Boundaries: help or hindrance?

A reader asked about her sociopathic-seeming significant other, bringing up an interesting point about boundaries:

He knows he has thing's inside of him that work different from most people. I don't like to say, "normal" because to me, he is pretty normal or tries to go with the flow as much as he possibly can. I know to always be on my guard, and I have noticed that if I seem more like it does not bother me and if I am more stern with my remarks and answers, he seems to like that. Is that normal I suppose.

I don't know if I can speak for all sociopaths on this point, but I myself like well-defined boundaries, at least in personal relationships that I am interested in maintaining, and it sounds like he is the same. It is a little unusual for a sociopath to be in such a long relationship. By now he no longer derives most of his pleasure in the relationship from the constant acquisition of power, through playing games with you, seducing you, etc. You must provide something else to him that he values enough to try to keep the relationship working, whether stability, a front/beard/respectability, money, someone to take care of his kids, intimacy, or any other number of things. Basically you are still a profitable endeavour for him -- he may pay $100K a month to keep the thing running, but he gets at least $101K a month in return, so he'll keep that up forever. In other words, his brain is constantly running a cost benefit analysis of staying with you: all the time and effort it takes and possible negative consequences ($100K) compared to all of the benefit he receives ($101K). Just like a business, he might let things dip into the red here and there on a bad month, but ultimately will not continue seeing you if he sees it as a losing endeavor.

You being stern helps him keep the account in the black by reducing expenses. There is always going to be a certain amount of waste in a business, including breakage of merchandise, worker injuries, broken machinery, or hurt feelings. To fix that, businesses establish rules to promote optimum precautionary measures. For instance, instead of the business paying thousands of dollars to replace broken merchandise, they institute rules about putting breakable merchandise on the bottom shelf. Simple measures like properly training workers and forcing them to wear safety equipment (boundaries), can keep costs down and a business solvent. You are performing the same function with him when you establish boundaries. Instead of little things building up until you melt down emotionally (broken machinery), you are training him how to properly operate your machinery, so to speak.

Of course he will still do some things to hurt the business intentionally for his own gain, maybe the emotional equivalent of embezzling money, but when he does those things intentionally, he has no problem with them. Just because he kicks around the furniture one time does not mean that he wants to be accidentally stubbing his toe two weeks later. So some "stern" things you say will just make him angry and defensive, but if your sternness is just a matter of routine maintenance to prevent catastrophe, he will welcome any advice from you just as you would welcome the advice of a trusted mechanic.

Psychopaths feel emotions

This is an interesting interview with psychopath researcher and University of Wisconsin professor Joseph Newman in which he basically asserts that psychopaths feel the same breadth of emotions that normal people do, but that they do not attend to the emotions as others do so they do not experience them as other people do.

For those of you who want to skip around:

6:00: Non criminal psychopaths are characterized by weak urges breaking through even weaker restraints.

9:10: What happens when "guiding light" is absent is not necessarily consistent across all psychopaths, so psychopathy cannot necessarily be defined by behavior; behavior will depend on gender, age, social role, etc.

10:32: "The ones who break the law or who are violent, or commit criminals acts, those are the ones that are going to make it into my studies"

11:00: Do psychopaths experience emotions? If they do, are they less "deep" emotions? Sociopaths say they have emotions, will go out of their way to help others, capable of responding to affective materials.

13:53: Conventional wisdom regarding psychopaths and emotions being that psychopaths are fearless, incapable of emotions or general emotion deficit.

14:07: Newman's "attention deficit" theory -- "emotions don't have any power if you don't attend to them," psychopaths are not attending to the emotional cues that would elicit certain emotional responses.

16:12: "Emotions are there, to some extent, to the degree you pay attention to them"

16:48: Sociopaths are not obsessed in that the drive to do something is so strong, it's just that they are not considering other contrary info; but "if you can get them to pay attention to this information, they'll use it."

21:51: Treatment options using fear conditioning.

Newman thinks psychopaths are in some ways more likely to help a stranger than a normal person, which I think is correct in that the psychopath is just as likely to act impulsively doing good things as bad, and certainly doesn't see things in terms of "good" and "bad" anyway. (I talked a little bit about this lack of distinction here). I also think that there may be something to his theory that a lot of the emotional differences between psychopaths and normal people stem from the way that emotions are dealt with or attended to. If I focus on an emotion, I can greatly amplify its force far beyond what it should be. I frequently do this with pleasant emotions, but will also do this with "negative" emotions because there is pleasure in pain and I want to keep a flexible emotional repertoire (emotional yoga). For feelings that I don't care to feel, I just tune them out. I'm so good at compartmentalizing that it's easy to ignore anything I don't care to consider.

