Thursday, September 24, 2015

Sociopathic diversity

I am always interested to hear different perspectives from people who identify as being sociopathic. I think it's easy to hear from people who are at different stages in their lives or who have had different experiences and co-morbidities or different intensities of the sociopathic traits. For instance, before I ever experienced anxiety (about 5 years ago), I would have never thought myself capable of it and if anyone had told me that they thought they were sociopathic but experienced anxiety, I would have thought that couldn't be true. (It's a mixed blessing to now not be so sure of myself about things like that or anything else really).

I thought this description from a reader illustrated some of this diversity:

Its such a relief to know that I am not alone. So much of what you have said on this blog rings unbelievably true. Ive never been a very honest person. Honesty has never been priority because i know that if people really knew my motivations, intentions and feelings that i would be socially outcasted. My ability to change personalities to fit into and mimic whatever social scene I am in is the only way i can fill the strange lack of feeling that ive experienced ever since i was a child. 

 I am exhausted from being villainized and shamed for my sexuality and inconsistency and impulsive actions. Maybe i am just projecting when i say this, but I cant accept that I am worse or not as worthy of life just because I lie and have flexible ethicals. Other people cause just as much, if not more, harm to their fellow man with honesty and set value systems. Everyone is selfish and careless at some points in their lives, or at least they should be. I think having flexible character and morals is so much more valuable then having identities and morals that you would go to war over. 

I have fit into many places and situations with wild success by mixing beautiful concoctions of lies and the truth. These partial narratives have created my outward identity. But in these narratives i do give glimpses of truth and with this i have been working on piecing together my true personal identity. What i have found about myself, is that I am complicated and have a rich story to tell. 
I will never identify as a sociopath because it feels like a betrayal. I have tried to "define" or "identify" myself as many things to cover up for some of my unconventional behaviors. Ive tried being a sex/love addict to explain my cheating and jumping from partner to partner, or bipolar to explain my sometimes wild actions. Ive claimed that people close to me have died just to explain being unnecessarily emotional, so no one will know where my anger or agitation is really coming from.  The truth is though that i don't have an excuse that i can give people, other then coming out as a sociopath. But If i claimed the title "sociopath" i risk making the term inauthentic to myself. 

I Had a good childhood. no real traumas. I am successful and privileged and damn lucky in my exploits. I have no reason to think that this world is lonely, random and inescapably disastrous. But thats how i know the world to be. And whats interesting is that that doesn't bother me. we as individuals are too small for it to matter what we go through because for all we know the universe as we know it is just a micro combustion; the spark of a flint striking steal in a bigger picture we can not see or conceive of.  

That was sort of a long winded rant but I needed to share it for some reason with someone who might understand because you shared with all of us. you really are an inspiring character and excellent example of a slice of society no one wants to look at. 

I really identified with this: "I have no reason to think that this world is lonely, random and inescapably disastrous. But thats how i know the world to be." I think it describes well the way the world looks like when you don't have any of the usual emotional/love/hope/etc. wool over your eyes like others do (but obviously still other types of wool -- sociopaths are not immune to their own delusions about themselves and the world.).

Monday, September 21, 2015

"How psychopaths can save your life"

... is the title of a Kevin Dutton piece in the Guardian that I retweeted. Here are some quotable quotes:

This “new science” of psychopathy has met with resistance from many clinicians. And with good reason: their job means they only get to meet bad psychopaths. I’ve met them, too. But I have also met people more likely to save your life than take it. I wouldn’t go for a curry with many of them. But if a kid of mine had a brain tumour or my other half was on an airliner that had been taken over by al-Qaida I know who I’d like to see scrubbing up or storming the aisle. Those who go where angels fear to tread often have more in common than you might think with the demons they rub shoulders with.

