Key Insights from the Conversation
Sovereignism as a shield. Tiffany explores how the combination of narcissistic (NPD) and antisocial (ASPD) personality traits – termed “sovereignism” by Dawn – serves as a high-functioning defense mechanism developed to survive a “zero-trust” childhood environment.
Hyper-competence is an avoidance strategy. The discussion reveals how extreme self-reliance and mechanical skill (the “hyper-competent soldier”) can be a way to bypass emotional vulnerability and the need for connection, effectively hiding trauma behind success.
The nuance of sadism. Sadism is deconstructed not just as “evil,” but as a complex regulatory mechanism used for reclaiming power, enforcing boundaries (”antisocial punishment”), or communicating pain when words fail.
HRT as an emotional catalyst. Tiffany describes how hormone replacement therapy didn’t just change her body, but altered her brain chemistry enough to force her to process emotions she had previously intellectualized or suppressed.
Contumacious pride. The interview touches on the concept of stubborn, rebellious pride that acts as a survival engine – refusing to be broken even if it means hurting oneself (e.g., “martyring” oneself to prove a point).
Recovering from “zero-trust.” The journey from seeing all human interaction as transactional and manipulative to learning “good enough” friending and parenting, and the paradox that you often don’t know you are broken until you want to change.
Glossary of Terms
Sovereignism. A term coined by Dawn to describe the specific comorbidity of narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) and antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) with sadistic traits. It characterizes a personality structure built around antagonism, domination, resistance to control, self-reliance, and maintaining a “sovereign” state to ensure safety.
Cluster B. A grouping of personality disorders in the DSM-5 characterized by dramatic, overly emotional, or unpredictable thinking or behavior. It includes NPD, ASPD, borderline personality disorder (BPD), and histrionic personality disorder (HPD).
Ego-syntonic. Behaviors, values, and feelings that are in harmony with or acceptable to the needs and goals of the ego, or consistent with one’s ideal self-image. (E.g., sovereign aggression is ego-syntonic – one doesn’t feel “bad” about it because it feels necessary.)
Teleological stance (or teleological non-mentalizing). A mode of thinking where one interprets actions solely based on their observable physical outcomes or goals, rather than understanding the internal mental states (intentions, feelings, beliefs) behind them.
Dissociative identity disorder (DID) and other specified dissociative disorder (OSDD). Disorders characterized by the presence of two or more distinct personality states (“alters” or “parts”).
Splitting. A defense mechanism common in Cluster B disorders where situations or people (especially oneself) are viewed in all-or-nothing terms (e.g., all good/idealized vs. all bad/devalued).
Consensual non-consent (CNC). A BDSM practice involving role-playing non-consensual sexual acts (like assault) within a pre-negotiated, safe, and consensual framework.
Factor I psychopathy. Refers to the interpersonal/affective deficits of psychopathy (e.g., superficial charm, grandiosity, lack of empathy/remorse), often associated with “primary” psychopathy, as opposed to factor II (lifestyle/antisocial traits like impulsivity).
Egocentric vs. object relations. The interview touches on the shift from seeing others merely as extensions of oneself or obstacles (egocentric) to seeing them as whole, separate individuals with their own internal worlds (whole object relations).
Gray rage. A state involving a cold, calculated, dissociated survival rage, distinct from hot, impulsive anger.
Dawn: Hello, flitterific listeners! I am joined today by Tiffany [Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky, X, Facebook], who has narcissistic personality disorder and antisocial personality disorder – the combination that I usually refer to as sovereignism. She can tell us a lot more about this as a lived expert of that interesting combination of disorders. She has a lot of insight, but is there anything else that you would like to tell the listeners about yourself that is not related to the diagnoses, so they get a more full picture of who you are as a person?
Tiffany: I’m Tiffany. I’m a transgender woman in her 30s. I’m a creative kind of person, I’m mechanically inclined, I fix everything in my house, I fix my car, I fix my computer, whatever. So, I’m always in a problem-solving mindset. Which has ups and downs. I know I wrote a lot more about this, but I’m trying to not quite wing it.
Dawn: Wanna tell me more about your companion animals?
Tiffany: Yeah, so currently, I’m pretty sure she’s who’s scratching at the door. I have a long brown Norwegian forest cat. She’s brown and white and black, she’s what they call a Torby. I think it’s a combination of tabby and tortoiseshell. And her name is Farvel, because I found her behind some shipping containers at the back of a meth den of a motel. She wasn’t quite an adult, but she wasn’t quite a baby, and it was clear she knew what people were, and somebody had to have let her go. And Farvel means goodbye in Dutch. I just thought of that, you know, shipping containers are off in Dutch. And she’ll never have to say goodbye again.
Dawn: Awww!
Tiffany: Very recently, my cat named Dog passed. He was a fluffy and scruffy white Persian with heterochromia – the two different colored eyes – and he was my best friend!
Dawn: Hmm.
Tiffany: And he might have been what literally or proverbially saved my soul. He was the thing in my life I always cared about. And I’ve been around animals since day one. When I was brought home from the hospital, I’m told our cat at the time, Baby, was underneath my crib, day one. So I’ve always been close to cats.
Dawn: You wanna dive more into what influence Farvel and Dog, and perhaps Baby, have had on you, and perhaps on your recovery journey as well?
Tiffany: Let’s see, I don’t know. So, when I was very young, 3, 4, or 5, I thought of Baby as my little sister. She was a Birman, she was white and brown. And my grandmother told me a story once that I was playing rough with her, and she put her paw on my hand. And she stuck her claws out, but between my fingers, not into me. And I apparently said, “Kitty’s got needles in her hands!” That’s the best example I have of memory where she was being a role model to me. You know, the cat was actually being a role model to me. Emotionally, definitely more so than either of my parents at the time.
Dawn: Hmm.
Tiffany: I got Dog when I was 20. And for the first year, I was just so stressed from the hell my dad was putting me through, I didn’t give him much attention. And it took that whole year for me to start feeling bad about that, and regretting it, and becoming close with him, and having allowed him to get close to my father first. He was with me through thick and thin. Weeks on end of rotting in bed, getting scared when I stomp around the house. Sometimes the house taken better care of is litter boxed and food taken better care of, sometimes not. And through all of that, he maintained his personality and his care for me.
And with his passing, it really helped, because I have no way of doubting his judgment, or his love of me, like I didn’t do well enough for him. Like, I wish I had had a better life, to give him a better life, but I’m mostly at peace with that. I’m incredibly sad about it, but I mostly accept it. That gives some meaning, some implicit meaning to the last 15 years of my life, and then the preceding life up to then, because without that, I wouldn’t have been that person for him. One moment sticks out to me. So my dad owned the house I lived in, but he didn’t live there anymore, and he would just come by randomly without prompting, just walk in the frickin’ door. And he tried to greet Dog, and Dog just hissed at him immediately. And so Dog knew! He wasn’t antisocial, but if you came up to him and he just wasn’t in the mood, he would leave the situation. He wouldn’t get aggressive or anything, but he was immediately mad at my dad showing up. And little stuff like that sticks out in my memory that I did it right, or did it good enough that it mattered to him.
Farvel is a totally new experience to me. She can be such a hooligan. Dog wasn’t really a snuggly cat. He would love to chill in the farthest corner of the room with everybody, but he would be all about it. He’d feel like that’s his hangout time. But Farvel asks me to pick her up, and she’ll rub my feet. Rub her face right into mine over and over. She’s an incredibly cuddly and affectionate cat. And having been accustomed to this cat with, not a distance of connection, but a distance of closeness and a direct affection. It’s such a big difference. And, you know, I’m not used to taking care of such a needy cat. But at this point, that’s not that hard. And I love her! She’s my little slinky of a kitty. She’s really long.
And I guess I’m happy I have her after Dog has passed. I’ve always had an easier connection with cats than other animals or people. So there’s somewhere where my heart is always being put into, even if I’m angry at everything and everybody and myself at once. And that’s really helping.
Dawn: How old was Dog when you first met?
Tiffany: Just months. The litter he came from was because my drunk asshole uncle never got his cats spayed or neutered, and would just let them have babies, and we got another one. That’s how I got my three cats previous to Farvel. Dog was one of them.
Apparently, he was born lit. And he was covered in fleas. It was terrible. No, we got him very young, maybe even too young. He maybe needed to be around his mother a little longer.
I still remember him. Being at the base of the steps a little too small to start climbing up them easily, and crying all night.
Dawn: Yeah, I see that sometimes that when dogs grow up around cats, or cats grow up around dogs, they take on some behaviors of the respective other species. Did you notice that you’ve taken on any of the behaviors of the cats that you grew up with?
Tiffany: That’s a good question, I don’t know. That’s really hard to say, I’ve noticed it more the other way. Dog could be avoidant in that way, but in this era of my emotional honesty, I’m a little more like Farvel, at least with somebody that I’m closer to and I want affection from. I can be pretty… I can get sad and full of self-pity and be very clingy. And the one thing constant attention was never not there, but I used to try to deny it. But in spite of Dog’s personality being pretty different from mine, there were still ways in which he would communicate and enforce his boundaries that were like me. Like I said, he would leave a situation if he wasn’t comfortable, but if he trusted you, he would lightly bite you to tell you to stop doing something. Because unless he trusted you, it either wasn’t worth his time, or he wasn’t comfortable. But he would actually be more aggressive with somebody he was close with. Not very aggressive, but he wouldn’t really be aggressive at all with somebody he wasn’t close with, somebody he didn’t trust. And that aspect of him being a bit asocial. He liked it when people came to him. But if you did that, he would get close to you pretty quickly. He would appreciate it.
Dawn: Yeah, I suppose when people are not trusted, and Dog tries to assert boundaries, then the effect could be to just reveal vulnerabilities. Whereas if the person is trusted, then revealing vulnerabilities is exactly what Dog wants in order not to inform the other person not to overstep those boundaries.
Tiffany: Yeah. Yeah, and it was mostly just how to pet him right, you know? He would be pretty picky about how you would pet him, and it could change from day to day. And you’d have to kind of learn his body language, and his moods. And so he wanted that from somebody that he liked, but not really from someone he didn’t know well.
Dawn: Yeah, that’s cool. I think some friends of mine also enjoy seeing that another person can attune to them to that degree. It gives them a particular feeling of closeness.
Tiffany: Yeah, cause I get that. I get that pretty well.
Dawn: Like, another thing that I heard that is very close to you. It’s your waffle maker? Wanna tell us about your waffle maker?
Tiffany: Okay, so I just crash-landed in Bowling Green, Kentucky, after leaving a different place in Louisville that… I’m not judging the people for it, and I don’t want to mention them so they can’t be judged for it. But their house is a disaster, we found another place. And after several hours of driving, and then all the effort to shove all the stuff back in our car, we get to this other person’s house. And as the night draws near, I get in touch with my friend Jessa. And she was living in a bus converted to live in. And she was parked at this commune at the border, I think just at the Tennessee side of the border between Tennessee and Kentucky. I just… even with all of that, I had the energy to go out and see her, because A) people, B) she’s my friend. And I go out there, and we hang out, and sleep over, and I discover… I go and explore the places and the people of the commune with her in the morning, but I take this waffle maker home with me. She had several appliances that people had given her, thinking maybe she needs more appliances because her house is a bus. And she just kept the ones to give to somebody that needed it more. It’s just this nice one that opens like this. Pour it in, close it, and then you can flip it so that it gets coverage. It’s got this ceramic nonstick coating that still takes a season too. And it’s incredibly non-stick. It works really well, and it just makes these thick, Belgian waffles that are so good. And I remember bragging at the time to the person we were living with that, like, oh, you know, after all that, guess what? But I still have energy for people, because now there’s people, so now I have energy. And I went and saw her. And I hadn’t seen her in a year and a half or two years at that point. I didn’t want to miss that opportunity.
Dawn: Yeah, it’s doubly worth it in the end. For how long have you had the waffle maker now?
Tiffany: 2 years? Because I think that was late 2023.
Dawn: Okay, I had imagined that it happened longer ago.
Tiffany: No, I’ve just been through a lot in the last 3 years. So…
Dawn: Subjective time was much longer, okay. For how long have you been working on your recovery in the widest sense?
Tiffany: It’s about two and a half years. I discovered I have NPD at the end of 2022. But I didn’t really know how or really start working on it until Spring of 2023. So about two and a half years.
Dawn: Was there any particular event that marked that change for you, or tipped you off to it?
Tiffany: Unfortunately, yes. So I had just moved to Michigan, sorta. And I was staying with a bunch of friends. And one of those friends, since the lease was coming up in a few months, and we were uncertain about keeping together, we had a really bad argument one night about who was entitled to have the house if we all split up. And I woke up the next morning, and on my hour drive to work, I slowly fell into this paranoid episode, and I started really seeing things in a distorted way. And that resulted in me figuring out a way to, in the space of a couple hours, go underneath him, and take the house out from under him when it came time. And I ended up being convinced that he meant more. He said some nasty things in that argument, but some of it you could tell was proverbial, or just to demonstrate the strength of his feelings. I took those the wrong way personally, and I ended up smearing his name publicly on multiple social medias. And once I got talked down and realized, no, this person is still my friend – they are not anymore still my friend, mind you, but at the time – I was just filled with this shattering regret. And what that really showed me is I was not managed as well, anywhere near as well as I had thought. It had shattered my perception of my current state. And realizing I could treat people like my father treated me way more easily and freely than I thought, that I had become like him more than I had anticipated. Like, I acted out on him in a way that I had in the past on my father as a defense mechanism. Often when he was doing the same thing to me, to try to fight that fire with my fire. And so I was under the delusion that that wouldn’t come out from anybody but my father. And in retrospect, that was never true. I definitely did that sort of thing to other people, too. Maybe not quite to that extreme, but the same sort of thing. And it’s just devastating.
Dawn: Yeah, big hug! But something must have given you the strength or safety or something at that time to actually be able to confront it? Do you know where you drew the strength to be able to confront that part of yourself?
Tiffany: Riley helped me out of that self-pity episode. But it felt like a mandate from heaven, like I had to confront it. There’s a lot of parts of my struggle that… that’s kind of just how I treat myself. That I just feel like I have to. I know I don’t literally have to, but I feel compelled. And I basically listed the reasons. I never thought I would actually become like my parents. I was under the delusion that I hadn’t. Or it wasn’t as big of an issue as I had thought.
Dawn: Yeah, a friend of mine also described it a way that whenever she discovers that she has some traits of her mother in particular, it feels like a punch in the gut for her.
Tiffany: Yeah, I feel like I lost the battle. I was trying most of my adult life to not become like my parents. And it felt like I failed at that.
Dawn: It’s just a work in progress, I suppose. I’ve seen some YouTube comments from someone who said that he’s in his 80s, I think, and that he’s just woken up from his bubble that he’d lived all his life in, and regrets wasting his life. Waking up from that in one’s 20s… It’s kind of really good in comparison, like, lots of life to enjoy outside the bubble.
Tiffany: Well, 30s, but yeah. No, that was only a couple years ago, so I wish it was my 20s, but I don’t think that was possible. I was financially dependent upon my father and living in the house he owned. I don’t think that was possible, I didn’t have the space.
Dawn: Yeah, having that freedom, moving away, not being exposed to all these patterns all the time that reinforce the parents from childhood? It’s probably really valuable. I think that was also really valuable for me. I didn’t really realize it on an introspective level, but in terms of the timelines, it makes a lot of sense that once I moved away from my parents’ place in 2012, I probably had a lot more freedom to change the way that I thought, and that probably also helped me heal.
Tiffany: No, it’s definitely true for a number of reasons, for sure.
Dawn: Yeah, do you think it would have even been useful? Like, I mean, you needed those patterns, probably, in order to maintain yourself, your safety, integrity, whatever you could maintain of it at all, in the face of your parents, in the face of your dad? And do you think it would have even been useful, or would have been to recover earlier, or would that have just resulted in some kind of self-destruction?
Tiffany: Man, that is a big who-knows-what-would-ever-happen. Let me think so I don’t get my feelings of despair and regret to tangle into that. Because I think I can answer that question. I think the answer would have been yes. At some point, there was a threshold where I was able to work on some things, but overall, the way I interacted and dealt with people was getting worse, and I was also getting better at coping with it when it wasn’t bad. You know, my false self was getting more fleshed out and stronger, but my wounds were deeper. And there’s definitely a point. Like, at some point, I had trouble working at a job and it being night, just from my experience with being forced to work at my dad’s car garage. And at least before that, for instance, I would have had a much easier time staying at whatever job. I would have had more flexibility. And there’s other stuff that works out some more interpersonal too, but that’s an example. I ended up having more patterns and traumas being added for over a decade. And really, he held me back from making my own mistakes and learning from them. So definitely earlier would have been better. Exactly when, I don’t know.
Dawn: By earlier, you mean getting away from your dad earlier, or by changing your mindset to something less defended? Perhaps something closer to where you are now, earlier?
Tiffany: I have no idea how those two could ever line up. Here, let me tell you the story of how I found out. So I’m polyamorous, I date a bunch of furries, and I know somebody. And she got us the party room at Midwest Fur Fest in late 2022. And I go there, and this girl that she brought along… I end up really enamored and obsessed with her. And I think it was the third out of fourth days. We were the four or five of us that weren’t out and about in the convention somewhere else. We’re all tripping on acid, and at some point, a friend of mine casually calls me a narcissist. But this was narcissist trying to help another narcissist. But at first, I’m just like, you’re just insulting me. No! She meant it, authentically, to try to help me out. And then my now-girlfriend, Julie, sat me down and found a decent example of the symptoms of NPD, and I just started to digest it and went, “Oh…” And so it was one hell of a situation to be in, to have the right people to try to break the news to me, to try to explain it and help me through not totally crashing out, finding out, and frankly, tripping on acid to be mentally open enough to not just fall into further denial. Because I was in some pretty stiff denial about a couple of other things, like that I’m a woman. You know, I had managed to really suppress those thoughts and feelings, unfortunately, very well, and very strongly identified with my man persona. And like, I don’t know, let’s say I had gotten away from my father when I was 22. I have no idea how somebody could have talked me into that. I have the issues that I have then, and me receive it. That’s knowing my own limitations is what makes that a big question mark.
Dawn: Hmm. Yeah, I feel that. Lots of things that would have had to come together. Or that, in the end, had to come together for me to heal, and if only one of them had happened earlier, it would have just not worked.
Tiffany: Yeah, Riley and I sat down. Riley was like, “If I had a time machine, when could I have gone back, and what would I have had to say to you to break you out of your cycle and get you to leave your dad’s house at any cost?” And I’m like, I don’t know if that was possible.
Dawn: Yeah, I do the experiment a lot. Like, what would I have told myself if I had a time machine and could go back? Oh, no idea. Yeah, one friend of mine also has been recovering for a couple years, but looking back at her extremely abusive childhood just sees how her adaptation was perfect for keeping her alive throughout that time. And so she doesn’t need it anymore now, and tries to break these patterns now, but when she looks back at her adaptations in her childhood, looks back at those with a lot of love and gratitude. Is that something you can experience?
Tiffany: To some degree. I’m still working on integrating some stuff there. But for instance, you know, I had a complicated relationship with my father. I do think he really tried. I think it was just also very damaged and broken individual, too. I identify with that, I get that. And so he would teach me things about how to deal with people. How to see that somebody’s trying to screw you over, or manipulate you. How to counter-manipulate. But also just how to deal with people, some life skills, a lot of soft life skills, too. But only in retrospect do I realize that this was a spectrum. From just how to carry yourself that’s helpful, and how to interact with people on average, all the way to how to deliberately manipulate people, and the whole spectrum in between. And so I would say that A) him teaching me things like that, and B) adaptations I learned dealing with him were ultimately something I can draw a ton of positive things from. But some of them have been also incredibly nasty.
Dawn: Hmm. Yeah, I imagine when you learn how your dad sees other people, then that probably also informs how you think other people see you. And that probably also induces some kind of feelings again toward these other people. Like, imagine if he is particularly paranoid or something, like he thinks that other people are out to manipulate him, and he tries to defend against that, or he’s preoccupied with that, then imagine that informs how you think other people think about you – that they are preoccupied with whether you manipulate them. And yeah, maybe also how you think other people are themselves, that they might be manipulative. Like, is that also an effect that your dad has had?
Tiffany: Yeah, because I internalized – or transformed, and then internalized – some of his values about people and the world. Positive and negative. He was my gateway to progressivism and leftism, for sure. But you know, he could also be very paranoid and very distrusting and very cynical about a lot of things, too. Like, I have that in common with him. This believing people often can be total scum. But also believing often that people are broadly worth it, and yada, yada, yada. These really conflicting beliefs.
Dawn: Yeah, I take it he was particularly preoccupied with power, control, manipulation and such, and not getting manipulated himself. And not so much with whether the person’s hairstyle is correct, or whether someone adheres to the right kind of etiquette.
