Tiffany on Radical Authenticity and Recovery for Sovereigns – Psychopathic Narcissists

Key Insights

• Inabsolutionism. A philosophy for finding meaning without needing external “absolution” or a perfect narrative arc; life is messy, and meaning is implicit in our experiences and what we choose to value, not in a final resolution.

• The paradox of control. Rigidly trying to control outcomes often reduces your actual agency; surrendering the need for control opens up more options and allows you to navigate reality more effectively.

• Redefining trust. Trust should not be an expectation of perfection (that you or others will never fail), but a commitment to repair, learn, and do better when failures inevitably happen.

• Healthy vs. unproductive anger. Anger is a valid, motivating force for justice and setting boundaries (e.g., against bullies), whereas hate is often stagnant; anger can be channeled to set precedents that protect oneself and others.

• Process-oriented mindset. Shifting focus from rigid goals (which can lead to teleological, transactional thinking) to enjoying the process itself helps break down obsessive patterns and increases satisfaction.

• The disavowed self. Recovery often involves reconnecting with parts of the self (like creativity or innocence) that were suppressed or “disavowed” so early in life that they are pre-verbal and forgotten.

• Strategic disagreeableness. “Out-assholing the asshole” or “Duper’s Delight” can be a pro-social tool when used to dismantle bullies or toxic systems that don’t respond to kindness.

• Nature vs. nurture in personality. Psychopathy and narcissism likely arise from a mix of genetic predispositions (e.g., “Factor 1” lack of fear) and environmental factors (e.g., “Factor 2” abuse or neglect), leading to different defense mechanisms.

• Empathy as a skill. Affective empathy can be cultivated through a process of mindfulness, understanding the other person’s separate intent (mirroring), and actively imagining their perspective.

• Radical authenticity. Owning your entire self—including your capacity for cruelty, your “messiness,” and your “weirdness”—is the path to genuine connection and self-respect.

Glossary of Concepts

• Sovereignism. A reframing of what is clinically often called “malignant narcissism.” It describes a personality structure focused on maintaining extreme autonomy and control to protect a fragile self, often developing as a defense against a lack of safety or agency in childhood.

• Inabsolutionism. Tiffany’s personal philosophy that rejects the nihilistic need for life to “make sense” or end perfectly. It posits that meaning is generated by the observer (us) and exists implicitly in our experiences, regardless of closure.

• Mentalization-Based Treatment (MBT). A therapeutic approach that focuses on the ability to “think about thinking” – understanding that one’s own and others’ behavior is driven by internal mental states (thoughts, feelings, desires) rather than just external circumstances.

• Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT). A therapy designed to help people manage intense emotions. Key skills mentioned include mindfulness (being present), distress tolerance (surviving crises without making them worse), and interpersonal effectiveness.

• Teleological thinking. A cognitive pattern where actions are interpreted solely based on their visible outcomes or goals, often ignoring the internal mental states or intentions behind them (e.g., “The pen fell because it wanted to annoy me”).

• Introjects. Internalized voices, rules, or behaviors absorbed from authority figures (like parents) that become part of one’s own internal dialogue (e.g., a harsh “inner critic” based on a critical parent).

• Factor 1 (primary) psychopathy. Associated with innate traits like low fear, low empathy, and high dominance.

• Factor 2 (secondary) psychopathy. Associated with impulsivity, emotional instability, and antisocial behavior, often reactive to environmental trauma or neglect.

• The disavowed self. Aspects of one’s personality (often vulnerability, creativity, or innocence) that were rejected or suppressed at a very early, often preverbal stage of development to ensure survival or attachment.

• Alexithymia. A personality trait characterized by the inability to identify and describe emotions experienced by one’s self.

• Duper’s delight. The thrill or pleasure derived from deceiving or manipulating someone, particularly when “outsmarting” a perceived bully or controlling person.

• Splitting. A defense mechanism common in BPD and NPD where people or situations are viewed in extremes (all good or all bad) with no middle ground.

• Self-transcendence. The expansion of one’s sense of self to include others, allowing for deep empathy and love (often practiced via Metta or loving-kindness meditation).

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Transcript

Friendsgiving and the Car Incident

Dawn: Welcome back to this second installment of my interview with Tiffany! How are you doing this wonderful morning?

Tiffany: I’m pretty good, honestly. I’m happy to be awake at an ungodly hour and have something enjoyable and productive to do for once.

Dawn: Yeah, you didn’t sleep, eh?

Tiffany: No, but I woke up at 3:30 PM yesterday, and now it’s 6:00 AM, so my sleep schedule’s been upside down for weeks. I think today is the day that I suffer for tomorrow’s graces.

Dawn: Yeah, I heard that you’ve been to a Friendsgiving! What is that? And do you wanna tell me more about it?

Tiffany: Well, it wasn’t technically as much of a Friendsgiving as we thought. I was really the only person outside of the family invited over. My friend Kai invited multiple friends, and I’m the only one who showed up. But a Friendsgiving… I would say it’s something that happens with a lot of queer people because we don’t have a close relationship with our family, or we fucking hate them, they fucking hate us, or some mix of the above. So we invite our found family and our friends to have that kind of thing that none of us would probably have outside of it.

Anyway, this was her inviting somebody that she was close to in that way, but to her family. So it was nice otherwise. I like Kai’s family a lot. Just the people I chatted with – it was enjoyable, nice food, getting just a little drunk, snuggling with Kai later.

But in the middle of that, we went to go pick up alcohol. I said, “Kai, let me drive your car, I’ll back it out,” because I had pulled my car in behind hers as she had requested. And I backed her car into her house. Not at any sort of rate of speed – it bent the roof gutter drain spigot and scratched her car a little. It started out as her trying to tell me to stop with the most hushed tone. At first, I wanted to get really mad over that, and I thought, “No… I should be more patient and listening, and blame’s not the solution here.”

But I started having an emotional flashback to any issue that damaged property, but especially with cars, with my father. He always provided me a car, but it was always his, and under a lot of spoken and unspoken stipulations. I was fucking going through that.

Kai is a big precious sweetie, but she tries, honestly, too hard to make everybody around her happy and comfortable. In a situation like that, that’s just completely smothering to me. At first, I was just like, “Listen, if you apologize one more time, I’m just going to go the fuck home.” And I almost did. I’m not saying anything she’s doing isn’t well-meaning. She really is honestly trying to help. But I calmed down a bit, and I moved my car to somewhere better.

She ended up following me there to offer me Buspar, which has helped me – I’ve been trialing it through her with her extras. Maybe I could need that when I got more composed, but I just needed the space. I didn’t need the extra information coming into me from somebody bothering me. I told her that I don’t want that. I finally got her to leave me alone while I’m in my car for a bit, and I just started screaming in my car.

Man, as we’re about to actually leave… I had turned it down twice by then, but then she goes to give the Buspar to me in my hand. I take the bottle, open it up, put it back in the bottle, close the bottle, shove the bottle in her purse, and I go, “I’ve said no to this three times now.”

So I was getting close to my wit’s end. It was getting very hard for me to deal with. Her people-pleasing was just being stifling at best, and completely smothering and overwhelming at worst. Eventually, I recovered, and her parents are much nicer about that than my father, which is an understatement. It was completely fine, and in fact, their family joked with me – I think her aunt, her mother, and her grandfather. I was just like, “Oh, yeah, when I was backing up, I noticed the house was not exactly lined up with the road, and I was just trying to nudge it a little, and I tried too hard. I needed to nudge it 2 inches, I accidentally tried to nudge it 2 feet.” That more holistic, neurotypical way of blowing that steam off really helped put me in a much better space.

We talked about stuff like that later, and I think it’s still weighing on her. I think she’s very self-conscious. She saw our friend Lucy earlier – I’d say today, but now it’s tomorrow. Earlier yesterday? Before I went and picked Lucy up to hang out with us. Lucy tells me she was kinda not there, but it could be a different medication she’s adjusting to. But oh no, it has to be worry. I would really like what I had to say to her not damage her, not come off as this cutting criticism that makes her worry about everything she might be doing wrong. And that just stresses me the fuck out.

In moments like that, I need to learn to be much, much more direct and downright near incisive with taking my space and enforcing my boundaries. Just being like, “I just need a minute to collect myself, and I’m gonna leave for a bit. I’m sorry. I’ll be back, everything’s fine.”

I think my default to not do that comes from a ton of places, which is an issue. Like having difficulty trusting that if I don’t try and solve this situation right now, it’s gonna be worse in 5 minutes, and then for the next 5 years of my life. Just being emotionally compromised, and no longer really having much capacity left over to think about anybody’s feelings other than my own.

I just feel bad for freaking out on her. I don’t remember what she did, but she followed me to my car, and she apologized again for nothing, or because she’d taken the wrong lesson from it. I have to open my car’s hood to manually shut it off because the wiring’s weird. I just slammed my hood shut, and it scared her. I really don’t want to be that kind of person that scares people and makes them afraid of when things like that happen. I don’t really want to do that to her. She’s been a really good friend, and we’ve had a lot of fun. I dyed her hair a day or two prior to that – I bleached it and dyed it pink for her. It was really fun.

Tiffany: Yeah, I’m scared of hurting her and losing my gal pal. Just the finer notes of having kinda normal friends, it’s just tough still. I wish I had nicer things… more positive things to talk about, but… That’s still really weighing on me.

Dawn: It is a very interesting analysis of a very complicated situation. Imagine that situation – I would also think about so many things. Like how to make sure that she’s not taking the wrong lesson from the situation, trying to understand where she’s coming from, why she’s reacting in such a surprising way. And oh god, all sorts of things beyond the current trauma that I’m going through – like the flashback and everything on top of that. It just sounds super overwhelming.

Tiffany: Yeah, it was grotesquely overwhelming. One other thing I wanted to mention about that is I think there’s a masculine dimension to this. It seems that most of the men in my life really get me. When I talk about when something happens, I just need space. When I was talking to you about that the day it happened, a guy friend of mine literally came into my DMs on Facebook about it. Like, just getting it, just directly empathizing with it.

In that moment, I don’t want the comfort, I just want to regain control. I want to be more sure of myself again, and then be able to act on that. The comfort and the attempts at help just make it worse.

Dawn: Yeah, I think for me, the misguided apology would have been the distressing part. Because I would have had to mentally model her, try to figure out what I can say to repair whatever she’s misinterpreting about the situation, and I carefully do that in such a situation. I think for me, the comfort would have been nice, but her taking responsibility for something that’s not her responsibility would have been distressing for me.

Tiffany: Yeah, it really was distressing. Like I said, I think there’s lasting stuff concerning that. Like, I think she’s still going through stuff about it. It boils down to that happening, and now she needs help too, and she’s denying herself of it, and trying to help me, unintentionally sacrificially.

And I’m just trying to take care of myself first, and then I will very willingly take care of other people after I’m put back together. She just doesn’t know how to look after her own feelings in that way. Oh, and it wasn’t just one apology. Each apology of hers is like three to five apologies, and each one has its own explanation of why she felt she needs to apologize. Which is aggravating, annoying as fuck. I cannot stand it. I accept it, and when I’m in a bad mood, I put up with it. All the rest of the time we’re hanging out? Because she is a good friend, and she’s fun to hang out with. But a moment like that, it’s just making things worse.

I just get angry that she’s making things worse for herself while not giving me the space I need. It’s very hard for me in a moment like that not to just react like, “Why are you being so fucking stupid?” Like, I know it’s not that, I know it’s her own insecurities, but in a moment like that, that is my default. That’s where I’m going, and it’s very hard to fight. Very hard to manage.

Dawn: Like, for me, the problem was that I didn’t give myself permission to self-soothe, so once my therapist gave me permission to self-soothe, I could easily learn it. For other people, it’s apparently the learning of how to self-soothe in the first place, that they need to practice self-soothing itself? I don’t know which one it is for her.

Tiffany: It definitely seems like the latter for her. It strikes me as dependent thinking, because I really have to help her get her brain into a mode of seeing her own feelings at all. It reminds me of another friend that I used to date. She had a really nasty, narcissistic ex that I had the delight of going toe-to-toe with just once. That helped bring their relationship to an end and have my friend move out of the ex-wife’s house. She’d been putting that off for a ton of reasons. That precipitated stuff, and it was a conflict that needed to be faced.

It just reminds me of when I was talking to her and trying to get across to her, “You can’t be responsible for your ex-wife’s happiness.” Even if you would tell her about what she went through, she really still wouldn’t see it. You’d have to really demonstrate it or get her into a different headspace before she got better at being in touch with her own feelings. So it strikes me as a form of dependent thinking.

Now that I think of it, I’ve been trying to get out of the habit of pathologizing my friends. Not even just because that’s not super healthy, but so that my primary way I get to know somebody, even if I smooth over it with masking, isn’t basically psychoanalysis. I’ve been trying to just let friendships happen and be. But that just strikes me as something that a year-and-a-half-ago me would have noticed a lot quicker. But I had some worse patterns going on. I think it’s better this way.

Dawn: Yeah. Well, you can also just do it from a place of curiosity or something, just without any particular judgment or hypervigilance attached to it.

Tiffany: Yeah, but that depends on the… A, I tend to obsess over it unhealthily, but even then, I don’t want my friendships to necessarily be based on that. Rather, I want more friendships and relationships that are not based on that as the primary or secondary thing. Like, you and I have that. But for a number of reasons, right? If we weren’t talking about this stuff, we wouldn’t be having as much fun. But yeah, no, I want to have friendships that have depth in different things.

Internal Monologue vs. Abstract Thought

Dawn: Yeah, let me be curious once more. One of my notes from the last part of the interview was to ask you how you think. Some people have an internal monologue, some people have an internal dialogue between like 10 people or something, and some people just have silence, like me most of the time – just the thoughts themselves. Others seem to mostly use imagery for thinking. So yeah, I was curious how it works for you.

Tiffany: I have an internal dialogue, but it’s definitely more prevalent and worse when I’m locked in my OCD. When I’m in the moment, or I’m in a flow state, it’s primarily abstract. Like if I’m fixing something mechanical, electronic, or I’m machining something, it’s all abstract and imagery.

But my dialogue can definitely take me over, and it could be hard to see anything outside of what I’m obsessing over at the time, which is like the definition of OCD, how it tunnel-visions you. So I guess I mean to say… in my young adulthood to adulthood, I’ve had much more of an internal dialogue. But up until, let’s say, high school, it was definitely abstract and imagery first, and then I’d have to translate it into words to get my ideas out. And I’m just trying to return to that.

Dawn: Yeah, I think I started with the internal monologue around age 8, and then stopped at age 25, roughly. And yeah, for me, the downside has been that it hindered my introspection, because I pretended that the narration is everything that I was thinking, when it was a small fraction of what I was thinking – just sort of some kind of distilled and sometimes fictional story that I told myself. So, in a way, it hindered my introspection. Have you had that impression?

Tiffany: Yeah, it doesn’t actually hinder my introspection, it hinders my ability to be in the moment. So, forgive anybody who’s a fan of Terry Pratchett, but apparently in some Terry Pratchett books, they described the First Thoughts, the Second Thoughts, and the Third Thoughts.

The First, Second, and Third Thoughts

Tiffany: The First Thought is what you get from spontaneous experience or feelings, right? Just like, “Ouch, that hurt.” And then you think of why? And then the Third Thought is perspective-taking. Second Thought will also, you know, let’s say you’re a very damaged person. Second Thought will also have a lot of those unhealthy reactions. Like another person once told me, the first thing you think is how you grew up, and the second thing you think is how you are. That’s the Second Thought, and Third Thought would be, again, the perspective-taking.

So my internal monologue typically suppresses my First Thoughts. It’s a mix of things. I have plenty of unconscious reflexes for those spontaneous experiences to lead into these more Second-form Thoughts. And I have a lot of self-understanding and rules and ideas of how I and the world work that I can also lean on and go, “Well, if I do this, it’s probably gonna end up in this, and I’ll fucking hate that, or I will fucking love that.” And it keeps me from actually touching my feelings most of the time.

I was able to change a lot of those unconscious reflexes just by getting to know myself better, and some mindfulness stuff. But that’s just still not how my brain registers my spontaneous experience. And so, I’ve been able to do a lot of introspection with my internal dialogue, but in wanting to actually get closer to myself… And not just understand myself. I am learning to let it go. Suppress it, or at least make it a more conscious action when I think in words, you know?

Dawn: Yeah, like, the First Thoughts are also very many, and very nuanced and very complex for me. There are all these different factors. Like if I’m late for something, then there is sort of the frustration over the thing that has led to me being late, then the worries about how people will react, whether I’m interrupting something, or what people will think about me when I show up late for something and they don’t know me yet. All of these things come together.

And then the Second Thought is, “So how do I guilt-externalize now? What can I blame?” And I’m like, “No, you don’t have to do that, chill.” And yeah, I suppose then the Third Thought is how I actually show up and apologize for being late or something, and then nothing else.

Tiffany: Yeah, that’s perspective-taking, usually, right? From what I would glean, developmentally, First Thought is basically your Id. And it’s your base impulses, desires, feelings, etc. And when you’re young, your Second Thought will be more from your Ego. Your Superego hasn’t really formed. And I feel like as you grow older, your Second Thought comes from your Superego. It’s more in response to how other people will react to it. That’s where all the shame and stuff gets internalized.

And then your Ego has now shifted into a place where it’s trying to mediate that again. And my intuition would be that they flip again when one hits a more harmonious state. You know, you feel something, you’re hungry. And you go, “Hmm, I could do this.” And then you think, “Yeah, but not right now, because everyone’s gonna hate me if I eat a pizza in front of them.” That’s my intuition. But I think that makes sense, because our Superego is supposed to be keeping our Ego in check. And it’s when we have a lot of toxic guilt or shame that our Superego would need our Ego to come back and put it in check, you know?

Dawn: Yeah, like I used to have a very punitive Superego, so I think the key was, in the end, to get the Superego to chill out and just trust that the Ego will want the right thing anyway.

Tiffany: Yeah, and that the Ego knows when to check itself and go ask the Superego again. Because in the Freudian thing, your Id is underneath the water. It’s subconscious and unconscious. The Ego is what helps you… the Ego is the beginning of your idea that “I am separate from the world.” And so, it’s as simple as, “I want this right now. Well, I can’t have it right now.” Kind of mediation of your spontaneous experience and how you get that to interact with the world.

And then, your Superego… in the Freudian model, the Superego is both above and below water, and helps mediate them as a whole, and that’s why it’s more other-faced. Because that’s what’s really lacking in Ego and Id. So I would think somebody that’s healthy, their Superego comes in last. It makes sure they perspective-take, but it doesn’t make them hang on it. It’s not in charge.

Dawn: Yeah, and also, what you said about the Superego basically being an advisor who the Ego can turn to, that’s also a nice framing.

I was wondering whether your internal monologue perhaps also helps with bridging self-states? Like, I have this problem that my thoughts are very hard to remember, and they’re very hard to notice in the first place. I mostly just notice the echoes of these thoughts, and then sort of try to figure out what they are experimentally. “Might it be this thing? No, that doesn’t resonate. Might it be this other thing? Yeah, that resonates.” And then I sort of figure out what these original thoughts might have been. They have a certain feel to them, but it’s very diffused, and so I have a really hard time remembering them. They are also super dependent on particular environments, and probably mood states.

So if we instead use something like natural language that’s objective and shared among humans, so also trivially shared among mood states, then that could help bridge them. And so I was wondering whether that perhaps is something that I developed in order to not have amnesia between different mood states, but have something that can bridge the amnesia. And I think when I was 8, I started to be able to do that more, and so didn’t have problems with amnesia. Would that make sense for you?

Tiffany: I mean, I’ll start with what’s going on with you. That’s kind of the definition of why a self-narrative exists, right? Because you know your feelings will change, but you can know some things about you that’ll still be true tomorrow. And no longer being defined by your immediate feelings. So I think that’s just your autistic relationship with the self-narrative. There’s things that are more tenuous to you by nature.

Using MBT and DBT

Tiffany: For me, that’s basically what DBT (Dialectical Behavior Therapy) is, right? It helps me. I’m having DBT and MBT (Mentalization-Based Therapy) myself frequently. And that helps me with a similar thing. If I notice I’m splitting, or I just notice I’m in an unhelpful pattern, I can at least stop and try and synthesize the opposite – like the scholastic method – and go, “Does that seem as reasonable, or as unreasonable? If that sounds just as reasonable, the other extreme, what am I doing? What is this?” And at least get my brain back into a more self-reflective pattern.

If I can synthesize a totally different way of looking at something, if I can get my brain to get closer to the abstract and just get a spontaneous, better way of looking at the situation, or just an attempt at it, I can go, “Yeah, I’m clearly not looking at this in a helpful way, at least, and maybe not objective at all.” And in a similar way, I’m testing the waters of my own perception in that moment, instead of just my feelings. Cause in that kind of moment, I’m trying not to tell myself my feelings are wrong, but I’m trying to tell myself my understandings or my perceptions that are leading to my current feelings aren’t the way to go.

