Bipolar Disorder, cluster B, psychopathy

Mood Stabilizers and Mind Lies

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So, a lot has changed in the past month. I’ve been off the rails a few times with bordering-on-acute mania, and finally agreed to start taking mood stabilizers. I’m not happy about it, but someone is going to get very hurt or worse if I don’t get my bipolar cycles under control. I’m sure I’ll have more to say about that experience as the medicine reaches steady state.

However, the immediate musing is on identity. I’ve written for almost ten years now on how I’m certain that most psychopaths do not have a strong sense of meaningful identity. While I still believe that to be true, the true cause of such a dearth may be exclusively to do with poor childhoods than anything else, of which I also believe applies to many, if not a majority, of psychopaths.

I had therapy today as a means of holding me accountable for taking the first dose of a mood stabilizer last night. I had resisted the idea for a decade, so to say that I was happy to start popping them would be a bold-faced lie. However, in therapy today, we started talking about what to tackle when my manic episodes subside presumably after the mood stabilizer takes root, and the immediate request from me was to help me develop identity.

The new therapist, whom I’ve seen for about a month now, suggests that the key may be to use a treatment vector known as Internal Family Systems. In this, the personality is broken down into subsystems, and the roles and characteristics of each are deconstructed and identified. I don’t know much about it yet, and five-year-ago me would have said absolutely not to such an approach, but I’m desperate to feel like a distinct human being at some point before I die.

The trickiest part of all of this is that I lie … and my personality lies back. I cannot find a true observation of the facts in my head without this layer of intentional or unintentional deceit. How am I supposed to make sense of the distinct personality actors in play (antisocial, narcissistic, other?) if I can’t trust my own observations? I hope to find out in the coming weeks.

psychopathy

Act Now! – Empathy as a Weapon (Part 3)

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“For nineteen dollars a month, you can personally save little Jimmy and receive updates on little Jimmy’s health and … “, spare me the bullshit. People use the fact that others act on affective empathic responses to things shown to them. These same people are often trying to illicit an immediate response to a non-immediate crisis, sometimes for good, but oftentimes for bad. We see this with phishing attacks in the cyberspace arena and with bad-faith tv commercials stating only you can save little Jimmy. It’s mostly horseshit.

My mother passed away earlier this year, leaving my dad basically alone in the world to atone for his past transgressions against others. His health has been declining and his demands of my time and energy have increased. This is not inherently an awful thing, but recently I decided that I was going to set boundaries. That he would not have 24/7 access to me for non-emergencies. That we would start scheduling mundane, known beforehand tasks. That we would be conscious with our requests with one another. None of these are diabolical requests. However, he seems to think that this is my way of completely abandoning him … or at least that is what he says.

He is probably on the antisocial spectrum, but he’s not very good at it. He attempted to emotionally blackmail me, appealing to my affective empathy (ha), saying that I was sealing his fate to a horrible death. I did not buy it. There are plenty of ways to be proactive in one’s twilight years, and he has chosen to act on none of it. His attempt to appeal to something I do not possess was laughable, and he did not get the response he was looking for.

Be wary of attempts to latch onto the feels you may have. While sometimes others may use the presumed affective empathy of others for good, more often than not it is an attempt to gain something for nothing. Empathy is often used as a weapon, and it takes a wise person to understand when the blades are out.

cluster B, psychopathy

A Proposed Community to Discuss Disquiet and Disorder

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One thing that never fails to amuse me is the amount of gatekeeping within the NPD/ASPD/psychopathy land of things. I am a believer in professional diagnosis over self-diagnosis, but I also believe that the individual knows best when it comes to whether their cognitions create a problem for them. There’s always infighting between the more adjusted and the less adjusted, but at the end of the day, what are we really accomplishing? By the very nature of disorder, it means things are not particularly or fully working out for the individual with the disorder. We should be comparing notes and offering guidance, however knowing full and well that many will never become fully adjusted.