Tiffany: Well, from what I could tell, it was his internal feelings of not feeling appreciated being projected as enforcing his pride. Right? And you know, someone could slight him in a business way. And he would then maintain that. He would then do something, talk it out, do some sort of retribution, or change the social or literal contract they had to make sure somebody couldn’t harm his pride. And it was interesting. It could be really blurry. The pride could again then be a proxy for his paranoias of how this person might use it against him. And it could be the other way. He could get paranoias just because his pride was insulted. And so those were the internal reasons, but definitely the way he implemented them was control.
Dawn: Hmm? Was there always a disconnect between the actual cost of some kind of slight that he suffered versus the damage to his ego or to his pride, that he would react strongly even if the actual cost was low?
Tiffany: Oh, absolutely, because the pride was always the justification. Like, I’m saying a lot of this stuff in retrospect, having been able to understand it, and being a prideful bitch myself. That his pride often was a proxy for a lot of it, and it becoming the ends that justified the means a lot of the time. I don’t think that most people were close enough to know that what he was seeking was being appreciated.
Dawn: Did he talk explicitly about pride or honor or such things with you in private, or was he unaware of that?
Tiffany: No, no, he absolutely did. He had some real values. For him, it was prideful, but for him, it was honor. And so it was as much to the standard he tried to hold himself to. To try to be the kind of person he wanted to be in this world.
Dawn: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. For context, your dad has died, right? And your mom? And when did this happen?
Tiffany: My mom’s still unfortunately alive. My dad died in late 2023. He would have been 72. Can you imagine being 33, and your father’s still more than twice your age? Always felt weird to me.
Dawn: Oh… I don’t know, my parents are not so far from that. Yeah, my parents are 75 and 76 now, and I’m 37.
Tiffany: Okay, yeah, you can imagine it. Right, I never meet somebody else who can imagine it. Delighted by that. I always thought, you know, when I was younger, I’m like, “Oh, cool, well, they did the smart decision, they waited until they had more life experience.” But they also waited until they were more miserable about the life they felt they had fucked up, too.
Dawn: Mmm. Yeah, since I needed someone to have a better life as a proxy, vicariously for them or something, and putting that hope into the child? I don’t know.
Tiffany: My dad, for sure. He said the same sort of things, that he didn’t want me to make the same mistakes as he did. But most of what he gave me that was intangible were definitely in his view – and I mean explicitly so, his view – that would allow me to be independent, and lead me towards being self-made in the domain and the vein that I wanted. He thought he was giving me the things to actually set me up pretty well.
Dawn: Hmm? Yeah, interesting combination. Oftentimes the parents have this very fixed idea of what exactly the child needs to do in life, and in this case, it’s more about a fixed idea about how to achieve the thing to do in life.
Tiffany: Absolutely. My mom was a lot simpler. I was her Trophy Genius, and I guess that shows she can, you know, give birth, or she can raise somebody successful, even if she isn’t. I guess I’d just say, my dad had a similar mindset, but you know, he did try to be more proactively involved in doing that, and actually trying to raise me, even if it was just quite the mixed bag.
Dawn: Hmm… Yeah, what influence has your mom had on you?
Tiffany: Ugh… It’s hard for me to describe. But she’s had an influence on how I will judge whether something is a good idea to do, or productive idea, in myself and others. Even when I was 3 or 4 years old, I would come up with these ideas of things I could invent that would maybe improve people’s lives or whatever, and she would strike me down – and I mean that proverbially this time – but she would strike those ideas down in a way, and be like, “No, you know, if it doesn’t make money, it doesn’t work, and it’s not worth trying, that the world will eat you alive.” And so she definitely impacted my core selfishness in that way. She’s definitely the seed of my sadistic qualities. Like, the thing she would say is, “Don’t dish it out if you can’t take it.” But then, that reinforced with how she treated me, I had the unconscious impression of, “Well, if I can dish it out, then I can do that. If I can take it, then I can dish it out.” And that doesn’t have much regard to whether that’s a good idea, or morally good or not.
Dawn: Yeah, it also dictates the framing, that the whole framing is about some kind of aggression against one another, like the famous ego-syntonic aggression that it’s associated with, like sadism, and sovereignism and malignant narcissism and such.
Tiffany: Yeah, I tried to resist it. For a long time, which had goods and bads. Until my mom moved away when I was 15, and I was left with just my dad, and they could no longer kind of balance each other out. I maintained my values better, but I had poor impulse control over my aggressions, specifically since I was disavowing it so strongly. Like, when I was a little kid, I was diagnosed with intermittent explosive disorder. I was expelled from kindergarten the first day.
Dawn: Oh, what age was that?
Tiffany: I think that’s 5 years old? Yeah, I was expelled the first day. I was not allowed back in that school. It was a private school, my mom tried to give me a better life, a better education, and I ruined it day one.
Dawn: Hmm… Like, can you sort of, I don’t know, do you have enough memories of your early childhood to tell whether there was sort of a time before sadism, and a time once you developed or discovered any of these sadistic pleasures?
Tiffany: That’s a good question. I remember being very young and being very preoccupied with punishing bad people and criminals and having to be talked out of it? It was like it hadn’t really all coalesced. It feels more like the different pieces were there. Because I remember I in preschool, a year or two prior to getting expelled from kindergarten the first day, I punched this bully in the nose and gave him a bloody nose. It’s like a 3- or 4-year-old. And feeling bad that I had done it, but feeling like in the frame of my mom’s viewpoint that I misbehaved. And but also frustrated that nobody cared that these two kids were pulling my arms apart. And I mean that, like, it was ridiculous, and feeling like nothing was going to happen unless I did that sort of thing. But I didn’t take pleasure in it at that point. I definitely did it, and then I felt that pang of, like, “Oh my fucking God! What did I just do?”
Dawn: Yeah, that doesn’t sound like sadism.
Tiffany: No. No, like, because, like I said, I don’t think it was the seat. My mom planted seeds, and I had a fascination with punishing criminals, and I had a fascination with villains and their ability to put all of those negative feelings behind and do the things that achieved what they wanted, which I saw as strength. But those two things – the actual aggression, and how I thought about it – hadn’t made friends yet.
Dawn: Yeah, like, punishing criminals? I was also ambiguous, because some people take pleasure in the punishing, and then want to have some kind of excuse, and so they’re like, “Oh yeah, they’re these criminals,” or these bullies, or cheaters, where they can make up some excuse in order to act out that aggression. But then there are also people who just object really strongly to the particular thing that the person is doing, perhaps out of empathy with the victim, and they just think that punishment is the way to go in such a case. And so these are two very different frames of mind that lead to the same outcome. And if I understand this correctly, when you were younger, it was the second one, where the punishing is just instrumental.
Tiffany: Yes and no, but I think that comes back to the concept of antisocial punishment or aggression in the sadism spectrum. So, I remember, it was a little later in my life, 9, 11 years old, but I fancied myself a landlady that would punish her tenants in different ways that I had to be told were illegal, like shutting off their services if they didn’t pay and shit. And this thinking of, like, you have to punish somebody, or they don’t get it. But I did revel in going further than I felt than you could think was logically necessary. I wouldn’t say I was thinking it exactly like, “Okay, if I do this, then it will discourage that behavior.” Like, if I can remember some of the vague things about punishing criminals when I was 3, 4, or 5, it definitely wasn’t proportionate, and I just wanted to dispense that cruel justice, because I didn’t understand the point of it. Almost like this person is a bad kind of thing, and they had to have that beaten out of them. I don’t know if I’m not priming myself to almost say that. That’s definitely how my mom treated me. But it wasn’t her mindset, but that was definitely what her actions…
Dawn: Yeah, I just reject this whole framework of punishment, but also of rewards, sort of the flip side of it. That you need to condition children through positive and negative reward, instead of just explaining to them why certain things are adaptive or effective, and others not. And so is there examples of rewards being just as damaging as punishments in your life?
Tiffany: Yeah, I think maybe with my mom, let’s say just that emotionally, you know, I was her Trophy Genius, so she would emotionally reward all of these things she wanted me to be. With my dad, I can think of so many examples! So he bought me this workbench. And it was an argument to try to get them to not buy it, because I knew this kind of thing was gonna happen. I tried to get him to spend that money on me on anything else. But anyway, so we have the workbench, but it needs to be assembled. And one of the days that that came to a head, my friend Damien happened to be over. And it’s just the thing he wants to… that Hilly wanted to die on that day. And he even expected Damien to help me clean the room that the workbench was supposed to go into, and he banned him from the house for not being willing. And that ended in one of my episodes of being sadistically coercive and cruel. Like, if I didn’t do that, I would have had hell for days. He blew off when I said, “Alright, so my plan is this, and I think it’s gonna take a couple of days,” and he just started screaming at the idea that it would take a couple of days. Just immediately. Totally lost his marbles. And so that workbench was, at best, a burden, and at times a way to punish me and fuck with my life, and control me and my friends. Even though it was a gift, and was a kind of gift I would otherwise appreciate, you know? I’m handsy, I like fixing and building things. And it was nice, he got me the extra expensive stainless steel countertop I wanted for a couple of different reasons.
Dawn: How did this workbench gift work? Like, was there his, probably unconscious, idea behind that that he could exert some kind of power over you with that, or that it was a reward for something that he still wanted you to do, so that he can guilt you with it? What was the thought behind it?
Tiffany: It was some of the tangible things he was trying to give me towards something that was more productive, fulfilling and successful life. Because that is one of the things that, let’s say, his skills and his values overlap. You know, I value those skills in my life, and I have used them to make money before. And so I think the issue there was that he saw that it was, in a way, foundational to my progress and stuff.
Dawn: Mmm… Yeah, it’s kind of like a nudge to push in a particular direction.
Tiffany: Yeah, and then that was mixed with the pride and him feeling the need to be appreciated, right? That also came out there. A lot of things came out in that incident. Let me see if I can think of another one. I do and I don’t want to talk about my college years. I think I will have to sit down and type about it, because I could accidentally get on into a very unhelpful rant about it. That stinks. I had another one in mind… There are other tools that it was that way. You know, some of it which may have been a gray area, which really weren’t a gift, but were in his mind. I think that’s also an important thing to point out. And I recognize that in myself as being very adverse to somebody not explicitly doing something that they feel like they’re doing me a favor, and they’re not really. That they don’t know it.
Dawn: Yeah, but I have…
Tiffany: A whole defense against that. And like, when he bullied me into working for him at his shop, one little microcosm of that was he thought he wasn’t gonna have enough work for the both of us, and that turned out to be not only not true, he then suddenly expected me to show up 6 days a week. Monday through Saturday. And I had no way to try to escape that life that way. But often, he would be like, “I thought you’d be happy I found work for you to do,” you know? Like, yes and no. And sometimes it would just be that it was a very involved job on a car when I was not in a good headspace, or not in a good portion of my life in events outside of work to just handle that level of complexity and responsibility. And it was very all or nothing for him. He tended to think he was doing me a favor.
Dawn: Hmm, like, it seems like he completely disrespected any of your boundaries.
Tiffany: He bullied me into working for him.
Dawn: Yeah, so that’s kind of like how Dog reacted to your dad coming to your house. So the house being sort of metaphorical for the boundaries, and Dog being like, “I don’t want this person here.”
Tiffany: Yeah.
Dawn: Oracle for how you would have also liked to have been able to maintain your boundaries against them?
Tiffany: Yeah, I wish he had given me a little more respect, like he did Dog. I can… ugh… Oh man, I’m giving myself a minute, cause I’m kind of welling up with my anger at him. It’s really weird to have kind of a grudge against somebody that’s… it’s kind of justified. But also, they’re dead. It’s weird for it to be so sticky.
Dawn: Hmm… no, of course.
Tiffany: And then harder to… like I said, it’s kind of in some ways justified. Because I was never able to get up to any sort of point where you would recognize why I was upset with him. There were times, there were brief times, but, like, with any Cluster B stuff, you know, if the person isn’t really facing their core issues, it’s not long before they regress. I am no different from that, you know, in the past.
Dawn: Yeah, I think I see this in friends of mine, that the ones who have very stable identities, if they are in their adult years, meet someone, and the person mistreats them, then they cut them off, and they’re like, afterwards, they forget about the person, they’re not really affected by that. But if someone has either an unstable identity, or this happens very early in their life, when virtually anyone has an unstable identity, then the person has such a strong effect on my friend that basically, if the person dies, if they completely disappear from the face of the earth, it doesn’t matter, because they live on in the effects that they’ve had on the identity of my friend. And yeah, so it doesn’t surprise me at all that someone’s death doesn’t change that.
Tiffany: Yeah, for sure. That’s really complicated within me. If you haven’t picked up, you know, I caught a lot of good and bad from my dad – values, behavior patterns, traumas, life experience. But the thing I’m working on reframing is that that happened, and I dealt with it, and this is how I dealt with it, and I’m here now. That sort of framing. But I definitely react more like I’m still living with the consequences of that time and that era, and what he did to me. And it can make it feel like he precipitated all the bad things that are still in my life. And there’s some truth to that, you know? I internalized and learned these things from him, and I was financially dependent on him until I was 32. He’s set me up for that sort of thing, but that doesn’t have to determine the rest of my life. But he left his mark. And I find that hard to wrestle with on basically every psychological level, from based identity, patterns and worldviews, to really high-level ways of looking at myself and the world around me.
Dawn: Yeah, these things are all connected, unfortunately. If we could heal them one layer at a time, it would be easier.
Tiffany: It certainly would. I wonder if I try to do that too hard. I think I unconsciously tried to do that too hard.
Dawn: Yeah, as a software engineer, I get annoyed with how entangled all sorts of parts of my psyche and my body and my socialization, society, my friends and everything is. It’s like, no, I want to fix this one module at a time. Who wrote this stupid spaghetti code where everything is connected in chaotic ways? I kind of get annoyed with some god who doesn’t exist.
Tiffany: You know, so I try to take some beauty out of life like that. I feel we as people, as human beings in our physical, literal “we have these kinds of brains”-ness, as good examples of non-intelligent design. Right? Like, psychologically, I can see some things happen to you, and it’s more like you have the circuitry in your brain that then latches onto it. And some of it’s way more specific, like ADHD and OCD are dysfunctions in different ends of the same chemical feedback loop of attention and task organization. And yet we still handle OCD in large part with psychotherapy, too. You can still retrain that network, but we know the mechanism, even if we don’t know how it precipitates into the rest of our brain very well. And so you end up in this hodgepodge of ways in which the human brain has happened to develop, and ways in which you have happened to develop, and ways in which you’ve happened to conceptualize and internalize that consciously. And let’s take that with software, right? You could apply that to a business that now has a complex workflow. Like, with software, I was DevOps at this place, and one of the things I was instrumental in was bringing their continuous integration, continuous development – their Jenkins system – into a more maintainable and modern state. We moved like two major versions on some things. Because some things had just stuck in some version close to when at the company’s genesis. It wasn’t a very old or a very young company.
Dawn: Oh, I don’t remember if it was just under or just over 10 years old.
Tiffany: But there are also a lot of established things that you don’t want to… you’d rather iterate on in smaller chunks. Like, they were bringing in something from their open source side slowly, because it happened this chunk, this module, happened to be vastly superior, but it didn’t really integrate with the rest of the codebase. So they’re working on that over time. But they didn’t do that with everything, that wasn’t wholesale. So it’s like you have to pick and choose the things you try and tear down almost all at once, and stuff you iterate on.
Dawn: Mmm.
Tiffany: And it’s because of that messy process of who were their early clients? What did they want? What features did they discover they wanted? And then they had their open source branch. And that developed independently. You know, the place I worked for in the last machining job I had, we made blanks for other machine shops, actually. They were measuring tools, they’re called plug gauges and ring gauges. And so those shops were doing precision grinding, which is accurate to single hundred thousandths of an inch. And thus, they could certify the gauge to a single 10,000th of an inch. And they didn’t want to deal with stuff that was larger. They only dealing with stuff that’s between 12 and 24 inches. And then they’ll have specific sets in there. These are the only sizes they deal with, and the only profiles they deal with. But the place I was at was multifaceted and multi-purpose. Being the only manual machinist in the place, I was doing all of the low production and custom orders, or repairing something, fixing somebody else’s fuck up. And so we would be dealing with stuff that was on the order of let’s say 96 thousandths of an inch. You know, so .1 inch is 100 thousandths of an inch. But it really couldn’t be 105 thousandths of an inch, either. It had to be just under 100 thousandths. But then I had to machine something that was 17 and a quarter inches wide. And the production flow for a place like that is very chaotic. They’ll have things they make dozens or hundreds of at a time. And then there’s me, I might make 20 things of similar sizes, but one at a time, two at a time, five at a time. And maybe there’s a ton of ways that company could be optimized. But with something that complex, where do you start? And I was close with my boss, who managed that. He would, like… if he handed me work, somebody had personally emailed, texted, or called him and asked him, “Can you do this, and how much?” And he went personally and found that they did have the material to do it, or gave them a quote on the timeline. And so, if I went and got that material, I didn’t have to do the inventory. It was already done over my head, there was paperwork. So one man was responsible for handling that chaos. I saw that there was definitely a lot of room for improvement, but where do you start?
Dawn: Yeah. Like, this is one environment where I don’t really see the point in having chaos. Like, I would think that in adversarial contexts, it’s useful to have chaos. If a country is internally at war between opposing political factions, then it’s probably useful to have lots of laws and a very small municipal level, then state level, federal laws, and so on, and make everything really complicated. Because if some reckless actor tries out some policy, then it has terrible effects in some small area, and they notice that, and then they can roll it back, and it does not immediately have terrible effects on the whole country. So if people are reckless, and people experiment a lot with dangerous things, then I can see that it’s useful to have a lot of chaos in order to limit the bad effects that these things have. But if the environment is cooperative, and everyone wants to work together, then it’s probably better to not have chaos, because that makes it harder to make changes. So, yeah, I don’t know if this company’s probably collaborative, so less chaos would be better?
Tiffany: Well, the picture I’m trying to paint is that it was at least semi-necessary. There was a better way to do it, but he hadn’t had a skilled manual machinist in a while. And even though a lathe is conceptually similar, it’s just spinning things, and you make tapers and cylinders and holes and stuff, it’s much harder to be good at running a lathe, because you’re kind of going down just the base physics of it. It comes more down to, “Is this thing gonna grab my tool and pull it in, and then ruin the part?” The setups are all about that sort of thing. Because you’re trying to balance the time, and the precision, and the quality. Like, sometimes I needed a precise size, but the part could look ugly, it didn’t matter, they were gonna take enough material off. So I could be very quick. And so I was making a lot of those calls as an individual. And so people who ran a mill, a mill will hold the part on a table, and the table moves around. You end up in two totally different ways of thinking. Mills usually run at much slower speeds, or the sheer momentum of it… I like to call the lathe “the altar of angular momentum.” That thing will turn you into a bloody cinnamon roll at will. You could pull the power in that thing, and the momentum has it still spinning, you know? It’s kind of inherently dangerous. And you have to be smarter than the tool and the material. You have a lot more wiggle room with a mill. And so they would use tools in improper ways, or ways that would work on a mill. It would either give very substandard results, or waste a lot of time, or be dangerous! Like I said, if you have a material like brass, it might want to grab on the flutes of the drill. The flutes of the drill are only meant to give way for the metal chips that are being cut to come out. But brass can smear or fracture into little, tiny chunks, and it’ll grab, and it’ll pull things in. And so he had a lot of people that weren’t great at doing that job, so he needed somebody who was able to do some of that individually, and he didn’t have the headroom to do that.
And then let’s say, if I illustrate the difference between me and one of the CNC lathe operators. It depends. You could have somebody that’s just not stupid, and can learn, can do precision measurements. You set it up, and you cut the thing, and every 5 or 25, whatever the requirement is, you measure, and if it’s a little off, you adjust it, or you check the tool, and you change the cutting bit. And maybe for 2 minutes they could be sweeping up, or they could go on their phone, or they could go through notes, or they could sip their coffee. With a manual lathe, it was a “3-limb, 4-senses” kind of thing. I was smelling whether something was burning, even. I had my foot on the lathe brake. And those are two totally different kinds of workflows. So his effort was to set that up. But then that’s assuming everything always works out perfectly. It never does, right? Imagine material comes late. And he has to try to find some pieces of metal that are close enough, and you can change it. And some person will be like, “Alright, well, this isn’t exactly right, so you’re gonna have to cut out more in the middle.” And that person’s smart, and they’ll change the program. And then somebody’s not! And he either has to get somebody, or himself, he has to make the change for that. And then when they’re done using the off-spec stuff, they have to change it back to what’s normal.
Dawn: What you mentioned a moment ago about adjusting how you cut something, depending on whether it has to be absolutely perfect, or whether it’s more important to be fast, and I know they all take off so much material anyway that it doesn’t have to look good, or all sorts of other variations… I think that is something that I’ve struggled with in the past, because I knew how to make the trade-off, how to get the trade-off right. But then I’d be ashamed that someone sees the imperfect product afterwards, if I don’t have enough time, and then that would often compel me to put in more effort than would have been optimal, given the time constraints. Is that something you’re immune to?