Because only once I bring that back, and I’m back into a more integrated self-state, does the stuff like, “Yeah, but now how do I actually feel? What do I actually want?” come back. Can I do that again? When I’m disintegrated, when I’m splitting or I’m dissociating, I can’t really reach down there.

I certainly try to keep a lot of little things in mind specifically to counter some patterns I notice. And some things just like gaining a more helpful self-narrative and a more helpful view of other people – so internalizing them as values or beliefs to some degree. So that my current perception due to strong emotions is challenged, because I go, “No, that’s not what I believe. And I know I believe that for not no reason. I know I formed that belief over time for a reason, so I really shouldn’t go willy-nilly and just burn everything down right now.”

Dawn: Like, can you perhaps go even more granular? Like, do you use any particular skills or sub-skills from the DBT toolkit? Like from the STOP skill or something? Or some parts of the TIP skill? And is it first the DBT skills, and then afterwards the MBT? How do you use it?

Tiffany: Normally, I would do MBT first. Let’s bring up that Friendsgiving thing again. That helps remind me that my friend Kai is only trying to be helpful. Cause in the moment, I’ll often be reacting to some really negative assumption. Like I said, in the moment when I want to just straight up go, “You’re gonna move the car, right? Okay, good. I’m just gonna go sit in my car for a bit. I’ll be back in 10 minutes, half an hour, everything’s fine. I just need to calm my head down. Please don’t worry about it.”

I won’t want to do that, because if in the moment I have the time to reflect, I’ll go… I’ll think to myself, “Well, what would actually help me if I left the situation? Why am I not just doing that?” But wait, is that what she’s actually doing? Is that what she’s actually thinking? No. And then, with MBT, you then think of it from the other person’s perspective. She’s probably trying to do something more like this. Okay, well now that I know she’s trying to be helpful, I’m going to tell her I’m doing this because this is most helpful for me now. Okay, yeah, right, no, I can trust her.

Because that can help me even within a split. And that can get me out of the thought patterns that are reinforcing the split, or are keeping me from escaping it. It helps me bring about those things I don’t realize I’m projecting. Because MBT basically breaks projection down. If you’re mentalizing, you’re most likely not projecting.

So then, let’s say it wasn’t as big of a deal then. But if I was then also panicked – “She was no longer gonna be my friend,” etc. – then I would probably have to do some DBT steps, because that’s the kind of thing that’s gonna make me split. And I could imagine that then I would react in one way of the split: “I think she like hates me now.” And I would basically be angry that she won’t let me fix the problem. And in the other half of it, I would probably feel more helpless and stuck, because it would feel like a double bind. And then I would think that she wouldn’t help me. So in one, I think that she wouldn’t let me help myself, and the one end of it, I wouldn’t think she would help me. That’s a common split I’ll have.

And you really have to be dealing with a rat-shit person that will actually make both of those true at once. And it’s enough for you to go, “But that’s not really the issue here, is it? Oh…” And I can see then, both from experience with myself, so that kind of brings me back together, re-centers me, and I go, “I’m doing that because I’m afraid this is the end. I’m never gonna see her again. Right?” That I mask the fear with either anger that I think she won’t help me, or hatred that she won’t let me help myself. So that didn’t happen, but that probably wouldn’t be too far off the mark of what could happen.

Dawn: Yeah, what you described at first was pretty close to the STOP skill, though. Like, you first didn’t immediately react, but rather took a step back, went to your car, then observed, tried to understand the situation better, and then tried to proceed.

Tiffany: Well, no, that’s me talking myself into doing that. That’s me getting myself in a mindset where I can see that that’s what I need to do, and then talking myself into doing it. Because at that moment, with mentalization broken down, I’m only perceiving threats, and I handle threats with control. And that’s what I’m trying to break out of. But even in there, even if that doesn’t fully restore mentalization, at that moment, I can see that in a controlled mindset, I can still understand that giving myself space and doing something immediately indecisive to achieve that is the right way to handle it.

No, I normally start a few steps away from something like that, unfortunately. If I would catch myself like that then, and then do the DBT, so that gets me to there. I do stop, and then I can try and reintegrate. So normally, I need to do MBT to myself. I’ll pull from my MBT skill set to be able to access my DBT skill set.

Dawn: Yeah, that’s interesting. I just wonder whether it’s generally useful to install helpful patterns in all mindsets, so that regardless of which mindset you land, you have a helpful pattern there. Like with making friends – in the control mindset, you have something like, “If I’m kind, I don’t manipulate my friends with my charm, then they will continue being my friend, so I can trick them into continuing being my friend.” And then in a more regular mindset, you have something like, “I need to be kind to my friends in order for them to continue being my friends.”

Tiffany: I feel like I’ve tried to do something like that. I try to improve myself in all sorts of little and big ways, but the mindsets don’t really… I think this is just down to the rigidity of the mindset I get into when I perceive a threat. And the rigidity and pervasiveness of my “Control Mindset.” Because I have to waste a lot of fucking effort all day long initially seeing things in a controlled mindset, then talking myself out of it.

The Control Mindset vs. Process-Oriented Thinking

Tiffany: This is one of the aspects of my cognitive empathy. Just let’s say I’m in a line at a grocery store, and this person is taking forever because they’re $2 short. I just want to walk over and shove my card in the machine and go, “Shut up, go away.” And I have to talk myself into empathizing with other people in the situation, like the cashier. It may or may not distress people to get out of that. It can be something as simple as that, that I have to talk myself out of an impulse like that. That’s even the nice one, because if I followed that mindset through, I would do that, and then I’d make sure the person starts bagging their shit up and putting it in the cart fast. Because the whole thing I was really focused on initially was, “I want to get through this line,” and so that’s all I see at first.

So that still really is my default, and it’s been hard to make healthier things in that kind of mindset. It’s been just more worth it to kinda challenge it directly. You need so many more steps. Like, I would have those impulses in the past and talk myself out of them, but then I have to talk myself into it via the utility of it, and the percentages of it, and the odds of it making something worse or better. And if I’m just in bad enough a mood, I stop caring anyway. Or if I just perceive what it is as important enough, I just stop caring, and it doesn’t help.

I started out trying to think of a counter, that maybe you’re just right. But I’m having trouble imagining something in that very control-based and goal-oriented mindset. I guess I could try to change the kind of goals I’m looking out for in general. But I feel like I’ve done that in the past, I’ve been working on that. And none of these things seem to persist across all my different frames of mind and self-states no matter what yet. I’m having to do a lot of manual effort to keep myself somewhere where I want to be.

Dawn: Then I have two hypotheses what might be going on with friends of mine who seem to be doing this thing. Like, what they’re doing is exactly that: they want to have friends, they want to keep their friends, they like their friends, and so they tell themselves, “I’m using my Machiavellian charms to trick these people into liking me.” And they’re just doing that consistently, so the friends are like, “Oh, she’s so kind, I like her.”

I think there are two possibilities here. One is these triggered states, these control mindset states that you were referring to. And the other one is the kind of self-image that a person builds up when they are often in these states. I would imagine that when someone is in these states, but they want to make them ego-syntonic – they don’t want to feel bad about them – that they then build up some kind of self-image where hostile dominance is necessary, and they feel good about being strong and in control at all times.

Tiffany: Yeah, it kind of wraps back on itself?

Dawn: Yeah, like they actually are in a rational state of mind, a rational mindset, and… Yeah, that’s the problem. They think about things sort of not in a triggered mindset, but then they reframe them to fit their self-image afterwards, so that there is no clear distinction for them between the triggered state and the rational mindset.

Tiffany: If I get what you’re saying right, this is the reason why I avoid it. Right? I think I abstractly picked up on it earlier, but I really had to work through it. Really, I had to have you remind me of it, but I kinda unconsciously know that that’s what that is, and that’s why I don’t want to be that way.

Because something M.E. Thomas evolved into that she does, that I was doing, was I started to go from goal-oriented to what she described as process-oriented. Like, she told this story about how she wanted to get to a friend’s house, and her car ended up stuck in a snowbank or something. She ran it off the road because she’s not a good snow driver. The cops dropped her off at this gas station, and so she just walked right in front of an 18-wheeler and went, “Hey, can you bring me to this place?” And that’s a very benign example, but she just keeps going, because the goal of “I want to get to my friend’s house” was there.

And so, in a more process-oriented way, let’s say with the checkout thing, I go, “What I’m trying to do is just get groceries. And I don’t need that to happen in 5 seconds from now for that to happen. That’s okay.” And I think what that’s doing is a non-MBT version of trying to break down the teleological thinking.

So, I read in our last interview that in teleological thinking, one equates desires with wants, and wants with goals. And that shifts it in a language that doesn’t require the mentalization. Because that’s what that is. When you say “process,” really it’s recognizing that this thing is just a desire. It’s not the immediate goal, and it’s allowing internalizing a more abstract and a more flexible goal.

So, I did that, and it would just be harder to maintain if I was emotionally heightened, and especially if I was triggered. And I just recognize all the weaknesses with that, and I recognize the weaknesses with leaning into a self-image that is at least better by default, because that still tends to reinforce the control mindset thinking. Because you hit it exactly: that in order to make that stuff internally consistent, you have to believe that hostile control is often enough necessary and useful, and thus the right course of action. And that’s in conflict with a healthier, more nuanced self-image directly. And they can’t coexist if you don’t want to keep the cognitive dissonance machine going.

Dawn: Yeah, like a friend of mine has a lot of values that she lives by, de facto. She calls them “standards.” And also has this idea that it would be more internally consistent or something to be fully evil, but then wouldn’t be able to have these standards. And so this drive for an internal consistency of motivations toward being evil is in conflict with the standards that serve very useful functions for societal existence. And yeah, then there’s this constant cognitive dissonance between those.

For me, it was the opposite: trying to uphold an image of not making mistakes and being perfect and everything, and totally failing at that, and trying to hide that from myself. And I suppose both of these extremes necessarily break down, then cause a lot of cognitive dissonance?

Tiffany: Yeah, I wanna take one moment to note how much yours is oriented around self-image, and then the other is oriented around avoiding self-image.

Dawn: Well, avoiding self-image is just another self-image, I suppose.

Tiffany: Yeah, just not caring what the self-image ends up being. Well, no, so, like, I internalized values like that early on, and I feel like it’s a springboard, right? When you start to connect those values – those standards you hold to yourself – to the actual impact they have on other people. It can start to turn into a self-image. Because when you realize the value of what you do for people… that’s almost definitionally what a healthy self-image is, right?

And for me, when I started that, it was just very hard to fight all of the other things. It was me reminding myself to fight all of these rigid social patterns. That’s just me reminding myself that when I’ve sat down to think of it, no, it broadly makes sense to be pro-social in these ways. And I’m gonna try and talk myself out of it, and manipulate myself out of it, but I know better, I thought about this before. And I shouldn’t waste my effort right now, and I should lean on that value, that standard I hold to myself.

But then again, at least for me, that did eventually start to recall why I came to those conclusions. And then, as that does, I started to feel things about them. And eventually, I’m able to get myself to get into the point where the rational thinking is there to determine course of action, not the thing that’s doing the reality testing itself. It’s not the thing determining who people are, and why, and what’s going on.

In a world where you don’t care about your self-image, and you don’t have empathy, or you don’t have much empathy, that’s what it all is. You’re just keeping this list of attributes. You’re keeping the score, really. Maybe you’re trying to do it in a healthy way, but you’re keeping the score of “What has this person typically done for me as I’ve done things for them?” etc., and trying to maybe analyze it holistically, but you’re doing it in this very data-oriented, rational way.

And even if it’s just cognitive empathy, empathy is thus another source of information, another source of data. And it’s just recognizing that people are trying to give you that information freely. But in a world devoid of that data stream, you’re having to figure out what somebody’s actually about, and whether they’re good for you, based on just all externalities. And so it just ends up being that.

Dawn: Yeah, that’s also ties it back to the teleological, non-mentalizing problems.

Psychopaths Can Drive Themselves Nuts

Tiffany: Yeah. That’s why psychopaths can drive themselves entirely fucking nuts.

Dawn: Drive themselves entirely fucking nuts?

Tiffany: Yeah, because that’s very obsessional. With stuff that concerns other people, cognitive or affective empathy really helps you know when you’ve come to a conclusion. And if you don’t have that, if you don’t have that inward information stream, you know, it leads you towards some paranoid thinking of thinking of all sorts of other things, because you don’t know where the good stopping point is.

And also, when you’re not really connected with them emotionally, it’s not an intuitive connection. Without that intuitive system to be connected to people, with your connection system suppressed or not there, you’re just going through all these possibilities of what might happen, what might not happen, what that means to you, what that means to them, just purely cognitively, and that’s obsessive. And without knowing where that ends. Without having an intuition to where that ends. If you have a very complex or a very stressful life, you’re gonna just drive yourself nuts.

Dawn: Yeah, I also see how lots of psychopaths struggle with having any kind of empathy or understanding of themselves – so, self-mentalization. And then come up with all sorts of theories of why they might be doing things, and struggle to actually find out why they’re doing things, because nothing probably resonates in any particular way, so everything seems equally likely. Probably have a lot of trouble introspecting on what’s actually going on.

Tiffany: Yeah, absolutely. And then having to just find out. You get pissed off for what seems like this reason when somebody does this thing in this way in this situation, and trying to extrapolate that externally. Imagine having to do that not just with other people, but to yourself. It’ll drive you nuts.

I remember in that M.E. Thomas interview I keep pulling from, she said that that can drive psychopaths nuts if they don’t have a more successful life, or just as you get older, that shit’s harder to keep up.

The saddest fucking part is, I can even remember myself being in the thick of that when my life was hard in certain ways, and I didn’t have as many faculties to handle it, or as much of a support network, and just truly driving myself nuts. Not realizing that I was going into psychosis or something, not feeling the stress, not recognizing my own suffering at all. And seeing a lot of the genuine contributing factors to it, but without seeing the emotional dimension to it.

You know, I’m not gonna just go, “Alright, I’m just gonna veg out in bed for 2 days straight. And do I really have to deal with all that right now? No. So am I going to deal with all of it right now? No! It’s giving your brain the time to reset.”

Dawn: Yeah, I imagine in this case, you’re probably actually not in touch with these internal feedback mechanisms and your actual feelings about the situation. I suppose a variation on that is if someone is in touch with it, but doesn’t trust it. Like me, by the way. Something is only real if I can reason from first principles why I’m experiencing it. And if I’m experiencing it but I don’t know why – like I cannot argue for it step by step – then it’s like, “Nope, that doesn’t make sense.”

Rationalism vs. Feelings

Tiffany: That is so delightfully rationalist-coded. That’s beautifully disgusting. That is my critique with the rationalist community. Not everything can be discovered from first principles, because you can have a first contact with something and not understand it, and you don’t have the building blocks to discover the first principles.

My argument against it would be – and I’m not even saying rationalism is dumb, I just mean it’s unbalanced, in my opinion – that we didn’t really discover chemistry via alchemy. We discovered chemistry by being scientific about alchemy. But alchemy really did start at the object level: “I do this, and then that happens. What even is this?!”

I just actually want to be really clear, I’m not against rationalism, because that’s the kind of thing that, A, brought us germ theory. And if people were more rational at the time, it would have been a lot easier to get people on board with germ theory when we figured it out, or we discovered the hints that it was likely true. Because if you think about it… if you think about germ theory versus miasma theory. Miasma theory seems just so bullshit. Like, it doesn’t pass the sniff test. But also, if you used the evidence at the time… Because what we didn’t understand without germ theory was that the pathogens could self-reproduce, that they were individual tiny organisms. And there was plenty of body of evidence, both scientific and just personal experience, that if you thought for even a second – if you were given the idea of germ theory – you’d go, “That makes a lot of things that have never made sense make sense.”

Dawn: Yeah, but one thing I observe is that in my circles, all the folks who are doing focusing and circling and authentic relating and are into mindfulness meditation and other types of meditative practice, they are all rationalists. Like, the rationalist community is just sort of the hub for that sort of stuff. So do you think that’s a reaction to some other type of rationality that neglected that? Or is that coincidence?

Tiffany: I think it’s three things. You yourself are going through that – that being in a very strict rationalist mindset pulls you away from your feelings. But it’s also pretty rational that mindfulness would help. Right? It’s pretty straightforward. Even if just giving yourself relaxation time, you can go, “Your brain giving an onslaught of information all the time is not healthy.” You have tons of reasons to engage in it even before you have experienced and know the true value of mindfulness.

And the third thing? Oh, rationalists, very rationally, are very much about self-improvement. It’s one of their big obsessions. And that’s actually my favorite thing about the rationalist community. Mindfulness just happens to be one of those things. It’s uncomplicated, it’s straightforward, and it has a lot of second and third order benefits. So I don’t think it’s any mistake that rationalists end up towards mindfulness for positive, negative, and neutral reasons all at the same time.

I would say, actually, if I were to make a real guess, I feel like that attitude of self-improvement – or what underlies it, where the rationalist person would question themselves – is the kind of thing that really lends a rationalist towards searching something like that out. That truth-seeking behavior. I think that underpins all of the above.

This is where I’m getting into philosophy, but this is one of those things that you can rationalize, but I think it has a very reasonable, if not logical but irrational, underpinning. It’s an extension of curiosity. And the way you extend it, the reason you extend it – whether you find something in yourself, to whether you want more, or just you have a moment where you realize you were really wrong about something from mindset or first principles, and you have that flash of going, “Have I been doing this with everything? I should at least consider it!” – that I think rationalism is just a very healthy extension of curiosity. Because ultimately, if you delve deep into all this stuff, I think you know as well as I, even if you just discover the same things you already know, you go, “Well, now I know how that works.” And it’s the curiosity button you’re pushing in your brain, really.

Dawn: Yum! I find it helpful how these communities install missing introjects for me. This curiosity thing, for example, has been super helpful for all sorts of reasons – for self-discovery, and for creating some kind of distance from otherwise overwhelming emotions, and still be able to understand them, still be able to learn from them.

Introjects and the Feeling of Lacking

Dawn: I know I want to take this back to the self-soothing and other purposes of introjects. There seem to be these three different types of people, these three different archetypes.

The one person who has all the healthy introjects, knows how to self-soothe, can use their curiosity to investigate their emotions, and has some kind of truth-seeking drive. When they notice something, then they wonder, “Oh, am I doing this with everything? Am I making some systematic mistake here that I can fix?”

And then there is the person who has all sorts of really bad introjects – all sorts of patterns from their parents that keep them stuck, keep them self-hating, keep them turning away their friends and losing relationships, and all sorts of… going to prison, I don’t know. All sorts of behavioral patterns that they’ve picked up from their parents or some peers in their childhood and that have not served them well.

But then there also seem to be people who have very few introjects, and maybe even themselves feel empty in a way, and don’t really know who they are. Sometimes borrow a particular introject from one person they meet while they meet the person, and then they’re alone at home again, and it’s gone, and they forget about it.

I see that some people seem to associate pathological narcissism with having particular unhelpful introjects – like parents who condition their children very traumatically in particular directions that are important for these parents. Or people who were just neglected a lot in childhood, and so mostly just lack all the helpful introjects. Both of these seem very different to me, but both of them have been called “narcissistic personality disorder” or “pathological narcissism” at different times by different authors, so I’m confused. What’s the connection between those, and with which can you empathize more? Why do they look so similar?

Tiffany: Because I think they both lead to a feeling of lacking.

The first one, the former… you punish yourself. And you deny yourself. So you end up with a feeling of lacking, because you never… You know, let’s say somebody with a more dependent mindset would apologize for enjoying themselves, because they’re afraid they’re being too much. And that introject leaves one with a sense of emptiness anyway.

I definitely empathize with that more, because my primary introject would be my father. But I still empathize with and understand the latter. Because there’s a lot of situations I haven’t had the time to experience it, have my own view on it. And I’ll end up spinning my wheels in my head. Or those will be the places that I don’t realize that I’m not fulfilling or serving. Because there’s no introject – healthy or unhealthy or neutral.

So, let’s say with my desire to do some writing, and my desire to do some art, for art’s sake, just doodle. I had art taken away from me, and then I had stuff that would lead me away from it reinforced when I was young. But I really do like doodling. But I don’t end up there.

When I start drawing, and I make anything that looks nice at all, it feels fucking incredible instantly. But I lack, really, any introject there, so some parts of my creative drive feel empty. Even with the chaos in my head.

I think it’s a spectrum. And it’s just harder to know the stuff that you’re, in a way, devoid of. You’re not devoid of it deeper down, if you can get all the chaos to go quiet. But you’re devoid of a reflex to lean towards it. If you don’t have an introject for something that you kind of really need.

I get that when I’m bored or sad. I’m wondering, and I’m trying to fantasize about what I’ll do in the future. I can find myself thinking of either very practical or very entrepreneurial things. And if I’m tired of it, or I’m just trying to prime myself to think of another way to re-fulfill my life, I can feel this weird emptiness. Like, “Yeah, but where am I supposed to go? There’s clearly something I’m not serving or not satisfying.”

Dawn: Hmm.

