Sunday, September 28, 2014

Enneagrams

From a reader regarding the enneagram personality system:

Your book was phenomenal.  Maybe it's a side-effect of a good narrative, but I was slightly unnerved by how much I could identify with your behaviors and observations.  

One reason why I suspect I enjoyed your story so much is not due to possible overlaps of sociopathy, but that we may share the same personality index from the enneagram.  

Are you familiar with the enneagram?  As a profound "7-type," or "enthusiast" the pattern of trying many things, extreme sports, professions, people to date, and then getting bored and moving on to something else is a quintessential feature.  Apparently this type can exist independently of the presence or absence of a "personality disorder."  
***
As far as the enneagram thing goes, I believe there's a lot to unpack there with its relation to sociopathy.  In short, the enneagram is a sort of more useful version of the Meyers Briggs to determine useful career paths.  One of them is the "enthusiast" another monicker for a sensation seeker/ creative type.  I know the enneagram seems cheesy, but after I guessed every one of my friends' type at law school (They are mostly 8s and 1s) and they took the test I was right each time.  But I truly wonder how ubiquitous sensation seeking is among sociopaths.  I figure there are risk averse socios out there, or maybe not?  I'd like to hear what you think about this.

All being said, you strike me as an enthusiast.  You hated being bored in a law office (while this should be self evident for any normal human being, everyone I worked with seemed content with their corner office lives).  You did the bare minimum to pass school and the bar while maximizing your vacation time.  You enjoyed sexual exploration.  And you showed the creativity to write a book and lead a cool blog.  Those are all qualities of an enthusiast.  

Saturday, September 27, 2014

Non-violent psychopaths

A reader sent this video, pretty entertaining, from the author of Wisdom of Psychopaths:

Colonel Russell Williams

An update on our friend from a reader:

I suggest you check this out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLJzNpVrcGU

A few key moments:

1) 40:40 The interrogator explains that Russell is busted and that he ought to cooperate in order to look more human. Our colonel fails to understand that cooperating because the jig is up *is* in his rational self-interest, and coldly recounting the disgusting-to-normal-people facts doesn't make him appear sympathetic or human. If anything, it makes him seem like a psychopath (42:20).

2) 52:08 I'm concerned that they are tearing apart my wife's brand new house. This guy cares about his wife and his cat. He doesn't care about the victims or their families. He confesses, supposedly to help his wife. He and the wife later took action to transfer their assets to her - so as to protect their assets from the families of the victims. My sense: he cares about himself, his wife and his cat - and pretty much nobody else. (54:43) I want to minimize the impact on my wife.

3) 55:50 "got a map" - having decided that he's busted, when asked to say where the body is, he says, "got a map". For the empaths, this is apparently proof that the guy is very callous - having decided to cooperate, he cooperates.

4) 58:30 the investigator tries to convince Russell that he is "doing the right thing" by confessing. Russell immediately affirms that he is confessing to help his wife and her family. I suspect this is a bit narcissistic.

4) 2:08 "As I described I suffocated her using duct tape."

5) 2:38 - talking about suffocating her, how she died, etc. Quite cold.


My sense is the guy is a high-anxiety (secondary) psychopath: http://psych.wisc.edu/newman/SecurePDF/Harmon-Jones_Revision_v4.pdf

He got addicted to burglarizing and assaulting women. If he was low-anxiety, he'd have "played" at work with all the men and women he could have easily seduced. That would have been easier than breaking into homes to steal fetish items and sexually assault and murder people.

I think that explains why he's so tense about his self-image. If he was low-anxiety, he'd be looking forward to a life of not having to work, not having to make decisions - basically permanent vacation compliments of the Canadian government. He's high-anxiety, so he gives a shit - and suffers.

To the extent that he seems unemotional, my guess is that he's focused on the content of his speech. Empaths wouldn't be able to focus on the mission like this guy. He's decided his mission is to confess (for the sake of his wife), so he tries to do it.

