A reader asked the following question this week:
Recently, I’ve started doing more research into sociopaths and have run into a condition with which I’m unfamiliar: dissociation. Do you know if sociopaths/psychopaths have been considered to have this disorder, or if it is part of what makes them who they are?
The term dissociation has two distinct meanings in psychology. These two uses of the same word do not necessarily reflect a similar process operating in each.
The first kind of dissociation is a response to stress, and peritraumatic dissociation (dissociation during a traumatic event) appears to be a risk factor for stress-related illness. Symptoms of this kind of dissociation include disturbed experience of reality related to time, memory and nearly every sensation. For example, during trauma, time may stand still and people report that things do not seem real. Male sex hormones or androgens (that women also have in lower levels) protect against this kind of dissociation. For a good but technical article about peritraumatic dissociation read, Symptoms of Dissociation in Humans Experiencing Acute, Uncontrollable Stress: A Prospective Investigation.
The second kind of dissociation relates to the observation that the mind is modular. That means we don’t use our entire brain circuitry all the time, and during different behavioral and emotional states, different circuits are activated. Testosterone is hypothesized to disrupt the connection between the cerebral cortex and the limbic system, and so enhances this kind of dissociation.
This increase in mind modularity has been related to sociopathy/psychopathy by some experts. In a previous blog I reviewed Psychopaths in Everyday Life, a book by Robert Rieber. There is a great quote from the book that relates to your question. It is,
The true psychopath compels the psychiatric observer to ask the perplexing and largely unanswered question: Why doesn’t that person have the common decency to go crazy?
So why don’t psychopaths have the common decency to go crazy? Dr. Rieber explains, “Since psychopaths act as if they were perfectly normal, i.e. sane, they must be skilled in a cunning manner to dissociate any real guilt that they should feel about their antisocial behavior.” He also says that since psychopaths dissociate, they don’t go crazy. He believes dissociation prevents them from experiencing guilt. He also says that many psychopaths do have some level of guilt they are dissociated from.
So there may be a connection between sociopathy/psychopathy and dissociation, but the connection depends on your definition of the word.
interesting but we, (many of us with autism) disassociate and disconnect and pretty much we also depersonalize in our condition but we don’t or aren’t really selective about it, without proper instruction on how to manage things.
i can and have turned myself on and off. regress to a former period of myself. but i don’t think or feel it is in the same manner as they(socios) do. perhaps yes in a way i would say in some instances it appears that they do in the same way but for different reasons.
for myself and many like me emotions and feelings overall can be extremely overwhelming, and disrupt the process of our thinking. it contaminates our thinking. making what we can objectively think through unreliable through the virus of emotions seeping in, which at the time it can seem to be viruslike,
i love feeling but it does make reality less dependable as it tarneshing the thinking process into completely other shapes and forms. But ever since i have been actively expereinceing emotions, it has been necassary to shut that part off sometimes, slip into my autism state OR go insane.
there is a time to ‘feel’ things out but even then this should be in controlled doses or anxiety sets in and my OCD gets worse. And i can’t function.
to function properly i need to shut it off, and when to relate to those around me i “open that door” i never knew was there when i was a young child. At least now i have that option i didn’t have as a child.
But i wonder vaguely if they have a similar experience or if the way they dissassociate is completely different..
Mike
I just finished reading the study reports, and found it very interesting. Lots of stuff to “chew on” in that report.
Also, makes me wonder if there are genetically determined chemical responses that vary widely in humans in response to stress so that some individuals are more “stress tolerant” than others. I know they have determined that pain tolerance is more or less genetically determined (as well as some cultural training or expectations) so I wonder if toleration to “stress” or “trauma” is also determned by our genes.
I’ve had two “life threatening” traumas, one a car wreck in which when I saw there was “no way I could survive” I “calmly” turned off my mind like turning off a TV, well before impact, and didn’t regain any memory of anything until well after the car stopped rolling and I found myself in the back seat (I was driving, in those days before seat belts). The other was the witnessing fire in the aircraft crash that burned my son and killed my husband. I didn’t “turn off”–but I realize I was in a dissoative state, tunnel vision, etc.
