Tuesday, October 2, 2012

Unflappable?

Very few things bother me, but sometimes I am bothered when there is an unexpected reaction or consequence to something I've done. My friend says that I'm never so mad as when I think I have been doing things on the up and up, but someone still chastises me.

The other day I was traveling and had to rent an automobile. I parked in a particular location that turned out to be in front of somebody's garage. They left a note for me saying that they needed to get their car our of their garage and were going to tow my car, etc. I grabbed the note and hurried away, I was late for something, but the note continued to bother me. How could I have not seen the garage, I wondered? What would I have done if they had towed it, let the rental agency deal with it? How had I let this almost happen? My mind wouldn't let it go.

I read a good description of this type of reaction in this comment:

Any time a kink happens in my social interactions, whether it's a slip of my tongue or an unexpectedly aggressive reply, I dwell on it. It replays in my mind, and I dissect it to find out what I could have done differently. Did I misread the person's intentions? Was I not forthcoming enough? It's not that I truly care how people perceive me; I don't hunger for their acceptance or praise. But I very carefully cultivate my outward persona: it is charming, it is witty, and it is benign. So when it fails to work as planned, it's a serious problem. It throws into question all of the hard work I've put into it. 

If I make someone cry, I'm not disturbed because I've caused them pain. I'm disturbed because I don't mean to be seen as a negative source--now I have to apologize or feign sincerity, or all my effort to appear as a sympathetic and trustworthy person, and the emotional power it gives me over that person, vanishes. 

I'm disturbed because I control everything, all the time, and for me to not do that, or stumble--it's unacceptable. 


With regard to my parking incident, I drove back the next day to that same neighborhood to investigate. There was no cutaway from the curb. The "garage" was covered in ivy and not clearly either a garage or functional. It was as hidden from sight as the Batcave. I was at glad to see that my mind hadn't slipped as much as I thought. And I started to wonder at how often people park in front of their garage. Do they deal with this every day? Could they put up a sign? Or perhaps paint the curb a different colour? I was angry at them, for setting me up for failure--for trapping me and acting like they had some sort of moral or legal high ground. I left them the note they wrote, secured in their door. I don't know why, but I thought it was vaguely threatening, like letting them know that I knew where they lived. And they shouldn't leave notes on my automobile. Or something...

Monday, October 1, 2012

Sociopath fraud

A reader wrote me:


I ended up stumbling across Sociopathworld amongst other websites, all claiming to have the true definition of what a psychopath/sociopath is and how they differ / do not differ. Naturally I was surprised after reading some of your posts how much in common I have with yourself, and a few others who posted, and yet frustrated at the same time. This is caused by the, as far as I can tell, mini war between a) those who claim the vast majority of people on your site aren't socio's, and b) those that retaliate with sarcasm or angst. The frustration is born out of the fact that, as much as these opinions are seemingly coming from sociopaths, there is also the matter of objectivity, in that, there is very little. How to tell the sociopaths from the frauds, then added to that, individualism whereby every sociopath is slightly different in certain aspects, thus resulting in what I deem to be, sadly, a possibly subjective/biased source of information. It is my suspicion that the majority of sociopaths will not comment on this site, possibly because of apathy, the fact that they may gain some amusement from merely reading the bitchy, petty comments, or that there is futility in making a comment, whereby the majority would ideally, be understanding.

I must press upon the fact that I do not claim to be a sociopath, only that I share several characteristics which have aroused my attention. However whether these are due to being a sociopath, or merely born from experience resulting in a highly misanthropic, manipulative and moral nihilistic personality type. I have always been slightly different since a child in terms of recklessness and disregard for social norms, however it has only been in the last 4/5 years or so, I have changed more and more (I'm 20 yrs/o). Needing an objective view and with luck, an end to this horrible itch that cannot be scratched as a result of my morbid curiosity, I have started to see a psychiatrist, not for therapy but merely to see if I may be different, if my suspicions are true. I am who I am, and if I am truly different from your typical empath, an amusing and appropriate term, then fair enough.


I replied:
What is a diagnosis? Psychological diagnoses seem to serve several purposes. If the condition or the symptoms are treatable and are causing the individual discomfort, then they serve as a plan of action for how to combat the symptoms. If the condition is not treatable, what then? Specifically for something like sociopathy, is the point of the diagnosis? Keeping people in prisons is one purpose, probably the most practical purpose right now with most of the diagnoses being made on people int he prison population. Warning others? Only if others know your particular diagnosis. What else? Self discovery? Possibly. Or is it to identify some concrete scientific phenomenon that is happening in the human race. I guess if you're a scientist/researcher you would say the latter so you would be concerned with issues of validity, etc., and reject anything or anyone that might hurt that sense of validity (and your funding). Since I'm not a scientist (at least not this type of scientist), I don't care about validity, so it doesn't really bother me to have the diagnosis bastardized a bit. I figure that people who have firsthand experience with sociopathy will be able to recognize themselves in the posts on the site. If they don't, maybe we are something different from each other, although I wouldn't know whether to call me a sociopath and them something else or vice versa.