I am not the most well-adjusted individual living with psychopathy. By the very nature of the condition, extremity in all things is all but given. There was a time in my past where I thought I had it mostly figured out and I am actively taking steps to try and return to that mental state. Over the years, I’ve communicated with various groups sharing the same condition or related conditions (NPD/ASPD) and have observed the power dynamics between those that function well and those that do not. It’s interesting, but frankly a waste of everyone’s time. By virtue of diagnosis and self-awareness, disorder implies that the life of the disordered is not being lived remotely optimally. Getting into arguments over whether one can ascend to a higher level of functioning does nothing to alleviate any of that disorder. It simply causes people to entrench themselves and, I’d argue, makes prognosis worse.

As a means of trying to build a community in the Cluster B (BPD/ASPD/NPD/HPD) and psychopathic spaces that can learn from each other, I have created a Mastodon instance tied to the following domain: https://mastodon.cluster-b.online . Mastodon is a fediverse-driven twitter alternative that promotes individually curated communities and there are no algorithms to suggest or promote or force content down people’s throats. I highly recommend that the interested reader consider joining an instance part of the larger Mastodon federated network, even if it’s not with the instance I have spun up.

My promise to anyone that joins the instance dedicated to Cluster B and psychopathic anecdotes and communication is that I will never punish people for speaking authentically so long as no legal concerns are raised that require reporting. We all have our experiences; we should be sharing them. Let’s communicate.

psychopathy

rEvolution

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I ran away from everything the past five years. The diagnoses, the confirmation of psychopathy, all the Cluster B connections I made … ran from them all. Even ran away from psychotherapy. I’m not sure those five years away from the daily musings and collaborations helped however. I seem to have lost – if I ever truly had – my ability to be mindful.

A constant refrain of the past five years has been that I’m mindful enough to know what’s going on, but not nearly mindful enough to enact meaningful change. I’m not saying that I am better off not narcissistic or antisocial, but I could be much better off without the impulsivity of extremity. For instance, dealing with the eternal ennui by going to the casino and hitting double digit dollar spins on the slots? Probably (and most definitely) not the most productive behavior, one that I seem to realize as I leave empty handed, but never before or during the chase for feeling.

My immediate focus for this next stage of psychotherapy is to better understand when I’m about to engage in foolish behavior and to short-circuit those desires. There will be other topics for other days, but I most certainly will be better off if I’m not making the inwardly or outwardly destructive choices at what seems to be all times. I need to take the next logical step in my well-being and evolve. This need not mean returning to a 24/7 state of masking, but it does mean that all the bullshit I engage in needs to be thought out beforehand before I or someone else gets truly irrevocably hurt. Masking without changing behavior is basically the old saying about the tree and the woods and whether it makes sound if no one is around to hear. But, changing behavior while remaining masked will continue to damage my very soul, as that becomes a life lived unauthentically.

It’s time for a mental revolution, where I take back my bloody crown of less-masked psychopathy but more wisely wield the mental state that it has given me. Whether I am truly good or bad is somewhat irrelevant. Whether I am standing still, or even falling behind is the more pressing question. I do believe that I can better myself and, by proxy, others.

Everything in the psychopath’s life is truly connected, even if it may not seem so on the surface. Regaining (or finally truly obtaining) my mindfulness is the first step in both honoring that connection between symptoms and becoming master over the cognitions those symptoms beget.

We will revisit the entire gambit in time, but for now, do believe when I say that what separates the productive psychopaths from the feral comes down to mindfulness, and I’ve straddled that line too closely for a while now. It’s time for me to evolve and take back what’s upstairs.

psychopathy

I’m Not Dead Yet (Part 2)

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Having run away from the psychopathic condition for five years; desperately trying to convince myself that I wasn’t disordered and that all was truly fine, this caused me to completely forget all the mental fortitude and tricks that kept me out of trouble the many years prior. I wanted to believe that I was just misguided and that there was light behind my eyes after all, mostly because the alternative suggested great academic debates about good, evil, worth, and unworthiness. Don’t get me wrong, none of this was feeling state driven, but if you’re gonna leave a legacy, it’s probably better to leave a legacy of good rather than bad, and when I could not convince myself of the legacy I was creating, that fucked with me.