Tiffany: What is it? And I’ll be at a total loss. And I can only be at a total loss for so long before my brain will try to reflect something, go back to the things I already know. So I can empathize with both. And I think that it’s a spectrum. And again, I think it’s that both make you feel lacking. With the harsh introjects, my opinion would be that it gives you the feeling of lacking from self-denying yourself these things.

Dawn: Yeah, I could imagine that if someone ends up in a situation where they are just having fun, spending time with friends, but they have these introjects that drive them to be productive, then they might also end up self-hating for that. Like, “I’m currently not achieving anything, I’m falling behind the competition by just chilling here, and I’m such a slacker for that,” and feel the stress from that.

Tiffany: Yeah, and then not be in the moment, and just doing whatever. No, that totally happens to me all the time. Like if I’m at Kai’s house, and I see her parents talking, or I see the activities they’re doing and wishing… Like her stepdad and her cousin Z went out hunting. And I don’t want to go hunting. I just like firearms. I just like guns. Part of me – I’m Texan. That’s like super American. It’s like American squared.

I had to sell my pistol like a year ago. I would like to go with my friend Leon – I’ve reconnected with him, by the way, since the last interview – to the range. And just have fun with our guns, and have something of my own to bring, and not just be going back and forth between his Ruger hunting rifle, and his rifle that chambers .22s – these little tiny almost BBs of bullets. Those aren’t as fun for me to shoot at all. I prefer pistols. And the other reason I want to own a firearm is self-defense, and home defense? Rifles, shotguns make more sense, but you’re not gonna carry a rifle to defend yourself at the cafe or something.

So I don’t have an interest in the hunting, but it still brings up those feelings of what I’ve lost, the inadequacy, and then seeing the life he’s had, that he has this house, and he gets to do these things, and he has this property. And I end up thinking all about all that stuff, and comparing myself to him. Or maybe I’m talking with Kai, and it just makes me think of stuff that I would like to write. And then I just start thinking of all the things I haven’t written, and all the time I haven’t had because I’ve had to spend it searching for jobs. All sorts of things will bring out all of that judgment of myself for not being there yet.

And I have a lot of positive introjects with friends, but I have some counter-negative introjects, too. More from personal experience than an individual person. Like… I’ll be honest, I have a lot of trauma from being myself. From being afraid of myself, being like, “Am I gonna be the reason this all falls apart again? Am I gonna just terrorize somebody?”

Dawn: And a year or two later, never get to see them again.

Tiffany: And you know… it can hurt a lot to think about all those. It could just drive me nuts, even if I’m not in a space where I’m gonna feel guilty over it. Or I’m in a somewhat better space and I know better than to feel guilty over it. It’ll still make me feel hopeless, and helpless, or afraid of myself, and feel like I have no control, or afraid I don’t have anywhere near the control I think I need.

I don’t really enjoy being that kind of person. It can be kinda hard to sleep at night with who I used to be. Even knowing that my old self was usually very principled. Like somebody I recently connected with, our mutual friend Kyle, he’s like, “You know, back then, she even said she got why you did that, but you were just being a huge asshole about it. The reason was your friends, the reason was your principles, and she could understand you and didn’t hate you for it, but she deserved better than to be treated that way.”

And even knowing that I was ultimately a decent person, it still hurts.

Dawn: I wonder if this is a good segue to the topic about Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder (OCPD), or traits, and the link to psychopathy?

OCPD and Psychopathy

Tiffany: So I got to thinking about that with our acquaintance Laura. Laura… she’s something. And it’s what I was going on and on about before, that being in that world without enough emotional grounding to yourself or emotional grounding to other people, you end up obsessive, because thinking about it more is how you solve EVERYTHING.

I remember recently reading this fiction about vampires, and the vampire virus makes your brain really smart. But vampires tend to be obsessive about things from how constantly and how fast they’re processing everything. And the trope of a vampire I think probably lines up to some murderers and manipulators and sadistic people. To historical psychopaths in the same way that we have the most culturally well-known example of a sovereignism, of a malignant narcissist, would be Maleficent, the Disney villain. We have these fairy tales of people doing monstrous things, and then we think they must be monsters.

So I do think there’s actually a through-line there that’s not a coincidence at all, just blurred by the line of fairy tale, and most of that stuff starting out as just spoken word, folk myth, and not being written down at first.

If I could give you a more concrete example: let’s say I was in this situation 3 years ago. I would not be able to think about really anything besides eating, having sex, or what I need to do to get a job, or what kind of job I need. Not that I can’t put some amount of energy into all of those. But if that’s really all I’m thinking, I’m still thinking about that when I just wouldn’t need to be.

I wish I knew more about the pathology of OCPD, so some of this is a little speculative. I think that one of the commonalities between OCPD and psychopathy would be the attitude of: “Well, I think this. And why do I need to question that I’m right if I figured it out? I’m probably right, I’m just gonna do it.”

It seems that having OCPD comes from a different source of seeing that these rigorous rules and rigidity is what leads towards things working the way that you want. Whereas with psychopathy, you’re given the mind where that might be your only tool of seeking that out, and you’ll end up there. But they both can have reduced empathy and remorse for basically the same reasons of over-externalizing, attributing all of your happiness and well-being and the way you understand the world around you to all externalities.

Dawn: Yeah, like I have some experience with a few friends of mine who have this sort of very addictive, or almost addictive in some cases, type of sadism, where they are kind of aware that they are seeking that kind of pleasure all the time. It’s not just for vengeance or something.

Tiffany: Boredom, yeah.

Dawn: Yeah, they try to control that, but also pretty extreme pleasure in some cases, so that I suppose even if they weren’t bored, they’d still prefer that. But they’re trying to control that in ways that seem very OCD to me, and so I’m wondering: if they get in touch more fully with themselves, with their feelings, with who they actually are beyond the teleological facade… would that help? Would getting rid of all of these obsessive and compulsive patterns help them become happier and have an easier time living a pro-social life, or would it be dangerous because these OCPD or OCD traits prevent them from acting on their sadism?

Tiffany: I think this almost more comes down to a faith in people. You’re basically asking if they got more in touch with themselves, would they be likely to then find out that doing this thing does have immediate pleasure? But even short-term, and definitely mid- and long-term, it has disadvantages. If you’re more in touch with your emotional self, you’re going to care about things that are longer-term. So I do think that that’s broadly true.

You know, that’s even assuming if it gets worse at first. I think that’s a common thread with some of these tougher disorders. NPD is sometimes said as the disorder that gets worse as it gets better at first. Because you’re uncovering all that self-hatred you pretended wasn’t there. You’re actually reflecting now, and you’re doing better, but it feels fucking terrible.

And maybe they might feel better at first, and do terrible things, and then go, “Huh. Yeah, but I really didn’t like it when that person never spoke to me again, either, because I kind of liked them.” Even if it’s a very shallow version, just like, “You know, Saga’s the only person I know that’ll talk about this one thing with me in depth, and what are the fucking odds that I’m gonna find another person like that? And I like doing that.” And you could easily, logically go, “How many different things in my life am I willing to write out about that?”

I guess what would maybe give me pause is if that’s not only a dominant part of their personality, but a primary one. If the primary thing in them is that they’re sadistic. I still would think there’s eventually a path forward, but I would then want to focus on managing it and finding better outlets first. Long enough for them to grasp onto some things that aren’t sadistic. So that as they get in touch with themselves, even if they did some really nasty things, it would eventually be much more likely to hit home.

Dawn: Is there a way… like, I think currently these friends of mine are too afraid of themselves to try anything. They want to be extremely self-controlled and never indulge anything.

Tiffany: Oh, man! Very. Then your question’s almost ridiculous. If they’re that afraid of themselves, the recovery is possible.

Dawn: But in what order? They can’t just be like, “Okay, I will stop being afraid of my murderous longings now,” because that has very sudden, very long-term effects on their lives. You need to just try and start with something easy, like indulge in some ice cream sometimes. I don’t know, how do you get there that you come to actually trust yourself?

Redefining Trust

Tiffany: I think that starts with a redefinition of trust. When I talk with people with BPD that have a different toxic relationship with self-trust, how I try to help them is I tell them that when you trust yourself, you’re not expecting yourself to never make a mistake. You’re expecting yourself in the long game to improve, as you would expect another person – that if they make a mistake, they care, and it will change over time. That the kind of person you can’t trust is someone who makes the mistake and either doesn’t care, or doesn’t do what they need to do to change it.

I think the start with that is just trying to internalize a more nuanced version of trust. Because for them, the problem is trust is absolute.

Hello, Farvel.

I think that’s one of the bigger problematic patterns here, is trust being so absolute. That doesn’t deactivate checking yourself, right? It’s just, “I’m not gonna just outright defy myself with no reason.”

Dawn: Oh, we have another interview guest! Hi, Farvel!

Tiffany: She’s so content already. Or are you getting restless again? What you want, Farvel.

Dawn: Farvel, farewell. I think what would concern them is that there are certain things for which they say that once is too many times, like murder and sexual assault and such. They don’t want to do that even once.

Tiffany: And you go, “Well, if you’re already able to get yourself to not do that even once, or at least once more, then you already have a logical way to trust yourself that that’s not likely.” So you’re at least trusting your current process as far as you know it, right? Again, I still think that it comes down to a more nuanced version of trust, to trust that current process they have. Because if they have that way of thinking, and they have that concern that then drives that fear in themselves, they do actually trust that process, but they’re not letting themselves feel that trust, or lean into that trust.

Dawn: So… The process is okay?

Tiffany: Oh, and then that’s like faith – because that’s faith or belief in yourself. That relates back to self-image. And relates back to letting yourself feel that. And that’s probably stuff they have walls up against. I know I do. We’ve talked about my redefinition of faith as a concept, to give myself faith in myself.

Dawn: Can you describe how this went for you when you developed all of these obsessive adaptations at some point, when they probably served a purpose? I know more recently you told me that you are confident that you don’t actually need them anymore at this point. Like, you trust yourself now sufficiently. What was this like at the time when they were still serving a purpose, and how did you get to the stage where you just think that they have run their course?

Tiffany: Well, the thing that changed is, I told you that I’m basically doing MBT with myself frequently. But I have a cognitive and emotional reflex towards either the imagined outcome of what would happen if I followed this through, or just pattern matching. I have mental reflexes that will kick in and get myself to re-evaluate myself without obsessively monitoring.

So in the past, I would be profusely dominated with strong, negative emotions and fantasies and desires. And I think at that point, it was partly because I didn’t have trust in myself, but that was partly justified. You know, if I was at work, and I found myself wanting to come home and raise hell for no good reason – but I didn’t realize it was no good reason yet – I’d be just obsessively going through the practical and emotional consequences of actions I actually wanted to lead out.

That kind of progressed into my form of cognitive empathy now, but I do also have a lot more positive patterns. I don’t need to do the cognitive empathy to synthesize a better default idea for a lot of situations. Like, if somebody’s nice to me, I’ll just say thank you, even if I felt fucking nothing. Because that’s ultimately less confusing, and who cares? And I don’t really need to put stock in that, or think about it. And at that point, the obsession hurts more than it gains. And again, I’ll have an intuition of when I do need to think deeper.

Dawn: Sounds a little bit like there’s this thread that they use for suturing to close wounds, but after a while it dissolves by itself, timed just right so that when the wound has healed, the thread also dissolves at the same time. So maybe OCD is a bit like that, or like a bit too long-lasting thread?

Tiffany: Yeah, OCD is like, “Okay, well, I sutured it in three different ways, and one of those ways doesn’t dissolve, and then I put a dressing on it, and then I bandaged it, and then I wrapped it in this stuff.” And yeah, maybe my arm that wanted to fall out into 5 pieces needed that. But when you get in the habit of restoring that every day, it’s hard to get out of that habit. OCD is a motherfucker and is very self-enforcing, so I’m having to take different, deliberate action to kinda get out of it. But everything I’ve said… it did serve a purpose, even if to cause the obsession to be helpful and positive, as opposed to negative. If nothing else, like a replacement behavior.

Dawn: Yum! Like, would you generally advise for sadism, for example, to not just suppress and distract and never indulge, but to find harmless replacement behaviors instead?

Sublimating Sadism (Dagorhir & SCA)

Tiffany: Yeah, cause if they’re anything like me, they could put it into aggression in some way. Like, one of the softest core versions of that is combat LARP. I did Dagorhir (D-A-G-O-R-H-I-R) combat LARP in Pennsylvania. There’s several forms of that kind, and they call it “wacky bats,” because you have these foam swords and other foam weapons, and they’re designed to a strict standard that, at least with Dagorhir, you can REALLY wallop somebody. Probably the only gross risk is maybe breaking a small bone like a finger. It becomes tolerable.

And not all of them are like that. Some of them are more roleplay intensive. But Dagorhir was just good old wacky bats, motherfucker. One example of the culture in Dagorhir is the person being attacked kind of determines whether the attack was strong enough. So let’s say I’m fighting somebody, and they don’t really hit me very hard. I’ll go, “Light, light, light, light! Let me show you how hard you’re supposed to hit me!” Just clock them with my 55-inch red.

And oh, man, I miss that! So even the culture of Dagorhir was very sadistically and power-and-controlling pleasurable. Everything about it was great. But it had all sorts of healthy and pro-social aspects to it.

Stuff like that is just a more aggressive equivalent to how a more typical person might sublimate their anger into working out at a gym. And I think that’s more accessible to somebody with sovereignism. Kind of commanding yourself to get past something.

There’s BDSM and kink scenes… Getting into a contact sport? For girls, you could do roller derby. For guys, you could do hockey. Hockey’s a great example, because hockey’s the only sport with jail, right? Just expect fights to happen. And so there is an upward bound to what’s acceptable. It’s not entirely unokay to just get pissed off at maybe even your teammate and go punch him in the fucking face or something. Worst case, you even just get ejected from the game. You’re not gonna get banned from the sport if you don’t permanently injure somebody.

And with Dagorhir, too, there’s still also soft limits. You don’t need to hit anybody more than twice for them to be considered dead and have to go back to start and respawn. And unless you’re into everyone trying to pile onto you, you don’t want to hit somebody as hard as possible every time, or you will make yourself the target.

If they’re more about the body control, you can get into European – either Italian or German – sword fighting, so not the normal fencing, usually, but the broadsword stuff. And if they really want tough, and they have the time and the money to make metal armor, there’s something called SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism). SCA’s weapons are wooden, and so let’s say an SCA helmet has a maximum hole size. You know, with your wooden sword, you don’t want to be able to accidentally go through somebody’s helmet and poke out their eye. But you’re also allowed to just brawl, just fucking walk up and grapple or just punch them right in the fucking face. You’re armored, so you’re allowed to just fight.

Dawn: It’s critical that all these parts have a certain ritual to them – that you go to a particular place that has a particular aesthetic, and a particular smell, and you put on particular clothes for it, and you pay, you check in and you check out, so that the time during which you indulge in these pleasures is delineated at the beginning and at the end.

Tiffany: Yeah, maybe. It feels like, “Okay, I did a session of this.” I feel like there’s also a social aspect. SCA has the strongest social aspect of all this, because they actually have a fiefdom hierarchy thing going on. For real.

With Dagorhir, we’d have our group, you know. Sometimes we’d do smaller skirmishes, brandishing our colors and being part of a bigger thing. But with SCA, the people you’re fighting with and alongside… there’s almost some degree of, “Yeah, well, I’m winning for my team’s honor. I am jousting that motherfucker in the face for my team’s honor, too.” And there’s royalty there. And there’s actually a pretty positive culture around that.

So it may even be a good thing that with maybe the most violent of these, there’s the most safeguards in place, and there’s the strongest social structure. Like, you want to be a part of these people. And you will have more fun if you do that. Or it’s basically necessary.

I think a lot of these are important just by also introducing a pro-social framework that has soft bounds in which this thing is either allowed, encouraged, or just literally necessary.

Dawn: Yeah, I wonder whether that makes something like Dagorhir or SCA superior to, for example, street fighting? I don’t know a whole lot about street fighting, but from what I’ve heard, these people didn’t really know each other, and they were also just sort of meeting up in random places, and there’s probably a lot less ritual and culture and such around it. I would imagine that it’s higher risk of spilling over, or perhaps in the case of my friends, they would probably not trust themselves to let themselves go if they don’t have this clearly delineated ritual to it.

Tiffany: Yeah, no, I… You know, I’ll stop and say street fighting is fun. But in the right circle. People aren’t going to probably let you kill somebody, or maim them past a certain point, because they’re there for fun, ultimately. But if it’s more random, you never know who you’re gonna meet.

Dawn: Yeah, cool. Thanks for all these insights. I’d like to switch to a slightly different topic. There is this question here about hating one’s own weakness, or hating weakness in general. I think you mentioned at some point that you hated yourself for perceived weaknesses. Is that still a problem? And in general, what can one do about that?

Tiffany: Yeah, that’s totally still a thing I suffer from, even if it’s not an emotional reaction, just the way I think, my frame of mind, or just habits. It’s where most of my pathological emotional suppression comes from.

Hating Weakness

Tiffany: I might just be anxious in a situation, and instead of just letting myself feel it and let it be no biggie, I’ll be trying to talk myself out of the anxiety when maybe it’s just so completely reasonable to feel that it’s not gonna go away like that. It can be as mundane as that.

But it can be as much as like: “Alright, well, Tiffany, you plan on staying up all night and all day, so you will stay up until 9pm. You will make no exceptions, and you will rest, and you will get up. And after you eat, the first thing you will do is you will start looking for a job. Because until you make headway on that, what the fuck are you worth? Well, you’re a useless sack of shit. You’re not gonna be able to support yourself, because you keep letting yourself get away with it.”

And the problem of where that gets projected onto other people is because of internalizing that that’s the right and most helpful, most productive way to be. I would say that’s also my primary barrier with empathy, too. Like with the incident at Kai’s Thanksgiving. In my head, just being like: “Why don’t you just shut up for a minute? Why don’t you just not apologize? Is it really that fucking hard?” And the answer is yes, you know? But I’m seeing it as weakness, and in a heightened emotional state when I was triggered like that, it’s very hard to see outside of that pattern.

I’ve always seen that as more of a means to an end. My base goals for the longest time were just financial success, and being able to go and see people, and party whenever I want. And so I’d see strength as the thing that gets me the job I want, makes me perform every day. Keeps my house in order, etc.

I’ve had a different view of it normally when it’s allowing a negative situation to happen. That’s definitely what happened at Kai’s when I backed her car into her house. It’s like, “How was I not looking at the rearview camera her car has? How am I so weak that I can’t just be more patient and take more time and think it through?” And the real answer is I just made a mistake. So there, it’s harder to find the tolerance with.

My pathway has been to just value things other than strength. Seeing more means to these ends was initially a very easy thing to add before I had internalized more kinds of goals than “make a lot of money.”

Dawn: Yeah, ironically, I feel like giving you a hug, but then I would make you feel weak or something as a result.

Tiffany: No, I think this is like the perfect time for that, because I would actually feel like it’s a hug of, “You’re so strong, you learned how to not have to be strong.” I feel like that actually exists in this moment.

Dawn: It’s perfect. Aww, thank you! I was also wondering whether it might be useful to just value a lot of things. Like, if someone just values a hundred things – they value strength, and they value insight, and they value capacity to apologize, and 90 other things that one could value. Then that could give someone just a lot of flexibility for how to view a situation, jump between viewpoints very flexibly. Like, they’re not attached to any one of them, and when they have some narcissistic injury along one dimension, then there are 99 other dimensions along which they are unharmed.

Tiffany: Yeah, no, I think that would work. Even if those standards come back to control, which still seems to be the through-line here, the thing isn’t always strength that that standard is trying to uphold. Those kind of rules people set for themselves are good pathways to valuing things, and I think that’s a good pathway to self-reflection, too. Because then you start asking yourself, “Why do I have that standard I hold myself to? Why would I want anybody to have that standard for themselves? And why would I value it?”

Dawn: Yeah, like I’m also thinking of myself. Last time I had some kind of injury, it was about thinking that I had already healed something, and then noticing, “Ouch, actually, I’m somewhat less healed than I had thought.” And then I was like, “Damn, that hurts.” But at the same time, it didn’t change anything about 99% of my view of myself, so I was still very stable in that situation. Could ask for help, could ask someone to support me at all, and then a couple hours later, I felt great.

Tiffany: I think it’s also funny how rational-coded of a narcissistic injury that is, right? Like, “Oh man, but aren’t I so good at improving myself? Apparently not!” I love it. And that’s probably actually one of the reasons why it was so easy to tank and to soothe, because it has so many other moving parts backing it by nature.

Dawn: Yeah, the next question is actually one that cancels out the previous one really nicely, or complements it. What are the things that you’re most proud of, that you like about yourself most, and appreciate most about yourself these days?

Tiffany’s Appreciation of Herself

Tiffany: Let’s see here. I like that I’ve really leaned into pouring my creativity into everywhere, and showing myself again that I’m just generally creative.

I want to take a pause and just say that I have a hypothesis that this little bugger is why I’m a little more in touch with my emotions at this point in the conversation. Just cause I’m petting your fuzzy belly. She’s winking and happy.

