Thursday, February 20, 2020

The origins of criminality as a feature in sociopathy (part 2)


Cleckley’s sociopath was “bold”, boldness here being “a capacity to remain calm and focused in situations involving pressure or threat, an ability to recover quickly from stressful events, high self-assurance and social efficacy, and a tolerance for unfamiliarity and danger. Terms related to boldness include fearless dominance (Benning, Patrick, Blonigen, et al., 2005), daringness, audacity, indomitability, resiliency (Block & Block, 1980), and hardiness (Kobasa, 1979).” Id. Bold individuals are likely to show: “social dominance, low stress reactivity, and thrill–adventure seeking (Benning et al., 2003; Benning, Patrick, Blonigen, et al., 2005) . . . imperturbability, social poise, assertiveness and persuasiveness, bravery, and venturesomeness.” Id.

Boldness was evident in [Cleckley’s] case descriptions and diagnostic criteria in terms of poise and high social efficacy, absence of anxiety or neurotic symptoms, diminished emotional responsiveness, imperviousness to punishment (“failure to learn by experience”), and low suicidality. Other historic writers concerned with psychopathy in psychiatric patients as opposed to criminal samples (e.g., Kraepelin, Schneider) also identified bold externalizing types. Id.

Cleckley studied non-criminal sociopaths at a large inpatient facility. No other researcher has focused so extensively on non-criminal sociopaths.

Most researchers studied criminals, and consequently defined sociopathy as a dark strain of criminal deviance. Early researchers William Maxwell McCord and Joan McCord painted a picture in “The Psychopath: An Essay on the Criminal Mind” (1964) of a socially detached, predatory, aggressive, and remorseless individual plagued by angry-reactive forms of aggression and resultant criminality. Similarly Lee Robins, whose work underlies the DSM-V’s “Antisocial Personality Disorder” (ASPD), focused on a maladjustedness marked by persistent aggression, criminality, and destructiveness. Robins (1966, 1978).

Around that same time, Robert Hare developed his Psychopathy Checklist (now revised, PCL-R), based on the Canadian criminal population. The PCL-R is the most popular diagnostic tool for sociopathy. Hare based it on Cleckley’s sociopath, however, it is distinctly darker:

In contrast with Cleckley’s portrayal of psychopathic patients as personable and ostensibly well meaning but feckless and untrustworthy, this latter perspective conceptualizes psychopathic individuals as cold, abrasive, and aggressively exploitative in their interactions with others.

Patrick, et al. (2009).

Cleckley saw “boldness.” Hare substituted “meanness.” Why? Interestingly, Hare’s own early work also found boldness instead of meanness. Id. What changed?

Alice, a sociopath I met in Australia, theorizes that it wasn’t the sociopaths that changed, but Hare. Alice thinks Hare is biased. In fact, she goes so far as to tell me she believes he’s a subclinical narcissist. Her evidence for narcissism includes Hare’s statements that suggest he has a fragile ego and needs to be liked by others. For instance, you could read the following statement as a theory about how most people feel, or you could read between the lines and see someone who is overly concerned with how he is perceived by others:

“We are haunted to some degree by questions about our self-worth. As a consequence, we continually attempt to prove to ourselves and others that we are okay people, credible, trustworthy, and competent.”

He does seem to take the misdeeds of sociopaths personally, for example he warns:

“All the reading in the world cannot immunize you from the devastating effects of psychopaths. Everyone, including the experts, can be taken in, conned, and left bewildered by them.”

Hare speaks from personal experience. He is on record describing his first encounter with a sociopath “Ray” as a long con in which Ray influenced Hare to break prison rules. Hare said he did what Ray asked to build a “rapport”. Due in part to Hare’s influence, Ray received a plum job in the prison mechanic shop. When Hare’s tenure at the prison ended, Ray performed a tune-up on Hare’s car. The brakes failed while Hare was driving down a hill, family in tow. A local mechanic confirmed that the brakes had been rigged with a slow leak. 

Alice thinks this early experience and his continuing inability to build a rapport with prison sociopaths caused him to harden his heart against them. Alice thinks he sought payback by portraying them in the worst psychological light possible, destroying their possibility of parole.

Alice’s theory for Hare’s anti-sociopath bias is consistent with the facts as we know them.

To give you an idea of Hare’s lack of scientific objectivity, in his book Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us he calls sociopaths the “monsters of real life” and warns:

“On a more personal level, it is very likely that at some time in your life you will come into painful contact with a psychopath. For your own physical, psychological, and financial well-being it is crucial that you know how to identify the psychopath, how to protect yourself, and how to minimize the harm done to you.”

Hare has manifested other narcissistic traits. In a widely publicized move, he threatened to enjoin the publication of an academic, peer-reviewed article that criticized his PCL-R. The article, by researchers Jennifer Skeem and David Cooke, argued that “the PCL–R weighs antisocial behavior as strongly as—if not more strongly than—traits of emotional detachment in assessing psychopathy.” Consequently, it “is overly saturated with criminality and impulsivity (Blackburn, 2005; Forouzan & Cooke, 2005)” and as such, it “imperfectly maps psychopathy” and “does not fully correspond to Cleckley’s (1941) conceptualization, on which it is purportedly based.” 

Thursday, February 13, 2020

The orgins of criminality as a feature of sociopathy (part 1)


“People tend to think of psychopaths as criminals. In fact, the majority of psychopaths aren’t criminal.”
--Dr. Robert Hare

In his seminal treatise The Mask of Sanity: An Attempt to Clarify Some Issues About the So-Called Psychopathic Personality (1941), Hervey Cleckley theorized that sociopathy was due to an underlying impairment in emotional processing, e.g. an emotional colorblindness.

Common manifestations of this impairment included emotional disconnectedness:

  • ·        lack of feelings of guilt
  • ·        shallow emotions
  • ·        self-centeredness
  • ·        lack of empathy
  • ·        insincerity
  • ·        lack of awareness or understanding of their own emotional states
  • ·        failure to imbue sexual behavior with emotional meaning

Adaptive (positive) traits:

  • ·        intelligence and social aptitude
  • ·        absence of irrationality
  • ·        boldness and confidence
  • ·        low incidence of suicide

And maladaptive (negative) traits:

  • ·        deceitfulness
  • ·        unreliability
  • ·        impulsivity
  • ·        failure to learn from experience
  • ·        unrealistic expectations that things will work out
  • ·        recklessness, especially when intoxicated
  • ·        atypical sexual behavior

Modern researchers would call Cleckley’s sociopath a “Factor 1 psychopath”. Factor 1 traits make up the first half of Robert Hare’s Psychopathy Checklist Revised (PCL-R) and/or the similar set of personality traits in Scott Lillienfeld’s Psychopathic Personality Inventory (PPI).

