Monday, February 3, 2014

Practicing Catholic

From a reader:

My name is Violet and I have recently been "Diagnosed" with ASPD, specifically Sociopathy. My psychologist of six years has recently told me (recently, as in almost three months ago) that he believes me to be a sociopath and for quite a while now. This was sort of a revelation; so many aspects of my life and mind became clear and made complete sense. I then realized why so many relationships failed and why I never could understand certain life lessons my mother or others would try to explain.

The reason I am writing to you is because I have a few questions and I am internally torn at the moment.  I am a practicing Catholic and have been since the "age of reason." I think that is probably one of the most difficult aspects of my life, that is, being myself and trying to live by what my Faith and Church teach even when I disagree or possess no love or interest in it. I am purely a Catholic because the fear of Hell was instilled within me from a very young age. I have always questioned the Church when others around me follow it blindly, or what appears to me to be blindly. Do you believe it is possible for a sociopath to fully accept a form of religion? My religion teaches that human nature is inherently sinful. There are degrees and variations of evil and good. The Church never mentions anything about the human brain and how certain disorders or personalities could make one more susceptible to sin. Sociopaths can lie, cheat, kill, steal, etc. without feeling remorse but this doesn't mean that we will, we are just more inclined to do those things and with ease. Would you say I am right? Psychology doesn't seem to apply with most Christian religions. People do not think psychologically. Most people do not seem to think, independently anyway. I am a philosophy major. I have also taken many logic courses. Thinking differently and more extensively has always been a part of me. I am sure you can relate.

I am having difficulty finding facts about Sociopathy online. Most of what I come across are the exaggerated and dramatic narratives from "Victims of Sociopathic/psychopathic relationships" who complain about their past romantic relationships and the "Sociopath or psychopath" who wronged them. I find it very humorous that they think that because one man/woman (normally a man though) cheated on them and ended the relationship that this therefore makes them a sociopath or psychopath. What a hasty generalization. There are so many disorders, why do people always label the "evil doer" as a sociopath or psychopath? Also, there doesn’t have to be something psychologically wrong with a person to perform hurtful or faulty acts.

Most people are terrified of sociopaths/psychopaths. I find this very interesting. I told my closest friend and she has absolutely no issue remaining my best friend. In fact, she finds it fascinating and she said it explains a lot of my behavior. She is also Catholic and an empath. I think she has a "Normal personality." She is the least dramatic and emotionally charged person I know, and because of this our friendship works very well.

I understand that most people are fixated on the "no remorse" aspect of the personality and that is why they are afraid and prefer to remain apart from us. I am tired of pretending though and I am tired of being an actress. Every now and then I am myself though, either with people I am just meeting or my mother's friends. I just do not see the sense in pretending for certain people; I gain nothing from them so I will stay away.  

I also have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Is this common? My research online only stated that the personality favors order and control. I am constantly internally examining myself for all of the traits I have read or the little "ticks" that I possess. Since discovering that I have the personality this has been a great personal study.


I have one more question. Is it normal that there would be an abusive instigator or crucial person who would illicit abnormal emotional behavior for a sociopath? From Childhood maybe? Research has suggested this. Sort of like the one person who helps form the person through abuse and could possibly only be the person to illicit any sort of emotional behavior? My psychiatrist thinks it is possible and told me that my mother is this person. She is the only one who can make me cry. Do you have that sort of person?

Your website is very helpful.

My response:

Thanks for this! Your thoughts on Catholicism reminded me of this and this post on contradictions.

I do think sociopaths can be religious, for various reasons, including maybe that they just want to. My religion seems to take into account psychological issues and relies more on mercy than justice, so maybe that's why I feel at home there.


I don't think that we don't have emotions, we just don't usually give them any sort of meaning or real role in our lives. You probably feel anger towards your mother? I used to feel angry at my father, now I just don't. I figure, what's the point?

Neuroscientist and diagnosed James Fallon has talked about having bouts of both obsessive compulsive behavior and anxiety issues. If you believe that sociopathy is largely a disorder of attention, which I do, then it makes sense that we would become fixated on things (OCD or anxiety) in addition to being completely oblivious to others (unemotional, unempathetic) -- hyper and hypo attention, if those are words.

Sunday, February 2, 2014

There is no there there

A reader asks:
Do sociopaths actually have personalities? I mean clearly defined, stable personality types. Is there much variance from person to person? I've personally been drawn toward the ISTP of Myers-Briggs. Under all the bullshitting and such this is close to what I am. Under all the lies are we clones? Or are our core personalities changed by our experiences? Or does empath profiling relate to us at all?

