I nave a complementary (albeit speculative) hypothesis to your proposed sociopathic enlargement of the amigdala, which I refer to as the reversal of the moral compass.
I suspect this situation could unfold as a defensive mechanism for people who go through extended periods of intense emotional pain - they become so consumed by affective suffering... they simply learn to enjoy it, for self-protection.
They especially enjoy to provoke it in others, as a sort of misguided attempt to foot the emotional bill. At the same time, they start to regard happinness as a prelude to pain (everything that rises must fall) so begin to shudder at it.
This reversal of the moral compass could make up for the malignant layer in NPD and ASPD. Its malignancy doesn't necessarily manifest explicitly as a criminal type, and sometimes seems to express more subtly as the miserable type of person who absolutely loves making other miserable - a sadistic temper, simply put. The very antithesis to emotional empathy, this makes the person prone to "feeling against" rather than "feeling with".
I entirely disagree. Its been a major obstacle, this thinking that people come to enjoy thier pain. I cant speak for everyone on this planet, but no, that's not helpful.
If they have a differently wired brain, like a psychopath for instance, but the brain is adapting to changed like abuse, who knows what compensation it could make regarding the situation.
I understand what I wrote could have made little sense to the logical mind, since it boils down to emotional reasoning. I appreciate this oppotunity to try to bridge the gap.
To clarify, it helps to think of Boomer concepts such as "tough love" or to think of how you feel towards doing something you don't truly like doing, but that you gladly do nonetheless, because you appreciate its effects - you know, things like exercising or eating healthy food.
For many people, these are acquired tastes. Things they originally disliked because they did not know better.
I imagine that people with the sadistic mindset could have developed this layer that rationalizes emotional suffering along similar lines.
Such people might likewise rationalize the suffering of others as "bitter medicine"... however, if such people were caught up in psychological spitting and they chalked down the suffering party to the "bad side", their attitude could easily degenerate into idelogically selective cruelty.
Do these examples clarify my point logically, I wonder?
That's why running can be addictive, in the best possible sense ;-) It'd also why many people tend to get bursts of creative inspiration while exercising, it's from the natural THC their brain produces - proper called Anandamide, aka "the bliss molecule".
Yes they do clarify it and I appreciate your words as being from someone with a different mindset from my own which is of course interesting. I do understand emotional reasoning, because while so strive for logic, I am very emotionally led.
Oh boy, tough love, I have a serious hatred of that concept and the harm it has caused. Twisted boomer bullshit. On the other hand, I am someone who has pursued fitness activities and have hiked to the very limit of my ability (my ability is poor, but I pushed it) and often run my body into the ground because it feels great afterwards even if you're sitting there with icepacks on your knees and bruised achilles. So I get it. Yeah, doing that was an acquired taste alright, I loathed hard activity as a young person.
Nevertheless I still have difficulty extrapolating this to sadism. I sort of understand how a sadist might rationalise it and think (mistakenly) that their victim my process suffering as a potentially beneficial challenge, bit it still seems a stretch. Though I guess there are many real world examples of this, like 'spare the rod and spoil the child', which give people a supposed excuse to be brutal.
I am not sure what you mean though about the "bad side" and idealogically selective cruelty, can you clarify? Do you mean the sort of rationalisation that it's for the victims own good?
The thing most people get wrong about capital Love is to assume it's an emotion, when it's actually a mental state. It's something you get into, that you build within a context (relatioship or otheriwise).
There's no such thing as to find one's "true love"; there's realistically such a thing as to make one's *love true* by acting in proper unison with one's logic and feelings. That is why Athena here is rather surprisingly a loving person (more than she herself seems to give herself credit for), well for someone who is a diagnosed factor 1 psycopath anyway. She doesn't seem to have the sociopathicc ASPD layer precisely (I suspect) because her psycopathy shielded her from the blunt effect of emotional trauma (that she did incur significantly regardless as well all do anyway), and she comes across in her writing as one one could reasonably deem a "pro-social psychopath".
Anyway - when I speak of the "bad side", I mean just about that.
Further, I use this term usually framed in the context of psychological splitting, a pervasive phenomena that makes for an all too common Dr.Jekil/Mr. Hyde dynamic, with people who are out of touch with their mandatory human darkness, and that in doing so allow it to run astray outside the reals of their awareness.
Splitting is a powerful psychological defense, which together with acting out and projecting, combine to combine the all too common pestilence of hypocrisy. It seems to be a common denominator among all people who are caugth up in personality disorders, dissociative disorders and psychotic disorders. I suspect it could affect as much as half of the population.
Anyone who indulgies in mentalities such as nationalism, racism etc, you can bet is a captive of psychological splitting and that is how they compartimentalize reality through a "us vs them" lens.
So the Irony (I'm suggesting) is that we're leaving in a emotionally stunted world, that breeds and rewards hypocrites while further perpetuating its self-reinforcing emotional collateral damage through the cultural modeling of the early age imprinting of psyches with perverse predatorial values that are aligned with what many out there refer to as "the patriarchy" or "the system".
This is ironic because it's set up in a way that makes the affective people loathe the way things work, while absolutely refusing to do anything but to collaborate witht the dominant positions at any given time.
It makes it so that a person who is caught up in splitting will invariably and compulsively work against their own best interests (mosts notably by damaging their children while scrambling to toughen them up for life), in a misguided display of repetition compulsion that is sourced by their often unconscious emotional wounding.
As Jung thus said "until you know your subconscious, it will rule your life and you will call it Destiny".
This could boil down to a "no pain, no gain" mindset. I strongly feel such mindset could correlate strongly (or even precisely) with the sociopathic mindset, and its clear predominance in our emotionally traumatized cultures makes up for..........
...... a very painful society. Survival of the fittest. Might makes right.
Hurt people hurt people without trying. And they believe it's for the best.
