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I watched this 5 part video series, in a which a woman who is supposedly a psychopath talks about herself. Apparently, she checked herself into therapy voluntarily. She doesn't sound dangerous in all but a small number of circumstances. She says that therepy has helped reduce the number of situations in which she's felt powerful, aggressive, impulsive drives, generally responding to what sounds like others' attempt to control her. As a result, whereas she used to get episodes of what she calls "grey rage," which is the aforementioned aggressive impulses I talked about, perhaps once annually...she now hasn't had one in five years or so.

I definitely lack this woman's aggression and fearlessness. She talks about, upon experiencing that "gray rage," actually trying to hunt people down for several minutes, but fortunately being too far away, or not having the ability to reach them.

When she was a kid, she used to get angry at people when they cried, because she had no way of relating to that so she assumed they were doing it for manipulative purposes. That sounds like a pure misunderstanding to me that could have been solved simply by a greater knowledge of how her mind compares to the minds of the majority. She has engaged in some rather asshole behaviors...but that particular anger at people crying seems like it could easily have been just a forgivable mistake based on a misunderstanding. She doesn't experience sadness, or remorse, or fear or, seeingly, any real negative feedback such as shame caused by not following social norms.

I don't know how this woman had been classified as a psychopath. She never mentions any major crimes she's engaged in, or particularly sadistic behavior, and I'm under the impression that's how psychopaths are typically qualified. I'm thinking that perhaps there needs to be another word besides psychopath for people like her, who lack a sense of remorse and fear, who have manipulative and powerful aggressive impulses, but who don't engage in life-ruining destructiveness. It sounds like both they, and society, could benefit from the knowledge that they think differently than most people, but in a manner that doesn't mean they're likely to attack anyone without provocation.

This woman, to me, sounds like a definite ass at times...but also a very self-aware ass, who understands her strengths and weaknesses.

Episode 1:

Episode 2:

Episode 3:

Episode 4:

Episode 5:

MrShittles 7 Apr 5
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Hubba hubba ... is she single?

I don't know. She is kind of cute though.

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Of the 5, which told you the most?
A most coherent and well delineated article you've written, in my view.
Having a condition of low energy, your selecting ONE video, reposting, I'd appreciate.

Am I right that she doesn't connect to others other than reacting?

They're all about equally informative. They're only about five minutes or less each. If you don't innately have an interest in watching them, or just picking one yourself, I'd just skip them all because there's nothing in here that's especially important to know if you don't have an interest in unusual psychologies.

She'll connect too others beyond reacting. Apparently she feels a lot of our positive emotions, so she'll be able to relate to, and connect to that, and while she may not have friends for the sorts of reasons most people want them, she might have them for her own sorts of reasons. For example, there's a guy with some traits of psychopaths named James Fallon. He says he experiences "cognitive love" for his wife. That seems to mean he doesn't love her the way most people would. He finds her fascinating though...and maybe has some other feelings about her too.

What she won't be able to relate to well at all are some of the more negative emotions like fear, sadness, guilt, or shame. She'd have to learn about that sort of stuff in an intellectual sense...like someone reading in a book about what it's like to have some sixth sense or something, but not experiencing that personally, and because she lacks those feelings in those ways she won't connect with people.

In some ways, she's going to be WAY better than you and I probably are at connecting with people though, because she'll have spent her life trying to figure out how other minds work, most likely, so as to fit in better.

I would say severely autistic people would be the ones who don't connect with others. They typically lack the aggression and boredom and skill at manipulation of psychopaths, but one of their defining traits, as I understand it, is not making connections to others...not understanding others or being able to relate to them easily - not understanding facial expressions well, or metaphors, none of which psychopaths typically have any problems with until it comes to those negative sensations they don't feel.

@MrShittles What sort of conversation would you expect to have say on life, or on suffering with someone like her? Would you say she's narcissistic or something else?
Would she harm you say legally if 8t helped her? Turn you in to get brownie points?

