Monday, April 2, 2012

Anxiety vs. fear (part 1)

I used to be really reckless, like trying to pass big lorries at night in a blizzard, getting run off the road, rescued by the police, dropped off at an out of the way petrol station, immediately flagging down another lorry driver, and hitching rides the rest of the way, picking up my auto on the way back.  Things always worked out for me because I had nothing to lose.  I was willing to ditch my auto on the side of the road because I didn't care much if it got ruined or stolen.  I didn't have any sense of a comfortable life that I was trying to protect.  I was willing to go lower and lower to get out of scrapes.

My friends often ask me now what happened to that person they used to know.  Now, for whatever reason, I can get very anxious in crowds.  The last time I was in New York, I insisted on riding in taxis, much to my friends' chagrin.  I couldn't stand the thought of going into the underground filled with swarming people.  You could say that I felt anxious about taking the subway, particularly with holiday crowds and the possibility of mob mentality taking over.

The change happened very quickly, about 3-5 years ago.  At around that time I had gotten the H1N1 virus and was sick for many months with secondary infections.  My immune system got so worn down that I could hardly be around anyone without picking up whatever germs they had and getting sick again.  I think it was then that I started to see everyone as a potential threat.  And for the first time I realized how vulnerable I was.  My health turned out to be something that I couldn't beat or cheat.  I wasn't myself at all.  It was disturbing.  Ever since then, I can get anxious.

More than the flu, though, I believe that I just happened to have gone into the elbow of my exponential shaped learning curve.  For the past decade I had been forcing awareness, probabilities and the assessment of risk into my conscious mind so much, I think eventually I just got so good at detecting and accounting for risk that I am just overly aware of things that most people choose to ignore.

I will give an example of what I mean.  When I drive long distances, to fight my ADD tendencies, I make myself hyper-aware.  If I closed my eyes, I would be able to recreate the exact scene in front of me, where every automobile is, a projection/guess of where they'll be a second from now or 5 seconds from now at their current speed, taking into account people entering or leaving the roadway, constantly aware of even the slightest possible outcome and constantly refreshing that information with Bayesian updating.  It makes me a safer driver, but it also puts me on edge.  I get a little Funes the Memorious about it.

Now that I've forced myself to be so hyper-aware of risk and probabilities of future occurrences, I feel like I cannot un-see them.  If there are a lot of things going on, it almost overloads my system.  Although I can predict rational human behavior, humans are not consistent and when they deviate from normal behavior it's usually when the stakes are highest, making the potential collateral damage to me high.  And now I have more to lose -- more money, a more stable life, a career, a relatively stable set of close associates.  All these figures get crunched in my head and make me aware of a million different risks, which added together are not negligible.  And that awareness gives me the symptoms of what is probably best described "anxiety," even though I used to be completely oblivious to all of it (or didn't care).

I may still seem reckless, particularly in circumstances in which people are irrationally afraid and I am relatively unfazed.  I still like excitement in my life; I tend to seek out new and potentially dangerous experiences.  But as I have aged, I have admittedly retreated into more a life of the mind in which my excitement and thrills come more from mind games or intellectual pursuits where the reward/risk ratio is high.

Sunday, April 1, 2012

Shaming (part 2)

I have written before about shaming here and here.  A reader responded with this email:

This is the malignant narcissist again.

I'm exploring the shame/sociopathy thing. I thought you might have some thoughts on it.

I was hungry and tired as I shopped at a big-box discount store. There was just one counter open. I wanted to check out. There weren't any customers in line. Then I saw two fat women pull up with their cart to the counter, ahead of me. They were starting to unload. It was clear it would take a long time for them to put the contents of their cart on the belt. I decided that I just didn't want to wait.

The belt was quite long - there was a 10 foot gap between the women unloading their stuff and the clerk. Rather than wait behind them or ask them if I could go ahead, I impulsively ran up to the cashier (10 feet ahead of the fat women) and handed her my stuff. She started to ring me up.

After a few seconds, the women behind me figured out what had happened. They wound up taking their stuff off the belt and moving to another clerk (also fat). They complained to themselves and the clerk about my behavior. As I heard them talking, I started to feel a bit ashamed.

As I left, one of the women I'd bothered said, "thanks for the chivalry."  I said to her, "you're welcome."  I was feeling nasty. Perhaps in the future I'll take a tip from you and giver someone like her a rage-filled glare.

When it was all over, I was a bit shocked at how selfishly I'd behaved. But then I realized, I didn't feel any guilt. I still don't - I don't figure that I did anything wrong. I didn't want to wait behind the hippos as they unloaded their stuff.

 If I'd done something illegal, they'd have called the police. If I'd done something against the rules of the store, the store personnel would have done something - but they did nothing. In the end, all that happened was that I was rude and some fatties got some ruffled feathers. I've broken laws in public before. Sometimes people say something to me about them. When that happens, I tell them that if they don't like it, they should call the police. In the same vein, if the women don't like what I'm doing, they should call the police or talk to the store management.

Later I reflected on things. My action was a bit unfortunate. Perhaps I should feel some guilt about the action (I don't). I do feel a bit like a bad person - but only because they called me on it. Had they not noticed, had they been blind or had I been anonymous, I just wouldn't have cared.

I figure this case is an example of why people assume sociopaths are a danger to society. If everyone acted the way I do, our civilization would fall apart.