Anyway, I like that I try to be productively helpful, and I’m good at not forgetting the real point of why I set out to do something. Like if I’m trying to fix somebody’s shed door, and it turns out all the wood in the shed’s rotted, I don’t get stuck as easily. I’ll be like, “We just can’t do anything about it today, let’s just go get a tarp.” I’m much better at switching gears.

I like that I seem to be somebody that makes somebody comfortable with saying no. Somebody who is afraid that there’s gonna be backlash when they say no – that I feel like a really comfortable person to them to say yes or no. And I think that’s harder than being somebody that someone’s comfortable saying yes to by a wide margin.

I like that I’ve turned this drive towards hard-won knowledge and sharing it and empowering other people by giving them back that agency, or even meta-agency, that ability to rediscover and reinvent themselves. And combined with my creativity, I’m happy I’ve put that into a wholly new pursuit – this psychology and personality disorder stuff, and emotions – that I thought I was never gonna be good at.

Farvel has changed to using her teeth and claws. We are playing. It is more distracting, but it’s fun.

I like that I’ve learned to enjoy the simple pleasures a lot more. Just going and sitting with friends in a diner, just taking a drive. Just reading a book, just watching a show. Just petting my crazy cat. I mean, that was very hard for me. I was very caught up in all the complicated things. Life felt so complicated.

I like that I started changing my career to sales, and I haven’t backed down on it. I’ve pivoted that in a completely unrelated different direction. It’s not machining this time. It’s sales. And so I obviously have some skill there in my capacity to rediscover myself and my capacity to learn on the fly.

I like that I push people to really, really see themselves first, and that I’ve learned to do it in a way that doesn’t forget other people. I like that I’ve become a pretty good listener. That was monumentally, grotesquely hard. I like that I am somebody that somebody can come to for emotional comfort, at least sometimes.

I like that I own my capacity for cruelty and evil. And I own it, as opposed to feel like it’s this uncontrolled or hard-to-control thing. It’s just one of the myriad many things that I am.

One last really specific thing: I am really happy that some friends have come forward to me and told me that they were able to find closure with their feelings of their narcissistic mom, dad, or ex, because they realized I’m making hard choices to be better, and that means their abuser didn’t make those choices, and they were never responsible for their abuser’s happiness. Ever. That abusive person always could have made those tough choices, and that’s on them. And it’s relieved them. I always hoped something like that would happen, and I really like it is, because it’s really empowering, and it reminds me of how tough the choices I make are, even if a lot of the time I feel like I don’t have a choice. But I guess that’s just me saying I just wouldn’t not do it. That’s not who I am.

Dawn: Yeah, awesome! Congrats!

Tiffany: Thank you.

Dawn: I was also wondering, like, people are often confused when psychologists talk about “objects.” Like within the object relations tradition, it just means “person” or something, it’s a super generic term. But people are often talking about “seeing other people as objects” when they really mean something like teleological, non-mentalizing.

Viewing People as Objects

Dawn: I find that to be a really apt metaphor, though. I don’t do projection as far as I know, but when a pen drops from the table, I get pissed at this pen for dropping. Or if I get some of my hair dye onto the shower curtain. I’m like, “Pen, that’s your own fault for falling down, I’m not gonna pick you up.” Or, “Shower curtain, you’re such an idiot, why are you getting in the way of my hair dye?”

So I think the analogy of saying that people who have this teleological non-mentalizing going on all the time – that they view other people as objects – is actually relatively apt. How would you explain what this is like to have this kind of non-mentalizing mode, and how has this changed over time? Have people sort of gained more depth? And in which cases are they distinguished from literal objects, and in which cases do they resemble literal objects more?

Tiffany: Well, my experience with it is like… You know, there’s weed vape pens, and they’re round, and they’ll just fall off the fucking table. Well, I have ones that are square, and they don’t fall off the table.

When you view things in that teleological, non-mentalizing way, you’re seeing things as like, “Well, that’s your nature, don’t you know better than to indulge in it?” You know, my father would say when he was pushing me to go to college: “People who take a break don’t go back.” Like that’s just human nature. If you do that, it will lead to that, so don’t do it, or that’s gonna happen, and you’ll end up a failure.

It’s this viewing people with this rigid, assumed nature. You’ll see that come out maybe more readily with someone who just has NPD going, “Wait, people aren’t basically selfish?” And I’m like, “Oh! Man, no, I’m like that, and I’m just assuming everybody else is! Oh, great, fun!”

So when you see people like that, you do just see like Newton’s Cradle. Like you pull back the ball and it hits the other balls and it moves them. You see the external stuff that leads towards the current or a possible future outcome.

Dawn: Hmm.

Tiffany: Understanding, valuing, and seeing people’s internal experiences being more real changes that. Just because you realize that’s not why people are being the way they are. They did that because they felt stir-crazy. They felt that way because they were so excited, and they couldn’t stop themselves. And you connect with the joy, the pain that they go through. And so even before it feels very real, it at least starts to really make sense that somebody else has some other goals.

Like, I have the long-term goal of having my own little personal machine and fabrication shop. Somebody might have a long-term goal of just getting a car. And there’s a lot of moving parts in making that happen. They might not even have a license yet. But then the real reason they’re doing that is so they can see their friends. So they don’t have to waste all their time and energy just getting groceries. You begin to see that in people.

And you realize when somebody helps you, it’s because they want that thing to be easier for you, or they know how hard it is without it. And that they genuinely care about relieving the suffering, or the happiness it brings. And feeling that’s real – that’s been kind of first to me. And then I’ll start to more intuitively see that in other people.

And then also just interest. You start to be interested in how somebody got here, or at least all the bullshit they had to go through. And then eventually that connects with how it leads to their goals, how it leads to how they’re feeling. And as those connect, then somebody really starts to have a depth. They feel like they have a life they’ve gone through. And there feels like a weight to it.

But that’s been an incredibly long time coming. Like if I don’t specifically think about it with you, I’d have to really specifically think about imagining you progressing through that and stuff. But I have more and more reasons to think about that, and sometimes those things do just hit on their own. There’s just something within me that it happens to resonate with, and it’ll click.

Why is my nose so itchy? Pardon me. Probably because I’m just slightly allergic to most animals and just had a lot of contact with my cat.

So I think your analogy works, at least for a bird’s eye view. If you could at least somehow add into there that it’s about seeing people only via a myopic, assumed view of their nature – of people’s nature, as if everybody’s nature is the same. Like we’re all the same kind of object, the same kind of machine. Then that is a more complete view.

Dawn: Yeah, a bunch of identical pins or something. A friend of mine recommended a movie to me that seems to have this as sort of a central theme: Anomalisa? I haven’t watched it yet.

The Capacity for Love

Dawn: I was wondering, though, is that also connected to your capacity to love? I think you told me that you’ve gained the capacity for love recently?

Tiffany: Yeah, you know, if I’m being compassionate just from my values and cognitive empathy, I’ll maybe connect with somebody’s goal or struggle at a time. But the moment I start to feel like they’ve done a lot of things that are setting themselves up poorly, I can definitely too easily go back into my more judgmental shape, and just be like, “Why the fuck did you do this to yourself?”

But if I’m closer with the person, I will at least be in the habit of wanting to see the smile on their face, of actually valuing them. I’ll know more of their story. If I have one of those fleets of judgments, I’ll have stuff in mind that will make me go, “Yeah, but do I really want to think of them like that? Don’t I know them better than that?”

Let’s say some people I’m very close with, like Riley, or my housemate, Rowan. I really vibe with Rowan. And they live their life very differently than me. One of the ways Rowan relates herself to me is she said she’s a big collection of beige flags. And she’s done a lot of things that to me would be very passive. But I’ve internalized this valuing of who she is and why. She supports the people in her life. But she also doesn’t want to rock the boat every chance. There’s a lot of things where she’s just lived and let live, when maybe she really should have moved on. But that’s kind of counter to some other parts of herself. And I will much less readily jump to the judgment. And so I have some love for her. It definitely started with her providing this house to live in for me without complex stipulations. And for Riley. Because Riley needs a place. Riley’s important to me.

See how if I have an actual love for the person, it’s a lot easier. I’m not talking myself into something or talking myself out of something. The way I learned love with Riley was it started out like I just at first realized that they put up with so much of my shit. And that at least gave me the reason to have almost unqualified, but deep emotional trust with them. And then from there, I learned that they are interested in my happiness broadly. Not just in this moment, but through life. Period. And they really understand and feel for the struggles I’ve gone through that have led me up to this point.

And I’m just like… “And that’s never gonna go away. And you love me! The reason you forgive me isn’t cause you think I’m worth being put up with. You just love me.”

And that was a lovely moment. The very first time I really felt that, it caught me off guard. It was harder for me to commit back the same way. It took a while before I felt my same love for them… But that also grew. And there’s truly a wonderful feeling when you realize you both love each other. You know, you feel all that fuzzy feeling?

Dawn: Yep.

Tiffany: Yeah, I had just not experienced that, I think, until late 2023? Early 2024? And it caught me off guard. I’m like, “Wait, this is what love feels like? What? Love has a feeling?”

Dawn: Which is…

Tiffany: The silliest sentence ever! Like, of course it does. It’s a feeling. Love has a feeling. And, hmm. Already missing my cat, thinking about that. I love her so much! She’s my little girl!

Dawn: Yeah, I hope that answers the question. I wonder whether your ability for affective or emotional empathy is also connected to that. You said you need to be in a good state of mind, and look at someone you care deeply about, and then focus your attention just right, and then you can experience it sometimes. I was wondering whether you have instructions for how to actually get there for people who’ve never experienced emotional empathy?

Three Steps to Emotional Empathy

Tiffany: Yeah, it’s a 3-step process.

Number one, you gotta understand mirroring. You have to understand their happiness for you is their own happiness, just cause they like you being happy. And you didn’t make them do it. They saw the smile on your face, and they’re just happy for you. So you need to do that… that also reinforces that your emotions are separate, which is the base thing of empathy.

And then you need to be able to be in the moment, in a positive way, trying to enjoy things. Or if you’re trying to comfort somebody, be in the moment and allow yourself to experience whatever. If you’re trying to help somebody, maybe understanding their negative feelings will help you help them better. Be open to it, because maybe you’ve gone through the same sort of just insane bullshit struggle and it’d be nice to not feel alone. That second step is mindfulness. To allow the feelings to happen in the first place.

And then what I try to do is, if you can get that far, as they’re telling me what’s going on, I’m trying to put myself in their shoes. Instead of just imagine it, because that’s different than imagining it from my perspective. Try to imagine it from their perspective. As they’re telling you things, let it paint a picture in your mind. Let it not have immediate reference to what you understand about yourself. Just trust that you can understand what a person means with what they say, and imagine that it’s them. And if that connects with something you can emotionally vibe with, odds are you have good chances of feeling something.

I remember one of my most recent moments when I was just struck by it was with my housemate, Rowan, and they were telling me something they went through, and I actually felt bad for them. And that’s the rarest one, for sure.

Or let’s say my housemate Lauren, who I enjoy as much as she can be annoying – but I’m sure I can be the same way, so it’s not a judgment! Often I’m just in a weird mental state, or I’m worn the fuck out. And she’ll be telling me something she’s excited about. And I’ll remind myself: “She’s telling me this stuff because she’s comfortable with me. She wants to share this with me.” That’s again, that mentalization thing. So this is a little deeper than mirroring, but I’m reminding myself of her intent. That it matters to her to share this with me.

And in reminding myself of her separate mind state, her separate intentions, desires, and feelings, I can go, “Wow, yeah, no. I’m happy you’ve gone through that, because that was really important to me when that first happened for me, too.” She’s a younger trans girl, and I’m helping her through some stuff. And I can feel the sense of milestones. But I do have to just kinda clear my head of all the fucking bullshit that’s going on, and just listen to her – that mindfulness thing.

I said that out of order, but those are still those three things: Reminding yourself the other person’s emotions are separate/their intent, and then mindfulness, and then trying to let it evolve. I just listened, and I thought about it, and I’m like, “Yeah! That’s fucking fantastic, Lauren!”

Dawn: Oh, that’s so sweet! Yeah, I hope that enough people will see that and be able to reproduce it, or we can make it part of the handbook.

Tiffany: We’re definitely making it part of the handbook. Even if not explicit steps. Or maybe part of the tips and tricks. Because I think for someone just starting recovery, all three of those individual steps can be incredibly challenging, and they can be even more challenging to hold together simultaneously.

Dawn: Yeah, we’ll need some more instructions. I suppose I should add for the viewers that we’ve been thinking about creating a recovery handbook for Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

Tiffany: Yeah. There’s not a lot of good literature around it for the person trying to do it. And I think that’s very important for somebody with NPD, because odds are, they’re going to want to do it themselves.

Dawn: Even if they’re with a therapist, they want it to be…

Tiffany: Their own fucking handiwork, they wanna own it. They want the sense of pride. They want to be the person to do it. They want to be where the buck stops.

Self-Sufficiency and Rebellion

Dawn: Yeah, I was wondering about self-sufficiency, whether that’s more often a rebellion against a dependency on society in general, or dependency on a particular other person, or even a rebellion against a dependency on oneself.

Tiffany: Well, just as an aside, for something like this, it’ll be part of the identity diffusion. It’ll be interleaved with your genuine desire for self-sufficiency. It’s likely to be an authentic part of the person, too, even if they have a reactive element. That’s the reason why someone would develop NPD instead of BPD, because they have this lean towards being that kind of person.

You’re saying rebellion against self or society? I feel like that’s just down to one’s lived experience. It really depends, I would say, if it’s someone with NPD, it’s where you find their resentment lies. Do they feel like they weren’t given a fair chance in life? Do they feel like they’ve just not been recognized for what they already are? That might be more down to an individual person, like their boss, or their father.

Do they feel like they had it, or they were going to have it, and they fucked it up? And they failed at either keeping it or achieving it? And that would probably be more rebellion against the self. I think that’s just very individual.

Dawn: Yeah, I imagine that psychopathy could factor into it for lots of people. Sort of, if they haven’t internalized these norms of society, they do feel like they are being fettered by them. And then that systematically leads people with a psychopathic bend to feel that they need to rebel against society itself to maintain their self-sufficiency.

Tiffany: I think that hits the nail on the head. I’ll give my one psychopath friend as an example. He showed up to that wedding with me dressed as a deliberately disheveled clown. He even had a rope belt. Actually, I think that was the coolest thing. But when I met him, I didn’t know that that’s how he was gonna show up. He wants to be what he is at face value, and people can take it or leave it. So I think that’s an example of that interleaving with an authentic value towards radical authenticity.

Another typical psychopathic value I’ll bring back to myself. With my value of self-determination. Feeling like I can’t let myself make the mistakes that contribute to making the world worse in the way that it holds me down.

Like, my pharmacy is really far away now – well over an hour away. But when it was 30 or 40 minutes away, I would still drive all the way to them, because I’m like, “No, I’m going to maintain my loyalty to this place that’s treated me right, because they’re this little tiny pharmacy.” And I will not allow myself to waiver from supporting this, or they’re just gonna disappear.

A negative would be… I will never own an iPhone. I think that’s an easier one for people to understand. Apple really makes the world shittier in a lot of ways. And I definitely judge people for owning an iPhone, even if it is useful for them. Because in the long term, it will still make it shittier for them in other domains. It contributes to making “Right to Repair” worse. It contributes to slave labor in other countries. And that actively adds to the world, so there’s things I will not allow myself to do. That is in defiance of the world that has held me back.

But the same thing came out in high school in a more nasty way. Seeing all these people with better families and better support, and being able to juggle their responsibilities – and totally ignoring my own lackings in keeping up on my homework and shit, and blaming the system. Or with all my fucking speeding tickets. Being a very hard case to talk myself out of not just blaming the system. I went to jail for just speeding tickets for 30 days once. Pennsylvania does suck, mind you. Most of our speed limits are based on the physics of cars from the 60s. And speed traps just generating money for little shit towns. And that’s all true, but is it really that hard of myself to ask myself to not do 95 in a 65?

So no, it totally can happen. If I imagine myself more like my friend who never learned to socialize in the same way… He said as much that that definitely held him back. And that’s genuinely true. But it can lead one to resentment of, like, “Fuck that, then I’m just necessarily not going to conform, because it won’t get me anything anyway, I don’t know how to do it right, who cares?” And I say that critique even valuing what he does. I think it’s cool.

Dawn: Yeah, that kind of leads into a question. For me, the analogy that came to mind was that my social anxiety caused me to be very introverted de facto for a long time. It was very hard for me to build and maintain friendships, and to even notice in the first place that that would have been beneficial. And then once the social anxiety was gone, and I started to be more extroverted, a lot of these things just sort of automatically fell into place. So how did you rewire yourself to want to do things and to do things more automatically and more fluidly?

Rewiring Social Habits

Tiffany: There’s two things. I did used to be way more asocial. I just defiantly didn’t want to take part in all sorts of things because I felt like I had been outcast. And I’m just like, “Fine. Then I’ll just be the fuckin’ outcast asshole.”

I really didn’t start to be the kind of social butterfly I am until I was like 27. I knew all these car guys from 4chan, and we made the “Dirty Jersey Car Meet.” And I started meeting them, and they liked me, and they thought I was interesting, and I went, “Okay, I do have a place in this world.” And it was just fun. And it was just this activity I liked.

But I will dig it up with my career. So I got a taste of software engineering, which is the thing I wanted to do my whole life. But I crashed out of it. I only had a year, 12 months of it. And then I went back to machining. And really, for me, it was transitioning. Because I didn’t pass as well at the time, and it made it such a hostile fucking environment. But the other part of that is not adding more scars to my hands and body unnecessarily on somebody else’s dime.

I was stuck in Kentucky for a year and a half, and for a year, I was part of NAMI Bowling Green. I was officially their secretary, and I was on the Board of Directors. And initially, just having that title, Secretary – I was able to… that made me feel important. And that was enough to start me, to motivate me to do even more and change other patterns.

But that still rings true with my career stuff. Instead of feeling like, “I’ll never get the kind of career I want, I’ll always have these jobs that suck because this is all I’ve ended up being good at because my dad bullied me into being a mechanic,” I had to challenge that. My dad had put this weird idea in my head that salespeople are just useless because it’s easy. And the reality is, is that he and I have a certain set of skills. So we don’t see it as too difficult.

And to just allow myself to be good at what comes easy. Not force myself to do what was more difficult just because that felt like that must be where the real value in this world is. And not just tangibly, because you know when you’re machining, you’re making real stuff. But like when I was designing and selling closets, I was using real, tangible skills. I was coming up with a real layout and a real solution for their needs. I was just also trying to upsell them on things and stuff. You know, those skills that seem soft in one way might really be more tangible than one thinks. Like, I can get really freakin’ poetic about the skills that made me a good machinist, but it still made a tangible thing. It all starts in here, and it initially feels intangible, no matter how tangible it works out.

So for me, it’s been still kind of outcome or goal-oriented in that way, right? I see sales as this expression of my soft skills? And then, thus, this is a way to use my soft skills as a pathway to make decent money eventually. And that money gets me the machine shop that I actually own, that I want, etc.

I’m not sure I know how to speak about it well outside of it being goal-oriented, but just opening one’s mind to that there’s other ways to achieve the same dreams, aspirations, or goals than the rut you think you’re permanently stuck in – that you feel resentful that you’re stuck in – can be really, really powerful, in my opinion.

Dawn: Yeah, I resonate a lot with this idea of doing something hard instead of the thing that’s easy for you, because it feels more like work. It feels more like external confirmation that I’m doing the right thing or something, as opposed to actually having fun whilst also being effective.

Tiffany: Yeah, and like when I’m gonna go to type up those bullet points I gave you… That will still feel like work, right? Like, I haven’t picked the day to do it, because I’m gonna need to give myself a few hours. It’s still gonna feel like work, I’m just also going to enjoy doing it, most likely. Definitely gonna enjoy the result. We don’t need a toxic relationship with labor.

Dawn: Yeah. I’m wondering whether you would also like to take a quick break? I’d like to make a coffee, would pause the recording for a bit.

Tiffany: Yeah, I think I will make myself coffee as well.

Dawn: Mmm, perfect, yeah, then let’s do that.

Tiffany: Bye. See you in a bit!

(Break)

Dawn: And we’re back from the break, as they say on Psychology in Seattle. It’s always like “We’ll need to take a quick break,” and then a second later, “We’re back from the break,” and yeah, that was a very quick break.

Tiffany: Yeah, you have no idea if it was 30 seconds or 30 days.

Dawn: Yeah, no idea. And our listeners also won’t know how long our break was. You mentioned last time that you have certain mood states that you currently cycle through sometimes – not like these alters that you used to have once upon a time, but sort of relatively well-connected mood states. And yeah, I was wondering which ones those are, and how your friends can help you manage those if they want to help you get out of one, or get into another one. What you would like them to do?

Managing Mood States (Self-Pity)

Tiffany: Well, I’ll start with self-pity, so I can start thinking about it. And then I’m probably gonna have to come back to it, because my intuition would be my answer is: I don’t know what you’re gonna do! Slam me against the wall? That worked last time! Anyway, no, I’m not joking at all!

