Tuesday, September 4, 2012

Guest quote: expanding consciousness

"If you have a golf-ball-sized consciousness, when you read a book, you'll have a golf-ball-sized understanding; when you look out a window, a golf-ball-sized awareness, when you wake up in the morning, a golf-ball-sized wakefulness; and as you go about your day, a golf-ball-sized inner happiness.

But if you can expand that consciousness, make it grow, then when you read about that book, you'll have more understanding; when you look out, more awareness; when you wake up, more wakefulness; as you go about your day, more inner happiness."

David Lynch

Monday, September 3, 2012

Who wants to be a sociopath?

I had the distinct displeasure of coming across this email from a guy named James who calls himself a sociopath. As bad as the email is, it does provide me with the opportunity to address the strange and curious phenomena of the sociopath wannabe.

After much blather, James says,
'There's something you should know about me… whenever I feel emotions, I never know if they are real because I don't stop thinking. I'm way too analytical for my own good, to the point where it's borderline sociopathic. Yes, I'm a sociopath. Not in the sense that I'd steal an old lady's life savings and think nothing of it, or torture little animals, but in the sense that I don't experience emotion like other people... 100% mind, 0% heart, the definition of a sociopath...'

Is that the definition of sociopath? Really? James has taken one sociopathic characteristic, the lack of in depth emotion, and turned it into the whole enchilada. Any reasonable definition of sociopathy would also at minimum include a flexible sense of self, the ability to charm when needed, the love of a well played mind game of one kind or another, a disregard for social norms on an emotional level, a greater than normal desire for stimulation, and of course a lack of conscience. These characteristics would then have to be demonstrated in a consistent manner across almost all aspects of one’s personal and professional lives before you could reasonably call that person a sociopath. James, out of ignorance or sheer psychological blindness, disregards all of this and calls himself a sociopath anyway.

This is a phenomenon I’ve observed coming from several types or groups of people saying they are sociopaths. One group of wannabes who might very well have other 'personality disorders' confuse their 'symptoms' for sociopathy. I call them the confused. For instance, a narcissist might confuse her grandiosity for the sociopath's calculated and laser like focus on self interest. Someone with Asperger's might confuse his lack of desire to interact with others for the sociopath's indifference to societal norms. A schizoid might confuse his social aloofness for the sociopath's lack of instinctive empathy. Another group of wannabes, especially those on the young side of 25 who are still trying to figure themselves out, might want to latch on to the sociopath label as a way of seeing themselves as hard or tough or whatever it is they think all sociopaths are. I call them the seekers. Some seekers might even believe that calling themselves sociopaths makes them 'cool' somehow. Seekers tend to have an unrealistic view of what the day to day life of an actual sociopath is like thanks to modern media. Another group of wannabes strap themselves with this label because they’re tired of feeling. I call them the desperate. They believe sociopaths feel absolutely nothing. The desperate wish to feel this nothingness as a means of escaping depression or anxiety or a creeping sense of failure perhaps.

That doesn’t exhaust the list, but I think I’ve made my point. If I had to guess, I’d say James falls into the seeker category. The tone of the rest of his email is maudlin, self pitying and overly dramatic to the point of tedium. What it does do is demonstrate how easy it is misapply the sociopath label.

Being a sociopath isn’t romantic or glamorous. I don’t have a conscience, so to speak. I can charm and be anything to anyone when necessary, I enjoy playing the occasional mind game with people, I've never cared about social norms, etc. So what? None of that means I go around acting like a movie villain. I’ve got friends, family, a job, a life. In many ways, I appear quite normal on the surface. I’m not plotting to take over the world or running an international crime syndicate or making lamp shades from human skin, and I don't make it a habit to eat the livers of census takers with fava beans and a nice Chianti. I make no effort to live up to any kind of sociopathic stereotype. I do what I must to enjoy the life I lead, plain and simple.

Put your thinking caps on boys and girls. Being a sociopath is more and less than you think. You don’t choose it, you are it. Why bother trying to be anything other than who you are?

