Sunday, January 24, 2016

Lack of self-reflection?

A belief about sociopaths that I hear pop up quite a bit, including from some people who are somewhat inculcated in the field of psychology, is that a sociopath would never self reflect and wonder if they were a sociopath. I have always wondered what the source of that factual statement is? Does anyone know?

Also, I'm curious what the explanation would be if such a phenomenon were true. Are sociopaths then just very unself-aware? How is it that they are able to manipulate and read people if they can't figure out something so obvious as matching a series of diagnostic criterion to a list of basic personality traits? Or do sociopaths supposedly think too much of themselves to even consider themselves damaged? Because the thing is that I don't think I know of a single sociopath (including the thousands that have written to me and that I've encountered in other venues) who considers sociopathy to describe something bad/damaged, particularly not at first. They all seem to have, at most, sort of a gee whiz reaction, like -- there may be something to that, but who cares, that's just how things are -- or perhaps even more often -- well, of course, who wouldn't want to have those traits and be able to do these things? So I don't think the grandiosity prevents this type of self-reflection either because the sociopath doesn't see the label as conflicting with something great and remarkable.

In fact, it doesn't even require that much self-reflection to recognize oneself as a sociopath when you think about it. I think it's pretty obvious to us that we're different. And we certainly use particular traits often enough (daily) that even if we hadn't thought of it much before, if someone told us what manipulation was and then asked us if we were manipulative, we'd see that we are.

Even my down syndrome relatives are aware of their disorder, despite one being quite low functioning. Still, they don't lack the capacity to understand that there is something different about them from the other people they know. I know that they experience frustration with their difficulty in communication. I know that they understand that the lives they live are drastically different from everyone they see around them. And even though they have somewhat the minds of children, they are also keenly aware that they are adults, if for not other reason than their sexuality, or now the physical aches and pains of aging. And if they can figure something like that out, it seems almost crazy to think that sociopaths would categorically be incapable of doing likewise.

A reader mentions this issue among others:

I'm a 27 year old female, that has been doing some self reflection, because lately my views on things have changed over the past few months. A little of my background history, I was born with an absent father, although in my early years I didn't understand the situation, and in my teenage years I became angry because of my lack of a father figure I began to question my value. My mother was always a very good parent in my opinion and always tried her hardest to provide for me, also no abuse or violence in my family. In high school I was shy and consequently bullied. One day as I passing notes, I had written something that was read by a teacher, and subsequently I was escorted out of the school and taken to a Mental health facility for two weeks. I don't recall the contents of the note something violent in nature I suppose, but in any event I was treated for depression because I had also been cutting at the time. I was treated by a psychiatrist all throughout high school and after I graduated. On and off depression medication for years. Once I graduated, I began to participate in activities with others that I never did in High School because I was shy and withdrawn such as pot smoking and various sexual conquests. I must make a side side note on my activities, I never had any regrets with anything I've done, or still don't. I got involved with a man when I was 19, and he was 50 years old, not because I ever had feelings for him, but because of his infatuation for me, allowed me to use him for things. He bought me a smartphone, bought me alcohol, drugs, took me to really nice hotels to spend the night, and all I had to do was be intimate with him. I realize that he was using me as well. I'm positive he was going through a mid life crisis, but it never bothered me. He had a girlfriend at the time, but to me they weren't married, and I wasn't serious about him. In my mind I was learning something about relationships and people and gaining experience in how to deal with people. One story always entertained me, he didn't mind what I did to him, I guess he liked women who were very dominate in their relationships, so I pushed that. I suggested cutting him, so I could take his blood, he let me, I didn't like bloodletting in the end but I kept pushing, it was fun. I had a bike chain in my hand one night because I wanted to chain him up but I had an idea, I asked him if he thought I would hit him with it, he said something like he didn't know if I would, then I hit him with it. The next day he had a gash on his cheek and a huge bruise. When it happened I felt excitement not guilt, it was liberating in a way. Of course I feigned guilt and pretended that I was sorry, and all was forgiven. After awhile I eventually got tired of that relationship, but I guess I had taken it too far, and his girlfriend found out and had him end it. I didn't think twice about it. Eventually I grew out out of the party scene as I got older and I matured. I still had depression up until two years ago when it simply disappeared. I still suffer with minute anxiety which is manageable. I have to say the only times in my past I actually got upset was when I was wronged in some way, but I had depression during those times. But recently I have been "feeling"  especially apathetic. I don't understand why people are so emotional or empathetic, it annoys me when people are so fake when people tell them about their problems, I hate that I have to pretend to be sympathetic. I honestly have only two people I care about my boyfriend, and my Mother, the latter I would die for. Everyone else could die tommorow and I wouldn't care. I don't care about a lot of things, and people surrounding me always think I am just a very patient person, but I truly don't care. Based on the information I have given is it possible I am a sociopath? I am curious, but I also have read that sociopath's don't research who they are and don't care. I'm not worried, I am amused with myself, and am curious about the human mind, mine in particular. I would appreciate your insight. 

