Wednesday, May 4, 2011

Socio crack

A reader writes:
You dont know what addiction to a sociopath is...He is my crack and i cant put the pipe down.

After being used, discarded, depressed, and all cried out, i met different normal men who wanted a relationship with me. I tried. I am decent looking so meeting men and keeping them interested has not been the problem. I am sorry if that sounds a little off but i am being truthful. The problem is that i cant and wont let go of him. Now, he is back in my life. I told him that i only wanted to be friends...Well, we seem to be seeing eachother quite often, "as friends". We all know where that is going although i am trying to convince myself that i wont get romantically involved again with him because i dont want to get used and discarded again. However, he is like an old pair of jeans that i cant get rid of. He just is the icing on my cake. I feel at home with him. I know he is wrong for me and not the right influence for my two little girls. I am a professional woman with a masters degree and i cannot get this man out of my system. I guess what i want to know is that , could be anyway that he could care about me or its all a game always? When we are out "as friends", he shows his claim on me and wont let another man step up to me. Is this for my benefit or could there be jealousy?

Is there anyway a sociopath could care about a love interest? What can i do to keep his interest so he doesnt get bored again?
M.E.: Having an addiction to him is a different problem than getting him hooked on you. You won't be able to get him hooked on you as long as you have an addiction to him, and you probably won't care to get him addicted to you once you don't have an addiction on him.

I recommend that you read the Art of Seduction and the 48 Laws of Power. You'll see why you are an addict and to what exactly you're addicted. It's not because he is anything great, he is nothing great, but he is good enough at manipulation and deception to fool you initially into thinking that you are getting something that you want. Right now he has accomplished the ultimate success in making you believe that all you want, more than anything else in the world, is him. But it's not true. even when you write this there are certain things that you know that you won't stand for, certain things that if you knew for sure you would break up with him, but you are willing to fool yourself and he is willing to help you do so just enough that you never ever will face the truth. You need to disassociate things that you feel about him with what he actually is. Maybe write down a list of what he is and how he makes you feel -- be very careful about that distinction. Realize that how he makes you feel is manipulation and all that is left is what he is.

Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Test

Someone sent me this test called the Pierley/Redford Dissociative Affect Diagnostic. It was quick, fun to take, eerily accurate for me, and gives you a small insight into what it must be like to be crazy. Beyond that, I have no idea what the test is testing or what it is about.

Sunday, May 1, 2011

The Killer Inside Me

I recently watched The Killer Inside Me. Casey Affleck plays a sheriff's deputy psychopathic killer with a "sickness" that seeks to break free. It's not the best portrayal of a psychopath I have seen, in fact it's a little hackneyed. I wonder if the book was any better in this regard, according to Stanley Kubrick "Probably the most chilling and believable first-person story of a criminally warped mind I have ever encountered." There are a couple interesting reasons to watch the film, though.

The movie has a somewhat unique brand of indiscriminate killings. The method and mode of the killings appear unfathomable, presumably because there is some self-delusion or insanity going on in the mind of the killer, but it's never made explicit. He convinces himself that he needs to kill these people, that it is the only thing to do and the facts support his conclusions to a certain extent but not quite. The audience is left thinking, "I can sort of see why he did that, but it also seems like a mistake."

This is unlike either most horror films where the killings are unapologetically senseless or crime dramas where the killings are unapologetically telelogical. The resulting depictions of killing are all the more disturbing because of this aspect -- you wonder whether he isn't jumping to conclusions, doing something that he may regret when he finds out the real facts. It reminds me of the same horrific self-justifications in Boxing Helena that leads the protagonist to perform amputations on the object of his obsession. People who think rationally, people who have not killed or maimed for pleasure watch these types of movies and squirm because they can't quite convince themselves that this could never happen to them. They know of their own powers of self-deception and think, there but for the grace of God go I.

