Sunday, February 14, 2016

Probably puberty

I've been trying to get to some of my very old backlog of emails from almost two years ago. It's interesting because most people no longer care about whatever they wrote me about (e.g. my sociopath boy/girlfriend/boss/ex/parent/etc.) Some of the most interesting replies, however, are coming from people who wondered if they weren't a little sociopathic themselves. (By the way, I have stopped opining myself on this question from people -- I don't feel like I'm anywhere near a credible source, but I realize that most people who ask me do not have access to professional psychological help so I figure we can try to help a little by crowdsourcing our experiences. I know some of you hate those posts. Sorry, but as long as I think it helps people to figure things out even just a little bit, I'll probably keep posting them, as it is literally the least I could do. Compromise? You can skip reading them and I promise I won't have my feelings hurt?)

Probably not surprising to most, there's a good portion of these am-I-a-sociopath people that no longer wonder because they no longer experience those tendencies. To put it perhaps too broadly, it was just phase. I actually have been enjoying hearing back from these people because I think it helps put things in perspective for those people who are currently where they were almost two years ago.

For example, from a reader in answer to my question if he would still like a substantive reply from me:

Haha no it's all good. Long time passed, lessons learned. To be honest, I just wanted to be different and the label of sociopath was a good excuse at the time. I realized that I'm not a sociopath, I'm simply amazed by the sociopathic type. I learned that I'm fixated with welcoming the unknown. I find a melancholic beauty in things considered taboo, immoral, dark, forbidden and sadistic (such as death and dying). Even though a sum of people consider me to be a source of emotional comfort (I get really deep really fast and find out things, that some people tell me they don't tell people), I enjoy watching people suffer in almost anyway possible but! It tends to be a win win thing. so what I'm doing isn't considered wrong even though sometimes I do question my own motives but! You don't need to be a sociopath to feel comforted by death. But thank you kindly for replying haha I'm a little surprised that you did

PS. I'm in the process of acquiring a degree in psychology (feel free to tell me to fuck off, feel free to not reply) but if I ever have to write a paper on sociopaths, mind if I send you some non-relative to this conversation questions?

PPS. It probably was puberty.

Good luck to all of you out there trying to figure it out. 

Thursday, February 11, 2016

More on PTSD

From a reader, written to me previous to the other PTSD inquiry, for a second set of thoughts:

I started reading your blog a few days ago (ordered your book as well) and it's been really helpful. Not sure how many random emails you get or how happy you are to reply to or publish them on the blog, but I'm giving it a shot as this is something I've been trying to get some information and/or reflections on for a long time. 

So I'm not diagnosed with ASPD (never been assessed), but this last year the pieces have started coming together and I'm pretty sure I'm a sociopath with narcissistic tendencies. I hate admitting it but eventually I suppose you have to look at the evidence. I've tortured animals. As a kid I had a list of people I was going to kill and I knew exactly what doing that meant. I've spent my entire adult life exploiting and manipulating everyone around me for professional, monetary or sexual gain. I'm a sexual sadist and have put people in hospital for kicks. I've seen the blank look in people's eyes when they think it's all over and it's the hottest thing I've ever seen. Got a pretty standard history of drug, sex and adrenaline abuse. Don't really know how many people's lives I've ruined, but some of them are in therapy now. Just putting all of this out for factual reference. I never felt bad about doing any of these things and never really considered myself a bad person. I suppose on some level I knew what I was doing was wrong, but it's hard to make morally correct decisions when the wellbeing of other's doesn't feel relevant. I just did what I wanted and didn't really think about whether it was right or wrong.

So that's the background. Eventually it all blew up in my face when I messed with the wrong people. Was almost killed and had to literally flee the country and start a new life. Before that, these people made sure that the life I had was completely ruined. Everything I'd been built up like friends, work, networking etc vanished and everyone I thought I had under control started seeing me as a monster. And then I was abused and mindfucked by people who were way better at it than me. Ended up a total wreck, got diagnosed with PTSD. And suddenly I started feeling guilt, which I'd never really felt before. Eventually I learned that it was just regret, or at least I think so. Example: I hurt two different people in the same manner. I get away with the first one, so I don't feel guilty. I suffer consequences for the second, so I feel some kind of regret that my brain interprets as guilt. Does that make sense? I also suddenly started caring about what people thought of me or how they saw me. Nowadays I'll actually feel bad if someone dislikes me, which makes no sense as I never used to care. I'm suspecting it's the trauma. My brain interprets anyone who dislikes me as a potential threat. I may be mostly fearless but being abused and almost killed isn't something I want to repeat. My brain works a bit like this: Person dislikes me = gets others to dislike me = mob mentality = I'm dead. It's fairly irrational, but then I suppose it happened once so it could happen again. 

