At the Backend of the Sylvian Fissure, Female Psychopathy, Mice and Men

Someone recently asked for my credentials and I found myself amused by that. It was the first time in my life that I felt no desire to have them known. It wasn't that I wanted to conceal them, but rather that I had no personal need to be acknowledged through them.

I soaked that up for a good moment, always thrilled to find salvation wherever it is--a new and unexpected freedom, a reprieve from the grind, respite from the relentless sun...

I hadn't even imagined such a thing existed, or that I needed it, or that it would feel so fine. Those little moments were 30 years in the making. I was surprised at my delight.

I laughed a little from that sense of relief and my absolute delight in it, but it seemed, I suppose, that I laughed off the request of the woman who had prompted it. Gathering up myself again, I suggested a silly thing and waited to see if she had a sense of humor: I could send you my resume. After a brief sputter for which I felt a twinge of guilt,she said flatly, dysphorically and pitifully: that would be great.

A thought went rumbling through on the tail end of that: It has always interested me to watch a cat play with what she thinks is a mouse.

And, quickly a train came pulling mental cars in a really fun few minutes where you have no choice but to sit and watch, eager for some good graffiti from up north.

It has always interested me to watch a cat play with what she thinks is a mouse.

Getting On Board After 30 years of it in one form or fashion,I'm still fascinated by the deeper, more 'abnormal' psychiatric issues--psychosis, personality disorders, trauma, emergencies. I suppose had I been an MD or RN, I would have liked the med-surg ER. An ex-near-boyfriend psychologist in-house colleague would say we're sending so and so over so you can install an ego. That level of work, but also extreme dangerousness, too.

Back to the Fishbowl I know I've mentioned the fishbowl psych ER, with goon squad stationed around before, but I keep going back there. How fantastic to know the spacing of chairs so that a lunge can be intercepted. You have to have a conversation if you can. Under any circumstances. Then, you have to wait for the privilege to be revoked by natural consequence...

That's the beauty of the no-life-time insurance cap and accountability to the litigious demographix in which one makes a distinction between the merely rich and the affluent.

Things go differently in the state nuthouse. You don't have to converse if it's too much trouble.

What a Woman Has to Do with It I have been off and on nostalgic for the power and control junkies since retirement. They were the hardest to detach from in the end; it required a clinical trauma bond exit strategy that has been slow in the execution and rather complex... I liked having a conversation if I could and making a relationship if I could. It was often like a really, really fine game of chess--so streamlined and without props. Well, maybe a cup of coffee and a dim bulb in a table lamp...

Those were the best moments. The worst were something very different, of course. The worst moments were still games, but ones you never heard of and so didn't know the rules until you were already in play.

You have to keep up or die in even the mortal combat of exhibition-only push hands with them.

The way you die without any evidence of combat or injury. That way.

The way of female psychopaths with their particular Sylvian fissures.

Personally, I've never found the garden variety female psychopath too frightening to work with. They're either overly concerned with a social facade, unable to manage cold detachment or very amenable to being understood. That's not a list of their characteristics so much as my own skewed and spontaneous sampling and how my clinical style works out.

The Woman, Mice and Men I've had the occasion here and there recently to consider a woman with a rather relentless power and control agenda. I dare say even in her best moments, it is in play--whether premeditated (it often is) or unconscious. However, another dynamic has revealed itself: she seems to over-estimate either her own psychopathic ability or her own intelligence.

Happily, lots of psychopaths do this.

I think of it this way: she's found the Sylvian fissure through chronic psychic masturbation and deep neediness for parenting, even though she is very long in the tooth by now.

Being older helps her some. It has given her intrapsychic chops--long hours of psychobabbling around in her own 'process'. Consequently,she's fiddled with the thermostat in there, straddling the hemi-crevasse at the fissure and is surprised that even a thing exists. Crawling around back, she has actually managed to breech the fuse box to the right temporoparietal junction.

Then, there is the use of auto-eroticism in various forms. Her anatomical tinkering, plus religious going here and there to services rendered by all sorts of providers, has inflated her grandiosity.

She feels powerful when sexually stimulated, for example, and psychic masturbation stimulates and soothes her, too.

All of this is supplemented with picking up housewifey (in the dullest, most classically sexist sense) self-help books to parrot. In short she's a collector of manipulative tactics, still unable to cope straight on effectively, but managing a passable shell with a social facade.

Of course I am speaking of the garden variety female antisocial. The petty thug we might call her male counterparts. The maneuvers of these women bode ill-fatedly for their lovers, but is only a mild irritant for acquaintances.

