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

Thursday, August 29, 2013

Nature vs. nurture

This New York Times article states the obvious -- bad parents can't take all the credit for good children and good parents can't take all the blame for bad children. Interestingly, it goes out of its way to say that bad behavior does not necessarily equal sociopathy:
“I don’t know what I’ve done wrong,” the patient told me.
She was an intelligent and articulate woman in her early 40s who came to see me for depression and anxiety. In discussing the stresses she faced, it was clear that her teenage son had been front and center for many years.
When he was growing up, she explained, he fought frequently with other children, had few close friends, and had a reputation for being mean. She always hoped he would change, but now that he was almost 17, she had a sinking feeling.
I asked her what she meant by mean. “I hate to admit it, but he is unkind and unsympathetic to people,” she said, as I recall. He was rude and defiant at home, and often verbally abusive to family members.
Along the way, she had him evaluated by many child psychiatrists, with several extensive neuropsychological tests. The results were always the same: he tested in the intellectually superior range, with no evidence of any learning disability or mental illness. Naturally, she wondered if she and her husband were somehow remiss as parents.
Here, it seems, they did not fare as well as their son under psychiatric scrutiny. One therapist noted that they were not entirely consistent around their son, especially when it came to discipline; she was generally more permissive than her husband. Another therapist suggested that the father was not around enough and hinted that he was not a strong role model for his son.
But there was one small problem with these explanations: this supposedly suboptimal couple had managed to raise two other well-adjusted and perfectly nice boys. How could they have pulled that off if they were such bad parents?
To be sure, they had a fundamentally different relationship with their difficult child. My patient would be the first to admit that she was often angry with him, something she rarely experienced with his brothers.
But that left open a fundamental question: If the young man did not suffer from any demonstrable psychiatric disorder, just what was his problem?
My answer may sound heretical, coming from a psychiatrist. After all, our bent is to see misbehavior as psychopathology that needs treatment; there is no such thing as a bad person, just a sick one.
But maybe this young man was just not a nice person.
For years, mental health professionals were trained to see children as mere products of their environment who were intrinsically good until influenced otherwise; where there is chronic bad behavior, there must be a bad parent behind it.
But while I do not mean to let bad parents off the hook — sadly, there are all too many of them, from malignant to merely apathetic — the fact remains that perfectly decent parents can produce toxic children.
When I say “toxic,” I don’t mean psychopathic. . . .
I often tell readers that not every asshole ex of theirs is a sociopath, and the same applies for misbehaving children. In this situation, though, I actually think it is foolish to discount the potential role of sociopathy. There is a strong genetic but weak environmental link to sociopathy, which is consistent with having two normal sons and one sociopathic one. Furthermore, although inconsistent discipline may not be enough to cause anyone to become a sociopath, it could trigger sociopathy in someone who was genetically predisposed to it, as sociopath children are particularly sensitive to incentive structures and perceived fairness (i.e. consistency and reciprocity). I obviously don't know the full story, but just based on the article, the description fits sociopathy, at least for this kid.

After spending time with my family recently, I am more convinced that nurture had a significant role to play in my development into a sociopath. When people ask me whether I had a bad childhood, I tell them that it was actually relatively unremarkable, however I can see how the antisocial behaviors and mental posturing that now define me were incentivized when I was growing up -- how my independent emotional world was stifled and how understanding and respect for the emotional world of others died away. Still I don't think I was "made" into a sociopath, nor was I born one. I feel like I was born with that predisposition, that I made a relatively conscious decision to rely on those skills instead of developing others, and that the decision was made in direct response to my environment and how I could best survive and even thrive in that environment. It's a bit similar to this author's description of her own survivalist adaptations:
If you’ve read much about writers, you know that many of us grew up with an alcoholic parent or in some otherwise dysfunctional home. Me, too. Kids who are raised in households where feelings of safety and predictability are up for grabs might be more likely to turn into storytellers. We spend a lot of emotional energy trying to guess what might happen next, and mentally drawing up different contingency plans. It puts us in the “what if” habit early.
Genetics are important for sociopathy, but environment plays a crucial role as well. Although the NY Times article notes that "[f]or better or worse, parents have limited power to influence their children," such that they should be reluctant "to take all the blame — or credit — for everything that their children become," unfortunately (or luckily?) they can still take quite a bit of blame (or credit) for sociopathic children, particularly with new "studies suggesting that such antisocial behavior can be modified with parental coaching." Knowledge is power.