This video showed up on LoveFraud recently, leading to the following insightful comments from "Redwald" (excerpts):

It’s easy to understand this idea with an auditory or visual analogy. Suppose we’re in a room where a party is in full swing and there’s lots of noise. Now and again the noise can “interfere,” but on the whole the auditory signals are strong, and we can discern multiple signals. We can not only hear what a companion is saying to us, but we can also pick up snatches of other conversations around us, besides identifying any music that’s playing. In the visual field, we can easily recognize several people we know in a group of people nearby. There’s Ted, there’s Tom, there’s Sally. We can see all of these multiple people clearly and individually.

Conditions are different if the signals are “weak.” If there’s music coming from somewhere in the distance, and murmurs of conversation from the next room, we’ll have a harder time recognizing what’s being said, or played. More relevant here, trying to recognize it calls for an effort of concentration. If we’re straining to hear what’s being said next door, we may not even notice there’s music playing somewhere else. Or if we’re trying to hear the music, we may not notice the conversation at all, let alone make out what’s being said. Similarly, if we spot a group of people some way away, they may be hard to recognize at a distance. Quite possibly we’ll focus on one person who looks vaguely familiar and ask ourselves “Is that Ted or isn’t it?” But while we’re focusing on him we’re not focusing on the other two, so we may never recognize them. In short, we only pick up some of the many things going on around us, and miss others altogether.

Regardless of how strong (or weak) the emotional signals are in absolute terms, much of the problem with psychopathic behavior is still how strong (or weak) these signals are in relation to one another. If psychopaths’ perception of their “urges” is weaker than in normal humans, bad behavior can still result if their “restraints” (such as “conscience”) are weaker still.

I think the point being made is that because psychopathic behavior is not well regulated emotionally in any constant fashion, it tends to be impulsive. One characteristic of “impulsive” behavior is that it’s likely to be inconsistent from one time to another. It may even be somewhat RANDOM in the direction the impulse takes from one occasion to the next. The psychopath is a “loose cannon” whose behavior may be hard to predict.

Given this built-in inconsistency, it’s credible enough, at least in theory, that a psychopath acting on impulse could behave helpfully, even generously toward others at one time, and at another time, acting just as uninhibitedly on a very different impulse, be guilty of an act of sheer cruelty or predation.

For the reason I mentioned above, people observing these contrasting behaviors are likely to discount the psychopath’s acts of helpfulness or generosity and characterize him or her chiefly by the acts of cruelty. But people go further. They attempt to see (as Polonius put it) “method in the madness,” where sometimes there may not BE any “method”! People expect “consistent” behavior out of others, and they look for a pattern. If a psychopath appears helpful and generous to them at first sight, they’ll start off believing “this is a kind, caring person.” If the psychopath then turns round and treats them badly or exploits them, eventually they’ll decide “this person is a villain after all.” But they may still try to reconcile the contradictory behaviors in their own mind by trying to find a common motive or purpose behind both. Then they may conclude that the behaviors they saw as “kind” and “caring” were deliberately contrived by the psychopath in order to “take them in” and “put them off their guard.”
That may well be true in some cases, but in other cases it may not be true at all. The contradictory behaviors may be largely random and impulsive, not part of any greater “scheme” or purpose.

Sociopathic altruism?

A female reader who relates to the sociopathic mentality writes about a lot of things that I relate to -- being a disruptive force in my family and provoking people emotionally to manipulate them until I grew older, then started using my people reading and manipulation skills to smooth things over. And now I am the peacemaker/powerbroker in the family:

I've been reading through your blog, and feel a lot of familiarity in your posts and fact section.

I lie constantly and can't control it, I have a grandiose opinion of myself, many admirers both male and female, a chameleon personality, and in the past have been prone to a quick temper--saying intentionally and specifically hurtful words to the people closest to me. As a defense mechanism usually, but I always knew how to hurt someone the most, how to put the ball in my court; how to manipulate and control. It was the worst with my family when I was younger. I've since learned this is rather unacceptable behavior among other people.

I often think to my childhood. My father was an angry man, his own father suffered from PTSD and my father inherited some violent tendencies and anger management problems. The thing is, I'm much smarter than he is--much smarter than most people, and when I was a young powerless little girl and into adolescence...well it grew to be a very dramatic power struggle. Shouting matches, crying, drama, anything to break him out of his rages--sometimes outrageous displays of emotion(though, intentional).

