-men, was prompted by his genius-overman flight to the skies of brilliance, which was replaced by anti-genius, when he flew too high to the Sun, or madness, and burned like Icarus. The absence of identity, family, friends from birth or losing them along the way. Adam without his Eve, or the inability to hide from humanity without his species representative. The Colossus B is Pabaisa’s A part, which doesn’t want an identity from the start, being the universal bodily brutality in the world of objects. The Titan C is Pabaisa’s A part, which wants an identity from all his heart, despite the consequences, being the conscious identity-subjectivity seeker. From appearances alone, one would say that here exists an extreme complex duality and conflicting characteristics, despite this, they both are nihilistic psychopaths, who, due to an open intimacy, love each other more than the lost A, the last connection with humanity, which they forged.
It seems, that monster’s C only goal, like some kind of ambitious animal, who is playing God, is to give others power, or value, maybe he even wants to create a race of snakes. Save himself by saving his saviors? Still, when the vampire extracts and reaches the other person’s zenith of happiness and the height of potential, when there is no place to climb higher, for him that person becomes a bore and he feels incomplete, which makes him act with cruelty and kill the parasitical person from hunger. On the other hand, the giant B is bathing in nihilistic conscious revelations about the indifference of the universe and the relativity of values, by which he tries to justify his murders. Cerber C didn’t want an identity connected to physical activity, which will never satisfy him, but with intellectual; he wanted an identity, which embodies everything he is opposed to, so he searches out the aristocrats.
Second metamorphosis: Narcissistic possession of a Prince. Prince is not as much of an ogre’s fruit of labor, as that, which Nietzsche claimed to be as soul-awareness transformation’s third stage. In short: 1. The camel – memory. 2. The lion – will-to-knowledge. 3. The child - wisdom. In this case, Prince is something of a “second childhood”, radiation of will-to-live and the forging of new values. Prince to the devil is everything, which he desires by his understanding of identity at that time: a status in society, political power, money, reactionary disregard for the sheep morality, wide connection circle, etc. The creature endures his hunger and postpones this inevitability for a long time for the means to an end, but one thing is missing – the War ambition, the natural evolutionary development condition, the only Art form of the ruling elite. The seven-headed, ten-horned and ten-crowned behemoth rises up and swallows up his Father and Mother, the King and the Queen, burning everything behind him and searching for a greater height, a new order within himself, which would shake the whole foundation of the Earth. The barbarian should not be held responsible for the killings of other people, because it is in his nature to be the Machiavellian, to be the blond beast-of-prey, devouring the lives of others.
Third metamorphosis: Re-integration into one person. The need to become singular: the pianist’s cut off arms, the drowning man's oxygen, the thirsty man’s water need. I am you. You are me. We are one. Prince is the outcast. We always were a monster, with a human side, which desperately clung to an identity, to save ourselves from drowning. The dragon with his identity as a Prince and as a Kreator gulps down the centaur without an identity. The active nihilism overcomes the passive nihilism. The monster, with a monster’s hunger, with a monster’s appetite, munching his other half from within. Pabaisa in a poisoned garden of Eden, knowing and wallowing in his own death, was made wild and totally uncontrollable, to satisfy his every desire, to realize his every ambition with unconditional commitment. And only then the Leviathan experiences his second true suffering, - having in mind, that the first one was the absence of identity, - not by killing his family and humanity, but whilst assimilating his other half, his primordial anonymity. The formless, faceless, nameless mammoth of a Prince, in the past only thinking of himself as un-and-in-human, feels a human, an all too human, familiarity with humanity, as if being a slave to the collective unconscious programming, which doesn’t have any uniqueness, personality or individuality, as if all the memory was implanted into his robotic brain – the gargoyle, who achieves cold intellectual empathy, the Satan, who finally kills God and outgrows the nameless humanity and its identity, swallowing it and making it his little, dirty dog-bitch. Ego-centrism as a whole humanity’s ego. Not power through wisdom, but the “real” world’s transcendence, which is denied to the rational mind. My name is Titas, for I am many.
Mutant A, troll B and savage C in the consequence of all the metamorphoses become phoenix A again, who has no identity, because it is stolen from the Prince, and made his own. The achieved pseudo-identity results in an existentialist tragi-heroism: after finding an identity, a meaning of life, Moby Dick understands, that the identity is the reaction between him, the other person and the whole world, that there is nothing, who could call him by his name, his meaning of life effectively disappears. The eternal incognito, a walking corpse and the super-cannibal in the end returns not even there, where he started, but into a negative sequence, because the beauty of the identity has disappeared, leaving only a heart filled with choking terror and disgust. The last man standing syndrome: will-to-life and will-to-power as will-in-itself, the loss to the world is its conquering. And so stands the Prince of princes, saying to himself, that if he is made of the parts and characteristics of dead people, then, basically, he is a person, but because they are dead, he never himself is alive. What scares the most – the paradoxical hunger in Pabaisa’s eyes and a satisfaction with his fake identity. Nobody stands on top of the world, except the highest alpha predator, who doesn’t have any dreams or hopes, who exists alone only to write himself an ending, then he will stop wandering and not knowing eternally his unbelievably mysterious soul, ignorant of boundaries and fears, but constantly fighting within itself. The realization, that you cannot become “a fake somebody”, but you can become “a true nobody”, the last prophet of the nihilistic truth of the universe. The wind became stronger, its screeching howl louder, and the air colder, as the demiurge’s eyes ached, while he was smiling into the Void.
Question: What is meaning of the story? Answer: No meaning. The worthlessness of efforts. To acquire, what is wanted, but to understand, that it doesn’t mean anything. To see, that there is no difference between good and evil, well and bad. Finally, a man can become anything he wants according to his wishes. He doesn’t have to take the walked-out road. He has a freedom of choice… People are like dice, they throw themselves in the direction of their own choosing.
Moral: If you admit your ontological uniqueness, identity becomes unimportant.
Sincerely, your friendly neighborhood Pabaisa.