Tiffany: No, I’m not immune to it. I’m a perfectionist, it would stress me the hell out. But maybe I’m better adapted at ultimately rolling with it. I got used to the lathes we had, the kind of stuff we had, the tools we had available to cut with, the type of materials we tended to use, and then also separately internalizing what he expected. I learned over time, like, “This company doesn’t really care. This one does. This one wants it to within 5 thousandths of an inch, and they want the surface to be nice.” And once I got to that point, I would then see the overall goal of whatever comes out that.
Dawn: Is visually and measurably acceptable.
Tiffany: That I could go, “Did I get there without breaking too many things, and did I get there relatively quickly?” That’s how I would view it in that. I would reframe the goal.
Dawn: Yeah, like, you want to be perfectionistic about the trade-off instead of the product or something.
Tiffany: Yeah. The result, you know. At least in my mind, efficiency does have that inherent complexity and nuance. I do want to bring it back, because my whole point here is that of starting with where you’re at, and the deliberateness. So, my boss couldn’t change everything about the workflow of the company at once. But he could change one significant thing at once. Once he got me to the point where I was familiar, he could then focus on things outside of me more. And then maybe introduce new products we do, and go back and forth. And the parallel that has to what we’re talking about is that you become consciously aware. Like, something I’ve struggled with in my growth that I’ve kind of coming to a point where I understand what to do about it now – even if I’m nowhere near where I want to be, I’m comfortable with it – is telling myself to push through something, or making myself do something, or both. Cause I can have a tendency to, whether that’s because of perfectionism or maintaining this idea of peerlessness that I do everything spectacularly, try to force myself to do everything all the time, quickly, perfectly, etc. But the things that set me up to that are useful. So let’s say I need to fix my car today, and it’s cold, and that’s gonna suck, and it’s probably gonna hurt my hands. But you know what? I also need to do my laundry today, and I’m probably gonna spend all the time I have to fix my car if I just keep coming back in and out of the house, trying to warm back up. And there’s gonna be a point where it’s literally hurting my hands being out there in the cold, and I’m just gonna be like, “No, I’m gonna get through it.” And that’s that self-sadism we’ve talked about before. And I will have a tendency to want to feed off of overpowering the emotional or physical pain of something. And like I said, sometimes that can be helpful, but I feed off of it without the deliberate awareness. Without the conscious awareness, and thus the deliberateness of the choice, it’s just a pattern.
Dawn: Hmm. Just… I mean, if that is related to your mom’s conditioning, what was her saying about dishing taking a turn?
Tiffany: The “don’t dish it out if you can’t take it.”
Dawn: Yeah, and you’re proving that you can take it, like by working on your car in the cold?
Tiffany: No, I think that was more her workaholic nature. Like, when she was spanking me, she would spank me with a Teflon mixing spoon so it wouldn’t leave marks. How devilish and disgusting is that? But if I flinched in the middle of it, she would swat me again, because I needed to take the punishment well. I remember when I was 3 years old, I tried to ride a bike, and I fell off and I started crying, and she had no tolerance for my fear. She’s trying to put this strength in me. And those are the kinds of things that conditioned seeing anything in the way of these goals or productivity are just straight-up weakness. Just ignore whatever actual costs to your physical or mental well-being. Just do it. Because the alternative is not acceptable. Because the other one, “don’t dish it out if you can’t take it,” I feel more wraps back onto myself, but starts in the frame of other people. It does wrap back on to myself, because then, one time, I did a bunch of stair climbs in my house. And then the next day or two later, it felt like someone had opened up my calves, and surgically sewn in scalpels. And it was painful to walk, and I got aggravated and impatient over that, and I decided to just walk up the stairs, just about run up the stairs in outright defiance. And in my mind, I’m thinking, “Aha, I’m pushing my body to be stronger. It will be harder to knock me down. It will be harder to stop me.” And so there is totally things where I think of improving my ability to dish things out, to always being the strongest person in a conflict. But I feel like that more wrapped back onto myself.
Dawn: Yeah. Like, I would imagine that this also ties in with the teleological non-mentalizing, that when your mom conditions you to suppress feelings of hurt, feelings of needing support, needing reassurance, whatever it was you might have experienced when you fell with the bike, for example – that if she conditions you to suppress those, that they like vanish or something. Like, she’s probably not aware that they just get pushed down, or the person develops some maladaptive coping mechanisms. But if she can’t see it, then it’s not there. Similarly, you’re probably trying the same on yourself. But I don’t know if it’s working. I have one friend who actually says that it’s working, she has very high pain tolerance as a result, but others are probably just fooling themselves.
Tiffany: Like I said, I think it’s somewhere in between. I do have a high pain tolerance as a result, but I still have scars from my foolishness. This was because I just negligently decided to not prepare to torch a suspension part out of a car, and a blob of boiling, flaming, exploding urethane rubber landed on my arm and put a hole in it. And I could have just put on one of my welding jackets. I had two welding jackets I could have put on, and I just didn’t at first. And that was definitely from the pattern of just, “I don’t need to take precautions, I’ll just tough through it and make it happen faster, instead of being weaker.” So I’ve had to reevaluate that, right? But there’s totally advantages. I’m not gonna continue to work on my car until I have frostbite and get gangrene or something. And I’m not going to do that every day and then make myself miserable. But today? Today, that is useful. Today and in this way, that is useful to feed off… to enjoy the pushing through the pain.
Dawn: Yeah, of course, all of these adaptations are sometimes useful. Some people get tattoos to remind them of important life lessons, and in a way, you have scars to achieve the same.
Tiffany: I don’t know if I told you about this one. That one’s harder to show up.
Dawn: Which one?
Tiffany: This one.
Dawn: Is it horizontal?
Tiffany: Yeah, it’s vertical. So, my friend Ed and I broke into an abandoned coal mine, and somebody had come with an angle grinder, and it cut through like 98% of this one bar that was removable, but it was locked. There was a lock on it, so I was cutting straight through the bar, and all I had was my Swiss Army knife that had a shitty metal saw on it. It took us two times of going there, but I had to just push through the misery, the no energy, the having eaten poor that day, the cold and the rain. Every single thing. And I got through that motherfucker. And so, this scar feels like victory.
Dawn: Yeah, cool. A friend of mine also has a bunch of scars and has cool stories attached to each. One of the stories is a bit boring, so I came up with a fictional story, but apparently she doesn’t want to tell lies about her scars, okay? No, I get that, because they feel real.
Tiffany: It feels really real. I did something I cared about in my life, I physically did something. I cut this metal bar, I finished cutting this metal bar in half. And I had to overcome my own physical limitations to do it. And it just feels incredibly real.
Dawn: Yeah, interesting. I also wonder, with all the stuff that you’ve gone through with your dad that was connected to cars, how did you manage to not develop some kind of PTSD related to cars, mechanical work, anything that’s related to that?
Tiffany: I sorta did, I think it was just easier to get through, because I still love cars. Because that turned into resentment. And I think that was my defense, and I was able to process that in a more healthy way later, without it turning into just pure trauma. Like, it felt like my dad had ruined one of my passions for me. And so being angry at him over it allowed me to push the processing off until I could do something better about it.
Dawn: So you use the same defiance that you use when your legs hurt, to push through the PTSD, and then probably have the exposure that actually heals?
Tiffany: I do that, I do that with a lot of things. Like, remember we were talking about anxiety over perfectionism, and I did at that machining job at first, but I am a little too comfortable with making myself do things I’m uncomfortable with. But like you said, just like that example, if it’s with the right mindset, it IS exposure therapy, and it can actually just be directly beneficial. So it’s dependent. Yeah, like, no one was gonna tell me I’m not gonna work on my car or the cars friends I do want to work on, but I did start putting up barriers between people. Like saying, no, I’m not gonna just casually… I try not to work on cars for money. I only try to work out it out of joy, or out of contributing to a specific friend or the community. Like, we do this thing called Pullover Prevention. And I take joy in that. And I finally get to be around a lot of gearheads. And that’s lovely. But let’s say Riley’s car. The other night, I finally got up off my ass, and I replaced their one headlight, and it was difficult, it was in a difficult spot, and it was cold. And it was dark, and I just pushed through, pushed through it, because I owed it to them, and I just wanted to get it over with.
Dawn: Yeah, I wonder whether we wanna switch to the second section, the questions that you suggested. Particularly, you mentioned that you have an identity crisis between the person you were before you, like, your soul was broken? And who you’ve become. And I wonder whether you can walk me through the different versions of you? And maybe also at what ages you transitioned between these different versions?
Tiffany: Yeah, okay, so, the first major change is when we moved from Texas to Pennsylvania, and then it was middle school, really, because of the emotional support special ed teacher. She was enabled by the corruption of the system to be abusive to both myself and all the children, and also the therapist that would accompany the kids. TSS’s, therapeutic support staff. And to an extreme, there was… I had found out some of the therapists had tried to get her in trouble, and they ended up blackballed from the industry. So it was sick and disgusting. But a lot of things happened then, too. My mother cheated on my father, and gave birth to my brother. And so that falling out was happening at the same time. So I was having to be kind of a different kind of person in the presence of my father and my mother. And then I was learning an entirely new hypervigilance at school. I was finally getting put back in some normal classes in middle school, and I remember this one time. I was just sitting there, I had this obsession with sharpening this bag of a hundred-some fucking pencils I had, and I was just sharpening a pencil, and I didn’t realize I wasn’t listening to what this teacher said, and he came over, and within inches of my face, screamed at me. And I just shocked me absolutely loose.
And between that and stuff I could expose to this teacher… When I tried to tell on her, I’m not gonna kill myself over trying to find less childlike language. I don’t wanna go through that emotional work right now. When I tried to tell on her, I used the wrong phrase not knowing, and it got construed as a different kind of misconduct on her part. And I had to explain 6 or 7 times to different people in my professional support system of, like, “Why did you say that?” “Because I didn’t know.” “Why did you say it if you didn’t know?” “Because I didn’t know that I didn’t know.” And no matter how hard I begged them to just trust everybody else’s story on it. In that example, I found out that the only thing I could have done was lie. And I had grown up Christian, and I was very against lying. And I was really too young to… I really went from a vague sense of, “Alright, the institution’s not perfect, but enough of the people in it are good enough that it’s okay,” to the institution being actively malicious. Or the rest of the institution enabling one actively malicious person that was highly in control of my life. Just having that institutional faith completely 180’d was damaging. Having seeing my parents blame each other for this and that, and losing some faith in them. And then learning this new kind of hypervigilance. That was a major change, and that happens when you first start to try to form an identity. And I was trying to fit in, too.
The next major change, I’m gonna try and make this story not long. I was on the 6th day of a 10-day diarrhea episode. And I needed to go to the hospital. I was about to go to bed, and I was just struck with the thought of, like, “I’m having more and more trouble getting up each morning, and my dad is away at work all day. Am I gonna wake up dead? Am I not gonna be able to do this? And am I gonna dehydrate and malnourish myself to death?” And it was the end of the world having that conversation with my father. He had this arbitrary rule – I felt it wasn’t totally arbitrary up until that point – but it was this arbitrary rule of I was not allowed to drive after 10. And so, since he maintained that rule, I couldn’t drive myself, so he had to martyr himself and drive me. He had this very uncomfortable customer’s car he was driving for two reasons. He had his car in the shop, and this car did need some miles put on it to try to test drive something, to get some issue to manifest. And he would not be able to rest in that while waiting in the hospital parking lot. He’s just blaming that all on me and making it my problem. And what really cut me to the core was he said, “Alright, well, no Porsche.” We had this shitty, rusty 1984 Porsche 944. They’re the poor man’s Porsche, they’re not that well built or designed of a car to begin with. It wasn’t that special, just because it was a Porsche. But it was cool, it was fun! But he said, “Fine, no more Porsche,” and I wanted to say, “Fine, I hope it lights on fire and burns your shop down. Fine. Never involve me with car things again. I don’t want a car from you. I won’t even touch your car. If you have to bring me somewhere. Car-sonas are done.”
And it just being the end of the world of something that might have killed me. I found out that there was some genuine risk there. There’s a point where your kidneys can shut down, and the only way to get things to restart is an IV. Right? Your body’s regulation system for taking in moisture is broken. I took in a full IV bag. And over 6 hours, I didn’t have to go to the bathroom once, I was so dehydrated. And I don’t know that it was there, but I was in genuine danger of being in that sort of zone where I was not recoverable without going to the hospital. And that broke my heart. He was my Superman. That shattered me. And the kind of person I was really changed. How I would handle that now is, in advance knowing this kind of thing, I’d already have the keys to the car in my pocket and be ready to belt down the steps. Either to take the car anyway, or to push the issue. To antisocially, aggressively, push the issue of, “I’m gonna fucking do it anyway, so figure out how you’re gonna handle that, and do it right the fuck now.” And I’m not giving you an option. That really broke my faith in how good faith I could be with my father, and I realized the only way to get through that was to consider whether and how and why I would need to be conniving ahead of time, to upwards over my own physical body safety and life. And it also broke me in that that means I can never make him happy enough with me that it’ll set me free, kinda, that I may have to do anything. Things I don’t agree with, that go against my morals or my values. I may have to completely forget entire goals and paths I have in life, and focus on leaving. If I have the fortune, maybe I can combine them, but I need to consider subverting. And at least temporarily throwing out, possibly, anything at all I had held onto.
Tiffany: I had an understanding of how other people were gonna handle this. I had no recourse. I couldn’t do anything about it. I found out later in life my dad thought she was just this teacher I didn’t like, and my mom was complicit! She helped enforce some of the shit, because she didn’t know exactly all the things the teacher was doing. But I was afraid to say, because some of the times I said things, it came back to haunt me. Not directly from my mother, but maybe my mother would talk to some of the other people in my support staff, and it would get misconstrued.
Dawn: Gosh.
Tiffany: Yeah, those are the 3 big… I guess that’s 5. But yeah, 3 people, 3 periods, chipping away at the faith I thought I could place in people.
Dawn: Yeah… it’s like… I think sort of the good enough parent, especially when the child is sick, pays close attention, and comforts the child, and cares for them, makes sure that they’re always there, they always have enough to eat and enough to drink, and especially when eating is difficult and the appetite’s low. Tries to make special food that is particularly easy to eat.
Tiffany: That’s a really good example of projection. She grew up really poor, and wanted me to be grateful for the food we have, and she enforced that quite directly. She would, as early as 3 or 4, she would swat me with that spoon, and then shove food in my screaming mouth to force-feed me. So, quite the opposite of that, an extreme version of the opposite. Needing her to be that was not tolerated.
Dawn: Hmm… Yeah, seems like the exact opposite of a good enough parent. Did you also take on her expect… Like, when she accused you of crocodile tears, did you take that on, or were you like, “No, that’s bullshit,” and I have no way to prove it?
Tiffany: Yeah, I knew it was bullshit, and I had no way to prove it. It taught me more the lesson of, “My pain and suffering will garner no respect or sympathy at all, and I have to get that support and care another way. Perhaps manipulatively.”
Dawn: Yeah, I suppose that’s also the difference between, I don’t know, maybe standard NPD or some other personality disorders, and probably something more sovereignism-flavored. That some people would probably take this on and be like, “Oh, apparently I am evil, apparently I am so bad, and shameful, and so manipulative,” and then they would try hard to be a different person or something, and feel bad about themselves, and hide this part of themselves that doesn’t actually exist, and build up a lot of core shame around that. And you instead… you kind of knew who you are already to some extent, you just didn’t have a way of existing.
Tiffany: Yeah, well, the way I internalized it was, I guess I took it as more like I wasn’t good enough at being the good kid at behaving and controlling myself well enough, right? And I, at that point, identified already with trying to be in control of myself. My mom had been setting the seeds for that pretty early. And no, that is… the thing is, some of that is at odds with my deeper self. I want to be more free-spirited. Even if, as an adult, I like taking on the value of self-determination. But I want it to play nice with my free-spirited nature, I want it to enable that, or just come out in places it makes more sense, like a career. Or deciding the buck stops with me on my car being fixed today, kind of thing. So instead, I internalized these things in a good way that was unhealthy. I internalized these things and viewed them as good, but it was unhealthy for me. I think that’s something you were getting at before, but it’s kind of hard for me to contextualize some of that really early stuff.
Dawn: Hmm… Yeah, I’m trying to… generally, when I see all of these different adaptations in people, I’m like… They’re useful for some things, they’re kind of mostly not useful in the given situation that the person is in. But I want to, in particular, have the freedom to move between them as the situation requires, and not be locked into one particular pattern, or to misinterpret the situation and then pick the wrong pattern.
Tiffany: Yeah, I mean, isn’t that the core issue with it being a personality disorder – the rigidity, right? If you don’t have that rigidity, it’s not a personality disorder, it’s in the neurotic realm. You know, it’s more situational. It’s more from emotional reactivity. It doesn’t necessarily splash damage your entire life.
Dawn: Yeah, like, one friend of mine would be the perfect soldier or something, or the perfect spy or something of the sort, but the country’s not at war! There is no war! It’s just…
Tiffany: Yeah, yeah. There’s a trope in ASPD-coded characters, and it mirrors something in myself and mirrors some characters a friend has written from having experience with people with personality disorders. And, and to a lesser degree, some people I know that only have NPD of this hypercompetence. And in general, I like, you know… “If I’m good at my job, I can manage all these other things in my life, and I have less to worry about.” And then that allows one to sidestep other emotional needs. In two ways, because the other way is gaining something emotionally from having that control and that hypercompetence. But it’s also avoidant, you know? My one friend, he wrote a story of this non-binary character that was a hyper-competent, excellent soldier. And since they’ve poured themselves entirely into that life, you know, they don’t necessarily have a big life outside of that. They don’t have to care about all of those deeper holes in themselves than those other struggles. And I’ve been guilty of that. Focusing on my competency and my success in a career, at my job. Or in my ability to maintain a household, or whatever. And then that’s sucking up my whole life. The difference is, I would still be driven nuts, and lonely, and bored and shit, but it still functioned in an avoidant way.
Dawn: Yeah, I think this is sort of where I draw the line between tiers 1 and 2 in my narcissistic spectrum system. Where people at Tier 1 have mostly borderline traits, and sometimes they find a little bit of something that they’re good at to latch onto, to build a false self to hide behind or hide within, but that only lasts for a couple weeks, or maybe a year or so, because they can never find something that they’re just stably that good at that they can keep it up. Whereas in Tier 2, the person has found something that they are stably good at, like this soldier, for example, so that they can actually hide in that shell permanently for maybe their whole lives.
Tiffany: Or at least semi-permanently, right? I did that with being… that was part of my man mask, my male persona. Mechanical hypercompetency. With being a mechanic, and then a machinist. And that’s a way transition started to make me look at myself, and especially how I was treated in those environments. Machine shops are astonishingly culturally stagnant. Really weird. To be in 2023 and be in a place where you encounter the 80s flavor of homophobia? And just not feeling like I fit in a place like that, and that feeling to start to happen, and going, “I need to find a different path.” That’s why I’ve pivoted to trying to have a career in sales, for a variety of reasons. But for a long time, I was able to lean on that. I was able to fix everything in my house, I was able to fix everything in my life, I was able to always make money fixing or making something.
Dawn: Hmm… Yeah, cool. I mean, you already touched on that when you mentioned that you want to become, or want to be more free-spirited, but, in general, who do you want to be? Why do you want to be that person?
Tiffany: Two things, I guess there’s two big, broad directions. One is embodying my creativity. And the other, I would say, is embodying my playfulness. With creativity, I would ultimately like to be an inventor. Like, my longer-term goal, if I get a decent sales job, I could finance building my own little machine and fabrication shop. And then this is now an example of both. I would then finance that shop by being a job shop, taking on individual things that companies would contract me to. I would like to use that to invent things, but I’d also like to make it a space, especially for queer people, but not exclusively. Just… there’s not a good environment for people to enter the skilled trades, and there hasn’t been for a long time, as much due to how our current flavor of capitalism works, you know? No company wants to put in the time to have one of their old heads teach the new person. And lingering attitudes from that, from these people not naturally wanting to teach, and being too wrapped up in their pride, and not wanting to share any of that hard-won knowledge. And see, like, even if you’re very macho and masculine, right, it’s still not a good environment for that. And then if you’re not macho and masculine, but someone’s willing to teach you, it’s also not a good environment for that. And it’s not even that people will be like that in that environment. It’s exclusively that. It can often be the only tolerated attitude, because it’ll be how a lot of toxically masculine men judge competency through proxy of how you project your confidence. How they judge trustworthiness. And so I’d like to be able to give that back.