I like to model my outward self after people I admire. I do admire some people. I look at them and I think, I could be you. I sometimes recognize myself in the actions of empaths, but I usually find disappointment when I look closer. The reasons why they do so many things make no sense to me. It is like looking at an alien species sometimes. They are afraid of everything. But I have also been disappointed when I come across low-functioning or low-IQ sociopaths. They may not have the same drives as empaths, but the results are the same. They do idiotic things with no thought of purpose. So is that the only difference between us, level of intelligence?

I think that is one positive about being the way I am: I can be whatever I am supposed to be, in any given situation. Ha if I didn't pay any attention to what people wanted out of me, I would have screwed everything up by now. I feel like a salesperson: the customer knows best.
My response: Ha, I'm sort of glad that you feel like you are more ISTP; people sometimes ask me if sociopaths aren't just INTJs.

I hate taking personality tests. I never know what to answer to questions like "do you have an emotional attachment to your friends?" Part of me does, but I also think it can't be that deep of an attachment if I cast them aside like used paper napkins when I'm done with them. An easier question would be, "Do you sometimes feel infatuation for things and people?" Because personality tests are not really designed for people like us, I answer most of them in radically different ways depending on context or my mood.

Maybe we do have personalities/selves but just multiple ones? The weirdest thing for me is to not know which self would be most appropriate in a given situation. Charming? Straightforward? Commanding? Cautious? It helps for me to have a buzzword to focus on, one primary goal, like the cliché actor asking the director "what's my motivation?" Because without it, I frequently can wander blindly when in a new situation or meeting a new person, slipping through several different "approaches" until I find one that works. This is never the first impression I want to make, but it is what it is.

Saturday, February 1, 2014

Fear of death?

This funny exchange with a reader:

Hey, it recently hit me that most people don't can't think about death without getting really bothered. 

E.g. you're going to die. If you have kids, they'll all die. Families, races, countries and species all die out. 

Nothing lasts forever.

I suspect a good test as to whether or not someone is sociopathic is can they take the facts - the incontrovertible facts of life - stoically.

Can you imagine going up to a mother with a little kid and saying, "what a nice kid! Too bad he'll probably be dead in 80 years or so. I sure wish he'd live forever - but you know how life is."

I can remember being a kid and black kids would taunt me by saying, "yo mamma." I'd say, matter-of-fact, "I don't have a mother. She's dead. She killed herself when I was 3." They often felt sad and apologized to me; it made no sense to me. One minute they were insulting me, the next minute feeling sorry for me.

Ha, hilarious. Did your mother really kill herself when you were 3? Can I publish this?

It is all true. Yes, you can publish the whole thing.

My experience of it was of misunderstanding. I didn't hate the black kids for being verbally aggressive, too personal and insulting. I thought they were a bit robotic with their insults - the black kids would reflexively say, "yo mama." Of course, it turns out I was the robot.


Friday, January 31, 2014

Sherlock: TV's favorite sociopath

BBC's Sherlock has started up again in the U.S. featuring many people's favorite fictional depiction of a high-functioning sociopath. Although Sherlock outted himself as a high-functioning sociopath in the first episode, not everyone was happy with Sherlock's apparent self-diagnosis. One of the more entertaining things has been to read people's explanations of how he cannot possibly be a sociopath, despite their hero worship of his brain and ability to analyze human behavior,

I can understand people's reluctance to acknowledge that he is a sociopath. After all, sociopath is a very dirty word and many people struggle with the idea that Sherlock is morally neutral, and that he just happens to be on the side of good. And so his fans tried to explain away his first reference to being a high-functioning sociopath, despite there being ample evidence to support his claim. And for a while there was nary a mention of the "s" word... tntil season 3, where he reminds people of his diagnosis almost every episode (search for the term "sociopath" in this wikiquotes article, but caution spoiler alerts). He chides his friend Molly for always falling in love with sociopaths, his best friend Watson for basically being attracted to sociopaths as well ("Your best friend is a sociopath who solves crimes as an alternative to getting high. That's me, by thy way."), and scares other people with it:



Perhaps Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock was not a high functioning sociopath (careful the link includes many inaccuracies about what a sociopath actually is), but BBC's Sherlock certainly seems to be one. And not just in the most obvious ways or overplayed ways like the video clip above. One of the more interesting ways he manifests sociopathic traits for me is how he interacts with his close friends.