The problem with lovers is that they are stewed in oxytocin and have let go of the drop floor button. They see no reason to dispose of her completely until, as they say, they do.

As psychopaths go, such a woman's psychopathic career seems to be a mediocre one, with very little promise in sight because her Achilles Heel is 3-fold:

1. She has very little self-control. Her limbic self is still wide open. No one among all those providers has successfully installed an ego. Consequently, there is insufficient detachment and this cripples her efforts. For example, she misses social cues that, if properly used, could make her more efficiently dangerous.

2.Too much labor is required to maintain her self-absorption. It isn't an uninterrupted flow. She's not graceful with it and it drains her to hide it. For example, she has to manage impulses almost everywhere she goes and is exhausted by it. 3. Her cognitive facility is not so sharp that she is dangerous at large. She is not intellectually gifted, for example, and she is poorly educated.

We shall be grateful for all that.

Some things are just mercy gifts to humanity.

Where Diagnostics Meet the Road There's a good deal of confusion out there about what psychopathy is. It is often equated, for example, with the more well known Antisocial Personality Disorder, or APD.

There are associations, but not quite what many think.

Here is the formula:

All psychopaths have APD.

Not all people with APD are psychopathic

Going back to our case subject for illustrative purposes... She appears to have been served a combo platter on the old school Axis 2--antisocial, histrionic, borderline and narcissistic characteristics. Of course, this cluster of traits is often exactly that: a cluster. It's not rare at all among the psychiatric population.

It is dreaded, but it is not all that rare.

and while all of those constructs are useful descriptors of pertinent strategies, the limbic connections she must manage undermine her psychopathic aspirations routinely. This is due in large part to the fact that she is the type of psychopathic practitioner that doesn't want to be found out.

The result, of course, is a great swath of damage when she has the opportunity to bring a victim to close range and inside her hunting ground., but overall, since she doesn't detach easily enough to cut her losses, move on, and hone her skills, very little cost to society.

That's all more mercy falling like rain, but makes for little seaworthiness in her self-chosen life goals.

You might want to know what the life goals are. I have to say we haven't discussed them,but

There are several brands of self-determinationists in the psycho-therapy world at large. Basically, you support the patient's chosen goals and honor the right for all patients to determine the trajectories of their own lives.You see the dilemma already. When the patient's goal is satiation, perhaps we can hang in. When the taste is for human spirit, then what do we do?

The classic psychopath guns for satiation as a prime directive. We can only hope that our denial has a kernel of truth or two in it.

Perhaps psychopaths are rare. Perhaps we have insulated ourselves enough to evade the targeting of the few out there. To feel safe, we have to play those odds.

But there are glitches in that plan. There are also holes in our research and even more anectdotally, basic misunderstandings. Perhaps.

One of the most touted is that female psychopaths just don't get caught as easily and so we misinterpret that to mean that there aren't many.

However, and you'll see my bias now, there are various possibilities about why we don't catch them and drag them into prison as often as we do their male counterparts. This would suggest that they are either smarter than male psychopaths or we are more stupid than we need to be when they're around.

I vote for a little of number one and a whole lot of number two.

Part of our delusion and denial is that women and men psychopaths are basically the same. What if they aren't? What if we don't find so many women who are like the men? What if we discard the real female psychopaths when we find them because they do not meet our gender neutral diagnostic criteria?

Also, whoever said that a psychopath has to commit crimes to quality for membership?

Ironically, too, she is not very educated, but has learned to parrot spiritual principles and to whack away at others with assertiveness and other 'skills' picked up here and there. She seems to think that reading a few books about love languages or the like is helpful. She is the victim of new age hodge podge and clinicians who have not been perceptive enough to diagnose her correctly. Consequently, she balloons iatrogenically into an infantilized grandiosity and insists that her feelings have to be heard and processed. All of that is fine, of course, except she cannot heed other social cues or access empathy. It is really a sad sideshow of what modern psychotherapy can produce after countless hours and many dollars.

It is really an ethical problem for people in the profession--akin to the problems of surgeons who continue to operate on the surgically addicted. According to Hart and Hare (1996), all individuals who have been diagnosed with psychopathy will also have APD but not all individuals suffering from APD will be diagnosed with psychopathy. In short, the psychopathic diagnosis reflects a more severe disorder than APD. "The variety and severity of criminal acts performed by these women, as well as their capacity for cold-blooded violence, are similar to those committed by their male counterparts" (p. 102). Research suggests that young women who later become psychopaths may look different than young men who later present the same disorder. Specifically, Verona (2006) found that young women who later develop the disorder show a more relational form of aggression characterized by jealousy, self-harm, manipulation, and verbal aggression. Other research has examined the importance of relational aggression among females, suggesting that women may display aggression differently than their male counterparts. Crick and Grotpeter (1996) studied relational aggression, also known as covert aggression, which is a type of aggression in which harm is caused by damaging someone's relationships or social status—and it’s different from the type of aggression (typically, physical) that males show each other. Relational aggression tends to be more subtle and manipulative.

