From a reader, here's a video of Professor Jim Fallon (previously discussed here) talking about some of the research he has done on the brains of killer.
Sunday, May 22, 2011
Saturday, May 21, 2011
Feelings (part 3)
The reader responds (edited for length):
I don't really know what people mean by guilt. I find that particular diagnostic criteria difficult to pin down and I'm not entirely sure that sociopaths never feel a type of regret or cognitive dissonance that is essentially what people mean by guilt. By regret I mean wishing things had gone a different way or you had made a different choice (without necessarily assigning moralistic values to your choices). By cognitive dissonance, I mean that you do something that is not in harmony with your personal view of yourself.
Now I think that guilt definitely must have elements of regret and cognitive dissonance to it, but is it something more? Is there a third ingredient, perhaps in which you feel the hurt you caused another as if you had hurt yourself, or perhaps for the religious you feel like you are being cast further away from the divine? I think the emotion "guilt" is a lot more complicated than people acknowledge. I think when people say that sociopaths are "remorseless" or "don't feel guilt," at the very least they mean that sociopaths are able to do certain things that most people would consider morally wrong without seeing or feeling the "wrongness" of them. I don't know if that means that a sociopath is categorically incapable of feeling "guilt," but I guess it would depend on one's definition.
But self-knowledge is such a Sisyphean endeavor, don't you think? At least I have recently found it to be a cycle of self discovery and self doubt.
What I can say for sure is that I have changed. Yes, of course we are different people now than when we were young, thank the gods and the nine circles, but... The extent of how much my personality and my behavior has altered - and how different I am aware that I act while on the pills - will have to be my character witness. When I was young I was impulsive and brash, a bit clueless and devil-may-care. I was also very honest for a child, and a bit sensitive since I had self-esteem issues, which is part of what led to my depression. And I know I had a sense of guilt, because of a few admissions I can recall I made voluntarily. Not so much the case after [the emotional dissociation]. And I think that's another crucial point; when I take the pills (Metamina 5mg capsules, by the by) much of my hesitation to stop and to go back to "normal" is out of what I think is a sense that I am betraying someone or something.M.E.: I wanted to comment a little bit about what you said about guilt.
And if that isn't guilt, then perhaps I never did know the feeling of it, or the definition. And isn't guilt really the crucial point, when it comes to the separation of the socios and psychos from the normals?
I don't really know what people mean by guilt. I find that particular diagnostic criteria difficult to pin down and I'm not entirely sure that sociopaths never feel a type of regret or cognitive dissonance that is essentially what people mean by guilt. By regret I mean wishing things had gone a different way or you had made a different choice (without necessarily assigning moralistic values to your choices). By cognitive dissonance, I mean that you do something that is not in harmony with your personal view of yourself.
Now I think that guilt definitely must have elements of regret and cognitive dissonance to it, but is it something more? Is there a third ingredient, perhaps in which you feel the hurt you caused another as if you had hurt yourself, or perhaps for the religious you feel like you are being cast further away from the divine? I think the emotion "guilt" is a lot more complicated than people acknowledge. I think when people say that sociopaths are "remorseless" or "don't feel guilt," at the very least they mean that sociopaths are able to do certain things that most people would consider morally wrong without seeing or feeling the "wrongness" of them. I don't know if that means that a sociopath is categorically incapable of feeling "guilt," but I guess it would depend on one's definition.
But self-knowledge is such a Sisyphean endeavor, don't you think? At least I have recently found it to be a cycle of self discovery and self doubt.
Friday, May 20, 2011
Feelings (part 2)
My response:
Hm, this is a very interesting question and there are a lot of layers and complications to it because your question sort of gets to the meta issues of who we are and what does it mean to be a sentient being and have a sense of self.
Have you never taken mood altering or mind altering substances before? Never had fluctuations in hormones or felt the flood of adrenaline? Sometimes I have found myself suddenly "feeling" something and acting on it and later trying to justify why I felt that way (he made me angry, or that thing made me sad). When I started to become more self-aware and less self-deceptive, though, I started actually asking myself -- did he really make me mad? What about that thing is so sad? I started realizing that sometimes although I felt I was having an actual emotional response to something, it was more of an emotional hallucination. i talk about it here and here.
I realized that for the most part, what I really was sensing was some change in my brain chemistry -- more adrenaline, less seratonin, more dopamine, exhaustion, whatever it was -- and my mind was trying to make sense of these "feelings" by imbuing them with meaning, the same way that during a dream it may interpret the bang of a door from the outside world as a gunshot in the dream itself. After that realization, I started questioning every emotion I had and going through an additional mental process apart from the feeling process in which I tried to analyze whether it was an actual feeling, or just an emotional hallucination. If I concluded that it was an emotional hallucination, i.e. that there was no reason that I should feel particularly happy or sad, angry or grateful, then I would just ride it out and/or try to ignore it the same way that you might ignore a visual hallucination of a dragon just inside your peripheral vision.
Do you think that you are just messing with your brain chemistry and your brain is interpreting the new sensations as being certain "emotions"?
