Tween sociopath?

From a reader:

Hi. This may not interest you in the slightest, but I have a question.

I am only 14 years old. This statement probably has already made you roll your eyes, saying, "Ah yes, another special snowflake teenager."

But I can't go to any of my family for things like this. They won't understand it, and they'll get angry at me for me believing that I display some sociopathic tendencies.

Here are a few things about what I've noticed about myself:

To begin with, I can't think of a time that I have ever felt guilty, remorseful, or ashamed of any of my actions. In my mind, they are completely justified. There have been many times where I've betrayed a friend for my own personal gain, and I've never felt bad, because I am benefitting. I don't care. My closest friend for eight years has recently told me that she sometimes can't stand being around me, because I can be very two-faced.

I didn't feel bad. I apologized, of course, but I didn't mean it. I just didn't want to start drama. It'd stress me out, as I have school and other things to worry about aside from maintaining appearance.

I lie a lot. I don't do it to get out of trouble, but I want to see how far it can go. I want to see how much I can make someone believe something with just my expression and words. It's interesting. I want to see who can spot out my lies, and who can't. How to better myself. These lies tend to be rather extravagant at first, and then I use smaller ones to build up a sort of story around it, backing up evidence.

I'm very intelligent. I skipped a grade in school, and am now a sophomore in high school. My research on this subject says that most sociopaths are highly intelligent.

People who know me say that I'm very attractive in the sense that I provide a comforting aura. People find it easy to tell me things. I'm not much good at maintaining friends, per say, but I have strings of acquaintances who find me a good secret keeper.

I'm not good at branching out myself, and I feel that I have to conform to fit in with other people.

I have been working for the past year to pass up the one girl who may be top of my class, instead of me. I can't stand not being better than everyone. I have recurring dreams in which she's gone. I don't know how, but I do know that I take the spot that I rightfully deserve: first.

That may sound petty. Maybe it's a teenage thing to want to be the alpha dog.

The only person I know that thinks even a little bit like how I do truly believes that she's the most, 'damaged, mentally unstable, different' girl in the world. Last year, I called her out on all of her theatrics. She burst into tears.

I walked away. Hearing people cry is annoying.

I've never really romantically loved someone. Then again, I'm 14. What do I know of such things?

I'm not worried about finding out that I'm a sociopath - if I am one, and not just some girl with a strange personality and odd habits. It's just piqued my curiosity.

It'd be fantastic if you could tell me if these were things you struggled with as a child, and if you think I may be a sociopath.

Sociopath causation

One interesting thing about law school is learning what does it mean for something to have caused something else. We talk about it in different ways, the "but for" cause, the last clear chance, and we hear crazy hypotheticals like someone who has been pushed off a 100 story building, but as they are falling they get shot dead by someone on the 50th story and who is the one who caused the death (the shooter, the pusher gets off on attempted murder although they still get to benefit from the result they were seeking, i.e. death).

I thought this comment from an older post was an interesting analysis of the harm that sociopaths really cause in relationships:

I just thought of something that nobody here seems to have pointed out. Sociopaths are human, and like any relationship with a human it depends on attraction, chemistry, compatibility, shared interests, etc. Some people who are burned in these relationships where there was constant fighting, etc., probably would have had bad relationships with the person anyway, even if they didn't have this condition, due to lack of other things that would keep the relationship together. 

I'm sure there are sociopaths who have longterm relationships that aren't that bad. I'm not saying their behaviour is easy to deal with, but if you think of it as a sort of disability, there are all sorts of people dating others who have various kinds of disabilities. I'm sure also a lot of sociopaths might really like their partner or care about them to the extent they are able to and it's probably really hard for them to go against their nature to try to be someone they are not, to please another person. I think it must be exhausting to have to constantly act and pretend for the benefit of others and know you will never be loved and accepted if you let the mask slip and just be who you really are. Also not all sociopaths have this disorder to the same extent. Not every one of them is violent or commit crimes. I think you'd have to look at the quality of your relationship and interactions with the person as an individual and take it case by case. One size doesn't fit all.

The self-violence of conscience

This ("Against Self-Criticism") was an interesting Adam Phillips piece in the London Review of Books about the harm that conscience often causes in the bearer due to self-judgment. Excerpts:

Lacan said that there was surely something ironic about Christ’s injunction to love thy neighbour as thyself – because actually, of course, people hate themselves. Or you could say that, given the way people treat one another, perhaps they had always loved their neighbours in the way they loved themselves: that is, with a good deal of cruelty and disregard. 
***
‘The loathing which should drive [Hamlet] on to revenge,’ Freud writes, ‘is replaced in him by self-reproaches, by scruples of conscience, which remind him that he himself is literally no better than the sinner whom he is to punish.’ Hamlet, in Freud’s view, turns the murderous aggression he feels towards Claudius against himself: conscience is the consequence of uncompleted revenge. Originally there were other people we wanted to murder but this was too dangerous, so we murder ourselves through self-reproach, and we murder ourselves to punish ourselves for having such murderous thoughts. Freud uses Hamlet to say that conscience is a form of character assassination, the character assassination of everyday life, whereby we continually, if unconsciously, mutilate and deform our own character. So unrelenting is this internal violence that we have no idea what we’d be like without it. We know almost nothing about ourselves because we judge ourselves before we have a chance to see ourselves.