For instance (spoiler alert), in one episode the three people he cares most about have their lives threatened by the villain (also a psychopath, but do psychopaths have a death wish?) Jim Moriarty. Missing from that threesome is the girl who has a very one-sided crush on Sherlock, Molly. And because Molly wasn't one of the three who was targeted, she was able to help Sherlock out of his bind. For her help, Sherlock rewards her with this statement: "Moriarty slipped up, he made a mistake. Because the one person he thought didn't matter to me was the one person who mattered the most. You made it all possible." How sweet, but how very sociopathic. When most people see things like "you matter to me," they mean that they feel a strong emotional connection. Here, Sherlock seems to imply something similar, but what he really means is that Molly mattered in his scheme in the very literal sense that she made it possible. In other words, his assessment of whether someone matters to him or not is what they are able to do for him. And for some people, that acknowledgement is enough. My closest friend is that way. She prides herself on being a very valuable friend to know, so that fact that I constantly seek her company is just an confirmation that I actually do find her to be very valuable. And that is what is valuable to her.



Thursday, January 30, 2014

Psychopathy, autism, and pointing fingers (part 2)

Not surprisingly, some people found the call for greater understanding and more careful (and empathetic) use of the term and diagnosis of the disorder psychopath to be a bridge too far.

One person has suggested that the term is not ableist or any other -ist because it perfectly accurately describes people who are the bane of humanity and should be rightfully outed and oppressed lest everyone else should be oppressed. The evidence this person provides are google image searches.

The one for psychopath:




The one for autism:



See everyone! Psychopaths are all portrayed as old white males (never mind that autism is also portrayed as very white male)! They can't possibly be oppressed. The diagnosis can't possibly be misunderstood. But it is that very white/evil/male/oppressor portrayal that the original article criticizes:

"In radical communities working toward intersectional social justice, the figure of the psychopath is invoked all too often to characterize members of oppressive classes, especially when they are in a position of political power in addition to apolitical structural power."

Psychopaths, in other words, or merely those who share traits with psychopaths aren't these ubermensch who only oppress and are never themselves to oppressed because they are far too clever. Sometimes psychopaths are children. Sometimes they are people who were abused as children. Sometimes they are people from disenfranchised races (one study found that African-Americans were twice as likely as white Americans to be assigned this diagnosis) or low socioeconomic classes, circumstances that they had no control over. The unfortunate reality, as the original author argues, is that the actual use of the word psychopath to diagnose (typically people who are institutionalized) "is most often a tool for criminalizing poverty, blackness and brownness, and disability."

But some people think sociopaths deserve as much as we can throw at them and more. Proving the earlier point about people with a particular disorder disavowing any similarity or mistreatment of other disorders (e.g., arguments like "my diagnosis is misunderstood, not like these other people who really are monsters") :

When most people think of the word psychopath, they imagine Ted Bundy, Adolph Hitler, son of sam, Dexter, the zodiac killer, jack the ripper, brutal megalomaniac dictators.

For these people the label of psychopath fits perfectly. However we should actually be focusing more about the corporate psychopath, the CEO, the stockholders, the ruling class who show no empathy or remorse, who manipulate and ruin societies and economies.

Psychopaths are the people who oppress, they benefit from being psychopaths because they have no moral restraints whatsoever. That makes them oppressors, most of them are men, white and cis. Again, oppressors.

Erasing this label can only serve the psychopath, the oppressor and the ruling class.

We have to be able to tell people that the emperor has no clothes. To deal with these people we have to open our eyes to the evil they do, and label them for what they are, manipulative dangerous psychopaths. Only then can we hope to remove them from the places of high power, by shaking off our collective apathy and paying attention when someone calls someone out for acting psychopathic we take away their power to manipulate.

Your boss who takes credit for your work all while manipulating people to believe you are useless? Psychopath.

The person who abuses laws and rules to oppress people. Psychopath.

The person who uses bureaucratic excuses to deny needing people social services. Psychopath.

Your therapist who plays games with you, makes you jump through hoops and then still denies you real care. Psychopath.
***
Psychopaths benefit from being psychopaths, dont defend them. Call them out as the oppressors they are.

The thing that this proposal has going for it is its simplicity -- bad person = evil psychopath and deserves to be outted as such. I can't really criticize this proposal because the actual reasoning behind method of diagnosing and treating sociopaths is hardly any better.

The first author argues against the use of a label but rather just focusing on those who manifest certain behavior:

“My advice: Be precise in your language and say that oppressive structures are violent and manipulative. Say that those who abuse their structural positions of power act with reckless disregard for other human beings. Say that they are callous and unabashedly wielding the power that comes with their privilege.

But don’t call them psychopaths.”

The critic's response:

So, you don’t want us to use the word psychopath, but instead describe them as a psychopath instead? That wont change the reality that people will still use this in a racist and ableist way.

Yes, the only thing that can change the reality that people will still use "psychopath" in a racist and ableist way is if that term stops being a slur we hurl at our enemies or a scapegoat for all of the evil in the world and rather acknowledge what it as what it purports to be -- a mental disorder. 
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