Thursday, March 11, 2010

Child custody fights (part 1)

One of my readers has been going through child custody issues with her sociopathic ex and father of her child. It's an interesting subject, and I do believe that there are pretty common mistakes that empaths predictably make. About the topic generally, this lovefraud post is actually sound advice. But for a more personal angle, I asked my reader to write her story summing up some of the advice I had given her and how she applied it to her particular situation:
How do you deal with a sociopath when he's fathered your child?

It wouldn't be such a big deal if there wasn't so much at stake. Sure, there's the whole business of my heart. He didn't just break it, he masterfully chiseled at it until there was nothing left. I hardly knew I was being tormented as he romanced me into insanity, literally through hell and back. But that's another story for another time. The end result was that I finally left with what shreds of dignity I had left. I was three months pregnant.

Our relationship was convoluted with other women, one of whom he married around the time I was about four months along. She never knew about me, much less the impending baby.

When my daughter was born, I filed for child support, confident he would not pursue visitation in order to protect both his marriage and reputation in his community. He is a charming, executive director of a well-known non-profit organization and is socially active in his town. This, I believed, was my leverage. I would soon learn that when you choose to engage in battle with a sociopath, nothing is what it appears to be, and you have to step into his world, his rules, his games. It is not for the weak or faint of heart. You have to be strong, have an undetectable poker face, and be ready to call bluff when the timing necessitates (but be ready for the consequences of calling bluff - it will generate a strong reaction from your sociopath, which is not advisable when children are involved).

But...

It is also a delicate balance of knowing just exactly how far to push, and when to give in. I learned the hard way that you absolutely never, ever let a sociopath know what your vulnerability is. This seems like a no-brainer, but for me, the fear was all to real when he began to threaten me with visiting my infant daughter. Mistake Number One. It would prove to be a fatal mistake that would be difficult for me to overcome and regain my footing. I learned it became easier for me if he underestimated me. So I played the light-hearted airhead. Absent-minded, not a care in the world. This worked for a while. When it came closer to our court date, he pushed more and more to see my daughter. I told him he was more than welcome to stop by. And then I would inquire innocently how his wife was doing. This was just subtle enough to make him gently back off. We did this for a while until we met in court.

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

The meaning of life (part 1)

A reader asked:

Hey dude, you know what would be interesting? An article about how sociopaths deal with boredom. What is boredom for a sociopath, why is it that it is so hard to deal with it and what do we do to not get bored. I am also curious about it. Thing is i am scared of the emptiness within myself. it's like when i was younger i used to have all these feelings that managed to keep me from getting bored by myself, you know, i had a way to meditate. but now whenever i am alone all i can sense is an empty space and for some reason i feel scared about it. it's like if i don't hold tight onto something i might fall into emptiness and never come back, dunno exactly. anyway, it's that emptiness that i want to know more about and how to deal with it.
Good question. I address this issue a little bit in this post. I was sort of made fun of for it in the comments of this post.

The human psyche really is so fragile. We lie to ourselves all the time about our existence and the meaning of our existence, like my recent post about free won't. Ignorance really is bliss in a lot of ways, but no matter how we try, we end up catching glimpses of the meaningless of life. I don't know why, really, but your question reminded me of Clive Wearing, a former musicologist, now the most severe form of amnesia ever documented. Every minute or so, he forgets absolutely everything and experiences a feeling of being born ex nihilo -- as if he never existed before, but now suddenly he does. He keeps a journal in which he writes over and over again, "I'm awake! For the very first time!" "I'm alive! For the first time!" "This is the first moment of my consciousness!" I think about him sometimes and wonder whether his life is horrible or wonderful.

What do you think about the subject?
I read the post and i think you are kinda right. That's how i feel, like living in a foreign country, gazing at the view but not being able to make any real interaction with the environment. I have been recently diagnosed with immature behaviour by a psychiatrist because i can't really make real progress in getting more mature, and i have to because i just dropped out of college because i was getting bored. Now i have to start all over again cause i don't want to skip college. I think it's true what you say about our meaningless existence also. I keep lying myself with fantasies about me being some kind of "chosen to do great" like that harry potter thing you talked about but i can see through the fog i create that i could also be a looser like everyone else. The "bad" thing is that realizing that i am just like everyone else doesn't change me. It's like i can't accept it willingly. I go on doing what i do and i feel kinda bad cause my psyche doesn't want to stop playing and realize that it has to get it's ass to work. Guess this unchangeable emptiness is something i have to get used to and work myself off to start doing some actual work. Guess this is why i reminded you of that amnesia guy. No matter what i do i can't change my perception upon life. I am still a kid even though i am 19.