Freud is showing us how conscience obscures self-knowledge, intimating indeed that this may be its primary function: when we judge the self it can’t be known; guilt hides it in the guise of exposing it. This allows us to think that it is complicitous not to stand up to the internal tyranny of what is only one part – a small but loud part – of the self. So frightened are we by the super-ego that we identify with it: we speak on its behalf to avoid antagonising it (complicity is delegated bullying). 

Like a malign parent it harms in the guise of protecting; it exploits in the guise of providing good guidance. In the name of health and safety it creates a life of terror and self-estrangement. There is a great difference between not doing something out of fear of punishment, and not doing something because one believes it is wrong. Guilt isn’t necessarily a good clue as to what one values; it is only a good clue about what (or whom) one fears. Not doing something because one will feel guilty if one does it is not necessarily a good reason not to do it. Morality born of intimidation is immoral. 
***
Just as the overprotected child believes that the world must be very dangerous and he must be very weak if he requires so much protection (and the parents must be very strong if they are able to protect him from all this), so we have been terrorised by all this censorship and judgment into believing that we are radically dangerous to ourselves and others.
***
The first quarto of Hamlet has, ‘Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,’ while the second quarto has, ‘Thus conscience does make cowards.’ If conscience makes cowards of us all, then we’re all in the same boat; this is just the way it is. If conscience makes cowards we can more easily wonder what else it might be able to make. Either way, and they’re clearly different, conscience makes something of us: it is a maker, if not of selves, then of something about selves; it is an internal artist, of a kind. Freud says that the super-ego is something we make; it in turn makes something of us, turns us into a certain kind of person (just as, say, Frankenstein’s monster turns Frankenstein into something that he wasn’t before he made the monster). The super-ego casts us as certain kinds of character; it, as it were, tells us who we really are; it is an essentialist; it claims to know us in a way that no one else, including ourselves, can ever do. And, like a mad god, it is omniscient: it behaves as if it can predict the future by claiming to know the consequences of our actions – when we know, in a more imaginative part of ourselves, that most actions are morally equivocal, and change over time in our estimation. (No apparently self-destructive act is ever only self-destructive, no good is purely and simply that.) Self-criticism is an unforbidden pleasure: we seem to relish the way it makes us suffer. Unforbidden pleasures are the pleasures we don’t particularly want to think about: we just implicitly take it for granted that each day will bring its necessary quotient of self-disappointment, that every day we will fail to be as good as we should be; but without our being given the resources, the language, to wonder who or what is setting the pace, or where these rather punishing standards come from. How can we find out what we think of all this when conscience never lets go?

I know plenty of people who have this relationship with their consciences. It's kind of sad but more disturbing.

And finally a fascinating support of different forms of expression and the interpretations thereof:

After interpreting Hamlet’s apparent procrastinations with the new-found authority of the new psychoanalyst, Freud feels the need to add something by way of qualification that is at once a loophole and a limit. ‘But just as all neurotic symptoms,’ he writes, ‘and, for that matter, dreams, are capable of being “over-interpreted”, and indeed need to be, if they are to be fully understood, so all genuinely creative writings are the product of more than a single impulse in the poet’s mind, and are open to more than a single interpretation.’ It is as though Freud’s guilt about his own aggression in asserting his interpretation of what he calls the ‘deepest layers’ in Hamlet – his claim to sovereignty over the text and the character of Hamlet – leads him to open up the play having closed it down. You can only understand anything that matters – dreams, neurotic symptoms, people, literature – by over-interpreting it; by seeing it, from different aspects, as the product of multiple impulses. Over-interpretation, here, means not settling for a single interpretation, however apparently compelling. The implication – which hints at Freud’s ongoing suspicion, i.e. ambivalence, about psychoanalysis – is that the more persuasive, the more authoritative the interpretation the less credible it is, or should be. If one interpretation explained Hamlet we wouldn’t need Hamlet anymore: Hamlet as a play would have been murdered. Over-interpretation means not being stopped in your tracks by what you are most persuaded by; to believe in a single interpretation is radically to misunderstand the object one is interpreting, and interpretation itself.

On Morality

From a reader:

Recently read Joan Didion's collection of essays, "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," I recommend the essay titled, "On Morality." Reminded of your views on mob mentality and the impossibility of a collective conscience. Here's a link to the essay, http://columbian.tiffin.k12.oh.us/subsites/Jennifer-Musgrave/documents/AP%20Language%20and%20Composition/120-Didion-On-Morality.pdf

Cool quote, “I followed my own conscience.” “I did what I thought was right.” How many madmen have said it and meant it? How many murderers? Klaus Fuchs said it, and the men who committed the Mountain Meadows Massacre said it, and Alfred Rosenberg said it. And, as we are rotely and rather presumptuously reminded by those who would say it now, Jesus said it. Maybe we have all said it, and maybe we have been wrong. Except on that most primitive level—our loyalties to those we love—what could be more  arrogant than to claim the primacy of personal conscience?"