/rant
Emotions are bitchy. But rationalizations are callous. Both are just as troublesome on their own terms, although in strikingly different directions. Too much of either always causes trouble, both personalliy, interpersonally, culturally. If continents are logic, oceans are emotion. For some reason, we imagine a world would be possible unless both things existed in persistent turmoil and defiance of one another.
What is social life but persistent waves crashing upon the rocky shore?
I can assure you from personal experience that there are far more people than you could imagine who derive pleasure from pain. The tastes of masochists runs the gamut from those who enjoy physical things like whipping, flogging and strangulation to those with mental issues who are into being cuckolds and otherwise humiliated.
Masochist are weirdos and I don't get them at all but they're out there in large numbers. Heck, just look at all the middle age women who flocked to the Fifty Shades movies
"...which I refer to as the reversal of the moral compass.
I suspect this situation could unfold as a defensive mechanism for people who go through extended periods of intense emotional pain - they become so consumed by affective suffering... they simply learn to enjoy it, for self-protection.
They especially enjoy to provoke it in others, as a sort of misguided attempt to foot the emotional bill. At the same time, they start to regard happinness as a prelude to pain (everything that rises must fall) so begin to shudder at it."
I concur.
In fact, I have proofs for this to be the case, albeit ones I'm not willing to share in details.
But let's just say that I completely confirm that sadism is the result of:
1) feeling too much of negative emotions - guilt, shame, suffering in general... +
2) failing to help others while suffering, +
3) trying to rationalize the others' suffering +
4) learning to enjoy their suffering because now it's justified.
Let's assume a hypothetical situation (since it's hypothethical, it cannot count as a proof, but just as an example of the process):
-Person A promises to do something for person B, but fails to do it in time because they have their own problems and suffering preventing them to do it;
-Person B starts torturing Person A by putting pressure on them, using offensive language, blackmail, etc;
-Person A, confronted with additional pain, tries to find reasons to minimize the pain and succeeds (perhaps the Person B had it much easier than Person A in life, has a history of abusing Person A or others, or simply doesn't conform to Person A's moral standards, which are usually decent);
-Now, Person A starts feeling justified in Person B's suffering and even comes to enjoy their suffering.
Congratulations Person B, you've just created a sadist out of a very empathetic Person A.
"The hypothesis that I have is that sadistic psychopaths were horrifically abused, which caused their amygdala to become slightly larger than that of a normal psychopath. In that transition, and with the rest of the emotional processing not available, and as a response to the abuse (psychopaths don’t internalize abuse, we externalize it) they become sadistic..."
I believe this could very well be the case. As childrens brains are still developing it is very possible for the brain to make adjustments.
I was also thinking, being that psychopathy is on a scale, like everything else, that some may naturally have a small unnoteable amount is empathy, due to a slightly larger amygdala, naturally, then add abuse to that and you could have a very dangerous person. Idk, what do think?
I agree that you'd have to have empathy to be sadistic, just because what else would motivate such action?
I also wonder if he was including secondary psychopaths in this study, or do we know?
I agree. I think that sort of person could become extremely dangerous.
As for sociopaths being included, that's a good question. I would like to know that as well, but it doesn't appear that they controlled for it either way.
You said, "psychopaths don’t internalize abuse, we externalize it." What do you mean by "externalize it"? (And also please correct me if I am wrong, I think "internalizing abuse" means sort of absorbing or putting the voice of the abuser inside one's own head??)
And also, great post btw. Conflating psychopaths and sadists just makes for a more confusing world.
Internalizing it is something like developing PTSD from the abuse, or sociopathy. These are changes that happen to a person's personality due specifically to the abuse they endured. Psychopaths won't have this. Instead they will externalize it out into the world in terms of antisocial behavior.
Yes, it does, and becomes exhausting when trying to explain to someone that is convinced that they are correct about all psychopaths being sadistic, when that is not what the science says about it.
So, perhaps oversimplifying: internalizing is doing to oneself what has been done to one, and externalizing is doing unto others. I can certainly see that if/when a psychopath was abused in childhood, that could certainly motivate them into antisocial behavior of many kinds. They might even conclude that abusing people was a normal behavior, and therefore, why not do it too.
Indeed, and they also will not understand why someone would suffer because of the abuse. It didn't bother them, so what is this person complaining about?
Great point that psychological abuse wouldn't bother them -- though I would think that physical or sexual abuse would. The impact would likely be different since no oxytocin and no empathy. [thinking....] Perhaps physical abuse then simply translates into a means of getting what one wants. Similarly with sex -- that the experience was that someone else simply took it from [me], therefore it's okay to just take sex from whomever, whenever one wants it. It's challenging to wrap my head around implications of psychopath thinking-and-experience since I'm firmly rooted in NT land.
I agree. I have often said that the worst psychopaths are made by the people that influenced their lives when they are young. However, that also seems to be the case for neurotypicals as well.
Idealistically people should just stop abusing other people.
I think there is an unbreachable gulf between your experience and neurotypicals when it comes to physical pain. You experienced this as a dancer. Dancers are very hardcore tough nuts. You were even more so. It is a mistake to look for an EMOTIONAL reason why people cannot function in the throes of a cluster or migraine, which for a regular sufferer has no emotional dimension, its just here we go again, physical suffering again, no danger. I think the obvious answer is just that they HURT MORE for other people. Like maybe as much as your meningitis. Reflect on your extreme agony deranged experience. Maybe that's how these pains feel to some people. We have pains we can disregard, and pains that incapacitate, that's just how it is. I have always striven to manage pain as a point of, I dunno, what? I'm not sure why, but I did. But after a point, I can't.