I know more than one person, I know two people personally who have the aspiration, locally, of building a garage that people can come and use the facilities. There’s precedence for that. There was this PBS radio show called Click and Clack, Car Talk. And earlier in their life, they made a shop that was like that. And it didn’t make them much money, and that wasn’t the goal. They were enjoying helping people work on their cars by their… there’s now a shop available, and now there’s experts that can keep them from making basic mistakes or teaching them the finer things. But with some of this less service-oriented skilled labor of these trades, there’s really nothing for that. With making something, with welding, machining, sheet metal work, fabrication. There’s nowhere to go but just buy some stuff and go on YouTube, and you can do that with a welder, and you can do that with maybe a small sheet metal bender. But a cheap lathe is thousands of dollars if you buy a lathe big enough to actually make something. You can buy baby lathes that are hundreds or a little over a grand. But you know, you’re not gonna make anything that’s bigger than an inch and a half wide, and a few inches long. Your project space, it could never be more than an addition to something else. It would be very hard to really make a bunch of components for something. Or contribute to something, like make something from a vintage car, or a vintage appliance, a vintage whatever. If it’s any longer than a certain length, or any wider than a certain width. You can’t make that part, and you can’t contribute back, and makers alike have those kinds of interests and passions, right? A lot of makers are just like, “Wow, I just wish I had a lathe.” And I would like to have it both for myself and other people.
But I also… I’m still trying to flesh out how I want to embody my playfulness. Some of that comes out in just socially carousing. And the personas I deliberately project, very much more deliberate nowadays. The outfits I pick, the kinds of get-togethers I try to make happen. You know, it’s pretty deliberately coordinated. One of the things I want there is I want to try to dare somebody to be their most themself they can be. And learn to dare themselves to be that. Like, you know, when I give you my wisdom. That’s genuinely what I hope. I hope that you internalize it not only as one individual way of looking at things, but as a whole attitude of seeing the ways that either passive or active cruelty of, let’s say, capitalism or social constructs can witness upon us. To defy that as much as yourself right.
Dawn: And a more abstract version of that is…
Tiffany: I meet a lot of queers that are… not even as queers, I meet a lot of people that are worried about taking those first social steps. Because they’re worried about making the other person uncomfortable, and I’m like… “That other person is also worried about making you uncomfortable.” You are both anxious about the exact same thing at once, and if you have that awareness, you can help that other person through that anxiousness and yourself the same time, and unlock that. And also be more each other and together than you could otherwise. And that’s just from how we are as humans, and how the kinds of traumas we’ve gotten from the kind of society we’re in. In my view, it does still come back to society. Like, there’s aspects of that in some Asian cultures, you know, the trope where the American kid with Asian parents can’t come home with anything less than an A on their report card. Then a near-perfect score, and they internalize that shame in a certain way. So there’s different cultures that emphasize different aspects of this, and so we are unintentionally reinforcing that upon ourselves. Individually and collectively. And I think this is something that at least my approach is to give the person the power to overcome it in their own individual self and help one other person overcome it in their individual self. And that’s one of the aspects of my free-spiritedness, that I can just see that kind of thing happening, where we unintentionally limit ourselves. And hurt ourselves, and hold ourselves back. Just from the confluence of all of these things.
Dawn: Yeah, definitely. Like, I have definitely, in the past, been very inspired by people exactly in the way that you mentioned, and you’ve also been inspiring for me in exactly that way. That… I can confirm that that’s extremely helpful.
Tiffany: Thank you.
Dawn: How much more energy do you have for more questions?
Tiffany: For now, plenty. I know we don’t want to go on for literally ever, but plenty. Seems like you’re in the mood.
Dawn: Yeah, so the next one would actually be, I think you’ve touched on this a bit, about different personas. You have these nice names for them: Muse of Neon, Mistress of Machine, and what’s the third called? Faye of Misadventure? What’s the pronunciation?
Tiffany: Yeah, something like that.
Dawn: Do they correspond to, like, who are they? What do they represent?
Tiffany: So I have 3 core aspects of my most disavowed self, or parts of myself that I didn’t feel comfortable expressing in a feminine way. And they’re my playfulness, my creativity… I always forget a third one. I’m gonna go get my notes, cause I always forget it. Oh, it’s on file.
Dawn: April has a cool AI-generated script photo for this.
Tiffany: Oh man, I get why she would, too. Curiosity.
Dawn: Oh, yeah, that’s one. That I definitely resonate with.
Tiffany: Yeah, and so let’s say, the Muse of Neon is that social persona of… and they’re basically each two of these three things at once. And the actively social persona. And I would say that’s playfulness and creativity. Creativity with your appearance, or what you want to do with people. And just being playful in how you’re a person with other people.
Mistress of Machine is creativity and curiosity, trying to… You know Bill Nye was that, right? Like that kind of thing, but for more hands-on stuff. Like, an aspect of that is calling a lathe the “altar of angular momentum.” And I have a very… it’s very… I’m not a spiritual person, but it hits that part of me. It feels very spiritual to me. Like, machine tools, I view them as true meta tools. They’re built to modify themselves, and they’re built to make parts for themselves, to make other parts for other things. So, like, if you… the way this comes out in a practical sense, even in this big, giant machine. It was 5 feet, so 2.8 meters wide. 60 inch chuck on it. That could spin hundreds of times a minute, and big enough that it’s two big doors, and you walk in it, and you can sit down on it. Even that had a prescribed way to disable every safety on the machine in case you have to do something outside of the usual. And there were examples that we needed to do that. There was one permanent example where the door alarm was permanently disabled. Because there’s stuff when you’re doing it slower, or you’re just touching the tool off gently, seeing the number on it to make the measurement of, like, “this is my relative zero.” You know, not my literal zero at the bottom of the machine, but this is like, I will count zero downwards from here into the negative. And stuff like that, like, no, you have to have it open, and look at it. And it was also a weird new machine for the company, and they were diagnosing all sorts of problems. And you need to just be able to open the door and look at what you’re doing, or maybe even touch what you’re doing. And another one is we bought a 4-jaw chuck. A 3-jaw chuck, typically, all 3 jaws will go in and out simultaneously. On a manual machine, you do it with this key a turn. A four-jaw chuck, they’re independent. And either you can get it very precisely deadnut-centered, or you could make it offset and do weird things. And so we modified one of those to go on top of the other chuck. And bolt it down for when we needed that. So, we basically had to turn the chuck underneath of it off, and we had to go outside of the bounds of where the machine thought it was normally allowed to cut, that it would alarm out and say, “No, you’re about to make a mistake.” “No, I’m not, I’m the boss, you’re the tool.” And all machine tools have this in common because they’re the machines that build the machines that build the machines. And that’s the kind of thing I like to embody, this, like, “Isn’t that frickin’ magical?”
And the reason I then thus split this off into 3 pairs of two of these aspects is my least embodied part, the Fae of Misadventure is playfulness and creativity. Let’s say in a practical sense of doing something like… I don’t know why, but my first thought is doing redneck dumb shit and blowing stuff up, but it can be more sophisticated than that. Maybe building something truly for the fun of it. Not just having fun fixing something. Or let’s say I wanted to write a novel. Just to get some of my emotions out. But just having fun with it. It doesn’t matter if it does or never does reach somebody else. Just be playfully creative. And then the name, also, I try to… I want to embody… the name is a synthesis between the inner and outer, and how to embody that in other people. Because sometimes, in a non-malicious way, it’s fun to fuck with people, or create interesting scenarios. You know, there’s pranks you could do to somebody. Like, one time, I was at that person I’m no longer friends with house, when he still lived in Pennsylvania. And I had this vial of dissolved LSD, and I was microdosed just enough to just be a little ridiculous. And I rotated a bunch of the furniture in the house. And this did have a positive chaos aspect that it caused the… some of the things, they just kept it that way. It turned out to be better.
Dawn: Well, all the 3 different people in the house thought another person did it. Rotated in what way? Like, upside down? Like, shelves?
Tiffany: No, like, the kitchen table, I rotated 90 degrees, and it stopped being as big of a… they had this one carpet in there. It was a big pain in the ass, and now you could walk around the table easier, and it fucked with the carpet less, and moved a bunch of little shit around. And it’s harmless, and it’s funny, and it gives somebody a puzzle about, or laugh at. But there also turned out to just be practical, like, “I don’t know why we never did that before! Who did that?”
Dawn: Yeah, I love it.
Tiffany: I’m always afraid of getting carried away with stuff like that. For a ton of different reasons, in a ton of different ways. And my fear of myself I guess is what holds me back from that. Like, one aspect of that would be, like, “Let’s just climb this thing.” Out in Ypsilanti, there’s this, it’s called Frog Park, I think. And there’s this causeway, this pathway over the water. But where it intersects, these three of them intersect. The bridge would be two, right? Kind of making up a word. These three pathways meet up in the middle, but underneath, near where they intersect, is this island. Actual Frog Island, this little tiny island. And I could probably get down there, and if I’m wearing the right footwear. And if I can’t find a way to get back up, the water’s shallow enough I could probably get back out. But I’m just like, “Let’s just do that.” And there’s impulse that’s verging on the like, “That’s kinda dangerous, Tiffany, or at least go there with a plan, and the right footwear while wearing shorts in the summer.” You know, because there’s ways for it to work out right. There were two ways that I get down there, and then some of the trees were dead, and I could probably climb up one and get back on. But I need a Plan B. And that urge within me wants to go. If you sit there worrying about Plan B, it’s just not gonna happen. And let’s say with that friend’s house, maybe I would have… I had to talk myself out of not flipping where the washer and dryer were, and I was starting to get into problematic things to fuck with in their house.
Dawn: Did you visit the Frog Island now, or didn’t you?
Tiffany: Not yet, because I’ve just lived far away from there.
Dawn: Aww.
Tiffany: So I gotta wait till spring, that’s okay.
Dawn: Yeah, okay, let me know what to do, please take photos.
Tiffany: Okay, I will. And so some of that’s daring myself, right? To be more me. The girl that climbs trees. Right?
Dawn: I do.
Tiffany: Yeah, exactly! But I’ll hold myself back from that, being like, “Oh, that’s not normal. That’ll put people off.”
Dawn: No, I even walk on the wall.
Tiffany: Yeah. I mean, that can be weird hanging out with some people, but it’s like, I shouldn’t totally limit myself, and some of those things are more socially acceptable when you kinda just do it, and you’re not too weird about it. People are less worried, or they’re like, “What are you doing?” It’s like, “Oh, it’s okay, I’m having fun.” And they realize there’s somebody they can’t contain. I’ve never said it like that. Somebody they can’t contain.
Dawn: I know, for me it has a bit of a histrionic flavor. Like, there was this university commons outside, and there are hundreds of students eating there, and I was looking for some folks, and I noticed there was a wall that started at a staircase. That staircase was going down, so I could just step onto the wall, and then walk around on that wall. At some point it was 2 meters high. Walk around that wall, have a good overview of everything, and could look for those friends of mine. And then I realized it’s actually really cool to be the only person in my bright neon-colored clothing who’s walking on this wall in between all of the people who are eating, and everyone looked up to me and was wondering what I’m doing there.
Tiffany: Oh, man, I get that feeling, too, when I do badass things a girl doesn’t normally do. Either from my strength, or my skill, or even just my assertiveness and social confidence. That still feels more narcissistic to me most of the time, but there’s also this more mischievous part of me. And I think this is a helpful time to differentiate between the narcissistic and histrionic flavors. I guess in a more histrionic flavor, I’ve limited myself from doing it in a more histrionically flavored and playful way by always tying it to my ego. You know, so those are… I think that’s pretty complete. I have subversions of those identities or whatever, but they’re just all for different scenarios.
Dawn: Hmm. When you’re talking about alters, or OSDD, and different parts, emotional parts, or apparently normal parts, do those correspond to those personas, or are these personas new ones that you’re trying to cultivate, whereas you have some other parts still around, or were until recently?
Tiffany: We have both going on. Those personas are… I synthesized those personas as a way to have more awareness and control – not necessarily control, but to be more deliberate. And again, to try to remind myself in times like that to embody my deeper self. And to bring that out over time. And to explore those parts about myself more deeply. But, now, I used to have DID, I had 7 alters, 7 headmates. But nowadays, it’s mostly just child versus parent. I want to take a little tangent. We do have a development thing that, before we get into a full adult mode of thinking, that we do default to child versus parent, parent versus child. And then I read that the child mode can have a kind of helpless or rebellious mode. But my child and parent, they also line up with… Oh yeah, my point is, though, that those are things that are happening that have kind of slotted into how my brain would want to try to deal with those kinds of things. In this big, bird’s-eye picture view, yeah, it can be technically more complex than that, but our brains have this way of doing it, and it has slotted itself in, and so it is thus helpful to think of it like this. At least to understand it at first. Anyway, my child and parent also will line up with victim and abuser, persecuted and abuser. And that’ll come out with my identity crises, like we talked about before. When I’m not a little more organized, I will oscillate between trying to do better in one way with all the control, like how my parents try to treat me. And then I’ll feel like, “Oh no, I became too like my parents again!” And either flip into this helpless, self-pity state, or this rebellious state. And so I’m basically… I have unintentionally slotted the ways in which I’ve unintentionally become like my parents into one of those halves. And as part of my difficulty with self-acceptance. So when I’m more down and out about the things I’ve picked up from my parents and how they can come out in these extremes and negatives, and I’ll be really focusing on my innocence that I’ve lost. You know, all because I did something wrong to somebody, and I’m reflexively hating myself. Hating that whole portion of myself. And I will tend to lose a lot of the positive aspects, like the self-determination. And it’ll flip around. When I’m more in that parent mode, I’ll have that self-determination and whatever, but I can maybe take things too far on myself or another person, and then the cycle continues. And sometimes it can split off a little heavier. Cause I can get… It can almost feel like age-regressing. I’ll feel like a little freaking helpless child, scared of everything in the world, because my parents didn’t help me face the world. They forced me to face the world. And that’ll come out, and it’ll feel like this little kid just wearing an adult shell. And the truth that they matter is, it’s none of these extremes. I have some emotions, or some emotions in some situations that are totally toddler grade in their development. Or I can get into a very toddler-grade level of emotional maturity with some things. But that’s not universally true, but in those moments, it’ll feel like it. It’ll feel like those extremes.
Dawn: Yeah, does it feel like when you’re in the parent mode that… I know there is some part of you that’s picked up a maladaptive way of being a parent from your parents, and then you’re trying to be that kind of person, that kind of maladaptive parent for yourself in that mode, whereas in the other mode, you’re actually the child.
Tiffany: Yeah, I get what you mean. Well, it’ll be reactive. Like, or I’ll be wanting to not be that. I guess it can go either way. Like, I’ll have done something that I would view as irresponsible, and then reactively go into the parent mode to try and compensate for it. And I noticed this also reflects my poorly developed system of connection. Of only ever really feeling like people are seeing me as a competent adult or an incompetent child, and then having trouble seeing other people as anything other than either of the two. And that’s been another specific thing I’ve been working on, because with that realization, I can have just the simple “I want to be a better friend to myself,” and there’s a ton of nuance there, because I can have the open question of “What do I want that to be and why?” Etc. And I’m really happy that that has a really simple reframing that allows the flexible nuance, and can contain a lot of unknowns and a lot of uncertainty.
Dawn: Yeah, like, there’s also parenting books, for example Unconditional Parenting, can convey an idea of what a good enough parent is like. And then there could be being a good enough parent for oneself. Or for the child, for example, to replace the maladaptive parent mode.
Tiffany: Yeah, well, I feel like I’m trying to move away from being so specific of that, because I’ve found my brain doesn’t have a good way of seeing anything other than that. Like, I totally took the lessons from CPTSD work of re-parenting. But in order to really redefine in my mind what reparenting myself is in a broader sense than that, I’ve had to go beyond the bounds of that scope, and change that and go, “I want to be a better friend to myself.”
Dawn: What was the acronym you just used, CB?
Tiffany: CPTSD.
Dawn: Okay. I misunderstood it. Did there used to be only those two, like the child mode and the parent mode? Like, when you say that the parent mode is something that you entered into reactively, then you must have been in some kind of state, then the thing happened, and you entered into the parent mode. So that implies that there are two modes.
Tiffany: Yeah, no, no, there’s the three modes, because the child mode, I could feel rebellious or helpless. But broadly, parent-child. No, I didn’t really have a default there. Cuz before my recovery started, and earlier on, the two ways I express that, one mirrors more nowadays, where I’m trying to imbue that fun, or helpful, or releasing chaos. And then the other one was taking responsibility for everything, you know, the self-determination and the hyper-competence stuff. So those are still broadly still there. That’s something I’m actively working on. Even if I’m not in an emotional extreme, it really… like, when you go “big hug,” right? My emotional reaction, instead of just taking that in, my first reaction was, “What are you pitying me? Why? Like your parent looking down on me.” And it really stymies a lot of connection, even now. So, like, right now, a lot of it isn’t super relevant. But it still gets in the way of core connection.
Dawn: Yeah… I’ve asked friends about this before, if they have these strong, negative reactions to any kind of warmth that has shown them? Because otherwise they feel pitied, as if the other person sees them as weak or something.
Tiffany: It gives me that kind of anxiety of, like, “What did I do? What did I do that would cause you to ask me if I’m okay?” You know, I don’t have a really good solution for that yet at all. Not everybody reacts not well, but just not helpfully. They don’t know what to do with “What did I do wrong that made you say that?” But some of that’s because that’s the only way I have right now of moderating how much vulnerability I have in a situation. To ease into people. When people start giving me all that comfort. Because it can be for their own reassurance, they’re worried they hurt me. And you know, I have this very specific way of managing my own emotions. And so then I have to start answering about how I feel before I’m really ready. And then if I don’t want to do that, I don’t know much what to do outside of trying to preempt or control the person’s reaction to it. I really don’t have a lot of nuance or depth for this yet.
Dawn: Yeah, with friends, you can agree on certain codes or something to describe this in a few words. What’s going on? I suppose I can observe that sometimes there are certain cues that I can guess at what state you’re in, and then I react exactly like you said, ask you how you’re doing, and then if you’re not ready yet to reflect on that, you could tell me in a few words that I can understand.
Tiffany: Yeah… Yeah, and then I let myself expound upon it later, because some of it’s just strong emotions, or makes a ton of different things pop up in my head at once, and I just… It just needs a little bit, even if I keep talking. And that does vaguely mesh with an adult way of socializing. But it doesn’t work with certain other personality types.
Dawn: Hmm… Yeah, I have a lot less going on, usually, emotionally. So I suppose for me it’s not intuitive to anticipate that someone else has a lot going on in certain situations, where the same situation would be very few emotions for me.
Tiffany: Gosh, my one friend who was really bad about it at first. The way she expressed it like that, she’s just like, “I never met somebody that it’s okay to be on the inside of them.” And I’m like, “Actually, no, it’s really bad to be on the inside of me, but I know what to do about it. And don’t make me let it out before I’m ready.” And so that’s not an easy thing to answer in her limited viewpoint, either. It’s really… I really have a hard time understanding not how somebody could get that there are people like that in this world, but how that could become such a strong expectation that it is so likely that it is dangerous to let someone fall into themself.
Dawn: What is her viewpoint? I didn’t understand it.
Tiffany: That she said it as that she hadn’t met somebody that the inside of them is safe. So what she meant by that is that if she has to retreat into herself, she may need help being pulled back out. For a variety of reasons. Whether their turmoil starts and is being held in, or she starts to close off and then doesn’t open those things back up, whatever. But again, my frustration is that with her viewpoint, it also made it hard to explain that it is more nuanced with that in me. It can be a bad place on the inside for me, but I’m just very adept and familiar with it. So I couldn’t say that’s her either. At least I didn’t feel comfortable yet.
Dawn: Hmm. Yeah, I think one of my partners is like the person who can only introspect in therapy sessions, or shortly before therapy sessions, because it’s so overwhelming. And I think for me, everything is harmonious inside, so that is actually a safe place. And then I suppose you just have the skill to work with that, it’s another variation.
Tiffany: Yeah, it could be a safe place inside of me. But it doesn’t have to be.
Dawn: Damn. You mentioned having had 7 alters at one point. Do you remember, can you describe them? Do they have names?
Tiffany: They did. One was my name proper. One was Tiff, one was Jude, one was TJ, one was Cal. TJ became my really young self. It’s hard to remember all of them. I know one was most of the positive aspects of my man persona, one was the interject from my dad, one was the disavowed parts of my femininity. One was a mishmash of things. One thing that was going on was one of them would get split into 5 more. I noticed that there was a different transition between one of these five and one of the other two. And eventually, I noticed one was an amalgam of the other. And then those two big ones, the other one didn’t have any major splits, in a way at all, it was just one half of the major split. No, it’s very hard to remember, I was pretty psychotic and chaotic at the time. You know, I had a lot of identity diffusion, a lot of identity fragmentation, and I was psychotic.
Dawn: Hmm. Was there amnesia between them?