Journaling to Get Answers When You Wake

 

I am still transitioning from a 32 year career as a therapist into retirement. Work was more than a fulltime occupation so it has taken awhile. A lot of factors caused me to decide to retire when I did. Some were tediously financial. I just can't review them one more time except to say that it worked for me. More pertinent factors, though, were emotional, psychological and even collegial and not. Interestingly, my clients did not much figure into the equation, nor did my love for my work. It was time.

I find that my decision to retire had a lot to do with the larger themes of work I have done in my life--the core issues of one's growth and development. In particular, today, my retirement had to do with resolving the issue of others' choosing to do me harm.

I have, from time to time, been the object of obsession for a few people in my life. As a pre-school child, I was incorporated into a vengeance obsession by a man who hated my father. This man intended to kill me, but obviously did not.

Later, I was the object of my teenage cousin's masturbation obsession. I see now I was just an  available entity.  I believe my mom took care of that with the help of an older cousin. I don't think any of this abuse was discussed with my dad and I knew somehow not to do that when he returned later that fall from work. 

Then, in high school, there were 2 guys that would now be said to have stalked me. Both were age mates and I'm sure were simply nuisances in the way other girls experienced love struck boys, too, but I did not find it endearing or just a boy thing  I beat one of them up, swinging him around by his polo shirt until it was stretched to double its size. When he fell down I kicked him until he crumpled up crying. I remember my words from all these years ago, "Now leave me alone".

The second was easier to scare off. Once I was over the flattery of him appearing here, there and everywhere in the neighborhood, he appeared at my school. even transferring he said from his private school to be near me. I'm not sure the was really the reason for the ransfer. Looking back NIW I tink it was probably a forced transfer because he was so uncontrollable. o my school and saying he'd done so to be near me, I began to be afraid of him. One day he followed me home from school, from a distance, taking the unusual turns I took to see if he were really following me. I asked him what he was doing at one point. I was suddenly afraid of him. He said he wanted to know if my mother would let him live with us because his father threw him out... When I got home, with him along side and circling me, I told mom. She said "stay here" and went out to where he sat on his bike, having sent me in to ask if he could live with us. That was that.

In college, an older and married Iranian man who was also a student, would cruise the parking lot after our German class saying "get in, get in". I had quite a trek across the parking lot to my next class and he would drive around the lot slowly to come back to me as I walked. When I wouldn't get in, he'd open the passenger door, lean over and say crazy things like "I just want to teach you the things a woman should know..." This had happened maybe 3 or 4 times, each time with something similiar being said. He said once, "you know what I like about my wife? She gets up early to make herself beautiful for me". I would say no, thanks and keep walking, but on the day he said he wanted to teach me things, something very righteously vicious boiled up in me. I stopped and went to his car. The passenger door was open as usual. I closed it and leaned into the window. He said "I knew you liked me". I said, "the next time you do this, I will shoot you". He said something to the effect that I wouldn't kill him. I said "you're right, but I will shoot you". He laughed and pulled away fast enough to squeal his tires. That was the end of that. In class after this, he wouldn't look at me, but would busy himself reading.

I told my roommate about this and she said she couldn't be my friend anymore because she was a pacifist. I asked her if he tried to rape me and I defended myself, you would think I'd done something wrong? She said she would--that violence is never ok. I posed some hypothetical situations to her, trying to regain her support and approval in general. I loved her a great deal and was terribly hurt that she thought I should allow someone to hurt me. I felt devalued, less important than an abstract. I remember one hypothetical that I posed to her was what would she do if she had the power to keep someone she loved from being killed in the moment of danger. She said she would let it happen because she could never commit an act of violence. I tried to persuade her that letting another person be killed would be violence itself, but she said no, it wouldn't be. Her conscience would be clean. I understood this all to mean that my life was less valuable to her than her ideals. It hurt me deeply.