Factor 1 sociopaths are associated with:
·        High social abilities and emotional resilience. Hall et al. (2004).
·        High five-factor model (FFM) extraversion, openness, and conscientiousness. Id. The Five-Factor Model includes the five major personality traits that all people share in different levels: extraversion, openness to experiences, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and agreeableness. These standardized traits are used to compare different personality types or reflect the prevalence of certain personality characteristics in particular populations, like sociopaths.
o   FFM extraversion is associated with social confidence, social adeptness, and charm.
o   FFM openness is associated with novelty seeking, adventurousness, and openness to unconventional beliefs and behaviors.
o   FFM conscientiousness is associated with an awareness of the effects of one’s actions.
·        Low FFM neuroticism. Id.
o   FFM neuroticism is a preoccupation with avoiding negative experiences or punishment, worrying, focusing on problems, and an inability to cope with every day stressors. People low on neuroticism are much more influenced by positive rewards than punishment.
·        High verbal intelligence and personal and parental socioeconomic status. Id.
·        High self-interest and self-regard, prone to manipulation and Machiavellian behaviors. Harpur, Hare, & Hakstian, 1989; Hare, 1991; Verona et al., 2001.
·        Long-term planning to use people and things in an instrumental way to achieve the psychopath’s desired aim. Patrick & Zempolich, 1998; Porter & Woodworth, 2006.
·        Low empathy. Hare, 2003.
·        Social dominance. Hare, 1991; Harpur et al., 1989; Verona et al., 2001.
·        Low fearfulness, distress, and depression. Harpur et al., 1989; Hicks & Patrick, 2006.
·        Low physical responses to fearful situations. Cf. Patrick, 1994, 2007.

Patrick, Fowles, Krueger (2009).

Are you surprised at how many positive characteristics there are? It’s easy to imagine how traits like emotional resilience and social dominance could promote success. Or how low fearfulness and depression might improve overall mood? How extraversion and adventurousness might help in love, business, and overall life satisfaction? Indeed, I receive several emails a month asking me to help the writer become more sociopathic.

Noticeably absent in Cleckley’s sociopath are traits like intentional cruelty, sadism, misanthropy, or even violence. Id. In fact, only three out of fifteen of Cleckley’s sociopaths showed high interpersonal aggressiveness. Id. They were no one’s angels, but nor were they devils. Instead, they were “charming ne’er-do-wells who harm others incidentally rather than deliberately.”  Id. Cleckley even argued that sociopaths are less prone to violence because they’re less likely to be emotionally triggered. Id.

Sunday, February 2, 2020

Trading stocks like a sociopath

My friend sent me this NPR quick 10 minute piece on investing in the stock market and what tends to be the best strategy overall -- buy and hold.



I remember talking about this just a bit in the book, about how I have beat the market year after year. I don't think I am super good at picking stocks. Maybe just a bit better than average. I think this is one thing that I am super great at, though, which is not letting my emotions dictate whether I buy/hold/sell. I do think sociopaths might be bad at stocks for other reasons, including impulse control short sightedness, and a novelty seeking tendency to self destruct a bit every few years or so. But if you can somehow avoid those sociopath pitfalls, I do think sociopaths can have a bit of an advantage long term over the average investor. 

Sunday, January 19, 2020

Shame as the root of narcissim

My sister in law has been reading "Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead" by Brené Brown and sending me quotes.

I think this one is such a good point, especially on the heels of this post on what is actually the best way to help a sociopath change their behavior. Re narcissists:

"Here’s where it gets tricky. And frustrating. And maybe even a little heartbreaking. The topic of narcissism has penetrated the social consciousness enough that most people correctly associate it with a pattern of behaviors that include grandiosity, a pervasive need for admiration, and a lack of empathy. What almost no one understands is how every level of severity in this diagnosis is underpinned by shame. Which means we don’t “fix it” by cutting people down to size and reminding folks of their inadequacies and smallness. Shame is more likely to be the cause of these behaviors, not the cure."
***

“When I look at narcissism through the vulnerability lens, I see the shame-based fear of being ordinary. I see the fear of never feeling extraordinary enough to be noticed, to be lovable, to belong, or to cultivate a sense of purpose.”

Same thing for sociopaths. Their grandiosity and self centered behavior comes from a profound lack of sense of self. They don't recognize or honor the boundaries of other people because the sociopath has no sense of his own boundaries. He was never taught to understand, respect, or make space for the vulnerability of others because he was taught from his earliest ages to stifle his own vulnerability and to take up no space, to be a cyper.

Along those lines, from the same book:

"The Wholehearted Parenting Manifesto Above all else, I want you to know that you are loved and lovable. You will learn this from my words and actions—the lessons on love are in how I treat you and how I treat myself. I want you to engage with the world from a place of worthiness. You will learn that you are worthy of love, belonging, and joy every time you see me practice self-compassion and embrace my own imperfections. We will practice courage in our family by showing up, letting ourselves be seen, and honoring vulnerability. We will share our stories of struggle and strength. There will always be room in our home for both. We will teach you compassion by practicing compassion with ourselves first; then with each other. We will set and respect boundaries; we will honor hard work, hope, and perseverance. Rest and play will be family values, as well as family practices. You will learn accountability and respect by watching me make mistakes and make amends, and by watching how I ask for what I need and talk about how I feel. I want you to know joy, so together we will practice gratitude. I want you to feel joy, so together we will learn how to be vulnerable. When uncertainty and scarcity visit, you will be able to draw from the spirit that is a part of our everyday life. Together we will cry and face fear and grief. I will want to take away your pain, but instead I will sit with you and teach you how to feel it. We will laugh and sing and dance and create. We will always have permission to be ourselves with each other. No matter what, you will always belong here. As you begin your Wholehearted journey, the greatest gift that I can give to you is to live and love with my whole heart and to dare greatly. I will not teach or love or show you anything perfectly, but I will let you see me, and I will always hold sacred the gift of seeing you. Truly, deeply, seeing you."

Sunday, January 12, 2020

"What matters is behavior"

I try to read most of the comments and I saw this one that raised interesting points:

I should have mentioned: I like that video because it's message is that what matters is behaviour, not nature of experience. Behaviour is pertinent to evolution; regardless of how motivation might vary between types of individuals.

The video the comment references is here:



I recognized this belief as being the one that I had for 95% of my life. It was the one that I advocated multiple times in the book, that "what matters is behaviour, not nature of experience." And I still do believe it in so many instances. For instance, I do believe that sociopaths love, even though it is different than the way that other people experience love.

