Last Reflections on Elliot Rodger

[Variform]

I spent most of yesterday reading Elliot Rodger's manifesto. I carefully read his thoughts and got under his skin. This was quite easy for me because I can relate and understand him quite well, which is somewhat disturbing. The fact is, he and I are not so different.
Admitting to that is a dangerous thing to do because it will immediately invoke antipathy against me by the association with a disturbing serial killer.

After reading it I am confronted with many similarities between his thinking and mine. But also I share similar events with him. It makes me wonder how close I would be to his final actions, had I lived in the usa.

But I differ from him in some core ways that leave me an escape from flipping like that. I wonder to what part culture in all its many and varied aspects played a role in his final acts bit I also feel that to say this is all solely his doing is not right.

We are all affected deeply by society and the actions and feelings and attitudes of others. No man or woman stands alone but is part of a whole. And this being fact, decisions we make have connections to how other treat us.

One of the most scarring events in Elliot's life was by the teasing or bullying of Monette Moio, now apparently an actual model. I would not easily dismiss her actions because Eliiot became a killer. She contributed to his emotional state right up to the end because she could not control herself and bullied him years before in school. And he had a crush on her!

I think it should now be very clear in society, that bullying people can be extremely hurtful. We have programs in schools, we even have a tv show about it here, which records the bullying with secret camera's to confront the participants later. Controversial, but seemingly very much needed, because despite all actions to battle it, bullying keeps happening.

I was bullied in school. This undermined my already fragile self-esteem.

Another similarity and misconception is the one of Elliot being privileged. I never lacked anything in my life but emotional support. Physically I was kept fed, clothed, warmed. Although my parents were not rich, we did well, lived in a suburb in a two level house etc. I never lacked anything. It makes no different if you are well-off or poor, the reason for bullying doesn't make the pain different or less.

Things we share are shyness, easily rejected, feels things deeply, has a good sense of injustice that in his case becomes totally warped. That is what bullying does to you.

In some ways he did better than I did. He had Maddy, a girl that was his friend early in life, where I had no female friends, ever. He hugged girls as a form of greeting in school, which is a cultural thing. I never had that. He danced once at a school party, so did I but I was younger and found myself so self-conscious at this party, halfway I stopped and no girl that asked me could drag me onto the floor again. I lost my nerve. I wonder why, cause the girls liked my dancing.

Overall he cannot connect to peers. Neither could I very well. He tried his best to fit in and was more successful in doing so than I ever was, as he learned to skateboard well. He is able to take steps to improve his social skills, like working out and going on karate class.

But he suffers from intense social anxiety, enough for a dx. Like I suffer from it still. He has some friends, but they come and go and he cannot keep them but only a few stick around, like his friend James. He flees in games, so did I.

He never feels equal to anyone, I know how that is. He minimizes his successes and inflates negative feedback. He feels unworthy but knows it need not be so, that he has inherent value. But no one extends much of a helping hand to him, maybe because he is closed and doesn't share, like I never did.

Yet as responsibility goes, his parents do understand he has problems and get him professional help. The professional mental health care fails him, as can be seen with Robi Ludwig, psychotherapist, who never seemed to understand him at all. Some articles suggest Elliot hears voices too, but he never shares that in his manifesto, so I think it is nonsense.

I never got any professional help and my parents let my severe anxieties and behavior towards them slip. In some ways I was worse off then he was.

His father is often away, my father was emotionally distant or away. He has bad role models, so did I. he blames his parents for not guiding him better, so do I. He feels things deeply, so do I, he has a high libido, so do I, he comes to terms with sexuality a little late and fell behind. I was late too, where my high school class mates, age 13, 14, talked about blow jobs, I didn't really understand all that yet. They told me they had seen vagina's fooling around with girls, I was like Elliot, shocked about it.

He is afraid of girls, so am I, because of my overbearing mother with her self-aggrandizement in combination with her victimization stories. His mother arranges his play dates and doesn't seem able to grow him up, but he loves her. So did I, despite the fact she treated me wrong, abandoned me emotionally or nurtured me badly.

He is intelligent, so am I. He can apply himself to schoolwork better than I, seems to have working systems to do home work properly. I severely lacked, so maybe he was smarter than I am. Or maybe american courses are easier.

I always kept one room in one house, but he seems to spend his life moving from house to house on the rhythm of the financial success of his parents. He dislikes these changes before adapting.

He has normal empathy towards others, so did I. He starts obsessing about sex, so did I, but that could be any pubic boy. He develops a thing for blond girls, he is absolutely not gay at all. This suggestion made in public is a vile attempt of smearing if you ask me. Like me, he starts to idealize sex and girls and starts to believe that his social anxiety can be resolved by sex and the self-respect it will grant. I cannot say if, like Elliot, I felt it would give me status, that he desperately seeks for some reason. Maybe this is because to be equal to his peers, he needs to be like them, so his sense of identity is diminished, even more so after the bullying starts.

So already social anxious lack of self-worth and self-esteem become diminished by bullying and a negative feedback loop twists his thinking into a single-minded ideation of girls and the act of sex and his sense of identity becomes dependent on this. I recognize this in myself. It is shocking.

This negative cycle continues throughout his life. No one recognizes his value, extends their hand in understanding because he remains silent and withdrawn, becomes socially isolated, like me.

Has trouble with people being intimate, jealous, like me. I could not handle duplicitous sexual jokes or references. It made me mad, like Elliot. I wanted a girlfriend so bad but could not overcome anxiety and insecurities and feelings of not fitting in and so forth and so on. This continued through his life and mine, up till the point I finally found a partner in the loony bin.

What we also share is acts of aggression. I took a real looking starter gun and fired it at my in-training psychiatrist to underline my suicidal tendencies in an abject and self-loathing act of hatred and aggression, to which I had to appear in court, where I was sentenced to a a probationary task punishment for 5 years, which I passed without problems. I was so high on Paxil that it allowed for 'aggressive impulse breakthroughs' which Elliot has in the last year of his life, when he attacks people with a super soaker or throws coffee and tea from his car as he passes by couples. But he has no medication, whereas with me it was the medication.

Hope keeps him going, same here and he has regrets about not finding love and intimacy at a younger age, like I do. These years you cannot get back and is very painful, believe me.

I feel that had I known this dude, he and I might have shared the killing spree. I am someplace maybe between Elliot and his friend James, who also struggled with attracting girls.

Elliot's thinking becomes increasingly narrowed into obsessive ruminations about blond girls, sex, love, desire to be appreciated for who you are. The desire to be appreciated, loved and recognized for your character, your ability to be good, to not be shallow, to have depth of character I deeply recognize.

He is in fact worthy of love, not ugly, yet so social anxious that even if a girl had talked to him, he might have not been able to respond. At this point he wants the girl, but fears them. He starts to hate them, where I never did so. Yes I had these moments of resentment, but not as Elliot had.

Elliot feels betrayed easily and maybe rightly so. Peers can be brutal and unkind and people throughout his life seem very much self-absorbed invividuals, only fighting for their own best interest and succeeding where Elliot and I do not. This sparks resentment and feelings of inadequacy while remaining lucid about the fact that you do have the right to be and are worthy of a respect and relationships.

But it is this dichotomy that is where the pain lies, to be aware of that you should feel worthy to be who you are, that you have intrinsic value to yourself and society and people around you, if you could only find a way into showing this but on the other hand being incapable and thwarted continuously by your own anxieties, so, that you feel unworthy yet.

All this then starts to warp critical thinking, in him and me, about relationships, about sex, about love. In essence here too a dichotomy arises: on one hand you know what pure love is, that you recognize the need for it, that you understand no one can snap their fingers that easily, yet see this is what happens to some people, you are indeed realistic about it and yet on the other hand desire it deeply and become confronted that inf act some people get to it with apparent ease. So what is it about you that makes it so hard.

And that answer is confronting and humiliating. And so the mind enters into deep recesses of political analyses, sociological and cultural contemplations, philosophical hide-outs and basically deforms to to cope with the stress and all the different negative emotions. I get Elliot just as well as he would have gotten me.

At this point any help provided can't come through anymore. The ways are set, the mind locked, declaring itself free. Coping mechanism have formed, patterns of thought deeply established, negative feedback loops occur, schemes of thinking cloud realistic judgment.

Elliot goes through this process quick and because he feels things so deeply he is on a fast track, whereas I would have taken a longer time to radicalize. His emotional unbalance follows a high and steep curve up to 22 years of age and I think american culture and society and all that contributes to the meeting point between self and external reality, so to say, contributes to this fast descend. My culture is very different and has a more moderating effect.

We do not have highschool shootings here or rampages. We had one some years ago, when a kid shot his teacher dead, which was an immense shock. There have been a few cases in Germany, and in Scandinavian nations. Overall the culture is different enough to limit access to weapons and people don't seem to flip as much, though even that seems a product america exports unfortunately.

Elliot ruminates continually. So do I. His mind never comes to terms with who he is, why he suffers, he tries to analyze but never gets it. Why so unlucky? What did he do wrong? I recognize these patterns. I know them from the inside. Had I access to real guns, I might have taken my own life many years ago, maybe even as a child, maybe at the age of 16 or so.

Elliot cannot be comforted much as a child, neither could I. I would kick away from me any person who wanted to help me when I would topple or hurt myself, because I was apparently, as my brother explains, angry with myself for allowing myself to be hurt, or being stupid.

The question is, what makes a young boy have feeling of self-loathing and anger directed to the self, so unforgiving towards himself? Is it the emotional neglect of parents? Is it a brain chemistry issue or some other brain related malfunction? To this day I do not know for sure. Elliot didn't understand either, but he and I share this self-defeatist complex.

Always thinking we are flawed, always believing the lies we tell ourselves about ourselves, eager to accept our own inadequacies and having difficulty with praise, always this paranoia that it is not meant or true. I sense this in him but maybe I project too much. But he ruminates to no end, like me and his topics of thought are similar.

In the last years he has magical thinking about the lottery, desperately clings to self help books and tries to influence the universe by sheer willpower. I do not think this necessarily means a diagnosis of a psychotic disorder, but I feel it is a stress induced coping mechanism in recognition of the self slipping into an vengeful mindset capable of murder.

He may have had at least one episode of derealization or depersonalization. He feels as in trance outside a museum he visits with friends, but any social contacts are always confronting him. He suffers from depression. He probably would be diagnosed with dysthymia, like me, which results from the constant self-reflecting undermining thoughts. But with periods of actual clinical full blown depression.

He had intense sexual fantasies, like me. Elaborate in scope and range they can last between minutes and hours up to full days. They can be complete life stories of finding a girlfriend, dating, sex, ending the relationship or growing old together. He doesn't say too much about it but I think it is too embarrassing for him to disclose it.

In an effort to battle and compensate feelings of being unworthy and inadequate, he develops notions of grandeur, of being a hero. This is why magic and fantasy gaming appeals so much. Fantasies of being a hero mix with sexual fantasies, one becomes the hero in their own mind, saving girls from sexual assault or being great in some way, like an artist, or great guitarist or just being plane awesome to a girl. But these fantasies only outline the failure in real life that he felt he was. That goes for me too.

The mind is the cause of agony yet battles desperately to stay sane.

In Elliot this battle came to a conclusion when he could not cope anymore and all that he saw as a possible way out, like becoming very wealthy and in being wealthy, being able to attract girls, was lost. The combination of losing hope, feeling no more options existed, no more excuses of fantasies to cling to lead to a deep depression and existential crisis. Like I have.

Both Elliot and I know not who we are, what we are, what we are supposed to be, how to become a better person, how to fight these anxieties, why we are so different, why we need to endure life rather than enjoy it. In a society where guns can be easily obtained, he took steps, whereas I will never harm another. I would only harm myself but yet I have not given up all hope.

I share the end game process though, in that I feel I have to give myself a chance, whereas he hopes that girls, society, the world, life itself give him another chance to prevent his death and the death of others.

I might get a dx for ADD. I have hope and trust in medication. I desire therapy that I will go for in a last attempt to get to understand myself and get a grip on life. I don't know if I succeed. If not, I hope I have the courage to take my life, but that is against such a basal instinct it is very hard.

But I am glad I do not live in america. I cannot say to what extent I would act out in violence against a world that doesn't seem to be able to or help me be. I already acted out once. And I can so deeply understand his need to take people with him, because it is true, no one is alone in the world and we are all affected by others and how they treat us, relate to us.

All Elliot's friends or acquaintances and his parents, his coaches, his mental health professionals must now introspect to what extent they contributed to this tragedy and own up their part for it. What did they do or failed to do? All those who bullied him needlessly, or who looked away or hurt him intensionally or out of sheer callousness or disinterest, like his step mother need to examine to what their impact was on him. That he felt so lonely, so lost and that no one was there for him. No I refuse to see him isolated from his environment, that his act of aggression was only his own doing. The fact is, society does play a part, culture does play its role and inter-human relations do affect the mind of a person.