Friday, May 17, 2013

Book appendix (part 4)

From an interview with my mother:


It was hard for me when you were born.  Baby number three is always hard because when there’s two there’s one for each parent, but when there are three it’s hard.  And you came so close to Jim.  And Jim was taking his sweet time getting potty trained, so I had both of you in diapers for like a year.  And that was before the disposable diapers were popular and they were expensive so we had cloth diapers and I had to wash them and hang them out on the line because we didn’t have a dryer.  So it seemed like that was my whole life was taking care of babies, changing diapers, washing them, hanging them out.  I think that was the time I went a little nutso.  I remember I just started freaking out sometime and dad had to call grandpa and have him come over and talk me out of it.  I don’t know, just the stress and everything probably piled up.  In those days I wasn’t very good about keeping on an even keel.  I’d let thing build up and build up and then just start flipping out.  

We thought you were perfectly healthy, but you had thrush at birth and the thrush got worse, which made you not want to nurse.  I would try to calm you down by nursing you.  You would just be upset and there was nothing we could do to get you to stop crying.  You would cry until you were exhausted and then sleep for a while.  So that was a very trying time.  Finally, I don’t remember how old you were until we finally took you into the doctor, and they checked you out and said you had thrush.  You had a herniated navel too, probably because you were crying so violently.  That was sad, my poor baby.  I just remember the family get together at the beach when you were crying and everyone was trying to be the one to hold you and calm you down but nobody could do it so I just took you and went away with you walking around the whole park.  I would sometimes just leave you in a room to cry.  There was nothing else to do.  I put you on your stomach on the water bed because you seemed to like it.  So you would cry and fuss, the waterbed would rock you and you would finally go to sleep.  In some ways I think that made us bond more because I was very emotionally involved with you and protective of you, wanting to fix what was wrong and wanting you to be better, happier and healthy.  So I think I was maybe a little extra attached to you.  Dad would be the one who would say, “Just put her in a room and shut the door.”  Because we lived in that little dinky house, so there wasn’t anywhere where you could escape the noise.  I wonder what Jim and Scott thought of that.  I don’t remember focusing on them at all, I was just so wrapped up in you.  Poor Jim, because he was just a little guy.  He probably got ignored a lot when this screaming baby came along and kicked him out of mama’s world.  

I can’t remember hardly anything about your childhood. I remember you drowning as a child.  I can’t remember who noticed you back there but then when I saw you, it seemed like you had let go of the boat.  But I just remembered feeling totally frantic and I remembered just having this sick feeling and praying that you would be ok.  It seems like we had to go down the river a little to be able to pull over to the side of the river.  I can’t remember how they called to get people to come help.  I ran up the beach, sick with worry.  I guess you just kind of came to and started breathing.  You seemed to be pretty much ok.  I mean kind of out of it a little, but I was just happy you were conscious and breathing and back with us.  