I was also just reading about Shaquem Griffin, who is a one-handed NFL linebacker. He told the story of how when he was young, there were weight minimums and maximums for the league he was playing in. At one of these weigh-ins, he was told he was too heavy, even though he had weighed himself the night before and was fine. He had his coach re-weigh him and he was within the proper range. When they confronted the official that said that he was too heavy the official confessed that it wasn't so much about the weight, the official said what he said because he was too uncomfortable having a boy play who was one-handed. This seems like a very good application of experience vs. behavior. Is he able to play? Then he should be able to play. I don't feel like someone can validly come in and say that he can't participate in all life has to offer just because others experience the same situation differently.

And I think that was always what I was thinking about when I voiced that belief -- that behavior matters over internal experience. Because I didn't want my personality disorder to limit me in any way. I wanted to have enriching relationships and lasting and rewarding jobs and maybe even kids! (Although that last one turned out to not be in the cards for me.) So what if my risk/reward meter was always on. So what if my love was as shallow as a sandbar? These things all felt very real to me, despite not experiencing them in the same way that others did.

But my brother recently shared with my a BYU talk with the following passage:

The challenge is not so much closing the gap between our actions and our beliefs; rather, the challenge is closing the gap between our beliefs and the truth. That is the challenge.

This is more how I feel now. Because when your beliefs are based on true and right principles, it's much easier to act accordingly. When you see good and loving behavior as a natural form of self-expression, that becomes that most natural way for you to behave.

I think a related point is the question that some people have about how much responsibility a sociopath has for their actions. My pinned tweet is "I'm not saying that sociopaths aren't responsible for their actions, but they're certainly not responsible for being sociopaths." Even that gets push back from people who think that sociopaths are trying to eschew any responsibility for their actions. It it oft cited and accurate that a sociopath often knows what the morally "right" answer is in any given situation. But the sociopath does not have an actual belief in the rightness of the thing. To the sociopath, even well decided moral issues are seen as essentially social conventions. To them there's not much difference between the moral issues you fault them for and using a shellfish fork properly.

Some of you are probably less gross than I am, but at least when I was younger I remember washing my hands after using a restroom much more frequently in public than I did in my own home? Why? Because I knew it was the "right" answer, but I myself did not value washing my hands in most situations. I think everyone does things like this, even daily. But imagine the world of a sociopath in which you do things like this dozens of times per day -- always conforming your behavior without ever having the belief. If you want to know how difficult this is to sustain, look at how often sociopaths self-destructive (or how often you give up your New Year's resolutions).

I think the key to a sociopath having greater life living sustainability and being and feeling "better" is not in changing behavior, it is in changing beliefs. Unfortunately, hardly anyone in the psychological community is willing to help sociopaths change their beliefs and it's almost impossible for them to do themselves, like a game of blind man's buff.

I'll write a little more on this in the next post.

Here's the more full context from the BYU quote:

People say, “You should be true to your beliefs.” While that is true, you cannot be better than what you know. Most of us act based on our beliefs, especially what we believe to be in our self-­interest. The problem is, we are sometimes wrong.

Someone may believe in God and that pornography is wrong and yet still click on a site wrongly believing that he will be happier if he does or he can’t help but not click or it isn’t hurting anyone else and it is not that bad. He is just wrong.

Someone may believe it is wrong to lie and yet lie on occasion, wrongly believing he will be better off if the truth is not known. He is just wrong.

Someone may believe and even know that Jesus is the Christ and still deny Him not once but three times because of the mistaken belief that he would be better off appeasing the crowd. Peter wasn’t evil. I am not even sure he was weak. He was just wrong.

When you act badly, you may think you are bad, when in truth you are usually mistaken. You are just wrong. The challenge is not so much closing the gap between our actions and our beliefs; rather, the challenge is closing the gap between our beliefs and the truth. That is the challenge.

So how do we close that gap? 

Sunday, January 5, 2020

Therapy for sense of self

I thought this was related to the last post on the importance of sociopaths focusing on changing beliefs and acting according to beliefs rather than just conforming their behavior to social and moral conventions. I thought this conversation with a reader shows a bit what this belief change might look like, at least in part.

From a reader, under the subject line "Therapy for sense-of-self":

Hi -- in the November 30 post on spwd.com, you mentioned that you'd had a setback a while ago in your therapy to develop sense-of-self. In your book you talk about not having a strong core sense of self as one of the hallmarks of a sociopathic personality. That hit me strongly, and was a powerful explanation for a lot of things I've experienced. While I'm working with a therapist (I'm highly functional) we haven't touched on this aspect yet.

It's trivial to put myself in someone else's psychological space and interact with them that way. It's highly effective at superficial relationships (i.e. business, casual), and that's the upside of the weak sense of self. The pitfalls of it in what are supposed to be close relationships, long term ones, are obvious. I honestly have no idea what working to develop a strong sense of self would even mean. Do you have any thoughts or insights into what you're gaining by working on this? Any resources you've found useful?

My response:

I almost feel like I should ask my own therapist what the particular type of therapy he did with me. The core exercise I remember though was to get me to realize that I had underlying preferences regardless of context. To get me to do that, he did a thought experiment in which when presented with a choice I had to imagine that there was no one else in the world. If there was no one else in the world, then I could not be tempted to consider how people would react and thus make a choice based on which reaction I would like, rather than just my preference. Does that make sense?

Reader:

Thanks -- and yes, that's really useful. Kind of ironic that a group of people who are popularly considered not to care a bit for anything about other people are constantly modifying their behaviors away from what they would naturally do, to they point where they lose sight of the simple fact that they have preferences. To me, this feels a lot like the emotion work I've done with my therapist -- the emotions are there, but just very very quiet. So quiet that having grown up and lived in almost exclusively "loud" emotional environments, I thought I didn't have any at all. It takes practice and relative silence to be able to hear them, but I'm figuring out how to do it. Maybe it's so with the preferences too.

Really appreciate you sharing your experience.

Friday, December 13, 2019

Biases and natural experiments

I teach legal classes. I've done so in some capacity for almost a decade, so I've had a ton of teaching evaluations over the years. I just got done reading my teaching evaluations from this summer, mostly because I ask intuition when is a good time to read it, and if it isn't a good time I just wait until I get a confirmation that it is. So I had some time, caught up tonight on grading, and looked at them. Some were better than I thought they were going to be (my "boss" had emailed some concerns about them, which I responded to, but hadn't read the evaluations). I got like a 4.9/5 rating, which I don't know but guess is one of the highest out of all of the instructors at that particular institution. The other institution I knew at least one review was bad because when the boss emailed me, it said "the one is basically an outlier," so didn't worry. But there were actually two really negative reviews. One of them said "I don't know why she teaches here."