So… when I get into self-pity, it’s like self-defeatingness. I will go as far as saying, “No, you know, I believe things could be worth it, but I just don’t want to live through it, even.” And I don’t know, if I can see it in the time, I have to be reminded that the joy is there, and the joy is frequent, and the weight of the world just feels upon me.

I guess I answered it. For once, I’ve remembered what has worked. But I’ve gotten angry, too, and been like, “No, but I… I know I get happy sometimes, but it’s still not worth it.” And it’s just like reminding me of any one really good time, or reminding me of… What did I just say? See, I have this much trouble remembering what it is. If I get myself in that head zone, to try and remember it.

Dawn: Well, we are like 3 hours 28 minutes into the interview, so you can now record the reminder to yourself, and then I turn that into a YouTube short, and whenever you need that reminder, you can play it back.

Tiffany: Yeah, no, I remind myself that the joy happens. It’s definitely more frequent. And what I’m going through is just as temporary as the joy can be. But also, for me, it’s just like reminding myself: “Tiffany, you’re just sad you don’t have a job right now, and you can’t afford to go do anything. And getting another job sounds like it’s gonna suck. And at first it will, and you’re right. But just like before, it’ll probably turn around!”

That one can be hard to get me out of, because I’ve argued against that during there. I wonder if somebody could just tell me, “Tiffany, do you really believe you can’t do it? Do you actually believe that you can’t do it?” And getting me to challenge my feelings of helplessness or hopelessness? Because that’s really the thing I’m obscuring, this feeling of helplessness or hopelessness.

I’m sorry, one second, my cat’s about to cause herself a problem. Bargains with cats. She’s trying to play with the lid on a soda. And I don’t want her trying to caffeinate herself, so I’m just gonna take the lid off and let her play with it.

Dawn: Dang it!

Tiffany: Well, she likes the straw anyway. Alright, that’s good enough. I really don’t need a caffeinated Norwegian Forest Cat. Oh my god.

Dawn: Long cat becomes fast cat, too.

Tiffany: I’ve seen her in zoomies, and it is truly a brown blur, but faster. She flew by the kitchen door. And it’s not that she was a blur, it’s just very briefly you could see this long brown mass in view, and then the immediate blip next, you could no longer see her. It was silent, just… How fast is she going? Oh my god.

Anyway, yeah, self-pity is… It’s not necessarily the most frequent one, but it’s the one that sucks the most to get out of. I’ll get into a state of not really wanting to get out of bed, really. For a number of reasons. I even get helps being… that’s easy, that’s intuitive, even. I can just be told that I’ll enjoy myself once I get up, or I’ll feel like it’s worth it once I get up, whether I’m going and running an errand, or I wanna get up and… Oh, like when I had to get up and go to the Thanksgiving, and had to be reminded by an outside source that, yes, I will enjoy myself when I get there. Because can I really argue with Riley over that? No, because I know they know me.

Dawn: Hmm, yeah, I know this problem. Sometimes I also have to force myself to do things that I know cognitively will make me happy.

Tiffany: Yeah. Or let’s say if I get into my kind of obsessive, I don’t know, panic? One is, let’s say, making a character for a tabletop RPG like Pathfinder. Really, I just need to stop and let my brain calm down. There’s a lot of… anytime I’m gripped by something. But I just can’t get my mind off of it, because I’m OCD locked. I just need to take a second, because what I’m really doing is I’m trying to solve the emotions. And then magically have no problem sometime. And the real answer is, I got overwhelmed, or just a lot happened in my head, and I just need to take a second.

That could happen just if somebody’s talking to me, and we get into some emotionally deep stuff, and I just wasn’t ready for it. Like if I just don’t know the person well yet, and I don’t know how they’ll react… Don’t know if it’ll become a big pain in my ass. Just give myself a second. Recenter. I can’t believe I’m more patient with other people than myself now. I’m a little surprised.

If I come upon thinking I think I have the magical solution for everything, I am bounding myself in leaps for crash-out. That hasn’t happened in a while. But just asking me what I’m gonna do next. Get me out of the logic loop of cycling through how awesome I’m going to be in 10 minutes to 10 months from now, over and over again. And realize, “Yeah, I know I have to take real steps towards that.” Not as common, it happens.

Dawn: How would you contrast the self-pity state against self-compassion?

Self-Compassion vs. Self-Pity

Tiffany: Normally, I would say when I’m being… when I’m giving myself compassion… Man, all the times that are coming to mind are when I was really frantically trying to force myself to do something, or I was emotionally or mentally finding myself in some way, and so I’m coming down off of that frantic energy.

When I do self-compassion, it does tend to be caring for myself after I’m either hitting or screaming towards and narrowly avoiding burnout, and I’ll just be like, “You know what? I can take a break. I can go pour myself a bath. I can go outside and just look at the stars for a bit.”

And really, it’s just both giving myself that time, and then just starting to think of what I’ve done for myself, how much better I treat Riley, how good of a Fuzzbuddy Mommy I’ve been to Farvel. I’m reminding myself of how difficult all the things I’ve done are, and what makes me actually strong? That I persevere. Just relentlessly.

Dawn: Not recently.

Tiffany: I’m gonna take a moment to say something that popped through my head that was very positive. That hasn’t as much in recent years, and is starting to come back. The “Like, I may as well try.” Or, “I don’t know, there’s a possibility that what I’m going to do is going to make a real difference, or it’s gonna pan out.” I may as well do something. I may as well try. Or feeling like I can’t not try.

Cause I was thinking of my genuinely psychopathic drive to… Oh, no, no, no, this is it. That who’s crazier? The person who lives a normal life and thinks about what they always wanted to do and never does it? Or the person that drives themselves completely fucking nuts, maybe relentlessly going towards the thing they actually want? Even if you fail, actually trying to do it.

Because I was thinking of how almost merciless I’ve been to myself in my self-improvement at times. But I can’t say that I don’t want to do it, even if it’s like too much at times. For a ton of reasons. I’m trying to set myself up better. I’m trying to have the happiness and fulfillment I never did. Trying to gain all that which I never got. And I just see the obvious paths towards it, and I’m like, “I can’t tell myself to not do it.” I wouldn’t want to not. And yeah, it can drive me a bit nuts, but not doing it drives me a different nuts, and so this is good crazy.

Dawn: Yeah, no, I empathize with that. I also want to rather – well, this sounds overly dramatic – but die trying! Probably not actually going to die trying, then. I’m glad, like you.

Tiffany: So, you know, I think about it, and it’s like not everything that is good for you doesn’t suck. And I think to some degree, that also applies to applying yourself and kind of driving yourself nuts by the effort you put into something.

Dawn: You know, let’s say starting a workout routine. That can really suck, but it’s really good for you, but you don’t really feel like doing it.

Tiffany: Mmm. And I think that can apply to stuff that can make you frantic, too. That maybe would see that it’s maybe… it might seem counterproductive to one’s mental health. But the sense of capacity, capability, potential, control… it’s all so much more positive. Are all obvious positive things. And I think I had a big threshold to get over. I had a lot to overcome in myself and in my life at the time.

Dawn: Yeah. And…

Tiffany: I think it was a good thing I drove myself completely bonkers making myself better.

Dawn: Yeah, cool, I even sort of use this as a heuristic now, that when I feel that I’m afraid of something, then I’m like, “Oh, that’s probably an important challenge for me now. Great that I’ve… thank you for this feeling of fear that tells me what I need to do next.”

Tiffany: Can you try and feel the fear as… trepidation? But like you get to do it.

Fear vs. Trepidation

Dawn: But I guess I also find it just slightly thrilling. Like I want to do a certain thing with a friend, and I notice, “Oh, I have never actually made myself vulnerable in this particular way. This is really scary!”

Tiffany: Oh, no, no, wait, to me, it’s like the goal. It’s what you’re gonna get to the other side. It’s like, “Oh, I’m scared, but I’m about to get through this, I’m about to overcome it, I’m about to finish it, achieve it, complete it, fix it, build it, make it, whatever, it’s about to happen.”

Dawn: Yeah. That’s trepidation. I love trepidation. Oh, okay. Alright, I need to make a distinction between fear and trepidation.

Tiffany: Yeah, trepidation is when you have fear and excitement at the same time.

Counterphobic Behavior

Dawn: Hmm. I’ve also heard of this term, counterphobic, when people have a particular fear, but they consistently act in ways that counters that fear, or that exposes them to that fear in such a way as to prove that they can conquer the fear. That seems like a really cool psychological mechanism where someone with NPD – or like standard NPD, more likely – is afraid of being outdone, afraid of losing, of making mistakes or something, and so they actually throw themselves into every competition that they can find. And it’s an interesting, for me, very counterintuitive mechanism, but they found very useful, in a way, to adopt.

Tiffany: I think it’s very intuitive to me, it’s what I do. It’s like, “Well, I know I’m afraid of it, but I’m about to overcome… I’m about to do the things that lead me to overcoming that fear. This is me getting bigger, better, faster, stronger.” Right? That drives me quite powerfully.

Difficulty with Rupture Repair

Dawn: Yeah. Like, I know to what extent you can put yourself into the mindset of someone with standard NPD, let’s say, but one thing that is very confusing to me are all the different reasons that make it difficult for people with NPD of different brands to do, for example, the relationship repair after some kind of rupture happened. Than to figure out with the other person what happened, apologize often to each other, and figure out how to do it better next time.

And one way, of course, in which it can go wrong is if the person just has too much shame, and so cannot clearly think about what happened, needs to repress the memories of what happened, and then that interferes. I can’t acknowledge any kind of responsibility in the situation.

But then there are so many other reasons as well, like the fear of giving up some control. And probably also some kind of resentment, that perhaps they resent being asked to do something for someone else that they have not been given in their childhood, for example. That could also factor into it.

And then there’s also an interesting counter-phobic aspect to it, often where if someone feels a lot of shame, for example – if that’s the reason that it’s difficult – then has this rupture and refuses to repair it because they cannot face their responsibility in what happened. Then what I often see happening afterwards is that they take a bunch of selfies, and post a bunch of selfies online, or seek contact with the other person whilst pretending that the thing never happened. As if they kind of know on some level that they want to use that situation to grow and to learn how to handle it better, but don’t know how.

Tiffany: Yeah, no, that makes sense to me. I’ll start with that, and then I’m gonna speak directly to my NPDork and NPDemon crowd. But in a situation like that, when you’re working on such… when you still are at a very surface level, they’re basically bolstering themselves with supply right there. They’re getting the positive, strengthening self-esteem feelings from somewhere. And you gave a vanity example with selfies. And then it also helps to distract, and that’s avoidant, and you can see how that just… that’s very NPD.

I mean, like, I’m totally not against doing that just to lift your mood. Like I’ve had some hookups, and I happened to take some more nude selfies of myself. And then I’m in a bad mood. Somebody that I notice some depth that also appreciates my body, I’ll go, “Hey! Wanna see my tits?” And that’ll be great. And then I get… it’s really positive, I get to lay some positivity back into them. They’re normally somebody I like, somebody I would like to appreciate in my body.

But let me try and speak directly to my brothers, sisters, and other NPDork siblings. I would say… idealize it. If it’s something like getting up in front of a crowd. If it’s something like accomplishing a certain thing at work. Just try to make it the potential, but not the necessity. Not that it has to be, but imagine coming out on top. Imagine that you meet another version of yourself. And you tell them. This might do it. You don’t know.

And imagine if it works out! Think of how awesome you’re gonna be! Everyone will see you have pushed through that. And those that don’t… That’s okay. They see you on top already. It’s fantastic.

If it’s something that’s more painful. Just being vulnerable. Or facing a difficult thing you kinda gotta own up to, or facing a difficult conflict? Think of the awesome partner, or of the awesome head of household. The one that can keep it in their head straight. Think of the one that is bigger than the setbacks. Maybe you’ll cry, but that’s because you’re better than denying that from yourself. And from everybody. Everybody else, they just pass it off, and it’s easy. They just say, “Don’t worry, it’s okay. It’ll never happen again.”

And just imagine yourself not held together perfectly, but holding yourself up. And being that head of household, that caregiver, that partner, that girlfriend, that boyfriend, that husband, that wife, that friend. That through those difficult things, inside and outside, stuck it through like nobody else. And you know that that person that matters to you would see that. And you KNOW you see that when you see that in somebody else. That’s what you wish you had. You know they’ll see it.

That felt really, really cathartic to imagine. I’m gonna be honest. So I spoke that from my soul.

Dawn: Yeah, like, one thing that I was wondering about is, are there any other reasons for this difficulty with rupture repair? Like, I think there was the resentment, there was the control and the shame. Am I forgetting any?

Fear of Loss and Shame

Tiffany: I was focused: control, resentment, shame, fear of loss. Right? Technically, shame is an extension of that, but it’s important to note because the shame can still be just straight up a proxy for it, too. It can be interleaved, but it can also just be a proxy for it, because somebody wasn’t allowed to show perceived weakness.

And so, whether it was from a specific situation, or those just came together… This is something I think that can be very uncommon with BPD and NPD, but it can present very differently. This fear that this is the mistake that it’s the end. That they’re all gonna figure it out, that you’ve been a sham the whole time.

And I don’t think that’s too hard to work through if you know the right things. Like, I would say, number one: Do you think friends worthy of you would actually all be fooled? All of them? Or fooled the whole time? Do you think maybe some of them even know and think you’re kind of badass for it, even? And then they find out… And it’s no big deal.

Or thinking maybe somebody really will fucking hate you for it. But they probably hated you for other stuff, too, then, and they haven’t left you yet. So like… Give it a chance. Give them a chance. Give them a chance to prove you fucking wrong. Wouldn’t you want to be proven wrong about this, of all things? You know… anything else? Sure, no. But this… So much easier to be proven wrong. You don’t have to worry about it after that.

I don’t know, this gave me… I just resonate with this. It shows some of the struggle. That’s just the kind of pep talk I would give somebody.

Yeah, let’s hear, fear of loss. It could still come down to safety, too, right? Like if it’s your support network or your career. What are you gonna fucking do if that all falls apart? If maybe you’re not performing well at your job, or you made a mistake at your job. Or maybe you can rely on your lover or your friends in the house you live in. But maybe they’re afraid that they’ll think they’re a lazy-ass louse, and it’ll be the fear of stability. That’s safety.

Dawn: Another one that came to mind is when someone needs a lot of self-esteem juice, and has found someone who idealizes them, but then is afraid that if they don’t look perfect anymore, the person will split on them. The way that they were probably split on someone, I suppose.

Tiffany: I would just say, there’s no way you were perfect from the beginning. You can’t know somebody before you meet them to be perfect. So like, you’ve only gotten better at it over time. It’s fear, not the truth. And it’s an understandable fear, but…

Dawn: I mean, related to that, I also wonder how forgiving people usually are. Like, I have always been too avoidant and internalizing to have tested out how forgiving people are, so I don’t really know, and would be like interesting to sort of get an overview of how forgiveness works for most people, that we actually want to have among our friends.

Forgiveness and Accountability

Tiffany: Well, I think that’s complicated in a number of ways. One of them’s me, one of them’s everybody. Because when you’re first starting out in recovery, you might not have the healthiest relationships. Let’s say someone with NPD is friends with somebody with BPD or NPD. No, that other person might not be that forgiving.

And you know, my friend Leon and I have traded back and forth on this as we’ve hit different developmental milestones, and we came back. I’m fortunate for that. But it doesn’t mean that that’s a guaranteed at all. That might be someone you now never see again, because you hit a deep trauma trigger.

But as you get healthier, and you have people that matter more to you, and you matter more to them, typically the accountability lends people to be more forgiving. Because it’s difficult to understate the power and value of accountability. You really don’t see a lot of it in this world. And then the people that really get to know someone with NPD – point blank, seeing a narcissist be really accountable can be like a thing of awe. Just like, that’s the stereotypical person that avoids accountability at any and every and all costs.

Dawn: And here they are, doing it anyway?

Tiffany: And even if that’s not impressive to that… like my friend Leon, it can impress him sometimes, but he, A, knows what the actual difficulty of the struggle is, also having a Cluster B personality disorder. And it’s also important to him that we are allowed accountability. Because like, how could you be… Man, I remember one of our heartfelt talks before I had to leave Michigan for a while, and he’s like, “You know, these people that see us as a demon, Tiffany, you know? How does that motivate you to be accountable? Isn’t that something you want to support in the world? That somebody is actually doing it?”

So I think that changes over time with the kind of people you get close to as you heal, and the kind of people you keep around as you heal.

But from another thing where it complicates it for me is… We’ve talked about the psychopath thing of over-apologizing. So, I will instead talk about that in the vein of: I have gotten away with so much shit with people and jobs over time. Either deliberately, semi-deliberately, negligently, or passively taken advantage of people’s forgiveness.

People can be almost shockingly forgiving. It’s not a guarantee at all, but people can be almost shockingly forgiving. At least from my perspective. And knowing when I know that, it gives me the confidence to face it, instead of craft another lie, because that’s a better future that I would want to build towards. That at least the reasonable chance is there. Like, I’ll have trouble having faith that it’ll pan out. I’ll have trouble having faith that the person really will be forgiving, but if I can really talk myself into it, I will realize it’s just worth the chance.

No, but genuinely, people can be shockingly forgiving, because people do actually often want to see the best in somebody. Especially if you have any sort of pleasant personality. They don’t want to see you go, for no reason, if you’re a fun or a nice person. You know, a lot of people are nice, but they’re boring. That’s why people often put up with assholes, because they’re at least interesting. Genuinely, for not everybody, but a lot of people, an interesting asshole – at least in regulated doses – is way better than the same boring person who never does anything wrong, every day. Because people don’t generally expect people to never do anything wrong either. People are honest with themselves enough to know that they do wrong as well. Just by mistake, by impulse, by that there’s no way to predict how what you do might hurt somebody unintentionally.

So, maybe on your journey, Dawn, I wouldn’t say test the limits. But I would say you could be as confident enough to test the limits. And if you can do that reasonably true, I would say as a form of radical authenticity and radical accountability. And just being that accountable person, that self-respect of, like, “No, I’m not just gonna pretend these things under the bus because that’s the weak and easy thing.” I would encourage you to experiment with that. You definitely take people’s forgiveness too far more easily than you would think, so if you’re not doing that, you’re probably fine.

Dawn: Yeah, I think for the most part, I’ve started cultivating this mindset of if I’m unsure whether I can do something, then to try it. When I get to know a new person, and I’m unsure whether asking a particular question is something that is okay for them, then I will just ask the question, and then trust that if it’s not, then they will tell me and not answer it.

Eggshell Friends and Testing Limits

Dawn: And then I noticed sometimes when I interact with an “eggshell person” for a moment, and then interact with one of my regular friends again – and by eggshell person, I mean people who make me feel like I need to walk on eggshells around them. When I interact with one of my regular friends afterwards, I’m like really cautious suddenly, and I’m like, “No, no, wait, this is regular friend, it’s not eggshell friend.” And then it takes like half an hour, an hour or so, and then I go back into my regular, more daring mindset.

And yeah, I suppose for the most part, that’s been working fine for me so far, too. Just like try things. But I have lots of habits around not trying. One of my partners noticed this recently, that she told me about their search for apartments, and all of her must-have criteria for an apartment. And then I didn’t say anything, and so she carried on, and then at some point explained what her criteria are. And what happened in my mind in the meantime was, “Okay, she just talked abstractly about must-have criteria for apartments. I’d be quite interested in what they are, but she talked abstractly about it, so maybe she doesn’t want to tell me which ones they are in case…”

Tiffany: Yeah, and when she was just giving you like an overview, so you had something in your head to kind of place it, you know? You knew why she wanted it, right? Yeah, she’s talking like a normal person.

Dawn: She expected me to ask what the specific criteria are. Like, it was not only that she would have been open to that question, but it was the one that she expected me to ask. And we talked about this afterwards, and it was quite eye-opening that I just sort of anticipate what might be a problem with the other person, self-censor, and then don’t do things that would have been even positive in this case.

Tiffany: And don’t you think that’s funny? It sounds to me like your intuition for what you should ask next is just getting negated, but the same thought process is happening, but you’re afraid to follow through now. You know? And it’s just like, trust yourself.

Dawn: Yeah, trust myself, or just like… Just try it, just fuck around and find out.

Tiffany: I’ve been trying to have the value of: I would want a friend to challenge me because they would want to see my happiness, right? My fulfillment. So I would want friends like that. So I am accepting, to some degree, that if I lean into that, it might lose me friends. Because not as like they’re a bad person, but that’s probably not the kind of person I’ve won if I can’t challenge them, because they’re probably not the kind of person that would challenge me.

And the other way of thinking of it more empathetically is like… Because this can apply with someone who’s gentle but insecure. And I’m still trying to find the balance here, because I don’t want to overwhelm people. But I think of helping them get through this difficult thing that someone else might not. I see myself as helping them challenge this thing that they feel threatened by, or they’re scared of. And even if that’s not abrupt, even if it’s not aggressive, I think it counts.