Tiffany: Mostly, no. Not entirely, because it was more sectioning off aspects of my life. Like, if you notice when we’re talking, it takes me a bit to get in the headspace to really think about and contextualize what my mother did to me. And then when I do that, I have to take time to kind of come back out to what my father did to me, because those things have lived in different places of my life. So, yeah, not as much in the immediate life, but through to my deep past, yes.
Dawn: Yeah, were there some that were usually fronting, and some that never fronted, or how does that work?
Tiffany: Yeah, the parts of myself that I could express femininely that had not been disavowed, that fronted the most. The one that was not subdivided fronted plenty. I’m having trouble. Because the one that was the interject of my father came out the least. But yeah, it’s a very hard time for me to put that kind of identity stuff together. I was totally identity soup.
Dawn: Boom. Like, one of them is named Tiff. Did you choose that one in the end, or how did it work?
Tiffany: No, I… in going into myself, I realized I was split into a bunch of different pieces, and realized I had no way of putting all of those together under the banner of my own name. And that was just the one that was closest aligned to who I was becoming.
Dawn: Yeah, so quite different, but sort of post-integration. You just picked up the name again?
Tiffany: Well, yeah, but I think that was pretty inevitable. Yeah, cause I picked my name late 2021, and I realized I had such a fragmented identity early 2022.
Dawn: Yeah, when did you integrate it?
Tiffany: Late 2023 is when I was basically integrated. Like, I could be stressed into fragmenting again. But I was broadly integrated. Like now, I can still be forced to feel all of my fear I’m disavowing all the fucking time and feel like a child. And feel like that little girl again, and terrified. And I guess I’m less disavowing my fear nowadays, and rationalizing around it. But I’m working on that, too. But yeah, this child parent way of things is still there. And there’s still some integration going on.
Dawn: Yeah. Were your parts all broadly on board with the integration, or did that take a lot of negotiation and convincing?
Tiffany: That took a lot of negotiation and convincing. There was overall consensus, but they were more agreed than didn’t, and some disagreed on what, why, and how. And it just came down to, “This isn’t happening unless I use all of the parts of myself, and I’m not healing unless I have all the parts of myself. See? This is why.” And they’re like, “Oh…” So it was just not being able to hold the fact that those things were disavowed and came out sometimes under the banner of myself for a while. Like, I really strongly identified with my man persona. And so transitioning gave me a major freaking identity crisis. And there was just a lot of things that I had buried, or I had convinced myself that this is masculine, and had convinced everybody else somehow. And I even had an initial reaction to that was then being averse to all my masculinity and flipping back between that. And seeing my femininity as weakness, and being averse to it. And stuff like that just fragmented me to pieces. I don’t know, it was pretty inevitable for me to fragment and then come back together, I think.
Dawn: Like, I think HRT also had an interesting, unexpected effect on that.
Tiffany: Yeah. So, I was actually bullied into trying HRT. I went and hung out with this girl. I was on an encrypted group chat with a lot of people, myself and one other egg. But this one girl, she lived in this group home at the border in New Jersey, and I was bored, and I went and drove there. I was near there, I was at my friend’s house in Philadelphia. And I go there, and we do some shenanigans, and so she… I went into one of these modes where I was talking about gender, but not acknowledging that I had feelings about it. And only slightly nicer words, she was just like, “Bitch, shut the fuck up, I have a bottle, try some. I have a bottle of ginger, if you’re so curious.” And my other friend just said, “You know, one won’t do anything.” I’m like, “You’re right.” And so I tried that, and it just started to get my brain chemistry better, and I started to connect with feelings, whether I wanted to or not. And initially, the way that showed is my feelings would resolve more often. Sometimes I would be stuck on something for days or weeks, and so now it could be minutes or hours. But my capacity to connect was still almost not there. And it actually made me much more chaotic and sometimes much more tyrannical and much… It made my outbursts worse, because my feelings were no longer something I was familiar with, and much more intense, even if they were easier to resolve most of the time.
And eventually, it’s like I had my egg crack in HRT. Something like 9 months into HRT, 3 months after I picked my woman’s name, I went, “I have to allow myself to let my femininity to be as important to me as my masculinity, and maybe more important.” And I felt part of myself dying accepting that. It was so weird. It was very hard. But yeah, that’s the kind of realization that normally gets someone to try HRT, but I kind of needed my brain chemistry rebalanced with HRT to get me there. And the acid trip I picked my name on. That have helped push things, if nothing more than committing to a woman’s name and pushing myself into that space where I’ll only be able to deny it for so long, right?
Dawn: Hmm? By pick the name, you mean the complicated spelling?
Tiffany: Yes.
Dawn: Like, heh, okay.
Tiffany: The complicated spelling, and then being like, “Woohoo, secretly, I’m Tiffany.” Yeah, it was very egg mode stuff for being on HRT for 9 months.
Dawn: Oh, cool!
Tiffany: And nowadays, I’m just Tiff or Tiffany. And my true name is for the privileged few, quote unquote, and some of the anonymity that provides.
Dawn: Yeah, cool. Yeah, I can see that I went from extremely shallow emotions, sort of very rarely, a little bit, hardly in touch with them, to, “Oh, I can actually feel things in my body now, and I can distinguish emotions better, that’s so cool,” to some limited access, I think? So, yeah, HRT has had the same effect on me, just on a much lower scale, somehow.
Tiffany: Yeah, it is really interesting. I think it’s just cause I think that’s a part of our personality we have kind of in common of being at some distance with our emotions by default. Not disallowing ourselves from them, but just, like, that’s not where the steering wheel is, but it is where all the most important lights in front of the steering wheel are, you know? Or at least some of them, right? And I definitely tend towards doing it that way. I’m getting there in a similar place where I’m having these bouts of strong emotions, but then I’m very placid most of the time. Well, I wanted to say halcyon, but not quite so tranquil and peaceful, per se. Just, almost not much of anything going on there. Then I start getting in my head, I start thinking too much. And then I create a problem?
Dawn: Yeah, I had a couple years ago… there was this diagram of different types of emotions and different intensities of it, and I noticed for me, the whole anger thing was missing, I didn’t have a lot of boredom either, a bunch of things were just completely missing. But for example, guilt was one that was super intense for me. And now, I think I’m sort of just making it all similarly intense, trying to equalize it a bit more.
Tiffany: Mine, I’ve noticed that I don’t want to change is a secondary emotion, fear and respect. That is the feeling of submission. I can only completely fake that. I remember doing that when the submissive person, the masochist I know, I’m just like… “Will you please help me? Tell me what to do, beat me, I can’t do it! It feels weird!” I don’t have a submissive bone in my body. And I don’t want to change that. I guess it’ll just mean if something like that happens, maybe I’ll fear and respect somebody at the same time. But then that makes apprehension instead. Because then, that kind of thing, when something like that happens, my fear gets shunted to anger or something similar. Either anger or disgust.
Dawn: And anger’s fine. I can deal with anger, disgust is when I start losing respect for the person.
Tiffany: Absolutely. Cause that’s the same part of the pie slices that leads towards shame, and guilt and regret. That’s a whole thing about intent, right? Like, me trusting the person’s intent that I’m afraid of them because I don’t feel safe, but not because they don’t give a shit that what they’re doing might be harmful to me. Like, a misunderstanding or a mistake has happened, or I’ve misinterpreted something. And if I feel fear and it gets shunted to something else, it makes it really hard to then go back, realize it was fear, and realize I am misjudging their intent. Misinterpreting or presuming their intent. We were talking a lot about that, where the psychopathy, the ASPD aspects, at least for me, are often in these problematic ways of thinking. It kinda boils down to, I’ve told people, that whole part of me is from being accustomed to a zero trust, a permanent zero-trust environment, and somehow trying to survive in it. And needing to operate, needing to do things that would normally require trust, and either faking it, or giving it in a very tentative manner. And because it won’t have that connection to lean back onto.
Dawn: And so, you know…
Tiffany: We were talking about this, like, this whole world of, “If I don’t know how to, or I don’t feel safe with connecting with people, how do I navigate this world, what kind of world do I start seeing?”
Dawn: Yeah, like, the trust is one thing. I remember that when I had this intense fear of overstepping my status or something, and then getting punished for that. I thought that the probability was like 10% or so that I would get punished for it, and thought that the punishment would be that I get expelled from society and die on the streets or something. And both of these things come together.
Tiffany: Powerful! Shame is powerful.
Dawn: Yeah. And then I had both. I dared more and more things over the past year or couple years, and learned that the probability that anything bad happens is really low. Hardly ever happened. But I also learned, I think that was important, that if something bad happens, it can’t harm me. Like, I had this borderliner friend who actually shamed me or attacked me for something that was exactly my trigger, and then that turned out to be completely harmless. Like, it actually happened, and I did not die on the streets. And so I think both of these are important. That A, you can learn to trust people again, learn that you’re not in this low-trust environment anymore, that some people are trustworthy, but also B, that if someone does betray you, that you can survive that, and that oftentimes nothing bad happens as a result. Is that connect?
Tiffany: Yeah, and I think a lot of like what I said before, I think a lot of that is me just disavowing any feelings of fear, right? Because I don’t recognize it as that at first. And so I can’t negotiate with myself. It gets, like I said, it gets shunted to anger or disgust, or something, or disappointment. And because that feels like that’s something I can do something about it, and that’s… I’m trying to learn a framework where I’m not viewing everything as, the way I handle it is control. Because for instance, the way you handled that was not control. Control would have probably made things worse. Like, one simple way I try to tell myself is just, “It’s not socially helpful for people to have a big issue with everything you do. Frequently, let alone all the time. It’s not gonna happen.” And so, from that, people will tend to be conciliatory, or look for a solution. But I do still have some fear of social isolation from overwhelming people. Or harming them. And that comes back to my fears of getting better, and stuff.
Dawn: Fear of?
Tiffany: Fear of not getting better, rather. Yeah. Not getting better enough that something’s just become either too innate. Or even just fearing that it’s gonna take forever. That the experiences I need to learn the comfort and learn the strategies will take so long that, “Oh yeah, I’ll be happy and safe in my 60s or 70s. That’s totally worth it.”
Dawn: Hmm… Yeah, no, like, a friend of mine is also… the usual timeline is like 2 to 4 years, and a friend of mine even started her recovery in her 50s? Well, 49 or so, I think, but basically 50s, and just the NPD part she mostly overcame within one or two years or so, and then there was a whole bunch of particular CPTSD triggers that she needed to work on, and a bunch of other things, sort of a bit of a long tail, but I think after 8 years or so, most of that stuff was overcome. So she kind of put it at 8 years, and I think there was even a gap in between, so she didn’t even work on everything continuously.
Tiffany: My big thing is that I just want to be able to hold down a job, have a space of my own. That sort of thing. And then maintained some friends. And you know, from my own past experience of being me and how difficult it’s been, it makes it feel like it could take an incredibly long time to get to that point where I have a hard time imagining holding down a job, and a place on my own, and a car that’s not almost as old as me, with over 200,000 miles, giving me expensive problems all the time. I have a hard time imagining that being true at the same time as a lot of other things not worked on much more thoroughly and deeply. And I imagine it has to be true, though, that I’ll get to a point of financial and personal stability with still tons of work to do, but not… But it’s hard for me to imagine what that looks like.
Dawn: I think at some point you enter a bit of a positive feedback loop, where your environment becomes safe enough and stable enough that that’s giving you much more space, and more stability. Also, like, more positive reward from making progress internally, then there’s this thing that, as the emotions feel more listened to, more attended to, they become more manageable, and then people can’t hurt you as much anymore either, because the emotions are so much more tame. And yeah, so I think at some point there’s this runaway positive feedback loop that just catapults someone onto the neurotic level.
Tiffany: I’m hoping I’m basically in that sort of situation. The people I’m living with, and also my personal decision to… I broke off with my engagement with Riley, and then I broke up with them, just like, “I can’t stand, I can’t survive and tolerate, the permanent, repeated whiplash of doing something that hurts them, and feeling helpless to change.”
Dawn: And then coming back from that.
Tiffany: And that was a tough decision to make, but I have the feeling it’s instrumental. I would have never made a decision like that. Because if I had in the past, I would have cut them out of my life. I wouldn’t have been able to tolerate having them around. Or even if I would, I just wouldn’t want to. I’d want to move on. And so, I’m keeping this person around in my life, and trying to grow a different kind of friendship and relationship with them. And I’m open to the future and stuff, and it feels pivotal. Feels like it will grow into something. Even just the deliberateness, that kind of decision being made…
Dawn: Yeah, like, these things that hurt them, are they specific to the favorite person dynamics, so that if you have a different kind of relationship, they would not hurt so much anymore?
Tiffany: I don’t think so. The stakes just feel lower. I feel like I have to be less perfect? Quote-unquote, right? It’s easier to hold myself to a more reasonable standard. And then it’s also more easy for me to hold them to a more reasonable standard. And then it’s also telling myself I could survive without being engaged to somebody. And that’s important, too. I think that’s the really big, important part. The first part is more helping me manage and heal symptoms, but this is something new.
Dawn: Hmm? Yeah, I think previously we’ve mostly talked about features of avoidant attachment, but this seems to be more like you overcoming preoccupied attachment?
Tiffany: Yeah, with certain people, I’ll get very clingy with. Right? It’s, in other words, there’s a threshold. I’m default avoidant because I have trouble not obsessing over somebody once I’m attached to them.
Dawn: Like, I think I would call it avoidant when you don’t trust people, when these old patterns come up where you used to grow up in sort of a zero-trust environment, and so that is something that just induces avoidant attachment. I think when the avoidance comes from a place of consideration of what dynamics you would otherwise enter into, then I wouldn’t class that as avoidant attachment.
Tiffany: Interesting. One thing that confounds it is the, due to it being zero trust, you know, I’d have to be in situations where I needed something from somebody practically or emotionally, but I needed to somehow mediate not really being emotionally connected or available to them. And it made my boundaries very porous, but then with that lack of connection, I wouldn’t have as much of an issue just riding most people out of my life. Not all, there would be exceptions. And so, like, somebody… my friend Athena… one of her roommates… I left some of my leftovers in their fridge, and they… one of their roommates didn’t think to check and just ate it. And I took that so personally.
Dawn: I caused fucking problems for these roommates.
Tiffany: And I was happy to deal with all of the complexities that added to being a girlfriend of Athena’s, and then just a friend, and then eventually I stopped talking to Athena, too. I handled it by just going, “Alright, enough of this shit.” And trying to change that pattern. I’ve made amends with the housemates. And I’m just trying to have a normal friendship with Athena, instead of having to date her to feel like there’s enough mutual obligation that I can trust her, and she can put up with me. So I don’t know, I’m not sure that falls cleanly on any of those lines.
Dawn: You’re recovering, so it makes sense that you have the old pattern of the avoidance and distrust, and dismissiveness, perhaps, of some people, and the new pattern of, like, actually, I know better now, and I can overcome it.
Tiffany: Yeah, but there’s also this hypothesis people have had of disorganized attachment being you have one, and then you’re forced to do the other sometimes. And the attachment center of your brain literally goes haywire there. And that’s why, because the comfort feels scary.
Dawn: Yeah… Yeah, I think I was probably always high on preoccupied attachment. But then in high school, I decided at some point to give up on avoidant attachment. Like, I was very paranoid and didn’t trust people, and at some point, I was like, “Nope, I think the opportunity cost of all these lost connections is too high. I’d rather want to be hurt a bit more often, and in turn not lose out on those connections,” and so I doubled down on the preoccupied side as opposed to the avoidant side. So, yeah, like, I think in that case, I was probably already quite preoccupied, and was just sort of using avoidant attachment from time to time as necessary.
Tiffany: Yeah, it’s like without understanding the healthier version of it, you know, only seeing the only solution you’re seeing at the time is the extreme. Because you didn’t really know what something more nuanced looked like. And I’ve always tried to manage myself and my connections so manually. Like, I just… all I can say is I know that with the right person, I get really clingy, but outside of that, it could be just obsession for attention, or something more. Or it could be I force myself to be closer to the person because they are good enough friends to me, or I do need something from them. And that all sounds really haywire to me, and I don’t know what to make of it.
Dawn: Hmm. Well, I definitely empathize with the preoccupied side of it.
Tiffany: I care about Riley a lot. You know? Tired of hurting them.
Dawn: That’s true. Yeah, I just had a chat with a friend who probably also has high preoccupied attachment, and seems to have just dated someone for a month. Probably has disorganized attachment, probably borderline, and yeah, seems also in this like, totally loves him, but it’s not working, it’s just a constant push and pull.
Tiffany: That’s uncomfortable, that’s a shame.
Dawn: Hmm. Yeah, I was also wondering, in the context of the seven alters that you mentioned, you also mentioned to me at one point that you had the state where you were able to dissociate from all alters at the same time, where you were basically in a no-self state, identity-less state, and I was curious what that felt like, whether you had any kinds of preferences in that state, how you interpret your perceptions? Sense perceptions and such?
Tiffany: That was there for a couple of reasons. So, normally, when I’m in that state, it’s been because I really form myself around the objective I’m after. So, either I’m so overwhelmed that I’d be like psychotic, or too dissociated already. And then forcing myself to operate a certain way. Or kind of the other way around, where I realize there’s one objective I need to achieve, irrespective of what’s going on with me. Well, so the first one, I would be much more conscious about what things I’m doing. I’ll be very OCD about it, very OCD about all of my actions and goals, and following through on them. And still forming myself around those objectives. But a more extremified state, that’s probably actually more chaotic, but a more extremified state is like… Everything’s going wrong, and this one or these 5 things – like the times I’ve had to move in an emergency, and all sorts of things are going on around me. And just whatever I have to do, whoever I have to be at work, whoever I have to be to the people that let me borrow this thing I need, whatever I have to do to get myself up at the right time to do this, whatever I form around the objective. And then, an even more narrowed version would be gray rage, because that’s the objective… for me, that is usually the objective of “survive.” Right, and in all of those states, I’m trying to actively manage or completely suppress any and all of my impulses and reactions.
I think that the first one, where I would just be really stressed, and I would have to function, even though I was heavily dissociated. That’s the one that can still exist nowadays. I used to default towards that sort of hyper-competence mindset. I think partly I didn’t want to show anybody anything was going wrong. I didn’t want to have those feelings exposed and then have to frickin’ deal with them. I said, in the other state, it’s just like a different kind of, “I need to still function,” right? It’s like an emergency is happening, and I feel like there’s emergencies going on inside me, and I do know better that I can do it, and I’m just telling myself, “Nope, I just have to do these things.” And that was more of being my own hero, or being a hero to somebody to save the day sort of mindset. And I just feel when I’ve been in gray rage, when I come out of it, the best way I could describe what I was like in that state is just like a very sentient, caged animal. Like when I thought that somebody was gonna try and commit me into a mental health ward, and then I did something worthy of that. I told her that “if you even try, I’ll fucking kill you right now.” And whether I was bluffing or not, it took like half an hour before my adrenaline came back down, and I realized the fucking scar that could leave of just doing that, and I was just like, “Oh my god!” And that person broke up with me the next day.
Dawn: No. Hmm.
Tiffany: That’s interesting to note. I’ve seen people, like, they dissociate, and then they can’t do anything, and I’m like, “Wow! You’ve had the grace, the fortune of your life, to, like, when you dissociate, you get to not function?”
Dawn: Good for you! No… I’ve tried to scan my memory for vaguely similar instances, and I think I go into some kind of hypervigilance, workaholic type of mode or something.
Tiffany: Yeah, that’s kind of like what the first one is, when I’m just so stressed I’m dissociating, and I have to keep all the moving parts in my life moving anyway. Like, let’s say with machining, like, I can’t not have my brain working. Or with sales, I can’t not… I can’t be dead there as a person. The thing I’m there for, I’m paid for, is my personality, etc. I can’t show up and be just there. The jobs I’ve had are not those kinds of jobs. So, and I’ve thought about this, but most of the time I have, for better and worse, I have parts of my life. The aspects of my life are like that, in that they can be hard to maintain when I need to give myself rest.
Dawn: Hmm. When you say dissociated in this context, do you mean there’s identity dissociation, where you are like separate from any and all alters, or do you mean depersonalization, where you feel separate from your body?
Tiffany: It starts as the… it’s when it gets more extreme than the first one. Because it would be hard in a state like that for me to answer anything about what I actually want, as opposed to need. And it’ll… I’ll have to fully intellectualize who and what I am and what I have to do to continue being that in each individual person’s life. So, like, I’ll have an understanding of identity, but I won’t have any feel for it, or any intuition for it at that point.
Dawn: Yeah, I think when people live their whole life in that state and don’t know anything else, then identity is like a very fleeting thing that’s just sort of briefly imprinted on them by another person.
Tiffany: Yeah, like, for me, in the past, to some degree now, too, but it can just feel who the person expects me to be. And that has been my way of understanding connection and friendships and relationships. So it’s very narrow. It’s not even like that information isn’t useful and relevant, but it’s very narrow.