I’m not all bad, but I’m certainly not all good, either. But the demons have been gnawing ferociously at me these past five years or so. Impulsivity and thrill seeking in particular have been completely unchecked, leading to scenarios of temporary poverty and absolute abandonment at times. When a person cannot ever feel true affect (emotion), it leads them to engage in an escalatory cycle of shenanigans trying to chase fleeting feelings. There have been multiple times, for instance, that I’ll go to the casino and absolutely slam $20 or more slot pulls just to chase a high. Winning or losing doesn’t matter at that point, it’s just rush of pissing money. I bet I lost over 30,000 dollars in the past year alone going after feelings that last only the briefest of moments.

A particularly manic spell oddly enough was the catalyst for returning to my unfinished business. As the longtime reader knows, orthogonal to the personality disorder nonsense, I am bipolar. While manic, I was especially dangerous in my thrill seeking and emotion chasing, and while the mania abruptly stopped after a few weeks, the damage left behind was substantial. It became clear that I needed to re-enter therapy, and to do that, I needed to find a therapist I could trust with the unsavory bits.

From there the conclusion of my current journey became clear. If I’m re-entering therapy, it’s time to become mindful, to return to the days of galvanized resolve that I had during my A Tale of Two Masks era. It’s time to do the heavy lifting that will honor my past, keep me grounded in the present, and shape the future.

Over the coming weeks and months, I will reintroduce the reader to the psychopathic condition, my experiences with it, and the hopes I have in order to remain not just free, but thriving.

I’m not dead yet and there is so much work to be done.

psychopathy

I’m Not Dead Yet

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It’s been many years since I’ve written a post on this site. Hell, I even deleted the site in 2021 as I fumbled trying to retcon my past. I convinced myself for a few years that all that psychotherapy, all my experiences, everything, was just a ruse, that I wasn’t as disordered as I was made to believe. God damn it, I was wrong – I cannot escape the beast that gnaws at me and guides me with its dark hand.

The listlessness and eternal boredom are still real. The impulsivity of extremity is real as well. The wanton disregard of the needs and desires of others… the list goes on. I can try to run from it, but all that did was cause me to lose the focus and resolve I had on keeping my demons in check. With my tail between my legs, I’m re-entering psychotherapy, albeit with a different professional.

I did call my former therapist while searching the landscape in St. Louis for a proper therapist that wouldn’t just cast me aside if I were to open up. The former therapist was surprised that I wasn’t dead or in jail, and they reminded me of the importance of mindfulness. However, having not routinely practiced active mindfulness in years, it is clear that such is easier said than done. That said, I must move forward. Having just enough mindfulness to be aware of my failings but not enough to change anything these days won’t cut it. I have to recall my past fortitude and resolve and evolve.

I need to go back and re-read many of the posts on this site. Many of them have probably not aged well. Also, as part of the resurrection of the contents of this site, all comments have been purged and tags lost, so I need to add meaningful tags to the 600+ posts I have written over the years. I will not revive the comments, it’s time to start fresh there with new perspectives from a new generation of antisocials and narcissists.

This is who I am. It’s time to get to work, again.

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Secrets Known Only to Scars

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I beg God to stop trying to teach me lessons, for I will never be able to learn…

The dead and dying … the scars outside and in … how many marks will I be given until that time in which I, myself, pass? I’m at the front of the line to witness the end of all things, but how can I appreciate anything when nothing can be internalized, no subject can be learned, and I remain indifferent to the disfiguration of it all?

The tragedy of whatever composes my essence is that I cannot appreciate, cannot recall on demand, and cannot recognize the importance of any event. My life is simply that of a hungry, unthinking mass; I simply gravitate toward what is beneficial in the moment or what seems to be the most hedonistic activity I can engage in at that time. Any information I’ve “learned” in the past is not considered, for it cannot be internalized or properly recalled – should I have ever truly learned it in the first place. I stick my hand on the hot stove, seeing if it still hurts, or, more accurately, whether I can summon the memories of the pain such action caused in the past. I cannot recall those lessons in subjectivity that I once thought I had learned. Tabula rasa at all turns…

Eventually, I will walk alone, with all remnants of my family – in particular – having turned to dust. I will not be able to summon the memory of appreciation, having never had the memory to begin with. God has made it obvious as of late that my time with them is running out, yet I cannot make them important, I cannot do more than assign cold prose to my life with them, and I will never appreciate them in the way that a neurotypical would their own. My skin, my heart, my brain, my soul all scar deeper as my family withers and dies, and one day I will look back at these scars, not truly understanding why I am scarred … not truly understanding the joy, the elation, and the sorrow that those scars hold secret beneath the skin. All I can do for now is to pray. I beg God to stop teaching me lessons, for I will never be able to learn…