Like, there’s somebody I know I want to get in touch with her again. She lost someone important to her this year. But she’s someone I definitely want to choose my words with. But I really want to put that effort in, because I want to help her get through that. And that’s still ultimately the goal, the desire, right? And that leaves some flexibility in it. And that also gives me some patience for some people that can be more eggshell-y, but that they are worth it, it’s just a longer game.

Dawn: Yeah, I love my eggshell friends, too. I’m looking through some of the remaining questions. There is the question from the shadow work section, basically your Facebook post about wishing that you could have your innocence back? Do you remember that one?

Loss of Innocence

Tiffany: Yeah, I’m gonna go read my most recent. One of my most recent posts, I’m pretty sure you saw it, you liked it this morning, and it made me go, “Oh, she’s awake, I can bother her, and see if I can do this earlier than normal.”

Loss of Innocence

I said: “I often feel like I’m holding onto a ghost dream. One of a version of myself that didn’t survive the needle’s eye of survival and forced change. I wonder what’s left of her, but I admit sometimes I feel a part of myself so deep that even SHE had already forgotten her, too.”

And but that’s on the same themes. When I posted that and I thought about it, I realized that I’m afraid there’s some important part of my being, my fulfillment or satisfaction, that’s gone. Or there’s enough in me that’s in permanent conflict with it, these aspects, that they’re just part of who I am now. And they either negate it or subdue it. Or keep me from being my full self.

I’m afraid that I’ll never feel the real joy in life that I sometimes used to. And some of that’s like my recovery’s been long and difficult. I definitely experienced like… Oh, this is such a silly phrase: intermittent joy. But don’t we all? But, you know, just intermittent… sometimes I do just enjoy myself, but it never seems to be part of anything bigger. And I’m not saying it like has to be, it just… it feels truly, ultimately transient. Like it’s just completely random.

And I’m afraid in some way whether I’ll be… whether I’m being a bit dramatic, and it’s like some near-complete psychic death, or absolute psychic death. Over some important parts of myself. Or just, like I said, older, more innocent parts being in permanent conflict with some nastier – or at least the potential to be nastier – newer parts. Just in permanent conflict, it can never… And I could never embody them the same way.

I’m afraid that having that change… Or I’ve lost something that’s just fundamental to me being a human. Finding happiness in life. I know happiness isn’t a feeling, it’s like a more general state of being. To finding that deeper joy that isn’t just hysteria. Because I’ve been through an awful fucking lot getting to this point. And maybe I am closer, but I don’t really feel it. I don’t really feel like I am closer to that at all, and I don’t know whether I have that intuition because the future I dream is so different now? Or because I idealize that younger version of myself. Like… It’s a mix of things, I don’t know.

Dawn: But I’ve also had very sudden changes in my life. Like, last summer, I became very self-loving very suddenly. And this summer, I suddenly stopped feeling guilt for the most part. When I was learning things, then there was usually also some sudden cliff where it became really easy. So like these sorts of things have happened to me a lot.

Tiffany: Yeah, you know, it’s not… I’m sorry, it’s just because it leaves me without words. It just weighs on my heart heavy. Such a complicated feeling. Obviously, you’ve seen my statuses on social media, that feeling has evolved, and it’s still very incredibly complex and nebulous. And it might be that it’s like because it’s from a dozen and a half different places.

And I do wish I could just sometimes go back to being a person who could never imagine myself cutting someone down. Twisting and coercing them. Hurting them, and enjoying it, or hurting them for joy’s sake. And maybe I’m just messing with the world. Didn’t feel like that was sometimes necessary, or I hadn’t lived through something that made it feel necessary. Maybe it’s just a loss of innocence I’m still processing.

I think we all go through that, but if I told that to my old version of myself? She would tell me… “Are you kidding me? You’re not dead yet. Don’t give up. You don’t know. You gotta try. How could you possibly live without trying?” And I get a little brief glimpse. It’s nice.

Dawn: I suppose all the listeners will also value all the wisdom that you wouldn’t have had if it hadn’t been for some of the most difficult experiences.

Tiffany: Yeah. I’m sure there goes some of that resentment of what I’ve had to live through, because I’m just like… “Yeah, but I wish no one had to fucking live through that, so I wish I just didn’t have to, who cares?” But I know, I’m sure they would. And I’m sure whatever handbook we put together will also truly ring that truth. It’s still though not, you know… That beautiful world is not the one we live in, we live in a different beautiful world. And isn’t it beautiful I could go through that and find some really tough answers to even tougher questions?

Dawn: What is your experience with providing closure? Like, I know some people who seek closure. I’m guessing that has something to do with identity diffusion. There are some people who seem to be quite indifferent to it, and some people who are like, “No, I never want to talk to this person again for no matter for what reason,” and I never know which person I’m dealing with until I ask them. So I also don’t know how to provide closure, especially after the fact where I’m not speaking to them anymore.

Providing Closure

Tiffany: It could go a variety of ways, some people make that very clear to me. I have definitely lived through too many people who definitely never want anything to do with me again. They make it clear, I have hurt them too deeply.

One weird experience with it was a girl I dated for a year, on and off. She had had – man, this weighs on me heavily – she had had a happy relationship and been married for a while by the time she found me on Facebook again, and asked me to help her find closure to feelings from then. I had damaged her self-esteem so deeply that finding safety and happiness in life was not enough. Man.

And it’s never quite happened like that before or since. Some people, I treated as just reconnecting with them and seeing how it goes. And some of those people then blocked me and never talked to me again.

My closure to myself is just… What else can I do? I’m already doing all the things that add up to being the person I wasn’t at the time that I wish I had been. I can’t go back and change that, and why would I want to make what they lived through meaningless, and not improve myself? And that’s about all the closure I can get sometimes. I can hope they’re happier without me. I’m thinking of one person, of one ex-girlfriend in particular. She probably is happy without me. And that sucks in a way, but I’m happier now than I was then, too, so that is an improvement in the world. And still hurts to know someone is probably happier without you.

But I’m not really the same person I was then, so I should remind myself not to directly compare myself with who I was then. If I met them now, it really would be different. And not to hang on that of what could never be, but just like… I learned the lessons I needed to.

Closure for stuff like this is incredibly tough. Like, before I found out Leon had changed his appraisal of what happened through another friend, it was just like my closure was: “I hope he learns better for himself. I brought it as far as I could. I didn’t just let it happen.” And so I really only cut things off when it was tearing my life down. And not only was I just tearing my life down, but all the things I tried to keep things going forward just ultimately were tearing me down more. And I didn’t at the time cut him out of my life maliciously or anything, or even with anything less of having given it my best. And then not to discount that I stuck around because I would have rathered it just work out. And so why else would I… what else would I have done? Left sooner and been sad that I didn’t try hard enough?

You know, closure for this kind of stuff is really tough. But if we get to the inabsolutionism question, I’ll expand upon that.

Dawn: Please tell the viewers about inabsolutionism.

Tiffany: The inabsolutionism is my personal life philosophy. It is, in my mind, my evolution of absurdism. And so, absolution is this like… you do something that sets everything straight. Frees you from the weight of the things you’ve done, and the guilt and stuff, it’s been reversed, made up for, paid off. And part of that is closure. Right? Wanting it to all tie together neatly.

And some of it is also a direct attack on nihilism itself, and the point of view, the mindset that leads you to try to iterate nihilism into absurdism. And in both of those, the people that dreamt up nihilism were like, “Well, if I die one day, what’s the point?” And really, they’re struggling with the fear of death, the fear of it not meaning anything, etc. They’re struggling with these existential dreads, and something that would be an absolution would free them from it. But they’re not really facing it.

Dawn: They’re deflecting it.

Tiffany: Right? They’re living with the dread. As opposed to either accepting it, or embracing it. Or turning it on its head. And I feel like I can turn it on its head.

The other core part of the point of view that I don’t like about them is that their meanings are… They make meaning explicit instead of implicit. Nihilism makes it clearer, where it speaks of meaning as being explicitly about what happens after your death that propagates on, or if anything feels meaningful enough before then to really count. And I genuinely think that’s all bullshit, and it’s all up to things that aren’t you. And I don’t think any of that is necessary, it’s a major overcomplication.

Inabsolutionism: We Named the Stars

I came upon this way of thinking. I got the seed to it when I was contemplating the ineffable awe I would feel looking into a beautiful, clear, starry night. And I realized we are the ones who named those stars. That if I wasn’t there, if I was dead or never born, I would not be feeling that. And so, that magical feeling is really within me. If we weren’t here, and we did not name the stars, they would just continue on being their gravity-powered thermonuclear incandescent, vaguely spheroid engines of physics. Devoid of meaning. Right?

And there’d be nothing wrong with that, or nothing right, it wouldn’t matter, they’re just stars. But they mean something to us. And so let’s say when we name a star or we name a constellation, it already had some meaning within us, and we made a name for it to give a name to that meaning. And so it is, to me, as simple as: If something means something to you, if someone means something to you, it means something, and it means that thing to you. That’s it. We are the seed of meaning.

And that is my ontology… my tautology. Of how WE are ontological. We’re arguing over where meaning starts. But I think meaning has an ultimately irrational basis. Like, why do you do the thing? Cause you like it. You know, you can go really deep into, let’s say, why I like cars. I like cars in 4 different dimensions. I like driving them fast as much for the adrenaline, as much for the skill it takes. And the latter is an intellectual thrill. The former, you could see the adrenaline comes from a different part of evolution, like hunting. The immediate satisfaction of fixing it. The community, etc. And what I figure out at the end of that is that I like cars.

It’s not that all that intellectual pursuit of understanding it is meaningless either. It’s just meaningful in a different way, it’s another part of it. And that we should not make the initial meaning of just “I like cars” hinge upon whether it ultimately makes sense or fits into some framework.

And so, within this amalgamation of ideas I’ve put forth, I then invite somebody, instead of to think of a life like a book, to think of life like a diary or a journal of somebody you love, or of found footage. Because unlike a book, we don’t have neat covers. Even the first starting page, where we start – you know, we didn’t write that. Our parents did. And you have no idea when that last page is going to be, and if it’s going to tie up nicely. We cannot define our front cover. We have no idea where the rear cover’s gonna end. Life is so fucking messy.

Dawn: Hmm.

Tiffany: And we should not bound ourselves by feeling a necessity to make it all make sense. To try and find that absolution. Where it all falls apart, where all the difficult parts fall away, and it all falls into place. And instead, like I said before, where we should have a healthy relationship with work, with labor. Find meaning in the difficult things.

As somebody who rarely feels guilt or shame, I’ve realized the weight of guilt. You know, the weight of negative feelings of loss. Because, let’s say with my cat dog passing, he’s my best friend! He’s the most important person in my life for the longest time. And I can’t decide when his passing would happen, but that didn’t make a single minute of a single day of those 15 years less meaningful. It doesn’t end cleanly, it doesn’t matter.

And you get to decide what you do with that meaning, and I have. And so instead, to give it implicit meaning – it all implicitly already has meaning. And you can describe it if you want, but the things you do, you do them because they matter to you. You do them because they matter to somebody else. They already mean something, and to not ever predicate that on anything. You don’t need to. Just unnecessary.

And like I said, so then embrace the negative. Embrace the weight that it gives the positive. Embrace what you have to go through to get to the positive. Embrace the trudgery and say, “Yeah, but I got through it.” Because the real part of that story that matters there is the person that lives through it, the person that tells it. It’s not only meaningful because you got through it. But it is meaningful to you that you got through it.

And thus, we can let go of our seeking of absolution. And embrace life in its positives, and its negatives, and its neutrals, and its unclassifieds. What do you think of that?

Dawn: Yeah, I love it! Like, in particular, also the messiness of a life without absolution is something that allows me to relate to so many people. Like, I think if I didn’t have any messiness, or if I were to repress any kind of messiness, then that would just block me from relating to most people, or all people. Probably just make me feel isolated.

Tiffany: Yeah, I sought absolution my whole life, and I think I could call it a number of other things, but it fits enough a part of the philosophy, and it sounds strong, impactful, and badass. You could have called it, instead of saying absurdism, you could have called it “embrace the cosmic joke.” You could have called it something else, and it would still mean the same thing, and the words can attach to it and get meaning assigned to them the same way.

One other thing I wanted to note is that it’s more self-oriented. Like I said, that nihilism predicates itself upon the meaning of your life after you’re gone, or to other people. Instead of orienting it to yourself. And to each individual person’s self, and the meaning they already live, embody, and hold, even if they recognize, acknowledge it, embrace it, understand it, or not.

Optimizing Meaning (Equanimity)

Dawn: I have an excessively rational question about that. So, like, inabsolutionism sounds like it’s agnostic about the particular meaning. Like, it’s about meaning in the abstract, but it’s agnostic about the particular meaning that a given person will assign to whatever happens in their lives. So, how do you optimize the meaning that you want to assign for things? Like, there’s probably some kind of optimal meaning to assign to different things, given whatever you want your life to be like.

Tiffany: I think that’s got a partly abstract and a partly more discrete answer. Because the abstract answer is: “Well, it depends on the person.” Which is true, but I think I’m gonna give a good example of just one thing. You can take one thing from multiple people’s perspective, and you can see that each person has a different way they would want to take it forward.

You know, let’s say you move away from your parents’ house. They’re going to be sad, but they will see it as you moving on. You’re probably not going to stress about that the same. You didn’t give birth to yourself. To you, the same act will be whatever specific thing you’re working towards, or gaining independence.

But in a more explicit, a more discrete and practical way is: You want to try to go towards what does not downplay the positive, neutral, or negative aspects of your life. With some equanimity.

Because if you try to throw all the negatives away, you will lose the weight of the positives, or at least lose the weight of what got you there. If you try to throw the weight of all of it away, you’re just trying to avoid the pain of the negatives. If you try to be a practical cynic and downplay the weight of the positives, you forget… you know, you can become very outcome and solution-oriented and become very capable, but you lose out on the joy, and the implicit meaning and the strength of what the positive things you can do for yourself and for other people have. And it can steal motivation from you to do some of the stuff that might seem more frivolous, but might turn out really stirs your soul.

I guess that’s what I would say that you would want to find: equanimity in valuing and the weight of the positive, the negative, and the neutral. And not try to force them to fit into something that they aren’t. Or not try to wish one of them away.

Because I think that actually also gives you a more realistic view. Like, don’t downplay your misery. Don’t pretend it didn’t happen. Or you know… It doesn’t mean you might not forget it over time, because it’s not like what you need to think about anymore. But don’t devalue what you’ve had to live through. It was hard. Don’t devalue your suffering any more than your happiness. Is that rational enough?

Dawn: Yeah, certainly. Like, I’m way more on the self-pity side, I think. Like just yesterday I caught myself in this respect, like my life is totally fine, and still I have this impulse to whine about the times in my past when it wasn’t. And yeah, I think I’m sort of the opposite.

Tiffany: Well, you know, let’s maybe try an exercise. Because so let’s say if we don’t want to downplay them, and we want to give equal weight to the positive things, it’s like: What lessons did you learn from the negative things that brought you those positive things? What positive things would you not really understand the depth and the value of without those negative things? What things that sucked?

You know, you don’t want to pretend they didn’t just suck. Some things do just suck, and they don’t teach you anything. And there’s value in that, too. That shows us that sometimes life can make no sense, and that instead can show us a sense of compassion for ourself and other people. Especially with mental illness stuff. For instance, even just as simple as depression or anxiety. It just sucks. Maybe you learned some lessons along the way. But the bigger lesson is, we should do our best to not do the things to people that give them depression or anxiety. Right?

And so if you put too much weight in either of them, you can’t come to that sort of conclusion. And not allowing yourself to give too much weight to any of them forces you to try and find value, if not meaning, because you’re not trying to steal away the value of even your suffering. You know, that’s something you lived through. It’s meaningful to you to never live through that again. It’s meaningful to you to perhaps help somebody avoid that ever happening.

And you may never be able to help somebody with that. And it may never matter like that. But so what? You also don’t know that. That has a lot of definites, but none of them are like preordained or predestined, and none of them try to truly alter any of the other things, and none of them try to throw anything else out.

Dawn: It’s a bit like when someone like me, without much car knowledge, tries to buy a used car, and then buys a car with all sorts of hidden defects for way too high of a price, and then has to get lots of repairs afterwards, and then has like an actual working car.

Tiffany: Yeah, maybe you might end up with a working car, or you learn that that dealership sucks. Before you learn the mechanic friend that you should actually listen to? Or you learn how to avoid that again, because maybe it’s literally an unavoidable lesson. Maybe that’s the only way you end up learning the lesson. And maybe not because of anything other than life circumstance. It might just be where you live, and that one dealership doesn’t seem sketchy, but they are, and there’s no way for you to know.

Or maybe your needs and your preferences tend you towards wanting a car that sucks and you don’t know it. Like there’s a car called the HHR, and then there’s another one called the PT Cruiser, and they’re conceptually and functionally similar. Do not buy a PT Cruiser. Note if you bought an HHR, you’re probably fine. And it could just literally evolve from your needs and your preferences.

You know? And if you try to seek the absolution there of trying to get rid of the bad feelings, or trying to make it all make sense, you might end up throwing away your preferences. And not realize that there is a better car than a PT Cruiser that fits all your needs and wants.

That’s a real example. I talked somebody out of a PT Cruiser. And there’s a lot of reasons to like… the PT Cruiser and the HHR were goofy marketing ideas, in a way. They had a deliberate, semi-retro look. But in reality, they’re like this mid-sized vehicle that’s not too big in any dimension. It’s like an expanded hatchback, it’s like a miniature station wagon before we had crossover SUVs. And you know what? They’re not so high off the ground, and heavy, and expensive like an SUV. They’re arguably a way better idea.

Why PT Cruisers Suck

But two examples of how bad a PT Cruiser can be. They have a light bulb that no other car takes. And so, since they don’t make that anymore, you have to buy an adapter. For their headlight? And that’s an important part of a car! And so it’s just stupid by inception, and that’s just so they can make the headlights look really long and fit the body right.

And then another one is, I was fixing the air conditioning on one, and the fan is necessary for air conditioning to work. And Chrysler’s instructions on it were actually too updated, and it said, “There is no specific separate fan relay anymore, it’s all part of this big box now.” Do you know what? They were wrong! There was a fan relay. It’s a simple-ass fan relay, like it’s still the 1960s. It’s right there, right where you would think it is, on the fan. And that was the whole problem, and we drove ourselves entirely freaking nuts. So the documentation isn’t good. They just suck.

Dawn: Why didn’t they call it a PT full cruiser?

Tiffany: Because, I don’t know. Unless Chrysler isn’t selling to boomers, they don’t seem to know how to do anything right. And I mean that. Like Challengers and Chargers are reasonably okay vehicles, and they’re sexy, and they come with big engines, and they can come in all-wheel drive if you want. And you know what? They’re not specifically good at anything other than being like fast and sexy. But that’s why a person buys that car. So, like… Okay.

But they don’t really know how to do much else right but minivans. And even then, in my opinion, a Dodge Grand Caravan is not reliable. They tend to have a lot more features that you would want on a minivan. They’re a desirable and capable minivan, but they still kinda suck to own. I wish Chrysler didn’t suck, they do some really cool things sometimes. But broadly, Chrysler sucks. And that is one of my few broad rules. I’m not even like that with Ford. I have exceptions of Fords I’m either like okay with. Maybe I wouldn’t own one, but I know why a person would. Don’t buy a Chrysler.

Dawn: Okay. Let’s do it! Thank you!

Tiffany: Mopar, don’t buy a Chrysler, don’t buy a Dodge. They make capable trucks, but it’s the same thing, they’re not the most reliable. They’re very capable, but they’re not very reliable.

Car Rants: Chrysler, VW, and Saturn

Dawn: What about the Volkswagen Lupo? It’s so cute!

Tiffany: The Lupo? They’re okay. Why not a Golf, though?

Dawn: That Lupo was cuter!

Tiffany: But how about you import a Suzuki Cappuccino? It’s as cute as the name sounds. They’re microscopic.

Dawn: I need to Google that. No! Right! Oh, I wish I could like easily share the screen now for the viewers, but yeah, that’s very cute!

Tiffany: Yeah, right, no, there’s cars that are just straight up cute. And then, this is really confusing, the New Beetle. And I mean, quote, “New Beetle,” end quote. Because the beetle… the current Beetle we have is the second generation Beetle. The one just before it was not called the Beetle, it was called the New Beetle.

That is the only car ever with an integrated flower holder. Little tiny flower vase, like, just above where the ignition switch is. And they did a lot of cute things in there. They’re not too hard to work on. I wouldn’t say they’re desirable for most people, but there’s nothing wrong with them. So I think Volkswagen Beetles can be actually like pretty practical and cute. Get one and have someone vinyl wrap something cute on it, and now you have a sturdy car that handles well. Just don’t get the inline 5. That sucked.

Dawn: Hmm? Inline 5?

Tiffany: Yeah, that was a 2.5L engine, and they stretch all their timing chains. All of them.

