Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Back for more (part 1)

Along the same lines of the last post, a reader writes an update about reconnecting with a sociopath after being discarded:
Somewhat of an update. Two months later, sociopath boy contacts me after skulking around Facebook for an hour. I was extremely surprised as at this point I was never expecting to see him again. It's four in the morning and he basically tells me that he's horny and do I want to come over and have sex with him and make up and talk and such. I am shocked and also horny and elated at the thought of seeing him again so I say yes.

I drive over although I am somewhat a little drunkish. When I get there he confides in me that he has no idea how to talk to people. He feels socially inept. Strange, because if you see this guy among a group of friends he steals the spotlight like a shiny lion. Everyone around is constantly hanging on his every word.
"how long have you felt this way?"

He says, "I don't know. Six months, two years, two days-forever, honestly. I've always felt this way."

I was wondering. Recently he's been into doing this stuff called bath salts. They are a form of amphetamine, similar to meth. Since using it, I feel like I notice that his sociopathy has become a bit more obvious. That is, he's always managed to be social very very well when not on these drugs, but as he's been abusing them his social ability seems a bit more...well, finicky. It's becoming apparent to more people who don't know him as well as some that something is off. Of course, naturally these drugs tend to bring out some insanity in even those who are perfectly normal. But I was wondering if you knew anything about the effect of amphetamines on the sociopathic mind.

I ask him, "what did I do to make our friendship dead?"

"I don't think you did anything," he says. "I'm just a freak."

As per our friendship's "deadness", he remarks that, "I meant dead as in it would never be the same again. Like it died to be reborn, now it's something else." so our friendship is a Phoenix, I suppose? What a funny creature he is. But he is very sexy. So what if he does many different girls all the time? I've already fallen in love with him. Being able to be close to him is wonderful, just an indulgence on my part. Nobody will ever own or tame him. He is wild and wonderfully free.

He had been following me on Facebook for some time before contacting me. He let me wonder if he'd blocked my number but did as much as admit that he had been reading my text messages, even though he never replied and let me believe otherwise. He let me completely break down and I let him proceed with our friendship as if nothing had ever happened. What else can I do? He is fascinating. I suppose he is worth it.

Monday, September 19, 2011

Keeping your sociopath interested

At the risk of this blog becoming even more like a woman's magazine, from a reader:
I have a question:

I know a person with (admitted) sociopathic qualities. I've know this man for many years and I've been completely in love with him all of that time. I do whatever he wants, and I work hard at keeping myself within his accepted types of behaviour. I avoid, for the most part, challenging him with emotional stuff. I present a challenge which he succeeds at, in bending me to his will. I do this in full knowledge of the probable extent of his attachment to me. He has put trust in me though, and tells me more now than he used to.

My question is, in this state, where I present him with anything he wishes coupled with a challenge in some part of controlling me, is he likely to get bored? Will my acceptance of how he is make him more likely to make use of me for longer? Is there anything I can do that might keep his interest?

Yes, I really do want to keep rather than get rid of him. He is rather fantastic for me, as I am rather unusual.
M.E.: I don't think there's ever one thing people can do to keep a sociopath interested. I actually think that most relationships with sociopaths end because the empath gets fed up with the arrangement. Even if they don't realize it, they start becoming more difficult, and not in the fun challenge-y sort of way that sociopaths like. They no longer are willing to suspend disbelief and allow the sociopath's charm to work on them. If they're not willing to play the game the way the sociopath likes it to be played, the sociopath just moves on to find someone who will. I think that's the right answer. Thoughts?