There is a curious and anomalous example of someone with congenital insensibility to physical pain. Usually, these people destroy their bodies in infancy and later live careful lives very compromised by past multiple injuries. But there is a British woman who apparently feels no pain but remains uninjured and empathic and has had a very normal life. She just thought other people must somehow feel more than she does. Her childbirths were pain free. She cared for her partners and children with great understanding, but not with the same fierceness that would be typical.
These oddball examples just point out the complexity of the situation. I believe it is a mistake to look for an emotional component to pain when wondering why other people are incapacitated and you are not. Emotional pains, sure, that is a given when you are psycopathic, but non-deathly physical pains, no. Until we have some gadget that is able to transfer pain brain to brain just for the hell of it, there will always be gulfs in understanding. Even with no fear or dread, the neurotypicals pain may be way in excess of yours. Obviously I can't KNOW this for sure. But your writings about your experience very much suggest so. Looking to fear and emotion here I believe is a mistake.
Meanwhile, it makes sense what you say that the average psycopath has no interest in sadism, but that the terribly abused might just go that way. It is generally true that in all neurotypes that cruelty CAN result in a perpetuating of that. For myself, as an abused person, there was a time when I was a nasty and vengeful price of work, though it was mostly in my head and I did little actual harm beyond snarkiness. I can imagine myself into a brainspace where sadism felt like something natural and indifferent, but somehow necessary, even though psychopathy prevented a full appraisal of the suffering inflicted on the victim.
How does this discussion of sadism tie in with your saying that you by admission have a cruel streak? Is that something that was purely pragmatic and tactical at the time and which you thought had no emotional weight? Or something that you deployed against someone for whom vengeance seemed deserving? Or you just not getting it at all because emotional pain equals zero and its too easy to be 'nasty'?
There is definitely emotional aspects to pain that cause neurotypicals to suffer more than I do, and that part cannot be dismissed. There is fear, anxiety, loathing, as well as many other emotions that accompany pain. I didn't have a good deal of understanding of this, so I asked this question on Quora:
and received many insightful answers to give me a greater understanding of that emotional aspect that runs beneath the surface and often is not even understood to be present because it is a part of the experience for neurotypicals.
They have demonstrated this through pain experiments. If a person knows that they have the power to say stop, and the pain will stop, they can endure ten to twenty times the level of pain than when they have no power to control stopping the pain. That singular shift, the control and power, makes the pain lessened to the degree that they can withstand much more of it.
Thanks for the link, interesting anecdote. I do understand that having the power to make it stop can make people able to endure more, that makes sense to me. Perhaps I underestimate the emotional aspect and lack imagination in this respect. Thinking back over my own pains, luckily they tended not to be in situations in which I was afraid, I knew I was OK, it really was just the pain. This may make me lack personal understanding of how fear and other negative emotions could increase pain perception.
Nevertheless, I stand by my assertion that pain thresholds are so variable, and quite separate from pain tolerance, and I really do think it would be a mistake to ascribe all differences in the perception of severity to emotional factors. I think of my brother who unexpectedly needed a root canal- the tooth had only just started to feel touchy. The dentist tested all his teeth with some electrode device cranked up to full power and concluded that he did not feel anywhere near the typical amount of tooth pain, so he wouldn't notice a basic cavity in time. It wasn't that he was being heroic. It would be a mistake for him to dismiss someone else's raging toothache as histrionics. My partner also doesn't feel things until they get pretty bad- he can take his hiking boots off and find feet that are raw and bleeding all over, but which had only just started to annoy him. I would long since have been unable to walk and been applying dressings. This has not always been an advantage, he has barely registered the signs of serious conditions. He also is not heroic, he just doesn't feel it as much.
So yeah, I totally understand pain being incapacitating, and do not ever dismiss people's pain as being just whinging. That has led to medical mismanagement, such as in the long term dismissal endometriosis, which was likened to just regular bad period pain, when in fact it's on a whole other level. There are huge medical ethics issues now in pain management with the backlash from the opioid epidemic, and that bothers me a lot. And I remain stunned that it wasn't until 1986 that infants and small children were given analgesia for surgery. Dismissal of others' pain has consequences. I honestly do believe that I can separate pure pain intensity from other emotional factors, and do not appreciate my own pains being dismissed or my incapacity being judged as wimpy grumbling or a failure to live up to stoicism standards set by those who just feel it less. My attitude has always been to deal with it as best I can, kick on, and to learn pain management techniques, I can do no more, we get what we get.
But until we have that sci to device that allows us to tap into the brains of others and their experiences, we will never really know how things feel for those others.
You make some really good points here. I think pain varies from person to person physically. I also think if emotions are attached to our pain, that can make it worse. Also we NT's apparently remember pain better then psychopaths, at least from what I've heard from Athena. We tend to dwell on it and she seems to not be able to recall it once it's gone.
I think it fear of pain may make it harder to deal with the pain we have, like our fear or memory of similar pain, may add to our current amount of pain. Other then that I agree with you.
Yep, fear of pain is a thing, though for me its more fear of emotional than physical pains. We wonder how we will manage to endure what might be coming next.
So something that is seldom discussed is that masochists recruit and train their tormentors. Steven Pinker pointed this out in one of his books though I can't recall what it is off the top of my head. It's not the new, fresh, prison guards who are the worst it's the seasoned veterans etc.
So about masochist recruiting, I've had that happen and I will say it was sort of fun at first. the thing is that the girl and later multiple girls were having a GREAT time. I was scrupulous about things like safe words and obvious physical conditions but I wasn't getting much in the way of arousal from scenes. So, I left. I still don't get what drives a real masochist and I've long since lost interest in them.
In case you are not interested in participating, but might still appreciate some info about what is the appeal...