@2FollowHim I don't know. The videos don't delve into that stuff much. All we get to see is how she depicts herself. I'd be quite curious about how her sense of ethics works. She'll need some type of behavioral code just to fit into society. She's a successful lawyer.

@MrShittles It may not surface often. Is she missing hormones, etc? Is she 'defective'? Not normal. How would you know if you met her?
Really, it's like masks: many fear we might BREATHE on them, jeopardize their very life!!
But how do you know who you're meeting? To be a lawyer, she conceals all that.

@2FollowHim Honestly...I think she'll be as trustworthy as anyone else in most ways. I'm hesitant to say that because psychopaths tend to talk about themselves as being better people than they actually are, but based on how she talks, I'm comparing her mind to my own. I don't have the aggression, boredom, or fearlessness of someone like that, but I wouldn't be surprised if I have the emotional detachment from other people...maybe even to a greater degree than she does. Also, while I do have a sense of remorse, and she may well not, I actually can do something odd that most people don't seem able to do. I can switch off, at will, my ability to experience remorse, sadness, shame, and most of the emotions, except for fear, that she naturally doesn't feel.

Regarding ethics though...while I have little in the way of protective instincts or instincts to assist others, in terms of more abstract, more philosophical forms of ethics...I think my detachment actually leads to me caring more about those sorts of issues that most people do, rather than less, and those abstract forms of ethics, I think we discover through logic, rather than instincts. I'm pretty sure that, while most people will care about their family members more than I do, when it comes to people on the other side of the world, we'll both care about them equally...so while I'd make a shoddy career babysitter, for all I know I have the same type of personality as Gandhi and Martin Luther King had...because they were people who had an interest in assisting society in general.

That brand of ethics, I think, stems from an understanding of the world around oneself and self-awareness rather than the typical warm feelings a lot of other sorts of empathy stem from...and this appears to be an extremely self-aware, clever woman, who has already described pretty much all of her past behaviors that we'd see as immoral as unfortunate. Also, I was wrong about her having annual powerful aggressive urges before therapy. What she'd actually said was that was back during her playground days...when she was a young child, she's have those powerful aggressive urges that frequently and in my experience, one thing about being young is that you're at your most impulsive and you've not built up any philosophical forms of empathy yet...so I'm suspecting that a lot of people out there are going to be at their worst when they're kids, and if they can make it through that without messing up a lot of stuff...there's a good chance they'll get through the rest of their life just fine, and that sounds like what's happened to her.

So...based on my own mind, I would assume this is a safe person to be around who will not screw you over, if you are a stranger to her. I'm guessing that the only time she's going to harm someone is emotionally, if she's in a relationship with someone...especially before she knew her mind worked differently from most people's.

Relationships can involve a lot of stuff she might be completely oblivious too, or that just exhaust her to the extent that she'll completely ignore it, though she knows it harms the other person. I would probably trust her about as much as anyone else, because she seems to have all the equipment necessary to make moral decisions, despite her seeming lack of an instinctive sense of guilt, and her history appears to show that she's behaving relatively fine.

I'd not advise anyone to date her unless they have skin thicker than the walls of a bomb shelter though...because I might imagine her doing something like saying, "I don't feel like celebrating your birthday this year. Can we just skip it?" or maybe requesting to sleep with other people while she's dating you and talking about how much more attractive they are than you...but talking about wanting to stay with you because you make more money...stuff like that.

I think people's past actions are a good judge of how they'll behave in the future.
Also, regarding people with shallow emotional attachments to other people...the more they understand about their own minds and the world around them, the better. I'd say a person we might consider being most cautious around is someone who is quite emotionally detached from their fellow human beings...but who also doesn't understand themselves, and who doesn't care about abstract concepts like philosophical forms of ethics. They might have impulses they don't understand build up inside themselves and erupt, and their shortsighted, in-the-moment, sort of mentality won't give them any reason to suppress those impulses.

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