Dawn: It’s basically the line between people-pleasing and psychopathy is probably a bit blurry.
Tiffany: Yeah, because psychopathy leans you towards being agreeable so that you’re always in a good state with the people that you want to be. And when you compromise your… when you’re willing, so willing to compromise your values to keep certain things going. Or apathetic about compromising your values. Like, not really considering it at all. You will do things that are people-pleasing, but at least for me, since I’ll interpret that as the obligations I have to the person, or their expectations of me, I’ll also only see them as seeing… I’ll also only understand obligations from them and my expectations of them, and it’ll really limit how much of the depth of the person I can understand or experience. And it is funny that somebody like that can then just cut somebody off! Just go, “You’re gone.” And that’s that porous zero-trust thing, not having any sort of real intuition on how to navigate any of that, and having to intellectualize all of it.
Dawn: Hmm. Yeah, it was like a weird experience for me when some bosses of mine who had some expectations on me, and I delivered on those expectations. Okay, great. And then suddenly they had like a complicated interpersonal conflict, and I tried to mediate between them, and I literally had to constantly… I heard them say something, and I had to think, “Okay, how would I feel about this if a friend of mine had told me that? Okay, how would I respond to a friend of mine?” Let’s say exactly those words, because it was like having this hierarchy differential, and at the same time having to do friendship things. It was like very manual for me.
Tiffany: Is that part of the preoccupied attachment, too? Like, for me, if it’s with me or the boss, or a boss and another person, and I can see that it could affect me in a way later, you know, I’ll want to intercede in some way, and try and help the situation. You know, that sense of control, because preoccupied attachment can lean you towards that control, right? Where you worry that it’ll be the end of the world, so you want to solve those feelings they’re having, and you don’t realize that’s what you’re doing.
Dawn: Hmm? Yeah, it was like a very conscious decision in that instance. I was already interested in all this stuff, and they had the conflict, so I was like, “Yep, sure, I can help with that.” Not the first time. So I think that didn’t come from preoccupied attachment. But, yeah, no, it was just strange situation, consciously, because I didn’t cast them in the role in which I had previously cast people that I had helped, which was like a friendship kind of role, very equal, and they had been in this boss role. Like, it just seemed extremely separate to me, and so… now you know.
Tiffany: Now you know why I’m trying to make my idea of roles more fluid and nuanced. For me, it’s to have something deeper than the inward going, the teleological understanding, and the transactional way of thinking. But for you, there is some level of transactionalism.
Dawn: That is healthy, too. Like, a boss…
Tiffany: You know, the bosses should not expect you to do things that aren’t your job, but when we get stuck in roles, we also limit the role. Not that that role is bad, but just what our idea of that role is. We’ll still be doing that idea if we can’t see outside of roles.
Dawn: Yeah, exactly, and I would just be doing the teleological thing again, where if the boss seems grumpy, then I’d be like, “Oh, I must have not delivered on some expectation, or I must have disappointed, or I don’t know.”
Tiffany: When they could just be being grumpy and happen to also be your boss.
Dawn: Yeah, exactly.
Tiffany: They’re also a person, yeah.
Dawn: Makes this less intuitive for me. I would probably not immediately think of it, because the power differential or something? Or these roles, yeah. You also mentioned, like, you just used the term “operate” to describe how you operated your body or something when you were in that state. Was that a deliberate choice of a word? Because a lot of folks that she’s interviewed have described themselves as operating themselves.
Tiffany: Yeah. Like, let’s say a situation just like that, right? And I think my boss is upset with me, and I’m like, “Okay. Whoops, I made a mistake. So what degree and what kind of guilt or shame do I want to project? Okay, that kind. Now I know that kind. Let’s act that out. Act out those actions and those feelings that I think that they’re going to expect from me, from what’s going on.” So if I can make up a scenario in my head, I can do it. Like, if I imagine that you think I’m stuck in the Mirrorverse… And I’m having trouble handling the self-doubt that that’s giving. To just go, “Oh, really?” And it’s like unraveling my thoughts, and not letting me wrestle control back on myself. Like, I’m getting insecure from it. And I’d be like, “Okay… Don’t show the insecurity, but continue to show interest, and continue to show curiosity.” Mirror mode? You mean the thing we talked about when I get stuck in being the person I think someone needs to be, right? That thing? And I have this cheery, like, inviting. I want to be inviting. And that’ll be as much for my emotions as you, maybe, if I’m trying to manage my insecurity, right?
But let’s say my boss… let’s say I fucked up another expensive part, and I’m like, “I don’t know how I did that. You know, I’m sorry. I just… Yeah, you know what? I don’t do these big things that often, and I think I read the wrong part of these calipers, again, look, it’s not gonna happen again. I know it’s happened more than once, but, you know, I didn’t really understand why I was doing that before.” And so in the middle of that, I’m thinking of shifting from showing care and shame, and then go into, “How am I being accountable?” And then transitioning that to confidence, and I don’t know if that came across, but I am playing back through my head something I had to do before.
Dawn: Yes, I didn’t see the confidence.
Tiffany: You didn’t?
Dawn: Where was it?
Tiffany: It was at the end, it’s just like, “Yeah, no, I know what the problem is, so I’m gonna, you know, I’m just gonna triple check it in that way, I’ll keep it in mind. It’s not gonna happen again.” Because I’m expecting him to still be upset, too. And like, you still gotta… the impulse is to still also react to that.
Dawn: It’s annoying.
Tiffany: Or, let’s say something bad happens at work, and yeah… That’s more complicated, but then I could shift completely from that mode and maybe be on a call with somebody and be like, “What do you mean, no? I’ve got everything handled at work, please don’t bother me with that right now. Stop it. I have enough going on, alright? And so do you.”
Dawn: Yeah, I sometimes notice that my psychopathic friends kind of over-apologize for some things, and why? Why is this happening?
Tiffany: Cuz we’re totally unsure of how the trust is broken, and what the fuck to do to restore it. So we’re unsure of how honest we need to be. Cause sometimes it has been kind of negligence, and sometimes it’s just showing weakness of just like, in that scenario, I was just stressed out, and not sleeping right, etc.
Tiffany: And nowadays, it could be like, “I’m sorry, I guess I need another Monster. I don’t want to fall asleep at the wheel, but don’t worry, it won’t happen again.” Or something like that. You know, because it doesn’t feel like that person is gonna care about any of my fucking adult reasons for getting into that. It feels like all I’m gonna be there for them is the machine that runs the machine.
Dawn: Mmm… I actually care, of course, about my friends when I chat with them, and if some minor thing happens, then I know that they don’t experience shame, guilt, remorse, any of that. They know that I know, and they also know that I probably wouldn’t feel shame or guilt ever.
Tiffany: Yeah, but there’s also that’s wanting to project that, though, you know, like the projecting the toughness deliberately. Because a lot of psychopathic projection is maintenance. You had a question in there I’m gonna touch on, of what’s the difference between the trait narcissism of, let’s say, a Factor I psychopath, and NPD. And I think I have some of both, because like I said, I’m really accustomed to making myself do things I’m uncomfortable with, but it’s just like if I don’t have to put myself into a less strong position, why would I? Like, I know that generally, the confidence, the self-assuredness, projecting that works. It helps. And I’m just gonna do it. And it can just be fun, too. So there’s other parts of projecting that that is maintenance. It’s like, “I don’t want you thinking that I feel bad about that.” And of course, I can be insecure, I can feel bad about that. Maybe I don’t think I was a bad person for it, but I just think, like, “Shit! I’m not doing… I fucked up to what I think I’m supposed to do. I’m not living up to my own standards.” And I’ll feel insecure. I don’t like showing my insecurity at all.
Dawn: Hmm. Yeah, like, I think when the over-apologizing… when I see the over-apologizing, I kind of… it sort of works. There is this disconnect between I know what my friends are actually feeling in that situation, and the usual model that I have in mind that’s probably based on me or something, how I would be feeling if I were saying those things. And they are sort of there, like one of them has more of an emotional pull, the other one has more of an intellectual pull, so it’s not like it’s doing nothing, it’s still having a bit of an effect.
Tiffany: I guess it’s just like, you can tell I care, and this is the way I know to express it. Simple as, but imagining that in your mind, I can imagine is hard, because… That’s why you would ask that reactive grandiose narcissism and trait narcissism question, because the human brain is wired up to defy that sort of thing.
Dawn: That is still super unintuitive for me. Like, for most of my life, I thought that if I display any kind of confidence, people are going to knock me down for it, are going to attack me, humiliate me, because they don’t want me to usurp that status from them or something. And yeah, this doesn’t seem to be what’s actually happening in the world? I don’t know where I got that from.
Tiffany: No, no, well, you’re probably over-worried about their insecurity, and that can really depend, right? Like, if you acted confident about something on a car to me that I knew was wrong, I would both be like disappointed in you, and insulted at the same time, and get kinda insecure and angry out of, like, “How dare you!” And I do mean you in particular, somebody who isn’t a gearhead, or isn’t a mechanic. And I might, and there’s totally people who will react like that. People with a more pathological form of narcissism. And so that happens, but that’s certainly not the default, either.
Dawn: Hmm? Yeah, like, gradually warming up to that, experiment with some grandiosity, and see what happens, and somehow I don’t get knocked down. Surprising every time?
Tiffany: No, people think it’s hot! They admire it, they wish they could be that. I was always confused, I’m just like, “Why don’t you just do it then?”
Dawn: Yeah? Yeah, I mean, like, I had the same conversation. I’m also in one of the avoidant personality disorder groups, and basically, my take was, in order to be self-confident, you just have to allow yourself to be self-confident, and then dare to be self-confident. And the other person was like, “No, like, I would allow myself to be… I would dare to be self… but I’m not!” And I was like, what does that mean?
Tiffany: I actually have had to learn a more nuanced version of confidence, because I didn’t realize I was projecting it in a teleological and a utilitarian way. I did, but I didn’t know why that was so narrow. Why that was so myopic. And I’ve learned that confidence is uncomfortable, and confidence is a form of courage, your willingness to do something you’re uncomfortable with. So people do still perceive that you’re confident if you seem unsure, but you do seem like you’re determined to do it. This one YouTuber, NileRed, a famous trope of how he does his chemistry experiments is he’ll be like, “You know, I didn’t think this was a good idea, but I did it anyway. Oh, so it was a bad idea!” And that projects as pretty effortless confidence on his part pretty irrespective of what’s going on with him, because ultimately, it is the action of confidence that he’s doing. He is confident in doing it, in what he’s doing, and confident following through and going, “If that doesn’t work, I will figure out something else.” So it’s a less shallow form of confidence.
Dawn: Yeah, like, I just watched a video where there were a few physics majors, and they were asked a question, and one of them said, “Well, that’s embarrassing, like, we’re this and that semester physics majors, we should know that.” And that displayed simultaneously a kind of insecurity, but also confidence, because she had no problem talking about that on camera.
Tiffany: I would say that’s the confidence to be vulnerable, right? The confidence of knowing your own limitations. And knowing what’s probably expected of you. They’re telling you what you might already be thinking, and going, “But I’m okay with that uncomfortable thought, and this is how I am handling it.” They’re taking that ownership of it.
Dawn: Yeah, exactly. Really admired that.
Tiffany: Yeah, when I see that stuff, I try to really learn from it more deeply than just emulate it.
Dawn: Hmm… Yeah, I think for me, confidence has also meant… well, I suppose if someone’s just naturally fearless, then being courageous and facing fears and whatnot that come with confidence is just a lot easier. But for me, it’s also been about noticing that when things go wrong, they can’t hurt me, or not that much. It’s kind of okay, I can recover from it. And then the fear is lesser after that, and then it becomes easier to be confident.
Tiffany: I get that in a… I really have to imagine my 4-year-old self to get that. Because that’s not something my mother tolerated. I’m not factor one, I’m not fearless, but I’m not exactly afraid of humiliation. But I’m confident in dealing with what’ll happen if that happens, or I know it won’t hurt me that bad if that does cost me a friendship. I know I can move on, I know I can find another person. And some of that’s also the lesser or lack of attachment. Like, “That person goes away, and I will find another person.” And yeah, I’m not fearless, I can totally be afraid of things. Wow! I… Yes, I, like my fellow humans, experience the emotion of fear in certain situations.
Dawn: Congrats!
Tiffany: Oh, man! That was mask off in not a disturbing way, just to like… Well, this is my closest approach to what you experience.
Dawn: Yeah, like, I know, not being afraid of humiliation is rather foreign to me.
Tiffany: To me, it’s like, “Why would I let somebody… I could maybe feel really bad that that happened, or feel very afraid I’m gonna lose them, but why would I allow that person to have that power over me?” And I imagine that not allowing them to have that power over me is the only thing that’s going to allow me to navigate it if it goes wrong. And that is a little too rigid, but it is also a helpful alternative way to think of things, so that like I said, that’s the healthier version again of me telling myself, “No, I have to do it.”
Dawn: Yeah, as a little child, that’s a boundary that could have helped me a lot. Even if this person wants to humiliate me, or wants to punish me, or wants me to feel guilty or something, it’s still my choice whether I want to actually feel that.
Tiffany: Yeah, whether you internalize that that makes you a bad person, or makes that a mistake. A lot of my rationalizations are around that. Sometimes it’s as simple as, “I don’t respect you, I don’t care what you fucking think. Make me feel bad. I’m not feeling bad for you. Don’t do that, don’t try that! Don’t waste your time and my time.”
Dawn: Phew. Yeah, but also with friends, I know they don’t want me to feel bad, they just want to fix the relationship or something, and so I’m just like, “Okay, I’ll just not feel bad about this.”
Tiffany: Yeah, it doesn’t help you. Or just being upset that it happened, maybe, but not punishing yourself for it, you know?
Dawn: Hmm, just making sure it doesn’t happen again, like fixing the relationship, caring for the other person. This is also one of those things, I used to be so wracked with guilt over all sorts of things, and hypothetical things, and instead I’ve been like, “Okay, shame, I don’t need that anymore, guilt, I don’t need that anymore. Instead, I still focus on what has been the impact on the other person, and how can I make it better for them? And not any bad feelings for myself.”
Tiffany: And that’s another thing, I have doubts of somebody valuing me trying to make it better for them. Doubts that they’ll believe the authenticity, doubts that they will value it at all. Either from they’ve concealed their true intentions, and that’s not what they were looking for. Or that they’re just being malicious, etc.
Dawn: Yeah, I think I trust people on that by default, but of course, that trust can be broken, and then I don’t anymore.
Tiffany: I guess it depends on the person, yeah. I guess maybe I think more… I don’t even want to just say positive, because this takes in negative things, but a more additive mindset would be is I can realize I’m not offering it to that person. I’m not offering this person that trust, and I’m not offering them the opportunity to show me that they are a good person. And I just had a little revelation of a more active way to try to work on the trust things, that there’s things that I’m internally not doing to suppress the connection. And instead of it feeling like a risk, it’s just like, “Well, that’s not gonna be there if I don’t do it, too.” You know? The trust and connection. It’s not gonna be there unless I’m doing it, too. And it’s just not super tangible to me, so I have to think of it like that, to teach myself the tangibility. And kind of combine that with a reason to do it, even when I don’t feel the tangibility.
Dawn: Yeah, it’s like the exact opposite for me, where the trust’s always there, and you just need to be extra careful consciously now, that that’s not exploited. I’ve somehow gotten lucky with my partner so far. But for a long time, I wasn’t aware of that risk.
Tiffany: I mean, like, you’re not somebody that in either a devoid or a malicious way I would look at in either, let’s say… I think a cruel reality of life is that certain kinds of brokenness within us seek out certain kinds of brokenness within other people, right?
Dawn: Yeah.
Tiffany: You know, the whole people with NPD, NPDorks, and BPDweebs like each other, and feed off each other, and it can actually be good if both people are aware enough. But you’re not somebody I could see that I could take advantage of. You’re not somebody also that… I guess the other one’s more reactive. Like, for the narcissistic holes in my heart, since you’re relatively secure, it’s like you’re not reacting to my attempts to elicit the praise in that way, right? Oh, yeah, yeah, in a less healthy way of saying, like, “Oh, I’m not gonna get that… I know I wouldn’t get that kind of thing out of you.” And being a healthier person definitely attracts healthy people. If there’s nothing else more than that healthy people would prefer to be more deeply involved with other healthy people. Duh!
Dawn: Yeah, maybe there’s also an attraction between healing people, that healing people want to be…
Tiffany: I think so, too. It’s a unique experience. There’s a song, I Wanna Get Better by The Bleachers. And I remember being younger and just thinking, like, “Well, this is just pasty, happy horseshit.” And then there’s a line in it like, “I didn’t know I was broken until I wanted it to change,” because that comes together. You know, like I said, I was happy causing Athena problems that then came to be my problems, too. And being an asshole to her housemates. And that didn’t change until I also wanted that part of myself to be better. And that transition is something that most people do not experience.
Dawn: You had this discussion recently with a friend of mine about how often people change beliefs, like, some important beliefs in their lives. And I’m in this rationalist community where everything is about fluidly exchanging beliefs to fit the reality, and always being truth-seeking and well-calibrated. And so in my bubble, there’s definitely a lot of belief changing going on, and it’s an important value and everything, but the average person, how often do they change important beliefs?
Tiffany: They don’t need to, right? Like, you know the saying goes that it’s not abnormal to not know who you are, but it is atypical, abnormal, to be worried about not knowing who you are. Like, a lot of people never go through that self-reflection, and either they’re miserable and just accept it, or they’re happy and there’s nothing major they need to change like that that prompts that sort of introspection, and so it just doesn’t happen.
Dawn: Yeah, exactly. I have a friend who seems to be totally happy and emotionally regulated, secure in his attachments and everything, and I try to have conversations with him, but his reaction is mostly, “Huh, I’ve never thought about that.”
Tiffany: And it’s endearing, it’s kind of cute, I’m precious, and it’s kind of fun and enjoyable, but it can get boring if that’s what you’re after with that friend, because it’s not really inquisitive. When I talk about people with philosophy and stuff, I want to know their ideas. I want to be prompted myself to think about it differently as well. Sometimes just for the act of thinking about it, just because it’s fun, but also maybe we can find a new kernel of truth between us.
Dawn: Yeah, exactly. Like, I’m always super happy to change my mind on things, and just a few days ago, I messaged someone, “Oh, by the way, in case it wasn’t clear, I’ve completely changed my mind!” Like, it’s a certain pride in being able to do that effortlessly.
Tiffany: Yeah, you know, I think I’m gonna have to steal that from you, because when I get manic, I can just be like, “Oh my god, I’ve discovered the next revelation, and this and that.” And that’s part of an old pattern, that’s not as prevalent.
Dawn: I thought every next thing was the magical solution.
Tiffany: And that’s what I was seeking. That’s also what I was seeking, right? So I had to change my mind what I was looking for. But that was embarrassing to me. That’s like… anybody’s paying attention longer than 5 minutes can tell I’m just a big fucking chaotic jumble. Oh, boy.
Dawn: Yeah, like, I think I know that I will change my mind, and so I preemptively state my probabilities, at least internally. I’m like, “Okay, he’s probably leaning toward this, feels like 60-70% or so.” And then afterwards, I’m like, “Oh, okay, it was totally wrong. Apparently, the 30-40% option was current.” So that helps a bit to make it less embarrassing?
Tiffany: I guess the way I could internalize it is maybe like, “Well, I don’t want it to be true like this. I really need to think about that, I don’t know how to integrate that.” Because like, I don’t know how to integrate that yet, but like I’ve said of my fears of difficulty with changing, I get really focused on the bullshit I’ll have to go through, the grueling slog it feels like it might be. And I have to at least start off telling myself that maybe things will just be fine, but this part will be difficult. But all among that, I missed the plot of, “Do I have the opportunity to be proud of how much I’ve changed?” I have… people tell me all the time that I have a lot of empathy, and I have a lot of cognitive empathy, but you know, I can process empathy with myself distanced from it, too. And since I’ve had to learn empathy from such a ground-up way, I’ve grown a really strong capacity to understand people, to look into people, and to generate insight. A mutual friend of ours, she told me she liked how I made some of my venting palatable, she said. But the real thing is I was doing more than one thing at once, and part of it is working through the negativity in me, too. And I’ll try to turn it into a new insight, or if I’m just pissed off at everybody. Like, the recent post I made about that it’s a big turn-off for me when…
Dawn: You’re made to feel as if you intimidated someone?
Tiffany: Yeah, that that’s actually a turn-off. And then I gave reasons why, and then it made myself vulnerable a little, and it allows somebody else to do that synthesis as well. But I’m trying to do all of those things. I’m trying to not just fucking look down on people that are like that. Even if I don’t vibe with them, just like get it out of my head. And also not take it as personally, so personally that they do that. But also, that gives other people an opportunity to see it from my perspective, and I feel like I actually expressed that gripe. But again, at the same time as turning it into this insight, I find that when I look towards turning it into an insight that somebody else can use, it tends to do all of those things at once, and present it in a way that other people can do synthesis with it as well.
