Wednesday, April 9, 2014

Quote: Education

“Black and Third World people are expected to educate white people as to our humanity. Women are expected to educate men. Lesbians and gay men are expected to educate the heterosexual world. The oppressors maintain their position and evade their responsibility for their own actions. There is a constant drain of energy which might be better used in redefining ourselves and devising realistic scenarios for altering the present and constructing the future.”

― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

Tuesday, April 8, 2014

Better than before

I thought this article was interesting (interesting enough to re-tweet the quote "We are frightened by people with mental illness." a few days ago) for its discussion of stigma and heritability of mental illness. But what has stuck most with me was the section where author Jenni Fagan talks about trying to get better by just paying attention to herself, her reactions to things, and making fine adjustments that seemed to put less stress on her brain or give her outlets:

[O]ur bodies want us to heal. My injured brain was telling me I had to change how I thought.

So I did. I bought a record player. I made a vow to brush my teeth each morning and not check emails until after I had breakfast. I decided to go out to dinner during episodes of severe derealization. I said I would not wait for my illness. I took train journeys where I thought I would not be able to stand at the end of them because my exhaustion was so severe it seemed I would have to just go to sleep on the floor. I told people.

Am I well? I am better than I was before.

A lot of people have asked me what I find most helpful in dealing with my mental issues. I tell them what has worked for me: gardening, playing music, writing the blog, therapy that is focused on helping me be more in touch with my own self (especially the origins and progressions of my thought processes), alone time, exercise, fish oil, a diet high in protein and fiber, excessive amounts of sleep (induced by sleep medications), not being around strangers for more than a couple of hours a day, being around family, writing, masturbating, being religious, listening to music when performing mental tasks to help me think more linearly, calling people by their titles to remind myself of both who they are and who I am to them and to treat them appropriately, finding relatively harmless mind games to indulge in instead of doing them with people I love, etc. How'd I figure these things out? I don't know, I just tried them and they helped (or tried stopping them and they hurt). 

Maybe I'm just self-medicating with some of these, and maybe in a way that simply masks problems instead of helping them to get better. Maybe some of these things are a crutch that I really don't need. But I don't think the only criteria for whether or not something is a crutch or perhaps an excuse to engage in bad behavior is just whether other people seem to find it distasteful. Some people might disagree with the way that I am religious, say that it is an opiate of the masses and ultimately contributes to my delusional thinking and megalomania. Others (probably not the same people) might take issue with the masturbation or the antisocial or selfish tendencies. And I'm sure a sizeable portion of people reading this will think that playing mind games with people is bad and I should stop doing that right away. But will those same people believe that I can keep exercising and playing music? Probably so, because somehow those are more popular/common amongst people aspiring to live "better". 

Here's the thing: I currently don't think that playing music and exercising are necessarily better or more noble or even more wholesome than masturbating and mind games. Or at least, I haven't yet learned to distinguish between those. Maybe I will eventually. Maybe I will come to see that some of those really are crutches/placebos and should never be indulged in by nobody ever. I am not ruling out the possibility. But I probably won't believe it just because you say it. Because maybe I will eventually learn that music and exercise are actually bad for my mind but mind games are good. Or maybe I should start taking long train journeys. I'm pretty willing to try whatever might help. And maybe I am doing wrong things. Maybe some of you care enough about me to tell me how/why. Or maybe some of you don't care at all about me and hope I get worse and then die.

Relatedly: medicinal marijuana? Legal farce contributing to social and moral decay? Or godsend to suffering souls?

Monday, April 7, 2014

A computer analogy

From a reader:

For most of my life I've been operating under the assumption that I was fairly normal psychologically even if my social life and general socialness was atypical based on what I could observe around myself.  This would turn out ultimately to be an elaborate trick on my part against myself, but solely for the sake of my own survival.  I'm not sure when exactly it started, but it must have been fairly early on in my life as I have no recollection of building my web of self-deceit, only sporadic instances that could have contributed to it and general notions of my childhood. This includes my overly curious nature, always asking questions that "didn't matter" or "didn't concern me" as a child, but I would always press until I got answers or until I could be pointed to other information that could satiate my curious mind.  "Why" was my favorite or at least most used word growing up, much to the dismay of many people around me.  I also would watch people intensely for clues into their behavior, to figure out "why" for myself instead of asking questions.  Reflecting on this I realize now that it was because I understood very little compared to others when it came to anything outside of factual knowledge I'd picked up from classes or books.  I always wanted to know more about how and why people thought like they did.