The other fun aspect of the film's indiscriminate killings is seeing how the victims each respond. In one scene our killer is explaining the deaths of two people to a friend of his. The friend volunteers that the victims must have had it coming, to which the killer replies, "No one has it coming. That's why no one can see it coming." Indeed, because the killings are relatively unprovoked and unwarranted, none of his victims do see it coming and they all react to the killings in different ways. One moment they are self-assured, even making small demands of the killer, "not now," "get dressed," "where's the money," etc. In just a few moments they are being killed and staring up at him with not just surprise, but real disbelief. For a second you can see them wonder, "how could this possibly be happening?" as if they just saw a law of physics being violated. It makes you realize how entitled we all feel, how everyone believes that they have certain rights that will never be violated, could never be violated, chief among them being the right to life. Yet here is an individual who routinely violates those rights, with no repercussions. Some of the killings are done in such odd ways that the audience also feels disbelief, "Can you really die that way?" and you realize that the world holds many more dangers than you ever dared admit to yourself.

Best quote by the creepy Bill Pullman: "A weed is a plant out of place. I find a hollyhock in my cornfield, and it's a weed. I find it in my yard, and it's a flower. You're in my yard."



Boxing Helena:

Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Objects of lust

A socio reader asked: "How does it make you feel, knowing people have sexual fantasies of you? Do you feel anything besides the typical ego boost? I know my question is a little rhetorical, but answer anyway."

I responded:

Funny you should ask -- I've been in the unusual position recently in which I can almost guarantee that 15-30% of the people that interact with me at all on a daily basis have had sexual fantasies about me. That's much higher than my usual 3-5%. What accounts for the surplus? I've been in positions of power and authority over relatively powerless and not as attractive people. But it does make me dress up more and be better about flossing and moisturizing. Also I strike poses more often for their benefit, just a little something to remember me by.

How does it feel to know that people are fantasizing about me? Powerful, I guess -- more powerful the more people there are doing it. It seems funny to have power over people that way. Sex makes people weak in funny ways, I guess I mean. I was writing to someone else about sex and power and she asked if I ever use sex as a means to power. I told her never actual sex, there is no power in actual sex. It's much better to maintain the allure, the anticipation of sex, without actually consummating anything, and by much better I largely mean much cleaner. But you should know more about this with your BDSM interests.

Speaking of fantasies, I have had this horrible obsession with someone I barely know for the past few years (or more the idea of them) and i'm not flying to their city. Every time I go, I try to come up with some way to meet up with them, but it makes me feel so weak to want it so much that I don't contact them at all. I *need* power and control. I only *want* to have this person, and if I have to sacrifice some of my power and control to get them, it's not worth it. But I want this person so much and it's been for so long, it has been a thorn in my side.

Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Music cognition and broken brains

A reader sent me this New York Times article about music cognition that had a section on how people with Autism process music differently from everyone else, less emotionally:
Daniel J. Levitin, director of the laboratory for music perception, cognition and expertise at McGill University in Montreal, began puzzling over musical expression in 2002, after hearing a live performance of one of his favorite pieces, Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 27.

“It just left me flat,” Dr. Levitin, who wrote the best seller “This Is Your Brain on Music” (Dutton, 2006), recalled in a video describing the project. “I thought, well, how can that be? It’s got this beautiful set of notes. The composer wrote this beautiful piece. What is the pianist doing to mess this up?”

To decipher the contribution of different musical flavorings, [Levitan and a graduate student a pianist] perform snatches of several Chopin nocturnes on a Disklavier, a piano with sensors under each key recording how long he held each note and how hard he struck each key (a measure of how loud each note sounded). The note-by-note data was useful because musicians rarely perform exactly the way the music is written on the page — rather, they add interpretation and personality to a piece by lingering on some notes and quickly releasing others, playing some louder, others softer.

The pianist’s recording became a blueprint, what researchers considered to be the 100 percent musical rendition. Then they started tinkering. A computer calculated the average loudness and length of each note Professor Plaunt played. The researchers created a version using those average values so that the music sounded homogeneous and evenly paced, with every eighth note held for an identical amount of time, each quarter note precisely double the length of an eighth note.

Study subjects listened to them in random order, rating how emotional each sounded. Musicians and nonmusicians alike found the original pianist’s performance most emotional and the averaged version least emotional.
***
[T]he Levitin team found that children with autism essentially rated each nocturne rendition equally emotional, finding the original no more emotionally expressive than the mechanical version. But in other research, the team found that children with autism could label music as happy, sad or scary, suggesting, Dr. Levitin said, that “their recognition of musical emotions may be intact without necessarily having those emotions evoked, and without them necessarily experiencing those emotions themselves.”
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