By Joyce Alexander, RNP (retired)
Most of you know I have spent a good portion of my life training animals of various kinds dogs for obedience and to work livestock, horses, donkeys and cattle (oxen).
When we train animals, we “condition” them to do X and they receive Y reward. Ivan Pavlov, a Russian physiologist, conditioned dogs to expect to be fed by ringing a bell every time they got fed. Eventually when a bell was rung, even though there was no food in sight, the animals expected to be fed, and their bodies reacted by making them “slobber” at the mouth, just as they would if food were present.
B.F. Skinner, and American psychologist, observed that animals who had intermittent rewards, rather than continual rewards, would continue a behavior longer than animals who got rewarded every time they did an act. For example, a rat that pushed a lever and got a grain of food every time, would quickly stop pushing it if the food didn’t com. But a rat that sometimes got a food pellet when he pushed the lever would continue to pound on the lever for a very long time, or even never stop pushing it, even though he did not get a food pellet.
In humans, this “intermittent” rewards works in a slot machine, or in gambling games, because every once in a while you get rewarded. Therefore, you keep hoping that next time will be THE TIME.
Psychopaths and intermittent rewards
You may ask what this training technique has to do with psychopaths. Well, just as Las Vegas was built on intermittent rewards for gamblers, relationships with psychopaths are built on the intermittent rewards they give us.
At the first part of the relationship, the psychopath “love bombs” us by giving us the good things we enjoy compliments, doing things for us, great sex. WOW! We think we have found nirvana. Just as a dog I am beginning to train gets a treat every time he “sits,” then only sometimes when he “sits,” the psychopath only gives us the “loving” some of the time. Also, just as I eventually no longer give the dog a food treat any time he “sits,” and the most he will get is a “good dog” verbal compliment, or a scolding if he doesn’t sit fast enough, the psychopath quits giving us treats and gives us “scoldings.”
We have been conditioned by the psychopath to be and do what they want, because we still desire that initial “love bombing,” and we dread the “scolding” they will give us if we don’t “jump” when they say “frog.” We keep on hoping against hope that we will be able to please them again. We do whatever we can to keep the scoldings to a minimum and get them to reward us with “love” again.
Running for bread
It doesn’t make any kind of difference if the animal we are training is a dog, a parrot, a donkey, an steer, a horse ”¦ the conditioning works the same. Intermittent rewards cause the desired behavior to continue. If we give continual rewards every time they perform the behavior, it wouldn’t take long for the behavior to be extinguished when we stopped rewarding it.
My mammoth jack donkeys, Fat Ass and Hairy Ass, haven’t had a piece of bread (their preferred treat) in a year or more. But any time I go to the hangar and open the freezer, they come running up to the fence on the never dying hope that I will get bread out of the freezer and give them a piece. They are totally “conditioned” to that treat, and they know that the opening and closing of the freezer is what always preceded them getting a slice of bread.
The psychopath we have had relationships with know what “rings our chimes,” what makes us happy and what makes us sad, or what makes us angry. It is like a panel of buttons on the front of our chest. They know just the exact words to say, or the thing to do, that will press our “buttons” and get the reaction they want from us.
No Contact is the answer
No Contact keeps those buttons covered. That is why it works.
Psychopaths know that in the past, if they pressed “button A,” you would do B. So they will keep on trying because IT ALWAYS WORKED IN THE PAST. They just know if they keep doing it, it will EVENTUALLY work again. So they will press it harder and faster and longer. Just like some old lady sitting at a slot machine, plugging in quarters, she just “knows” that the very next quarter will get her a reward. Just like my donkeys running up to the fence when I open the freezer, they still hope to get a slice of bread, a reward.
Expect when you go No Contact that the psychopath will up the ante and will work harder and longer to get a reaction. If it takes 30 times for them to eventually get a reaction, THEY LEARN THAT it takes 30 TIMES TO GET A REACTION. If next time it takes 40 times, they learn that they must work a bit harder to get a reaction, so they keep on and on and never stop.