Sunday, September 18, 2011

Preattentive processing

This was an interesting article discussing the progression of recent research that focused first on fearlessness as an explanation for much of psychopath's behaviors, then to attentional deficiencies (psychopaths don't direct their attention to scary things as much as neurotypicals), and most recently deficits in pre-attentive processing. From the Huffington Post and the author of "On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind's Hard-Wired Habits":
Patrick Sylvers, of the University of Washington, working with Patricia Brennan and Scott Lilienfeld of Emory, suspected that psychopaths may suffer from a deficit in "preattentive processing" -- the constant, automatic scanning of one's surroundings that takes place outside of conscious awareness. Theoretically, if children lack this basic cognitive machinery, they would never learn to decode normal signs of danger, and without this acquired fear, they would fail to socialize into adults with conscience.
***
The scientists gave the boys a visual test that measures unconscious emotional processing. Specifically, they wanted to see if the test subjects, compared with normal boys of the same age, were slower to become aware of fearful faces that were flashed rapidly -- so rapidly that they were not registered by the conscious mind. If so, this would be evidence that the troubled boys are not automatically assimilating threatening cues in their world. They also flashed happy, disgusted and neutral faces for comparison.

The results, reported online in the journal Psychological Science, were clear and provocative. Indeed, they comprise the first evidence ever that kids with psychopathic traits have a significant deficiency in their automatic, unconscious processing of certain cues -- especially fear cues, but also cues for disgust. Fear and disgust are closely related in the primitive mind, and the findings suggest that these troubled kids have a fundamental impairment in recognizing -- "in the blink of an eye" -- any kind of social danger. So perhaps the childhood roots of Hannibal Lecter's murderous personality lay not in fearlessness itself, nor even in his conscious thought processes, but rather in his general social cluelessness.
I hadn't heard the term pre-attentive processing, so I looked at the Wikipedia article for it and wasn't surprised to see that it is also associated with those on the autism spectrum. Apart from that, I still am not quite sure why the lack of preattentive processing would cause attentional problems. Presumably it's because certain things never even show up on the sociopath's radar, so of course they would never consciously/attentively register them?

The subject area is ripe for exploration. If this is a primary causal factor in sociopathic behavior, can this be treated? For instance, the wiki article suggests that by consciously focusing on particular tasks, preattentive processing will improve for information related to those specific tasks. How do preattentive processing defects relate (if at all) to sociopath/autistic supersensitivities or the concept of hyperfocus? Is it like how paraplegic people have super strong arms to compensate for the lost use of their legs? And on a more personal level, could this explain why my learning curve is shaped like an exponential function instead of a gradual increase, i.e. extremely flat at the beginning then sloping steeply up?

As I've said before, I really relate to the attentional theories for sociopathy, I'm very curious to see where this new research leads us.

A quick word on the who wrote the blurb -- this is the guy who advocates in his book that people force more thoughts out of their subconscious and into the conscious mind, something that I have always done both naturally and explicitly. You almost wonder if this guy is not a sociopath himself, or at least has trained himself to see the world more sociopathically. By the way, if you're interested in becoming similarly more sociopathic, Amazon tells me there are a slew of reading options including (according to one reviewer): THE ART OF CHOOSING, THE INVISIBLE GORILLA, THE HIDDEN BRAIN, PREDICTABLY IRRATIONAL, or MISTAKES WERE MADE (BUT NOT BY ME)

The abstract for the paper is here.

Saturday, September 17, 2011

Why I started the blog, and why I continue

The percentage of my personality that my disorder represents is not actually that significant (does anyone walk around thinking "I'm a sociopath" besides fictional character Dexter?). Maybe it's 15%? What do I mean by that? Well, if I was a jigsaw puzzle, let's say, and the puzzle was a small deserted island, the kind that you always see in political style cartoons with two guys stranded on a desert island with a lone palm tree, then maybe the sociopathy is the lone palm tree. It is not the defining feature of the puzzle, although it is part of the defining feature. And how many pieces are devoted to the palm tree? Maybe about 15%. Some of those pieces are completely palm tree, and some of those pieces are mainly island and just a little bit of palm tree, or mostly sky and just a small sliver of palm frond. Add up all those percentages of palm tree against the total picture, though, and you have approximately 15% palm tree.