I remember when you had your appendix problem.  I always thought that I was pretty good at reading my kids, knowing what was wrong with them, but you were super hard to read.  And we had never had anything serious happen with the kids before, so this was a first for us. I didn’t really know or think there was something that was seriously wrong because you weren’t even acting serious until you developed a fever.  But when we went in there and it had ruptured and you were so sick, I was mad at myself for not having taken you in sooner.  But you were really good at being closed off, showing a brave front and going off and doing your thing and you didn’t really care if you were sick or let little pains get in the way.  You were just off doing yourself.  So I guess your common sense with your health wasn’t that great.  Because I remember you went and even played in a tournament with your appendix either ruptured or about to rupture.  So that was crazy.  I can’t even comprehend someone being able to do that.  

I remember you hated the hospital and always tried to get dad to eat your food, which wasn’t very hard.  And I remember he had to finish your breakfast that morning so you would get out of there and wanted to get out so bad.  And then you had to be in a wheelchair for like 5 days after.  And I remember you being at school and seeing how the kids were fawning over you and I realized that you had a lot of friends and people that cared about you.  And you seemed to be in pretty good spirits about the whole thing.  It’s not like you were like, “I’m in a wheelchair and this sucks.”  I think you were kind of enjoying a new experience.  But I think you were happy to get better—get back to your fast paced life.  You wouldn’t have lasted in a wheelchair that long for sure.



Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Acting normal: gateway drug to charming

Okay, as promised, I address the reader's question of how to act normal, or in this reader's particular case, charming.
Although I had a tumultuous childhood and adolescence, I am now 21 and more in control of myself than anyone I know. I watch others have emotional breakdowns and can only think that it looks like a lot of wasted effort on their part. I have learned facial expressions through FACS (the facial action coding system, used by investigators). Not a single person I know has guessed that I am anything other than well-adjusted and the most controlled person among a bunch of seniors panicking about the next few years of their life. I am not a criminal, nor do I have criminal intent, but I manipulate those around me just enough for them to leave me alone so that I can live a normal life. I am routine-oriented, and rarely let others get in the way. I am still working on a sort of a front, but I think I am well on my way to complete control of my own little spot in the world. I found your blog looking for strategies that sociopaths have used in their lives, as I hear that they have somehow learned to act "socially charming" and would like to acquire that skill as well for when I need it.
Acting normal is not an easy thing to learn. It is trial and error. It is specific to you. The good news is that the skills you learn to "pass" (manipulation, deflection, projecting confidence, listening skills, strategic flattery) are the same skills you use to be charming. This wikihow article about being charming is actually a good primer:
Charm is the art of having an attractive personality. This characteristic can only be achieved over a period of time. While everyone is born with differing amounts of natural charm, much can be acquired and honed through practice and patience. As with dancing, the more you practice, the better you will become. Effort and careful attention to the needs and desires of others will ensure that charm becomes a permanent part of your character.
Et cetera. There are also other books that have helped people, like Emily Post's Etiquette, How to Win Friends and Influence People, How to Talk to Anyone, among others. Use your sociopath wits and extreme objectivism and learn social graces like you learn anything else--hard work and genius.

It turns out that things like deflecting--always turning the conversation back onto the other person--and similar "smoke and mirrors" routines--are all things that people think are charming. It may take a while to get to the point of mastery, but if you are already "passing," sociopath charm is right around the corner.

Friday, August 14, 2009

Potholes in the brain

What a quaint way to describe a sociopath's brain. Apparently that is all researches can come up with when they are trying to interpret the results of a study about brains scans on known criminal sociopaths:
Psychopaths who kill and rape have faulty connections between the part of the brain dealing with emotions and that which handles impulses and decision-making, scientists have found.

In a study of psychopaths who had committed murder, manslaughter, multiple rape, strangulation and false imprisonment, the British scientists found that roads linking the two crucial brain areas had "potholes", while those of non-psychopaths were in good shape.

The study opens up the possibility of developing treatments for dangerous psychopaths in the future, said Dr. Michael Craig of the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College London, and may have profound implications for doctors, researchers and the criminal justice system.

"These were particular serious offenders with psychopathy and without any other mental illnesses," he told Reuters in an interview.

"Essentially what we found is that the connections in the psychopaths were not as good as the connections in the non-psychopaths. I would describe them as roads between the two areas -- and we found that in the psychopaths, the roads had potholes and weren't very well maintained."

The scientists cautioned against suggestions the study could lead to screening of potential psychopathic criminals before they are able to commit crimes, saying their findings had not established how, when or why the brain links were damaged.