Much is written about the stigmatisation of mental illness, but we still have a long way to go. What headline writer worth their weight in bold would dream of vilifying autistic individuals or victims of depression or PTSD in the same way that they pillory “psychos”? Last year in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, I and my co-authors presented the first published evidence that psychopathic traits – especially those linked to the personality dimension “fearless dominance” – are positively associated with holding leadership and management positions as well as high-risk occupations, such as police work and firefighting.

Next time you hear the word “psycho” spare a thought for the functional diaspora of card-carrying psychopaths who aren’t “psychos”. Who by their ruthlessness and fearlessness do good. And who, with their low-fat consciences and sugar-free emotions, execute the knife-edge transactions that can improve the lives of the rest of us. “You never know,” as Andy McNab points out, “next time you use the word ‘psycho’ it might even be as a compliment.”

Saturday, September 19, 2015

"My experience of you" vs. "real you"

It's funny once you become aware of something and it's on your radar, you start both (1) seeing other instances of it and (2) you understand what's going on in those instances. For instance, I remember at one time in my life not understanding the meaning of the Fleetwood Mac song Landslide, and I also remember there being a very specific (although I've forgotten it now, ha) moment in which I suddenly understood it and it applied perfectly to my situation at that time.

I've always liked this Bjork song, but a few months ago I finally understood it:


I watched the first episode of the Netflix comedy Grace and Frankie, sort of an odd couple dynamic between two women whose husbands leave them for each other. Frankie is hippy dippy, Grace is rich white lady. But it also had an example of the sort of defining someone's identity that I mentioned in the last post:

Frankie: I lost my best friend. You don't even like Robert. 

Grace: You have no right to judge me. You don't know us. 

Frankie [clears throat] I'm sorry, I was judging by my experience of you, not the real you. That was wrong of me. 

I thought, that's a good distinction to make -- judging by our experience of a person versus whatever the real them is. We would never assume that we know all there is to France and French people after watching a French film or visiting Paris. Why do we feel so sure of ourselves in terms of our ability to judge someone's character after seeing a similar small sliver of the real them.

Wednesday, September 16, 2015

Defining others = emotional abuse

One thing that I liked about the way the neurofeedback guy approached the whole dream interpretation thing, though, is that he didn't try to tell me who I am or what my dream meant. He asked me. My therapist is also huge on that -- will let me drift and drift and drift for months and years even until I learn a particular principle for myself. He says it's because that's essentially the best (only?) way for lasting change.

Sometimes I see people in life and here trying to tell people their truth, and I certainly have been 100% guilty of that in the past. I'm not sure if the impulse to dictate someone's truth is more likely to come from a largely ignorant or mislead desire to help or from a more ego driven desire to tear someone down or to build ourselves up as the keeper of Truths (capital T) about the world and other people. One thing that I have learned from therapy is how sacrosanct people's concept of identity is, and how so many behaviors can be traced to their identity, often negative behaviors occur when people believe that their identity is being threatened or has been mangled somehow. And one major type of psychological/emotional abuse is for the perpetrator to pretend to have the power to define the people in his or her life -- either as explicitly negative things like being stupid, no good, incompetent, ugly, or even as things that appear to be neutral but still are oppressive because some outside force as deigned to tell you what your thoughts, feelings, motives, etc. are and to try to impose their view of the world on you. These efforts are as emotionally violent to a person's sense of self or identity as punching them in the face, in fact most people would probably prefer to be punched in the face and have that unwanted invasion of one's personal space than they would an assault on the very thing that makes life seem worth living for most and what Victor Frankl credits in part to his survival in the concentration camps -- the no matter their circumstances, they still have absolute control over how they choose to view their circumstances and the power to define for themselves what they know to be basic and unassailable identity truths.