Another good quote from the link:

Of course you will say that I do not have the right, even if I had the power, to inflict that unreasonable conscience upon you; nor do I want you to inflict your conscience, however reasonable, however enlightened, upon me. (“We must be aware of the dangers which lie in our most generous wishes,” Lionel Trilling once wrote. “Some paradox of our nature leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them the objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion.”) That the ethic of conscience is intrinsically insidious seems scarcely a revelatory point, but it is one raised with increasing infrequency; even those who do raise it tend to segue with troubling readiness into the quite contradictory position that the ethic of conscience is dangerous when it is “wrong,” and admirable when it is “right.”

You see I want to be quite obstinate about insisting that we have no way of knowing – beyond that fundamental loyalty to the social code – what is “right” and what is “wrong,” what is “good” and what “evil.” I dwell so upon this because the most disturbing aspect of “morality” seems to me to be the frequency with which the word now appears; in the press, on television, in the most perfunctory kinds of conversation. Questions of straightforward power (or survival) politics, questions of quite indifferent public policy, questions of almost anything; they are all assigned these factitious moral burdens. There is something quite facile going on, some self-indulgence at work. Of course we would all like to “believe” in something, like to assuage our private guilts in public causes, like to lose our tiresome selves; like, perhaps, to transform the white flag of defeat at home into the brave white banner of battle away from home. And of course it is all right to do that; that is how, immemorially, things have gotten done. But I think it is all right only so long as we do not delude ourselves about what we are doing, and why. It is all right only so long as we remember that all the ad hoc committees, all the picket lines, all the brave signatures in The New York Times, all the tools of agitprop straight across the spectrum, do not confer upon anyone any ipso facto virtue. It is all right only so long as we recognize that the end may or may not be expedient, may or may not be a good idea, but in any case has nothing to with “morality.” Because when we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble. And I suspect we are already there.

Lack of self-awareness leads to transparency

Bruce Lee (via Brainpickings) asserts:

We can see through others only when we see through ourselves.

Lack of self-awareness renders us transparent; a soul that knows itself is opaque.

I find this to be true. I think it's particularly well illustrated by one narrow facet of life. If you look at an infant, it is almost not self-aware at all. It lives every thought, every feeling, every bowel movement as if it is not being observed, either not even by its own self. Eventually it becomes a child, but there is still a lack of self-awareness, things that are not even on its radar. The child picks his nose, it throws tantrums, it does all manner of things that are considered ridiculous or at least transparent by its observers. It is not aware that it is being judged for these acts. It does not see any ridiculousness in its actions.

You see this in adults all of the time too (every adult, every person, including me). Maybe it's the couple that doesn't seem to understand that the way they fight in public shows that one or both have a rigid interpretation of gender roles. Maybe it's someone's championship of Donald Trump as someone who "tells things like they really are" at an office holiday party that suggests that their vision of the world is one of relative intolerance. Maybe it's the over defensiveness someone gets over a particular issue that suggests that this is a sore spot. 

But I really wonder, if Bruce Lee is correct, is it just that people like that seem transparent to others because they're not as adept at hiding those particular traits (or don't realize that they probably should be hiding those particular traits)? Is it just about the breach of social norms that make these people seem transparent to me and others? If so, that makes Bruce Lee seem less wise. 

But I think it is more than that, there's more to it than just noticing the violation of social norms. Because today I saw a young teenage girl in Christmas performance spring up to the stage and back down with the same sort of exaggerated springing body movements of a very excited three year old. It was definitely a violation of social norms. I thought that most people in the audience would identify that sort of behavior as immature. But it also had such a purity, such a lack of affectation to it -- as if she was self-aware, just not social norm aware, and just being true to herself and whatever it is that she wanted to do in that moment with regard for keeping up appearances. And she didn't seem transparent to me. She still seemed opaque. So it seems like it's not just about knowing what masks to wear to hide our true selves? But also, how is it that sociopaths are so good at reading people? Is it that they are more self-aware than most? Or perhaps more self-aware of the role of cultural expectations in which they live?

Another thought from Bruce Lee describing a problem that a lot of people experience, and for sure I see it in personality disorders that have a tendency to create a false self and have weak self-awareness (e.g. narcissism):

To become different from what we are, we must have some awareness of what we are… Yet it is remarkable that the very people who are most self-dissatisfied and crave most for a new identity have the least self-awareness. They have turned away from an unwanted self and hence never had a good look at it. The result is that those most dissatisfied can neither dissimulate nor attain a real change of heart. They are transparent, and their unwanted qualities persist through all attempts at self-dramatization and self-transformation.

And a parting thought that seems to reference the external control fallacy that got referenced in this post on cognitive distortion:

There is a powerful craving in most of us to see ourselves as instruments in the hands of others and thus free ourselves from the responsibility for acts that are prompted by our own questionable inclinations and impulses. Both the strong and the weak grasp at the alibi. The latter hide their malevolence under the virtue of obedience; they acted dishonorably because they had to obey orders. The strong, too, claim absolution by proclaiming themselves the chosen instrument of a higher power — God, history, fate, nation, or humanity.