Saturday, November 26, 2011

Young love (part 3)

(cont.)
Four months later, after she learned that I was going through a hard time, we began to speak again. She seemed more firm in her resolve that we would never be together again, and insisted that she was over me...while insisting that I move in with her, calling me sweetie, saying I love you all the time, sending me poems about how much she missed holding me, talking about raising kids together. Eventually we got into an argument because she would randomly be angry at me and never explain why. In the end, she told me that there wasn't even a good reason. She just felt that way. And she would lash out. Having pep talked myself into the idea that I was worth more, I gave her an ultimatum to treat me right, or leave. Later, I apologized, figuring our fight could be fixed that way. She blocked me on facebook and replied to my message and forwarded her response to my father, saying that she never wanted to see or hear from me ever again.

She also posted a facebook status that I was stalking her when I wasn't. She called me disturbing and pathetic, claiming that she didn't want to lose sleep at night worrying about what I might do to her friends.

We haven't spoken since.

I'm angry. I'm hurt that I got treated like his and that she didn't get what she deserved. Why wasn't she hurt? I'm still not over her. I can try to repress my feelings for long periods of time...and then I burst, like I can't keep it under control. I just miss her so much sometimes. I beg and plead with whatever I feel like I can with a god I don't even believe in to have her come back to me, or to at least let me fall out of love. I'm kind of nervous to even go back to college next year because of the fact that I see the Northeast as her "territory."

I'm trying to work on it in therapy and it's not as effective as I'd like. My therapist thinks she was borderline with a nice, thick and heavy coating of narcissism. I've never ever been attracted to a girl, which was something that made the relationship so weird. I wasn't even attracted to her at all, but she seemed to complement me so perfectly at times, that I dismissed this HUGE detail. I think that this just further suits the profile. In fact, I like guys-a lot. Given the fact I had PTSD, it seems like I was a prime candidate for further victimization.

My question is this: Do you think that she is a sociopath, or not? What do you think about her and the relationship?
M.E.: I actually think that there is a decent chance that she is a sociopath, although your therapist's theory is interesting as well. A lot of sociopaths have a parent who is a narcissist. She sounds very changeable, which is also associated with other personality disorders, but for whatever reason I am not getting a borderline vibe from her. She seems in control of what she does, but not really aware of what exactly she is doing (or at least all of the ramifications of what she is doing). I think that behavior is consistent with a young sociopath, but then again I am not familiar with young borderlines. If you imagine that she is just playing at love, experimenting with what love means to her and other people, reveling in the power and control and intense feelings she is having, that could be consistent with a young sociopath, or a lot of other things of course.

Friday, November 25, 2011

Young love (part 2)

(cont.)
The next school year, she wasn't there, and to make up for it, we contacted each other everyday, for hours at a time. And things got weirder. When I asked her questions, she was vague, or would lie. That summer, her parents had started to get a divorce, compounding her strange behavior. She began to see a therapist, whom she seemed to become obsessed with. she would begin to defend her own crazy actions with whatever her therapist had said. She even told me at one point in a fight she didn't care what I thought and didn't have to because her therapist said so. Throughout our relationship, she had admitted her anger was often irrational and unjustified, but would then say that that didn't matter and it was ok. She would sometimes say she knew me best and that i knew her best. When we played games (which I eventually stopped doing), she would tell me she was analyzing how I thought, seeing my strengths and weaknesses. She often admitted to being abusive, saying I deserved better. Every time I tried to get space though, reminding her of this fact, she would become furious.

Despite all of this, there were moments when she was very loving and truly seemed to care. She even reported to my school I was suicidal after I told her I had suicidal thoughts. Would a sociopath do this? This was towards the end of our relationship, and we had been having some major problems. My PTSD was going untreated. I felt horrible, I couldn't deal with the world, and with our relationship. But I still felt like I would do anything I could to save it, to save us. A week later, I was kicked out of school, single and on my way back home to a shitty school.

When she broke up with me, she simply said that she was going to try and move on, and said that she didn't think that we were right for one another. Strangely though, two days before she had been insisting we were perfect for one another. The same day she broke up with me, she was talking about us living together and having kids. No fights happened between us between that time and the time that we broke up.

I begged for her to come back, pleaded and asked why she wanted to end things. She wouldn't address any of it. She got angry when I brought up-even when she sent me seven e-mails a day asking me how I was, where I was, saying that she loved me and calling me sweetie. When I addressed that, she would become furious, saying i was crossing boundaries by bringing up a topic that she didn't want to talk about at all. She even refused to read that one e-mail all the way through. Our fights became worse-she would call me pathetic, telling me she didn't want me, and that it was all a mistake. The situation was like a pendulum swinging back and forth between two different extremes with increasing frequency.

