This was actually a good description of the difference between personality disorders versus other mental disorders and the problematic features of personality disorders, cognitive versus affective empathy, how and why the PCL-R emphasizes criminality, how sociopathy is a spectrum, and why brain scans cannot actually diagnose you with sociopathy (but rather just show that your brain is prone to the typical sociopathic traits), with Jim Fallon:
Thursday, August 20, 2015
Tuesday, August 18, 2015
The Jinx
Again, I am late to the party. I just started watching this. Can I say that I love the taped conversations he has with his wife while in prison?
Friday, August 14, 2015
Reading people (part 2)
This was an interesting old comment from an old post:
I love Jung's concept of the "Shadow". It is the part of our identity we split off from our own consciousness because it is too threatening to the persona we access (constructed to a greater or lesser degree based on our need to calculate vs be sincere) .To have our shadows exposed feels like an annihilation of self- and the sociopath knows this. You are correct- a few select individuals who are not sociopaths seem to have an eerie knowledge of how to "map" the Shadow sides of new acquaintances. However they rarely employ this talent for nefarious purposes. But it is a formidable skill set to have- and anyone who has had their own Shadow exposed (or have been threatened by exposure) tend to have a reflexive defensive reaction to people who have developed this gift- sociopathic or otherwise.
The best "tell" I know for whether someone with this gift is sociopathic or simply insightful is their use of flattery whenever you look at them funny for saying something that to outsiders might seem innocuous, but has pierced you to the core. The sociopath has made a note of your reaction and tries to switch the subject by propping up your wounded ego. The insightful person is more likely to stay present with you and not immediately pretend they did not see what you both know that they saw. They aren't necessarily interested in learning more- they happen to just reflect back to you what they have seen.
In contrast- the sociopath becomes obsessed with knowing every last detail about you as a way of learning the "Shadow" part of you that you hide even from yourself. They want to know what buttons to push should they ever have the need to ruin you, and also for the purposes of inducing your confusion and anxieties when you deviate from their plan to make you one of their sycophants.
The gift of having your life turned upside down by a sociopath is in having your "Shadow" self exposed. When this happens, your comfortable illusions about your identity are shattered. This experience will either destroy you or strengthen you, depending upon your own resistance to the lessons you chose or refuse in the aftermath of this traumatic experience.
I love Jung's concept of the "Shadow". It is the part of our identity we split off from our own consciousness because it is too threatening to the persona we access (constructed to a greater or lesser degree based on our need to calculate vs be sincere) .To have our shadows exposed feels like an annihilation of self- and the sociopath knows this. You are correct- a few select individuals who are not sociopaths seem to have an eerie knowledge of how to "map" the Shadow sides of new acquaintances. However they rarely employ this talent for nefarious purposes. But it is a formidable skill set to have- and anyone who has had their own Shadow exposed (or have been threatened by exposure) tend to have a reflexive defensive reaction to people who have developed this gift- sociopathic or otherwise.
The best "tell" I know for whether someone with this gift is sociopathic or simply insightful is their use of flattery whenever you look at them funny for saying something that to outsiders might seem innocuous, but has pierced you to the core. The sociopath has made a note of your reaction and tries to switch the subject by propping up your wounded ego. The insightful person is more likely to stay present with you and not immediately pretend they did not see what you both know that they saw. They aren't necessarily interested in learning more- they happen to just reflect back to you what they have seen.
In contrast- the sociopath becomes obsessed with knowing every last detail about you as a way of learning the "Shadow" part of you that you hide even from yourself. They want to know what buttons to push should they ever have the need to ruin you, and also for the purposes of inducing your confusion and anxieties when you deviate from their plan to make you one of their sycophants.
The gift of having your life turned upside down by a sociopath is in having your "Shadow" self exposed. When this happens, your comfortable illusions about your identity are shattered. This experience will either destroy you or strengthen you, depending upon your own resistance to the lessons you chose or refuse in the aftermath of this traumatic experience.
Wednesday, August 12, 2015
Sociopathic feminity
From a reader:
Saw this documentary and thought that it seemed like the kind of thing beautiful sociopathic women might do to take advantage of their looks.
Is this an instance of sociopathic femininity or is it something else entirely?
Monday, August 10, 2015
Empathy
I saw this on social media, 23 Emotions People Feel, But Can't Explain. I can't speak to the legitimacy of this particular list, but I myself know of some emotions (like "saudades" or "schadenfreude") that have words for them in certain languages but not others, suggesting that certain emotions are more prevalent, or at least more on the radar, in certain cultures than others.
Some of these emotions on the list I could see myself having (or have had), others not so much. It made me think of emotional (affective) empathy (as opposed to cognitive empathy). If people are not even aware that some of these emotions exist in the broader population, how could they possibly feel empathy for someone who is experiencing one of these emotions? It makes me wonder about some people's absolute faith in empathy, that just because they happened to have been born a human being they were somehow magically imbued with being able to reliably understand each other and feel each other's feelings. In a world in which researchers are constantly finding new ways in which our cognition fails us such that entirely new disciplines have sprouted up over the past decade or so (behavioral economics for one), it's odd to me that there is still such blind faith and misconceptions about what exactly empathy is, means, and can do.
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