As I understand it there is sensual component of a) strong sensations that are only moderately painful and b) release of endorphines as response to pain and then there is emotional component which is where power-trust-adrenaline-taboo comes into play, but also emotional catharsis. Why someone wants to watch a tragedy that makes them cry? Because something inside gets released. Also I read once about how it provides opportunity to rewrite past painful experiences through similar, but safe and comfortable scenario played out in present during scene, so... And another thing is that sexuality starts to develop in early years and associations that a young body and brain develops can be... Various. That is also an explanation of why victims of sexual abuse in childhood sometimes get trapped in experiencing arousal simultaneously with fear, which plays a role in being vulnerable to new abuse. Not the same thing as masochism, but association between certain stimuli and sexual gratification can be a pretty wild thing.
I imagined there could be curiosity as motivation. Toying with people and seeing how they will react. You are bothered by drama. Could someone in theory see squirming breaking person as entertaining, as a challenge - finding a way to crack them, finding a way to play them in this and that direction, finding how different people are played differently. What ordinary and not so ordinary poking will do what. Shaping clay, taking apart a machine, testing limits of something.
Your interest is more in perspectives, talking and observing will do. And driving someone to insanity would be too easy and not so informative (beside all the drama).
Can curiosity induce fixation? You say you are stubborn. Passion is wrong word. But how about relentless want to achieve something. And that wouldn't be about power and control and self aggrandizement. Merely that challenge occupies mind that wants its stimulation.
I'd think of sadism to overlap more with traits of borderline personality disorder or sociopathy. SPD was a thing in the DSM-III but it got scratched in later editions and was never properly clustered and I have a pretty straightforward answer for it - physical or emotional sadism is pretty much just bullying. At least with psychopathy or any other personality disorder there's some kind of aspect that the individual is missing out on (ex: lack of empathy, isolation, identity disturbance) but I don't see the same thing with sadists. Overly toxic or aggressive people just come across as arseholes to me, I don't look at them and think "oh, they must have (insert personality disorder)" because usually that's not the case and there's plenty of people who are just unpleasant to be around and never went through any trauma.
From what I can gather sadists seem rather cowardly and bogus, their venom is entirely counterphobic to that heightened anxiety they feel which sociopaths and psychopaths don't. For ASPD, manipulation is a modus operandi whereas for sadists it's a means of picking on powerless scapegoats which I personally find rather pathetic.
The only place I can see this being productive is some kind of law enforcement job, where they possess the "right" to control and punish those who won't submit to them.
One thing I have to nitpick about the 2012 study though is that it somehow implies that sociopaths can feel guilt or remorse, lol? As if that's not one of the criteria for ASPD. Though Robert Hare said the difference is that sociopaths lack empathy compared to an average person and it doesn't exist for psychopaths I'm more prone to viewing the two as mostly the same but sociopath is better for semantics due to the unfortunate confusion between psychopathy and psychosis.
I dunno, I get that there's two different dimensions and that the affective/interpersonal facet of psychopathy is separate for impulsive and antisocial behaviors but I have both facets do differentiating the two can be irrelevant for my purposes sometimes. I'm yet to come across one person formally diagnosed with psychopathy or ASPD that doesn't have traits of both regardless of the subtle differences in brain structure and I can't say I've really met anyone with ASPD who experiences strong anxiety/depression or PTSD symptoms, co-morbid drug abuse is a different story.
I have spoken to several people that were diagnosed with ASPD but outside off the behaviors that were antisocial they didn't have anything particularly significant underlying. Many of them participated in antisocial behaviors because they were young and bored, with underdeveloped brains.
Hypothetically, due to how sociopathy is formed, they could feel all emotions. Could however, is the operative word. It does not mean will. Sociopathy is very different from psychopathy, their emotional experience is quite different, and people that are sociopathic may or may not have ASPD. A person with ASPD is unlikely to be a psychopath or a sociopath. Most ASPD individuals are just poorly behaving neurotypicals.
The entire social deviance facet of sociopathy is the epitome of being young and bored, in my experience. But other than that, most of these people barely meet the criteria for ASPD. CD may as well impact 15-20% of young people nowadays anyhow, highballing here obviously but it's worth noting how common it is.
Most ASPD aren't sociopaths because from some of the ones I've met, they rarely have gone through anything super harsh. If you're misbehaving say, you get into a bar fight and are arrested, and a shrink throws shit on the walls with an ASPD diagnosis that's one thing, maybe this person has some antisocial traits. If you violate your conditions of release or show versatility it could be a sign of something more serious.
Not sure what is thought of Theodore Millon in these circles, but his deal is coming up with subcategories and he identifies bully-like type which tends towards cowardice, insecurity and counterphobic direction and weak victims, but also group that experiences explosions of violence and fury, then rather impervious overly critical scathing merciless intimidation and at last those that go into enforcement, either with blatant relish or proping themselves with justification of righteousness. I do agree not all of it is disorder, rather that disorder is the more extreme form
There is also division between vicarious and active approach to this desire. And it either might or might not include sexual component. And when it comes to sexual sadism question of consent separates it into two groups and BDSM is built in consent.
He would be incorrect. They have done studies on bullies and found that they in fact have very high self-esteem. The notion that they are insecure was incorrect.
If it is extreme pain it isn't that my temper is shorter, it is that I am less likely to maintain the mask. Masking takes concentration, and pain can interrupt that if it is severe enough.
I nave a complementary (albeit speculative) hypothesis to your proposed sociopathic enlargement of the amigdala, which I refer to as the reversal of the moral compass.
I suspect this situation could unfold as a defensive mechanism for people who go through extended periods of intense emotional pain - they become so consumed by affective suffering... they simply learn to enjoy it, for self-protection.
They especially enjoy to provoke it in others, as a sort of misguided attempt to foot the emotional bill. At the same time, they start to regard happinness as a prelude to pain (everything that rises must fall) so begin to shudder at it.