Friday, January 22, 2016

Levenson Self-Report Psychopathy Scale

Someone sent me their results from what looks like a personality test on this website: http://personality-testing.info/tests/LSRP.php

My initial thought is this is not going to be legit, but I didn't take it. Has anyone else seen this?

Here's another ethically problematic video re tests: http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/brain-games/videos/are-you-a-psychopath/

Actually, the last link reminds me of my genius reality tv show idea. Let me know if you have contacts. :)



Wednesday, January 20, 2016

It's not personal

The Godfather taught us that some things are just business, not personal. I've had to explain to a lot of people in the past few years that so much of what I do does not generate from any feelings of sadism or pleasure in the pain of others, but simple pragmatism/instrumentalism in which someone or something has just been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I thought this recent-ish comment described something similar:

"to sit and smalltalk with other people about weather, for no other purpose than "to do so", does not fit the average psychopath"

Well it certainly doesn't appeal to me. I love having one-to-one conversations about interesting topics but I admit it's for the purpose of deepening my understanding and widening my views.

Here's another sign of (my) socio Christmas: I never buy presents to my friends/family. I say that it's because I don't like the stress and Christmas should be about chilling out etc but really I just don't see the point and don't want to spend my money on others – except for my clients, in which case I consider it a marketing expense.

I'm not bothered about receiving presents either. I think quite often people think that sociopaths are people that want attention and gifts etc but I'm the opposite. And anyway I think people often confuse sociopaths and narcissists. I don't like giving affection and I don't want it back. I also don't like being admired and it actually sometimes really irritates me if I get those kind of vibes.

I guess I'm the type of a sociopath who doesn't feel the need for other people but I don't feel the need to hurt them either. It just sometimes happens that when people annoy me for whatever reason I ignore them or dump them or dismiss them and do something that they think is hurtful. But its never for the sake of harming others but more like the people just get on the way of what I want. This wasn't meant to sound like me giving excuses, I'm just thinking out loud.

Another thing I thought here is that maybe this is just more what a sociopathic traits look like when they manifest in a female who is also introverted?

Monday, January 18, 2016

Evil wants an evil response

One of my mantras for the past year or so is evil wants an evil response (see here). But let me back up. One thing that has always bothered me about having my particular brain wiring is that despite craving power and control, it has traditionally been so easy to push me over the edge, lose my temper, make me angry. I get caught up in power struggles sometimes and make a bigger deal out of things than they warrant because I get ego hurt or my mind just seems to crave that particular stimulus.

But in the past couple of years of trying to find a better balance in my psychological and emotional life, the mantra helps me to understand that in having that reaction of anger against something that rankles me, I am at worst playing into my opponent's hands and at best losing control and perspective. There's actually a sort of suggestion in Mormon theology that enmity is its own sort of currency -- that you can stir up and use enmity to do plenty of momentous things that not even mountains of gold would do (think French Revolution or Hitler). And so our enmity often makes us pawns as well, and in fighting people that are filled with enmity, we're often just fighting pawns. (For some of you nerdier types, it's like when I tried to explain to my little relatives that Emperor Palpatine from Star Wars was leading both sides of the clone wars, but they couldn't understand how a war (every war?) could really just be fought completely by pawns against pawns, and of the same man.)

Martin Luther King Jr. (happy MLK Jr Day U.S.!) put it this way:

"The attack is directed against forces of evil rather than against persons who happen to be doing the evil. It is the evil that the nonviolent resister seeks to defeat, not the persons victimized by the evil. If he is opposing racial injustice, the nonviolent resister has the vision to see that the basic tension is not between the races… The tension is, at bottom, between justice and injustice, between the forces of light and the forces of darkness…. We are out to defeat injustice and not white persons who may be unjust."

Or Marcus Aurelius:

"When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own — not of the same blood or birth, but of the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands, and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are obstructions."