Don’t buy a Mini Cooper. They’re even cuter. But… maybe they’ve changed, but they’re one of the hardest cars to work on I’ve ever seen, and they have BMW prices, because they’re basically BMWs in a way, except they’re not. And then their parts aren’t like well-made? So you buy these BMW-priced parts that are pieces of shit, that are hard to install, and then they have weird Mini Cooper versions of the BMW engines? So if they have a supercharger, the superchargers tend to go. If they have a turbocharger, the turbocharger tends to go. If they have neither, the timing chain tends to stretch. So the solution is to not buy a Mini Cooper. I think they finally changed, but they managed to ruin everything.

Another my favorite quirky sub-brand that sucked like this was General Motors, Chevrolet, birthed Saturn out of their forehead like Zeus and Athena. And they had like good ideas. Saturns were made with all plastic body panels, so if you get in a fender bender, you glue a new fender on. Now, they’re not main anymore, so you can’t do that now.

But the mistake they made is they let Saturn do whatever they wanted, and Saturn invented their own gas engine, their own diesel engine, their own automatic transmission, and their own manual transmission, and they all had problems. And what they really should have done is like let Saturn maybe make the whole interior themselves, or just borrow components and switch gear to build the interiors of the dashboard. And then do the innovative, cheap car stuff, like the cheap body panels and stuff, build the frame lighter, etc. The stuff that would make it a better, cheap, or practical car, and then just shove whatever Chevy engine and transmission that’s good enough that fits.

My best friend Kyle, he loved these boxy Cavaliers that came in V6 for forever. So he’d have these 94s. And he’d have like 92, 94, 96, he had a bunch of them. And we would need to get an ignition coil for it. That ignition coil was in General Motor cars from 1988 to 2012. So you could go to O’Reilly’s and get 3 of them, and then you could go down to Advance Auto and get 3 of them, and then go down to Napa and get 3 more, because they normally will have them 3 at a time. It’s normally V6s. I then go down to AutoZone to get another 3. Could buy 12 that are on the shelf and not even have to go to another brand of parts store. Because it’s such a ubiquitous part.

Dawn: You could get high-quality versions.

Tiffany: Of all of the most vital stuff on these cars, because of that. And Saturn could have totally leaned on that with the like big expensive drivetrain stuff, and maybe the suspension stuff, and they didn’t. Saturns didn’t need to be special, they were supposed to be good at not being special, which is way harder.

Tiffany: My weird fantasy there is Saturns came in right-hand drive. For postal wagons, for rural postal wagons. Because if you don’t know, our mail trucks are right-hand drive, the steering wheel’s on the right. So they can access mailboxes and stuff easier. So Subaru ships some over, of theirs, because they’re Japanese and they already have those. Steering wheel on the right, ships them over for that purpose. And Saturn was sold in Japan! So they had right-hand drive versions. And Jeeps still come in right-hand drive from the factory, if you ask, for that purpose. Because sometimes rural routes in America mean a dirt road.

Anyway, and so I’d want to get a right-hand drive Saturn Postal Wagon. And thanks to General Motors inbreeding, it shouldn’t be too hard to put in something completely irresponsible, like the turbo V6 from a Saab in there. Because that was a Saab-only version of that engine, but that V6 was still a Chevy engine. And then you could find a 6-speed front-wheel drive automatic, which is totally a thing that exists that would fit that V6, and have an unreasonably fast, stupid, fun-to-drive car that is like the most grandma or single mother station wagon on Earth, and then for no reason it has the steering wheel on the right side. It would be an unreasonable nuts of a car that only exists because you can play LEGO blocks with some Chevrolet stuff.

You could do that with almost anybody, but Chevrolet is the best, worst offender of this of all. There was a Chevy Cavalier – well, there’s also the Toyota Cavalier. The Bubble Gin Cavalier was sold in Japan. That’s a Toyota with a Toyota badge on it. So you can order that Toyota badge. And it comes in a package that says General Motors on it. That’s like buying a part for a Nissan, and it says BMW on it or something. It’s preposterous. They even had some Australian-only brand, the Asuna. The J-body is the beautiful, ultimate whore of car-vehicle platforms. So, you can benefit from that if you want to do really weird, preposterous projects only a car nerd would want, and only a car nerd would know is possible.

Dawn: I’ll pass, I think that’s a bit of… It’s a car, so it drives, but would probably still fly over my head. Maybe one day when all the software engineering is automated, I need to relearn. Like, I was hoping to learn some job that has to do with high-pressure cleaning, like high-pressure water cleaning, because that seems fun. But maybe I need to go into cars or something instead, whatever is needed.

Tiffany: I don’t know what it was before, but like your understanding of people and yourself made me think, “Is she autistic?” And your dream job of being pressure washing. Well, that is… I will never have doubts of your autism again, Dawn. Never again in my life. I remember when I was like 6 or 7, my dad let me play with the pressure washer to clean the porch.

Dawn: Same time!

Tiffany: He taught me how atom bombs and hydrogen bombs worked, and how fuel injection and air conditioning, the physics, the phase change works. There’s really awesome stuff to love my dad. Like, think of how powerful and good of a formative experience of letting your 7-year-old use the pressure washer, use this badass tool…

Dawn: Dangerous tool instead of like…

Tiffany: Instead of infantilizing the kid and think they can’t do things and showing them what you can do. You know, and there were other, I would say, cooler things he let me do, but I think that was one of the most dangerous things he ever let me do when I was young, because a pressure washer could totally take your toes off if turned up.

Dawn: Okay, now I was wearing shoes. Maybe we were pressure washing something at the same time. Like…

Tiffany: For a couple years apart, I suppose.

Dawn: Yeah, I really enjoyed that. I wanted to go back to the meaning, though, because I had thought of a great segue back then, which doesn’t work at all anymore now.

Tiffany: Doesn’t matter. Immaterial.

Responsibility and Failed God Mode

Dawn: Alright, so we were just talking about meaning. And one way in which I changed my meaning recently was that I’d always felt responsible for everything, so like everything bad that happened in the world, I felt responsible for, because I could have prevented it.

Tiffany: That is the most unempathizable thing I have ever heard a person say, and I hear it all the time. I’m like… I have to take myself… just like, I need you, my friend, to know… Why would you do that to yourself? Go on.

Dawn: And I realize that there are certain inconsistencies with that. Like, for example, throughout all these one or two decades that I’ve felt that way – and like really all my life to a lesser extent – just sort of my understanding of the suffering in the world changed, but the principle behind it had been the same for decades. I had never taken responsibility for all the good things.

Tiffany: Oh, that’s shame, isn’t it? I just had a lightbulb moment, that’s shame that leads you towards that, isn’t it?

Dawn: Shame and like I don’t know, some kind of failed god mode or something?

Tiffany: I… no, no, I just had the light bulb moment of like, that’s so irrational, what’s the most irrational thing I can think of? Shame! You were grown up and shamed into thinking the bad things in your life are your fault. It blows my mind that somebody CAN be shamed into thinking that things totally outside of their life are their fault. But if I can imagine that shame is real… it makes sense. I have to reverse it. I have to think, if someone shames you, the feeling is so strong, you’ll start to believe it, even if it makes no fucking sense.

Dawn: Yeah, well, it makes sense, like I could have prevented those things, hypothetically, if I had…

Tiffany: I’m so sorry! That’s so stupid! Why would they do that to you! That’s idiotic.

Dawn: I don’t actually know where this came from originally. I just for as long as I can remember, I’ve always felt guilty for things that I failed to prevent. Some kind of survivor’s guilt that I remember even feeling in early elementary school. And my thinking was that it’s probably better than helplessness. That my mind was sort of like, “Okay, you can either feel helpless about these things, or you can have some kind of illusion of control and then feel guilty instead.”

Tiffany: If you feel good, and you feel that people around you that are feeling bad are seeing you, you’ll feel like they’re judging you, and you’ll feel the shame for it.

Dawn: Yes! How did you know?

Tiffany: I’m only understanding that right now as I speak it. That is… what do you mean, how did I know? That has taken approximately 30 months of self-work for me to comprehend, woman. Like… I refuse to let somebody make me feel that way. It’s dumb. No, I’ve just finally understood it! The only way for me to empathize with it is like… It’s so dumb that that can be done to you, and that it’s so dumb that somebody would do that to you. I don’t know if that line of logic makes any sense to you, but that’s the only way I’m able to comprehend that you were shamed into…

Dawn: Like, I mean, I don’t know whether people who see me being happy whilst there are things that I fail to prevent, whilst there are suffering that I fail to prevent, are actually judging me for that. But if I think that they are, then my projection of what they’re thinking is essentially shaming me, so I’m basically shaming myself via this projection.

Tiffany: No, I figured that out, it’s blowing my mind.

Dawn: Yeah, so that is my failed god mode. Just like feel responsible for everything so I don’t have to feel helpless.

Tiffany: One second, please. Alright. The lovely girl that was sleeping in my bed is no longer sleeping in my bed. No, sorry for me to derail that. My friend Lucia.

Dawn: Sorry to derail that for you. You’re expressing this feeling, but I’m just like… hit me, kinda.

Tiffany: It… Anyway, go on, Dawn.

Dawn: Yeah, so I was thinking that being a failed god kind of sucks. Feeling guilty for everything so I don’t have to feel helpless kind of sucks. So an alternative way to frame that would be, like, it is also inconsistent. Because of what I said earlier about not taking responsibility for all the good things that I also didn’t prevent.

And so instead I figured I’d take all the suffering in the world and divide it by a power-weighted sum of all the actors that have responsibility to prevent it, or have some power to prevent it. And then that leaves me with a lot less responsibility, with a tiny fraction of that responsibility. That’s perhaps more manageable. And so in a way, I’ve just reassigned the meaning that I wanted to give to different things, and made the whole experience a bit more bearable for myself.

Tiffany: I’m still processing it. So, to try to bring it back into my world… I am, like, you know, how I hold myself to the standards of not participating in things that I think contribute to bad shit, yeah, right? Apple. And I don’t have to feel somebody else’s judgment for that. In fact, I know there’s people who would judge me for thinking that people who buy Apple are kinda dumb. And I don’t care! Why would I care? I know they’re wrong. Like… I see the bad they do.

And so then I’m just introspecting on how much that reaction is not there for me, to give myself a comparison point. Did you say that shame gave you a sense of control?

Dawn: No, the guilt. Like I pretended to have control over these things to not feel helpless, and then the cost for that was the guilt.

Tiffany: I see, and so the guilt helps resolve the shame.

Dawn: Yeah, I don’t know about the shame in that context. What I feel is just guilt, and then when I’m like, “Wait, why?” Then I’m like, “Okay, because I don’t want to feel helpless, I want to feel control.”

Tiffany: I can understand trying to guilt yourself into something like… At least with my parallel, you know… It’s not the healthiest, but I’ll hate myself into doing something. But I view that as metaphorically whipping myself, punishing myself, doling out punishment to myself to try to bring myself into line.

Dawn: Yeah, I used to do that too. I don’t anymore.

Tiffany: I’m sorry, I won’t get back to the meaning portion of it, I’m just still trying to process it. Cause from my point of view, somebody needs to give me a reason, or I need to have values that would make me want to not do something. And so shaming me won’t work. So the reason why hating myself works is because it’s proverbially like whipping myself. It’s like if you want me to do something I really don’t want to do, you can just punish me into it. I won’t… you know, I’m not submitting, I’m just complying. Good job. You know?

It’s hard for me to view shame as anything else other than something that… I guess there’s healthy shame. I guess, I don’t… I don’t even want to believe that! You know, not even that we can’t use shame healthily. It’s just so disproportionately powerful. Especially in a modern society. So it’s hard for me to see shame as healthy. I can see guilt as healthy.

Shame vs. Guilt

Dawn: But it’s hard for me to see shame as healthy, because shame to me just sounds like legacy code. The old legacy code that hasn’t been removed yet.

Tiffany: Yeah, because guilt can at least reflect either your values or just the harm done to somebody that makes all the sense in the world. Shame just seems like an overpowered, unnecessary, extra version of guilt.

Dawn: Yeah, exactly. And so much like childhood traumas due to different forms of conditioning through shame. I think we could just get rid of it. Like before birth, intervene a bit in the genetic code, and then remove the shame. That would probably prevent a lot of bad things without enabling same amount of bad things.

Tiffany: Yeah, I think if everyone still had guilt, but nobody had shame, we would probably live in a better world, because then an asshole can’t shame you for something completely illogical. Right? This is why shame feels stupid. The person is making you feel bad. You know, if you punch me in the face, it makes me feel bad. But why is punching me in the face gonna make me think that that’s my fault on its own, in and of itself? Maybe they could, but it won’t in and of itself, but shame has the power to do that. And so I feel like shame gives disproportionate power to assholes to just make you feel bad until you believe something that’s wrong.

Whereas healthy guilt is just like a lesson. You know, once you learn your lesson, the guilt can float away. Doing bad things isn’t supposed to feel good.

Grandiose Fantasies

Tiffany: Anyway, my experience with that… Having felt like I failed myself, my father, and just felt like unforgivable, like damned, in a way. That the only way that would compensate for all the people I’ve hurt, all the mistakes I’ve made… When I felt my worst, those grandiose fantasies did involve inventing fully automated luxury gay space communism. And that’s a great aspiration to have, but I used to put a lot of my self-worth into that grandiose delusion of like I was necessarily on the golden path to that, to a practically jobless, automated, resource-based world.

And so I just, I don’t know, the pathway to meaning for me was easy there. You know, in the same way you were saying before, I have a ton of individual things. Like really, what that was, was a synthesis of everything either I already was capable of, or I wanted to be, or I was growing into be. It was a synthesis of basically all the positive things of me turned up to infinite, basically.

Just splitting those out and valuing them individually is what I did. But it was still more of the time thing, really internalizing that. Since I can’t… there’s no guarantee of meeting that grandiose fantasy. So what? That was never on me? And I have all these awesome things that if we had a world like that, or we were trying to build that world, it would contribute to it?

And also, I was combating feelings of fakeness. You know, I’d tried all my life up to that point to just get more emotionally regulated and stuff. Let alone hold down a job, let alone do anything I dreamed of. And so I felt like maybe my fucking intellect was fake, too. And I had fooled myself into it along the way.

And even before I really wrestled with that face on, that feeling of fakeness was there in different cordoned off pieces throughout me that would contribute to that. So I guess there was just like learning it’s not just raw intellect that will fix your life. You still need to have the right tools. You still need to know the actual things you need to challenge in yourself. And stop treating yourself like a perfection machine. Because I know that’s a question you had: “How did I find meaning when I found out I’m not like some God?”

Dawn: Exactly. After realizing you’re not God. That’s the question that I have on my list, so you already segued to it perfectly.

Tiffany: Well, you know, like all the things I said, that doesn’t mean that I can’t use this kind of creativity and depth of insight to help people in a way that most people can’t. Or I’m learning like the psychopath version of empathy is really sophisticated. But then simultaneously, it’s easy to keep my emotions from mixing up with the other person’s. And not get bogged down having to feel emotion after emotion, and just work through it like a logic problem. And I can help people really work through some complex stuff, comparatively trivially. And just like practice. When you’re doing Mentalization-Based Therapy (MBT) and DBT to yourself like all day, every day, for a year and a half, two years straight…

Dawn: You get good at it. Yeah.

Tiffany: But I think I learned a greater depth than that. That’s another thing I like about myself: my commitment to my tribe. Towards trying to find the real problem in something. Like my dad taught me that, just with mechanical stuff. Like I said with the PT Cruiser, it’s not that you can’t fix it. It’s that it’s obtuse to fix. It has problems it just doesn’t need to have. That the solution is that this sort of car shouldn’t exist. It’s that this sort of car should be normal.

Knowing How Things Work (Electric Water Pumps)

Why does Saturn suck? It’s not because they have plastic body panels, or the cars were cheap as shit. They’re supposed to be like that. It’s because they didn’t rely on the reliable things they had for what should be a normal-ass basic commuter car.

That sort of thinking… or let’s say BMW switched to electronic water pumps, and they also got rid of their radiator temperature gauges. If you still had a temperature gauge, and it still at least partly told the truth… They most car gauges lie to some degree, because people have complained about it at some point. 1980s Volvos ended up with what’s called a “temp faker,” and that’s literally what it’s called in the instructions. That outside of certain operational parameters, it just slowly raises the value to nominal and then just keeps it there. Because people who didn’t really understand what was going wrong with their car saw what looked like a non-ideal value and read too much into it.

That wasn’t as big of a deal back then, but when you move to an electric water pump, that has a different kind of failure mode. If it’s only pumping a third as hard, if you had a temperature gauge, you could see that this thing reaches too high a temperature too often, and it didn’t used to do that, and you could catch it. By that point now, the only sign you’d have is that the red temperature light lights up on your dash. And now your car’s in limp mode, and it’s gotta get towed. You don’t know until it’s too late.

Electric water pumps aren’t evil. It’s that there’s no graceful failure available anymore. And it just strands you.

I try to take that kind of thinking with my mental health and other people’s problems. And so I guess I basically set out to ask myself and try and find an answer to the question of: “Why is recovery so hard? What are the actual points me and other people get hung up on that would maybe make me stuck and why?” And that gives me as much insight into myself as a person, any person. To me in particular. And teaches me a lot about other people.

Asking those sorts of questions and actually getting answers teaches you things about where our lightning-powered thinking meatball meets reality. It’s not a totally rational design at all. It has lots of quirks and features.

Like, one good example M.E. Thomas ran into with her therapist that she found to be totally anti-intuitive – and so did I when I first learned it – is that losing something negative about yourself still hurts, because you kind of process it as a piece of you dying. And it’s just because it attaches to identity, and that’s how we experience identity. And no other reason. And knowing that empowers you greatly, and it helps you get through the difficult parts of change.

Somebody healthier, but not healthy – someone who might have severe depression, but that’s their primary part, their biggest problem – it feels like that old version of themselves is dying. But if that’s your only problem, and you work through that grief and get over it… really, the thing they’re learning that’s hard for them is grief. And eventually, you probably can do that, even if you don’t learn the finer points.

But somebody who’s never had a stable sense of self, or basically never had a sense of self at all? The answer to that is so unintuitive that it really does help to have somebody tell you point-blank that this is how this basic part of you works, because the rest of it is not gonna regulate itself through there. You’re learning how to regulate yourself for the first time for so many of these things as an adult.

I’m really happy I have that mindset. I really love and appreciate my motherfucker of a father for teaching me that. It teaches you something deep. He taught me how to figure out how to think about something. And then you learned that’s a thing you could do, that you could learn new ways to think.

I feel like that’s something a rationalist really would understand, right? Especially somebody that just so casually goes, “Oh, yeah, a few years ago, I turned off my internal narrator, and it had all of these clear first and second order benefits.” You know, and to most people, that’d be stupidly abstract. And it’s not abstract to me at all, I get it. But that’s that same kind of thing. You learn that, and then you go, “Wow, I could really game this… that my thought meat.”

Dawn: I have like two friends who can do all sorts of weird shit with their brains. They can like up and down regulate all sorts of emotions, and attachment to different things can change their level of agreeableness or disagreeableness at will.

Agreeableness and Disagreeableness

Tiffany: I’m working on that last one, but I’m having to learn what agreeableness and disagreeableness is to me. Because I’ve recently learned more deeply what it means to have an antisocial personality. And like… You saw in that one thread where I vaguely whined about something. And she knew exactly what I was bitching about. She’s just like, “That’s my baseline, I can’t stand it when people are like that.”

Yeah, I can’t stand it. Like when people try and just help me over and over when that’s just not what I need. They don’t know my needs. And just the thought pattern of getting mad at somebody for trying to comfort me. And getting mad at them hurting themselves and shooting themselves in their own foot, and just making everything worse.

Normal people don’t get mad about somebody over-apologizing, maybe. Annoyed or tired of it, but I’m just like… “Oh, my fucking god, how are you so dumb! I know it’s not that, but it’s just… Ugh!”

And that realization… I realize that’s pretty fucking antisocial. It causes me problems all the fucking time. And it’s made me go: “What antisocial aspects do I want to keep? When and why?” And I think that will answer a core of when and why I would want a certain amount of agreeableness or disagreeableness. And in a certain way, too. I wanted to share that.

Dawn: Yeah, just… I also want to have just the right amount of disagreeableness or agreeableness for the right situation.

Tiffany: I mean, like, you know, it will be said, you could change every sentence in a conversation, honestly. I want the flexibility. I want to know why, so I can make it a decision on the fly.

Dawn: Yeah, like I kind of adopt to the other person and the situation. But for me currently, within a very small band, I’m going all the way on the agreeable side, and then if the other person is relatively disagreeable, then I’m like, “Okay, let’s play a little bit with that.” But you know.

Tiffany: That’s so very human, but that is an obvious hole to me, because it’s like you’re just energy matching. And that might escalate something you don’t need to. And your stance is now dependent upon… Bam! And so that’s not rational to me.

Dawn: Oh, I only do it when I want to, not generally. You know, when I’m feeling playful or something. But sometimes there are also people who I want to show that consistent agreeableness to, because I want to give them some kind of corrective experience to some other experiences that they’ve had previously. It’s totally dependent on the situation, what I think is useful.

But you mentioned, “I surrender control to regain agency.” Do you remember that? What you meant by that?