My other question is about how you remember being normal and having normal emotions before a certain time in your life. Might you be self-deceived about that or remembering incorrectly? Memory is such a fickle thing, and the way we remember things is frequently not the way they actually happened. particularly, our memory of things will be colored by our vision of reality and the truth about yourself. In the same way that the brain interprets certain stimulus in a dream in a way that it "makes sense," might you have been interpreting contemporary childhood events in a limited childish way that assumed that you were normal, had normal feelings, that your beliefs and feelings were objectively warranted by the situations you found yourself in, etc.. or is possible that your earlier memories are all colored by a distorted view of the world, the same way that someone suffering from paranoid delusions might interpret any small thing as "people out to get him"?
Best,
m.e.
Hm, this is a very interesting question and there are a lot of layers and complications to it because your question sort of gets to the meta issues of who we are and what does it mean to be a sentient being and have a sense of self.
Have you never taken mood altering or mind altering substances before? Never had fluctuations in hormones or felt the flood of adrenaline? Sometimes I have found myself suddenly "feeling" something and acting on it and later trying to justify why I felt that way (he made me angry, or that thing made me sad). When I started to become more self-aware and less self-deceptive, though, I started actually asking myself -- did he really make me mad? What about that thing is so sad? I started realizing that sometimes although I felt I was having an actual emotional response to something, it was more of an emotional hallucination. i talk about it here and here.
I realized that for the most part, what I really was sensing was some change in my brain chemistry -- more adrenaline, less seratonin, more dopamine, exhaustion, whatever it was -- and my mind was trying to make sense of these "feelings" by imbuing them with meaning, the same way that during a dream it may interpret the bang of a door from the outside world as a gunshot in the dream itself. After that realization, I started questioning every emotion I had and going through an additional mental process apart from the feeling process in which I tried to analyze whether it was an actual feeling, or just an emotional hallucination. If I concluded that it was an emotional hallucination, i.e. that there was no reason that I should feel particularly happy or sad, angry or grateful, then I would just ride it out and/or try to ignore it the same way that you might ignore a visual hallucination of a dragon just inside your peripheral vision.
Do you think that you are just messing with your brain chemistry and your brain is interpreting the new sensations as being certain "emotions"?
My other question is about how you remember being normal and having normal emotions before a certain time in your life. Might you be self-deceived about that or remembering incorrectly? Memory is such a fickle thing, and the way we remember things is frequently not the way they actually happened. particularly, our memory of things will be colored by our vision of reality and the truth about yourself. In the same way that the brain interprets certain stimulus in a dream in a way that it "makes sense," might you have been interpreting contemporary childhood events in a limited childish way that assumed that you were normal, had normal feelings, that your beliefs and feelings were objectively warranted by the situations you found yourself in, etc.. or is possible that your earlier memories are all colored by a distorted view of the world, the same way that someone suffering from paranoid delusions might interpret any small thing as "people out to get him"?
Best,
m.e.
Thursday, May 19, 2011
Feelings (part 1)
From a reader:
I am a diagnosed sociopath, but I can recall emotion. And not just the pale, logical, calculated representation of it that it seems some sociopaths seem able to affect in their minds, but the actual, vibrant and unintentional feelings. And I know this because, against probability, I've experienced them again, very recently.
Recently, I managed to get myself recommended to a psychiatrist and analyzed as having relapsed into depression due to injury and stress. I was looking to get myself some study buddies, since I've done my medical research and happen to know that the people who can't be treated with regular serotonin boosters (I've tried SSRIs; they didn't do a thing to me) and who show my "symptoms" over here get time-released amphetamines instead.
I expected that I might not get much sleep the coming days. But not that this would be because of feelings of guilt or urgency or anxiety. I actually had a breakdown and cried, completely without control or intent, something I cannot recall the last time I ever did without faking it. I felt a lot of my old despair coming back, as well as regrets, impulses, the need to call certain people and talk or write something down...
I kept myself off the pills for a couple of weeks, then tried them again. The reaction was precisely the same. And this is when I (probably foolishly) told my psychiatrist. The only theory available to me is that I might be one of the few with MDD who responds to low-dose amphetamines instead, or possibly that I've something closer to ADD, but that my brain somehow "crashed" or "coped" back during my depression by "shutting off" my emotions. I was feeling too much like crap and killing myself, so I simply had to feel nothing at all instead.
I have been off the pills again for a few weeks. As I see it, there are drawbacks both to choosing to stay on the medication and perhaps get therapy, or to neglecting to take it. I know that when I am on the pills I feel more of certain things I want, including certain motivations, and a fear of what I am like without them, but also much self-loathing and that old depression coming back. But off them, I am more consistent, more capable. And I have learned to, if not take pride in, then at least find strength in being callous. It let me get myself back on track and helped with improving my social situation. It lets me put up with the problems I still have.
I would also be much obliged at any feedback or opinions.
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Quote: Learning from experience
There's only one thing more painful than learning from experience, and that is not learning from experience.
- Archibald MacLeish
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