Though each of the “instant” traumas effected me, I sometimes wonder if the long-term roller coaster of the relationships with the psychopaths didn’t do me more “damage” mentally and physically than the two unexpected and traumatic “events.”
Making conscious efforts to decrease stress in my environment and life has been a limited success, because I don’t have control over some of the stressors, but I do believe it has helped decrease some of the physical and somantic complaints.
I remember the article you did on the “fat mice” experiment where the mice under stress (with controlled exercise and diet) gained weight “in the middle” more than the un-stressed mice. I have noticed that though I had been somewhat “overweight” as an adult after the birth of my kids, my “shape” always had a waist and was proportionate. Now, since the “great chaos” of the last couple of years, I have put weight on, but ONLY in the middle, and recently to the point I became uncomfortable because of the expansion of my “belly” to theh point I started to look like an apple, which has never been my shape.
I’ve been on a lower calorie diet for 3 or so weeks, and have taken off about 9 pounds, which seems to have all come off my waist, which now allows me to get back into the jeans I wore before gaining the most recent weight, and I again have a “wrinkle” where my waist used to be. (My son D laughed at me for crowing, “I’ve got a wrinkle around my middle”–and said he’d never seen a woman who was happy to have a WRINKLE!) LOL
On this blog we have frequently (more in the past) talked about the effects (both mental and physical) of the chemicals produced by our bodies in response to stress, and I imagine not only I, but many/most of us here have had high-stress lives for some extended period of time while engaged in interactions with the psychopaths (some of us more, some less, but all to some extent).
One of the things that has concerned me about my own situation is the short term memory problems that I have experienced. After the aircraft crash, they were so bad for several months that I could not read even a sentence as I couldn’t retain the thought from the first part of the sentence by the time I got to the last part. I couldn’t punch in a full telephone number into the dial, I had to do it by writing down the number, and crossing off the digits one at a time in order to keep up where I “was” in the sequence. I could watch a movie and watch the same movie the next day and not remember I had seen it.
Just being aware of the level of my disability in reading, thinking, remembering, was very very disturbing to me. I felt like a stroke patient must feel, or a head injured patient, (which I worked with for many years) and the word-finding difficulty I still experience from time to time (more verbally than in writing) is frustrating, though it has improved since the crash. However, most of the time since the crash I have continued to be in high stress situations as well due to the P-chaos.
While experiencing these things was very worried me a great deal (made me wonder if I was losing my mind) I asked my therapist to administer an IQ test, which he did, and I scored 1 point higher than I ever had. (Which, BTW suprised him I think, as I think my verbal functioning was not up to the score I made on the test.) It was at least, if nothing else, though, REASSURING to me that I wasn’t “losing my mind.”
The gaslighting that many of us have experienced while dealing with the psychopaths, I think, also, makes us have anxiety about our own “reality testing”—and I know it sure did with me!
In a way, just knowing that the things I experienced in the way of dissociative symptoms and PTSD doesn’t make me “crazy” or out of touch with reality, and that I am not a “nut job” does seem to reassure me at least. My psychiatrist kept reassuring me that it would “get better” but I had trouble believing her. She was right though, it has gotten better, and I have over all gotten better, and am taking better care of myself with as much attention as I can give to decreasing stress.
Keeping away from “distressing” people, NC, and working on a better diet, more exercise, and stopping “bad habits” (like smoking) does help. Thanks, Dr. Leedom for this great article and the link to the study. I appreciate all that you contribute here!
‘The true psychopath compels the psychiatric observer to ask the perplexing and largely unanswered question: Why doesn’t that person have the common decency to go crazy?’
HOT DAMN! LIKE THIS! yes, WHY DOESN’T THE @.......#$%^&*(*&^%$##$5678U7Y%$$%^&*(&^%$$%
JUST GO CRAZY! ME LIKEY THIS IDEA.