Of course I know that you can't please everyone and sometimes a teaching style that some people will like, others don't, etc. Some people want more assignments! They want me to be strict or to penalize them for things. I don't know, maybe they don't have a great internal locus of control and feel like they want me to police them, but I don't because it's their agency and they can use it to learn or not to learn.

But these two people for were really negative. One said "Frankly, I really don't see what she is doing teaching here." And: "Enough with the [review] games, stop being lazy and truly teach your students something." How often do these outliers happen? I find that there's either none, or about half the time there are 1-3 per class. And it's kind of an interesting social experiment, because they all take the same class. And the rest of them are saying things like the class is great and they love the review games, etc.

What is going on? Again it could be that some people don't like the format of the class or maybe they're jaded because I was giving them bad grades or because they learned things a different way and don't like my way (the practice of law is like music or art in that there are some basic rules of thumb to go by, but there's actually also a lot of discretion and "practice" in the discipline). Or maybe they don't like women or whatever. But you know what intuition thinks it is? Intuition thinks that some students google my name and see that I've written a book about being a diagnosed sociopath and they don't like that. And that knowledge colors their perspective of everything else they experience in the class. Suddenly I am lazy, not innovative for reviewing the material in a game show format.

Sometimes students will outright reference the book. Not surprisingly those evaluations almost always have a very poor view of the value of the class. My people know about the book and are still very supportive (one of the bosses did disability accommodation in a previous position and the other one is a baby boomer era gay woman, so I feel like they both get it better than your average person, and I'm lucky that way).

But even when evaluations don't explicitly mention the book, there can be weird comments like: "I felt that the instructor was ambivalent about our success and comprehension." That's a common one I see in conjunction with the comments about the book. I think they're trying to find a relevant reason to complain. It doesn't matter that I seem perfectly friendly and invested in their success, everything I do is seen through a lens of suspicion. Why did I choose to have them do group work? It must be because I'm lazy. That sort of thing. But interestingly students who don't seem to know about the book will mention that they loved the group work, etc.

You've probably heard the term "natural experiment". Like situations in life that just happen to have experimental qualities -- things like community programs that are decided randomly, e.g. based on a lottery system.

I guess my situation is not quite a natural experiment, because I'm sure it's not entirely random who decides to google me. I often think it's the people that especially like me and the class at first that are more prone to google me. But they all subsequently sit through the same class and come up with really different ideas about it. And with the people that know about the book, it seems to color their every subsequent interaction with me.

Have you ever taken those inherent biases tests? The ones that kind of play off your expectations, like the word yellow written in purple and you have to read yellow out loud? But for racism or for sexism? I feel like I am just as socialized as the next person to have inherent biases. Maybe it's seeing so many examples of bias or the way people's psychological make-up distorts their perceptions or seeing how normal deeply ingrained norms seem to the people I visit in my travels and how foreign they seem to me, but I'm basically a 3/10 for believing that I can rely on my own mental capacity to understand. I love to learn, but I just know that my understanding is so limited -- sometimes in really obvious ways like when I try to understand dark matter, and sometimes better like when I actually was able to understand how astronomers have predicted a ninth planet (not Pluto, which doesn't count, but a new planet we have never seen before based on the motion of other objects in our solar system). Also I think being in academia really jaded me in terms of relying on expert anything? Because I have met those people and they're just people. And like all other people they're like 7/10 driven by fear and self preservation. I see it in the sociopathy researchers who won't stick their neck out and go against the general tide and I see it in my students who take corporate jobs they hate and I see it in a million other ways in which people settle for something less than the truth that will set them free and their real life's purpose. 

Saturday, November 30, 2019

Re-integration

I had a dream five summers ago. It was during a little bit of a hiccup in my therapeutic progress. Due to external circumstances that were particularly psychologically trying, I was "going through it," as the kids say. I felt like I had lost the sense of self and inward sense of forward motion and direction from therapy. I was lost to myself again. But mixed in with these feelings was relief -- relief that I once again was detached from my own emotions. I went back to my old habits. I manifested weak sense of self, chameleon-esque behavior, but that particular version that I always liked to think was "being on my best behavior." In other words, I was doing stuff just to get along with society and being a little more careful than usual to follow rules or social norms in order to keep things smooth in my life. I was no longer choosing to do things primarily as a true expressions of my identity. I kind of went through periods like this cyclically. I would blow up my life, people would bail me out, and for a short period of time I would feel like I needed to clean up my act. But I didn't really know what that meant, so mostly I just tried to force myself to be what others wanted me to be. This particular time, because of what I perceived to be expectations of my religious faith (and my family, who shares that religious faith) that I live in a very particular way and out of my desire to not rock anybody's boat, I was ready to live a cloistered life of hermitage rather than keep trying to be more authentically myself in a flawed and imperfect way. This was probably the peak of me thinking that I should try in every way possible to fulfill the expected role of legit Mormon upstanding citizen, whatever the personal sacrifice.

That whole summer I was plagued by depression, anxiety, and bad dreams, which led to bad sleep. I started to see a neurobiofeedback guy, who my mother had heard about and wanted her two most troubled children at the time (me and my little brother) to see during the summer while my brother was home from college. I called him my brain doctor.

When the brain doctor first mapped my base level EEG brain activity, he was so tactful and gentle trying to break the news to me that I had abnormally low activity in the areas of the brain associated with empathy. And perhaps because that was such a blatant lack, he always wanted to spend out sessions working on empathy. I always wanted to work on my sleep because the bad sleep and bad dreams were making me a little miserable. As part of that concern for my sleep, he had me keep track of my dreams, which is I think why I remember this one so vividly. I wrote about it a little at the time.

A bad guy (or multiple?) are after me for most of the dream. There are these government agent looking men (dressed in black, sunglasses, assault rifles) that are my security detail. The main bad guy gets caught. For some reason, he has hands that are like just flat circles, like the shape of a thick hamburger patty or pancake -- 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? government agents? a private group?). His face is also deformed and scarred. His lips have been fused together so he can't talk. I thought in the dream -- 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. Instead, he gets locked in a walk in closet in a master bedroom suite of what sort of looks like my parents' house. I'm also staying in the same house in another bedroom off the same hallway. Time passes and the men and black and I go to check on the bad guy, but he's not in the closet. Then I notice bloody footprints on the carpet. I immediately know who caused the bloody footprints, another bad guy that has no skin, just exposed flesh. I understood no-skin guy to also be in that condition somehow as a result of the government men. Based on the footprints, no-skin walked in the sliding glass door, walked to the closet, let out pancake hands, and appeared to be still in the house somewhere. So basically the one bad guy let this other out and now they're both on the loose. That's when I woke up.