About what you asked, i think he is having a good life feeling the beginning of his existence all the time like that. If he doesn't remember and the thrill keeps coming and coming i think he lives kinda happy all the time. Even though if someone explained to him his condition from a to the z, i think he would be kinda sad but not for long, right? Reminds me of the movie "First 50 dates" with adam sandler. If the people around him keep his illusion alive he doesn't have any reason for which to be unhappy and i guess that is all that matters. Sure, he won't do anything with his life being stuck in that loop hole but for him it doesn't matter, right? If i get to think of it he could be unhappy if he realized at the end of the loop that he is loosing his memory. That would be a moment of unhappiness, which would only make his existence pitiful but not horrible. Is pity a feeling a sociopath would feel? Hm...

Wednesday, January 15, 2014

Being told you're a sociopath (part 2)

(cont.)

As I asked myself these things, another realization came to me.

I was born with severe astigmatism. We know now, that I hadn’t been able to see much of anything for the first years of my life. But back then, nothing was out of the ordinary. I thought I was perfectly normal and so did the people around me. It wasn’t until I started reading, writing, and watching TV. My parents noticed how I would sit right up to the screen, and burry my nose in the paper to read or write. Still, I was completely oblivious. My world was the blur that it had always been. Then, one day, my mom picked me up early from school and said we were going to the doctors. On the way, she asked me if I could see. I told her that of course I could. She stopped by a red octagonal sign and asked me to read what it said. I told her it didn’t have any words on it.

I got glasses a week later and I’ve been wearing them ever since.

The point was that I didn’t know what my mother meant when she asked me if I could see before I got to wear glasses and truly see the world for the first time. I didn’t think that the world could be anything other than what my eyes had always told me it was. Nothing could have suggested otherwise because I had no idea what the word “see” really meant.

Which is what I think happened with the word “sociopath.” How could I have connected the dots and seen such a thing in me if the word had no meaning for me? Only now, years later, do I look back and laugh at all the times I would get into social pitfalls and awkward situations because I had no clue what was wrong with the people around me. I see now it was me. I would focus, like you, on all those little moments when I had convinced myself I was normal. Back then it was the world that was different and full of crazies.  

Reading your book was like a revelation. That mask of normalcy you speak of, only now do I realize how hard, how draining it had been to keep up pretenses for so long! But because I had never really considered it a mask at all, having it fall now became this boulder crashing off my shoulders. Every smile, every forced emotion, was like I was trying to pick up that boulder and toss it back on me.

Granted, I’ve been slowly getting my game face back on. It’s been getting easier to regress into the comfortable routine I had so mindlessly gone through for years, but I know I can never be the same. Just like seeing the world through glasses for the first time, clear and definite, I have now seen behind the curtain of my own self-deception.

Whether an actual doctor will diagnose me as a sociopath I don’t think I will ever know. I have no intention of going to a therapist or talking to someone about this and, even if I am ever forced to, I’ll lie my way out of it with a clean bill of health.

The only person that will probably ever hear this story, or know what I have gone through for the last few months, is you. I had to tell someone, and you were the only one I knew I could tell. I don’t need confirmation from you about what I am, although your opinion would be much valued. Like I said in the first paragraph, just a reply would be nice so I know you are real and not just a book and a website.

It's interesting how similar this story is to my own story and others that I have heard. The first time I really thought about what the word sociopath meant, I was in my early twenties. I was doing a summer internship with someone who became a fast friend. It was very similar to the class about Evil -- she was very interested in theology and Mormonism, so I told her all of my opinions on morality and she told me I really should consider the likelihood that I was a sociopath. When I looked up what the word meant, I immediately recognized certain aspects about me, but there were other things that didn't seem to quite fit. I didn't really identify with the label right away, or at least I had my doubts. In the five years or so after that informal diagnosis and before my official diagnosis, however, I became better able to assess not just my own behavior, but to better understand the behavior and motivations of empaths. There were many things I shared in common with empaths, particularly superficial similarities. But I slowly started to realize that even though I often had similar behaviors to empaths, my motives were very sociopathic. And seeing things in that way was very similar to having my vision of myself and others suddenly coming into focus. 

Does anyone else have a similar story?

Saturday, May 18, 2013

Book appendix (part 5)

(cont. from interview with my mother):


Sometimes I feel guilty for it because I know I was gone, being on the stage and trying to figure out what would bring happiness in my life and I was gone way too much. I should have been home more and keeping tabs on things.  