I responded: I am usually am not full of rage unless I feel like I have been attempting to comply with the strictures of good social behavior and people still give me a hard time about things.

I very much identify with this thought that if you weren't called on it, you wouldn't feel badly at all.  Although I am starting to wonder more and more if neurotypicals also identify with this feeling and it's not unique to the "dark triad".  Shall we publish it and see what they say?

Saturday, March 31, 2012

Theory of mind

A reader sent me a link to this Psychology Today blog post discussing how those in the dark triad (narcissists, Machiavellians, psychopaths) experience theory of mind.  The wikipedia definition of theory of mind is "the ability to attribute mental states—beliefs, intents, desires, pretending, knowledge, etc.—to oneself and others and to understand that others have beliefs, desires and intentions that are different from one's own."  It seems to overlap a little with cognitive empathy (which the article gets into a little).  The blog author further distinguishes between the social-perceptual component of theory of mind ("the ability to determine the mental states of others using immediately available non-verbal cues (e.g., eyes, face, hand gestures)") and the social-cognitive theory of mind ("involves the ability to reason about the mental state of others, and use that reasoning to predict or explain their behavior"), the former of which is tested by this "Mind in the Eyes" emotional recognition test (I scored 30).

The article itself is a little long and all over the place, but it makes some interesting points and some even more interesting conclusions.  One of which is that Machiavellians do more "mentalizing" than other people, "cognitively strategizing, scheming, and trying to infer the intentions of others," presumably to stay one step ahead.  Another seems suspect:

For most of our evolution, it payed to be cooperative and empathic. But during the course of our evolution, there were also selfish individuals who learned how to manipulate others to get what they wanted. They lacked empathy, perspective taking, and self-awareness (i.e., metacognition). Still, they had in tact lower-level perceptual theory of mind abilities that were good enough for them to manipulate others. In fact, their lower levels of empathy and higher levels of strategizing and spontaneous mentalizing worked to their advantage: whereas most people intuitively felt as though they were doing something wrong when they hurt others, these Machiavellian individuals didn't recieve [sic] the same emotional signals so they persevered toward their short-term selfish goals. In the process, they obtained more quantity of mates. Therefore, they remained in the human gene pool, along with their short-term mating orientation.

I can see that narcissists lack self-awareness, but what about Machiavellians and psychopaths?  I'm sort of underwhelmed by this guy's reasoning.  And he is a cognitive psychologist at NYU.  So credentials in the psychology world don't mean much?

But here's something else interesting I didn't know:

Andrew Whiten and Richard Byrne argue that primate intelligence stems from "Machiavellian Intelligence" -- the ability to manipulate and deceive others in the competition for scarce resources.


Friday, March 30, 2012

I feel your loss

Many readers have asked me how sociopaths respond to feelings of loss, either a break up, a death, etc. I discussed this once myself in the context of fungibility.  A sociopath reader agreed to share her own experiences regarding the loss of a partner.

He was the ultimate empath. Not blind to my sociopathy at all. Yet he embraced me and loved me unconditionally. It was an intense and giving sort of love, which suited my selfish love just fine. We were puzzle pieces.

One morning, I stopped hearing from him. No cheerful "Good morning, beautiful" text. One day turned to two days. On the third day (he didn't rise again), his brother sent out a mass message saying he was involved in a motor vehicle collision and was in critical, comatose condition. I expected to feel like I'd been sucker punched. Instead, I felt strangely the same. As devoid as I'd always been. I really thought it would work out and I'd get the sociopath's version of happily ever after, haha. We were planning on an extended vacation, just the two of us, for later that summer. After he passed, my sister, with whom he was on friendly terms, revealed to me that he had been planning on proposing that summer. She'd been sworn to secrecy.

Shit sucks. But you get over it. For those of us who have an emotional deficit, it's an easier and quicker process. I still miss his presence and unconditional acceptance, but I have no intentions of putting a halt to my life for a body that's six feet under. I'm currently dating a guy who displays distinct sociopathic traits and that has its own problems. I don't concern myself with what-ifs with the dead, unless it's the zombie apocalypse.

Thursday, March 29, 2012

Emotional martyrdom

A reader sent me this article about emotional martyrs.  Martyrs of all types are perplexing to me.  I read the drivel on LoveFraud and wonder, why would anyone choose to see the world this way?  In which they are constantly being acted upon, never acting.  I always want to think that I control everything, even if that means that I am the reason why something has gone wrong.  It's very empowering and I surround myself by people who think like that as well because it rubs me the wrong way to have people blame me for their misfortunes.  In my mind, we all make choices and should all have to suffer the consequences.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the above referenced article suggests that there is a connection between martyrs and the conscience-less:

Martyrs are often attracted to difficult and abusive people. They have a compulsive need to change them, make these people good, and make them appreciate and respect them. They pick spouses who are brutal or intolerant, who lack a conscience, who deceive and manipulate them, and who resist the martyr’s efforts to reform them. It is interesting that they unconsciously choose to be around impossible people, and that their efforts to rehabilitate the latter are doomed to fail.

Do they really want to change us?  Or do they just like the abuse?  I'm inclined to think the latter.  My thoughts are that it's generally understood that people don't change so if people are around me, it must be because they like what I'm dishing out.


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