In essence, these influences all had their finger on the trigger that day. But society shies away from responsibility, because it knows it has impact on people. And how tragic that 'innocent' people died, people who may have had similar problems getting a relationship. After all, it doesn't show on the outside. That he killed people like him, possibly. And who knows, these victims might have contributed to the mental instability of someone in their own environment. A scary thought, but we are all related, and tied by invisible strings. What have I done in my life to hurt another? Who will ask these questions now?

RIP Elliot Rodger.

 

[Latte]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WataMote


Genuine recommendation.

 

[Ex-User (9086)]

Things we share are shyness, easily rejected, feels things deeply, has a good sense of injustice that in his case becomes totally warped. That is what bullying does to you.

Bullying warps your sense of justice? How come that your sense of justice is not warped while you both have undergone the same process?

And doesn't the good sense of justice develop during the bullying and helps you not to give in, etc?

And you are afraid of girls because of your mother? Nice analysis there.

I have that too, I have to talk to people, because I was born from my father mother, really, I can't do anything about it, it is her fault.

 

[Variform]

Bullying warps your sense of justice? How come that your sense of justice is not warped while you both have undergone the same process?

It makes you become more explicit and adamant and less likely to relativate. You become harder in your judgment when you see injustice. You may become more violent in response. If I see someone being bullied, I want to basically go medieval on the bullies and make them suffer in agony. Elliot wants to basically skin people alive. I think he is quite moderate. :-)

And doesn't the good sense of justice develop during the bullying and helps you not to give in, etc?

That may happen. Elliot refused to leave Santa Barbara because he would feel defeated by those inflicting their injustice upon him. One becomes in that sense trapped to their own sense of feeling entitled to be treated fairly and with dignity.

And you are afraid of girls because of your mother? Nice analysis there.

I have that too, I have to talk to people, because I was born from my father mother, really, I can't do anything about it, it is her fault.

Nothing is ever clear cut. Many contributing factors or maybe a few. But emotional neglect or undernourishment plays a part, some innate personality traits and then the double hearted message her stories gave me, the hypocrisy of it, these all play a part. I believe every contributing factor is a case of the exponential function.

With each stacking of something not in your favor the difficulty doubles.

 

[Bock]

He was not able to get past the initial patterns he saw/experienced, neither emotionally nor intellectually.

 

[nanook]

okay, topics like this ... i want to stay out, but i can't.


elliot's level of PD would have caused issues regardless of what youth experience he had. most negative youth experiences were manifestations of his PD, not causes. sure, he might not have killed somebody, in a different universe. but it's not like he could have been saved by the people around him. these people had to save themselves from his delusional actions and whatever bullying he got was probably an attempt to defend not only the bully but also the bullies' circle of friends from him, like an attempt to ban him from the territory or from expansive entitled behavior once and for all. and a ban is never a matter of justice, if justice is thought of as a right to be included. even a psychologist can usually not do something about this level of PD.


you do have a bit of a narcissistic core, it shows in poor understanding of motivation (how you blame the ineffectiveness of your neurotically diffused and self-contradictory intentions on neurotransmitters)

you also have many fantasies of grandeur and no shame about communicating them rather frequently.

and it shows in a tendency to switch off empathy, when you feel wronged (how you will gladly sue somebody, because they didn't do well enough for your purpose). you really act on such hateful thoughts, not just momentarily, you will also justify it in general. it's your sense of justice.

hail the police, lock the thiefes away. one of the simplest ways to detect narcissist is to ask them how they feel about bums. only narcissist individuals believe that certain people are "loosers", as if loosing was a despicable choice. loosing is independence from striving, and to the narcissist this would be death, because his sense of self is defined by achievement, not by values.

looser, that's how you think about your brother. and it shows you (would love to be able to) think of yourself as a winner, a strong person, an achiever. being strong means identification with extroverted standards, extroverted judgement and it's insensitivity towards the human subject.

the correlating hate for other subject and the selfhate itself is not a problem, if it only arises as a fleeting inner voice. it's normal, since everyone has extroverted judgement somewhere in their psyche.

and even the acting out of such voices may be statistically "common". perhaps that is what you mean, when you say that elliot had "normal" empathy. but it wasn't "healthy" empathy at all. it was horribly poor.

a person with healthy empathy has a clear sense of how girls ought to do, whatever the fuck they feel like doing, including blowing a 'stupid unworthy looser-jock's' cock.

elliot was not autistic (as the media said), he is a clear case of NPD, but the lack of empathy in full blown NPD is actually much worse than the lack of empathy in autism.


you don't appear to have full blown NPD, merely a narcissist core. meaning you are not limited to it. you are far too openly reflective for a full blown case. but it's still seems to be the core that guides you in life. more than a fluctuating sub-personality, i think.

it's really mommy issues. the norman bates kind of mommy issues. that is NPD. NPD always starts with a struggle with the mother, because the child is merged with the mother (much more than with the father) and NPD is based on a sense of being merged with the object of competition, the feeling of being merged allows you to sue or kill it, etc, just like you would attempt to suppress your own emotions.

if the child can not wake up from the sense of being merged with the mother, it can not be healed from the state of narcissism.

which is a state of not being a complete own person, a state that prevents independent values-based- or motivation-controlling- introspection. and without such introspection, it is not possible to develop empathy, since empathy is a projection of introspective capability.

sure, the narcissist has some interiors to project and that can seem empathic, but he lacks the understanding of how people can be truly independent from relationship in their orientations, motivation.

elliot doesn't even know, that these girls don't even "give their hearts" to the jocks they blow, because he can not imagine emotional idependence within relationship.

in his mind, the interaction between her and that jock must be like the fusion he knows from how he experienced his mothers affection.

and i wonder if your idea of unconditional love is just the same. in reality, the concept means something else. to be accepting of someone else's motivational independence. you go blow a jock and i'm not going to be jealous. that is unconditional love. not: you belong to me, regardless of how much you want to escape.


i believe the separation from the mother happens between age 6 an 11, based on what i have seen. better 6 than 11.

for me it has happened somewhere around this time (not at once) and it was just a little bit painful.


the first push was leaving home for kindergarden, but i wasn't ready to let go, the next push was leaving home for school and i was rather ready internally, but didn't let go completely, externally. the next push was when my mother send me to a clinic, into which i didn't want to go. that made it obvious and i got it once and for all, internally (for me feeling) and externally (for me thinking). that she would not always stay by my side, which made me realize she is a person on her own, not some sort of unreliable but eventually well serving function of my life, my higher self. and i was able to accept that, more or less.

but i have not seen healthy people grow up. perhaps it's healthy, if it happens in Kindergarten.

in a full blown narcissist, it has never happened, hasn't even been attempted.

apparently the narcissist is so used to fight for his mothers acceptance, that he will never stop the fight in his own fantasy.

whereas i never had to fight, i had no way of fighting and when her acceptance became limited, there was no option in me, but to surrender to the reality of being separate from her.

From what i have seen, narcissism only occurs in individuals who lack Fi, who have Fe instead. Please, i don't say Fe types are narcissist, though!!! I believe Narcissism is heavily dependent on extroverted feeling. At the very least on absence or weakness of Fi. Unless all my understanding of cognitive functions is just introspective concepts that i hallucinate on the fly. But they work fabulously in my mind.

Perhaps Fe is a sign of having to make a greater effort to resonate with the mother.

I used to fake Fe through Te and i did that for my mother and not long ago, i had to overcome my relationship with here once more, this time not emotionally, but in my mind, before i was able to see my own Fi and Te for what it is. So the pattern is similar, but it was only a cerebral fight for understanding and getting along, not an emotional fight for belonging and feeling good.

I think, if extroverted THINKING is in overdrive and obsessed with external stimuli, it doesn't look like narcissism any more, it looks like schizoid PD and it's verry different.


I am effortlessly closer to my mother than my sister is, due to similarity.

My sister is the Fe type, the firstborn, the achiever, who, like my father, has a worldview of winners and loosers, she is the one who had to struggle to get affection from my mother and she has some narcissistic patterns, but it's not so bad, since she clearly managed to become independent from her.

The most typical narcissist is a son who is close to the mother through similarity and yet has to struggle, because the mother makes him, it's a game to her.


i have real trouble with my father. it fucks up my life just the same, but does not fuck up my personality (motivational self-awareness) that badly. i don't get caught up in relationships of purely emotional neediness, but i can't dare to take care of myself practically, so i am financially dependent, which comes around a circle and becomes somewhat emotionally relevant. being schizoid is like a "practically instable personality disorder", lol (as opposed to emotionally instable). it's a problem between differentiating and integrating extroverted thinking and introverted feeling: one should be clear about what one wants and clear about how one can go about getting something like that and then shoot. but in schizoid PD this does not come together. the schizoid does some of the things he knows how to get (act out some Te) even though he does not want to do them and avoids to confront Fi with the limitations that Te imposes, which sends Fi into fantasy land, makes it impossible to life fully, according to ones own desires and values, to utilize Te for the right thing.


The narcissists have a much more fundamental difficulty of feeling who they are on their own terms, they don't even know it in their fantasies, therefore they will easily get too attached to a random script provided by culture.


So a narcissist is an eternally six year old boy, who plays with he-man and scelettor (or ken and barbie), imitating a play, following the rules he has observed. He does not have an own value system that could guide him in making up his own game rules or goals. He is unconscious of why some episodes of the provided/imitated script feel better to him than others ("could it be neurotransmitters?"), but he certainly attempts to achieve and prolong the comfortable episodes. This is Fe without any reflection, that means without integration of Fe with other functions, as it comes later in life.

Elliot truely has absolutely no understanding on why girls would be with guys, since what they do is not a simple script, in most cases. All he knows is they don't play by the provided rules of the game that he mistakes for real life. In his perception the game is about providing value and winning fusion in return. But the boys and girls don't care about fusion, they practice freedom.

He is acting out culture, as he sees it, and it does sheds a light on the nature of competition and consumerism, that is culturally embraced and communicated. Everything in capitalist culture is a value that is traded and if cultural value, like a bmw, is provided a return should be expected, like a barbie. For a sane teenager that would be the freedom to play with barbie once, but in his mind it's the right to attain permanent fusion with barbie.

It's the TV show that our 6 year old protagonist imitates. He does not want affection as such and does not require being adored for the purpose of receiving affection or being adored, because he can not understand and perceive such introspective concepts, he only has marked them in a system of winning and loosing and he needs to win the game of life, so he can feel like he is in control of it, so he does not have to be anxious.

It's about power, but not specifically power over others for a purpose, just the power of ego to feel in control of life, of one's own actions.


Life is about self empowerment, according to the impulsive stage of development, which is practiced by six year old children. But in a sane case, power emancipates from the need for fusion. In a sane case, it liberates from expectation. You can feel powerful, even if you loose a fight, even if you don't get expected results, simply because your own muscles obey you and boundaries are clearly defined.

But for the narcissist, safety is when actions return whatever results were expected. Getting expected results is fusion. Being one with the world. No contradiction, no conflict. Magic. The winner has it all. That's the meaning of control or power or achievement to a nacricist. Security in fusion. It's the impulsive stage, but it's incomplete, since independence from results was not achieved, hence the person get's emotionally stuck at this stage.

And it often finds a perfect home in conformistic societies, but never in modern societies. A conformist society is predictable, you can have fusion with it. You always can sue people, if they don't do what is expected from them. You can avoid expecting things, that are unlikely to happen. You can feel powerful, by being a perfectionistic slave and master of the system, at once. Because the conformist game is without much risk. So for narcissists who can find a conformist life, there is no incentive to grow. but for elliot this was not an option. even though america is in so many ways conservative, the youth culture is a far cry from conformism. if he had grown up in the 50ies, like norman bates, he would have at least owned his own hotel.

 

[Bock]

blame

There is no such thing as "blame", same thing with the concept of "excuse". It implies free will/that there is something detached from "yourself" that can act/observe freely on its own.

"Misplaced weight"/irrational focus on the other hand seems more coherent.

 

[Bock]

Also, too much unstructured text from both of you.

 

[Bock]

a person with healthy empathy has a clear sense of how girls ought to do, whatever the fuck they feel like doing, including blowing a 'stupid unworthy looser-jock's' cock.

Sounds like inane sensor bullshit. Where are the patterns? The thoughts on implications/ramifications of such behavior? "Healthy empathy"?

"Everybody should be free to do what they want even though free will is a laughable notion at best /end"

 

[Variform]

okay, topics like this ... i want to stay out, but i can't.

How interesting. Shall we analyze you, as you do me? Is this an involuntary reflex in you?

elliot's level of PD would have caused issues regardless of what youth experience he had.

The very first sentence and you alert me.