When I write on this particular blog I almost always write about the palm tree. Sometimes the piece is entirely palm tree. Sometimes there is just a sliver of palm tree, mostly something else. And every one in a while I will talk about the island and sky, inasmuch as I think they inform qualities about the palm tree.

Taking the analogy just a little further, if I think of my life as the process of assembling this jigsaw puzzle (understanding who I am), I tend to focus on one area until I reach an impasse, then focus on another. Or I focus one one part until another part compels my attention. When I first started this blog, I had just been fired from a very high profile and lucrative job for behavior that I believe stems from my more sociopathic characteristics. I had just had several relationships end on very poor terms, isolating me from many more sub relationships. I was having problems with my family, with my personal life, my work life had just gone to hell. I started looking for answers, so became re-interested in a casual diagnosis a friend had made of me years before as a sociopath. As I started doing some browsing of what was out there in terms of basic information, I was appalled that all of it reeked of a particular bias. I saw an opportunity for offering a different perspective that coincided with my own interests at the time, so I started the blog.

This was the not the only time of deep self-introspection for me. My first prolonged one was at University the first time my life really went completely to hell. I didn't have the label sociopath at the time to identify with, but after a long period of unflinching honesty and self-analysis I knew that I was a very manipulative, cunning person, who was unable to connect to anyone on more than a superficial level, obsessed with power, and willing to do anything to get ahead, among other things. To the extent that those things were negatively impacting my life, I tried to tame and control them.

The pattern here is this: I am doing fine, great actually, I get carried away and my life goes to hell, I take a step back and look at who I am, I gradually get better until I am doing fine, then great. Right now I am right at the point of doing great. I've had a couple of recent professional coups and all other parts of my life are growing and expanding. I'm less interested in the palm tree because that's not where the action is. Then again, part of me believes that the reason why I am doing so well is that the blog forces me to constantly consider those potentially destructive aspects of my personality -- to not get caught up in the here and now that I lose sight of the big picture. In an effort to stay focused on that, I'm both going to continue to write new material that I find interesting, but will also repost some older posts that I like and think deserve more attention.

Friday, September 16, 2011

Sociopath(ic) (part 2)

From a reader (cont.):
I may not be neurologically atypical when it comes to having a conscience, but we are (at least in part) the product of our environment, and I was raised around a group of men obsessed with regaining their youth, as well as their potential "go" at fame, and that impression has stuck with me. My mother associated with my father initally because of his unpredictability as well his ability to make everyday life seem exciting, despite its disfunctionality. Don't get me wrong... I'm not blaming my desires on my anyone. I comprehend them fully, and I see where they're going, but when my personal relationships are going well, I detach because I'm incredibly bored. If things are going well in ANY of my personal relationships, romantic or otherwise, I disentangle. At this point, it's a game to me. How long can I keep people interested in me without personally investing in them? 
I learned to manipulate before I could walk. From my perspective, this is sick. There's an Onion article that really resonates with me, despite its obvious jab at overanalysis... ... I don't think that I'm neurologically atypical, but I do think that I've learned techniques from people whose world view doesn't resonate with mine. 
Back to my actual question, though... How often do you see strong socipathic traits in people clearly in possession of a conscience? Have you noticed these tendencies and learned bahaviors to be more prevalant in those related to socipaths? I'd love to hear back.
M.E.: It's an interesting question. I think there are a lot of people in my family who have sociopathic traits and tend to think like sociopaths, but do seem to have empathy. Sometimes I think I make the mistake of just assuming that they are sociopaths, but then they say something that doesn't make sense, like talking about how important love is. And I think sometimes they assume that I am normal but just like them, but then I say something that they think is horrifying, like telling them some sketchy thing I did. I've gotten emails from a few other people who had sociopathic parents and adopted some of their sociopathic traits. I guess you could say that they are bilingual in sociopath and empath. Although I don't think anyone can ever be completely empathic if they have seen the world through sociopathic eyes, do you?
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