I got very depressed after this and had insomnia for months. I went to a priest on campus to discuss it. He was a sort of non-violence expert, a student of Merton and an ethicist/conscientious objection advocate/advisor (this was during the Vietnam draft). He said that he believed that in my hypothetical she would have consented to violence by her lack of intervention--violence by assent. He also said that rejecting me in the first place was an act of violence. I never discussed it with her after that and took some solace in having discussed it with the priest. I began reading Merton and fell in love with his writings. When the semester ended,we changed roommates. She told some other girls that I was crazy and dangerous and that's why she had to change to another room. I went back to discuss this with the priest and he said, "she is continuing her violence" and something else to the effect that I could choose to be a true pacifist and walk away from it because no one would be harmed by me doing so. I do remember him laughing and saying "It was all about being a pacifist, wasn't it?"

There are more examples of being at odds with someone because I thought I was going about my business and doing the right thing. I imagined these people intruding upon my free passage and my feelings of safety and peace of mind. You never know, though, how you are pulling these kinds of experiences to you. Therapists and mentors have suggested that my personal attributes and behaviors have to be examined. What I have looked at mostly--the recurring themes--have been my confrontive nature and saying what I think, along with refusing others' attempts to control me. Those aren't always the same thing. Voicing my opinion is not always confrontive, for example, but some, more men than women, have not liked these things about me. It has off and on been painful to me. I have been told that I expect others to like me and told in a way that makes it seem pathological. I've argued that expecting others not to like me seemed more like pathology to me.

So, back to the decision to retire. I still have the firm belief that others shouldn't bother me and that they shouldn't bother me directly or passively. Also, I still believe that everyone should deal with emotional issues quickly and get them behind us so we can carry on. This last belief is what my husband has said is very endearing to him and one of the things he has liked about me since we were "kids" (20 something, really). He's a fan of not letting emotions make decisions, clearing the air, shaking on it and getting back to square one. This was the explanation he gave me to clear up the cognitive dissonance I felt one day when he proclaimed, "I love you, Marie. You think like a man".

I don't think he meant a battering, narcissistic man. I think he meant the kind of man he is and his brothers are and his uncles, his grandfathers, nephews and friends are. That's a man horse of a different color than I've encountered elsewhere.

So, a strangely colored man horse found me particularly distasteful in my workplace. Finally, he was revealed as who and what he is and that healed emotional issues for others in my office. What I had to do to heal myself was journal--extensively. I also spoke with a psychiatrist or 2. One is my doctor and the other is my friend. The best help I got from both of them was to revisit my tendency to draw out the craziness of others. My doctor said that's why you are so good at your work. You squeeze out the pathology and get down to fixing it. My friend said, "oh, Marie, you know exactly how to deal with guys like this". He wouldn't elaborate. He laughed at me as he is wont to do.

So, I set about journaling. I journaled and I journaled like a non-literary man. I said the facts as I saw them and stripped all emotion from them as best I could. When I woke up the next morning, I heard the words, "You have an opportunity to be merciful". I applied that principle to the most recent troublesome man in my life. When I look at him now he seems broken and fearful. That has relieved my burden to see him more clearly. I don't understand why he hates women, but I have come to see that he does hate them if they are strong and give him no favors. On the other hand, if they are strong and give him favors, he follows them around closely and gets them lunch and other small favors of ingratiation.

I asked my 12 Step sponsor about the concept of mercy and we had a good conversation about it. We decided that many people have the ability to ruin the lives of others and that by choice they can or they cannot. In this situation, I can continue his torment or not. I have a great deal of information that could be very upsetting if I shared it. I choose not to.

I have never chosen to hurt him. I have fantasized about it, but I only acted to stop him from hurting me by confronting and speaking my mind factually. In the end, he hurt himself far worse than he hurt me. Now he flees from his office and has panic attacks in the hallway.

He has figured into my decision to retire, but it is not to get away from him. I'll be happy not to see him anymore, but really, I will be happy to be away from his unhappiness. There is nothing left in him but unhappiness and he drives it around all day and sits in it and talks in it. The joy of being there has been overtaken by the unhappiness that encapsulates my joy. My joy is in session with my clients. We laugh a lot. We dig through pain and then we take our "commercial breaks" and laugh before we dig through more. It is amazing work. I have been so lucky all my career.

I think this man has come to symbolize toxicity, unhappiness, cruelty and all the decisions one has to make to have those and have them every day, all day. This is a step out of my family of origin's dysfunction. I tell people I don't have a family, my parents are dead. They were my only family really. The rest made too many decisions to be toxic, unhappy, and cruel to each other every day. We left them. My parents knew there were choices to make about things like that. I am so glad they did.

So, after all this work of trying to find out what I have symbolized to my tormentors, I journaled myself into finding out what my tormentors symbolize to me: the opportunity to be merciful and to walk away.

photo: Magic Highway, Marie Monroe