So hang in there. Once you make up your mind to go NO CONTACT, then STAY no contact, because if you give them ANY reward of ANY kind, even a well deserved “cussing,” it is still a reward. It is ATTENTION, and even negative attention is attention. Not being noticed at all is the worst punishment they can have.
If you are required by law to have contact with them, like if you share children, do it only by e-mail, so that you have a record of it. Discuss ONLY the children. Do not respond to any nasty comments they make. Refuse to discuss the other person with your children, and Gray Rock them entirely. NO emotional responses at all. If possible, get someone else to pick up and drop off the kids, so you do not have to see him/her. Or do it in a public place, a police department parking lot if necessary.
We can stop them only by not responding. So when your ex is trying to push your buttons, just think about Joyce’s donkeys Fat Ass and Hairy Ass running up to the fence for a slice of bread. Visualize your psychopath with long ears, standing there trying to get a reaction from you, and then DON’T GIVE IT. Take control and refuse to allow the psychopath to make you respond to his/her button pushing!
God bless.
Katy,
I will help those who can’t follow: those who’re actually trying but struggling… I normally do not grade homework, except for the fact that they can prove they made it (besides they can copy it or have someone else make it for them), and I give extra teaching in the afternoon for those who request it and show up. The classwork I can grade, since they have me to assist them if they fail to understand something.
But I agree… those who can do better, should have an environment and a teacher who gives them the opportunity to excell. They certainly should not get a lesser education because others can’t.
Right now I’m pretty much upset with some changes of the educational system. We used to have a separate education system from 12 year on. Kids who simply cannot make it, shouldn’t be in a large classroom that goes way too fast for them. So there was an A class and a B class with other requirements. Of course if you ended up going to the B class you couldn’t just return into A class. I still think it’s a good system, but the problem is that parents and public thought of it as ‘lesser’ education and was used as a “waterfall” system by parents. Kids who failed a grade, could pass on to the next year in a technical or professional education system. Kids who are smart enough for the academic level, but too lazy or too rebellious ended up in the professional one, while other parents cannot accept their kid not able to keep on going on the academic level kept them there anyhow and they have to redo year after year, and then when they’re 18 they drop out without even a HS degree.
It wasn’t lesser, but trying to prepare kids mostly for a practical work life, while they’re in smaller groups and thus get more attention. Now education department did away with it for the first HS years from 12-14. The result of course is that those who need intellectual challenge will not be challenged, while the other kids who truly cannot understand this drown and their self-image will just plumet even more.
It denies the reality that people have different capacities and it’s no good to keep expecting the same thing from them on an intellectual level. There are other capacities that can be valued and developed and admired just as much. There’s more in this world that are talents, other than intelligence.
Oxy and Sky and so many others here,
Yes, I could see these things before, but LF, red flags, grey rock and NC – the whole experience and what I learned from it from all you – have helped me to step up the plate. Before I’d try but couldn’t detach enough, still hoping for the kids to become more responsible. Now I can detach and realize why it’s so important to implement grey rock, and it makes me think how I can alter the situation again so it’s possible for me to grey rock. I can still start off with my natural expectations, but when shown the contrary, I let these expectations go without any guilt and the grey rock strategist takes over, and that usually works.
So, while I felt exhausted by Friday night, I was also very pleased with how I am dealing with them for the moment. Still wish I didn’t need to be a drill master, but I have no issue with being it, when I’m required to by circumstances.
Darwinsmom
Your explanation of the educational changes saddens me. We had the integration of learning disabled into one classroom too. A little girl who was learning disabled (IQ 80) was told that she could be anything she wanted. She believed that teacher and was awarded all A’s graduating high school with a 4.0. But she couldn’t show proficiency for the testing to get into university. When she found out she could not/would not EVER be a doctor, she went into a rage and committed suicide. People in our town pretend it didn’t happen. Kids should be encouraged to their best, but making promises isn’t appropriate. She was a kid who could not read complex sentences and she always scored nearly zero on comprehension tests but she was graded according to how hard she tried, earned lots of awards for trying. It was a terrible travesty.