This sentence is not neutral. It is also not true. Being bullied exacerbates incredibly.

most negative youth experiences were manifestations of his PD, not causes.

You assume he had a PD. Maybe. But let's not be too hasty here. What PD did he have?

sure, he might not have killed somebody, in a different universe. but it's not like he could have been saved by the people around him. these people had to save themselves from his delusional actions and whatever bullying he got was probably an attempt to defend not only the bully but also the bullies' circle of friends from him, like an attempt to ban him from the territory or from expansive entitled behavior once and for all. and a ban is never a matter of justice, if justice is thought of as a right to be included. even a psychologist can usually not do something about this level of PD.

I think you have it backward and are defending bullies. You are blaming the victim. By saying he had a PD and therefore was trouble to others. That does not entitle anyone to harass another. It requires sympathy or should invoke it, unfortunately, people are not very enlightened and have no heart for people in trouble. There is no insight nor understanding when someone is weird and I suppose you cannot demand from teens to understand some clinical psychology.

That is a severe flaw in society though.

You also assume too much. Again. Have you read the manifesto? I did. And I see no signs of Elliot acting with entitlement and demanding anything from peers. Rather, he makes serious efforts to fit in and be accepted. This shows me he has an innate human need to be liked and appreciated.
This is what most children will do, try to fit in. Some will do so more than others, and some succeed, like one of his friends that is not in the elite group in school, but gets to be among them later in life. So he was successful. Elliot was too, as he learned some skills to impress, be liked.

But you turn it around on him and I question your motives and neutrality. Elliot did not antagonize his peers, rather, he managed to be part of the cool gang on several occasions, for periods of time. But you suggest he was obnoxious in some way and got banned from these groups.

The fact is, only after he got bullied and shut out, he became angry and decided not to care about being a cool kid anymore and only then he started to become obnoxious , which of course, did not help him to be accepted at all.

So don't turn it around on the poor bastard.

you do have a bit of a narcissistic core, it shows in poor understanding of motivation (how you blame the ineffectiveness of your neurotically diffused and self-contradictory intentions on neurotransmitters)

Have you proof that I do not have ADD? Again you make these claims as if you know it all. We all have a measure of narcissism, PD's and their symptoms are exaggerated personal traits. Blown out of proportion. I think I understand motivation really well. By what standard do you measure me?

Where am I self-contradictory? You use fancy words but say little...

you also have many fantasies of grandeur and no shame about communicating them rather frequently.

No, why would I be ashamed in this difficult period in my life, when I have decided to open myself up to people like you? My grandeur is not based on nothing. Hahha, I know I have an IQ. I am not stupid. I can appreciate my views on the world and I believe they have merit and can be insightful. Do you deny this to me? A PD doesn't mean that whatever a person says should immediately be take with a grain of salt.

and it shows in a tendency to switch off empathy, when you feel wronged (how you will gladly sue somebody, because they didn't do well enough for your purpose). you really act on such hateful thoughts, not just momentarily, you will also justify it in general. it's your sense of justice.

Well, here speaks something deeply flawed in you. Because here again you assume that because I have a PD, whatever I do in life is a result of this PD. Do you understand the following concept:

Because someone has a PD, we isolate him, scrutinize him and question everything he says. When he defends himself, we take that as just another sign of his PD. When he addresses this unfairness, we see prove in his defense that he is indeed disturbed. And so, you box someone in completely, not open to the idea that what he says might actually be true or a normal response.

That is how you operate chap. You take my PD and my responses as proof there is something wrong with me, it is a circular reasoning and it tells me something about you. It tells me that you lack empathy and critical thinking abilities.

Take your language, the use of the word "gladly" is nonsense. I do not sue anyone gladly, rather, it takes a lot of energy and a lot of motivation, that I lack in life. For me to be motivated enough to act on my legit case means that there is really something going on. I remind you that someone with a PD who files offical complaints against a doctor, has the full legal right to do so. And so here too you follow a circular reasoning, that because of my PD, I am more likely to just rampage around sueing every cunt.

The first complaint I ever filed was against a shrink and a physician-assistent because I had told them I did not feel myself, felt agitated and aggressive on Paxil, what we call Seroxat in Europe. They explicitly denied this could possibly be true, yet, I am vindicated because it is now known that the manufacturer, GlaxoSmithKline, kept data and research findings to themselves, that showed that their medicine had some serious side effects.

Their stubborn refusal to change my medication and me relying on their authority with trust, resulted in acts of aggression against other people, for which they then blamed my personality. This was injustice and the only positive thing about Seroxat was that it also helped me be so motivated as to file complaints against them.

The recent complaint against my doctor is legit too, because she made observable and factual mistakes in my referral to get a an examination for ADHD. I think I have a very strong case and the though this takes a lot out of me, I cannot just let it pass, because I feel responsible: what if she makes more mistakes, then this should be known. It is the same as when a woman gets raped and won't sue or come forward to testify, meaning the perp may continue his vile acts.

And I have anxieties about the hearing, how my doctor will deny the claim I made, about how I will have to phrase myself at the hearing. This is all very hard and I rather have shied away from it. But sometimes you just have to do the right thing and I will not let my PD be an excuse not to defend my rights as a patient.

The standards to which doctors have to submit to may be lower in Germany though. So, here too you are mistaken, when you suggest that it is some arbitrary standard that I feel has not been met. So basically, every sentence you write in some way is just nonsense.

hail the police, lock the thiefes away. one of the simplest ways to detect narcissist is to ask them how they feel about bums. only narcissist individuals believe that certain people are "loosers", as if loosing was a despicable choice. loosing is independence from striving, and to the narcissist this would be death, because his sense of self is defined by achievement, not by values.

And where do you get this wisdom? If you think that asking such question to someone to find narcissim you fool yourself. How can you be that simplistic?

Besides that, you seem insensitive to language. When Elliot calls some friends losers he does not do so by some factual standard. He does so by the value that is is important to fight for your rights.

looser, that's how you think about your brother. and it shows you (would love to be able to) think of yourself as a winner, a strong person, an achiever. being strong means identification with extroverted standards, extroverted judgement and it's insensitivity towards the human subject.

You can believe all you like, but my psychologist stated that I am the one better off than my brother, that in a sense and in essence he is a loser, because he cannot overcome the emotional bondage of our mother, whereas I, with great tour de force, was able to get away from the deeply dysfunctional relationships. I never call myself a winner, because I am damaged, but at least I am now at a point where I can overview the situation. It took me 10 years to finally understand how deeply I have been fucked up by these relationships.
And yet here you perceive me in all these ways. I think I wills tick with my psychologist. What you say I don't understand, extroverted standards? My ass. You don't know my brother or by what standards I judge my own family situation.

the correlating hate for other subject and the selfhate itself is not a problem, if it only arises as a fleeting inner voice. it's normal, since everyone has extroverted judgement somewhere in their psyche.

and even the acting out of such voices may be statistically "common". perhaps that is what you mean, when you say that elliot had "normal" empathy. but it wasn't "healthy" empathy at all. it was horribly poor.

So you read his manifesto then? If not, there is little point.

a person with healthy empathy has a clear sense of how girls ought to do, whatever the fuck they feel like doing, including blowing a 'stupid unworthy looser-jock's' cock.

I think you lack empathy. You intellectualize freely but I think your insight lacks. Before the age of about 10 Elliot seems to have very normal empathy. And even, when he has started having more severe social anxiety, he is the only one to notice his little brother drowning and he saves him. And he seems not to have made a big deal of it either. I do not understand your inability or desire to question this empathy. Empathy is a human trait, not a symptom of a PD that can be questioned. There will always be empathy but it may be twisted in so that a killer can feel he does a victim a favor by killing them. But in principla, the empathy is just a source and the conduct is at fault, not the empathy itself.

You have to learn how to make distinctions between normal human traits, based in biology and how the psyche takes them as fuel for behavioral patterns.

elliot was not autistic (as the media said), he is a clear case of NPD, but the lack of empathy in full blown NPD is actually much worse than the lack of empathy in autism.

I remain unconvinced. I think his main problem was something else. I think it is something that has no name. I think his narcissism was a result, not a cause. I think the cause was severe social anxiety. But underneath was something else. GAD I feel is floating atop an even deeper issue, which is either a neurological/genetic issue or something we have not yet a DSM description for.

you don't appear to have full blown NPD, merely a narcissist core. meaning you are not limited to it. you are far too openly reflective for a full blown case. but it's still seems to be the core that guides you in life. more than a fluctuating sub-personality, i think.

My specific personal narcissism is not really a problem in life at all. It is merely an compensation to be able to resist people such as yourself, who would too easily stampede over my psyche in their attempt to isolate me and judge me, then when I defend my views see this as proof of dysfunction.

Or maybe it is not narcissism at all, but just a healthy awareness of my strengths. I have found that society dislikes people who stick their head out above the mowing level. I have a great intuitive insight into people, how they think and why, because of a unique advantage I have over just about anyone else: a PD combined with a good IQ and an analytical ability.

I also have ample time to think, cause I don't work. These are not inflated delusions, just facts of life in the way that even a side effect to life, like a PD, has side effects to, that can be positive. Every advantage has a disadvantage, says a famous football player, but I would add that every disadvantage then again gets an advantage.

But it is hard to say these things because likely, you will regard them again as narcissistic self-defense.

it's really mommy issues. the norman bates kind of mommy issues. that is NPD. NPD always starts with a struggle with the mother, because the child is merged with the mother (much more than with the father) and NPD is based on a sense of being merged with the object of competition, the feeling of being merged allows you to sue or kill it, etc, just like you would attempt to suppress your own emotions.

Again, totally off the mark. Again you are prone to judgmental self-righteousness.

if the child can not wake up from the sense of being merged with the mother, it can not be healed from the state of narcissism.

How am I merged with my mother and how was Elliot?

which is a state of not being a complete own person, a state that prevents independent values-based- or motivation-controlling- introspection. and without such introspection, it is not possible to develop empathy, since empathy is a projection of introspective capability.

sure, the narcissist has some interiors to project and that can seem empathic, but he lacks the understanding of how people can be truly independent from relationship in their orientations, motivation.

elliot doesn't even know, that these girls don't even "give their hearts" to the jocks they blow, because he can not imagine emotional idependence within relationship.

Yet Elliot explains that it is this lack of emotional independence as you call it, is what is eating him. He cannot understand why anyone would independently make a choice to be with these specific types of men. He thinks that they must be mentally flawed, to have such desires. He cannot imagine a relationship having dependence, rather than independence.

in his mind, the interaction between her and that jock must be like the fusion he knows from how he experienced his mothers affection.

and i wonder if your idea of unconditional love is just the same. in reality, the concept means something else. to be accepting of someone else's motivational independence. you go blow a jock and i'm not going to be jealous. that is unconditional love. not: you belong to me, regardless of how much you want to escape.

I don't buy into this. How is a child 'merged' with the mother. You fail to explain this.
I think it is a rather...twisted way of thinking to make examples of blowing cock in comparison to ownership.

If you really believe or think that unconditional love means that a partner must be free to cheat, never have a relationship please. Love is not a matter of unconditionality. This is just a emotional notion and a delusion.

Love knows boundaries and limitations. You suggest this is somehow wrong, that love must be unrestricted. But that is not something a biologist would agree with at all. A biologist would explain that love in nature is about a bonding that denies other potential mates from accessing the partner.

But that aside, your ideas that 'escape' is rather simplistic of the nature of relationships. You suggest that men want to own women. And that the only way to allow them freedom is to let them be promiscuous if they so desire. But that is not love, it is perversion.

Love is a willingness to restrict yourself to one partner and this choice is what actually liberates the couple into mutual trust and freedom. It is by the choice of the partner that either one feels no longer any need to control the other.

This liberation causes partners to bond faithfully and in trust. Love is both a bonding and a freedom.

Your idea reminds me of cavemen, dragging women to their caves. It is about men hunting women and I think this idea is based on religious frustrations in culture, that still blames women for original sin. Women would need to be hunted, controlled, subdued. This is not psychology, it is religious dogmatic patriarchal and hierarchical indoctrination into a paradigm.

i believe the separation from the mother happens between age 6 an 11, based on what i have seen. better 6 than 11.

for me it has happened somewhere around this time (not at once) and it was just a little bit painful.

Imagine my brother. He is far into his 40's and still has not cut the cord.

the first push was leaving home for kindergarden, but i wasn't ready to let go, the next push was leaving home for school and i was rather ready internally, but didn't let go completely, externally. the next push was when my mother send me to a clinic, into which i didn't want to go. that made it obvious and i got it once and for all, internally (for me feeling) and externally (for me thinking). that she would not always stay by my side, which made me realize she is a person on her own, not some sort of unreliable but eventually well serving function of my life, my higher self. and i was able to accept that, more or less.

but i have not seen healthy people grow up. perhaps it's healthy, if it happens in Kindergarten.

in a full blown narcissist, it has never happened, hasn't even been attempted.

apparently the narcissist is so used to fight for his mothers acceptance, that he will never stop the fight in his own fantasy.