This reversal of the moral compass could make up for the malignant layer in NPD and ASPD. Its malignancy doesn't necessarily manifest explicitly as a criminal type, and sometimes seems to express more subtly as the miserable type of person who absolutely loves making other miserable - a sadistic temper, simply put. The very antithesis to emotional empathy, this makes the person prone to "feeling against" rather than "feeling with".
That is a very interesting thought, and I can certainly see the merit in thinking so.
I entirely disagree. Its been a major obstacle, this thinking that people come to enjoy thier pain. I cant speak for everyone on this planet, but no, that's not helpful.
If they have a differently wired brain, like a psychopath for instance, but the brain is adapting to changed like abuse, who knows what compensation it could make regarding the situation.
True, it's a big world full of all sorts of people, who knows, maybe some people do end up enjoying their pain, but I can't believe that is typical.
I understand what I wrote could have made little sense to the logical mind, since it boils down to emotional reasoning. I appreciate this oppotunity to try to bridge the gap.
To clarify, it helps to think of Boomer concepts such as "tough love" or to think of how you feel towards doing something you don't truly like doing, but that you gladly do nonetheless, because you appreciate its effects - you know, things like exercising or eating healthy food.
For many people, these are acquired tastes. Things they originally disliked because they did not know better.
I imagine that people with the sadistic mindset could have developed this layer that rationalizes emotional suffering along similar lines.
Such people might likewise rationalize the suffering of others as "bitter medicine"... however, if such people were caught up in psychological spitting and they chalked down the suffering party to the "bad side", their attitude could easily degenerate into idelogically selective cruelty.
Do these examples clarify my point logically, I wonder?
Isn't there something like an exercise high that people chase?
Yes, runner's high is a well documented phenomenon that has only recently been clarified in neuroscience.
As Irony would have it, all joggers are secretly natural stoners:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-athletes-way/202102/runner-s-high-depends-endocannabinoids-not-endorphins
That's why running can be addictive, in the best possible sense ;-) It'd also why many people tend to get bursts of creative inspiration while exercising, it's from the natural THC their brain produces - proper called Anandamide, aka "the bliss molecule".
Yeah, I had it once. Once. For me, totally not worth it. Friends tell me otherwise.
Yes they do clarify it and I appreciate your words as being from someone with a different mindset from my own which is of course interesting. I do understand emotional reasoning, because while so strive for logic, I am very emotionally led.
Oh boy, tough love, I have a serious hatred of that concept and the harm it has caused. Twisted boomer bullshit. On the other hand, I am someone who has pursued fitness activities and have hiked to the very limit of my ability (my ability is poor, but I pushed it) and often run my body into the ground because it feels great afterwards even if you're sitting there with icepacks on your knees and bruised achilles. So I get it. Yeah, doing that was an acquired taste alright, I loathed hard activity as a young person.
Nevertheless I still have difficulty extrapolating this to sadism. I sort of understand how a sadist might rationalise it and think (mistakenly) that their victim my process suffering as a potentially beneficial challenge, bit it still seems a stretch. Though I guess there are many real world examples of this, like 'spare the rod and spoil the child', which give people a supposed excuse to be brutal.
I am not sure what you mean though about the "bad side" and idealogically selective cruelty, can you clarify? Do you mean the sort of rationalisation that it's for the victims own good?
The thing most people get wrong about capital Love is to assume it's an emotion, when it's actually a mental state. It's something you get into, that you build within a context (relatioship or otheriwise).
There's no such thing as to find one's "true love"; there's realistically such a thing as to make one's *love true* by acting in proper unison with one's logic and feelings. That is why Athena here is rather surprisingly a loving person (more than she herself seems to give herself credit for), well for someone who is a diagnosed factor 1 psycopath anyway. She doesn't seem to have the sociopathicc ASPD layer precisely (I suspect) because her psycopathy shielded her from the blunt effect of emotional trauma (that she did incur significantly regardless as well all do anyway), and she comes across in her writing as one one could reasonably deem a "pro-social psychopath".
Anyway - when I speak of the "bad side", I mean just about that.
Further, I use this term usually framed in the context of psychological splitting, a pervasive phenomena that makes for an all too common Dr.Jekil/Mr. Hyde dynamic, with people who are out of touch with their mandatory human darkness, and that in doing so allow it to run astray outside the reals of their awareness.
Splitting is a powerful psychological defense, which together with acting out and projecting, combine to combine the all too common pestilence of hypocrisy. It seems to be a common denominator among all people who are caugth up in personality disorders, dissociative disorders and psychotic disorders. I suspect it could affect as much as half of the population.
Anyone who indulgies in mentalities such as nationalism, racism etc, you can bet is a captive of psychological splitting and that is how they compartimentalize reality through a "us vs them" lens.
So the Irony (I'm suggesting) is that we're leaving in a emotionally stunted world, that breeds and rewards hypocrites while further perpetuating its self-reinforcing emotional collateral damage through the cultural modeling of the early age imprinting of psyches with perverse predatorial values that are aligned with what many out there refer to as "the patriarchy" or "the system".
This is ironic because it's set up in a way that makes the affective people loathe the way things work, while absolutely refusing to do anything but to collaborate witht the dominant positions at any given time.
It makes it so that a person who is caught up in splitting will invariably and compulsively work against their own best interests (mosts notably by damaging their children while scrambling to toughen them up for life), in a misguided display of repetition compulsion that is sourced by their often unconscious emotional wounding.
As Jung thus said "until you know your subconscious, it will rule your life and you will call it Destiny".
This could boil down to a "no pain, no gain" mindset. I strongly feel such mindset could correlate strongly (or even precisely) with the sociopathic mindset, and its clear predominance in our emotionally traumatized cultures makes up for..........
...... a very painful society. Survival of the fittest. Might makes right.
Hurt people hurt people without trying. And they believe it's for the best.