The dream was such a great example of my typical bad dreams at the time. That summer, being asleep felt like it was the only time in any given day that I didn't have control over my thoughts and feelings and I didn't like it. I didn't want to be asleep because it didn't feel safe. I was afraid of where my mind went.

When I met with brain doctor next, we talked about the dream. He seemed to already understand what this dream likely meant in the context of me, but was asking me questions to see if I would come to see what he was seeing: "Who are the bad guys, aren't they just you? . . . . Parts of yourself that you've disassociated from? . . .  And figuratively castrated or mutilated so they have no say, no ability to do anything? . . . Stripped of any identifying features or relationship to you? . . . They're not looking for you to hurt you, but to be reunited."

And in that moment I knew he was right. When I saw the dream in that light, it was not scary at all. I felt so sorry for the bad guys. So sorry for what I had tried to do to them, unknowingly. I realized very naturally and without having to be prodded that these figures were not to be feared and opposed, they were to be embraced.

I don't know that I've ever experienced such a profound paradigm shift, or at least not so quickly or as obviously as in that moment.

That was the day that I finally gave up on trying to distort myself to fit some concept of what someone else wanted me to be. Because I saw it for it was, mutilation.

And I stopped having bad dreams after that because I realized that the things I feared had nothing to do with uncontrollable external forces and everything to do with me being wrong about what was best for myself and unwittingly self inflicting pain and attempting to live in a world of delusion rather than just seeing and accepting things as they really are.

For a while I was very deliberate about making sure that all parts of me found easy/daily self expression, even if it was just playing cheesy wedding music gigs or watching terrible movies. I wanted to regularly acknowledge and find expression for every aspect of who I am, never silence or disempower.

I think this is something that every body deals with (but especially the personality disordered). I really wish I could find this reference, I want to say it was Ta-Nehesi Coates, but he was describing how he saw his African American daughter gradually grow from being almost completely unaware of her African American status in the eyes of society, to gradually recognizing it, to gradually distorting her true self in response to the expectations -- either in defiance or compliance. We all distort ourselves a little bit. But it is not a good thing. It is the worst thing we can do to distort our essential identity. We shouldn't be doing it for any reason, not for any purpose, and never to please any person. But since we all do it, the good news is that we can re-integrate those parts of us that get lost along the way. We can re-familiarize ourselves with the aspects of our own selves that we have lost touch with. As someone recently told me going through a similar healing process: "I feel more like I have a way of thinking that is like my old self and my new self."

Sunday, November 17, 2019

Sociopath Poetry? For the Nefarious

For the Nefarious
BY MAI DER VANG

From a recessed hollow
Rumble, I unearth as a creature

Conceived to be relentless.
Depend on me to hunt you

Until you find yourself
Counting all the uncorked

Nightmares you digested.
I will let you know the burning

Endorsed by the effort of
Matches. And you will claw

Yourself inward, toward a
Conference of heat as the steam

Within you surrenders, caves
You into a cardboard scar.

Even what will wreck you
Are your mother’s chapped lips.

Even to drip your confession
Of empty rooms. I know about

Your recipe of rain, your apiary
Ways. Trust me to be painful.


Tuesday, November 5, 2019

A Week in Interior Alaska for $500

I had such a great, cheap trip to the Alaskan interior that I thought I would share some tips.

First of all, why so cheap? First, hotels in Alaska tend to be quite expensive for what they are. Second, I wanted to go on this polar bear tour that was almost $2000, just for one day. But on the other hand polar bears aren't going to be around forever maybe? Also I had learned some cheap travel tricks and wanted to challenge myself to use them. And I didn't want out time there to be limited by how much money we were spending on hotels.

I flew into Anchorage on a late Wednesday night and slept in the airport rather than leave or rent a car earlier. My new sociopath friend Arthur turned me on to this strategy -- save money by taking really early flights or really late flights and just sleep in the airport. There's even a website, sleepinginairports.net. The general rule is as much as possible be on the inside security side, because the sleeping and other opportunities usually exceed that of the public side of airports and with less harassment from cops, etc.

My goal was to not spend a single night in an actual lodging, and we actually did make it the whole week sleeping in the car, which was a lot of fun. Alaska is a great place to do what a lot of people call boondocking, or dry camping, or sleeping in cars. The only place that has any sort of limitations on it is in Anchorage, and there are plenty of places just outside Anchorage to stay. You can sleep at rest stops. You can sleep at pull outs. We slept at a Wal-Mart twice. I suggest picking a place that already has someone there for safety or if you need to jump the car or something in the morning. For showering, we showered at campsites at places that we were already going to, like Denali National Park, and we paid $15 each to go to the Chena Hot Springs Resort just outside of Fairbanks, which had showers. (At Denali the technical rule is showers are just for campers, but we had a reservation snafu with them and the showers were empty and $7 so I didn’t have qualms about it.)  I guess you can also often find showers at laundromats. Dry cabins or dry camping is an Alaskan phenomenon and it is well suited for it.

That morning I woke up, brushed my teeth, and picked up my rental car. I had booked a car originally for the week for something like $450, but I got free cancellation and just kept that browser tab open on my laptop to periodically check if prices went down. Every time they went down, I re-booked another car. I got supplier's choice because I figured I was probably going to book a small car anyway, so I had nowhere to go but up. Me and my traveling companion hit the jackpot when we got a minivan. We were really hoping for anything on the big side, SUV etc. But worst case scenario we had brought this off of Amazon:



The reviews suggest that it doesn't last long, and it started dying the last night of the trip. I never did get a chance to use it like it's mean, i.e. in the back seat of a car. But it was about the size of a twin bed plus 20%. Not a full size mattress, somewhere in between. You could probably sleep two people (and some reviewers suggested that they did), but they should be small-ish people who don't mind being all up on each other. In any case, we didn't end up using it this way, just as an inflatable mattress for sleeping in the back of the van.

We flew into Anchorage because it was cheaper than Fairbanks and gas is cheap in Alaska, plus we wanted a scenic drive. And we ended up going down to Kenai Fjords National Park on a very beautiful scenic drive on the Kenai Peninsula.