I had to go through severe depression to come to professional help. Then it took like 10 years to finally understand the dynamics I was in as a child and teen, until I left the nest. Now I finally will close this book forever, this year. I cut the cord even though emotional issues remain. But I will deal with them to the best of my inabilities.

This is the year of growth for me. This is my version of Elliot's Day Of Retribution But I do it in a less dramatic way.

From what i have seen, narcissism only occurs in individuals who lack Fi, who have Fe instead. Please, i don't say Fe types are narcissist, though!!! I believe Narcissism is heavily dependent on extroverted feeling. At the very least on absence or weakness of Fi. Unless all my understanding of cognitive functions is just introspective concepts that i hallucinate on the fly. But they work fabulously in my mind.

A shot for open goal, but I decline to shoot. I think you have interesting ideas, but I cannot come to terms with some of the conclusions and modes of thinking you apply.

Perhaps Fe is a sign of having to make a greater effort to resonate with the mother.

No, I think that would be unhealthy. One must come to terms with the fact that a mother is a creature that gave life to you. This means that when you have existential questions or fears and struggle to come to terms with the nature of reality and your own self-reflective self-consciousness, you have to include your mother in your struggle. She is responsible for your plight.

Nature is less subtle. Animals, like lions or birds, will violently drive away their offspring. I do not think it is needed to resonate with a mother but that a healthy relationship can be achieved that should not be based on existential ties. Literally and figuratively, the cord must be cut. Only without these emotionally charged attachments can there ne a truly free relationship.

And even then it might be a loaded dealing, because our society enables mothers to keep seeing their children as owned by them.

i have real trouble with my father. it fucks up my life just the same, but does not fuck up my personality (motivational self-awareness) that badly. i don't get caught up in relationships of purely emotional neediness, but i can't dare to take care of myself practically, so i am financially dependent, which comes around a circle and becomes somewhat emotionally relevant.

I had that going as well.

Elliot truely has absolutely no understanding on why girls would be with guys, since what they do is not a simple script, in most cases. All he knows is they don't play by the provided rules of the game that he mistakes for real life. In his perception the game is about providing value and winning fusion in return. But the boys and girls don't care about fusion, they practice freedom.

No it is much simpler than this. He has a deeply felt desire of which the root is unknown to him. And this desire is not met. It is not about him not understanding women or woman-men relationships. That is all just a twisted cover, a result pattern of thinking.

His whole dressing up, his ideas about wealth to attract females, these are all just overlays of thinking as a compensation for the unmet need. It is not about how this douchebag can possibly be with this blond girl. If it would be, he would also notice non-blond girls. These are just situational responses in a way.
What he is all about is that he feels a deep inner need to be. I often propose the question of 'how to be in the world'. I borrow this from Terrence McKenna.
Elliot doesn't have an answer to 'how to be in the world'. This I believe to be the most important question a sentient being can ask in a cultural sense.

There are several other questions. Who am I? What is my purpose? He had a severe existential crisis from puberty. He cold not come to terms with it. He felt no inner resolution that is the basis of self-worth. Out of that comes a search for foundation. Where to land. In what way does my relationship with either person validate me? What do others do?

And so he seeks to belong. And succeeds, yet temporarily.

He is acting out culture, as he sees it, and it does sheds a light on the nature of competition and consumerism, that is culturally embraced and communicated.

That is correct. He grasps as cultural norms as a fundament for his lack of innate sense of self. I don't know why some people are born this way. I think it is something that comes even before the very core things like E and I.

Everything in capitalist culture is a value that is traded and if cultural value, like a bmw, is provided a return should be expected, like a barbie. For a sane teenager that would be the freedom to play with barbie once, but in his mind it's the right to attain permanent fusion with barbie.

Not a right, but a deep desire for validation through what only love can bring, a reflection in the mirror of the other, who presents the most glorious image of worth. A lasting relationship would endure this image, but one can also find this image in quantity rather than quality.

I don't think Elliot really cares about blond girls. The female obsession is a tool, a means to the end of a sense of identity he lacks. It is his libido that gets channeled into sexual desire because the problems in his life begin to appear when he enters puberty. So the sexual drive becomes the conduit or the mirage under which is hidden the true and desperate need to be identifiable.

There is a sort of split going on. He sees himself as physically weak and inadequate, not an alpha male basically. He is short, not athletic. He cannot enter a ride in an theme park, he cannot use a swing because he is too short.

In essence this means that there is a dis-congruity between his physical and mental sense of self. He doesn't come to terms with it and he never would. This issue combines with the sexual drive, so that his physicality becomes a token of his inability to match his mental self-image to his physical traits. This leads to an easy picture of narcissism but it is not that. Any and all comments on females are an expression of the need for a working appropriate self-image, one that is worthy to be beheld. And to be beheld is to be accepted as a member of the human experiences, which is the question of culturally-sociologically 'how to be in the world' and 'who am I?'

It's the TV show that our 6 year old protagonist imitates. He does not want affection as such and does not require being adored for the purpose of receiving affection or being adored, because he can not understand and perceive such introspective concepts, he only has marked them in a system of winning and loosing and he needs to win the game of life, so he can feel like he is in control of it, so he does not have to be anxious.

It's about power, but not specifically power over others for a purpose, just the power of ego to feel in control of life, of one's own actions.

I see it, like I said, as a problem of self-identity. Power is just Yet Another Tool or thought pattern of behavioral pattern to control, indeed, that is what power does, to come to a solid identity.

Life is about self empowerment, according to the impulsive stage of development, which is practiced by six year old children. But in a sane case, power emancipates from the need for fusion. In a sane case, it liberates from expectation. You can feel powerful, even if you loose a fight, even if you don't get expected results, simply because your own muscles obey you and boundaries are clearly defined.

But life starts with identity. Always. I am what it is to be.

 

[Latte]

Variform, will you watch my series recommendation?

I'm very interested in how you would interpret it and what you would gain from it.

It is highly relevant to this thread. Probably more than any post that will be posted here.

 

[nanook]

most of what i write in this forum, in general, is hypothesis and i won't attempt to prove any of it. i think the purpose of discussion on a forum like this is to practice the ability of hypothesis.

i can't imagine something more boring, than a poster who limits his statements to things that are commonly accepted to be proven facts. so i could not possibly apologize for making assumptions. being speculative, especially about human nature is my type, so to say, so yes, it's like a reflex for me and it gets me into a lot of trouble.

i understand that it's very challenging and dangerous, when this approach get's personal, but i was hoping you could handle it, especially since you are daring enough to open a thread like this.

i think you would rather have your love affair with elliot challenged by me, than by one of those women who make it all about misogyny and the general nature of men. but this fight would happen, if people would consider that elliot did not even have a severe PD.

if you challenge my hypothesis, i might be able to further clarify it or explain it's origin but then we will have to let it go.

you have started my hypothesis on your narcissism, by declaring yourself so similar to elliot, who is, according to me, an obvious example of NPD. there is no other pattern in my mind, that comes even close.

i took up the theme of exploring in how far it would make sense to think of you as similarly narcissistic. apart from this exploration, i have no interest in proving that you are a narcissistic.

i just do find it peculiar, that you do not see his narcissism, which is what i would expect from a narcissist.

>I do not understand your inability or desire to question this empathy.

i have actually explained what specific aspect empathy he lacks, what specifically he can't recognize and respect in other people, because he does not have it in him self.

i did not question that he might have feelings of protectiveness for his brother.

if you go out and kill six people, you have proven the extend of your empathy. people are allowed to be your brother, mother, lover, but they are not allowed to choose to live happily, while not being there for you.

>There will always be empathy but it may be twisted in so that a killer can feel he does a victim a favor by killing them.

twisted empathy can no longer be labeled such, because the twist is the end of empathy. empathy is labeled for what it does, not for what it might have done if had not been twisted like that. after the twist, it's simply narcissism. and didn't i call it unhealthy empathy? this sort of twist is really the most characteristic trait of narcissism, from the perspective of the outside perceiver. same with the bums. not being simplistic. of course one has to differentiate between narcissist moments and a full blown narcissist character, but dead bodies are a strong argument for the latter.

you argue as if you are unaware of how all narcissists are very nice sensitive six year old boys and sentient beings who only want to be loved and appreciated, by everybody, because you suggest that the presence of those traits in elliot prove, that he was not a narcissist.

it makes me wonder, if you hate and project any narcissism that may be your own, in order to appear "cleared", according to unreflected internalized values. societies values. nobody wants to be a narcissistic, of course. except that a very solid identity would want to know everything about itself.

the trouble begins with how hard they attempt to represent something that is appreciated, according to unreflected internalized values.

and then it escalates, when they make violent temper tantrums, if they don't get, what they set out to achieve through their more subtle goal oriented manipulations.

you don't have to prove to me, how nice and sensitive and vulnerable elliot was, in his painfully limited ability to understand, how being a human being actually works. i know this in more than one way. from myself and many other people, who are essentially in a situation like this. i have downloaded photos of him and look at him with empathic and sad eyes. i'm not here to condemn anyone. that includes the bullies, which i imagine, by the way.

i'm not saying he couldn't have been saved by something like 50 weeks of stationary treatment in a very good clinic. i doubt clinics like this exist in america, nobody could afford them, with that health system. a single therapist who sees him occasionally? no way.

my father is a classic case of narcissism, mixed with bad case of paranoia and i know this attitude, when i see it. i can see my father as a victim of life, and empathize in that sense, but i know for certain, that the damage was done in childhood and not by the many people who have tried to mob my father, to get rid of him.

there is no right way of treating him, no way of evoking a sane version of him, because it does not exist. a child who pretends to be a grown up, an extremely proud and defensive and judgemental grown up, is always like an elephant in a porcelain store. in his mind he is just innocently playing along. he has absolutely no concept of his wrong doing. he could not possibly be any more self righteous.

there is no way of stopping him from acting like a puppet player, whenever he can get his fingers on somebody. there is no way of explaining his narcissism to him, because he has nothing in him, that could look down on himself, analytically.

he blames to world of everything and seems smart somehow, but his reflective capabilities as far as his narcissistic motives are concerned, look like the whole left from a bomb. absent.

my father is happening to the world, and the world is running away from him. but we, as his family, were unable to do so. and that is not fun. if elliot would have had a girlfriend, she would not have had fun. no way a girl would have saved him. not even borderliners are saved from the many relationships they usually have. borderliners have similar patters, but less extreme.

a narcicist is totally destroying the indepence of other people, if he can. because he makes the world revolve around him, or he destroys it, if he has the power. for instance my father would destroy modern society, politically, because to him it is a pain in the ass. but the world is destroyed in both cases. if it resolves around him, it has lost it's natural way. revolving around a narcicistic parend destroys you, as you know verry well. this disease is not spread by society, versions of it are passed on through generations, in families.

the thought that you might be better of than your brother, on a mental health scale, had already crossed my mind (for all i know he might be a pure version of norman bates), but the fact that you are better of is not an explanation for why you seem to be so condescending or resentful about the fact, that he is worse off. i would expect you to pity him.

social anxiety does not escalate in murder. just saying.

>My specific personal narcissism is not really a problem in life at all. It is merely an compensation to be able to resist people such as yourself, who would too easily stampede over my psyche in their attempt to isolate me and judge me, then when I defend my views see this as proof of dysfunction. Or maybe it is not narcissism at all, but just a healthy awareness of my strengths.

i'm not surprised that you read me like that, i might have done the same, as i also tend to be a bit paranoid when people touch me personally, but the idea that i want to isolate or cause you any harms is completely wrong.

i merely take you seriously enough to engage in discussion and challenge your views. i understand that a person is isolated in society, once they are labeled narcissist, but i am not fucking society.


> I have a great intuitive insight into people, how they think and why, because of a unique advantage I have over just about anyone else: a PD combined with a good IQ and an analytical ability. I also have ample time to think, cause I don't work.

we have so much in common, which is still the only reason i'm tempted to engage in a difficult topic with you.

>These are not inflated delusions

it's all relative: it could be true and delusional (exaggerated) at the same time. for both of us. a genius isn't automatically right, when he sets out to understand that, which has created him, the human condition. we should play it humble, but love our desire to understand.

>How am I merged with my mother and how was Elliot?

i had the general narcissist in mind. wether the concept applies to you or elliot is hypothesis, again i won't set out to prove it, that's not the point.

>Yet Elliot explains that it is this lack of emotional independence as you call it, is what is eating him. He cannot understand why anyone would independently make a choice to be with these specific types of men. He thinks that they must be mentally flawed, to have such desires. He cannot imagine a relationship having dependence, rather than independence.


exactly. that is what i said. no contradiction here. he does not understand the independent ways of these girls, how they go through life and choose to have experiences.