Sunday, September 30, 2012

Boredom: the three year itch

Someone sent me a link to a blog that is apparently written by a sociopath. I haven't read anything else but this post about sociopath's boredom, but I thought it addressed some interesting issues:

I’m suffering from a very specific sociopathic malady just at the moment: boredom. You may think that doesn’t sound so bad, but to a sociopath it’s a huge problem, something we can’t shake off or ignore or alleviate except by extreme measures.
***
So divorce or a breakup followed by serial dating and a new seduction; being promoted or headhunted OR fired – all these provide excitement, chaos to be skillfully negotiated, new people to be charmed and controlled and moulded. You’ll notice that the negative experiences carry the same value as the positive. It shouldn’t make sense, but to us it does. Change is good, and because of our tendency to grandiosity we think we’re equal to anything. We can do anything, deal with anything, overcome anything. We’re not afraid. Sadly when we charge off for our shiny new adventure we can forget that not everybody finds it quite so wonderful, and that it impacts on others in ways we hadn’t considered or felt responsible for.
***
The interesting thing I’ve found, in discussing with other people like me, is that for all of us it happens on a regular cycle. The length of the cycle varies from one to another, but for me it appears roughly every three years. It hasn’t been obvious up until now because with that timescale, naturally-occurring events in my life have often provided change at just the right time. Job changes, pregnancy, college etc all synchronised with my cycle and I haven’t often found myself feeling this way. I’ve also been lucky that the changes I’ve made have fit with the needs of my partner and family, and we’ve never found ourselves materially or emotionally worse off.
***
The interesting thing I’ve found, in discussing with other people like me, is that for all of us it happens on a regular cycle. The length of the cycle varies from one to another, but for me it appears roughly every three years. It hasn’t been obvious up until now because with that timescale, naturally-occurring events in my life have often provided change at just the right time. Job changes, pregnancy, college etc all synchronised with my cycle and I haven’t often found myself feeling this way. I’ve also been lucky that the changes I’ve made have fit with the needs of my partner and family, and we’ve never found ourselves materially or emotionally worse off.

Saturday, September 29, 2012

Society of sociopaths

People are always asking what a society of sociopaths would look like. As i have suggested before, there already is a society of sociopaths. It is the Dutch. And I'm not the only one who has suggested that the Dutch are as cold and calculating as they come. A libertarian blogger posting about the proposed universal health care in the United States writes:
If the public sector atrophies, the scope for manipulation broadens, because the information about what's available outside the public sector shrinks. Nor is this just crazy speculation. I actually think it's pretty reasonable when conservatives worry that the Dutch attitudes towards euthanasia are influenced by the burden old people and severely disabled children put on the public purse. I don't see how they could fail to be.
What then does a society of sociopaths look like? The Dutch are very efficient, utilitarian, and all of them ride bikes. They invented several of the world's evils including things like slave trade, diamond trade, and imperialism. They're also very tolerant, traditionally a haven for religious minorities like the soon-to-be American pilgrims. Once you're too old to be functional to society, you kill yourself, always with one eye on the bottom line, e.g. gay okay but old decrepit, not so much. And they're firm believers in the free market. Not so bad, is it? I mean there are tradeoffs in everything, right?

Friday, September 28, 2012

Experts on sociopathy

The following were taken from an article on Dr. Robert Hare, psychopathy expert.

History of the term psychopath:
The condition itself has been recognized for centuries, wearing evocative labels such as "madness without delirium" and "moral insanity" until the late 1800s, when "psychopath" was coined by a German clinician. But the term (and its 1930s synonym, sociopath) had always been a sort of catch-all, widely and loosely applied to criminals who seemed violent and unstable.
Why we should care about psychopaths:
Psychopathy may prove to be as important a construct in this century as IQ was in the last (and just as susceptible to abuse), because, thanks to Hare, we now understand that the great majority of psychopaths are not violent criminals and never will be. Hundreds of thousands of psychopaths live and work and prey among us.
On their inability to respond to punishment or learn from negative experiences:
For his first paper, now a classic, Hare had his subjects watch a countdown timer. When it reached zero, they got a "harmless but painful" electric shock while an electrode taped to their fingers measured perspiration. Normal people would start sweating as the countdown proceeded, nervously anticipating the shock. Psychopaths didn't sweat. They didn't fear punishment--which, presumably, also holds true outside the laboratory.
On the sociopaths' lack of familiarity with emotional language:
Hare made another intriguing discovery by observing the hand gestures (called beats) people make while speaking. Research has shown that such gestures do more than add visual emphasis to our words (many people gesture while they're on the telephone, for example); it seems they actually help our brains find words. That's why the frequency of beats increases when someone is having trouble finding words, or is speaking a second language instead of his or her mother tongue. In a 1991 paper, Hare and his colleagues reported that psychopaths, especially when talking about things they should find emotional, such as their families, produce a higher frequency of beats than normal people. It's as if emotional language is a second language--a foreign language, in effect--to the psychopath.
On the potential for abuse:
"We'll let people out [of prison] on the basis of scores on this, and we'll put them in. And we'll take children who do badly on some version of this and segregate them or something. It wasn't designed to do any of these things. The problems that politicians are trying to solve are fundamentally more complicated than the one that Bob has solved."
On using the diagnosis to argue in favor of the death penalty:
"A psychological instrument and diagnosis should not be a determinant of whether someone gets the death sentence. That's more of an ethical and political decision."
On the sociopath's level of humanity:
Are these people qualitatively different from us? "I would think yes," says Hare. "Do they form a discrete taxon or category? I would say probably--the evidence is suggesting that. But does this mean that's because they have a broken motor? I don't know. It could be a natural variation." True saints, completely selfless individuals, are rare and unnatural too, he points out, but we don't talk about their being diseased.
On the possibility of a cure:
Asked if he thinks there will ever be a cure for psychopathy--a drug, an operation--Hare steps back and examines the question. "The psychopath will say 'A cure for what?' I don't feel comfortable calling it a disease. Much of their behaviour, even the neurobiological patterns we observe, could be because they're using different strategies to get around the world. These strategies don't have to involve faulty wiring, just different wiring."
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