Using analogies is one of the key ways I figured out how others work, and I find them equally useful in explaining myself to others, whether it is some fictitious account to make myself more acceptable or actual truth.  And in relation to the human mind my favorite is using the analogy of a computer.  Using this theme and imagining everyone else wireless computers of some kind, constantly sending and receiving signals, it is easy for me to understand mental difference.  Some of them are genetic predispositions(hardware) and others are socialized into them(software).  When something goes "wrong" with one thing or another it results in a mental disorder.  I could spend the rest of the day explaining all the nuances of this analogy, but I'm sure you can suss them out for yourself.  Sociopaths fit into this model as computers that lack the hardware and/or software to make sense of certain codes transmitted in the signals they are constantly bombarded with, one might even go so far as to say they're running a different operating system than most(as I think Linux computer users will tell you, it's hard making their machines talk nicely with a Windows computer).  Criminal sociopaths would be the ones that, frustrated with their position, start bombarding others with malicious viruses and strands of code meant to disrupt the processing of other computers.  Successful or at least non-criminal sociopaths on the other hand would usually attempt to make sense of the mysterious codes by seeing what other computers were doing with the same codes and then writing their own programs as to mimic the same responses so as to appear normal and try to function with other computers in the system, but eventually there are issues as spitting out mimicked codes only works so much.

Bringing this back around to my story.  It was my overly curious nature mixed with a very nurturing, protective, and understanding mother that allowed me to build my little program that kept the real me hidden, even from myself once I had it up and running.  I'm not sure how I did it or if was entirely me, but continuing from the computer analogy, I didn't stop at building a simple list of commands to mimic the responses of others.  I built an emulator program.  As such, instead of simply responding with a mimicked code, I could actually take in, process, and spit back out code in the same fashion other empaths did.  It wasn't and still isn't perfect, and requires constant maintenance and energy to keep it up to speed.  The main difference being I can actually "feel" the emotions I pretend to have, even if those responses are merely my own trickery.  To try and bring this back into the realm of reality and not just analogy, the best I can figure out is I that created a mental programming that not only tried to figure out the correct mental and social responses to others it actually caused physiological changes similar to those experienced by empaths, thus allowing me to "feel".

The only reason I'm still not bound up in the web of my own creation is after several years of living away from my parents(my mother in particular), and I'm sure several other contributing factors I'm not whole conscious of, this construct began to degrade as I no long had reason to maintain it as thoroughly.  My sociopathic nature began to seep through at an alarming rate(it had always popped up now and then, but was excused by everyone, myself included as the result of stress at school or work) and I thought at first something was seriously wrong with me.  As time when on the sociopathic traits showed more and more, until eventually I had to sit down and figure it out NOW.  When I did I realized that most of what I felt made little to no logical sense to me, and I began poking at this mental construct until it all but completely fell apart.  I put it back together because I realized it made my life a ton easier after only a day or so of not using it.  I still had no name for what I was on the inside, that is until I came across your book.  How nicely everything you said lined up with what I saw in myself allowed me to finally ignore the clinical representation of sociopaths and explore the notion of it from the perspective of someone who really knew.  That as brought a level of ease and acceptance to me that I'd lacked until now, probably due in large part to my empathic emulator's influence.  And now that I'm looking at myself and the world in a new light everything is making a lot more sense.  But it also makes me wonder if there are more out there like me who have this capacity to emulate even down to the internal responses of empaths.  I've not found any evidence of them, but then again, if they never have reason to doubt their own trickery then they would remain stuck in their own web oblivious to who they really are.

I found it particularly interesting that he focused so much on analogies to figure out the world around him. I feel the exact same way. I focus on the structure and relationships between things, so thinking in analogies is a natural fit for me. I think that's what made studying law such a good fit for me, because particularly in common law systems, everything is analogized to previous cases or previous legal reasoning. It's a very instrumental way of thinking, thinking of everything and everyone in terms of what they do and how they function in different situations. But it makes me wonder, is this something common to any/most sociopaths? Certain personality types? Other personality or mental health disorders?

I also liked the part about how it was a "very nurturing, protective, and understanding mother that allowed me to build my little program that kept the real me hidden". I actually just met someone who has sociopathic tendencies/proclivities, and he speaks much the same way about his mother -- about how she trained him to be sensitive to certain things. He always says things like, "if you follow a thought, it can take you all sorts of places," like he makes a distinction between "having" a thought, and "following" it (and of course finally "acting" on the thought).