But seriously, if there is some guilt present – perhaps treatment lays in connecting them with it.
i can’t believe i just said that. i hate it when guilt is used against people.
but then, my desire is that these creatures become ‘citizens’ in some way, not just low flying vampires. and it isn’t my concern for their internal lives; i am not there yet. I’d just like some way of stopping their destruction that doesn’t involve me going to prison.
i wonder if my hick library has this book. really like to read it.
geez, Oxy you just described the autistic experience, except many of us start out and remain like that nearly 24/7, from toddlerhood on up. (I don’t much remember infancy).
http://www.sensory-processing-disorder.com/autism-anxiety-overload.html
emergence out of autism is when we aren’t experiencing those symptoms on a constant, but have times when we are expereinceing the world somewhat nearly normally. but the tunnel vision, yep that was basically the first eight years of my life then afterwards some times when the world seemed more assessable when many of us pushed ourselves more into it, fighting our symptoms all the way.
i have at least four to five hours a day of being on full autism mode. the times that i’m pushing myself out of autism to relate and interact with the world around me takes alot of energy and effort to do so. when i get home i have the comfort of losing myself, losing speech, and withdrawing into myself with my autistic family doing the same. you can see us some afternoons looking like three drowling zombies. he he..
Des says there is a little autism in everyone, or a time when every person experiences the autism state of mind.
Stress and anxiety is part of the everyday of autism. even when nothing seems to cause it. We belong to ABMD group.
that’s the autism bio medical discussion group through our integrative DAN! (defeat autism now) doctor. there are ways to take certain supplements to take after a full metabolic analysis is done to even out or tamper down symptoms of anxiety, stress, and brain fuzz.
http://www.defeatautismnow.com/ and http://www.autism.com/
article on integrative medicine
http://www.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/features/alternative-medicine-integrative-medicine
now they have also assisted in lessening the symptoms of various issues of ADHD, mitochondrial dysfunction issues, bipolar and schizophrenia, and folks with PTSD as well as other anxiety disorders, not just autism. a metabolic analysis can sort through how the chemicals are running through you and how supplementation and elimination can help.
Being in a autistic state can be disorienting but if you stick around there long enough it can be comfortable almost and some insight and creative ways to navigate through it and other things can be useful in the everyday world.
Mike
Thanks, MIke, that was interesting to get a glimpse of how you see the world some of the time at least.
Since my early days in physiological chemistry, studying the effects of stress (even back then in the old days they knew some of the things) dissociation symptoms (the tunnel vision) etc. were known to be caused by extreme threats/stress.
In my studies and observation of animals what are prey animals some of the things some of them do and what WE do when we are under immediate attack are pretty much the SAME thing. (of course they can’t tell us if they have tunnel vision, but I bet they do!) The experiences I had as I saw the crash site, the fire, my husband on the ground, and could lNOT see jmy son and the two other victims though my son says I iwas within 3 feet of him and “looking right at me” shows I definitely had tunnel visiion, and though I was Having thoughts about “what to do” (I am a traiined medical professional with a great deal of trauma care experience in “the wild” through 13 years as a medical responder with the fire rural department, and always kept my “cool” under “fire” but this time, with it being my family, my friends, I didn’t keep my “cool” at all. I was trying to function, but was not able to focus or prioritize tasks.
The time with the car wreck, I knew there was “nothing I could do” I was preg, and I thought very quietly “I’m sorry the baby is going to die with me.” Then “turned off the TV” and everything went black until probably a minute or more completely after the crash. I didn’t even FEEL scared or afraid, or anything except that sadness that my baby would die and calm.
In species of prey animals that are held closely in a situation that they are not able to move, they “self pacify” and quit struggling. Temple Grandlin’s “squeeze chutes” designed to calm animals while they are medicated etc. uses this self calming action to keep the animal from struggling and harming themselves and/or their handlers. I think I was emotionally squeezed in the car by the fact I “couldn’t get out of this” and I didn’t want to “see it” so I turned my mind off so I wouldn’t have to. Actually that would be a very “self pacifying” way for facing death. I don’t want to die, but one thing that car crash did “teach” me is that I am not AFRAID of death itself any longer.