Being there at the very end of August was  little bit key because that's the beginning of Polar Bear Season, the end of National Park or boondocking season for Denali (unless you want cold and rainy), Grizzly Bears go into a nonstop eating pattern in preparation for hibernation, there were beautiful fall colors that were changing by the day, and there were Northern Lights.

I'd suggest doing the Tundra Wilderness tour in Denali and trying to sign up for a Ranger led hike (you can only sign up in person 1-2 days before the hike, so consider being there for 2.5 days to accommodate this schedule. Buy bear spray on your way up on a Fred Meyer. We also got sleeping bags for $10 on sale there after spending the first night shivering under the thin blankets we had packed and wearing nearly all of our clothes.

Chena Hot Springs just north of Fairbanks is a great place for seeing the Northern Lights. I would set an alarm for every hour and if you see anything, stay up because they can grow a lot brighter and disappear pretty fast. Fairbanks is supposed to be one of the best places in the world for Northern Lights do its latitude and number of clear, starry nights.

A good low key activity between Northern Lights viewing nights is Fairbanks' Pioneer Park and the salmon bake there: https://www.akvisit.com/dinner/

Fairbanks Ice Museum is cheap and surprisingly fun to play with the ice sculptures.

If you can swing the Polar Bear tour, I really recommend it. It's really expensive, but they call up ahead of time to see if there is any bear activity, so you're almost guaranteed to see them. Also you get to fly over Northern Alaska and get up to the Arctic Ocean. If you want to do it on the cheap, the place they go is called Kaktovik and Ravn Air flies there, but they're notorious for leaving passengers stranded, so give yourself an extra day. I believe there is only one inn there, that is also the only public eatery, so pack snacks or plan on eating that the whole time. I think a local tour company is Kaktoviktours.com, and they can help you arrange stuff. The nice thing about the package tour I took is that everything ran seamlessly.

I would pass on the Dalton Road. Looked totally boring from the air.





Saturday, October 5, 2019

Seeing wolves during Yellowstone Shoulder Season in Lamar Valley

In the third week of September, I was in Yellowstone and thought I would share some travel tips and thoughts.

Traveling to Yellowstone in late September is pretty far into shoulder season, but I had hoped the weather would hold up. The weather was good while we were there, but because it had snowed the weekend before we got there, many of the major campsites had been closed just the day before we arrived. I had been monitoring the supply of campsites online for several days prior to that, but hadn't checked the night before, so wasn't aware about the campsite closures until we arrived when we and dozens of others were all scrambling for the same few available sites. Campsites are pretty important in Yellowstone unless you want to stay in their lodges, which at least for our dates would have been several hundred dollars a night. So our first day in Yellowstone was us driving through the park with no phone reception and campsites not updating their availability on the few times we could log into the website. None of the camp hosts or rangers were helpful. No one seemed to know what was going on. We almost came up completely short when we got kicked out of a campsite that someone said they had reserved with a camp chair set up in the site, but another camper overheard our predicament and offered to share his campsite with him and his wife who were just planning on sleeping in their truck and had extra space. Thanks so much to the couple from Maine who so generously allowed us to share their site.

My first suggestion for Yellowstone then is that if you plan on getting campsites that are first come first serve, even during late shoulder season, book a reserved campsite for your first night and try to get to your campsite of choice definitely before 10:30 a.m. (and even sooner if you can swing it) to be sure you get a site. Because it takes at least an hour from anywhere outside in the park to get to any of these first come first serve campsites, everyone that's already in the park will have a competitive advantage. My second suggestion is that apparently some National Park Service campsites require a tent, so if you can make friends with an RV person and you have a tent, you could maybe arrange to share a space to your mutual benefit.



If you're interested in wildlife, I suggest asking rangers and even approachable tour guide operators or people who look like they've been here at least a few days early and often where the best places and times are to see wildlife. The last night we were camping there, a camp ranger told us that you can see wolves in Lamar Valley pretty predictably for the first few hours after sunrise (she said until about 9:00 a.m.) My understanding is that the wolf parents are coming back from an evening of hunting, reunite with the rest of the pack for some family fun, and then find some place to sleep. My ranger said that this is as much of a guarantee to see the wolves as you can ever make with wildlife. She said that if you don't see the wolves on the main road going through the valley, Highway 212, (if you're coming from most places in the park, you can make your destination Pebble Creek Campground and it will route you through Lamar Valley), you should drive up the little road associated with the Slough Campground. We had other places to be in the morning, so we never did go up to the valley in the morning to see the wolves, but I wanted to let other people know so they could plan better than we did.

Also in Lamar Valley are many herds of bison and people also report a lot of other wildlife sightings in this area. But get here early for wolves (or people suggest getting here in the late afternoon for other wildlife sightings).


Some thoughts on wolves, both here and in other national parks in the United States. If you haven't had a chance, maybe take a look at this video on how wolves can change the shape of a river.


I was in Alaska's Denali National Park this past August (beautiful, and I may do a quick follow up post with tips for traveling there) where the rangers dutifully told us that the National Park was established not for the highest mountain in North America (Denali aka Mt. McKinley) or for the Grizzly Bears or the moose or caribou or other myriad animals that we might be more familiar with, but rather to protect the Dall Sheep, which were being over-hunted in the early part of the last century. As such, the numbers of Dall Sheep were being carefully watched and in the early years of the park's history when there was a decline in the population, the common wisdom was that something needed to be done, and that something to be done was to start culling the wolf population -- the sheep's major predator. At the time the National Park Service thought of themselves as needing to be the caretaker for preserving nature. Since predators were considered destructive, no one really thought about preserving them. Instead, their elimination was favored. In fact, famously and as portrayed in the How Wolves Change Rivers video, they were eradicated completely from Yellowstone National Park for these and other reasons related to Yellowstone's rancher and farmer neighbors.

Young scientist Adolph Murie opposed any such wolf eradication measures in Denali. He did a decades long study of the Dall Sheep population and discovered that the wolves actually helped the sheep because the wolves would prey on the very young and the sick or injured, and as a result the strength of the herd as a whole was stronger and had access to greater resources per capita. This is pretty well-accepted science and even common knowledge, but at the time it was revolutionary and very counter-intuitive.

I hope that you have heard the Yellowstone wolves story before. If you haven't, the video is good on this point and I won't belabor it except to give you the TLDR: ecosystems are a lot more complicated and interdependent then we think and consequently to mess around with one part of it for the supposed benefit of another part of it is to play with fire. Despite this, while I was in Denali, a tour guide gave another example of people wanting to completely eradicate another animal -- mosquitos -- not realizing that they are major pollinators in the region for the flora as well as being a food source for larger animals.

