Saturday, May 9, 2015

Empath Song: Not Your Kind of People

From a reader:

I was listening to this song recently and the lyrics reminded me of how many empaths, particularly those who have been the "victim" of a sociopath, feel towards the sociopath.



We are not your kind of people.
You seem kind of phoney.
Everything's a lie.
We are not your kind of people.
Something in your makeup.
Don't see eye to eye.

We are not your kind of people.
Don't want to be like you.
Ever in our lives.
We are not your kind of people.
We fight when you start talking.
There's nothing but white noise

Ahhh.... Ahhh.... Ahhh.... Ahhh....

Running around trying to fit in,
Wanting to be loved.
It doesn't take much.
For someone to shut you down.
When you build a shell,
Build an army in your mind.
You can't sit still.
And you don't like hanging round the crowd.
They don't understand

You dropped by as I was sleeping.
You came to see the whole commotion.
And when I woke I started laughing.
The jokes on me for not believing.

We are not your kind of people.
Speak a different language.
We see through your lies.
We are not your kind of people.
Won't be cast as demons,
Creatures you despise.

We are extraordinary people.

Thursday, May 7, 2015

Discovering oneself

From a reader:

I'm just beginning to truly discover myself in my thirties. Funny how lying to the self can take so long to capture. Anyway, there is an interesting interview online that discusses how to spot us on a very different level than most anti-sociopath websites. I thought you might and enjoy it and share it with others as a means to educate them on how not to behave when confronted with disillusionment. Best wishes and thank you for keeping up your website. It's been with utmost pleasure that I revisit it.


Tuesday, May 5, 2015

Stranger than fiction

I ran across this older than a year email and remembered again how there were some people who absolutely could not believe that the book was nonfiction. I never could understand why that was. I think this from a reader provides at least one plausible explanation (another reason why I actually like the premise of that iZombie tv show -- people really are living in such different brains from each other):

I was informed of your website and subsequently your book by a friend and former colleague.  We worked together for almost 10 years and at some point realized we had a lot of common world views and didn't understand peoples emotional attachments to supposed negative actions.

As we peeled away layers of our friendship it became clear that we had both "cheated" on boyfriends and felt nothing that would constitute shame.  That was only the tip of the iceberg.  We kept so many of each other's secrets and still do.  I get nothing out of gossip and know it serves me better to keep her secrets as much as it serves her to keep mine.

When people see us together they assume we are on our own planet.  We are very well liked individually and collectively and are two of the smartest people I'm aware of.  We often joked about how things would easier if certain people were dead.  It wasn't that we would actually kill them, but just a logical fact that it would be easier if something killed them.  What prevented us from any wrongdoing ever was not our moral bias but our awareness of the consequences.

We joked a lot about being sociopaths and started to really look into it.  Well before I came across your book, I already knew.  Here's the thing.  I've read a lot of bad reviews of the book wherein people are shocked that someone would try to pass that off as nonfiction.  I merely read it as written confirmation of everything I have ever known about the way I think.  However, it messes with their construct of a functional person.  It reads like a hoax to them when it is anything but.

Additionally, I have met others like my friend and I.  It's something subtle that I can pick up on.  Maybe they haven't figured out why they are different yet.  They're always smarter and ask questions I would have asked.  I'm drawn to them and after each and every meeting, I text that friend and say.  "I've found another.  So and so is one of us."  I tell no one.  I thrive more on keeping the secret to myself and I feel a little less alone.

You said you would tell me who you are. You know who I am.  Feel free to use any of this on your website. For all I care, you can make me the face of non-violent sociopaths.  I'll take everyone on because I like the challenge and no one is going to take me seriously anyway, much to their own demise.

Sunday, May 3, 2015

Sociopaths in literature: The Seducer's Diary

I once knew of a girl whose story forms the substance of the diary. Whether he has seduced others I do not know... we learn of his desire for something altogether arbitrary. With the help of his mental gifts he knew how to tempt a girl to draw her to him without caring to possess her in any stricter sense.

I can imagine him able to bring a girl to the point where he was sure she would sacrifice all then he would leave without a word let a lone a declaration a promise. 

The unhappy girl would retain the consciousness of it with double bitterness because there was not the slightest thing she could appeal to. She could only be constantly tossed about in a terrible witches' dance at one moment reproaching herself forgiving him at another reproaching him and then since the relationship would only have been actual in a figurative sense she would constantly have to contend with the doubt that the whole thing might only have been an imagination.

Søren Kierkegaard 

Friday, May 1, 2015

Sociopaths = utilitarians

Sometimes I get people pushing back on the idea that sociopathic are largely utilitarian (think trolley problem, etc). I was looking through some old emails, however, and found this Psychology Today article about there being an actual empirically recognized link between the two. My guess is that utilitarians are not necessarily sociopaths. My guess is, however, that it is true that sociopaths naturally default to a more utilitarian way of thinking because there almost is no other universal, sustainable basis of decision making for a sociopath to choose that would work in almost any situation without the sociopath being run out of town for outrageous selfishness. From the article:

As The Economist recently wrote, a forthcoming paper in Cognition (link is external) reports that experiment participants "who indicated greater endorsement of utilitarian solutions had higher scores on measures of Psychopathy, machiavellianism, and life meaninglessness" (from the paper abstract). 

From the Economist article in the link above:

One of the classic techniques used to measure a person's willingness to behave in a utilitarian way is known as trolleyology. The subject of the study is challenged with thought experiments involving a runaway railway trolley or train carriage. All involve choices, each of which leads to people's deaths. For example: there are five railway workmen in the path of a runaway carriage. The men will surely be killed unless the subject of the experiment, a bystander in the story, does something. The subject is told he is on a bridge over the tracks. Next to him is a big, heavy stranger. The subject is informed that his own body would be too light to stop the train, but that if he pushes the stranger onto the tracks, the stranger's large body will stop the train and save the five lives. That, unfortunately, would kill the stranger.

Dr Bartels and Dr Pizarro knew from previous research that around 90% of people refuse the utilitarian act of killing one individual to save five. What no one had previously inquired about, though, was the nature of the remaining 10%.
***
They found a strong link between utilitarian answers to moral dilemmas (push the fat guy off the bridge) and personalities that were psychopathic, Machiavellian or tended to view life as meaningless. 

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