At the current age of 22, I now have the most influence on every member of my family. Thing is, I had to, in order to repair what was so broken and dysfunctional. Get into everybody's head, maybe control them, manipulate a bit sure--but I fixed things, eventually. Seemingly altruistic, but when it comes down to it, isn't altruism also selfishness?

I remember when I was 7 or 8, my grandma died. I'd met her many times, she'd given me plenty as a child. We were at her funeral and my mom was crying, leaning on a church pew. I had no real tears, but I forced myself to bawl that day. I remember thinking simultaneously, while crying and exaggerating my shoulders, that this is what she wanted from me though I had no inner emotional response. I knew instinctively that this would also benefit me. Turns out I've been painting the picture of myself as a very loving, innocent, and caring person for a very long time...

I'm wondering if sociopaths ever use their abilities to altruistic extremes, in which the end result benefits them, as well as everyone else? I also feel like I have the capacity to feel strong feelings, but it's more of an intensity. Romantic relationships can be very intensely positive, and intensely negative. When sleeping with people I either have absolutely no attachment to the person, or an unhealthy obsession.

Found your website and was engrossed. I've always known I was different. When my roommate found out she was pregnant, and told me and my friend--she was crying hysterically and my friend was visibly distressed. I didn't react at all. I had to think first how I was going to react to this, what was appropriate, because I had no immediate response. It didn't affect me at all.

I have consciously on several occasions admitted to myself that my personality can very dramatically change depending on my location, situation, and who I'm surrounded by. I somehow easily win people's trust, respect, and admiration--I seem to cater my approach to each specific individual, and it doesn't take me much time. I always chalked it up to being charismatic and understanding, and I'm not entirely sure if I'm a sociopath who's grown up and figured out how to truly blend in and still get everything I want--or something else.

I've been viewing life from this perspective lately and have realized that I am different, but have been lucky enough to be surrounded by certain influences and experiences growing up which have developed into a great and generous moral code I can abide by. 


There has been much growth and change since my teenage years especially, and even now and this past summer, such constant change. Seriously, thank you for all the work you've put into your site, it's contributed a lot to my growth and helped me navigate my own relationships and the way I am. Understanding. I didn't understand why I am the way I am for so long. 

Can sociopaths be altruistic? I don't know, but they certainly can be very effective at relating and interacting with people. I was listening to a talk from LDS primary children President Rosemary Wixom in which she discusses trying to think like a child in order to better relate and deal with children. It's such an easy concept but so hard for a lot of people to put into practice. Sociopaths very naturally understand and adapt to the needs of the people around them, though, whether people of different ages, cultures, genders, ethnicities, etc. That's obviously going to be a very useful and welcome trait in almost any situation. It's funny, though, what the reader said about not understanding herself -- I think especially younger sociopaths find it easier to understand other people than they understand themselves.

Better off post-sociopath?

A reader writes about how he appreciated having sociopaths in his life, if for nothing else because they add excitement and color to life and brought out different aspects of his own personality:

I'm much better off for having sociopaths in my life at one time.  Have you ever read Jack Kerouac's "On the Road?"  Whether you have or haven't, I'll give you some context: JK, in my estimation was a very shy empath, hence the raging lifelong alcoholism.  He found himself drawn to Neil Cassady, a sociopath who probably had some bipolar disorder thrown in as well.  Cassady brought so much fun, spontaneity and wildness into Keroac's life that there literally would be no "On the Road" or Jack Kerouac if it weren't for Cassady. 

Anyway, in all honesty, I'm probably more like Keroac in temperament - a good bit more outgoing, but nonetheless, an introverted empath.  My best friend through much of my childhood and adulthood is the co-founder of a website that's a household name now.  To make a very long story short, he cut me out and threw me away when I was no longer convenient for him in the internet businesses, however I wouldn't trade the experiences and pain for anything.  It's the time in my life that's worth writing a book about (which I have), and if we're really all honest with each other, I would bet that its sociopaths that make life more interesting, and worth writing about in the first place.

By the way Ms. Thomas, I love your book.  I am now a practicing psychotherapist, a profession mostly populated by empaths, and your book provides the greatest insight into sociopaths of anything I've ever read, and I have a stack of books up to my chin about sociopathy.  