After three weeks, I couldn't take it anymore, and cut off communication.

The pain was so bad. I ate almost nothing for two weeks. I cried all the time. I felt miserable. I couldn't understand any of this. I still don't.

Thursday, November 24, 2011

Young love (part 1)

From a young, female reader:
So, I think that I was very close to someone who is a sociopath, but I'm not sure. I'm writing to you seeking closure on this issue. We haven't spoken in over a year, and I'm still reeling from, what I perceive to be, abuse. I loved her, and still love her very much, despite everything that she has done to me.

She had a very abusive childhood-her mother is a narcissist and her father, while brilliant (he's a professor at Cornell), seemed to have Asperger syndrome. When we first met, she was a bit strange. She seemed to be observing me, rather than interested in friendship. In fact, one of the first time we hung out, I fell asleep for two hours. And she just watched me.

She would follow me around-and I was dealing with some very deep personal issues at the time-so, I didn't mind. It seemed to be a comfort, if that makes any sense. Soon enough, we became very close friends at a boarding school in NY. She didn't hang out with very much people-in fact, only me and one other friend. Many people suspected that she liked me-and I couldn’t deny the possibility of this to myself, but I certainly did to everyone else-it was too strange.

Well, one night, I asked her if she did have a crush on me. She looks away for a minute, and then looks back at me, replying that no, she didn’t. Venturing further, I asked her if any of the issues I had told her about were at all important to her. She then replied no. Becoming anxious, I asked her if she cared about anything. She looked at me dead on, with empty, eerie eyes. "No."

I felt hurt and angry that I had opened myself up to her. How could she have used me like that? I expressed these feelings to her, and she insisted, unflinchingly, that she still did not care. The next day, I went back to her, and she insisted on holding me for a little bit in exchange for getting the answer I wanted. After precisely ten minutes, she admitted that she was in love with me...but that she still didn't care about me. I felt so many mixed emotions. I told her that that's not possible. She either loved me and cared, or didn't care at all and therefore, didn't love me. But never having been in a situation remotely like this before, I chose to believe the former, rather than the latter. I wanted to be loved and I needed the support I felt that that could provide. Not to mention the fact that I wanted to solve this problem. I wanted to show her she was wrong, that she could care about something or someone.
Overtime, we became very close. We spent every moment together. When we were together it was perfect, like floating on a cloud. I never wanted to be with anyone else or spend my time with anyone else. For her, it was even worse. She would wait anxiously while I was in the shower, and hated being apart from me. She was very vocal about this too.

As much as we couldn't seem to get away form one another, there were tons of fights. She would call me names, press boundaries (sexually and emotionally-she would read my dairy, go through my papers, just violate my privacy completely). When we were in fights, I felt like I was being abandoned. Even when I had done nothing wrong, she would make me feel like i was the culprit of all of our problems. Moreover, she seemed moody and strange to everyone else. People always warned me to stay away from her-they claimed she was dangerous, crazy, dishonest, mean and horrible. Even teachers would warn me against her. When she was in a bad mood, or angry, she would lash out completely.

But when she was ok, she seemed to be the perfect match for me. She would call us soul mates, saying I was her other half, that she couldn't function without me, needed me and that I was the only person who could make her care. She told me she would love me forever, even if we ever broke up and that she could never feel the same around or about anyone else.

Eventually , I came to his point where I couldn't stand the idea of life without her, but i would ask myself this: "Why is it that I can't stand my life as it is, now, with her?" I decided better the devil I know than the one I don't. Don't get me wrong...I was completely in love with her.

So I stayed.

Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Fratricide

From the questionable Tilda Swinton, currently starring as the mother of a sociopath in the film We Need To Talk About Kevin, from The Guardian:
"Years ago, when James Bulger was murdered, every newspaper front page was talking about evil. At that point, having suppressed it for years, I remembered when I was four or five, I tried to kill my own brother. He was newly born and I was disappointed, because he was the third boy. That was enough as far as I was concerned.

I went into his room to kill him, saw some ribbons from a bonnet going into his mouth, and began to pull them out. And I was discovered saving his life. So I had this strange reputation - my brother's savior - and no one knew I wanted to kill him. It took the Bulger case for me to remember that I'd seriously wanted to."

