Bonding over bullying

I've been meaning to post about this Invisibilia episode for ages, and also saw this comment from a somewhat recent post that made me want to post it again, and finally have gotten around to it.

So the Invisibilia episode is worth listening to fully, at least the first half of it. It talks about a woman who has always been treated badly, bullied, and even villified, and she had no idea why. She's high functioning -- a doctor -- but she found social interactions to be very difficult. She describes the worst of many similar episodes of bullying:

The worst thing that ever happened was, I was at summer camp, and I don't know what I did. I have no idea. But they actually bound and gagged me and took me out of the cabin at night in the rain and put me outside, and it was just awful.

Here's why: "Kim's brain is not great at seeing emotion. When she looks out at the world, she physically sees all the things that most people see. It's just that much of the emotion is subtracted. Though for most of her life, she didn't realize that, and so her interactions with other kids could be difficult."

She undergoes TMS, transcranial magnetic stimulation, which some of you may remember from Wisdom of Psychopaths: "Basically in TMS you take this very fancy magnet, hold it to the scalp and send pulses through the skull to get brain cells to activate in a different way. They typically change for a very short period of time - between 15 and 40 minutes."

During TMS, she experiences for the first time an awareness of the emotional world, and realizes that this whole time she has been missing out on millions of emotional cues from the people around her. She says that she would have otherwise had no idea that such a world existed before, because she had always just believed that the way she saw the world was the way the world actually was (sound familiar to all of you out there?).

I thought the hosts had an interesting reaction to her realization that the world was different than she thought it was -- as if maybe she would have been better off not knowing. But she doesn't see it that way at all:

But even though TMS has not changed Kim's ability to see long-term, she says she's still happy she got it. She says she thinks a lot about one of the videos she was shown. In it, two employees were saying mean things to a fellow employee named Frank. And Kim says the first time she watched it before the TMS, she couldn't answer any of the questions the researchers were asking about it. But afterwards, she understood not only the video but also one of the big mysteries that had dominated much of her life.

KIM: It never made any sense to me as to why people would be mean to somebody else. Why would you be mean to somebody? And what I saw is that when the two employees were there and were talking together and then were giving Frank a hard time, the primary thing was not that they were trying to be mean to Frank.

The primary thing is that they were bonding, building a bond between the two of them. And it was simply the means to do it was to be nasty to Frank. And then I was like, oh, maybe that's what these kids were doing when they were bullying me.

SPIEGEL: It's much easier to live in a world which makes sense, where people are mean not just for fun but because they, like everyone else, want to belong and feel safe. Now that's the world that Kim lives in. 

This same phenomenon of bonding over bullying was referenced in the comment I mentioned above:

But I also made the experience, that the team spirit in a group is rising if there is a common "enemy/victim". Well it's at the victims expense but for the rest of the group and their friendships it is something positive... Anyway, I don't know if this phenomenon is also visible in a group consisting of various sociopaths.

The point of the podcast was that everyone has blindspots -- everyone has a certain viewpoint that by its very nature is limited. As much as Kim was blind to emotions and sociopaths are blind to morality, empaths are also blind to the random things they get up to -- like bonding over bullying. The key is to have just a little bit of intellectual humility to admit the possibility that the way you see the world may not be 100% accurate. 

What/when change is possible

My therapist often deals with bosses, spouses, church leaders, probation officers, etc. who inquire as to whether and how fast behavioral change is possible with someone who suffers from mental problems. He tells them that change is almost always possible, it's just not often possible in that moment. For example, someone who struggles with rage issues may be able to learn to control their temper through years of training and self knowledge and growth, but they may be completely incapable of controlling their temper in any given moment. He says that this restricted ability to control behavior, where mental hardwiring meets a deficit of willpower or skill level, is really hard for people to understand who don't suffer from similar deficiencies in those areas. First, it feels like the person is cheating, coasting through life on excuses while the rest of us have to try so hard. Second, it's difficult to understand how someone couldn't just be able to make a choice in that moment to do something differently, e.g. "just relax".