The interrelatedness of everything is a great point and I think has a lot of really valid applications to the idea of a society with sociopaths versus without sociopaths. I think the benefits of sociopaths, like the mosquitoes role as pollinators, might be less obvious than some of the alleged harms, like the mosquitoes bites and disease carrying abilities. The outsized influence of the more obvious effects versus the ones that are less obvious to us may people to erroneously assume they'd obviously be better off without sociopaths and that there would be little harm to society from their removal.

This time listening to these stories at both parks, however, I was more struck with how absolutely certain people were about the wolf situation. Adolph Murie was ridiculed and maligned for much of his career. I learned in a fireside ranger talk that when wolves were re-introduced to Yellowstone in the 1970's, the U.S. government solicited public comments and got more participation in that debate than any other public comment program up to that point in U.S. history. My European friend who was with me was flabbergasted that American's seemed to care much more about this than any other political topic. To me it's just another illustration of the things we know and don't know, including there are : (1) things we think we know and do know, (2) things we think we know but don't know, (3) things we don't know and realize we don't know, and (4) things we don't know that we don't know.

I think our global society would vastly improve if everyone was just a little more open-minded and intellectually curious without constant appeals to authority or expertise to shutdown a conversation and stifle new ideas. And this applies as much to sociopaths who think and talk about sociopaths as it does normal people who think and talk about sociopaths. What we don't know vastly exceeds what we do know, and we would do well to show a little more intellectual honesty about that.

Thursday, September 26, 2019

Killing Eve, Mad Chat, and The Hidden Brain

I've written about Killing Eve before. Here's a clip a reader sent in which she discusses the boredom and emptiness she feels.


Killing Eve was also featured in a recent episode of the podcast Mad Chat here. In it they interview Sarah Kay, who had done the sociopath themed episode of Sincerely, X. I think you can sign up for a free trial to listen to it here because it's behind a paywall.

The Killing Eve podcast references a lot of the Sincerely, X concepts, including the ups and downs of empathy and what it makes to be human. For instance, one fictional psychologist in Killing Eve has a quote about how most people when they think of sociopaths think: add violence, add coldheartedness. But what people should really be doing is subtracting everything that makes a person human. The podcast host and guest on Mad Chat do a good job pushing back on some of the portrayals of sociopathy or other mental illness in the show.

The Killing Eve podcast has a transcription.

The Hidden Brain is a sometime favorite of mine. Another sociopath friend of mine likes it because it explains some of the things about humans and how they're influenced, etc. that she's intuited but gives her the science. She liked a recent episode on empathy, but I didn't like the guest that they had on. Nor did I like the supposed example they used of the dude getting shot by paintballs. I just think it's a lot more complicated and whenever people try to simplify and give the same tired platitudes about the importance of empathy, I start feeling a little like I'm getting conned. The guest is a Stanford professor, and I guess I didn't empathize with him because I thought almost all of his takes were tired and even disproven by researchers like Paul Bloom, author of Against Empathy.


Friday, August 9, 2019

Tourniquetting identity leads to weak sense of self

From a reader:

I was reading your blog, specifically the post titled “Seeing things as they really are”.

On the topic of weak sense of self. I’m really curious as to how that affects people and sociopaths in general. (I would love to read a post specifically on that topic.) I was listening a song by Charles Manson called “My World” which actually mentioned his weak sense of self or lack of ego. (I’m not necessarily sure what the difference between a sense of self and an ego is) Charles Manson was considered either a psychopath or sociopath.(they never really specified, constantly using the terms interchangeably) If you don’t know about him, in a very small nutshell he was claimed to have grown a following, a cult. And then was claimed to use that cult to kill some famous people. He has also been in and out of  penitentiary's his whole life. He himself claiming that the penitentiary was his father. You should really check out his interviews, many are available on YouTube.  

On a separate matter, if you ever get the chance head down to Kentucky. Me and my friend would love to sit down and talk. I suspect myself to be sociopathic, no idea of if i am or not. I’m not going to get a diagnosis mainly because of the negative effects that can occur. But basically before preschool in daycare i made my best friend that we’ll call Sam. We both had a very  similar up bringing and have always stayed friends. About a year ago we both started researching about sociopaths, for some reason we were both naturally drawn to this. And when I say we both started researching this i mean that we were doing this separately from each other, not know that the other person even knew about the subject. And one day it popped up in a conversation some how and we both confessed. But what’s really amazing about that is that we both started researching around the same time and came to the conclusion around the same time. 

You mentioned that you’re trying to learn more about other sociopaths. I can’t say for sure that i am one, but you can make an assumption off the info that i give you. I’d like to know if i am one. Not because of the thought that “oh I’m a sociopath and I’m callous and blah blah so I’m better” but rather that I’m just very curious. Referring to a weak sense of self, i believe that i have one. People always tell me that you gotta find yourself, i guess mainly because I’m the age of 18. But i am confused by that statement because why do you need to find it in the first place? Aren’t you already yourself? And can’t you just be whatever you want? One thing I’ve said before is that “you can’t be something you’re not if you don’t know what you are.” 

Who am i as of now? I’m 18 and male, and i see the whole world as an opportunity to exploit. I feel that you can do anything that you can do. I’m a very kind and popular person. I have many friends that i got to for if i need something. I have both meaningful and meaningless bonds with my friends and family. I’m nice for one because it’s beneficial in the long run and two because it gives me a challenge for something to do when I’m bored. Which I am a very very bored person. I drive fast, take hard turns and used to drift (until i had to buy new tires ) if i could i would get a motorcycle. I play with fire a lot (or so my friends say) although it’s a lot less than i used to. But i do a lot of thrill seeking activities. I love art, dancing, and science/engineering. I draw abstract concepts of my mood and thoughts. I used to dance a lot being in on a competitive dance team that’s been to Vegas. And i build things all the time, my latest project being an electric bike so i don’t have to walk at college (I’m lazy, or as i see it being efficient). I feel as though i have multiple personalities or masks. Wearing different ones for different people, although I’m pretty sure most people do that. Here are two different examples of times where I’ve acted different. 

Ex.1 i got a call from a friend. Her voice was almost inaudible. I could tell that she was crying. So i asked “where are you?” I then drove to her car which was in a parking lot. This i found odd, but thinking to myself I knew that she was a sensitive and emotional person so i just assumed that it was just on a whim of some sort. So i hopped in her car, she had just got in an argument with her boyfriend.  She had her head on her steering wheel, her hands were clinching the wheel with intensity. She was crying very loudly tears were just pouring out her eyes. I calmed her down and reassured her. Being very attentive and holding the best facial expressions that i could( crying is always hard to deal with, since i never know how to actually act. I always wish that i could just give someone a pat on the back say “there there” and then say “get over it, you’re fine”) she was actually on the verge of suicide so i was being extra attentive marking up lies and connections, just about anything that would give her enough reasons to hold onto life. She hasn’t killed herself yet. 