Friday, January 15, 2016

Compassion (victimhood) vs. agency (accountability)

I've noticed in law school that smart people with one viewpoint or ideology who surround themselves with people of an opposing viewpoint or ideology tend to be 3-5 years ahead of the general thought trend amongst the class of people who consider themselves educated (by that, I mainly mean people who read the NY Times, just because I am not sure by how else to refer to them).  Philosopher Martha Nussbaum is one of these types of people. As much as I don't often agree with some of her ideas (animal rights?), hers is a rare mind that understands not just the reasons that she believes make her right, but all of the reasons that others think she is wrong. Which is sort of reassuring in reading her work. In her book Upheavals of Thought, as excerpted by Brain Pickings, she discusses the interesting interplay and intersection between agency and victimhood. True to what I just described, she anticipates some of the backlash against the cult of victimhood (published in 2001! 14 years before college students begin protesting microaggressions, amazingly prescient), but argues that the backlash goes too far -- that although identifying as a victim could be a worryingly disempowering tactic for the would-be victim, we also can't deny that people are often hurt by the world in ways that they do not deserve:

Compassion requires the judgment that there are serious bad things that happen to others through no fault of their own. In its classic tragic form, it imagines that a person possessed of basic human dignity has been injured by life on a grand scale. So it adopts a thoroughly anti-Stoic picture of the world, according to which human beings are both dignified and needy, and in which dignity and neediness interact in complex ways… The basic worth of a human being remains, even when the world has done its worst. But this does not mean that the human being has not been profoundly damaged, both outwardly and inwardly.

The society that incorporates the perspective of tragic compassion into its basic design thus begins with a general insight: people are dignified agents, but they are also, frequently, victims. Agency and victimhood are not incompatible: indeed, only the capacity for agency makes victimhood tragic. In American society today, by contrast, we often hear that we have a stark and binary choice, between regarding people as agents and regarding them as victims. We encounter this contrast when social welfare programs are debated: it is said that to give people various forms of social support is to treat them as victims of life’s ills, rather than to respect them as agents, capable of working to better their own lot.
***
We find the same contrast in recent feminist debates, where we are told that respecting women as agents is incompatible with a strong concern to protect them from rape, sexual harassment, and other forms of unequal treatment. To protect women is to presume that they can’t fight on their own against this ill treatment; this, in turn, is to treat them like mere victims and to undermine their dignity.

[…]

We are offered the same contrast, again, in debates about criminal sentencing, where we are urged to think that any sympathy shown to a criminal defendant on account of a deprived social background or other misfortune such as child sexual abuse is, once again, a denial of the defendant’s human dignity. Justice Thomas, for example, went so far as to say, in a 1994 speech, that when black people and poor people are shown sympathy for their background when they commit crimes, they are being treated like children, “or even worse, treated like animals without a soul.”
***
If, then, we hear political actors saying such things about women, and poor people, and racial minorities, we should first of all ask why they are being singled out: what is there about the situation of being poor, or female, or black that means that help is condescending, and compassion insulting?

She discusses why she believes people are reluctant to acknowledge true victims, essentially an application of the just world fallacy (the belief that the world must be ultimately basically fair):

The victim shows us something about our own lives: we see that we too are vulnerable to misfortune, that we are not any different from the people whose fate we are watching, and we therefore have reason to fear a similar reversal.

One thing that has been interesting about being more public about having a personality disorder that is largely loathed by a large segment of the population is the lack of compassion. The truth is that the sociopath is its own type of victim. No one chooses to have a personality disorder. A sociopath is a victim of genes and environment that triggered those genes at such an early age that the sociopath does not even remember that time period. The sociopath likely was preverbal. The sociopath for sure was an infant, toddler, or small child. The sociopath lacked almost any control over what was done to him or her and certainly had no understanding about the consequences of those experiences, nor had any adequate coping skills or ability to have chosen to develop otherwise.

So the agency/compassion distinction is big with sociopaths, and really all personality disorders and a lot of mental health problems that are stigmatized. On the one hand, society really must demand a certain sort of responsibility for actions and conformity to basic rules of behavior (i.e. agency), even from those who have different brain wiring. Ok, but why do we have to hate people with different brain wiring? The agency/compassion distinction does not mean that they're mutually exclusive, right? Can't we both have compassion for people and hold them responsible for their actions? Or I guess a slightly different question is, can't we hold people responsible for their actions without necessarily blaming them for their actions? 
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