A lot of people have experienced this frustration with me over the years,. Recently, though, I've had extensive experience with it myself from someone else who has a very entrenched personality disorder, but also has started suffering from major depression symptoms. For various reasons, I am to a large extent responsible for this person and must interact with him various times a week. And every week there is some new flavor of dysfunction going on in his life, despite a comprehensive cocktail of medication and weekly therapy. This week, it's an inability to get out of bed for anything but work. He is already suffering pretty serious health consequences from a lack of exercise, for which he is taking another set of medications. All of his doctors, mental and physical health, tell him to keep trying to exercise. He knows that it will improve not just his physical health, but his depression as well. He knows that he enjoys getting out and walking in nature. But it is just very difficult for him to do it, so difficult that he doesn't quite go to the trouble of trying. I have a very tough time relating to this, and after years of dealing with nearly limitless levels and varieties of dysfunction, my frustration levels can get pretty high.

The crazy thing is that I would have never had this experience at my most sociopathic self. There would be a snowflake's chance in hell that I would have continued to deal with someone like this for longer than a few weeks, maybe a few months in exceptional circumstances. So I've never actually had to confront this type of frustration at someone's inadequacies. The one great thing that has come out of it is that I now have much more cognitive empathy and understanding for what people have to deal with on the other side of the mental health problem equation -- the people without the seemingly intractable problem, but still have to deal with it on a regular basis.

But I think of a parallel -- my grandmother, who suffered a stroke and had to undergo a sequence of physical therapies. She did get better over time -- better bladder control, speech, decreased paralysis, etc. There were also some things that she didn't get appreciably better at -- lack of inhibition, sense of decorum or propriety, respect for the privacy of others, demonstrating an adult level of patience, and certain types of emotional regulation. She had in many ways the mind of a child to her death, but I bet that even in those things she could have seen further improvement -- too bad she didn't live 50 more years to reach that point in her trajectory.

And I know that as much as I have improved over the past few years -- almost no manipulation, more in touch with my emotions, stronger sense of self and identity -- there are still things I probably won't ever be able to do -- affective empathy, strong emotional theory of mind, understanding subtle emotional cues, conforming more closely to social norms and expectations, etc. Or maybe I will, it will just take some future brain surgery and/or 50 years of training. We'll see. 

Avoiding seeing red

My peacemaker brother was telling me today about some of the weird things he'll do, like park his car somewhere else after he's done pumping gas but needs to go inside the store for something, because he's worried that people will be put out or upset, or a handful of other weird things like that they seem almost overly considerate and polite, or maybe abnormally concerned about upsetting people. I actually identified with the general theme of his behaviors, though. I also try to avoid conflict, but not because it I fear confrontation. I explained to him that it's more that I worry about losing control in situations in which someone might try to confront me about something. The classic example is the DC metro worker story from the book. If someone tries to correct me or shame me about some behavior of mine, that is the most predictably reliable way to make me see red. This is a weakness, as it has big potential negatives for my social capital and clean criminal record, and there are essentially no advantages. So I've noticed that as I have gotten older, I've gotten increasingly more polite and considerate in an attempt to reduce the number of situations in which this might happen.

I thought this recent comment was interesting, along the same lines, with another good potential suggestion for avoiding them:

My rages have dissipated to very rare status the older I have gotten. Might happen to you too. Seems to be the norm according to research. A good way to deal with them is to recognize when you are triggering, keep a journal if you must. Then when you see/feel a trigger coming on step back from the situation, acknowledge it, control your breathing, try to break your focus. The focus break is important since we achieve that hyper focus state and when we reach that BAM in the zone. See if there are any physical triggers too. Low on nicotine or blood sugar drop, dealing with too many idiots in short period of time, frustration, and physical pain like you mentioned. I hit the trifecta day before yesterday and almost went off but I knew what was causing it and managed to clear my triggers before i did to much damage. On an amusing note I appear to have inadvertently trained the people I work with to spot my triggers and they will take a look at me and send me out to have cigs and food when I present symptoms. This benefits everyone. If you can train people around you to be spotters like this and let give you some detox moments then you can usually avoid the meltdown. 

W.H. Auden: False Enchantments

I found this quote from W.H. Auden to be thought-provoking:

The state of enchantment is one of certainty. When enchanted, we neither believe nor doubt nor deny: we know, even if, as in the case of a false enchantment, our knowledge is self-deception.