>If you really believe or think that unconditional love means that a partner must be free to cheat, never have a relationship please. Love is not a matter of unconditionality. This is just a emotional notion and a delusion.

partner 1 IS free to cheat, partner 2 is free to leave in return. partner 2 is not free to kill partner 1, because he has cheated.

i was explaining empathy and unconditional love. both mean the same, in this context, both mean that you should not kill a person, when they don't give you, what they want. both mean, that you will grant ta person to choose how they want to live their life, because you do not own them and you are not the police. self defense is the only way, in which your way may eventually cross their way. and discussion is allowed.

we are not talking about "romantic love", emotional transfer, this is a game, that Elliot was not involved in, since nobody wanted to play it with him. this game is truly not unconditional, because it's an exchange program, not love. it happens inside of love. love is the acceptance of the presence of the other and the joy of their independence. love is what let's go, if the game is over, because one party is no longer interested in playing. if you shoot the person, you have been blind to love. sure, once they are gone, your love is largely limited to the acceptance of your memory of them.

love is what ought to be there, before you approach someone and while you get to know him. the acceptance that drives your curiosity about the other person. this happens before any emotional transfers are done. elliot did not love the women, he killed. nobody can tell if he had a rudimentary love for that one person who is described as bullying him. but since his ability to perceive individuality is so reduces, his love would have been limited to whatever he could perceive. so in the objective world, he is incapable of loving a person, with the subjective love that he might have. i know, this isn't fun. but you can't just kill whatever is outside of your love or perception.


>You suggest that men want to own women.

ABSOLUTELY NOT.
narcissists act as if they own the people in their life.
grown up men want them to stay, but will let them go.



>One must come to terms with the fact that a mother is a creature that gave life to you. This means that when you have existential questions or fears and struggle to come to terms with the nature of reality and your own self-reflective self-consciousness, you have to include your mother in your struggle. She is responsible for your plight.

not sure if you are talking about a child or a grown man.

if a child opens to existential perceptions, his mother will look like a god to him and in that sense she seems responsible for the general atmosphere of the child's soul.

but any thinking about "responsibility for plight" sounds more like something the mind invents, to torture itself.
it's part of the old manipulative relationship.
if i can make my father feel guilty for my sorry existence, he is more likely to pay.

only reality is responsible for your existence, at the present moment.

and your mother is in the process of disappearing, there are no more deals to make with her, so responsibility/guilt become obsolete concepts and what is left will be called forgiveness. which is just love. accepting what is and was. she did her best and you wanted or needed more than she had, you poked her a bit to get more, but not much came from it. that how all child and parent relationships are like.

Anyhow, what i suggested about Fe being necessary for some children was about the necessity of practically communicating and interacting with a mother, who might not respond to another function at all.

While grown up Fe can cleverly design common ground of mutual advantage, a child's Fe can become a pathway of intrusion, through which the parent manipulates the child into superficially becoming something to the point, where the child looses it's independence, it's right to co-define the common ground. it becomes an imitator.

and what you say about mirroring in a relationship is nicely said, but an full blown imitator is already blind to reflection, because he clings on to the false self, as if his life depends on it, so he can not be healed that easily. my mother has literally reduced herself into the mirror of this false self to the point where she was no longer an individual. to no effect, other than keeping the peace, preventing violent outbursts.

Of course children are merged with their parents, because they perceive parents inside of their brain, the parents become powerful god like voices in the psyche, animated enough to appear in dreams and the mother who breast feeds and has all those hormones that make you feel good is the god, who you have to interact with the most. I don't know what else to say about this obvious symbiosis. You just have to visualize intelligence and how it changes over time.

>It is his libido that gets channeled into sexual desire because the problems in his life begin to appear when he enters puberty.

See how the same libido was once invested in the mother breast. Problems have been in the libido all along, but not they are transferred to a new stage.

But it's too late now, to discuss the interesting part further.

Spoiler

[bimgx=600]http://teal-blog.s3.amazonaws.com/2014/05/Selfish-quote.jpg[/bimgx]
everything i do for you, is for your own good. therefore i declare that you need me. since you need me, i must not allow you to escape me. if you were to escape from me, it would be the end of you. if you could do without me, it would prove that i am insignificant. i will destroy your sense of self by convincing you, that you can not get by, until you become what only i can make you into. my own image. you are never allowed to become my own image though, because that would make me obsolete. you must stay incomplete and dependent on me, forever. i am a lie and you are the truth, i can only exist, if you are prevented from existing.

 

[nanook]

quoting teal swan. not that i suck up to her or anything, but since she happens to share my opinion, i share her choice of words.

These shooters will often explain who they want to kill and why. But they are doing so from a place within them that is unconscious of who they really want to kill and why. The target of their rage (in this case girls who wont give him affection) is in fact only a reflection of a deeper wound within them. Their relationship with their primary caregivers. Our relationship with “people” and with “the world” is nothing more than a reflection of our relationship with our primary caregivers. All of us are children who never grew up. We are all un-integrated children. These mass shooters are in fact reacting against the pain of the rejection they felt from one or more of their primary caregivers. They did not get the affection or attention they needed. Because of this, they lack two of the most primary human needs, loving connection and significance. This painful emotion within them was invalidated and they could do nothing about it and so it was covered over with rage and it was suppressed. They spent the rest of their lives (especially from the onset of external orientation at puberty) trying to gain approval from other people. The mind does this to try to gain closure and resolution for the old wound.

The subconscious motivation is this: “If I can get a girl to love me then mom loves me. If I can be significant to a girl, I am significant to mom”, “If I can get a girl to pay attention to me than mom pays attention to me etc.” But the buried emotional pain is what needs healing. That pain needs to be allowed and fully felt, like it wasn’t when he was a child.

that's the thing right here, the part where you die from unity with your mother and other care takers and become independent as an identity. it's always painful and you must be capable of facing it. anyone who ends up avoiding it, ends up as one of many different brands of narcissists, or men children, etc.

if the pain and truth is not accepted, the thread is projected into the world, which is the other, the other half of your brain-self, the part in your head, in which mom and women are the reigning gods. and it appears to threaten you, coming from there. and this thread is like a literal thread that weaves together self and world, so that you are ready to take out the world with you, or impose any and all of your suffering on the world.

i really think this is too obvious to be debatable. one could debate details, such as whether it was more of a borderline brand or a paranoid brand of narcissism, etc. but the basic pattern of a PD at that stage of development is obvious.

In his reality, this takes shape of continuing to be cast out by the popular crowd and ignored by girls. He copes the same way he coped as a child. He indulges in the “cover emotion” of rage and revenge. He becomes preoccupied with violent video games and movies and fantasies because we all know it feels a lot better than the time stopping grief of rejection. Each time he engages in this cycle of suppressing the pain and grief, the pain and grief gets bigger and louder and he gets rejected a little bit more until he finds himself at a crossroads of no return. He has only one option… to reject what rejected him. The “void” look you see in their eyes is the look of realization that they will never get the loving connection they need. Their connection with love is severed. Their connection with the human race is therefore severed.

source

 

[Spirit]

Var, I'll be your friend.

 

[Variform]

Variform, will you watch my series recommendation?

I'm very interested in how you would interpret it and what you would gain from it.

It is highly relevant to this thread. Probably more than any post that will be posted here.

Alright, If I can find it.

Edit:

I saw all of season 1. Gimme a few months to get over this please. I wanna kill myself now. It is funny if it wasn't so depressing. Too bittersweet. Why did you want me to watch this? Kill me now :-(

 

[Variform]

quoting teal swan. not that i suck up to her or anything, but since she happens to share my opinion, i share her choice of words.

Curious. Why state you don't want to come across that way? I doubt anyone would.

that's the thing right here, the part where you die from unity with your mother and other care takers and become independent as an identity. it's always painful and you must be capable of facing it. anyone who ends up avoiding it, ends up as one of many different brands of narcissists, or men children, etc.

Only narcissists? Or other PD's as well? If so, which ones?

I do not agree with Swan. That Elliot fled in violent games. ALL kids play violent games. That means nothing. In fact, ANY game is violent. Because games are competitition. And the original competition comes out of nature, which is survivalism.

But that aside, he didn't like WOW or Halo and some other games because of the violence. He never mentions that at all in his manifesto. He actually states why. He likes the social aspect of it.

In fact, he would walk over to some game shop where you can play, I don't know of such shops here but I guess in the usa you have these shops or places where they set up computers where you can play your game on and pay a fee or something.

And he would go there with friends. I think he also mentioned that he felt really good about that and he also liked his WOW characters because of a sense of power. And that too is very kid. It gave a sense of control.

I hate it when people so easily blame 'violent games'. There is no scientific research that shows that violent games cause these sort of shootings. There is no correlation.

And a smart guy on YouTube said that there is a difference between causation and correlation. He is right naturally.

 

[Variform]

Var, I'll be your friend.

How kind! Are we gonna go on a play date. You can be James and I'll be Elliot.

Hehe.

 

[Variform]

i understand that it's very challenging and dangerous, when this approach get's personal, but i was hoping you could handle it, especially since you are daring enough to open a thread like this.

I am not sure I can lol.

i think you would rather have your love affair with elliot challenged by me, than by one of those women who make it all about misogyny and the general nature of men. but this fight would happen, if people would consider that elliot did not even have a severe PD.

My love affair with Elliot? A funny thought. Wonder what a gay encounter would have done to him.

i just do find it peculiar, that you do not see his narcissism, which is what i would expect from a narcissist.

Would you also imply then that I would not be able to see schizotypal behavior in others? Or social anxiety? Dysthymia? Cause I have these diagnoses.

I see his narcissism very well. But I go for root causes and I feel that his narcissist is not the original PD. I think because I find myself so similar to him in some ways, he has something else. I feel that his narcissism ( I just cannot spell this word without a spell checker, which annoys me to no end) is a compensation strategy, a survival mode.

I think maybe you see this narcissism so clearly, in your personal drama in life with your dad and all that, just as I know my narcissistic traits are compensation for my social anxiety, that therefore you see these traits in me. A simple case of confirmation bias?

Elliot does have obvious narcissist (this word should be made illegal because it is not spell-able by beings on Earth) traits but I think we should not stop there. I am sure there are gonna be loads of shrinks to label him that way.

I know I am not a narcissist. But I recognize a lot in how he thinks. So I see his traits as arising out of something else.

if you go out and kill six people, you have proven the extend of your empathy. people are allowed to be your brother, mother, lover, but they are not allowed to choose to live happily, while not being there for you.

Is that narcissism? Or is that normal thinking? I feel that my mother, now child-like in her dementia, escapes my wrath. But I find it normal to get closure by a heartfelt apology. A recognition that errors were made, that I am the way I am because of her, for a big deal, her. My father is dead. So I cannot go there, unless I find a medium and hold a séance!

>There will always be empathy but it may be twisted in so that a killer can feel he does a victim a favor by killing them.

twisted empathy can no longer be labeled such, because the twist is the end of empathy. empathy is labeled for what it does, not for what it might have done if had not been twisted like that.

I guess that makes sense. I reject the idea that empathy in its pure manifestation can become tainted. The implications... are horrifying. That means nothing is sacred. I prefer to keep these things pure and that any twisted behavior is an overlay on top of the pure thing, not a direct twisting of it.
It would mean that pure love could also be so tainted. And I don't even wanna go there, because that is an idea to me more sacred than most anything.

after the twist, it's simply narcissism. and didn't i call it unhealthy empathy? this sort of twist is really the most characteristic trait of narcissism, from the perspective of the outside perceiver. same with the bums. not being simplistic. of course one has to differentiate between narcissist moments and a full blown narcissist character, but dead bodies are a strong argument for the latter.

As analyses go, dead bodies mean little to me. It sounds harsh but only to people that don't get me.

it makes me wonder, if you hate and project any narcissism that may be your own, in order to appear "cleared", according to unreflected internalized values. societies values. nobody wants to be a narcissistic, of course. except that a very solid identity would want to know everything about itself.

But we all have these 'bad' traits. Narcissism starts with 'nar'. The Dutch word for 'fool'. We fool ourselves we do not have these traits, but any PD starts with natural traits, that get inflated. So we will always project some of it into the world. As introverts we infuse objects with it.

photos of him and look at him with empathic and sad eyes. i'm not here to condemn anyone. that includes the bullies, which i imagine, by the way.

I am angry. I am pissed off about all this. It just shows me, like never before after such shootings ( I always stayed away from getting involved) how fucked up we are as people in how we inter-relate. How isolated we all are with our issues. How no one gives a fuck, how we can all go around often with happy faces on while inside we are raped beings. Lol, I sound like Elliot.