Dawn: Yeah, that’s definitely something that resonated with me a lot. Like, I used to be downright afraid of intimidating someone. And I think my transition has also been a reaction to that, to some extent, that I wanted to feel safer in a position where it felt less likely to me that I might intimidate someone.
Tiffany: Well, being, most people, fortunately, see me as a woman now, so like when people are intimidated to meet me… because I’ve gone through that too, right? Like, I had a Van Dyke, and I was brash and loud and confident. And that puts some people off, but now it just sounds like a big pain in my ass. Just like, “Oh, you’re intimidated? You won’t talk to me? Why? Don’t do that! That’s annoying!” I don’t want someone to feel like they’re just a big, annoying piece of shit, either.
Dawn: Yeah, the authenticity and communication is a really interesting topic. Like, a bunch of friends of mine have the ego-syntonic sadism, so like they do something cringey, and then they are really proud of that, and they want to tell me about it. But of course they know that I will probably find it really cringey.
Tiffany: Just wanting the reaction, yeah. No, no, my impulse is to tell somebody, “Do you know that that is like one of the most annoying fucking things you should do? Don’t do that.” And trying to pressure them into not doing it. And also feeling stronger that I’m not counter-pressured.
Dawn: Amazing. Would you react like that?
Tiffany: What?
Dawn: In which position would you react like that?
Tiffany: Like, let’s say you said that I intimidated you, I’m like, “Do you know how fucking annoying that is? Do you even think about that?” And definitely taking some sick joy out of it at the same time is trying to push the person to not do that, but not really feeling like their feelings are my problem, so it’s just like also showing, “Stop being a pain in my ass!”
Dawn: Yeah, like, if that’s about intimidation in particular, it could be liberating for the person, I suppose. It’s like, they probably don’t want to be intimidated. Like, I think I was not usually intimidated by people. But I thought that they wanted me to be intimidated or something, and so I was sort of people-pleasingly trying to cater to their expectations. And if they then tell me they don’t actually want that, I’m like, “Oh, great, that’s a relief.”
Tiffany: No, don’t give that to anybody, that’s disrespectful to yourself. I think that’s one of the times where empathy is less helpful, because we’ll get stuck in how the other person feels in something like that. But if somebody wants you to be intimidated and you’re not in a BDSM scene or something, like… What good reason could they have for that? Like, that possible thought of theirs doesn’t deserve the time of day, just because maybe they’ll feel hurt if you’re not intimidated.
Dawn: Yeah, about the communicating sadism thing. One friend of mine went for, “I have mixed feelings about this, because I know that I probably shouldn’t do this, and I know I’ve lost friends to this, but I also feel really proud of it,” and so kind of communicated just the whole range of feelings that she had about her behavior. And another friend rather pretended to feel ashamed of it or something? Like, not directly, but at least sort of was not explicitly bragging about it. And another friend more dressed it up as radical honesty or something, and then as if she had to force herself to be very direct and straightforward about her exploits, but again, she was bragging!
Tiffany: I used to do that. Sometimes with that consummate pride, sometimes with fear of being judged, but like the in-between of those is just like, “Well, if this doesn’t turn them off, then I’m good.” I used to… so, when I’ve had outbursts on people, and I’ve been really angry, and I just feel like they just don’t fucking get it. And someone would go, “Don’t you know how that hurt the person?” And I’ll be like, “Why am I supposed to care? Do you know what they did to me?” Etc. Or, “They’ll probably never talk to you again,” I’ll be like… “Good.”
Dawn: Yeah, but I can imagine in that case, it’s sort of for communication, right? Like, you were hurt, and you wanted to communicate to the other person how they had hurt you?
Tiffany: Yeah, there is technically a way to recover that, yeah. If they had acknowledged it, but like, what I was doing was definitely subduing them, or making them not feel like I would give a shit if they acknowledged it. But yeah, if they had acknowledged it, and said anything to the effect of how they’re gonna try to keep that from happening again, I’d go, “Oh, fuck.” And that would be like… That would actually be, in most situations, against my values to not try and take that for what it is. So it would be recoverable. There’s been times where it’s just some of the things that have happened to me, or some of the things I perceived that some of the people have done things that have fucked up my life so bad that I, at the minimum, need to scare them away from ever fucking doing it again. I’m either not gonna put up with that, or I can’t fucking survive that, or it’s just so egregious that like, “How could you let yourself do that sort of thing?” And it could definitely just be there to scream down their throat, because I thought their throat needed screaming down. For one reason or another. Normally, when I do that, I would only be proud of it, and like I didn’t take shit form of it afterwards. But normally, in that I’m not reveling in the sadism itself, because it just imminently is true to me that I didn’t want that to fucking happen in the first place. And you’ll hear people with more abusive tendencies, perhaps past me, say something like, “Why did you have to make me do that?” Like, that’s where that kind of thing comes from at a deeper level, because they don’t want to admit or explain all of that, for sure. I’m just realizing how many villains I can empathize with, with that. Like, I’ve heard that, and I’m like, “Yeah, I get it.” That was probably a fucking nightmare, and the person is just probably like, “Oh, I’m sorry,” and they don’t really get it. And this feeling of entitlement to being, not placated, but getting something back from it, from all you’ve gone through. Entitlement to some sort of recourse, and sort of dispensing justice yourself.
Dawn: How many different categories did you just mention? Like, there was the one where a person hurts you, you want to hurt the person back. I think there was the communicative aspect to it, but you were also not really seeking to be understood at the same time, if I see this correctly. Like, you wanted to cut the person out. But then I imagine there’s also the case where, I don’t know, it’s Riley or me, and you actually want to communicate the emotion that you’re experiencing with the interest of me understanding it, and once I express that I’ve understood how I’ve made you feel, then you’d be happy with that, and want to restore the connection. And, well, then there were the vengeance ones, but they were probably separate.
Tiffany: Yeah, so those first two can be on a border, can have a threshold. I remember a really nasty example of I was teaching a friend how to drive, and they froze up in the middle of it, and we had to switch driving places in the middle of traffic, it was frickin’ horrifying. And I think deep down, I would’ve accepted something, but I was not in the kind of state where I was gonna actually be receptive of it. And so there’s times like that where maybe the person’s more tenuous but I still like them, and I’ll mentally prepare for that what I’m about to do might write them off for me. And I would accept it if it turned the other way, but I’m not expecting or really in that mode at all. At least not until I would calm the hell down.
Dawn: Yeah, of course. Imagine there’s also the third version, where the sadistic person values the conflict positively. Like, “Oh yes, this person has hurt me now, because that gives me a reason to hurt them back, and that’s pleasurable.”
Tiffany: Yeah, I have a weird relationship with conflict, cause I’m more comfortable with somebody screaming at me than holding the stuff in. It feels like there’s resolution. I feel like I’m giving them a chance to get their shit out on me. I think that’s a fair trade, even. And I have totally so much as told people in the past, “Listen, if you wanna fucking lay into me or scream at me for that, that’s okay.” Thinking that they wanted that. That they felt like they really needed to, or felt like that might at least improve their mood. I’m gonna kinda get that aggression out. And this is all the same person I’m talking about, because I remember once on a long road trip with him, we had had a conflict he was handling with avoidance, and he was trying to placate me. This was before he knew he had BPD, and before I knew I had NPD. And so he was trying to placate me, and he was learning I had more depth than that. And when we finally got to talk about it, I’m like, “Dude, like… conflict can just be good and okay if we want to resolve it.” But, of course, the emotional half of that for me is just viewing the fucking yelling at each other as at least possibly a net directly positive. Like, either at least we got that out, or you know… “You’ve really wanted to do that for a long time, huh?” Just thinking back to when I, a narcissist, quote-unquote, gave a borderline person a pep talk of, “No, conflict is good.” And how there were very good aspects of it and less than ideal. I wouldn’t even say bad, just like, I didn’t have the awareness that other people wouldn’t either get something from it, or flat out get off from doing that.
Dawn: I’ve also wondered whether it would be useful for me, like, since I didn’t used to be in touch with anger at all, and then through therapy, I’ve discovered a little bit of mythness sometimes. That would be useful for me to be in the context of people who are a bit more externalizing or something, so that I have an environment in which it would at least be okay for me to experiment with different behaviors?
Tiffany: My suggestion, I guess, like, let’s say you wanted to vent about something that happened in your life. Right? I… even if we were in person, in the same room, I would be okay with you literally being screaming, stomping mad. Maybe somebody did something to you that’s that bad, and you want to not express it… You know, you’re not doing that to me. You want to get that out, and hope I understand and commiserate that, like, “Oh my fucking god, yeah, I can imagine how you feel going through that.” And not necessarily that extreme, but that’s my permission I’m giving you that if you need to just fucking gripe about something, fucking bitch about somebody or something that happened, I will very quickly empathize with that. That’s one of the things I do easily empathize with.
Dawn: Yeah, that happened last time. Last October, I think I mentioned it earlier. I had a bit of a situation like that. It’s been a while. I don’t know if it will happen again. I’m kind of a CPTSD type, overreaction, and so… I would hope that I’ve overcome that? We’ll see.
Tiffany: Wanna go through the other parts of sadism just to do it, since we’re here? The 6 types of sadism?
Dawn: Yeah.
Tiffany: So we… I’ve touched on control sadism a bunch during this conversation, that’s probably definitely my primary mode. Like the extreme examples of with my father. It’s like an antisocial punishment, your blog calls it. Because I view it as trying to push the person to not do something, or to do something better. And like with my father, it was maybe blatantly necessary. Like, one time, I came home with a customer’s car key in my jacket on accident, and I was a 5-minute walk away, okay? And he couldn’t find the key. And so he’s taking out all the aggravation of the wasted time, half hour, hour and a half of him trying to search for it on me. And but after that, even 2, 3, 4 years after no longer working for him, he would call me, and when my sleep schedule was really upside down, I’d fall asleep at like 7, 8 in the morning, and he’d call me at 10, 10:30 in the morning, and asking me. And there are other situations where I wouldn’t want him to really ask me about how my job is going in a certain way. Because I didn’t have the expectation that he would listen to the nuances there, right? Because I didn’t want it to go down a route where he felt the need to fucking tell me what to do, or judge it, etc. I was technically totally okay with talking about what was going on with my jobs with him, but not in the way he wanted to do it. And I would just make that experience for him as miserable as possible, to the point that he noted it. He’s just like, “I swear I can’t fucking talk to you about this!” I’m like, “Yeah. You’re right!”
Dawn: Yeah, I think I would also do that.
Tiffany: Yeah, in the situation where the person’s just not listening, right? And your only course is to turn them off. But it can be much smaller things, you know? Like I said, my impulse would be to tell the person who’s told me I’m intimidating to make them feel embarrassed over it. And maybe humiliate them into trying to push them to not do that. So that’s definitely my most common mode, and I think you can see how my mom set up the seeds for that, right? That phrase, “Don’t dish it out if you can’t take it.” And having no patience for certain things and expecting me to just buck up and figure it out, or spanking me an extra time because I flinched, because I need to take the punishment well.
I wanna say I’ve done righteous sadism before, and it’s just been like feeling like my honor… Normally I’ve gotten like that when I feel like the sanctity of my life or my household or a friend has been violated. There’s healthier versions of like that. You know, if you’re with your friend at a bar and somebody literally copped a feel. It depends on how the person responds, but the response of putting a little fear in them of like, “Don’t even think about trying that. You shouldn’t do that with anybody. You should be legitimately scared of doing that to people,” may be acceptable. Or even prudent. But that big thing where I freaked out on that ex-friend, and I found a way to get the house out from under them, but I also smeared them on social media. That was that. That was like, “Don’t violate the sanctity of my livelihood and my household and my relationship. My pets, etc.” So, I’ve done that, but I’ve more like done it. I wouldn’t say that’s a big part of myself.
The resentful sadism. Because when I talked before about somebody tells me they dissociated, and they weren’t able to function, and I’m just like… “You had that opportunity? Wow, you lucky piece of shit!” Out of resentment and jealousy, to just feeling like they don’t appreciate what they’ve been given in life adequately enough.
Dawn: Hmm… For me, this feels like envy. Like, I’m happy that they have it, but I wanted to please, back in time.
Tiffany: Well, it’s resentful, because it would feel like I can’t have it, like I’m not allowed it.
Dawn: Yeah, the thing that I’m talking about is something that I have now, that I wish I had always had, and then when I talk to a friend who’s always had it, like the absence of core shame, sort of a basic feeling of lovability… Having had that 37 years ago would have been awesome.
Tiffany: We’ve touched on vindictive sadism, and sometimes that’s been like… I had that hotel double charge me, and I wanted to somehow get back at the hotel manager. That was also partly, really at the bottom inside of me, I was hoping that it changed the outcome, but that was just to make me feel better about really wanting to lay into her. It’s clear to me somehow how a lot of these can bleed between each other, and why sadism is so weird. But lashing out at somebody just to get that out of me, because I don’t feel like they adequately understand what they’ve done to me.
But the one we really haven’t touched on, and it’s… I wanted to go through them, because I think it helps set up the concept of it better. The contumacious pride. And the contumacious pride is a form of self-sadism, and NPD and ASPD and psychopathy intersecting is really the only reason it would happen from pathology. That my dad martyring himself so that he could keep to his 10 o’clock curfew, so I can’t drive. You know, he’s hurting himself so that he’s not above his rules, and I don’t have that power over him of having gained an exception. Or, there’s a small amount of that with my friend Athena, when I was mad at their roommates. And it’s like, “Well, they don’t like you then. Okay, good.” Or, and then knowing this is probably gonna end my friendship with Athena too at some point, and it just being like, “Yeah, but none of… I’m not gonna have any of you tell me no. I’m gonna tell you no. And it’ll be at cost to me, and you’re gonna learn what happens.” Oh, man. That’s some nasty words. I say that because I’m actually feeling something saying it, and it’s not something I really want to come out. It scares me a little that all I have to do is just sort of act it out, and I start to feel it.
Dawn: But, like, somehow all of these so far, I think, have been relatively reactive. Like, what I see usually in my more sadistic friends is that they are very proactive about it, that they kind of wish that they could act sadistically in every situation, but they have their various behavioral rules, and then they look for situations where they can sort of rationalize it to themselves to act out, semi-provoke the situations, perhaps, and then enjoy the sadism as a result. And some of them are quite aware that they are doing that, that they’re not actually reacting to something, but that they’re enjoying the acting out the sadism so much that they are looking for opportunities to do it.
Tiffany: I mean, I do that, but that’s like all the stuff where I’ve said, “Well, my impulse would be…” I guess I’m just aware of why I would do it. And I’m not talking much about why I enjoy it. Like, let’s say… I need to give myself a minute. I’ve made myself mentally dizzy, because I realized that connection with it. And I had a flashback, I relived something. Normally, when I’m like that, I want the person to feel powerless. Or I want to push them to act. I’m struggling to think of a specific example, but I’ve had times where it seems like the person really isn’t listening to me, so I try and force the issue to get the person to do something, and like, now, I try to deliberately pin them into an immediate action. And I do get off of feeling the power in that situation. And if they then just shrink away or run away, they’ll feel so pitiful. And I might even laugh. I’m certainly enjoying it. If I’m driving, sometimes I want to just let off the gas and frustrate the fuck out of them until they realize they have to do something different. And if I saw them screaming in the car as they pass in some other way, in another lane, be like, “You dumb bitch. Like, how did you not figure that out already? Like, how did you end up in life at this point, and this was so hard for you to figure out?”
Dawn: But are you waiting for people to tailgate you, and then are glad that they do?
Tiffany: I’ll just be enjoying that, if I were to do… I’ve only done that sort of thing when it felt worth the risk. Like, I was driving down a narrow one-way, and some spaces there were to go around me, but most of it there wasn’t. And he was coming down this really steep hill, and he just had to have misjudged it and almost came into the lane. And so this guy was tailgating me, because he obviously thought I did it. And so, I was in a stick shift car, and I eventually brought it down to first gear, and I was doing like 8 miles an hour. And eventually, he gets around me! And stops his car in front of mine to force the issue. What a tough motherfucker! And he gets out, and he’s like, “You wanna play that? It’s like, you did this,” and I’m like, “No, I didn’t.” Like, he claimed, “You almost hit me.” No, I didn’t. He leaves, and I’m viewing myself as the person in control, and the person capable of doing… he’s doing a mean thing, well, I’m doing the mean thing that actually matters. And I totally told that story to a ton of people out of, like, “Look at what jackass I made of this total idiot.” I don’t normally… I talk myself out of stuff like that normally out of the risk. But every single time someone tailgates me bad enough, I am thinking about doing something like that. And I do want to just frustrate them at least for the moment, and maybe they’ll change their mind. But at least I’ll have gotten something out of it, instead of I’m just sitting there, holding my anger back. And that’s the way I view it.
Dawn: Do you want to talk about sexual sadism as well?
Tiffany: Sure. My most recent experience was this masochist person. So she had requested a black eye, because she gets… she feels strong being beaten up. Cause she can take it. And she wanted the black eye so that it made people uncomfortable and made them question, and helps her be more comfortable being this person who likes this deviant thing, right? And that did happen, some store clerk asked her. And I’m just like, you know, the store clerk went like, “Oh, honey, do I need to talk to your boyfriend?” And I told her, you should have said, “Number one, she’s a girl, and I asked for it,” which is beautifully ambiguous. I would totally want that person to be left with an even bigger question of their head of, “Maybe she didn’t really ask for it, but she did.”
Dawn: That was fun. I might have done that by accident recently, it was funny!
Tiffany: It is funny when it’s on accident, right? But anyway, so I’m doing the stuff, and she’s laying down. And I’m talking about my plan. I’m waiting for when it feels and looks like the right moment to do it. And I’m talking about plotting that out. And I go to just caress her face, and she just shirks in fear. And… Oh, my… God, that was delicious. It was tasty. And she loved it. She told me she hadn’t felt fear in a very long time, and it helps wrestle emotions out of her like that. And little later in the scene, I grabbed her hair to pull her into the position I wanted, and then I held her down by her throat to really physically subdue her. And I just sat there and soaked in the beauty that I was about to assault for a second, and I punched her in the cheek. And I’m just like, “You know… I’m not 100% sure on that,” and I did it again, and I’m like, “Oh good, I changed… her cheek had swollen up so much, it changed shape.” And that was delightful to have that immediate feedback that I got exactly what I wanted. That I know it’s gonna last. I don’t have to go, “Oh, I don’t know if I hit her hard enough.” Yeah, I did.
So that’s some sort of just direct hurting the person. There’s a little more mental is when there’s toys involved. Every toy does a different kind of thing. Like, stinging, aching. And different body parts. And I get myself into this mode where I’m trying to walk their brain and their body through these waves of endorphins, and to get them through certain thresholds, so I can leave this person with as many marks, so I can dispense as much pain and damage as I possibly can. And I’ll play with that. I’ll play with getting them over, and then you have to sort of… once you get them near, once their brain is warmed up to it, you have to push them over a threshold so that it gets into endorphins, or you’ll smack something and then smack it a second time so it really stings, and then you’ll caress it, to give their brain that positive association, while the warm endorphins flow through them. And as you get further, if the person is a beautiful, big enough pain slut, you get to the point where sometimes you push over the boundary deliberately to get their brain to the next threshold, which is, like, “I’m the one doing things here, not you.”
And my favorite toy ever was both of these things at once. It was a leather flogger with sharp, pointy, 3D-printed pyramids on it that I called the Spikula. And I couldn’t think of anything better than something that was an impact instrument that also drew blood. It was brilliant. I’ve wanted to get into MedFet, medical fetishism stuff. I’ve thought about learning stuff. There’s a way you can do skin removal that will make a scarification, and you can draw beautiful patterns that way, and people like that. And that sounds so intimate. Being this pain surgeon.
And something I’m gonna be deliberately light on details is CNC, consensual non-consent. And I generally like SA, sexual assault play. And I’ve had the delight of being able to act out a pretty realistic experience with that, that just the surprise and suddenness and no perceived lead-up. It was… And so, that’s different. I do CNC for, like, I feel like this dangerous, loose cannon. And if this person is that comfortable with me doing something like this to them, then maybe I’m fine! You know, and the person who I did that with was the same way that they’re now more comfortable pushing their own boundaries. Because they know at the end of the day, there is a safe word. And “no” is not the safe word. And so they know that at the end of the day, they’re safe, and so they can play outside of the bounds of their comfort zone. And it be in an environment like that. And I don’t know, it’s really emotionally rewarding, and it just happens to let a lot of aggression out at the same time. I’m wistful, I miss that.
Dawn: If you’re in Europe at some point, and I need to introduce you to my CNC friend.