All folk tales recognize that there are false enchantments as well as true ones. When we are truly enchanted we desire nothing for ourselves, only that the enchanting object or person shall continue to exist. When we are falsely enchanted, we desire either to possess the enchanting being or be possessed by it.

We are not free to choose by what we shall be enchanted, truly or falsely. In the case of a false enchantment, all we can do is take immediate flight before the spell really takes hold.

Recognizing idols for what they are does not break their enchantment.

All true enchantments fade in time. Sooner or later we must walk alone in faith. When this happens, we are tempted, either to deny our vision, to say that it must have been an illusion and, in consequence, grow hardhearted and cynical, or to make futile attempts to recover our vision by force, i.e., by alcohol or drugs.

A false enchantment can all too easily last a lifetime.

I feel like sociopaths deal in the currency of enchantments all the time. It's essentially what I mean by seducing someone -- to enchant someone, to put them under a spell. But, I also think (using Auden's tautology) that not all of my seductions involve a false enchantment. I know they don't, because many of them have led to life long friendships.

And as Auden's quote applies to this type of seduction, I think that whether or not something is a true or false enchantment often has more to do with the person being enchanted than the person doing the enchantment or the nature of the enchantment. I know myself that I have had hopeless crushes or obsessions on people that were not instigated at all by the person and reflect more a projection of my own ideals or idealizations on to the person. And actually, I think this comports with Auden's own experience -- that most of his early erotic encounters involved a gross inequality between the partners, either between age or intelligence, but were initiated because Auden had constructed in them a sort of idealized "Alter Ego", as he called it. It wasn't until his relationship with Chester Kallman until he found an equal, that he finally considered the relationship a marriage. So, yes, the sociopath is the one facilitating the enchantment (I don't think the sociopath can actually generate it out of thin air, consider the anti-seducer). But the sociopath has not control over whether there is a false or true enchantment.

That said, I get emails all of the time from someone who is under the throes of a false enchantment that has lasted much too long for their preference.

Ok to hate

This was an interesting interview with the author of " Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and a Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance, the Yale Law School graduate who grew up in the poverty and chaos of an Appalachian clan."

The interview is mainly about the appeal of Trump to the lower class white demographics.

Interviewer: I’m not a hillbilly, nor do I descend from hillbilly stock, strictly speaking. But I do come from poor rural white people in the South. I have spent most of my life and career living among professional class urbanite, most of them on the East Coast, and the barely-banked contempt they — the professional-class whites, I mean — have for poor white people is visceral, and obvious to me. Yet it is invisible to them. Why is that? And what does it have to do with our politics today? 

J.D. Vance: I know exactly what you mean.  My grandma (Mamaw) recognized this instinctively.  She said that most people were probably prejudiced, but they had to be secretive about it.  “We”–meaning hillbillies–“are the only group of people you don’t have to be ashamed to look down upon.”  During my final year at Yale Law, I took a small class with a professor I really admired (and still do).  I was the only veteran in the class, and when this came up somehow in conversation, a young woman looked at me and said, “I can’t believe you were in the Marines.  You just seem so nice.  I thought that people in the military had to act a certain way.”  It was incredibly insulting, and it was my first real introduction to the idea that this institution that was so important among my neighbors was looked down upon in such a personal way. To this lady, to be in the military meant that you had to be some sort of barbarian.  I bit my tongue, but it’s one of those comments I’ll never forget.  

The “why” is really difficult, but I have a few thoughts.  The first is that humans appear to have some need to look down on someone; there’s just a basic tribalistic impulse in all of us.  And if you’re an elite white professional, working class whites are an easy target: you don’t have to feel guilty for being a racist or a xenophobe.  By looking down on the hillbilly, you can get that high of self-righteousness and superiority without violating any of the moral norms of your own tribe.  So your own prejudice is never revealed for what it is.

I thought it was interesting, the observation that there is some tribalistic influence to look down on others. And it looks like hillbillies are to white liberals as sociopaths are to neurotypicals (and even non neurotypicals love to hate, I guess). But unlike hillbillies, there are plenty of sociopaths in the government and places of power and influence. So there's that I guess.