The FEAR of anything can make us react, and it doesnn’t even have to be present to make us fear it, we can imagine it being there and get the same result in stress.
I made a conscious decision not to live in TERROR (continual fear) of my P son sending someone else out to kill me, and it has I thinkk made a big difference in my hypervigilence and the fear itself stalking me. I just finished a book about the fears we as a nation developled after 9/11, it is written by the same guy who did “The Gift of Fear” and it is an EXCELLENT book on how not to WORRY about things, but to BE AWARE of your gut instincts and listen to them, and how to determine if you are worrying, (which you can stop because it isn’t productive) or if you are assessing a real threat.
I think many of us, especially those that developed PTSD after the psychopathic Chaos have more worry than we do fear, we become paranoid. I know that was my case any way, and I think many others here have experessed the same problems on this front.
The feelings of not being able to keep ourselves safe from every conceivable attack, like after 9/11 happened, or knowing that the world is actually dangerous, or not knowing what the Ps are out there plotting, can make us worry the rest of our lives away in paranoia. We can reject that line of thinking, but first we must realize we are thinking like that, and take action to quell that line of thinking.
If you haven’t read the research article Dr. Leedom linked to on this subject, I suggest that you read it, it really has some good information in it.
Boy, wouldn’t you love to be around in 100 years when they have all these things worked out and have medications for most or all of them? It has not been very many decades when cages and chains were the only opltions for treatiing lots of mental illnesses that can be successfully treated with medications now. Wonder what those physicians and people would think now at the miracles we have compared to what they had?
it’s great,
the abnormal reality of way too many autistics daily.
we have that overblown sense of fight or flight instinct constantly.
i remember being in this barbeque with some veterens, they were just as jumpy as we were. someone had the great idea of doing fireworks. Des as well as another couple of soldiers turned dead white and tossed themselves on the floor.
one guy after trying to pull himself together breathing heavy looked over at Des hiding under a table and asked where and when did she serve. i told him she didn’t, that she’s autistic. he looked at me and said “you mean she was always like this?” i answered yes. “G-d help her.” he answered. “i had a different life before this. We weren’t always like this. but this is how she always was? how can she bear it?” I shrugged and said we just get used to it is all.
he said you don’t get used to this. and i told him when you’re autistic, you’ve no choice really.
right now i’m home getting the new nurse accustomed to Des and the dolphin. Des can ‘read’ a nervous nurse and it ignites her warines. with Des that fight or flight instinct can be scary because she fights more than takes flight. She’s like a cornered animal really these days, not that she’ll do anything but i have to worry abouts these things.
some guy is coming over to talk about autistics and remote viewing which i wonder if it’s to help us turn that aspect off or if he wants us to perform like a carnival show, if that’s the case we have absolutely no control over this so he shouldn’t bother… But i’ll hear him out anyway.
Mike
Onestep,
You crack me up, even when you’re as mad as a hornet!
I get what you are saying, though, that it would be wonderful to find a way to help p’s connect to themselves. To rid the world of their harm. I am with you.
It is not so much my care for them as individuals (though I can say I do have some of that). More it is out of concern for a civil world, that has a better chance of survival and improvement.
Mike,
I am not one who posts long and frequently. But I wanted to say that I am really glad you are here. You have added a level of insight and ‘richness’ to LF, as well as Des. I am glad you are both here.
slim – i wonder how diff the world would look if they all just…died?
one step
The low flying vampires would rather die than connect with their guilt. It was the one emotion (if you can call guilt an emotion, more like an excuse for an emotion) I detected in the P but it was a very frustrating hovering thing…. So failing a forced connection like a plug in a socket…..eh get the garlic out, fast….
Mike, is that “remote viewing,” as in ESP?