Sunday, April 6, 2014

Salt of the earth

I liked this comment on an older post about sociopaths being just a natural human variant:

This is very encouraging to read. It does seem more logical to see there being an intended role in nature for those considered psychopaths rather than being an aberration or flaw.

I think the statistic I read somewhere was that approximately 4% are psychopaths. This seems to be exactly the proportion of managers you'd need for any group. Those that can make hard or even life and death decisions dispassionately for the preservation of their tribe, corporation, or nation. The fact that those same people tend to be gifted with an easy charm to persuade others and that they naturally migrate to positions of power would seem to reinforce this. What would be perceived as evil by the recipient might be seen as good to the group following the psychopath who subsequently have food to eat for the winter, a surplus of wives to mate with, or more valuable stocks.

The fact that I see myself equating the decimation of a rival tribe with acquiring increased stock value is not lost on me. Humorous to me though in it's own way...

Are sociopaths like salt? Even just a little too much can ruin a dish, but if you don't have any you'll eventually die? One of the facts that stuck out to me as a child in social studies class was learning that in certain parts of the world at certain times in history, salt was worth its weight in gold. Has that ever been true of sociopaths in history?

Saturday, April 5, 2014

The Wolf of Your Street

Andy Jones writes for Men's Health UK about how I (sort of) mentored him to (sort of) success. The article is pretty entertaining. One of my favorite stories:

Olga, our cleaner, has to go. My partner Jennifer adores her, even though her work is sloppy. Also I'm paying 40 a week for someone to break stuff and push a vacuum around. Empathetic Me would have given he a warning; then -- if I had to -- the 'it's not you it's me' talk and sent her off with a tip. Weak. 

Sociopaths don't just take what they want, says Thomas. They take more. "Say a friend is selling a car for 5000 and another is looking to buy one for 10,000. Most people would simply put the two in touch. Not me. I would buy form the first friend, sell it to the second and double my money." Emboldened by Thomas's ruthlessly simple rationale, I corner Olga on Monday, cleaning day

"We're done here. No more cleaning." 

"Ok, I see you next week." 

"No, I no longer need a cleaner." 

"But Jennifer..." she starts. "No, I am saying I don't need a cleaner."

Now for the profit: I like to Jen that I have booked the cleaner for the next week then do a deliberately half-arsed job of cleaning the house myself. Jen notices the house is still a tip. "You know what, you're right -- we need to let Olga go." I offer to do the firing -- covering my tracks while looking both decisive and strong -- and pocket the 40. Later on, conscience racked, I pay for dinner. This kind of stuff doesn't come naturally. Deep down, I'm a nice guy. On a night out both the drinks and the jokes are on me. I'm ambitious but cautious and often think what I could achieve with sharper elbows.

I really enjoy hearing about empaths trying out sociopathic traits, although I wouldn't have bothered cleaning the flat, even half-arsed, I would have just told Jennifer that she decided to move back to Estonia (but I guess he did get some money out of it?). It's funny that many of them see it as something to aspire to, as if they could accomplish many more of their dreams if they just toughened up a bit. But frequently as they start toughening up, they start realizing that accomplishing the dream is not actually the most important thing to them. And I think that's good for them. Good for them to realize that there are other things they would rather have than that particular brass ring, so they can stop pining for it and feeling miserable when they don't get it. Because it is not all that sociopathic to be envious (except for the mythological covetous sociopath, whom I sort of suspect is just a malignant narcissist?).

But don't stop at that realization, I say. Explore the experience for what exactly it is that you really do want above all else. For instance, later in the article he describes being sociopathic in his relationship:

In the bedroom, I've been persistent in my campaign against Jen's negligence with negligees. It's working. "I like this power game," Jen purrs, as she tries the lacy ensemble I've picked. But I don't enjoy manipulating her. Being a sociopath is fine in emails. Face to face, it's a very different matter.

Not to read too much into what is mainly just an entertaining piece, but it's interesting that he says he doesn't enjoy manipulating her. And I'm sure he doesn't. But why? Is it because he thinks she doesn't like being manipulated? Because it seems like she does, at least in this seductive way (everyone wants to be seduced). The problem seems to be more that manipulation doesn't suit his "nice guy" vision he has for himself, even if that is exactly what his partner desires from him apparently. If so, this example sort of supports my theory that one reason that sociopaths are such charming chameleons is because they have a weak sense of self, i.e. that they don't allow their own need for personal integrity and identity to interfere with their desire to please another.

Also, apropos of nothing, but have I noticed before that "pathetic" is in "empathetic"? There must be some interesting shared root analysis there.
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