That’s horribly sad and wrong, Katy!
I get it… intelligence is rated highly in our society, and there clings shame to people who do not have the capacities beyond summation and detraction. They try to solve it by denying reality, and instead assume logical intelligence is something democratic. Well it isn’t! You don’t tell a child they can become an opera singer when they sing out of tune like a cat just by trying (me for instance). You don’t tell a child they can become magnificent illustrators when they can do nothing else than draw stick figures. Nobody would argue against that, and nobody would even try to proclaim it’s unfair to the child. But, oh my if you dare to suggest that a child does not have the logical capacities to even learn the necessary skills to go to university.
And the sad thing of it all is that those kids who do get through professional and certainly through technical HS level often have all it takes to make a succesful career from when they’re 18. The world can’t do without hair stylists, plumbers, woodworkers, construction workers, electricians, etc. They’re in full demand, with a full schedule roster from morning to evening, even having to decline jobs, and with great earnings. It’s the kids who go through academic level in HS, but do not have the abilities to do any higher studies that are basically fucked on the job market. The academic level is simply preparation for higher studies. Kids often ask me what the hell they need to learn this or that for. I tell them it’s necessary for their higher education, even if they’ll only get a minor course in it (much quicker than we give it) or because someone at academic level is supposed to develop an academic intrest on several levels, other than their major subject. But no, if you graduate at 18 from the academic level, functions, differentials, 1st law of Newton is not what you need in every day life and the best you can get for a job is working in a junk-food restaurant.
I hated Latin when I was in HS. I was good at it, but still hated it. I managed to convince my parents to drop it for the junior and senior years. I only realized the benefits of Latin much much later in life. I wasn’t interested much in languages, except for communication reasons (and English literature)… and Latin even less, since it was a dead language. And I hated all the parrot studying I had to do for it (I preferred insight studying or exercises). But I was good in translation, in making comprehensible meaning out of a Latin text, very good even. Which is why my parents didn’t want me to drop it for so long. By 17 I knew I wanted to study for architecture or industrial designer and I preferred biology over Latin, and the max hours of physics and chemistry was more important. It’s when I debated about something years later, that I realized that my ability to deconstruct someone else’s arguments and translate it into unforeseen consequences was honed because of the Latin. I had the skill already, but it was trained because of the Latin, where we had to dissect a text word per word to find out what it related to because of its tense and other grammatical features. It’s the same for function analysis and physical world analysis imo. They don’t need to be bright matimaticians, but learning to analyse data and the world around you, create theoretical models is a skill that needs to be honed if you intend to go to university, whichever study a child ends up choosing.
Darwiin’s mom you are so right, IQ is not democratic it is for the most part inherited, and the “proofs” that poverty CAUSES low scores is BACKWARDS IMHO, people are poor because they don’t have the IQ to be more than Day labor or whatever, or they can increase that living by selling drugs.
That’s another thing, you tell a kid to get a HS diploma so he can get a job flipping burgers at McDonald’s when a 12 year old drop out can make hundreds of dollars a day selling drugs. DUH? Why should he study math and English?
Then you have those like my son Patrick, who is in the 99th percentile in IQ and is the smartest guy in the Texas Prison System. Whoopie! What an honor!
I think I saw a PBS program about the successes of Valedictorians, and it turned out that C students had the highest rating of what they defined success to be (entrepreneurs and biz owners). Seems they felt they had something to prove…
Darwinsmom, I envy you your education. On a smaller scale, my friends child is no longer being taught cursive writing, yet from what I read, cursive writing develops the brain in ways beyond writing by hand. So yes, I agree that there are unimagined benefits to a good education.