This whole thing is eery for me and my friend; we recognize that but for the grace of god, we'd be like this guy. We don't empathize with his victims, we empathize with this guy and are a bit sad that he screwed up his life so badly. And yeah, it does suck the women got victimized. But this guy was actually kicking ass as a colonel. He was being productive - until he threw it all away.

Thursday, September 25, 2014

Questioning Sociopathy

From a reader:

I'm an academic with a background in pharmacology/neuroscience, and somewhat unsurprisingly as one of your readers, a sociopath. After becoming self aware, I became increasingly fixated on understanding the concept and any sort of serious academic investigation makes it very obvious that the current understanding of the 'disorder' is completely substandard and relies both on reams of terrible a priori reasoning and ridiculous qualitative moral judgements. After spending a while reading (thanks for writing your blog, it was a huge help) and thinking about things, I began to seriously question the prevailing academic ideas around the disorder - I also began to identify some of my peers as possibly sociopathic, and after carefully approaching the topic confirmed that all of the people I had suspected were, in fact, either sociopaths, BPD sufferers, or narcissists. After interacting with various individuals and quizzing person after person (in appropriately controlled ways and avoiding identifying any sociopathic traits myself) I've begun to steadily build my own picture of things. In the long run, I'd like to seriously research into this area and try to break down the ridiculous modern consensus, but at the moment I'm far too junior to publish ideas that controversial. As a result, I've started writing my own blog in an attempt to communicate my ideas and also just to get my thoughts on paper - which is at questioningsociopathy.com. I'm sending you this email because I am rather curious as to what your opinion of my site will be, and also as something of a thank you for providing the idea to start a blog as a way to communicate my ideas.
Thanks for your time!

Sunday, September 21, 2014

No hierarchy of humanity

This was an interesting excerpt from Charles Blow's memoir featured in the NY Times about coming to terms with his identity, specifically his bisexuality. It also has an interesting story about how to deal with victimhood (he was sexually abused by a cousin, upon which he wisely remarked, "I had to stop hating Chester to start loving myself. Forgiveness was freedom. I simply had to let go of my past so that I could step into my future." He also makes an interesting argument:

Yes, the mark that Chester’s betrayal had left on my life was likely to be permanent, but blaming him for the whole of the difference in my emerging sense of sexual identity, while convenient, was most likely not completely accurate. Abusers don’t necessarily make children different, but rather, they are diabolically gifted at detecting difference, often before the child can see it in him or herself. It is possible that Chester glimpsed a light in me, and that moved the darkness in him.

The explanation for the strong correlation between childhood abuse and non-heterosexual orientations is that child abuses go after kids who they sense are sexually open? I would like to see some stats on that, because that's the first I have heard of this specific argument. But I feel like this general type of argument is common for victims of child abuse to make. It seems almost too depressing to admit that your sense of "difference" from others all stems from you being a child victim. We would like the world to make a little more sense and be a little less haphazard than that. I certainly have made similar arguments about my own childhood -- that I wasn't made to be this way by what I happened to have experienced in formative years, or at least that I already was predisposed this way. But of course I freely admit that if I hadn't had those formative experiences, I wouldn't be who I am today (whatever else I might look like).

But I also thought his discussion of self-discovery and trying to find an identity in a world that wants to shoehorn and pidgeonhole us into their expectations of what we are or who we should be was interesting.

My world had told me that there was nothing worse than not being all of one way, that any other way was the same as being dead, but my world had lied. I was very much alive. There was no hierarchy of humanity. There was no one way to be, or even two, but many. 
***
I had done what the world had signaled I must: hidden the thorn in my flesh, held “the demon” at bay, kept the covenant, borne the weight of my crooked cross. But concealment makes the soul a swamp. Confession is how you drain it.

DARING to step into oneself is the bravest, strangest, most natural, most terrifying thing a person can do, because when you cease to wrap yourself in artifice you are naked, and when you are naked you are vulnerable.

But vulnerability is the leading edge of truth. Being willing to sacrifice a false life is the only way to live a true one.

I love that first part "There was no hierarchy of humanity." Except as true as it is, almost no one actually believes that, unfortunately.
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