Ex.2 it was New Years. I went to a friends party. It was a smaller group of 15 people. But one girl one having too much to drink, on purpose it seemed like to me, i think she needed an excuse to act reckless. But she was very insecure and very unstable. Constantly letting people know that she loved them and that the world loved them as well, some how i guess that helped her feel like she was loved. But she was getting too drunk and dropped a glass that shattered onto the floor. She attempted to go clean it up and almost fell into the glass. As a reference from your book it seemed to me as she was flirting with death. So they stopped her and cleaned up the glass. We all moved out of the basement and to the upstairs cause there were still shards laying around. She stayed down there desperately Singing and moaning for attention. Annoying everyone at the party. I walk to the basement door and from the top of the steps i yell “SHUT THE FUCK UP” she then was quiet, i walked into the room where everyone was and they all were at awe. They slowly began to laugh quietly, because they knew it’s what they wanted to do but wouldn’t. She latter came upstairs, projectile vomited, got on her knees(which were now in the vomit) and proceeded to scoop up her vomit with her hands. It was disgusting, embarrassing, and enthralling to watch. Then she took a shower, went into the kitchen and grabbed a knife and was about to kill herself. I sat on the couch and watched, somebody stopped her. This is by no means extreme in anyway, simply the fastest experience i could think of. 

For as long as i can remember I’ve always felt apart from the crowd. I’ve never been a part of something. I never belonged to a group of friends or my school or even to my best friend Sam. I believe that i will always feel alone and isolated. How i act is also heavily affected by my mood. I mainly have three moods. One is where I’m irritable, aggressive, impulsive, blunt, callous(more than normal). Two is where I’m very calm, quiet, reflective, rational and calculating. Three is my neutral where I’m in the middle of the two. I have a little bit of high energy great for interacting with crowds and talking to people. The perfect twist of impulsivity and calculating. But perfect mood for doing anything i need done. One thing i find odd is how being nervous affects me. It affects me physically with increased heart rate and maybe a little bit of jitteriness, but i don’t feel that it actually gets to me, my mind is perfectly calm. A difference between me and you is that i don’t have a grandiose view of myself. However that seems to slowly be changing as I’ve become aware of how stupid other people are. It took me a lot longer than you to realize this. I figured this out around the age of 12 or something like that. I believe that’s because my mother tried to me make believe that i was worse than everyone else so i always felt stupider and didn’t judge other people. But i grew out of that perspective and am confident and smarter than most ect. 

My child hood.
In my child hood i was high in Conscientiousness. I remember being just tall enough to reach a door knob as i thought to myself “i wonder what happens to you when you die, does anything happen or are you just dust?” I always would enjoy them moment and try to be one with my surroundings. Or i would sit down and just think, walking around the hallways of my mind for what felt like hours. My cousin that we’ll call Nate introduced me to fire and other things. I remember one memory where me my sister Sabrina and my cousin Nate were all sitting around this green slide in the heat of the summer. The sun was very intense. We grabbed worms one at a time and put them at the top of the slide to watch them wiggle their way down as they turned into crisp. Me and my cousin did things like this a lot. Snails and salt, watching in awe as the snail would bubble and fizz. Me and Sam would go out at night killing fireflies with our hands, tennis rackets, swords, and a can of hair spray with a lighter. We also found a snake in his yard one time, we both grabbed sticks and started beating it to death. It was a fun game dodge the snakes bites, after it couldn’t move we then cut off its head and put it in a bowl of salt in his shed so that we could keep the skull. There were a bunch of other things too. One time me and my Sabrina (as toddlers) walked down the neighborhood to the river, grabbed some rocks and started throwing them at ducks. The police cars siren turned off and told us to stop. I’ve always wondered how different i would’ve been i had started the habit of abusing smaller animals(this event with the ducks happened years before the event with snakes and Sam), because up to then it was just bugs. I was emotionally and mentally abused throughout elementary school and possibly before that (can’t remember that far, all those years just blur together to me) i have a good family, i recognize that I’m very fortunate and that what i experienced is nothing compared to others. My mother was mainly the antagonizer. She’s bipolar and possibly has borderline personality disorder. She loved me when it was convenient, when she needed me to do something, and constantly lied to me. One moment i was the best child in the world and then next i was the worst. And I’m not exaggerating  that at all.  She was very emotional, she taught me that emotions were unreliable and so was love. I was only with my father when i was helping with one of his projects. When there was a complication or obstacle he would always get furious and yell and cuss. It was always so annoying and made me mad. I didn’t want to be like that so i taught myself how to hide my anger. I was never physically abused. However my mother would always yell at me calling me things like worthless and good for nothing. And her face was red and she was very loud stomping through the house making noises by slamming doors, drawers,pans, pots, everything. She always tried to make me feel bad about myself.  there was a time when i cried myself to sleep every night in a row for a month. One time i watched a movie where the person said “being yourself is enough” so i asked my mom one day. Isn’t being myself enough? She glared at me with anger and said no. The sadness she made me feel became anger and somewhere along the line i created a dissociation from my self. Life didn’t feel real and i was just like another one of my games.(life still doesn’t feel real) but as i grew up i realized that my mother only acted that way because she was just very unintelligent, insecure, and living a life she didn’t want. I used to hate her but after realizing that i forgave her. This doesn’t mean that she doesn’t  aggravate me, she does. But instead i feel indifferent towards her. I was unpopular in elementary school, mainly because i didn’t fit in or understand people. So when i went to middle school i mimicked the popular people and added bits and pieces to my arsenal of personas. Then i became popular and people loved me. I watched a plethora of psychology vids trying to understand people as much as i could. That’s mainly why i got into psychology and am now planning to major in it. 

Thank you so much if you read all that. I’d love to hear back from you. 

My response: 

I’ll try to write about sense of self again sometime, but I think you already understand how and why it happens to us — we take enough psychological hits to our identity that we just dissociate ourselves from it, like a tourniquet cutting off blood flow to a damaged limb. I think (through usually professional help) we can restore some function to that damaged limb, but it isn't super easy, it's not intuitive, it's hard for us to even have a vision of what it might look like to do something like that, and it's a bit like being lost in the woods trying to find our childhood home that we only remember faintly. And certain things will never be back the way they could have been. I still don't experience affective empathy and probably never will, despite finally graduating from therapy. 
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