Sunday, September 2, 2012

Sociopaths = flexible sense of self, redux

Finally someone in the psychological community explicitly writes about the sociopath's elastic sense of self:
“In fact, most sociopathy involves an individual’s not having significantly developed, across the board, a general capacity to identify with things in the world. It is not just that he is lacking a strongly identified moral identity, he is likely lacking a strongly identified self identity almost altogether… His life is largely about a narcissistic satisfaction of desires, not an expression of autonomous valuated personal projects. It should be no surprise that the sociopath typically feels no qualms of lost integrity when he violates some generally accepted moral dictum. The issue here for him isn’t really specifically about a lack of internal response to some failed morality on his part. Rather, it’s about general self identity integrity just not being a question for him. If a person has no strong sense of self in general, then of course he will probably have no strong sense of lost integrity when he violates life projects which for the rest of us would be central parts of our self identities. In a nutshell, it’s not that the sociopath lacks moral integrity specifically; he lacks general self identity integrity, of which moral identity integrity is only a possible part. So a lack of, say, a moral conscience, isn’t really the central problem for the sociopath. What’s more at the heart of things is his lack of moral identification, along with the lack of any other significant life identifications.”
As I said before, many psychologists understand the “what” but not the “how.” The psychologist who wrote this, however, gets it just about right.

Saturday, September 1, 2012

Guest song: Talking Heads



Making Flippy Floppy


Nothing can come between us
Nothin gets you down
Nothing strikes your fancy
Nothing turns you on
Somebody is waiting in the hallway
Somebody is falling down the stairs
Set someone free, break someone's heart
Stand up help us out

Ev'rything is divided
Nothing is complete
Ev'rything looks impressive
Do not be deceived
You don't have to wait for more instructions
No one makes a monkey out of me
We lie on our backs, feet in the air
Rest and relaxation, rocket to my brain

Snap into position
Bounce till you ache
Step out of line
And you end up in jail
Bring me a doctor
I have a hole in my head
But they are just people
And I'm not afraid
Doctor doctor
We have nothing in our pockets
We continue
But we have nothing left to offer
Faces pressed against the window
Hey! they are just my friends
Check this out don't be slick
Break our backs it goes like this . . .

We are born without eyesight
We are born without sin
And our mama protects us
From the cold and the rain
We're in no hurry
Sugar and spice
We sing in the darkness
We poen our eyes (open up)

I can't believe it
And people are strange
Our president's crazy
Did you hear what he said
Business and pleasure
Lie right to your face
Divide it in sections
And then give it away

There are no big secrets
Don't believe what you read
We have great big bodies
We got great big heads
Run-a-run-a-run it all together
Check it out - still don't make no sense
Makin' flippy floppy
Tryin to do my best
Lock the door
We kill the beast
Kill it!

Friday, August 31, 2012

Volume and nuance of emotions

Once upon a time I was discussing music over lunch with a graduate school advisor. I mentioned to him that my biggest strength as a musician was having a highly tuned ear, being able to distinguish between slight changes in intonation that most people would not be able to perceive, much less know in what direction the pitch moved and by how much. Later in the conversation I asked him to repeat himself and explained that I have a hard time hearing in crowded, noisy places. He looked confused.

"I thought you just told me that you have good hearing."

I was about to explain when I saw him understand, "Oh, you have bad hearing, but it is nuanced." 

Yes! Exactly. I have bad hearing but it is extremely nuanced. In fact, sometimes I have wondered if my hearing became nuanced to compensate for my hearing being bad. 

I was remembering this story recently and thinking, maybe this is a good analogy for how I interpret emotional cues. People always wonder, how is it that sociopaths are so mind-blind about somethings but can be so uncannily perceptive about others. I've had a hard time explaining it myself. But maybe it is just this: that it's difficult for me to hear certain things and not others because they are actually unrelated in a way that is not obvious to the average observer. Maybe the emotional cues I am picking up on use a different sort of perception, like less empathy, more sheer observational skills. Or it's more something that can be learned with practice, like reading people's microexpressions

Or maybe it's hard for me to pick up on big picture things, like which emotion, and it's easier for me to pick up on small emotional nuances, like how that emotion is affecting a person's motivation in that moment. Maybe it's like Newman says, that sociopaths can do quite well with emotion as long as their attention has been directed to it (e.g. talking with a person one on one), but if there is too much background noise distracting, it will go completely over my head? 

I haven't refined the theory yet, but I feel there is something to it.
Join Amazon Prime - Watch Over 40,000 Movies

.

Comments are unmoderated. Blog owner is not responsible for third party content. By leaving comments on the blog, commenters give license to the blog owner to reprint attributed comments in any form.