“exercising” the brain in learning DOES change the brain in many ways. For example, a child who is taught to play a musical instrument at an early age (with or without much “talent”) will actually have a DIFFERENT brain than a child who is not taught to play a musical instrument. An adult who tries to learn a musical instrument, even if they have a natural talent are still “behind” the adult who learned as a child. The same way with learning 2 or more languages as a child gives one an advantage over someone who learns as an adult. Plus, learning one extra language makes learning the next language much easier because of the changes in the brain, so there IS a good reason to learn latin.
Oxy, true about languages… Dutch is such an international insignificant language, and it’s culturally inherited to adapt to whichever occupiar we’ve had in our regions the past 2000 years (starting in written history with Caesar) that we learn Dutch, French and English … whether you’re specialising in science or languages in HS. If you do modern languages you get German or Spanish on top of that. If it’s classic languages it’s Greek on top of the Latin. I was quick in taking up my Spanish that I stated to learn at 28… after one summer of language bath in Mexico working there as a volunteer and staying with a family my Spanish was usable to work there, with just a basic course up my sleeve. I sound pretty fluent nowadays… every year 1,5 month being there was enough to develop it further. Most people here have no problem learning a language, and we find it weird when people can’t or don’t.
I also get what you say about music… I’ve always been a music lover. I’ve got a HUGE music library, from jazz to techno and everything in between. I tried to learn to play the guitar at 16. It was way too late, and I can’t hold a tune. Only thing I played moderately well was the flute at 12. But notes mean nada to me, never did, never learned well, and in that sense completely tone deaf. Only thing that got really developed was rhythm (more of a motoric skill imo). Should have chosen the drum or a jembe instead of a guitar… lol.
Of course there was no time really for me to learn to play music… I went to art classes outside of school hours since I was 5, plus a sport of my choosing.
There are several type of intelligences – 7 if I remember correctly: the logical one (tested by IQ), motoric intelligence, visual-creative, music, nature (people who can find their way in a natural place they’ve never been to without much thinking), emotional internal and emotional external. And even within the type you can split off subclasses. I’m lousy at ballsports… though I always loved playing them. But I just am bad at predicting where a ball will land. On the other hand nobody ever really needed to teach me rhythm, a swimming teacher tried to persuade my parents to get me into a swimclub for competitions (they said no, because they didn’t want something I enjoyed to turn into work), and I was a good and loved horse riding, and of course dancing…
As a child you don’t notice the changes to your brain, but I noticed it immensely when I started to learn to surf a couple of years ago. Apart from balance it requires judgement on the right timing to go for a wave. First I made many mistakes, but after a while I just started to catch them at the right moment without thinking – one after the other. By then it wasn’t so surprising to me that there exists a whole surf philosophy speak, nor that several mathematicians and physicists are surfers. I actually still compare life circumstances to surfing, and it’s the world of basically predicting chaos.
Ox Drover says:
“Darwiin’s mom you are so right, IQ is not democratic it is for the most part inherited, and the “proofs” that poverty CAUSES low scores is BACKWARDS IMHO, people are poor because they don’t have the IQ to be more than Day labor or whatever,”
Oxy, I think it’s probably both “forwards” and “backwards”, meaning a mix of forces at work. A variant of “backwards” is also called “social drift”, a concept used to argue against the notion that poverty causes things like schizophrenia. The idea is that you can even start out at the middle or higher up, but mental illness will drag you down to the lowest socioeconomic rungs of society. Low IQ, chemical addiction problems, lots of others things like that, can drag people downward, and, as a result, their immediate offspring too. Some things have a more drastic effect than others. Depends on the culture of the society too. (US: mentally ill people often homeless)
You were right to see through claims that poverty causes low IQ if someone was claiming that it only goes one way. I do think there is *some* “forwards”. For instance, the music training you speak of is probably a more likely thing the more affluent one’s family. I *think* music training is said to bump up brain development and IQ later in life — not sure if that’s been determined 100%.
