Monday, May 21, 2012

Psycho and proud?

Newsweek reports on the neurodiversity "craze":
I met [Will] Hall one night at the offices of the Icarus Project in Manhattan. He became a leader of the group--a "mad pride" collective--in 2005 as a way to promote the idea that mental-health diagnoses like bipolar disorder are "dangerous gifts" rather than illnesses. While we talked, members of the group--Icaristas, as they call themselves--scurried around in the purple-painted office, collating mad-pride fliers. Hall explained how the medical establishment has for too long relied heavily on medication and repression of behavior of those deemed "not normal." Icarus and groups like it are challenging the science that psychiatry says is on its side. Hall believes that psychiatrists are prone to making arbitrary distinctions between "crazy" and "healthy," and to using medication as tranquilizers. . . .

Just as some deaf activists prefer to embrace their inability to hear rather than "cure" it with cochlear implants, members of Icarus reject the notion that the things that are called mental illness are simply something to be rid of.
Too true.

Sunday, May 20, 2012

Song: I know you won't

My friend listens to this when she's feeling overwhelmed by her daddy issues.  I feel like it is such a classic victim song.



I know you don't mean to be mean to me
'Cause when you want to you can make me feel like we belong
Lately you make me feel all I am is a back-up plan
I say I'm done and then you smile at me and I forget
Everything I said
I buy into those eyes
And into your lies

You say you'll call, but I know you
You say you're coming home, but I know you
You say you'll call, but I know you won't
You say you'll call, but I know you won't

I wish you were where you're supposed to be
Close to me
But here I am just starring at this candle burning out
And still no sound
Of footsteps on my stairs
Or your voice anywhere

You say you'll call, but I know you
You say you're coming home, but I know you
You say you'll call, but I know you won't
You say you'll call, but I know you won't

You say you'll call, but I know you
You say you're coming home, but I know you
You say you'll call, but I know you won't
You say you'll call, but I know you won't

Saturday, May 19, 2012

Sociopaths in literature: East of Eden's Cathy

Probably the most prototypical sociopath portrayal in literature is Cathy from Steinbeck's East of Eden.
I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents. Some you can see, misshapen and horrible, with huge heads or tiny bodies; some are born with no arms, no legs, some with three arms, some with tails or mouths in odd places. They are accidents and no one's fault, as used to be thought. Once they were considered the visible punishment for concealed sins.

And just as there are physical monsters, can there not be mental or psychic monsters born? The face and body may be perfect, but if a twisted gene or a malformed egg can produce physical monsters, may not the same process produce a malformed soul?

Monsters are variations from the accepted normal to a greater or a less degree. As a child may be born without an arm, so one may be born without kindness or the potential of conscience. A man who loses his arms in an accident has a great struggle to adjust himself to the lack, but one born without arms suffers only from people who find him strange. Having never had arms, he cannot miss them. Sometimes when we are little we imagine how it would be to have wings, but there is no reason to suppose it is the same feeling birds have. No, to a monster the norm must seem monstrous, since everyone is normal to himself. To the inner monster it must be even more obscure, since he has no visible thing to compare with others. To a man born without conscience, a soul-stricken man must seem ridiculous. To a criminal, honesty is foolish. You must not forget that a monster is only a variation, and that to a monster the norm is monstrous.

It is my belief that Cathy Ames was born with the tendencies, or lack of them, which drove and forced her all of her life. Some balance wheel was misweighed, some gear out of ratio. She was not like other people, never was from birth. And just as a cripple may learn to utilize his lack so that he becomes more effective in a limited field than the uncrippled, so did Cathy, using her difference, make a painful and bewildering stir in her world.

There was a time when a girl like Cathy would have been called possessed by the devil. She would have been exorcised to cast out the evil spirit, and if after many trials that did not work, she would have been burned as a witch for the good of the community. The one thing that may not be forgiven a witch is her ability to distress people, to make them restless and uneasy and even envious.
. . .
Even as a child she had some quality that made people look at her, then look away, then look back at her, troubled at something foreign. Something looked out of her eyes, and was never there when one looked again. She moved quietly and talked little, but she could enter no room without causing everyone to turn toward her.

She made people uneasy but not so that they wanted to go away from her. Men and women wanted to inspect her, to be close to her, to try and find what caused the disturbance she distributed so subtly. And since this had always been so, Cathy did not find it strange.

Cathy was different from other children in many ways, but one thing in particular set her apart. Most children abhor difference. They want to look, talk, dress, and act exactly like all of the others. If the style of dress is an absurdity, it is pain and sorrow to a child not to wear that absurdity. If necklaces of pork chops were accepted, it would be a sad child who could not wear pork chops. And this slavishness to the group normally extends into every game, every practice, social or otherwise. It is a protective coloration children utilize for their safety.

Cathy had none of this. She never conformed in dress or conduct. She wore whatever she wanted to. The result was that quite often other children imitated her.

As she grew older the group, the herd, which is any collection of children, began to sense what adults felt, that there was something foreign about Cathy. After a while only one person at a time associated with her. Groups of boys and girls avoided her as though she carried a nameless danger.

Cathy was a liar, but she did not lie the way most children do. Hers was no daydream lying, when the thing imagined is told and, to make it seem more real, told as real. That is just ordinary deviation from external reality. I think the difference between a lie and a story is that a story utilizes the trappings and appearance of truth for the interest of the listener as well as of the teller. A story has in it neither gain nor loss. But a lie is a device for profit or escape. I suppose if that definition is strictly held to, then a writer of stories is a liar -- if he is financially fortunate.