If you feel so inclined, I'd love to ask you some questions; I'll start with one: you said in your book that Mormons were some of the sweetest, most loving people you've ever met, or you said that about people at Brigham Young, I believe.  How do you as a sociopath react to sweet, kind people?  Do you see them as rich source for gain and opportunity, or do you enjoy the love you feel, or some combination of both?

My response:

I like sweet people as long as it comes from a genuine place. I think that most people who are self-actualized or able to see the big picture tend to be a little bit sweet and generous because they realize that life is short and there aren't really winners or losers (at least not in the rat race), so why not make friends with your seatmates. And a lot of Mormons are this way. It is like I said in the book -- Mormons believe that we are all spirit brothers and sisters and of course you're going to act more generously with your brothers and sisters than an enemy or non-relative, so there is generally a lot more social capital that I have with Mormons than other people.

But I guess to get more to the heart of your question, I like who I am around them. I'm really impressionable, like a chameleon, so when I'm around goodhearted Mormons, I'm more goodhearted myself. I'm also more willing to take risks and consequently I feel more effective, like I'm leveraging my assets in a way that is clearly making a difference in the lives around me. That makes me feel powerful. And I feel more in control of my own self when I am being that way, like it is my best self. It's one of the times when I feel most engaged in the world. Oddly one of the other times I feel most engaged with the world is when I'm playing a long con or mind game ("ruining people"). 

Almost sociopath (part 2)

From a reader (cont.)

The main issue in my hesitation at self-diagnosis is this...I know enough people similar to me - in and out of my own family - that also fit these parameters to a certain extent to still be unsure.

My mother seemed to have had similar experiences in her past.  She is a control freak with those around her (though especially with me) and has to be right (Dr Phil asks "would you rather be right or happy?", to her being right IS being happy).  She is very charming, people seem to like her a great deal, but when they prove to be less-than in some way to her she'll grow a tad nasty with them...this includes me with whom she's grown overly aggressive to the point of abusive - emotionally and mentally if not, once or twice, physically.

My grandmother is the same...though seems more borderline/narcissistic in personality and her behavior may also be due to other medical issues.  My grandfather was known to have many behavioral problems as a boy/teen and was, even by his own confession looking back, abusive to his children ("it was the way it was back then"), but did well in the navy and, after the birth of his children, did not have criminal issues at all to my knowledge.  One aunt was known to be promiscuous and switch her entire personality with each mate (I always imagined borderline more than anything) while the other settled happily into a marriage in which both her and husband live beyond their means without much concern for the future consequences - :cough: IRS audit :cough:.  My uncle is the most clearly the "typical sociopath" with a string of moves, jobs, and even (easily debunk-able) lies in his wake - he is also, though, the lowest-functioning person in the family so that could be why I'm most aware of his "typical" sociopathic behavior.

Some of my friends often seem to have the same viewpoint and will make similar-type jokes as me - including those others have called "wrong", "mean", etc - and will both laugh at and repeat my own.  They seem amused by the same things, to wanna do the same things, and believe the same general things as I do...but I wonder if this one isn't a bit of a chicken and the egg situation.  Are they conforming to me or am I conforming to them?

Or am I seeing a likeness that's not truly there for some self-denial/self-comforting (they're similar, thus like me, thus I'm "normal") reason??  (Other family members, to my knowledge, have not done any sort of cruelties to those around/close to them and they emote more frequently with more genuineness, it seems.)     ....OR are they all also truly like me?

And, if both family and friends are truly like me, then am I not a sociopath at all?  Or, maybe, am I an "almost" or "borderline" sociopath (most self-tests online came back as this or as "high-functioning")?  OR have I been surrounded by enough my own kind for long enough that I never realized what, exactly, my "kind" was until your blog, which resonates so thoroughly with me I swear I could've written some of the posts myself?

Any help you can offer would be much appreciated, any thing you need answered in order to help me I'll answer (outside the details of true name, etc, of course).  If you wish to put this up on the blog that is also fine...perhaps others are in a similar situation as mine and need the help.

Sincerely

"Skye"

PS: Please note I'm a tad late to the game on this - I'm 30 - but was always a late bloomer in personality, if I was to move to the next stage at all.  (I only truly realized the gender of my mate is irrelevant to me a few years ago, I still live with my mother due to crap financial issues - I'm working to rectify this one now - and never moved beyond the "I shouldn't do that because, if caught, I'll get in trouble"...it is seriously the only thing that keeps me in line, if I think I can get away with something I will absolutely give it a go.)