/rant
Emotions are bitchy. But rationalizations are callous. Both are just as troublesome on their own terms, although in strikingly different directions. Too much of either always causes trouble, both personalliy, interpersonally, culturally. If continents are logic, oceans are emotion. For some reason, we imagine a world would be possible unless both things existed in persistent turmoil and defiance of one another.
What is social life but persistent waves crashing upon the rocky shore?
/rant
I can assure you from personal experience that there are far more people than you could imagine who derive pleasure from pain. The tastes of masochists runs the gamut from those who enjoy physical things like whipping, flogging and strangulation to those with mental issues who are into being cuckolds and otherwise humiliated.
Masochist are weirdos and I don't get them at all but they're out there in large numbers. Heck, just look at all the middle age women who flocked to the Fifty Shades movies
Fifty shades of garbage.
"...which I refer to as the reversal of the moral compass.
I suspect this situation could unfold as a defensive mechanism for people who go through extended periods of intense emotional pain - they become so consumed by affective suffering... they simply learn to enjoy it, for self-protection.
They especially enjoy to provoke it in others, as a sort of misguided attempt to foot the emotional bill. At the same time, they start to regard happinness as a prelude to pain (everything that rises must fall) so begin to shudder at it."
I concur.
In fact, I have proofs for this to be the case, albeit ones I'm not willing to share in details.
But let's just say that I completely confirm that sadism is the result of:
1) feeling too much of negative emotions - guilt, shame, suffering in general... +
2) failing to help others while suffering, +
3) trying to rationalize the others' suffering +
4) learning to enjoy their suffering because now it's justified.
Let's assume a hypothetical situation (since it's hypothethical, it cannot count as a proof, but just as an example of the process):
-Person A promises to do something for person B, but fails to do it in time because they have their own problems and suffering preventing them to do it;
-Person B starts torturing Person A by putting pressure on them, using offensive language, blackmail, etc;
-Person A, confronted with additional pain, tries to find reasons to minimize the pain and succeeds (perhaps the Person B had it much easier than Person A in life, has a history of abusing Person A or others, or simply doesn't conform to Person A's moral standards, which are usually decent);
-Now, Person A starts feeling justified in Person B's suffering and even comes to enjoy their suffering.
Congratulations Person B, you've just created a sadist out of a very empathetic Person A.
"The hypothesis that I have is that sadistic psychopaths were horrifically abused, which caused their amygdala to become slightly larger than that of a normal psychopath. In that transition, and with the rest of the emotional processing not available, and as a response to the abuse (psychopaths don’t internalize abuse, we externalize it) they become sadistic..."
I believe this could very well be the case. As childrens brains are still developing it is very possible for the brain to make adjustments.
I was also thinking, being that psychopathy is on a scale, like everything else, that some may naturally have a small unnoteable amount is empathy, due to a slightly larger amygdala, naturally, then add abuse to that and you could have a very dangerous person. Idk, what do think?
I agree that you'd have to have empathy to be sadistic, just because what else would motivate such action?
I also wonder if he was including secondary psychopaths in this study, or do we know?
As always, well written and interesting.
I agree. I think that sort of person could become extremely dangerous.
As for sociopaths being included, that's a good question. I would like to know that as well, but it doesn't appear that they controlled for it either way.
You said, "psychopaths don’t internalize abuse, we externalize it." What do you mean by "externalize it"? (And also please correct me if I am wrong, I think "internalizing abuse" means sort of absorbing or putting the voice of the abuser inside one's own head??)
And also, great post btw. Conflating psychopaths and sadists just makes for a more confusing world.
Internalizing it is something like developing PTSD from the abuse, or sociopathy. These are changes that happen to a person's personality due specifically to the abuse they endured. Psychopaths won't have this. Instead they will externalize it out into the world in terms of antisocial behavior.
Yes, it does, and becomes exhausting when trying to explain to someone that is convinced that they are correct about all psychopaths being sadistic, when that is not what the science says about it.
So, perhaps oversimplifying: internalizing is doing to oneself what has been done to one, and externalizing is doing unto others. I can certainly see that if/when a psychopath was abused in childhood, that could certainly motivate them into antisocial behavior of many kinds. They might even conclude that abusing people was a normal behavior, and therefore, why not do it too.
Yes, that is exactly what I mean.
Indeed, and they also will not understand why someone would suffer because of the abuse. It didn't bother them, so what is this person complaining about?
Great point that psychological abuse wouldn't bother them -- though I would think that physical or sexual abuse would. The impact would likely be different since no oxytocin and no empathy. [thinking....] Perhaps physical abuse then simply translates into a means of getting what one wants. Similarly with sex -- that the experience was that someone else simply took it from [me], therefore it's okay to just take sex from whomever, whenever one wants it. It's challenging to wrap my head around implications of psychopath thinking-and-experience since I'm firmly rooted in NT land.
I agree. I have often said that the worst psychopaths are made by the people that influenced their lives when they are young. However, that also seems to be the case for neurotypicals as well.
Idealistically people should just stop abusing other people.
Yup.
I think there is an unbreachable gulf between your experience and neurotypicals when it comes to physical pain. You experienced this as a dancer. Dancers are very hardcore tough nuts. You were even more so. It is a mistake to look for an EMOTIONAL reason why people cannot function in the throes of a cluster or migraine, which for a regular sufferer has no emotional dimension, its just here we go again, physical suffering again, no danger. I think the obvious answer is just that they HURT MORE for other people. Like maybe as much as your meningitis. Reflect on your extreme agony deranged experience. Maybe that's how these pains feel to some people. We have pains we can disregard, and pains that incapacitate, that's just how it is. I have always striven to manage pain as a point of, I dunno, what? I'm not sure why, but I did. But after a point, I can't.