"The most exciting question now...is when do the potholes come -- are people born with them, do they develop early in life, or are they a consequence of something else?"
***
Dr. Craig, who conducted the study, published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry with colleagues Declan Murphy and Dr Marco Catani, stressed that the numbers in the brain scan study were small, with only nine psychopaths analysed and compared with nine non-psychopaths.

"Trying to get people of this particular type to take part in a study, and also then deal with all the security you need to get them into a brain scanner, is not an easy feat," he said.

The study used new brain imaging technology to further analyse psychopaths' brains after previous studies found that the amygdala part of the brain, which processes emotions, and orbitofrontal cortex, which handles impulses and decisions, are structurally and functionally different in psychopaths.

"Up until recently the technology hasn't been available to look at the connections between those two brain areas in any meaningful way," Dr. Craig said.

But a new technique, called diffusion tensor magnetic resonance imaging (DT-MRI), allowed the researchers to look at the white matter tract linking the two key brain areas.

As well as finding clear structural deficits in the tract in psychopathic brains, they also found the degree of abnormality was significantly linked to the degree of psychopathy.

"As for the moral significance for society, and how society wants to deal with these things, that is a little premature," said Dr. Craig. "This is a small study and the important thing it raises is that more research needs to be done."
But seriously, just because the sociopath's brain obviously works differently than the empath's does not mean that one has "potholes" and the other is the Autobahn. Where are the studies showing the deficiencies of the empath's brain compared to the sociopath's? I guess they don't want to do those studies because "trying to get [empaths] of this particular type to take part in a study . . . is not an easy feat."

Tuesday, September 29, 2015

"A Special Education"

... the title of this New York Times piece, in which the author relates his experience of suffering from what sounds like would be diagnosed nowadays as oppositional defiant disorder, and consequently being sent to a special education school in which he quickly stopped picking fights because the kids "fought like grown-ups. If you hit someone in the arm, he might hit you back in the face or the genitals." Despite the frequent violence from his peers and common apathy from "the system", he finds himself wondering about the value of the experience: 

Was riding the short bus for three years a good or a bad thing for me? I’m not sure. When I graduated from high school, I could not find New Jersey or Connecticut on a map. But one incident that happened in that first tumultuous year in fourth grade makes special ed invaluable in my adult eyes.

I realized after I got on the bus one morning that I’d forgotten my lunch and that there wasn’t any place near the office building to get food. When lunch period came, I was fearful, not because I’d go hungry, but because any public mistake was routinely seized upon by the other kids. “Idiot forgot his lunch” would make great fodder.

While the others unwrapped their sandwiches and unscrewed thermoses, I waited silently, looking down.

“Hey, man, why aren’t you eating?” a kid asked.

“F’rg’t m’lunch,” I muttered.

A whisper was passed down the table; here it comes, I thought.

A rectangular object wrapped in shiny foil whizzed through the air and hit me in the chest. I opened it and found half a bologna sandwich. An apple rolled my way, followed by half a turkey on rye, which I caught in midair. A bag of chips was slid down to me.

I looked up and all at the table were smiling at me.

“What do you say, Josh?” the teacher asked.

“Thank you,” I whispered to the class.

“Don’t mention it.”

“No problem.”

“You’re welcome, doofus.”

I held my breath in response to the sudden volcano in my belly and quickly shifted my gaze to my shoes, but it was no use. I knew how to squelch emotion in response to violence, but had not known mercy, kindness and warmth, and was not prepared for the waterfall erupting from my face. I sprang up from the table to run away and hide my feelings from the class, but was blocked by one of the teachers’ aides. I ran full speed into her arms, burying my face. She wrapped both arms tightly around me and maneuvered me quickly out into the hall, quietly closing the door behind her. She held me while I gasped and sobbed, my tears and snot staining her dress. She didn’t ask me what was wrong; she just held me. I looked up after a minute and saw she was crying, too.

In that moment I felt for the first time what it was like to be supported and accepted, taken care of rather than yelled at, punished or shunted off, which is how most people react to children who are violent or feral. Special ed got me directly in touch with a deeper place in the same way music would later on.

I think a lot of people see adult sociopaths and gate them and fail to see that they just happened to be born with that disposition with childhood experiences that triggered the development of those traits. I know that children with issues are easy to get angry at and to want to punish or scare straight. If those tactics worked, I would be 100% behind them too. But they don't. Not on these kids. So how can you justify treating a child like that? They may not seem as innocent as other children, but they can't help the way they are anymore than any other child can.
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