Cathy's lies were never innocent. Their purpose was to escape punishment, or work, or responsibility, and they were used for profit. Most liars are tripped up either because they forget what they have told or because the lie is suddenly faced with an incontrovertible truth. But Cathy did not forget her lies, and she developed the most effective method of lying. She stayed close enough to the truth so that one could never be sure. She knew two other methods also -- either to interlard her lies with truth or to tell a truth as though it were a lie. If one is accused of a lie and it turns out to be the truth, there is a backlog that will last a long time and protect a number of untruths.
. . .
Nearly everyone in the world has appetites and impulses, trigger emotions, islands of selfishness, lusts just beneath the surface. And most people either hold such things in check or indulge them secretly. Cathy knew not only these impulses in others but how to use them for her own gain.

It is quite possible that she did not believe in any other tendencies in humans, for while she was preternaturally alert in some directions she was completely blind in others.

Friday, May 18, 2012

Fear of the unknown

Regarding why empaths seem so wary of sociopaths, a theory from a reader:


So I pretty much boiled down why I think empaths are afraid of sociopaths.

It's the fear of the unknown.

Let me explain.

When I was at the zoo a few years ago, I casually asked a zoo keeper why the giraffes don't choose to escape. They don't put up a fence high enough to prevent the giraffes from simply walking out of the enclosure. All there is a little ditch and a tiny wall. The zoo keeper explained to me that the reason the giraffes never leave is because they can't see what's in the ditch. Since they don't know what would happen if they tried to step over it, they choose to stay in their enclosure instead.

This is pretty good analogy for humans and death.

If God were to go “After life you get to be in heaven and it's perfect,” to everyone after they were born, people would throw themselves off of cliffs as soon as they were able to walk.
The reason people generally don't run around killing themselves is because they have no idea what happens after death.

So how does this relate to sociopaths? 

People eventually  had to come up with unspoken rules that would prevent people from hurting each other. Not because they cared about the other people, but because they didn't want to be killed themselves. They didn't want to face the unknown.

And thus we have “empathy” which is really just the fear of something that has happened to someone else either affecting you or happening to you. 

What's really scary to an empath about sociopaths is that they have no idea what they're going to do next. Their thought process is completely foreign, since empaths have always functioned with, well, empathy. 

Even if you explain how a sociopath thinks to an empath, they're still a little bit afraid. They have no idea what a sociopath will do, or maybe do to them, because they do not function under the normal silent rules humanity came up with. The sociopath's thought process is still relatively unknown to the empath. 

So for an empath, trying to understand a sociopath is kind of like the giraffe trying to see what's in the ditch. You can kind of tell what's down there, but because you don't really know what, you'd prefer to stay away.

I hope that makes sense. 

-Thoughtful empath

Empaths, see also this post for the answers to some of these questions. 

Thursday, May 17, 2012

Cultivating luck

Sociopaths are known for being charming, but they also seem to lead a charmed life.  I have had such unusual success in my profession that people often wonder what exact deal had I made with the devil and whether he is still looking for business partners.  It's not that I am not qualified, I am (but that is another story heavily influenced by luck).  It's more that my profession is one of those that is heavily influenced by luck.  I happened to have had a truly unique idea and was lucky enough to have been able to act upon it.  I do acknowledge that it was a lucky break, but there were also things I did to make my own luck.  Similarly, this was an interesting article in the Telegraph from psychologist Richard Wiseman about some of his research on what distinguishes the lucky from the less fortunate:


Take the case of chance opportunities. Lucky people consistently encounter such opportunities, whereas unlucky people do not. I carried out a simple experiment to discover whether this was due to differences in their ability to spot such opportunities.

I gave both lucky and unlucky people a newspaper, and asked them to look through it and tell me how many photographs were inside. On average, the unlucky people took about two minutes to count the photographs, whereas the lucky people took just seconds. Why? Because the second page of the newspaper contained the message: "Stop counting. There are 43 photographs in this newspaper." This message took up half of the page and was written in type that was more than 2in high. It was staring everyone straight in the face, but the unlucky people tended to miss it and the lucky people tended to spot it.
***

Personality tests revealed that unlucky people are generally much more tense than lucky people, and research has shown that anxiety disrupts people's ability to notice the unexpected. In one experiment, people were asked to watch a moving dot in the centre of a computer screen. Without warning, large dots would occasionally be flashed at the edges of the screen. Nearly all participants noticed these large dots.

The experiment was then repeated with a second group of people, who were offered a large financial reward for accurately watching the centre dot, creating more anxiety. They became focused on the centre dot and more than a third of them missed the large dots when they appeared on the screen. The harder they looked, the less they saw.

And so it is with luck - unlucky people miss chance opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else. They go to parties intent on finding their perfect partner and so miss opportunities to make good friends. They look through newspapers determined to find certain types of job advertisements and as a result miss other types of jobs. Lucky people are more relaxed and open, and therefore see what is there rather than just what they are looking for.

My research revealed that lucky people generate good fortune via four basic principles. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.



He then talks about how he wondered if those principles could be learned by the unlucky:

One month later, the volunteers returned and described what had happened. The results were dramatic: 80 per cent of people were now happier, more satisfied with their lives and, perhaps most important of all, luckier. While lucky people became luckier, the unlucky had become lucky. 

Other "lucky" traits that seem particularly prevalent in the sociopath community: mixing up routine and remaining optimistic.  And it wasn't explicitly stated, but I think being willing to take risks often makes someone seem lucky.  It's like the pickup artist community -- if you play enough numbers, you're bound to have one pay out.

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