One reader posted in the "resources" post a book from this psychologist, that has coined the term "verbal abuse" and has written several books on the phenomenon:



It's interesting, she suggests that men who do this are much more likely to be trained out of it -- she believes because they have been accidentally trained into it as part of their socialization to be a "man" in this society. My brother said something like that to me once -- that he realized that he was a horrible boyfriend and was always undermining his girlfriend's sense of self in subtle ways to get her to be more what he needed and wanted her to be. After he realized what he was doing, he was able to stop. But there are others who have slipped into this behavior who apparently are not self aware enough to stop. She believes that most women emotional abusers fall into this category only because they're less likely to have stumbled into the behavior accidentally from a place of otherwise psychological normalcy. Consequently, if it shows up in women (despite all odds), there's likely something fundamentally psychologically wrong with them that is causing both the impulse to define others in this way and also is likely preventing some self-reflective insight that would help them see the truth of their behavior and get them to stop it. 

Sunday, September 13, 2015

Dream interpretation

This is the dream description I sent to the neurofeedback practitioner:

A bad guy (or multiple?) are after me for most of the dream. It gets resolved, and the bad guy gets caught. For some reason, he has hands that are like just flat circles, like the shape of a thick hamburger patty -- like a skin and flesh mitt that has been placed over his hands or that his hands have been burned and deformed intentionally that way by whatever "good guys" got him (cops?). His face is also deformed and scarred. I think his lips have been fused together so he can't talk. I think this is part of his punishment somehow for being bad, that they tried to neutralize his ability to do harm while still allowing him to exist. He doesn't get locked in prison, though, he gets locked in a walk in closet in a master bedroom suite of what sort of looks like my parent's house. I'm also staying there. Some night some time after that, we go to check on the bad guy, but he's not in the closet (we don't realize this at first for some reason, even though the door is open, maybe we think he's hiding). Then I notice bloody footprints from the sliding glass door entrance from the bedroom to the outside -- footprints that go to the closet, and then continue into the house. The other bad guy let this one out and now they're both on the loose. That's about when I wake up.

His interpretation was to ask me what the "bad guys" wanted from me. I told him that it felt like they wanted to make me like them, to disfigure me, so that I wouldn't be fit for a normal life anymore and then I would have to be with them. It reminded me a little of what the protagonist/antagonist in Boxing Helena is trying to do (that film has had such an odd lasting impression with me that I either watched that film either way too young in my development or it struck some chord of truth with me that resonates and haunts still today, I wrote about it a little here). He loves the object of his desire to much that he wants to ruin her for anyone else. Or the Crazy Love documentary, in which a woman whose ex-boyfriend that hired thugs to blind her by throwing lye in her face ends up marrying him because he was the only man “who she knew saw her as stunning rather than blind and disfigured.” I was afraid to become this woman, or to have people attempt to make me become this woman.

The neurofeedback guy suggested that maybe these bad guys  were not trying to make me like them so much as they already were parts of me that I (at one time) didn't want to be -- that they were really just aspects of myself that I had disassociated from and they were haunting me because that's still who I am at some level but have chosen not to deal with it. I actually found that to be a pretty compelling interpretation. It felt right to me, and it's odd, the dream was actually a nightmare -- it was hard to fall back asleep from it and it still haunted me a little in the days subsequent. But the moment I saw those bad guys as just these castoff parts of me, it was a light had been flicked on, so quickly did my paradigm shift. Instead of fear and confusion, I felt compassion and sorry that I had done this to myself -- I had mangled my own self. I was sorry for my childhood self and my teenage self and my young adult self and every other self that I have contorted and distorted to fit whatever my purposes were at the time (to appear to fit in, to get something out of a situation, to achieve something or maintain something that society requires a certain degree of conformity for). I sort of resolved then and there to not do that ever again, as much as I could help it. I started to think of the things that day or week that I had been trying to ignore, suppress, or repress about myself. I started doing little things to try to more openly acknowledge and express those aspects -- something as similar as getting in touch with certain friends or acquaintances or reading articles about those worlds.

The whole thing was such a revelation to me that I now wonder if dream interpretation typically has such drastic results, or if this was just a one off? It also made me think of how many other things about myself that I am oblivious too.

I have a few more thoughts about how the neurofeedback guy let me come to my own truths and didn't try to tell me what my truths are that I'll put in the next post.

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