I suppose what I'm looking for is any insight into the connection between sociopathy and PTSD, and how this might influence one's emotional spectrum through "false" guilt or self-consciousness. My ASPD friend claims sociopaths can't be traumatised, but I'm skeptical. My life doesn't make much sense if I can't simultaneously have sociopathic traits and be traumatised, because there's evidence of both. I'm 28 and female if that's relevant. 

Tuesday, February 9, 2016

Famous sociopaths: competitive eater Jason “Crazy Legs” Conti

From a reader, with this update "FWIW, since sending this to you, I did a stint as a nude model. It allowed me to get over the idea that I - the thing emailing you now - am my body":

I was reading this article about competitive eaters: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/people-become-competitive-eaters/

Conti sounds remarkably talented, lazy, deviant, Machiavellian, charming and grandiose:

Conti is an eater with a background unlike any other. The 41-year-old Belmont, Mass., native graduated from John Hopkins University in 1993 as a three-sport athlete and went on to work an array of post-graduation jobs including bouncing at bars, window washing, donating sperm and posing as a nude model for art classes...

“Well, for one thing you get to live a bit of a rock-and-roll lifestyle,” Conti said. “Traveling, partying, groupies; it all comes with the territory.”

Wait, there are competitive eating groupies?

“Oh yeah,” Conti said. “It helps when you’re on television in a bar in a tiny four-antenna town.” Wisconsin, for example, is a great place for groupies, he said.

...

Conti shares this sentiment. “I’ve gotten to perform in front of troops stationed overseas and bring some amount of happiness to them,” he said. “I’ve seen the top 32 competitive eaters in the world shut down the all-you-can-eat buffet at the Luxor in Vegas. I’ve made a lifetime of memories through all of this. Auntie Mame once said, ‘Life is a banquet and most poor fools are starving to death.’ Well, if you’re a competitive eater that is far from the truth.”

Sunday, February 7, 2016

Graduating to every other week therapy

I've never been to summer camp. The closest I got to the experience was sixth grade camp, when as an 11 year old I went up to the mountains (snow! cold!) with all of my classmates for a week. I still have so many vivid memories of it. Everything I know about recognizing constellations I learned there, camp songs, a love/hate relationship to the hot dog, making snow survival shelters (we surely would have died if actually required to live in ours) and what seemed to be the startling amount of trust and freedom I enjoyed in leaving my family and any real responsible adult supervision and running amok in the mountains with a 15 to 1 ratio of camp counselors (barely more than children themselves) to children, and with knives and other sharp tools. Even though it was just a week, I came back from camp a changed person. Not to say that the person I was before was bad or even that I needed to change in that particular way in order to mature. Nor to say that the person I changed into was any less me than the person before. It's hard to describe the sensation, but whatever it was I was ok with it because for whatever reason I still recognized the person I became.

I recently graduated from every week therapy to every other week therapy. The change was precipitated by me reaching and maintaining a certain level of awareness and understanding about myself, other people, and the world. I feel the difference, but I also don't feel that different. I recognize who I am. I just feel more proficient, like if I had always been only a music sight reader and then finally learned how to play by ear, or vice versa. And naturally I understand the world in a more fuller and richer way, simply because now I engage with it in more ways than I did previously. Everyone has a blindspot. That was always my special talent to know growing up. Now I know better my own.