"Whenever there are children killing children, or perpetrating great acts of violence, there's always this word 'evil' pulled out of the top drawer. Not even the bottom drawer. It's a very quick response. And I'm always struck by it, because from the age of four and a half I have known that it ain't in no drawer. It's at closer hand. Isn't that the triumph of civilisation? That we manage not to be monstrous?"

"Does one ever feel it," she says, "or is one simply monstrous? I mean, I've been monstrous, I think."
The rest of the article is interesting as well.

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Sociopath as entrepreneur

One of my mentors just asked me, "What made you who you are." It was meant to be complimentary. The implication was that I am better than a lot of my peers. Particularly my mentor is impressed with how I seem to understand many more aspects of the dilemmas we are working with than some of my colleagues.

I guess you could call it an ability to think abstractly, or an increased awareness of the mechanics--a more intimate knowledge of the behind the scenes action that is motivating so much of what we look at. It allows me to Bayesian update like mad, like an excel spreadsheet with hundreds of inter-working, interdependent formula, but capable of adjusting in an instant based on new information.

My mentor actually calls it "alien." Again, he means it to be complimentary. He subscribes to the theory that great thinkers and entrepreneurs tend to be "aliens," people who are not really part of their culture. Aliens live parallel lives with different mindsets than the majority. They're readily able to think critically about the world around them because it already seems foreign to them. There's no effort in trying to maintain distance or perspective regarding the problem. The distance has always been there. The distance will always be there because that is the way the alien interacts with everything in the world.

My mentor thinks I must be an alien because my smart ideas are not just smart, they're groundbreaking. Even the way I explain my ideas to others is alien. It's like I am trying to translate my ideas into a language that others will be able to understand. The effort I am making to communicate is apparent, like figuring out how to instruct someone to hike from point A to point B when I had just teleported there instantly. My mentor thinks that you simply cannot teach people to think this way. You can open their mind and teach them some tricks, but they will never think fluently this way the same way that an "alien" would. I laughed off his comments, saying that I have plenty of stupid ideas too. "Well I do too," he responded, "we all do. That's part and parcel of risky thinking."

Here's an example of "alien" entrepreneurship, Tony Hseih, head of Zappos. From the NY Times:
At times, Mr. Hsieh comes across as an alien who has studied human beings in order to live among them. That can intimidate those who are not accustomed to his watchful style. “I have been in job interviews with him where you are expecting more, and it can be awkward silences,” said Ned Farra, who manages relationships with other Web sites for Zappos. “He is not afraid of it. It is almost like he is testing you.”

Mr. Hsieh said that he surrounds himself with people who are more outgoing than he is, in part to draw himself out. “My view is that I am more of a mirror of who I am around,” he said. “So if I am around an introverted person that is really awkward. But if I am around an extroverted person I will be whoever they are times point-5.”
***
Outwitting the system is something Mr. Hsieh has honed from a young age. In addition to describing his youthful business ventures (worm farms failed, personalized photo buttons succeeded), “Delivering Happiness” recounts a history of scam artistry. To fool his Taiwanese-born parents into thinking he was practicing piano and violin, he recorded practice sessions and played them back on weekend mornings.
***
Jason Levesque, another Harvard friend who worked at LinkExchange, recalled Mr. Hsieh’s self-effacement. When inviting friends to play a video game, “he was obviously the best at the game, but he would sort of hide that in order to get everyone to play,” Mr. Levesque said.

Like Mr. Zuckerberg’s, Mr. Hsieh’s success has been built in part on his ability to anatomize the way people crave connections with others, and turn those insights into a business plan.
***
Mr. Hsieh, who professes fascination with dating guides like Neil Strauss’s “The Game” and pontificated on his theory of the evolutionary futility of sexual jealousy, said he does not date. “I don’t usually define dating or not dating, together or not together,” said Mr. Hsieh, nursing another tall shaker of wine at the Downtown Cocktail Room. “I prefer to use the term ‘hang out.’ And I hang out with a lot of people, guys and girls. I don’t really have this one person I am dating right now. I am hanging out with multiple people, and some people I hang out with more than others.”
***
“I think of everyone I know in my life, he’s the best at not feeling jealousy,” she added. “But I think he’s human, whether anyone believes that or not.”
This is not the first time I have been called an alien. It is not even the first time that I have been called that with a positive or value neutral connotation. I never know what to say in these situations. I agree with them, obviously, but in terms of explaining to them why I might have grown up with the mentality of an "alien" in a foreign world...? "It's a mystery," I tell them. But it's not. It hasn't been a mystery since I became self-aware, or maybe since I learned of the term "sociopath".
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