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The Capacity for Suffering

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How much can the human soul take before it succumbs to the tragedies that surround us day in and day out? This is a question I’ve been especially pondering as of late. Family tragedies and near-tragedies can take their toll on even me, although I’m sure that my responses are muted compared to whatever “normal” is. Miracles and destiny, choices and fate … nothing makes sense except for one thing: someday we all will die. The in-between, the space between now and then, is what interests us all and is full of infinite pleasure and infinite pain – sometimes simultaneously. As I continue to age and explore change through meditation and practice, I find that tragedies that would have left me unaffected twenty years ago are now grating on me and wearing me down. Having finally understood the love that some have shown me, I suppose this is the natural progression of things; I don’t think I would trade this pain for anything after all.

Through an improbable series of events, a family member survived in the face of certain death. In the calm that followed, tragedy would try to strike out again from the void. Just what is the capacity of anyone’s spirit when it comes to these things? How can we stare at the infinite nothingness of time and space and not go mad? Eventually, everyone and everything we’ve ever loved, ever met, and ever hated will cease to exist in this realm. That is the cosmic truth in answer to all questions. No one knows what lies beyond this life, and I suppose the answer to that is irrelevant, for we are left with the suffering that this life brings regardless. Even a muted response to all of this is … unpleasant. But, this pain reminds me that I am alive and to cherish the moment. After all, joy cannot be appreciated with out its dark sister: suffering.

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Corrupted Peace

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As I write this post, massive uncertainty shrouds the United States territory of Puerto Rico. The people, from whom we naively believe government is derived, are sick of their corrupt government in ways I will never understand, much less be able to describe. The figureheads of the corrupt rule have drawn lines in the sand, and it appears the boiling point is quickly coming into view. With all of this in mind, we still want to believe that power comes from the people. I fear by the end of the week, we’ll see it comes from who has the most guns. The calm before the storm is that of living under a corrupted peace.

Many naively believe that violence is not an answer. On the contrary, violence may not be the best answer, but it is certainly an answer. However, it’s an answer that is only available to those with the power. To call for violence is to call for one’s own execution, so we retreat to the narrative that peaceful protest and disruption will cause change. It’s sad to say, but this approach has worse odds than any gambler would be willing to take.

By the time my readers digest this post, the deed may have been done. I hope for the best for the people of Puerto Rico, but I suspect the worst beckons. Power is a privilege. In government, many who become corrupt use the notion of “power” to imply that they were conferred special rights by a willing mass. However, it’s all just a show. The true sense of their power comes from their guns, bombs, gas, and threats of imprisonment. The people of Puerto Rico may be on the precipice of tasting such power themselves. Change will come, simply due to entropy, but those calling for change may very well have to pay the price of admission to get there. Godspeed.

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The Blood of Belief, The Breath of Action

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Morality is a boring subject. It’s often a tug o’ war between two opposing sides in which the “best” outcome or policy lies somewhere else. The Borderline cognitions that drive today’s discourse only cement the idea that we’ll always be poles apart and at each other’s throats. Yawn. Passion is a far more interesting, and immeasurable, construct. Take out the concept of morality and leave everything at pure will, and you will see that mankind is capable of the most astounding things. However, it seems that we are losing the light on this front.

The truth is that most are simply parrots that squawk what they have heard and nothing further. Original thought is lacking. SJWs spew hate from one end of the spectrum while absorbing the reciprocal noise from the other end. Where are those that go beyond and truly fight for what they believe in while offering new thought to a idea-parched world? I know that I would be on the receiving end of the vitriol of many of these groups, say Neo-Nazis or Antifa for instance, but at the same time, it’s hard to deny that they bring a passion for changing the world in the flawed ways that they operate under.

Give me your passion. Show me what makes you tick. Take the lead role and leave the extras behind. Let the spotlight shine on you as you go forth and bleed for that which you believe in. I don’t care where on the spectrum of morality you lie, as I simply must know that there are those in this world that are more than living husks. What makes you breathe? What makes you speak? Most importantly, what makes you act?