There is a curious and anomalous example of someone with congenital insensibility to physical pain. Usually, these people destroy their bodies in infancy and later live careful lives very compromised by past multiple injuries. But there is a British woman who apparently feels no pain but remains uninjured and empathic and has had a very normal life. She just thought other people must somehow feel more than she does. Her childbirths were pain free. She cared for her partners and children with great understanding, but not with the same fierceness that would be typical.
These oddball examples just point out the complexity of the situation. I believe it is a mistake to look for an emotional component to pain when wondering why other people are incapacitated and you are not. Emotional pains, sure, that is a given when you are psycopathic, but non-deathly physical pains, no. Until we have some gadget that is able to transfer pain brain to brain just for the hell of it, there will always be gulfs in understanding. Even with no fear or dread, the neurotypicals pain may be way in excess of yours. Obviously I can't KNOW this for sure. But your writings about your experience very much suggest so. Looking to fear and emotion here I believe is a mistake.
Meanwhile, it makes sense what you say that the average psycopath has no interest in sadism, but that the terribly abused might just go that way. It is generally true that in all neurotypes that cruelty CAN result in a perpetuating of that. For myself, as an abused person, there was a time when I was a nasty and vengeful price of work, though it was mostly in my head and I did little actual harm beyond snarkiness. I can imagine myself into a brainspace where sadism felt like something natural and indifferent, but somehow necessary, even though psychopathy prevented a full appraisal of the suffering inflicted on the victim.
How does this discussion of sadism tie in with your saying that you by admission have a cruel streak? Is that something that was purely pragmatic and tactical at the time and which you thought had no emotional weight? Or something that you deployed against someone for whom vengeance seemed deserving? Or you just not getting it at all because emotional pain equals zero and its too easy to be 'nasty'?
There is definitely emotional aspects to pain that cause neurotypicals to suffer more than I do, and that part cannot be dismissed. There is fear, anxiety, loathing, as well as many other emotions that accompany pain. I didn't have a good deal of understanding of this, so I asked this question on Quora:
https://www.quora.com/It-seems-that-physical-pain-has-emotional-implications-with-most-people-Should-the-emotional-experience-of-physical-pain-be-taken-as-seriously-as-the-physical-pain-or-is-it-something-that-people-could-ignore-if-they
and received many insightful answers to give me a greater understanding of that emotional aspect that runs beneath the surface and often is not even understood to be present because it is a part of the experience for neurotypicals.
They have demonstrated this through pain experiments. If a person knows that they have the power to say stop, and the pain will stop, they can endure ten to twenty times the level of pain than when they have no power to control stopping the pain. That singular shift, the control and power, makes the pain lessened to the degree that they can withstand much more of it.
Interesting, I did not that.
Thanks for the link, interesting anecdote. I do understand that having the power to make it stop can make people able to endure more, that makes sense to me. Perhaps I underestimate the emotional aspect and lack imagination in this respect. Thinking back over my own pains, luckily they tended not to be in situations in which I was afraid, I knew I was OK, it really was just the pain. This may make me lack personal understanding of how fear and other negative emotions could increase pain perception.
Nevertheless, I stand by my assertion that pain thresholds are so variable, and quite separate from pain tolerance, and I really do think it would be a mistake to ascribe all differences in the perception of severity to emotional factors. I think of my brother who unexpectedly needed a root canal- the tooth had only just started to feel touchy. The dentist tested all his teeth with some electrode device cranked up to full power and concluded that he did not feel anywhere near the typical amount of tooth pain, so he wouldn't notice a basic cavity in time. It wasn't that he was being heroic. It would be a mistake for him to dismiss someone else's raging toothache as histrionics. My partner also doesn't feel things until they get pretty bad- he can take his hiking boots off and find feet that are raw and bleeding all over, but which had only just started to annoy him. I would long since have been unable to walk and been applying dressings. This has not always been an advantage, he has barely registered the signs of serious conditions. He also is not heroic, he just doesn't feel it as much.
So yeah, I totally understand pain being incapacitating, and do not ever dismiss people's pain as being just whinging. That has led to medical mismanagement, such as in the long term dismissal endometriosis, which was likened to just regular bad period pain, when in fact it's on a whole other level. There are huge medical ethics issues now in pain management with the backlash from the opioid epidemic, and that bothers me a lot. And I remain stunned that it wasn't until 1986 that infants and small children were given analgesia for surgery. Dismissal of others' pain has consequences. I honestly do believe that I can separate pure pain intensity from other emotional factors, and do not appreciate my own pains being dismissed or my incapacity being judged as wimpy grumbling or a failure to live up to stoicism standards set by those who just feel it less. My attitude has always been to deal with it as best I can, kick on, and to learn pain management techniques, I can do no more, we get what we get.
But until we have that sci to device that allows us to tap into the brains of others and their experiences, we will never really know how things feel for those others.
You make some really good points here. I think pain varies from person to person physically. I also think if emotions are attached to our pain, that can make it worse. Also we NT's apparently remember pain better then psychopaths, at least from what I've heard from Athena. We tend to dwell on it and she seems to not be able to recall it once it's gone.
I think it fear of pain may make it harder to deal with the pain we have, like our fear or memory of similar pain, may add to our current amount of pain. Other then that I agree with you.
Yes, this is very true.
Yep, fear of pain is a thing, though for me its more fear of emotional than physical pains. We wonder how we will manage to endure what might be coming next.
Sadism yeah.
So something that is seldom discussed is that masochists recruit and train their tormentors. Steven Pinker pointed this out in one of his books though I can't recall what it is off the top of my head. It's not the new, fresh, prison guards who are the worst it's the seasoned veterans etc.
So about masochist recruiting, I've had that happen and I will say it was sort of fun at first. the thing is that the girl and later multiple girls were having a GREAT time. I was scrupulous about things like safe words and obvious physical conditions but I wasn't getting much in the way of arousal from scenes. So, I left. I still don't get what drives a real masochist and I've long since lost interest in them.