I can only say that I am very disappointed that these things happen, that, as people of the planet Earth, this gorgeous garden world, this island, that races through space around the sun as I think around 30.000 km per hour, we have such bitterly little understanding of the human psyche, our own mind and what we do with our minds to one another in this society that grinds people to dust rather than lifts them up.

there is no way of stopping him from acting like a puppet player, whenever he can get his fingers on somebody. there is no way of explaining his narcissism to him, because he has nothing in him, that could look down on himself, analytically.

How can that be repaired then? It sounds like my predicament. A chicken of egg question.

my father is happening to the world, and the world is running away from him. but we, as his family, were unable to do so. and that is not fun. if elliot would have had a girlfriend, she would not have had fun. no way a girl would have saved him. not even borderliners are saved from the many relationships they usually have. borderliners have similar patters, but less extreme.

Not later in his life. I think you are right: even if a girl would have befriended him, including sex, he might not have been able to handle it. I wonder though.
It would have destroyed him. I think. All the time he blamed these women...and after having sex with one, one to treat him normally, all that could not have been maintained, so he would have to alter his thinking. And that is all he had. What would have had to come in its place? His sense of self depended on this narcissistic coping or survival mechanism. Likely he would have taken his own life then.

a narcicist is totally destroying the indepence of other people, if he can. because he makes the world revolve around him, or he destroys it, if he has the power. for instance my father would destroy modern society, politically, because to him it is a pain in the ass. but the world is destroyed in both cases. if it resolves around him, it has lost it's natural way. revolving around a narcicistic parend destroys you, as you know verry well. this disease is not spread by society, versions of it are passed on through generations, in families.

I don't fit in any of that description. I wanna destroy the world, but that is any INTP :-) We do it so we can rebuild it in a better way, just an extreme version of systems analyses!

I would not mind society changing for the better. I wanna destroy it because something better can come of it.

But I do not wish to kill people or have people suffer.

I think mah mother had narcissistic traits. Her self-aggrandizement through her stories about her work and youth prove that. But she was very damaged by her own mother. I am not sure what ate my grandmother.

I am just happy I will never reproduce. Unfortunately some genes that are valuable will be lost. But hopefully they exist in the rest of the family line. They are rare.

the thought that you might be better of than your brother, on a mental health scale, had already crossed my mind (for all i know he might be a pure version of norman bates), but the fact that you are better of is not an explanation for why you seem to be so condescending or resentful about the fact, that he is worse off. i would expect you to pity him.

In a sense I do. It is hard, because he was the receiver of much love and attention and was considered a role model for me: 'When your brother made a mistake, he came to me to say sorry, but you didn't do that...' No you fucking cunt. You were the reason for my 'mistake'. How can I apologize to the one that is to blame? Fuck you! My psychologist agrees with me on this. How could I?

And then my brother... his ego was so inflated that he could not leave mother, ever. So despite he is to be pitied, at least he was sliced nicely.

What I dislike is that despite my cutting of all contact per 2003, he did not...'unmege' himself, as you might say it, from mother. My psychologist agrees: he could have indepoendantly of her write me. But it seems he had no interest in me whatsoever. He could have thought, 'He is my brother, I want a relationship with him, I do not want to lose him.' But nothing. He cannot seem to think independently from mother and he doesn't seem to respect me enough to want contact.

social anxiety does not escalate in murder. just saying.

I hope not! But I think it can. I think any PD can lead to such things.

>These are not inflated delusions

it's all relative: it could be true and delusional (exaggerated) at the same time. for both of us. a genius isn't automatically right, when he sets out to understand that, which has created him, the human condition. we should play it humble, but love our desire to understand.

I'd trade it in for love any day. I am atm unsure if it helps me much. I still don't have a good grasp about all the acronyms. Like a good INTP, I studied it until I had enough. Now, I don't have the motivation to study Ti and Fi and all that shite.

>How am I merged with my mother and how was Elliot?

i had the general narcissist in mind. wether the concept applies to you or elliot is hypothesis, again i won't set out to prove it, that's not the point.

Too bad. I would like to understand more clearly in what way this bondage occurs. How does a mother's self-aggrandizement stories + being the victim of grandmother's injustice stories leads to me. If I know, I can grief. And then move on.

I want so much to move on.

we are not talking about "romantic love", emotional transfer, this is a game, that Elliot was not involved in, since nobody wanted to play it with him. this game is truly not unconditional, because it's an exchange program, not love. it happens inside of love. love is the acceptance of the presence of the other and the joy of their independence. love is what let's go, if the game is over, because one party is no longer interested in playing. if you shoot the person, you have been blind to love. sure, once they are gone, your love is largely limited to the acceptance of your memory of them.

You tie it too much to excessive behavior. What you mean when you say "love is what is let go" I would move forward so that it lies within the relationship, not at the end.
Love is a difficult concept. And we don't all have to agree.

love is what ought to be there, before you approach someone and while you get to know him. the acceptance that drives your curiosity about the other person. this happens before any emotional transfers are done. elliot did not love the women, he killed. nobody can tell if he had a rudimentary love for that one person who is described as bullying him. but since his ability to perceive individuality is so reduces, his love would have been limited to whatever he could perceive. so in the objective world, he is incapable of loving a person, with the subjective love that he might have. i know, this isn't fun. but you can't just kill whatever is outside of your love or perception.

Well, he would liked to have approacher her. But she didn't show interest in him. She hung out with the wrong crowd, where he had little or no access too. I think maybe in america these cliques are more defined than in Europe. I think, or so is my impression, life is very brutal in american schools. I wish there was a more objective study to compare this though.

When he walked by this group she was associated with, a boy pushed him against the lockers, as they would do to him. And she thought that was fun. Maybe she was desperately trying to be liked by these bullies, tried to fit in herself. She might be an attention whore that way, in that respect no different from Elliot, so then it is dog eat dog and kick down those below you to gain ranking.

It is disgusting anyhow. He had a crush on her. She was cute and blond and he liked those traits. And she laughed at him. She might have just given him a Sig Sauer right there and then. Makes me think that children, teens, should not even be allowed to go around unsupervised.

I find this painful, because she is now a model going around having the great life and I am quire certain if interviewed, if ever confronted, she will dismiss her own responsibility and just say Elliot was crazy and an asshole, washing her hands in innocence. Yeah cunt, you helped made him into one and now you wash your hands of him. There is no justice in this word, is there.

>You suggest that men want to own women.

ABSOLUTELY NOT.
narcissists act as if they own the people in their life.
grown up men want them to stay, but will let them go.

I am letting my gf go, but it is fucking hard. I don't want to. Maybe I should kill her. I don't ever want to see her with another men. But all men think that.

>One must come to terms with the fact that a mother is a creature that gave life to you. This means that when you have existential questions or fears and struggle to come to terms with the nature of reality and your own self-reflective self-consciousness, you have to include your mother in your struggle. She is responsible for your plight.

not sure if you are talking about a child or a grown man.

I don't know, both? But an adult can think more clearly about it.

if a child opens to existential perceptions, his mother will look like a god to him and in that sense she seems responsible for the general atmosphere of the child's soul.

but any thinking about "responsibility for plight" sounds more like something the mind invents, to torture itself.
it's part of the old manipulative relationship.
if i can make my father feel guilty for my sorry existence, he is more likely to pay.

Plight simply means that paradox of self-consciousness. Cogito ergo sum.

and your mother is in the process of disappearing, there are no more deals to make with her, so responsibility/guilt become obsolete concepts and what is left will be called forgiveness. which is just love. accepting what is and was. she did her best and you wanted or needed more than she had, you poked her a bit to get more, but not much came from it. that how all child and parent relationships are like.

Maybe I'll kill her too. While she is still alive! Then kill my brother, put him out of his misery, which is empathy :-) He will die before his mommy dies so he doesn't have to suddenly wake up from her chain around his neck. I find these thoughts amuse me.

My brother will surely have a deep crisis when she dies. What do you think? A life of bondage to mommy dearest. The pitiful bastard will have no anchor. He won't even have me. He cut me out as much as I cut him out. Would he wanna fall into my arms? Cry? 'Our mother is gone!' Fuck him. Just get me my inheritance.

Forgiveness my ass. Yet still I have to move on. They must become irrelevance to me.

Of course children are merged with their parents, because they perceive parents inside of their brain, the parents become powerful god like voices in the psyche, animated enough to appear in dreams and the mother who breast feeds and has all those hormones that make you feel good is the god, who you have to interact with the most. I don't know what else to say about this obvious symbiosis. You just have to visualize intelligence and how it changes over time.

I don't dream much about my mother. My psychologist finds great significance in a dream I once had. I wonder if Elliot dreamed much. He doesn't mention it.
But in my dream Indiana Jones is at my house, where I grew up. My mother is there and she gives him small crumbs of dry bread.

My psychologist thinks 'How can you give this hero so little, just dry bread?' He thinks I am Indiana Jones. Which, he is a great hero to me, always liked the character. He suggests I was emotionally starved.

 

[CrayCrayPoTayTay]

So Nanook,

You indicated at points during your response (which by the way, both sides have been immensely enjoyable to read, thank you both for your responses to each other) something about your father moving in this world, right? Whether I'm astute or not isn't necessarily of consequence, as it reminded me of an important aspect to this situation. Isn't the greatest minority in the world the individual? I'm sure a much smarter man than me has already brought to collective knowledge this precise concept, but in my understanding of the shooting issue there is nothing more important than the understanding of authority which is granted each man, and under what inalienable format (someone make INALIENABLE huge and colorful for me please, the additional emphasis will be enjoyable) the application of this authority is to be approached. For instance in your mutual situations: you have both been educated (and continue to be) about the laws of your current regime. You are aware of consequences of actions but because you are provided the platform for thought, you are able to foster one that is more understanding of why your legal system is beneficial and universally applicable (to your respective universe). What I pose is this: in America, the significant "joke" amongst those who enter the legal system is "ignorance of the law is no excuse (not a defense)" yet quite frequently we find this would likely have been pursued as a valid defense by those who have gathered infractions. What that tells me about the law (as well as how much a legal professional still makes annually - STILL for emphasis that a lawyer still utilizes the British Esquire title; go ahead, research THAT one deeper, haha, also the cost and competition of law school) is that the information is not only proprietary, but so incredibly valuable that it has become the business of BUYING AND SELLING FREEDOM.

Now to link that process to the current one. As Variform indicated, this is pretty unique to the States, right? I completely agree. But that's not because of gun laws. There is information available through a diligent study of the law (and this is the only approach to Assertiveness I have found to work on the Logical processing systems) that affords each human being with an understanding of an innate Superpower! That's what is so cool about our laws here in America, we can gain a level of understanding that will turn us into creators. So I pose, as a learning process (societally speaking) that we provide better leadership into the understanding and platform upon which an in-depth legal knowledge can surely construct the basis of extraordinary, of independence, of approaches to happiness and the understanding of the responsibility that happiness is, etc.

Stepping backwards for a quick moment, I enjoy the psychology behind this person and think (though I have not read it) we have just been given a substantial gift as a society in this young man's manifesto. Not from the perspective of "know our enemy, so as to defeat him" but in the informative. This was a young man who either needed freedoms, or he needed to understand them so as to utilize them assertively in his world via his paradigm and relative definition of correct. Which brings me to the next point. Since the law is a product of the strength of a society's current level of "sin", and "sin" is a product of death, one can understand much about a society simply by judging the laws. Now at face value of course, one has to judge the fruit of a tree. I can certainly agree that, judging the States on instances such as this, the "legal fruit tree" of America does not appear to grow a good fruit. Here's the rub: this young man's sin will continue to exist in any society, but possibly not as extremely. I mean let's face it, usually the law is processing largely with a focus on the extremes, and impacting the majority as a result of the extreme minority (now, again, the greatest minority in the world is the individual), but only in America have I seen a beggar become a billionaire. Does that mean I believe billionaires to be more elite or better than a beggar? HELLS naw. But I certainly see a different level of the understanding of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" between the two groups.

Here's where I want some fun lonewolf-like INTPery: what type of legal structure would you devise so as to facilitate the greatest level of happiness for those whose happiness you will largely have the ability to impact?

***® disclaimer on all thoughts presented by my presence whilst here in earlier posts***

 

[Latte]

Alright, If I can find it.

Edit:

I saw all of season 1. Gimme a few months to get over this please. I wanna kill myself now. It is funny if it wasn't so depressing. Too bittersweet. Why did you want me to watch this? Kill me now :-(

I was hoping it would be kind of therapeutic. Some have more hints of what she is struggling with than others, and some more than her, most in qualitatively different ways, but in the end most people can benefit from the trip that is her show.

If one develops enough of a tendency towards egocentricism, other people are seen in a very different way from how one sees oneself. In an entirely different cognitive system even. This is not limited to narcissistic varieties.