Tiffany: Yeah. No, a lot of… I tell people that as a sadist, my limit is yours plus one. And both as a way of communicating to somebody like that, the like, “If you ask me to do it, and I think it’s any sort of fun, I don’t have any qualms doing it, for sure.”
Dawn: Do you mean age, or BDSM experience?
Tiffany: BDSM experience, like the extremeness of it. Some people might be good with using toys, and doing impact play, maybe spanking, but my recent masochist friend? I was just frickin’ punching her? And some people that might… There are people that are sadists, but they aren’t necessarily comfortable with that, because they’re doing the thing in their head of, “Well, this person likes that, so I can do that for them.” And they can either suppress or rationalize away the tinge of pain of hurting somebody. But I have fantasies beyond the extremes of what I’ve been allowed to do to people. So, that’s normally what some extreme masochists, hard masochists, do look for, in the same way that somebody who’s sexually submissive would like somebody who’s unabashedly dominant. As opposed to a Service Dom. Which is a similar thing, like, “Okay, I’ll do this to you because you like it,” as opposed to someone who likes being dominant and like, “Hey, let’s… how do we make this fun?”
Dawn: So that advertises myself when I say that my limit is theirs plus one, but it’s also basically true.
Tiffany: So you can tell your friend that.
Dawn: Yeah, well… First, you’d have to be geographically close, I suppose. But yeah, like, I think they have extensive experience.
Tiffany: Good! No, I’d rather they not be fresh meat. It’ll be way more fun, we’ll get into so much…
Dawn: Yeah, we had a little CNC orgy at one event a year ago. But like 10 or 12 or so? Like Dom role, like, surface Doms, mostly.
Tiffany: Yeah, you could probably tell the difference, you know? And I don’t know, I pride myself in being authentically dominant, and it’s just… it’s incredibly sadistic, and it’s also fun in a scene or a sex sense.
Dawn: Yeah, I think when it’s one-on-one, the person probably makes a huge difference. In this case, there were so many that all the hands and other things and everything sort of blurred together, and they didn’t have any idea anymore what was going on where and who.
Tiffany: Oh, no, that sounds fun in a different way. I like the sound of that, too.
Dawn: I get why somebody would like that. That’s really great. How did you learn all of that without being masochistic?
Tiffany: Riley. You know, they’re not as masochistic, they’re into the CNC stuff. And I was able to probe some of those extremes, but and then I just talked to people about why they liked it. You know, I can remember even being 4 years old and hearing the song by the Eurythmics of going, “Some people want to abuse you, some people want to be abused by you,” and me going, “But why would you… I can get why someone would want to abuse somebody, but why would somebody want to be abused?” And just curiosity, and asking enough questions to finally understand. That’s another thing, a brief thing of with the high pain tolerance, some people might mistake that as masochism, but it’s like, if I don’t think I’m benefiting from what I’m going through, I don’t want to go through that pain. Like that time I ran up the steps I said before, with the painful calves. It feels like this good, painful hollowness. Like your arm is stuck underneath a rock, and a forest fire is coming to you, and you’re somehow strong enough to free yourself by removing that limb. And it feels like slicing off or stabbing that weakness into submission. And that’s something I wanted to touch on, just… not sorry about making this whole part of the conversation about sadism, but I think the human aspect of it isn’t talked about it enough, and this is my opportunity.
Dawn: Yeah, no, I’m very interested in sadisms. Like, things that I’ve read is that some sadists… well, they probably have all sorts of vindictive sadism and whatnot going on, but when it comes to sexual sadism, they only find it pleasurable to the extent that the other person also finds it pleasurable. And that would explain why you experience sadism in a proactive role, let’s say, in a sexual context, but are so reactive about it in non-sexual contexts?
Tiffany: I mean, I’m happy my masochist friend let me do that, but I’m not gonna say I don’t have fantasies of just doing totally torturous things to people, either from retribution, or just to get my grief out. It is more satisfying when the other person likes it. Because it feels like in this directly but indirectly, they’re connecting with my aggression. They’re getting something different out of it than I am, but they also… I know they also appreciate that I’m getting something out of it. And you know, I guess that’s why harder forms of sadism, because when it’s very light, it can make me feel very surface sadist, or service dom. Because then it’s like, “Okay, I’m just doing this all for you. What’s in it for me? Do you even care about that I’m doing this for you right now?” And it can be very hard for me to feel like they’re enjoying that I’m enjoying myself. And so even if it’s there and I am enjoying myself, it will lack depth.
Dawn: Yeah. Yeah, I can empathize with that. I think most of the pleasure in vanilla sex for me is also in pleasuring the partner, and empathizing with their pleasure. Perhaps vanilla sex is like, for me, so…
Tiffany: Yeah, like, it’s the mutuality. Like, you’re both in all these situations trying to enjoy the same thing, actually. Together. You couldn’t enjoy it this much unless your mindsets were linked up in some way. Right? Even with just vanilla sex. Even with if I go on some dating app and get a hookup just cause I need a sexual release, you know, it’s different than somebody that I maybe just friends with benefits or fuck buddies with where like, “We’re friends, but at least we have sex… but we also have sex sometimes.” Even that has more depth, but sometimes it doesn’t fill it. Like, sometimes I do just need to get off. And I don’t want to go through all the emotional rigmarole.
Dawn: Yeah, it could be that that’s why I find sensual pleasures, like cuddling, for example, more pleasurable than sexual pleasures, because these, for me, would be something very specific that the other person probably wouldn’t want to do, and then what the other person finds interesting is something that I only find interesting empathetically, and so there’s not this level of mutuality, whereas with cuddles, it’s much more frequent that I’m in sync with another person.
Tiffany: Yeah, I’m a big cuddle fiend, even if I can be hypersexual. I get very frustrated if I can only really express one or the other. Let me think, so… If I take, where does the sadism come from within me? So some of it’s the power and control. If I take it at its core. But it’s also an aggression release? So in non-sexual contexts, like vindictive sadism, just to get it out, even if the person never knows it was me, or never understands. And usually that’s from feeling controlled by them, or feeling powerless. And so, like, some of my extreme desires or fantasies of wanting to get someone run out of the kind of industry or job they’re in, it’s just like, I want that person to the core to feel powerless and helpless as their life falls apart around them. And that’s I guess when it’s more vindictive, when it’s almost basically sadism for the sake of sadism. And the other more reactive stuff is either pride, aggression, release. Like a show of force, to be like, don’t… Either to maintain the image of strength, or to impress it upon them that I can. Or, like I said, as a form of antisocial punishment, as an act of trying to change the behavior, or a deterrent. I guess those are where sadism comes for me, because that’s where I’ve needed it, that’s where I’ve found it useful. Just like we were discussing really early on in my childhood, I would act out, but it would normally not be here just to hurt somebody. But I would have sadistic fantasies. And I would try to keep them separate from each other. And it’s just at some point those were allowed to coexist close enough to want to do vindictive and prideful, you know, contumacious pride forms of sadism.
When I did martial arts for 10 years when I was younger, I had a lot easier time with my aggressive tendencies. If I have a place to get my aggression out, and I don’t also feel completely helpless, and it’s like one person’s fault, I have a much easier time with it. So a lot of it is aggression to me, and if it’s not, it’ll be like control. But they can be closely related, you know? Hope that makes sense.
Dawn: No, it makes total sense. So, like, when it comes to fantasies, where you have a lot more freedom, are there any particular… You mentioned vindictive sadism and fantasies, but you also mentioned letting grief, grievances, something like that…
Tiffany: Well, it’s just venting my aggression, trying to get it out.
Dawn: Yeah, like, when it comes to fantasies, are there any kinds of sadism that you engage in fantasies that are not so reactive? That are more proactive?
Tiffany: Yeah, think so. I’m learning I really repress these thoughts a lot, so I don’t act on them. I can probably think of a… There’s a person in my life, no longer in my life, and due to a service of theirs I still get access to their shared parts of their Google Calendar. And I’ve kind of wanted to send cryptic letters about when they’ve done this at this time, because I know it would just… It might even throw them into a paranoid spiral. I don’t really have anything to get out of that, because I most likely will never talk to that person again, it’s just entertaining that this person could be so sloppy and entertaining that it would probably take so little to unseat all of their mental stability. And I’ve only been able to talk myself out of it out of, “That’s gonna come back to bite me.”
Dawn: They’re gonna figure out who it is.
Tiffany: And it’s two people, and they’ve got plenty of mental issues, and so it would throw that household into complete disarray if it had the intended effect. Because they would both have different paranoid reactions to it, and not be able to calm the other person down.
Dawn: We are in control.
Tiffany: Yeah, I technically have power over them, but I’m not, like, it’s not gonna change anything. You know, it would just be entertaining. I would love to be the fly on the wall when that happens, and watch them run around like scared monkeys.
Dawn: Yeah, that’s something I sometimes find disappointing, that I could hypothetically do things, but I wouldn’t be able to see what the outcome is.
Tiffany: Yeah, and I admit I would probably do it. I would be hoping that they would figure that out, and cut the service off that we’re sharing still. So that they know who did it to them.
Dawn: And then it’s more likely to fall back on you.
Tiffany: Yeah, absolutely. It’s not a great idea. Pardon me, it’s a fun idea, but it’s not a good idea. That’s a recent one. Because… So to be really vulnerable about this, so I told that story to my housemate. And she told that story to her ex. And that apparently was not an insignificant part of why her ex broke up with her. Because my housemate would be friends with somebody who would want to do that to somebody. Like, a values judgment? Now, no, we’ve talked about this, that ex wasn’t really great for them. Of course, this person can be kind of passive, and let things go on. But they’re not upset with me over it, that’s what I’m saying.
Dawn: Yeah, there’s just this weird transitivity. I think in our groups, a lot of people experience some kind of transitivity. If person X has an attribute that I don’t like, and person Y is friends with person X, then I also cannot be friends with person Y. Even though I never have to meet person X.
Tiffany: Yeah, so I’ll just add to how much I know what you’re talking about, that the person I’m gonna hang out with this weekend, that spontaneous, ridiculous plan of his, he has also been a victim of that. Like, cause actually, in the same way you said it, I get how they came to those conclusions, and thought that that action might make sense, but you know, I told that as much to my housemate, I’m like, “In a way, she’s indirectly trying to control who you’re friends with.” You know, like, I’m smart enough and in control and have enough self-control enough to not do those sorts of things. When I’m feeling like that, sometimes the only thing I can do to talk myself out of it is reputation, but it works. That’s a weird feeling. I have a feeling of someone would expect me to be ashamed of that, and I’m not. That I’m the kind of person that sometimes I want to do bad things, and the only way I can talk myself out of it is the relatively shallow reason of reputation.
Dawn: The badness, the harm to the other person is not at all what talks me out of it.
Tiffany: Yeah, no, maybe somebody would be, like, normally someone would be ashamed of that. I get the feeling someone would expect me to be. If you didn’t know that that can be part of NPD masking, too, with having low empathy, and not understanding how you’ve hurt somebody, for sure, right?
Dawn: But that’s part of psychopathic masking.
Tiffany: Again, of how I get the sense of, “This is expected of me. So, I better do it if I want the relationship to continue.” And it’s a real weird twinge. It’s like feeling like the other person might not like me. But I like me, and I don’t care? It’s really weird, it’s really one-sided.
Dawn: But there are also values, behavioral codes, whatever you might call it, that would make someone feel disappointed if they act certain things out they at some point decided they didn’t want to act out.
Tiffany: Yeah, like, I have my values, even if I don’t… some of them just don’t have emotions backing them up. I don’t feel bad if I were to go back on them, but I still don’t want to, that’s still not the kind of person I want to be.
Dawn: Yeah, exactly. It’s how it works for me most of the time now. Like, I used to have all of these internal threats of guilt and shame and whatnot that I would experience, and now that I’ve let go of those, what remains is, like, I don’t want to do the thing. So it’s always the result of some complicated trade-off. Like, sure, it would have this pleasurable effect, and would have this other effect, but on net, I don’t want to do the thing anyway.
Tiffany: I feel bad that I kinda can’t talk myself out of wanting to do the things. And partly, again, like I’ve said before, it makes me afraid of not being able to recover sufficiently.
Dawn: But for how long has this calendar been shared with you now?
Tiffany: Several months.
Dawn: Well, so far you haven’t done anything, so… The evidence that you’re actually doing a pretty good job at not actually wanting to do the thing.
Tiffany: On net. Yeah. But I do genuinely feel bad when I lose that battle to people I care about. So, we talked about my recent fight with Riley. And you know, in my mind, if I just felt bad about wanting to end a friendship or cut them out like that, over that? It would be easier to not do that sort of thing. And sometimes I lose those battles with people who do matter to me. And I guess I can’t help but feel guilty over it a bit. I don’t feel a lot of guilt, but it’s just I guess I still haven’t changed my mind that I want to be better for Riley. They’ve done so much for me. Back when I started to be able to feel their love for me, the first way it hit me was just like, “You’ll put up with all this shit of mine, for real, you mean it?” And then it hitting me that they were interested in my actual personal growth. That’s because they wanted me to be happy, not just because they’re tolerant. And I’m like… “Oh…” And you know, I guess I’m proud of myself, that even in breaking up with them, I haven’t let that connection shrivel up. I still want to be better for them, because I am still close to them. Feel like I owe it to them. I feel like there should be a better way of internalizing it than owing him, like it’s an obligation, but I struggle to imagine a different way.
Dawn: But you also want to be better for yourself, right?
Tiffany: Yeah. But those are in two different whole worlds in my head. I don’t know what’s normal there at all.
Dawn: Yeah, like, I’ve been trying to search for some memories. I think there was this one time when I had an interview lined up, and I had my flight home, and I needed to do the interview at home, but I was also sick. So on the one hand, I would have liked to isolate in order not to infect people at the airport or on the flight. On the other hand, I wanted to get home, can’t rebook the flight, can’t get a refund or anything, wanted to take the flight, and I wanted to be home for the interview the next day. And so I decided to take the flight anyway, and then on the flight, I wore a mask. And yeah, so like, there were all these trade-offs, like the risk of infecting someone, the interview, the flight, the impossibility to get a refund, and all of that stuff, and all of that netted out to the decision to take the flight, but to wear a mask. And all along, I didn’t feel any kind of shame or guilt or anything over that. Was just a bunch of factors that I intuitively aggregated, and then derived a decision from it?
Tiffany: Makes sense. Hmm. I’m just wistful over finding that part of myself difficult to change, and not really sure about how much I do or don’t want it to change, how much maybe it even needs to change. Like, even if maybe I would benefit from not brooding the sadism out of myself, per se, but making it a much, much gentler fire. If it’s managed, you know, my energy is better spent elsewhere. I feel my younger self disappointed in myself. That I won’t just find a way. Whatever sense of impossibility imps upon me, just arrogance my way through it. Maybe I need to tell my younger self that that’s not how it always works.
Dawn: I mean, sadism also solves a problem for you. Like, it’s not so addictive like for other friends of mine. Fairly purely reactive, and so it seems to serve some kind of purpose, and maybe it just wants that purpose to be served, regardless of whether it’s the sadism itself that does it, or it’s something else. Usually, there are a bunch of different solutions to choose from.
Tiffany: Yeah. You know, I guess that’s a good point. It doesn’t feel addictive. It just feels great, or necessary, or even emotionally necessary sometimes. It’s making me feel really weird feelings, like again, like my younger self being disappointed in me. Like I’ve fallen from grace. I shouldn’t judge myself so harshly. Again, I should remind myself, my younger self had no idea what she was in for. Because some of my delusional levels of faith, or also faith in my parents, faith and institutions, maybe contributed to things. Because when that crashes out, it crashes out hard, you know? When your dad feels like you’re Superman, and you find out you can’t… you might have died if you weren’t conniving or as big of an asshole back. It hurts. It hurts worse. Like, if it had been more gradual. Yeah, I really shouldn’t underestimate how unprepared I was to go through some of those things.
Dawn: What is your younger self disappointed about?
Tiffany: That I used to think that people were generally worth it, and that the world was overall worth it. And so that positive things I do have some sort of value. And some sort of likelihood to make somebody’s life better. And with that reasoning, that’s not really compatible with seeking out ways to do harm to somebody. Just to giggle. That’s not… And those were important values for me that were beat out of me. Proverbially, and when I was younger, literally. Again, I need to remind myself I had no idea what I was in for. And I couldn’t.
Dawn: Hmm.
Tiffany: Alright, I think I’m good. Thanks for that. It’s, you know, we’ve talked, that’s one of the challenging things I’m working through.
Dawn: Hmm. You know, like, maybe the adaptations that you found were close to the optimal ones that you could have found given the knowledge and abilities that you had at the time.
Tiffany: Yeah.
Dawn: And you had to adapt or survive? And sad. That was the way that you found?
Tiffany: Survival can be cruel, yeah. So, I’m getting hungry. We’ve been on a long time.
Dawn: Yeah…
Tiffany: I’ve enjoyed it. There’s a lot we haven’t gone over yet, but we’ve got over a lot we didn’t plan to, so…
Dawn: I’ll tick off the questions we’ve already answered. For the next time.
Tiffany: Hey. Hmm, it was really, it’s been really pleasant. Get some of that stuff off of my back. It weighs on me, the… my recovery weighs on me. In a way I find hard to describe, but it does. So… it’s important. Thank you, Dawn!
Dawn: It was lovely learning a lot more about you. I didn’t know I would learn so much more.
Tiffany: I know, I already talk a lot, right?
Dawn: Yeah, we’ve already messaged a lot, but there was still so much nuance in there, and I thought you used to have 4 to 5 alters, no, apparently 7.
Tiffany: At the… yeah, way back. Way back when, yeah, now it’s technically two.
Dawn: Yeah, I know, but like… They’re both Tiffany now, so… Can you switch between them on command?
Tiffany: No, no, I’m pretty integrated. It’s just they’re just pretty distinct, and there’s normally not as much amnesia, it’s definitely the base personality split slowly healing. And if that makes sense. Cuz I’ve shown you, right, the spectrum that most Cluster B personalities are the same kind of dissociation as mild DID. But it’s in a certain structure. But there can be, like, it could be very hard for me to see somebody as capable of respecting me when I seem like a child, it could be hard, you know. My perspective is twisted a bit, but there’s not as much amnesia. So, it’s just that identity fragmentation slowly healing. And it’s still having some extremes that are enough that you… I can just tell. You know?
Dawn: Yeah, we usually call them self-states or mood states when they are not full alters or full parts.
Tiffany: These can, like I said, I can almost age-regress. Definitely. When I oscillate… when I’m not in doing better and I’m oscillating, I will be oscillating back and forth between, “Oh, well, I’ll just make myself do it,” and self-pity of, “Oh my god. How could I do this with all this happening?” And that’s not entirely my… I guess I’m splitting when that happens. And like I said, sometimes there’s smaller parts of it, like smaller contained chunks that aren’t integrated in fully yet.
Dawn: So… but they don’t have their own separate identities, they’re different.
Tiffany: Dissociation, you know, dissociation is a sliding scale, it’s a spectrum. It’s a really interesting part of psychology.
Dawn: Yeah, and like, it sounds like you have most of the time control over it, maybe sometimes not so much when you’re oscillating and whatnot, but…
Tiffany: Yeah, the self-pity’s really hard to get out of, I’ll admit. Because the cynicism wraps back on itself. If that makes sense.
Dawn: Oh, hmm. You can fully get out quickly?
Tiffany: I am now that I’ve noticed it. I didn’t realize I was just sitting there wallowing in despair. Like, I did, but I didn’t. It just felt like it was happening to me, not like something I could control. And it felt like my everything. It felt like that’s all there is? That’s very indicative of splitting. So…
Dawn: Yeah. I think two friends of mine have told me now that they can just sort of pick whatever state they want to be in at a given time, like, maybe for sharing purposes, this state is best. For getting stuff done, this other state is best, and then they switch.
Tiffany: I have sort of modes, like, I have “Get through it at quote-unquote All-costs, any means mode.” But I don’t know if that… I guess that’s a different self-state. But it feels more integrated than the other stuff. So, like, regardless of what I call it, what I name it, it just feels like one of the ways I can be.
Dawn: Hmm… Yeah, cool.
Tiffany: Let’s get some food. Yeah.
Dawn: Yeah, thank you so much! Absolutely, Dawn! Happy hug!
Tiffany: You know your curiosity is just endearing.
Dawn: I’ll be curious about a lot more things in the next part.
Tiffany: Yeah, I’m sure I’ve given you a lot to ask. I’ve been through a lot, and I’ve done a lot about being through a lot.
Dawn: Yes! And you can reflect on it extremely well. And you have the eloquence to also get it across.
Tiffany: That was also hard to learn.
Dawn: Mmm. Yeah, same here.
Tiffany: Alright, I’ll see you later.
Dawn: Yo!
Tiffany: Really hungry.
Dawn: Bon appetit!
Tiffany: Bye!