I still like playing with bullwhips though :P
In case you are not interested in participating, but might still appreciate some info about what is the appeal...
As I understand it there is sensual component of a) strong sensations that are only moderately painful and b) release of endorphines as response to pain and then there is emotional component which is where power-trust-adrenaline-taboo comes into play, but also emotional catharsis. Why someone wants to watch a tragedy that makes them cry? Because something inside gets released. Also I read once about how it provides opportunity to rewrite past painful experiences through similar, but safe and comfortable scenario played out in present during scene, so... And another thing is that sexuality starts to develop in early years and associations that a young body and brain develops can be... Various. That is also an explanation of why victims of sexual abuse in childhood sometimes get trapped in experiencing arousal simultaneously with fear, which plays a role in being vulnerable to new abuse. Not the same thing as masochism, but association between certain stimuli and sexual gratification can be a pretty wild thing.
Odd
I imagined there could be curiosity as motivation. Toying with people and seeing how they will react. You are bothered by drama. Could someone in theory see squirming breaking person as entertaining, as a challenge - finding a way to crack them, finding a way to play them in this and that direction, finding how different people are played differently. What ordinary and not so ordinary poking will do what. Shaping clay, taking apart a machine, testing limits of something.
Your interest is more in perspectives, talking and observing will do. And driving someone to insanity would be too easy and not so informative (beside all the drama).
Can curiosity induce fixation? You say you are stubborn. Passion is wrong word. But how about relentless want to achieve something. And that wouldn't be about power and control and self aggrandizement. Merely that challenge occupies mind that wants its stimulation.
Cracking a person is easy, and doesn't take much to figure out. It's like watching a video game boss. See the pattern, utilize the pattern.
I'd think of sadism to overlap more with traits of borderline personality disorder or sociopathy. SPD was a thing in the DSM-III but it got scratched in later editions and was never properly clustered and I have a pretty straightforward answer for it - physical or emotional sadism is pretty much just bullying. At least with psychopathy or any other personality disorder there's some kind of aspect that the individual is missing out on (ex: lack of empathy, isolation, identity disturbance) but I don't see the same thing with sadists. Overly toxic or aggressive people just come across as arseholes to me, I don't look at them and think "oh, they must have (insert personality disorder)" because usually that's not the case and there's plenty of people who are just unpleasant to be around and never went through any trauma.
From what I can gather sadists seem rather cowardly and bogus, their venom is entirely counterphobic to that heightened anxiety they feel which sociopaths and psychopaths don't. For ASPD, manipulation is a modus operandi whereas for sadists it's a means of picking on powerless scapegoats which I personally find rather pathetic.
The only place I can see this being productive is some kind of law enforcement job, where they possess the "right" to control and punish those who won't submit to them.
One thing I have to nitpick about the 2012 study though is that it somehow implies that sociopaths can feel guilt or remorse, lol? As if that's not one of the criteria for ASPD. Though Robert Hare said the difference is that sociopaths lack empathy compared to an average person and it doesn't exist for psychopaths I'm more prone to viewing the two as mostly the same but sociopath is better for semantics due to the unfortunate confusion between psychopathy and psychosis.
I dunno, I get that there's two different dimensions and that the affective/interpersonal facet of psychopathy is separate for impulsive and antisocial behaviors but I have both facets do differentiating the two can be irrelevant for my purposes sometimes. I'm yet to come across one person formally diagnosed with psychopathy or ASPD that doesn't have traits of both regardless of the subtle differences in brain structure and I can't say I've really met anyone with ASPD who experiences strong anxiety/depression or PTSD symptoms, co-morbid drug abuse is a different story.
I have spoken to several people that were diagnosed with ASPD but outside off the behaviors that were antisocial they didn't have anything particularly significant underlying. Many of them participated in antisocial behaviors because they were young and bored, with underdeveloped brains.
Hypothetically, due to how sociopathy is formed, they could feel all emotions. Could however, is the operative word. It does not mean will. Sociopathy is very different from psychopathy, their emotional experience is quite different, and people that are sociopathic may or may not have ASPD. A person with ASPD is unlikely to be a psychopath or a sociopath. Most ASPD individuals are just poorly behaving neurotypicals.
The entire social deviance facet of sociopathy is the epitome of being young and bored, in my experience. But other than that, most of these people barely meet the criteria for ASPD. CD may as well impact 15-20% of young people nowadays anyhow, highballing here obviously but it's worth noting how common it is.
Most ASPD aren't sociopaths because from some of the ones I've met, they rarely have gone through anything super harsh. If you're misbehaving say, you get into a bar fight and are arrested, and a shrink throws shit on the walls with an ASPD diagnosis that's one thing, maybe this person has some antisocial traits. If you violate your conditions of release or show versatility it could be a sign of something more serious.
Yup, unfortunately that sounds about right.
Not sure what is thought of Theodore Millon in these circles, but his deal is coming up with subcategories and he identifies bully-like type which tends towards cowardice, insecurity and counterphobic direction and weak victims, but also group that experiences explosions of violence and fury, then rather impervious overly critical scathing merciless intimidation and at last those that go into enforcement, either with blatant relish or proping themselves with justification of righteousness. I do agree not all of it is disorder, rather that disorder is the more extreme form
There is also division between vicarious and active approach to this desire. And it either might or might not include sexual component. And when it comes to sexual sadism question of consent separates it into two groups and BDSM is built in consent.
He would be incorrect. They have done studies on bullies and found that they in fact have very high self-esteem. The notion that they are insecure was incorrect.
Do you find that you have a shorter temper when you're in pain?
If it is extreme pain it isn't that my temper is shorter, it is that I am less likely to maintain the mask. Masking takes concentration, and pain can interrupt that if it is severe enough.