It's not necessarily easy, but in the end the way out of the mentalities she struggled with is to "get over oneself" to some degree. This phrase usually has negative connotations and is rarely used with constructive effect, but there is an element of wisdom in it.

The only viable long term solution to the 'problems' that unhealthy levels of egocentrism causes one to focus on, resides in the perceptual realm, where one can undo what brought into existence one's particular kind of hyperfocus on these 'problems' through lessening one's egocentrism.

Some people laugh at themselves, make jokes about themselves, let other people make fun of or analyze themselves (without getting upset) or find other ways that lead to increasingly getting over oneself... there are probably many ways to do so.

Watamote brings up a topic that is very serious and nerve wrecking in daily life for many people, but at the same time manages to make it sort of funny and self-reflective.

 

[Bock]

egocentrism.

Why is there even such a word. Humans are not part of a hivemind, we are closed enitities that interact with eachother indirectly through a world that probably exist on some level.

"Becoming one" with the rest is not really a viable option for an INTP for obvious reasons, and striving for it anyway will most likely end up getting you burned in some way or another.

With that said, 100% isolation and NEET:nes etc is not healthy for anybody.

 

[Latte]

Yes. As you say, there are degrees, and some are unhealthy. The word is suitable for talking about this.

Sock :3

 

[TBerg]

Var, I'll be your friend.

I want to join in, as well.

 

[Spirit]

I want to join in, as well.

I was serious.

 

[TBerg]

I was serious.

I am too.

 

[Polaris]

So Nanook,

You indicated at points during your response (which by the way, both sides have been immensely enjoyable to read, thank you both for your responses to each other) something about your father moving in this world, right? Whether I'm astute or not isn't necessarily of consequence, as it reminded me of an important aspect to this situation. Isn't the greatest minority in the world the individual? I'm sure a much smarter man than me has already brought to collective knowledge this precise concept, but in my understanding of the shooting issue there is nothing more important than the understanding of authority which is granted each man, and under what inalienable format (someone make INALIENABLE huge and colorful for me please, the additional emphasis will be enjoyable) the application of this authority is to be approached. For instance in your mutual situations: you have both been educated (and continue to be) about the laws of your current regime. You are aware of consequences of actions but because you are provided the platform for thought, you are able to foster one that is more understanding of why your legal system is beneficial and universally applicable (to your respective universe). What I pose is this: in America, the significant "joke" amongst those who enter the legal system is "ignorance of the law is no excuse (not a defense)" yet quite frequently we find this would likely have been pursued as a valid defense by those who have gathered infractions. What that tells me about the law (as well as how much a legal professional still makes annually - STILL for emphasis that a lawyer still utilizes the British Esquire title; go ahead, research THAT one deeper, haha, also the cost and competition of law school) is that the information is not only proprietary, but so incredibly valuable that it has become the business of BUYING AND SELLING FREEDOM.

Now to link that process to the current one. As Variform indicated, this is pretty unique to the States, right? I completely agree. But that's not because of gun laws. There is information available through a diligent study of the law (and this is the only approach to Assertiveness I have found to work on the Logical processing systems) that affords each human being with an understanding of an innate Superpower! That's what is so cool about our laws here in America, we can gain a level of understanding that will turn us into creators. So I pose, as a learning process (societally speaking) that we provide better leadership into the understanding and platform upon which an in-depth legal knowledge can surely construct the basis of extraordinary, of independence, of approaches to happiness and the understanding of the responsibility that happiness is, etc.

Stepping backwards for a quick moment, I enjoy the psychology behind this person and think (though I have not read it) we have just been given a substantial gift as a society in this young man's manifesto. Not from the perspective of "know our enemy, so as to defeat him" but in the informative. This was a young man who either needed freedoms, or he needed to understand them so as to utilize them assertively in his world via his paradigm and relative definition of correct. Which brings me to the next point. Since the law is a product of the strength of a society's current level of "sin", and "sin" is a product of death, one can understand much about a society simply by judging the laws. Now at face value of course, one has to judge the fruit of a tree. I can certainly agree that, judging the States on instances such as this, the "legal fruit tree" of America does not appear to grow a good fruit. Here's the rub: this young man's sin will continue to exist in any society, but possibly not as extremely. I mean let's face it, usually the law is processing largely with a focus on the extremes, and impacting the majority as a result of the extreme minority (now, again, the greatest minority in the world is the individual), but only in America have I seen a beggar become a billionaire. Does that mean I believe billionaires to be more elite or better than a beggar? HELLS naw. But I certainly see a different level of the understanding of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" between the two groups.

Here's where I want some fun lonewolf-like INTPery: what type of legal structure would you devise so as to facilitate the greatest level of happiness for those whose happiness you will largely have the ability to impact?

***® disclaimer on all thoughts presented by my presence whilst here in earlier posts***

How can we define freedom within the parameters of not limiting another person's freedom?

If we break those boundaries, we'll just have anarchy.

It is an interesting question you pose, though.

Spoiler

For example, I would hypothetically like the freedom to carry a gun to defend myself. I am not physically strong, but I am agile and very quick to move. So, if I shoot the person who tries to violate me, I am taking this persons freedom away.

If I shoot all those people who violated me, or tried to violate me between the age of three and sixteen, I would violate their freedom. It would be an unneccessary act of revenge and purely serve to satisfy my suppressed hatred. Perhaps protect other people from their violence. Would I feel better? I suspect I would feel nothing, so pretty pointless really.

My father was a gentle and loving man. My mother is not. My father's kindness to me taught me that because some people are violent doesn't mean they all are. I don't hate all males for what a few males did; in fact, I adore men and get along with them more than females. But it made me wary for a long time, and it distanced me from my father when I was ten because I was scared he might turn on me as well. I hated myself for these compulsive thoughts; I thought I was a disgusting human being to think this way about the man I loved more than anything in the world.

Would I actually shoot these people if I saw them now? I used to have compulsive fantasies about slicing their bellies open and nailing their intestines to the wall. My anger runs deep sometimes, and it frightens me. It is probably the only emotion I truly recognise in myself.

But funnily enough, I don't think I could muster up anything other than indifference if faced with them. I could feel no hatred or anger because there is a person standing there, and it is hard to reconcile their past deeds with their current self.

 

[Variform]

I was hoping it would be kind of therapeutic. Some have more hints of what she is struggling with than others, and some more than her, most in qualitatively different ways, but in the end most people can benefit from the trip that is her show.

It was not therapeutic but confronting. I understand her so well. I want to share two points first.

1: The show is realistic because the makers have captured the thoughts of someone with social anxiety very well. (So well in fact they either went through these thyings themselves or had an advisor that went through it.)

2: The show is unrealistic because to have a show, you have to have little stories in which to express the social anxiety. And so, all these little strategies she develops, the plans etc. I don't think are realistic.

Although Elliot did so. Not me, but Elliot, skateboarded and hackey-sacked and practiced loads to get a skill others would hopefully admire. The sad part is that even there he did not feel up to par, dismissing his results. He saw other kids doing better and that disappointed him. I recognize that. I have never truly felt at peace with a skill I have. Always tell myself that someone else can do it better. So, never happy with whatever skill acquired. Maybe this is related to the INTP thing of studying a topic to a certain level of expertise and then getting bored and stopping because of the realization that IF more study would be done, better results COULD be achieved.

If one develops enough of a tendency towards egocentricism, other people are seen in a very different way from how one sees oneself. In an entirely different cognitive system even. This is not limited to narcissistic varieties.

The girl here starts to look at people differently, thinks of them as shallow and lesser in different ways, depending on the situation. So she sees them go karaoke and thinks this is for a specific type of shallow people or something like that. But this perception is the result of her not being able to connect up to these fun things the other kids do because of social anxiety.

What the show shows very well is how she wants to be like them, looks down upon them when she fails (in that 'failing' is her own perception in the sense that she is not satisfied with being herself) but cannot connect to them regardless of her desire.

And so, it is involuntarily. I have tried to make this point before but this show helped me. She wants to, she tries, but her attempts fail. She approaches someone, starts stuttering...it WILL NOT WORK. I don't think people here that don't have social anxieties understand this well enough.

It will not work. There is something missing or lacking. You want to say something, it won't be released from your mouth. There is no control over it. You cannot 'will' yourself. This causes feelings of hopelessness and wonder. Why can't I say that compliment? WEhy can't I just say hi to this girl. Why can't I walk up to a group and say something so they have to look at me and recognize I exist.

You know, you see this happening. A groups stabnds together in a schoolyard and this girl or by walks up to them and disregards any conversation, interrupting them with a loud 'hey guys! What's up!' Maybe slaps someone on the shoulder. They recognize him, continue the conversation but somehow he is suddenly included. Maybe someone starts talking to him, or he/she to another. He doesn't seem to mind or be aware he interrupts a conversation, or feels he is unworthy of doing that.

Social anxiety is a strange thing. I am following on YT this dude that talks about it. Such a nice guy, warm personality. Dunno where I am going with this. Just wanted to share.

It's not necessarily easy, but in the end the way out of the mentalities she struggled with is to "get over oneself" to some degree. This phrase usually has negative connotations and is rarely used with constructive effect, but there is an element of wisdom in it.

Maybe that is the same thing I mentioned. You cannot get over yourself. If you are the hurdle, how can you jump it. You need help with it.

The only viable long term solution to the 'problems' that unhealthy levels of egocentrism causes one to focus on, resides in the perceptual realm, where one can undo what brought into existence one's particular kind of hyperfocus on these 'problems' through lessening one's egocentrism.

Egocentrism is a funny deal. It cuts all kinds of ways.

1: You are egocentric because you value yourself so much, that others fail to meet your expectations.
2: You are egocentric because you devalue yourself so much that all others are above you. In fact saying you are special, different, where you are really not.

If egocentrism is the root cause of social anxiety, which is it? Both? Well, if that would be the case, then there is no overcoming it. Cause you are in a paradox. To overcome it you need to devalue yourself to a normal standard and value yourself to a normal standard.

Some people laugh at themselves, make jokes about themselves, let other people make fun of or analyze themselves (without getting upset) or find other ways that lead to increasingly getting over oneself... there are probably many ways to do so.

But it is not so easy. Humor at your own expense works only therapeutic if you are normal. If you have social anxiety, it cuts like a knife. I could never deal with humor at my expense.

You know it isn't meant to bleed, but it does, because it is so confrontational, and no one see it cutting in. The only way to laugh at yourself is with bitterness and with a mental preparation. That works like this: you set yourself up, brace yourself for impact, isolate your vulnerability like you would an expensive painting that you move to another museum, a crate, bubble plastic, then you crack the joke, and hope the insulation is adequate. If it is, it slides off and you remain intact. If not, there will be a wound.

I don't know if exposing the self to biting humor will help someone.

Watamote brings up a topic that is very serious and nerve wrecking in daily life for many people, but at the same time manages to make it sort of funny and self-reflective.

It is bittersweet. The fun is in this anime style typical Japanese exaggeration. They have a way of showing internal crises. Her face goes black and white, the images of fractured glass, the visualization of panic and realizations and shock, they do that well.

I don't know if they continue this show? Is it finished? I'd see more, painful as it is. But to be honest, I made a coffee between episodes and I teared up waiting for the water boiler.

 

[Variform]

I am too.

You are kind people. I am not easy to befriend atm. :-(

 

[Latte]

I'd say the obsession of relative value between self and others itself is what constitutes the egocentric aspect of those two. Other circumstances of an individual's psychology will determine how much or in what ways it leads to relative self-devaluation or other-devaluation. Often it leads to both. Even in Elliot one could see he also self-devaluated strongly, at least on an emotional level.

The thing about getting over oneself is about getting over one's obsessive idea about who one is or is supposed to be, within the context of others. It stands in the way of so much, and any proper solution goes through that in some way, because that kind of mindset will never ever be satisfied, and will largely defeat its own set goals.

I recognize the things you say about other laughing and such being automatically felt as confrontational. Analysis and such as well, even when that is not the intention. I empathize with this and understand. The deeper one is in it, the harder it is to get out. Once the problem is well enough understood, and types of methods that can help are established, if you notice ways to take baby steps that could bear fruit on the underlying issues, I hope you try to.

Self-depreciating humor or "taking the piss out of each other" is definitely is not only fruitful if one is relatively neurotypical to begin with or at least does not have egocentrism patterns of the ones we talk about. I can say this from personal experience and the experience of friends who have relevant diagnoses. But... the constraints on the circumstances in which it is initially fruitful will often be more and stronger. I am not sure to which degree this applies to full blown narcissism, or if narcissism is even solvable.... but if it is solvable, then finding mechanisms for egocentrism lowering and making use of them is something to aim for.

I'll stop digressing about one particular way to reduce egocentrism

 

[Variform]

Elliot devalued himself emotionally. Yet he would realize that he had acquired some skill levels. So cognitively he knew his strength. But it was never enough. So that is the emotional part guess then.