The most interesting development has been my more nuanced view of self. How is it that I am the same person I was as a too-aggressive child, a manipulative teenager, a scheming young adult, a risk-taking 30 something, and now someone who has graduated to every other week therapy. But even odder to realize is that during the periods that I was "truest" to "myself", those were when I was most engaged and satisfied by life, no matter my financial situation or family situation or anything else that may have been weighing me down in the world at large. It turned out it wasn't the fact that I was born/made a sociopath that caused most of my problems. It was actually my ill-informed adaptations to the world that I had picked up along the way that made my heart shrink and blacken. Some of you will understand what I mean and I apologize for not being able to explain better, but it was the societal emphasis and rewards based almost solely on appearances, end results, and bottom lines that created all of the wrong incentives -- versus a focus on the process over the outcome and learning through making mistakes = ok and understanding that society will (and must) adapt to you sometimes, it can't always be you adapting to it, and how to know when is when and what is what. Self-awareness about my sociopathic tendencies didn't make me better, it made me worse as I came to internalize how unpalatable that was in society. That's when my behavior became so aggressive, passive, hollow, desperate, and impotent. That's when I started wearing masks basically all of the time. Sayonara to my sense of self. I may have hurt others a little less but it was accomplished by hurting myself much more. Because I could always fit square pegs into round holes, even if it got a little ugly and I got dirty doing it. And it felt like that was the solution -- that was what was being asked of me as part of my faustian deal to make things go down easier for me, to avoid having to deal with any negativity or fall out based on anyone's disapproval.

But now I wonder, what to say to everyone? How do I respond to people who email me? How can I communicate this adequately to others so that they won't make the same mistake -- won't wait until there are decades of barnacles of garbage encrusting them, until they finally cease being recognizable to themselves, before they realize that who they are is not a problem that needs fixing. I want my little relatives to know this, you all, anyone who also will wonder about the meaning of the lyrics to Landslide or wonder what does it feel like to keep living (and most paradoxically keep changing) after you feel like you've finally discovered who you really are. To know how to resonate with this life, both so maddeningly static and so dynamic. And to learn what one must never, never sacrifice, even just to get by, even if it seems like that is what is being required of you to do. 

Friday, February 5, 2016

Mr. Robot's reduction of people to patterns

I started watching the tv show Mr. Robot. I have never done much programming. I guess the closest I have come is working in Excel, which I have done since I was a tween, and maybe some basic coding that they you used to teach youngsters back when computers were much simpler in a way (does anyone remember DOS?).  But I really did enjoy it. I enjoyed the predictability and the knowing that if you pulled this lever you got this result. I even enjoyed trying to pull a lever and getting the wrong result, because it was just a puzzle to solve -- a puzzle that I knew had an answer just waiting for me to discover. It's no surprise I often thought of people that way too, and so does the main character of Mr. Robot.

The anti-social protagonist hacks everyone he knows to find out all about them. It gives him the illusion of knowing people. He says that he is very good at reading people. And he is in a way, in the sense that so many normal people are terribly predictable -- looking for love in all the wrong places, etc. But I have also seen other real life people, particularly with personality disorders, similarly attempt to reduce people to patterns and predictions and it seems ridiculously sysiphean to me -- often by the time you recognize a pattern, the person or situation has changed and your data is stale. Moreover, to my eyes, they are clearly less successful and accurate with it than they believe themselves to be. And so in maintaining those beliefs that (1) people can be easily reduced to knowable patterns and (2) that they have successfully reduced people to those said patterns, those types appear a little delusional to me. (I'm sure that I am the same with my delusions.)

With all of that said, I still think there is something very useful and often powerful about being able to recognize the patterns in the people around us (even if it will never give us as clear a picture of each other as we might fool ourselves into believing).

A reader gives a similar math analogy:

The environment in which I grew up was certainly governed by physical violence. This enviornment, however, had a steadily balanced input from both sides of morality/ethics: at school was the common child's play, at home was my father's emotional instability brought on from too much drink, at the gym was the overzealous, self-righteous police. Through my Grandparents, at home, I received a clearer understanding of an ethical/moral constitution for a Family man. From the gym I was able to glean between the Warrior's code of conduct (almost Nietzschiean in its focus on self-control  and discipline), and the police offered the legal ramifications of societies expectations. Through these I was able to become Nietzsche's Child, Campbell's Self Revolving Wheel, where, in his Discourse of The Three Metamorphoses, I compiled my own codes; allowing me to adapt to whatever the environment I found myself expected. For me, this was a mathematical puzzle; just as language is an algebraic formula wherein the values are interchangeable and the formula remains the same.
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