Self Discipline

The psychopaths guide to telling yourself no...

I am sure that you know this already, but psychopaths are sort of known for acting on impulse and wanting what we want when we want it. No is not a word that holds a great deal of weight coming from someone else. It’s more of a suggestion than a denial of what is in my focus. For me, it is more or less a situation of

“Soooo… what you’re saying is”

Insert my workaround to the refusal. Believe it or not, I usually get a yes after that. Except from my Significant Other. He can be a stubborn bastard in this regard, which is part of what I like about him.

However, what about me telling me no? That is a different story. After all, why should I tell myself no? I want that thing, right? So I should just get that thing, or do that thing, right? Often, no. No, I should not. Maybe it costs money that I do not need to be spending. Maybe it means staying awake way longer than I should and with me ending up with only a couple of hours of sleep. Maybe it’s a safety concern, so avoidance may mean living longer than the next five minutes.

This means that I often have to be the authoritarian in my own life, telling myself no, and sticking to it. I can do this fairly easily, but it wasn’t always the case. In my younger years, I saw no reason to not do what I wanted to do, so I did. Sometimes those decisions had rather negative consequences and I had to come to the conclusion that I was going to have to self-limit the bad choices that I had a habit of making.

When I started writing on Quora I came across many many people that would ask how a psychopath could have any self-discipline, and many more people saying that we never do. I thought that this was a silly notion, and likely was born out of a poor understanding of how our brains work, and also from people that wanted an excuse to do whatever they want to.

This does seem to be a common theme with people claiming psychopathy. That they can’t help themselves in what they do, they are psychopaths, so what do you expect? I am the first person to recognize the value of this excuse. It’s not exactly difficult to understand that it is easier, and therefore more appealing to hide behind psychopathy and say that there isn’t an option but to act on impulse, but the fact of the matter is, it’s BS.

Psychopaths can tell themselves no, and not act on impulse. When they don’t it is not because they can’t help it, it’s because they don’t want to help it, and refuse to tell themselves no. I have made this assertion several times, and that has led people to ask me how I do so as though there is a trick to it. Apparently, it is believed that there is, and because I might have a more difficult time resisting an interesting idea, I must know what it is.

Guess what? I do.

The secret to telling yourself no is to do it, and then stick to it. Anticlimactic, I get that, but that’s really the secret. Why is this so difficult? Frankly? Because you don’t want to. You don’t want the answer to be no, so you will negotiate with yourself to get to the conclusion that you prefer. You know yourself better than anyone else alive, and we as humans are all gifted manipulators. The person we are most gifted at manipulating is ourselves. It’s actually very easy. You know the conclusion that you want, and you know where your own weak points are that will make you give in against your better judgment.

The moment that you are telling yourself “no” there is that whiny little kid in the back of your mind that you likely aren’t even aware of saying,

“But I want it…”

I have that little kid too, and I am very aware of her whining when she doesn’t get what she wants. She’s a sulky little bitch, and that’s okay. She can sulk, and I can tell her no because when we leave our homes we become our own parents. The desire to be satisfied in the moment is always going to be with us. We are born into this world as demanding self-focused creatures that become very used to having our expectations met immediately, and that doesn’t just go away. It simply gets buried beneath social expectations and requirements.

Because it doesn’t go away, it can become very easy to become a self-indulgent parent to that whiny little brat that doesn’t understand or care that you have a budget you are supposed to be sticking to. It wants that thing NOW, but has learned something over the years. Tantrums aren’t all that effective in the world. We learn that interactions and expectations of the desired outcome are better met through gentling a person to the position that you are seeking. You have been conditioned to this for all of your life, leaving behind the outright demands and moving in the direction of leading the other person by their emotions. Why would you be any different?

Being as good as you are at knowing what you want, and how to get that outcome from yourself, it is very difficult to tell that little emotional terrorist, no, and frankly, you don’t want to tell them no. If you did, it would be way easier to hold to your convictions. The reality is, you want to find a way to get the outcome that you want, and that is what stands in your way of saying no to yourself and making it stick.

It never occurred to me that this would be a mystery, but it has been explained to me that there are all these emotional implications in self-discipline that perhaps as a psychopath, I don’t understand. Granted, I will concede that I do not understand the emotional implications that neurotypicals face when having to police their own wants and impulses, but logically I think it’s an excuse. All the emotional aspects that attach themselves to tentative rejection of your desires are just part of the emotional manipulation that you are putting yourself through to find a way to say yes. Yes is what you want, so now you are going to find a way for yes to be the answer.

Telling yourself no is really about deciding that it is no, that you will stick to no, and that you are not going to be swayed by all the fancy and scenic trails through the woods of negotiation that allow you to find the one that leads to the outcome that you want. You have to decide that no has power in your life, and that you have to be the one to enforce it when everything in you wants to break it.

I won’t lie to you and pretend that I am perfect at doing this. I’m not at all. In fact, I am so bad at it that I have to give myself enormous doses of melatonin to force myself to adhere to some semblance of a bedtime. I am disinclined to do this otherwise. I know that I should go to bed, when I should go to bed, and that not going to bed is really not good for me as survival without sleep is a limited endeavor, but I can find a way to stay awake and keep doing what I am interested in for hours. This is not good for me, so I take my melatonin at a certain time to make my body so tired I cannot ignore it. Even then, I can still override it if sufficiently motivated.

However, I recognize that my failures in these things are because I have decided that no wasn’t going to be the final word on the matter. I allow myself to negotiate myself to the outcome that I want, and not the one I need. It is no one else’s dereliction of duty but my own. Is that a convenient truth? No, of course not. I could easily pretend that I stayed up until four in the morning when I have to be up in three hours because I lost track of the time. I didn’t though, and I know that. I know that I didn’t want to have the self-discipline that I required to hold myself accountable.

Obviously, I have decided that the negative outcome of my decision does not outweigh the desire to do what I want, and therefore I went against my own interests. I don’t have the emotional response of shame when I fail, and I understand that this is something that neurotypicals might experience when they decide to do something that they told themselves they wouldn’t, but I certainly will deal with the real-world consequences, and those are never fun.

If you still struggle to tell yourself no, I will give you a piece of advice that was given to me. When you have the desire to do something that isn’t a good idea for you, but you want to anyway, play the scenario all the way out until the end in your head. One of the things that can be a real roadblock to being responsible is that the consequences of things can be so far away that they don’t feel real. They are future you’s problem. That’s true, they are, but future you is still you, and the consequences of what you want might be very unpleasant.

I mean, I get it, the life-sized Big daddy is awesome:

but that $8,000.00 price tag is pretty steep, and do you really have a place to put it? Probably not, so you have to tell yourself no. Oh? It’s just me that wants that? Not everyone wants a massive statue from a videogame in their living room? Huh… that’s super weird, you guys are weird, but whatever. It applies to whatever thing you want too. Just remember that you’re weird though…

All joking aside, the reason sticking to telling yourself no is because you don’t want to and know how to turn things around to the outcome that you want. It’s not fun to have to recognize that, but it really is that simple. You have to be that dickish parent that tells you no and will send you to your room when you whine about how unfair life is. No one wants to be that guy, especially when you could just as easily be the cool mom that gives you ice cream when dad goes to work in the garage for the evening, but cool mom is an enabler.

Don’t be an enabler.

Just a heads up guys. Through this time of year, it is not always a guarantee that I can get a post up on Wednesdays. It may be that sometimes the post will be early, like this one. It may be that it is late as well. There may be times that the weather is so bad, however, that I won’t be able to post at all. No internet means no posts, so I wanted you to be aware.