When numbers geeks discuss an article online about research making some claim, you will frequently a response from someone reading:
correlationcausation. (does not equal)
I don’t know if this is a common expression among non-tech types.
RA, you are right of course, environmental enrichment that is available to children from higher socio/economic homes does have a definite advantage….neglected children, for whatever reason the neglect, don’t develop to their full biological potential, as children who are not given balanced diets don’t.
Nothing is 100% environmental and nothing 100% biological as environment turns on and off different genes, even identical twins are not 100% alike, as even the environment in the womb is not 100% identical…and after birth surely not, but there are great correlations between identical twins raised in different homes from birth.
In general, parents with high IQs giive birth to children with high IQs and vice versa, and parents with many mental illnesses give birth to many children with mental illnesses. The “adopted child syndrome” where children given up for adoption and raised in what one would believe were “good” homes more frequently than would be found in the general population have behavioral problems, mental health problems, and addiction problems–at first back when children were assumed to be “blank slates” at birth and biology having nothing to do with how a child turned out it was assumed that some how these parents failed in raising these children. As more has been learned about biology, however, it has been shown that babies put up for adoption many times come from “troubled” back grounds with parents having mental illness or other problems rendering them unfit to care for their offspring, thus giving the “adoptable” children available a high chance of likely being from “problem” families.
Of course not all adopted children turn out to be problematic or to have mental illness, but a higher percentage of them do than the general population.
Even in families where there is mental illness or psychopathy or other personality disorders, my own for example, the problems can be traced down through the generations even if there were no contact between parent and offspring, and sometimes it skips generations as well. My son Patrick for example has TWO grandfathers who were psychopaths, but neither of his parents were psychopaths, though his biological father did have some serious mental health issues, it was not psychopathy.
Darwinsmom,
I have to interject here. Often times, someone with a high IQ actually CHOOSES to be a hair dresser. In that case, they might be a very GOOD hair dresser.
Today, I went to get my hair done by a woman who needed a model to practice on. Many hair dressers take special classes to learn extra techniques. I save money by being a model for them. Not only do I get very good service but I learn a lot by listening to the teacher.
I went to get my hair colored. Hair coloring is 1 part chemist and 1 part artist. There is a LOT to know when coloring hair. Methods differ depending on the product used and the client’s disaster (like mine) hair. They have to make decisions that will get the best results and those decisions can only be arrived at by EXPERIENCE. So, the teacher is KEY since he/she has all the experience.
The woman who did my hair was obviously very intelligent. I can easily deduce that her IQ was above average. What I cannot deduce as easily, is if she was a spath. She seemed very nice. But that doesn’t mean anything, right?
My reason for bringing this up is because I believe that humanity has defined success, erroneously. What does success mean? Money? No, not by a long shot. Achieving your goals? Well, my spath’s goal is to be as evil as possible without getting caught. So far, so good. I’m the only one who really knows. Oxy’s son is also a “success”. Right Oxy? 🙂
My whole family has high IQ’s. Not one of us is happy. Not one. We are all miserable. Some are spaths, some are spath victims.
Is success defined by happiness? Narcissism makes a person happy while they believe that they are on top of the world. Then they crash.
BTW, my spath taught himself to play the guitar at age 12. He needed it for his mask. People praise him as a musician, but if you ever watch him play, you can see and hear that he feels nothing. A computer could match him. He taught himself how to fly a helicopter and how to build one. He still can’t spell and he can barely speak English, much less learn a foreign language. But still, he could sell snow to an eskimo. I once told him that he could start a cult, easily.
My opinion is that the values that humanity holds high were defined by psychopaths. IQ tests were designed by psychopaths. Money is spathy. As long as we continue to measure ourselves against the standards that spaths have set, none of us are successes. We’re all just dupes.