I know you were always closed off, like affection.  You weren’t ever very affectionate, as far as hugging.  You were kind of closed off emotionally.  I don’t ever remember you crying.  Instead of you being sad, you usually chose to be angry.  That was your emotion of choice.  It seems like when you got angry, you would just get in someone’s face verbally and then you would try to get that person to have their own emotional explosion.  I remember you would try to push dad’s buttons and get him to get really mad.  It’s almost like you liked the emotional turmoil of anger and every now and then you would feed into that and make it happen.  Then things would calm down, until they would build up again.  But I don’t know. Dad was like that too.  But it seemed like you and he butted heads a lot.  I don't remember you ever being sad or hurt.  Even when you were in the hospital with the physical hurt, you weren’t crying or sad.  You know, like a normal person would do.  Especially girl.  You know teenage girls, they would cry over stuff, be hurt or have their feelings hurt.  I don’t remember you ever being like that.  So you were definitely not the typical teenage girl.  I think that’s why you didn’t have a lot of teenage girl friends. Most of your friends were boys, maybe because you related to them a lot more.  Boys aren’t very emotional, they’re more thinking.   

I think you have a little ADD.  It’s hard for you to focus on one thing at a time.  You have to be doing like 3 things at once, even in church you’ll be doing multiple things.  You can’t focus on one thing at a time, or at least not for very long.  But I also think you’re always just thinking about things and wondering about things, so something will catch your interest and you’ll want to explore that.  You’re kind of an explorer type of personality; you like to explore new and different things.

In the way that you did far more and went far more than any of the other kids, that was a little bit of a surprise because I don’t think it was anything normal. You were like super child, going out and doing things far beyond what was expected.

I don’t think you’re trying to corrupt people, but I think you like to do things for shock value—just throw things out there and see how they land, see how they would fly. So I think I was a little uncomfortable with your influence over your younger siblings. I think you’re influential. Sometimes I see the whole family bending to what you want to do and I think we have set you or accepted you in that role of figuring out what we want to do or how we are going to do it, and I think we enjoy that. And I don’t think you carry it too far either. I don’t think you’re too pushy about it. But you are definitely a natural born leader. I think that’s what makes you such a good teacher. I think you’re influential because you’re smart and determined and passionate about the things you want to do, and I think people tend to want to follow someone like that. I think the family follows you because we know you’re smart and efficient and you can figure out probably the best way of doing things and you have novel and fun ideas. You’re always full of ideas. And you’re always coming up with good ways of solving problems or making things happen smoothly.

I remember one time when I was super proud of you, singing this particular song I like. That was a proud moment because you were just up there saying I’m my own person, I don’t care what other people do to me, I’m going to live my life the way I want to.  And I was just proud of you for that.  I don’t think I’ve ever been that way.  I’m getting to be more and more that way, but I used to not be.  I used to be codependent, trying to manipulate people from the wings but never really voicing my opinion and saying what I wanted, what I needed.  I was always kind of in the shadows.  That’s why I liked the stage I think, because I could be somebody else, another person.  And I was good at it and people thought I was wonderful, so I think that’s why I kind of got addicted to the stage.  

I think the book is kind of cool.  I see it as another step in your healing and becoming more your own person.  Kind of dealing with all of the stuff that’s happened to you and figuring out who you really are.  I think the book is part of this process.  

Saturday, November 16, 2013

Empath hypocrisy

I'm not saying all empaths are stupid and illogical, although some of them are. Similarly, there are some sociopaths that are stupid, horrible, evil, or whatever else. But let's focus on illogical empaths for a second. This is from a recent comment:

I'm an empath.
I believe that all humans are born with free will.
I believe that every human life is intrinsically valuable.
I believe that good and evil exist as absolutes, even if at times it is difficult to distinguish between them.
I believe that sociopaths are evil. 
If I could find an effective way to screen for you guys without too many false positives, then I would kill you as children. Of course, given that you are master manipulators I can already see you arguing your way out of a corner, convincing the other empaths that I am the evil one for suggesting the killing of children, suggesting that there is some error in my detection system. 
How many times do you have to burn your fingers before you realize that fire is hot? In love, you get back 100 times what you give. 
In war you fight to win.
I know I'm right. 

Now, I am not great at understanding sarcasm, so it's possible this was said with tongue firmly planted in cheek. But I have heard enough very similar statements from other people that I believe this person was being sincere. This person believes that every human life is intrinsically valuable but would kill sociopathic children? Really? Kill small children in a genocide? Just as long as the test wouldn't lead to "too many" innocent deaths due to "too many false positives"? Wow. Ok. An "empath" who seems not at all capable of understanding (must less empathizing with) someone sociopathic. Also, this person absolutely certain he is right. Good to know. 

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.

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