I know that so well. It annoys me to no end. What is it be like to be different. But I am taking steps in the hope of improvement. Again, after 14 years. Pff! I thought I had it so good when I had a relationship. But it was a cover. Maybe.

 

[nanook]

simply detecting a pattern of psychology is one thing, in some way any person with a PD might be able to relate to another person with the same PD, through similarity, but perceiving the pattern from a transcendent perspective, that allows criticism of that pattern shortcomings is another thing, that requires additional psychological structure, to which the shortcoming is compared.

if such transcendent structure is available, the pathological pattern has not caused complete developmental arrest. reflective self-development has continued. in that case there is only a supersonality, that has the pattern and an overall personality, that does not have it.

whenever the subpersonality comes up, there is an apparent regression to the stage, to which it is related to and of which it is a part of.

i don't have complete clarity about the stage of development, to which narcissism belongs.

i believe it's not the earliest stages, those would cause psychosis, nor the latest stages, those would cause neurosis.

it must be in the middle, very close to where borderline is.

this means, that in development, narcissism, or the inability to become subjectively independent from parents, from gratification though handling external objects, could be the result of another inability or weakness that sits even deeper.

this is how narcissism appears to be compatible with paranoid schizophrenia, such as it appears to be in norman bates.

and perhaps there is a rule in official psychology, that in such a case schizophrenia should be the main diagnosis. much like in the case of borderline, where narcissism would be considered to be a subtype or sub-diagnosis of borderline. but it's still the same thing.

i am not familiar with the definition of schizotypical PD, but perhaps it also just such a mix.

i intuitively disagree with the idea of "compensatory" narcissism. that word does seem all wrong. i guess what irks my here is that i don't think narcissism is a thing that is done for a reason. it's a failure to accomplish something. a failure to rest in your self, in self reliance. compensation means extra effort, in my book.

the inability to become something other/more liberated than narcissistic dependence, in a certain situation, might be an indirect consequence of another priority that exists in the psyche, another earlier attachment.

btw, i also am just learning to spell this damn word right

this thread became a bit like homework, im procastinating.

i already have more in my notes, but i need to go over it again.

 

[Variform]

So what if narcissism is a failure to accomplish something. Could that something be an inherent lack of identity?

Children grow and form an identity. This is a process. Is it possible this process does not take off well in some children? So that they constantly lag behind peers? This then causes feelings of inadequacy which then combine with the lack of a sense of self and the entitlement that comes with age is diminished. The development gets skewed.

There the child feels constantly the lesser of all peers. And so it will compensate this lack of identity by compensating with narcissism. Which is a rather simplistic expression of entitlement. It is quite flat and does not have the subtlety that comes with a normal development of identity. So it has no roots in the understanding that at some point you are entitled to something because you mastered some skill or behaved correctly.

Since a child lagging behind can never succeed in correct behavior and its abilities to perform tasks lags behind as well, there is no way it can gain the age related understanding of the world and how to be around peers.

So the solution is to self-create this entitlement which is narcissism. So the root of it is a continual lack of identity through an impaired developmental process and the reason for that is something either genetic or physiological.

 

[nanook]

yes, it could be formulated that way. a lack of reflective self awareness is compensated by what seems like putting social roles and aims into 'overdrive', in comparison to how other people handle such things. the game becomes absolute reality to him. like how amercian psycho gets off, fantasising about the color of his card. or how music is only interesting to him, as a topic, that can be used to do smalltalk, while you manipulate people. but he can't enjoy music, like everybody else does, because he is so busy striving for his external needs. even though they seem pointless to him. and he does not see how other people could truely and authentically enjoy themselves, in the middle of their other professional social games. he thinks their existence is as pointless as his own. so he chops their head off. or has plans to turn humanity into borgs, because it's all the same.


he thinks people are shallow for being sentient and he is deep for knowing that there is no self. but that's not spiritual depth at all. spiritual depth is seeing through the self, not having not much of a self to begin with. the irony or paradox is, that a tiny self is somehow easy to see through, or should i say, easy to overlook. which leads to that horrible pre-trans fallacy in the eyes of more sentient observers. to us, these people can come across as enlightened, because they are so undivided in their dedication to external focus and aims. they have in comparison less inner conflict, because they have less reflection. just like we would often assume that various animals are enlightened, even though they are not. as egos, we are hardwired to respect undivided consciousness. we are hardwired to learn from the unforgiving facts of pure nature. so we will often surrender to these people and their objective talk, which aims at ridiculing the human subject and sentience. that's how the wifebeater gets to have a wife, that's how the father gets the power to completely intimidate his son and it's how hitler gets to be the fuehrer. being primitive amounts to charisma. pure energy. people suck it up. (charisma could also be elegance, complexity simplified, but often people can't tell the difference)

"*god sleeps in stones, dreams in animals and awakens in men"

oh yeah, here goes that fucking subjectivist again.

 

[TBerg]

I feel unnerved and sad. You guys' posts read like a more articulate version of what I have been trying to work through in myself. Fuck.

 

[nanook]

so again, all psychopathology results from avoiding the experience of a part of yourself, your life, your truth, your soul.

and depending on what you avoid, the pathology will be different, because different strategies are required, to avoid different experiences.

for practical reasons, but also because differente experiences belong to different stages of development and often only the means of this stage have the power to avoid this particular experience. although, sometimes higher stages provide the ability, to suppress experiences of lower stages. only in one case, that i am aware of, can a lower stage successfully suppress a particular experience of a higher stage. that one case is when the higher stage is just about to appear on the mental horizon and the keyfeature of it is what is being avoided. so the whole stage is avoided. this would be developmental arrest.

anyhow, the next question in understanding narcissism would be: which exact experience is avoided. because saying that narcissist can't rest in themselves is pretty fucking vague, admittedly.

i feel like i had this insight once, but right now i don't see it.

i believe that i remember a stage in my childhood, did i already mention it (?), it ... no i didn't mention it ... it was about perceiving imperfections in myself.

perhaps that meant actually dividing myself into good and bad parts, and perhaps that is the key feature of the conformist stage, which is also the stage of neurosis.

neurosis is how you mange the division of yourself, that results from being conscious of your various role-playing-possibilities and judging them as either good or bad.

but before things become so complicated, you have to accept the basic possibility of judging yourself at all.

and this can feel very fucking scary, if the first judgement, that comes to your mind, as a result of your conditioning, a result of the voices you have in your head, the voices of your parents or society, if that first judgement happens to be not only extremely negative but also hit exactly the spot, that you are most identified with, for an unknown reason, so you are absolutely not willing to accept this first judgement and to let this part go, to say, "yes this is and was me, but now i repent and choose differently."

and you will forever be busy trying to prove ot others, that you are the opposite of what you are not willing to admit about yourself, and or prove to yourself, that this thing that you hold on to, can i no way be judged.

this struggle becomes the major and sole purpose of what little conformist role-playing-consciousness (script awareness) you may have. so it does not evolve properly. you see, the proper job for this level of intelligence is to become different people for different context, you are teacher for students, man for a women, father for a child, sinner for god, soldier for country. script awareness allows for a lot of complexity, a multi facetted identity. and the sensed self is transcendent to these roles, it's the subject that does the judging and managing of the roles, but can't know itself yet.

but if no judgement of self is accepted, out of fear of somehow being unable to live with imperfection in your own self, this whole intelligence of scripting roles will only appear to you in a dissociated form, almost like a psychosis.


you are not willing to internally surrender into any of these roles, to deeply feel like these created roles are even better than who you would be without them, while being a welcome part and creation of you.

script intelligence is like "a good father should become more sensitive, a good lover should become more patient" but you are like "i am good and how i father my children or love my wife is for nobody to judge, there can be no doubt, that i am doing it right, because i am good and i am doing it, i'm acting 24/7, no more can be expected from me"

you are resentful against all feedback that you get about your jobs, it's an offense to your original innocent perfection. you can't evolve a passion for any of those roles. and you are emotionally waiting for others to appreciate the perfect child under your businesses suit, but cognitively you will not admit, that you are a child who has no idea what it is doing, because it's just imitating something. and they all just want you to perform in the suit and give you average to poor feedback. evil people, who don't appreciate your self-sacrifice. working all day and night.

the roles of others occur to you like a proof of your inferiority, even though you don't understand it theoretically. you just get angry, if you feel like that husband at the altar is a more perfect husband than you could ever be, because you just try to appear like a husband, but he is so convincingly and passionately dedicated to being a husband, lover and future father. how can he be all that. what does he have, that you are lacking? it's not fair, you are perfect. and you have seen him slacking around in the bar. he can't be a true father and husband, if he is slacking around.

you are jealous of all the possibilities of the social live in the conformist world space and you want to wipe it out.

you may get paranoid about it, as if the only intention of conformists is to proof how you don't belong in there. you are unconscious of the fact that you have chosen, that you don't want to belong into this intelligence, that you don't want to subject yourself to the division of script mentality.

you think somehow they are excluding you. while your dissociated script intelligence shows you, what you can't have, what you are separate from. making those things look attractive to you.

surely they are all laughing at you, because everyone can see, that you are fake, with your tuxedo.

if you totally fail to explain your intense emotions of inferiority and exclusion from the conformist worldspace by how you are actually inferior, inferior since you are not even truly dedicated and involved in judging and scripting yourself, since you are secretly perfectly self righteous, then you come up with absurd psychotic explanations for those emotions of inferiority.

you would love to believe, that their apparent passion for their roles is not a genuine experience of them, because that would calm the sense of inferiority.

you may assume that these people are just pretending to be good citizens, fathers, lovers etc, perhaps they are all secret agents of agencies who have no other purpose in life, but to prevent you from succeeding in your solid actions of being a dedicated businesses man and father.

you see, it's all bout actions to you. if you can do the good job, you are the good person. you don't have to have interior understanding of good and bad parts in yourself, you just need to know, what a good job looks like, in objective terms of society. and nobody dare to say, that your understanding of that is quite poor.

so you are like an inspector, who proves how everyone in your company does bad work.

and the common people are pure evil and you are pure good. and pure evil is trying to stop you, because you are so good at taking good action. you are the only man who holds up the law and they are unlawful, since they are not even good enough to act perfectly and they perceive you as their enemy who has to be taken out.

you project your self righteousness onto them. they appear to be self righteous in how they play different roles, good roles like husband, but on another occasion also bad roles, like lazy musician, food connoisseur, slacking beer drinking story teller. you don't understand how all these roles have good purpose, in the right context, because you don't have that sophistication in scrip intelligence. so you are the only truly good person, you are the inspector 24/7, you inspect coworkers, your wife and your children. 8 o clock time to go to bed. none of these fake slackers can do it like you can do it. disgusting imperfect weak humans, evil and envious of you they must be, destroying your work they want. because you raise the bar of perfection too damn high for them, don't you.

so i think that is what narcissism is (in example) and how it leads to envy in the first stage and paranoia in the extreme case. another emotion is revenge, that comes with self righteousness. you are automatically a victim of external life (of society and loved ones), if you are not willing to perceive imperfection in your own nature. of course everyone is victim of their own nature, but you can't have your revenge against biology.



the key question can perhaps not be answered in general. what was the judgement about you, that was so horrible, that you would never consider it being the truth that you could work with. like your existence would stop, if it were true. like you had no future.

i remember struggling with various insights about me, my imperfections, biological and moral imperfections, things that i should attempt to improve or things that i would have to be patient with and humble about, until they improve themselves. at some point i was conscious of the ability of lying to myself, about such insights, or telling the truth and only lying to other people. so i chose the latter. until i discovered that telling the truth would not kill me either. later, lying to myself was no longer an option. or rather, for every insight that arises, there might be a limited time window for acceptance or denial.

 

[TBerg]

Yeah, I can only say from my own experience, but I did some inappropriate things as a child that others made me feel ostracized about. This was due to a lack of script intelligence as a result of at least a somewhat tumultuous childhood.

 

[Variform]

I feel unnerved and sad. You guys' posts read like a more articulate version of what I have been trying to work through in myself. Fuck.

Nanook inspires me because he is obviously very intelligent and I am trying to catch up :-) He has put hundreds, maybe thousands of hours into these topics, whereas I have put loads of thought into more ontological topics. He is quite the master of MBTI, and als in a personalized perspective, which is good, because we need more unique thought, not just follow MBTI like slaves.

I like anyone who comes up with their own theories of mind and personality. Or reality.

The way it works with me is, if you engage me in a serious answer, I feel invoked to reply in kind, most of the time.

But I also like short and to the point. And subjective. There is nothing wrong with that. So if I were you I would worry just the same. Nanook is verbally very strong, like me. Maybe more so than I am. How we word things... it is just a way of expression.

I value everyones input.