The Paradox of Control

Tiffany: So, I believe that’s really the paradox of control itself. The more you have a control mindset, the more you’re bound to specific outcomes, or following… And it makes you more rigid. And so surrendering allows you more options. Because you’re accepting that maybe you will do something that actually does matter, but you can’t have a control mindset to see those other options, and it actually gives agency back. I think the concept of control is broadly, but not entirely, very paradoxical.

Dawn: Yeah, I see this a lot in our groups with people who are very deep in the control mindset. They frame it as a kind of power, but when I empathize with “Do I want to be like that?”, then I feel mostly the inflexibility of it, and I’m like, “Yeah, I want to be like that 0.1% of the time, I would like to have the option, let’s say.”

Tiffany: Yeah! Or like, you know that if it would work out in their head like that… in your head like that. It would feel great, right? But you know, it’s not real. It’s not really what happens.

And the other flip side to that is people are more likely to do what you want if your primary thing isn’t trying to control them. And then part of that’s also surrender, because then accepting compromise. Getting 50% of what you want is better than 0%. So finding a common ground, and leaning them towards something that’s more like what you like. But not entirely, because you’re also accepting what they like. Still will likely net gain you.

Dawn: Yeah, that’s also like a nice mechanism that sort of aligns incentives. And people just use their empathy to care about each other, then she can turn any kind of gain into a mutual positive sum, kind of Pareto improvement of the situation.

Tiffany: I think it’s still more complex than that. Because I think there’s times where that doesn’t work out in a practical sense. But at least in the immediate moment. Helping people with their feelings at least gets you past whatever’s blocking actually moving forward.

Because sometimes, even after… You know, an extreme example. Let’s say you have you, and me, and another friend of ours. And you two are the normal ones, and I got mad at something, and I really don’t want to compromise. And initially, helping me feel better is probably gonna lead me back towards the mindset of where I would compromise.

Imagine you, another person, and a narcissist are at a table. I don’t know, the narcissist might end up compromising with you, but not while they’re still fucking pissed! I think that extreme example still breeds true for a lot of less extreme examples.

Dawn: Yeah, I think I read this in a bunch of books as well. There’s like this beautiful metaphor of the Sun and the Wind having some kind of bet. Who can undress someone who walks on the beach? And the wind tries to do it with brute force, and fails, because the person just wraps themselves in their coat more firmly. And then the sun does it with warmth, and the person freely takes off the coat, and the sun wins the bet.

Tiffany: I forgot about that one. I remember that. I was very young when I first heard that. Yeah, you know, what I just said strikes me as something that can be a very high social awareness. Someone… it’s a powerful soft skill.

But I think just if you have a more self-serving or malicious intent, it could be kind of a psychopathic mindset of, “Alright, I’ll make you feel nice, and then after we’re done making you feel nice, I’m gonna talk you into what I want.” But you know, if you put some practicality and compassion into that, it’s not strictly psychopathic at all. But I find it interesting that I’ve ended up there from the complete other end.

Dawn: It feels natural to me that those would be separate.

Tiffany: That people’s thinking and people’s feelings – even if they aren’t aware of it in the moment – can be ultimately totally independent of one another. Because the feeling could be transient. And in the moment of feeling that thing, they won’t necessarily think that at all.

Compromise vs. Blame

Dawn: Yeah, but I think like also when you have a situation like that, where someone resists some kind of compromise, oftentimes the framings of the situation are different. Like the party that seeks the compromise is probably in a collaboration framing, where they are trying to achieve something together with the other person. And the person who resists is sort of in a blame mindset, where they’re trying to figure out who’s right and who’s wrong, so who has to take the blame for whatever happens. And then breaking the person out of the right-wrong mindset and getting them into the collaboration mindset again makes it only possible to negotiate fairly afterwards. Not because it would have been unfair before, but because negotiation was just not on the table.

Tiffany: Yeah, absolutely. I can think of gentler and rougher versions of that. Like, let’s say somebody’s not going to get really into a compromising mindset. I’d be like, “Look, if you really want to blame somebody, we can frickin’ blame somebody! And this problem is still going to be here. And you can live with that, and I can’t, and I don’t care, and I’m going to solve it. So if you want to do it that way, we’re gonna get through this, and we’re gonna solve the problem, and we’re also gonna find the person to blame since you want it so bad.”

Dawn: Cute!

Tiffany: That’s… I don’t know why my mind leans me towards the “How do I out-coerce the coercive person?” But it could also be just a fantasy I’d love to do that. But I could imagine a more middle ground, that somebody just doesn’t yet understand that kind of value, and really you have to help them feel like people are gonna be accountable, we’re gonna make a solution that has you in mind too, etc. And then just kind of doing the compromise and negotiation. Even though they’re uncomfortable with it. But now that they’re at least not stonewalling it.

Dawn: Yeah, this worked really well for me at one point. There was a project, one person wanted to drop out, the project was kind of failing, and I noticed that the person was really dead set on blaming me for the failure. Didn’t see the point in that, but then again, taking the blame for that toward that person just didn’t seem to have any negative effects that I could think of.

Tiffany: I would love that.

Dawn: I would get off on that, it’s like, “Fine, if you want me to be the asshole, I will.” You know?

Tiffany: If that’s really what you want, I’ll give that to you, buddy. I’m the biggest cunt on Earth. I’m glad you finally recognized it. Let’s move on. If you want me to be the demon… I love that shit. It makes me feel powerful, because I’m letting myself be bad. I’m being stronger than my reputation, or whatever.

Dawn: Yay!

Tiffany: And this person thinks they’re so in control, and it’s just like… “All I had to do was lie to your face, you dumb bitch. And you were gonna go along with it anyway, and you think you played us.”

That’s that shit! Laura once said it. She called it Duper’s Delight.

Dawn: Yeah, exactly.

Out-Assholing the Asshole

Tiffany: And I like that there’s positive versions of it. I should remind myself of that, that there are very positive ways of out-assholing an asshole. And it being genuinely helpful and productive. Kind of having that asshole in your heart helps you do it.

Dawn: Yeah, I feel like sadism and Machiavellianism come from sort of a similar place, but Machiavellianism is very much easier for me to empathize with, or to experience myself, compared to sadism. So oftentimes, I try to tap into that when I try to empathize with what a situation feels like for someone. It’s so much closer, in a way.

Tiffany: Yeah, this is just a marriage of the two, right? Like, in a moment like that, I’m just thinking, “What do I gotta do that makes this move forward?” I’m just taking a little sadistic pleasure in doing it. You know, if I’m really upset with the person, it will help me get over the fact that I feel like I have to do it, for sure. And that’s definitely part of where my sadism came from, of having to do the thing I really didn’t want to do, but it does work.

Dawn: And allowing or enabling some of the Machiavellianism when necessary. We’re getting toward the end of the question catalog. There are a couple more questions that I want to save for the very end. But do you have in your notes any answers whose questions I haven’t asked yet?

Tiffany: No, I have to drive her home, so I had to schedule that. Not off the top of my head.

Dawn: We’ve explored a lot. There are lots of questions that seem to me that they touch on things that you’ve mentioned already. I think I can skip over quite a few of them now, and go right to the closing section. One of them is: how you are in general feeling about this whole conversation?

Tiffany: You know, hopefully wistful. And I think that’s how I feel about my whole recovery. It still feels really daunting, but I really don’t have any real reason to doubt that I’m going to get somewhere I want to be. Whether I know what that is.

Wistfulness and Whimsy

Dawn: Yeah, what could that look like?

Tiffany: I want… I want to really feel my whimsy again. I still feel compelled to do it. But I still feel like I’m going through the motions in my playfulness and my whimsy.

When I light up somebody’s face from something I’ve done, especially something from some aspect of myself I’ve nurtured a bit… I do it in my own unique way, or I do it in a way that most people don’t know how? Whether it be just for entertainment, or helping somebody through something? I want to feel that again. Feel the person light up through their face. And I have a strange, unknowable sense that that’s gonna happen, and it’s possible, but I have no idea how long that’s going to take.

I can just tell I’m doing so much good. But I only feel like the victory of it, and not the delight. I wanna feel more deeply what I am in people’s lives. I can feel like I’m not even belonging, I can tell I belong. But I wanna feel like I’m somewhere, something… and someone… more than just know it.

And I feel like if I get to whatever point that is, I will be capable of giving that back. And showing somebody else the splendor of life. I feel like I could. But maybe I already do, and I don’t know it. I don’t know.

Dawn: When you described the three-step process for experiencing emotional empathy, it sounded like you were already able to tap into exactly this delight, however briefly.

Tiffany: Yeah, but this is deeper, because those emotions feel fleeting, and they don’t seem to stick onto me slowly as layers and feel like I’m a part of people’s life. The connection part of it’s very tenuous. Like, I can be sitting with somebody and really getting to know them, and I can just tell that that’s what’s happening. And it’s really weird when you can see that so acutely without having to think about it, but not feel ANYTHING from it.

It’s one of my most alienating experiences to see, to watch somebody gain this deep connection from me and feel it. And I’m not feeling any of it. I don’t know if I’ve ever felt that before, but I can tell that it is long-term possible. And so that means that all the moving parts of my recovery are starting to coalesce.

And you see, this is a microcosm of itself. If I hit that point, I’ll have the feeling of accomplishment of having gotten to there. And I can tell I’m getting towards there, but I can’t feel it.

Dawn: Yeah, I associate that with Metta meditation. Like, for me, when I feel this connection with another person that I actually talk to, then it’s an amazing feeling, exactly as amazing as you think it is. But I get something very similar from Metta meditation.

Metta Meditation and Self-Transcendence

Tiffany: What’s Metta meditation?

Dawn: It’s when you try to feel love in general, sort of a training for feeling more love. And you train that by first starting out easy, feeling love towards someone you actually already love, like Farvel, for example. And then expanding it from there. Either to yourself and feeling self-love, or to another person that’s more difficult to love. And then you try to really understand where this person is coming from.

And for me, the trick is also to understand how I am like that person. So it’s easy for me to feel love for myself, and for people who are sufficiently like me. But then to expand that to people who are unlike me, I need to know how would I have become that person? So, what genes would have to have been different, what temperaments, what childhood experiences would have to have been different for me to have turned into that person? And once I can close that gap, and I feel like I’m that person but for a few little tweaks here and there throughout our lives, then it becomes really possible for me to merge, or to expand my identity to include the other person, and feel that.

Tiffany: I’ve had two shocked faces in this span. Because the first one was me realizing: “Why would I want to feel the love I have for Farvel for somebody else?” And I realized, very succinctly, I am selfish with my love.

Dawn: And I need to ponder that. That is…

Tiffany: A hell of a realization.

Dawn: You have plenty of it, you can give it freely! I love people I would never want to meet.

Tiffany: I’m just delighting at the novelty of that phrase, that’s astonishing. I’d have never come up with that phrase on my own, I don’t think.

Because I hope this would maybe even be a pathway towards this, but… Sorry, it’s so meta to me still. I guess why it’s called meta-meditation. It’s already like a complicated thing in my head to put myself in somebody’s shoes. So it’s challenging. When I have those moments of spontaneous affective empathy, that is what happens. It’s very… my brain’s not very good at it yet. And I would like that to be more natural, even if not constant. And I feel like that’s like a stepping stone from where I’m at, to where you’re at. And I don’t know that it has to happen linearly. But at least I know the shape of the lacking. Or the shape of the yet-to-be.

Dawn: I think that is what they call self-transcendence. Like, I told someone about this, a friend of mine, and she was like, “Oh, that is self-transcendence.”

Tiffany: I’ve never understood what it is. No, and now I understand what it is.

Dawn: Like, I just described that to a friend yesterday, how identification works for me. That I sort of highly identify with this body and algorithms that are sort of like it. I suppose one partner of mine is sufficiently similar that she’s also a sufficiently similar algorithm that there’s a lot of identification going on.

But then, I think sort of in general, humans are like a high level of identification, because a lot of them are fairly similar. Then all mammals, I think, are also like very similar to me, so there’s also a high level of identification. Then all animals that share culture. I think culture, having sort of a pack, and then having some shared culture within the pack, I think that is also something that makes it easier for me to feel a high level of identification with the animal.

And then all sorts of animals that don’t have that, like most invertebrates… That’s sort of where it gets a bit more difficult with the identification, where I feel like I don’t really understand what it is like to be that animal.

Tiffany: I understand it. I don’t know if I can do it, but I get it. Because I do that with Farvel. Because when she just jumps up into my hand… Or where she rubs into my face… Or when she was snuggling with me, laying on my feet, and then I watched her fall asleep and her head just fall off my foot, and then she woke up with the strongest trill of like, “Oh my god, I have mommy!” And I just want to feel that.

Dawn: Because I’m like, that has to feel so wonderful.

Tiffany: And I could put myself in her shoes. In her brittle paws. And that… I get why a person would do that now. Never understood. I’ve never understood what it is or why, but that also unlocked a realization of why a small self works the way it does. Real simple. If you don’t have much of a self-container at all, doing the process you’re talking about doesn’t grow empathy, it just like starts replacing the self you have.

And that’s the psychopathic mirroring thing? You know, where if I go to emulate somebody, and I try to take on parts of them… If they’re with a tenuous self-container, or suppressed one, then I become those thought patterns. So that’s why a psychopath would have defenses against empathy. Because it wipes your… it wipes your slate.

That’s really interesting. I need to think on that further. Like what part of the process you’d get hung up on that would cause you to have to stop there, and then develop the defenses that protect you from getting board wiped. Do you get what I mean? That those seem reactive to getting stopped or having trouble reaching the point where you can have a persistent or independent self-state from the people around you.

I thought you might think that that’s interesting, because it’s a genuinely new realization to me.

Dawn: Yeah, totally. I also wonder whether that could explain why a neglectful upbringing can lead to either this pure psychopathic presentation – for example, M.E. Thomas – or can lead to a more narcissistic presentation. Because I suppose the choice when you have this complete absence of introjects, or this relative absence of introjects with just a few things that you can call your identity – so a very small self… When you have that, then you probably have the choice between either creating some kind of false self to give you stability (and then you end up with this more anaclytic or empty form of NPD), or you can go for the more typical psychopathic flexibility, where you just take on whatever random identity comes your way, or is convenient at a given time.

Factor 1 vs. Factor 2 Psychopathy

Tiffany: I think that actually is more due to genetics. Because like with me, I had the predispositions for my amygdala to do those things, but you know, I suppressed and then atrophied my amygdala. It’s not that things were in… I think Factor 1 psychopathy is more of a lacking.

So the root of attachment is fear. And so, if you don’t have fear, you don’t seek comfort. And if you don’t seek comfort, you don’t form an emotional attachment system. And without an emotional attachment system, all these other identity things don’t precipitate.

But if you DO have one, and you don’t completely shut it off or forego it, you’re gonna end up with some narcissistic defenses, naturally. Because at that level of developmental breakdown, it’s basically a last-ditch effort. You don’t have enough of an identity to just have a borderline state. There’s not enough underneath. You have to have a facade to protect that last kernel. Or at least to mediate it.

Like stuff with good-bad fusion, where you start identifying with the bad stuff to, and it at least mediates it. It’s like a super primitive ego. That doesn’t recognize the interior, and so only functions as an external self-image, and is resultantly a narcissistic facade. That I think is much more genetic predisposition.

And upbringing will certainly influence the kind of personality someone develops, right? Like I’m thinking of another famous YouTuber, Kanika Batra. She’s a very narcissistic Factor 1 psychopath. And then someone who’s pretty in between, because she’s trying to navigate herself, our favorite “Cluster B Milkshake.” Right? Like she can have a narcissistic valence or not, etc. It’s more of a choice to her, it’s a part of her, even if her parts are very tenuous.

I’ve seen very narcissistic psychopaths, and then we’ve all seen M.E. Thomas, who has some trait narcissism, but you wouldn’t necessarily say that’s a defining part of her personality. And I think that’s just incidental base traits plus upbringing.

I guess that is to say that we have a decent understanding of the roots of Factor 1 versus Factor 2 psychopathy. It’s still nature versus nurture. You can still have strong Factor 2, and some pivotal Factor 1 traits. But the amygdala getting short-circuited is such an easy thing to MRI and to track the genetics that we have… It’s one of the few things we have a decent understanding of the pathway to Nature vs. Nurture. Because it breaks down so many things at such a fundamental level.

Anyway, where were you?

Dawn: Yeah, I still find it very complicated. Like the pathway that you described with the underactive amygdala, and so the child doesn’t seek attachments, is one that I find fairly obvious. But then there’s also the one where the child is emotionally neglected, and so also is not able to form attachment, goes into avoidant attachment in order to fool themselves into thinking that they are basically the same, but the amygdala is very active. Anyway, there’s just some kind of suppression going on.

And when that happens, there are those that form more of a psychopathic personality afterwards, and those who form more of a narcissistic personality afterwards. Or some combination. And that is the more confusing one to me.

Tiffany: I think again you could just split that into whether someone has a strong lead towards Factor 1 or not. So let’s say someone with Factor 1 that’s primarily strongly neglected. They’re probably just the stereotype of – for good, bad, or neutral – a high-functioning psychopath.

They might have had a lot of decent things modeled, or at least had a lot of opportunity to discover things, or model them for themselves. Just not been pushed towards more negative things. And then they’re not going to be narcissistic, really, outside of what works and what helps. And other people won’t be of no value to them. But they won’t necessarily have grown up as much of a predisposition to see them as such a potential threat.

And then the other one… You’re gonna get M.E. Thomas. Like, M.E. Thomas was fucking abandoned as a kid at a park once. Like, she was more than neglected. She told a story once of her dad beating down the door. She was like 5 or 6, I think. And her just being like, “Alright, is this how you want to lose control?” And I delighted in that. I wish I had that awareness when I was that young. Maybe it’d fuck me up worse, but I would have loved it. And so you know, she’s healthier now. She has a good head on her shoulders. But you can tell she came from somewhere more difficult, and she had to work through it.

Whereas, let’s say someone who doesn’t have a strong Factor 1… This even shows that if then someone has that environment, but they don’t have the opportunities, they’re gonna end up more adversarial. Right? Usually. And so then, let’s say that someone doesn’t have strong Factor 1, they just have a predilection, they could end up in Factor 2. And they’re just broadly neglected. Their propped-up self-image is just going to be… You know, they might know more about what adults and kids in their life that aren’t their parents mean to them. And they might get a better understanding of people that way? They might even be more obviously narcissistic, but less fragile.

And somebody that then has that, but is abused as well? You know, rather narcissistic, and at least initially rather unstable. And I imagine my counterpart that was just neglected would have less productive risk-taking than I would.

I feel like that would be the major valence. And then, maybe somebody that’s not me, that then had better opportunities… I think that had a similar or worse upbringing to mine, but have better opportunities in their teens, in their early 20s. That person sounds dangerous. They probably up until the wrong moment think they’re unstoppable and fucking indestructible. And have some level of confirmation that things go their way.

I don’t know, being one of those four primary pathways there, it’s not hard for me to imagine the other 3. I think broadly, the worse the kid is treated, and the worse opportunities they’re given, they’re gonna end up more narcissistic. Either for what it gets them, or to compensate. And I feel like for Factor 1, it’s inverted. Because empowering them will give them a reason to be more narcissist – will give them confirmation that they should just keep going.

Dawn: I want to chart it out. I already have a Canva open to make a chart of these things. There are also these other factors that I wanted to take into account, like alexithymia, for example, seems to be sort of a different beast from having an under-functioning amygdala. And then impairment of cognitive empathy is another thing that I also want to incorporate. And then just sort of to understand better how all of these things interact with trauma and interact with neglect versus abuse.

Charting Personality Disorders

Tiffany: Definitely the hardest one for me to understand is like straight up lacking cognitive empathy. Not understanding it. I had very poor cognitive empathy most of my life, so I can get that. I guess that would just be somebody with a Factor 1 psychopath having a very harsh upbringing, and then having no real opportunities given to them later. And then you would be predisposed against giving anybody empathy, even if you’re given a reason later, right? Even if you were capable of it, you’d reflexively or consciously choose not to. I think that’s modelable even if we don’t know the source.

Dawn: Yeah, like I want to chart that, just sort of assume that these things are a given, regardless of what the source might be. And then see like how they interact. Like this was quite successful for me when it comes to some hypotheses I had about the simulation hypothesis, so that we’re somewhere in sort of a tree of simulations. And it was quite insightful, and so I’m hoping that this chart can also be a bit more insightful for me. Because I can’t really keep track of that mentally, I need to actually draw it in some fashion to learn from it.

Tiffany: Okay, when I get off this call, I’ll give you a short outline of those. Because I see it as 6 possibilities, not four. And I do see two of those six possibilities impairing cognitive empathy at least as results, so I think it’s modelable.

Dawn: Beautiful, thanks! Yeah, I also want to turn this into a blog article at some point, once I have a bit more clarity of it. It’s one of my projects to just understand better where psychopathy and the more psychopathic bend of pathological narcissism actually come from. Because they have such a different ideology to what I’ve experienced, and so it’s all a bit foreign to me, I can’t directly empathize with it. But I’ve met so many people now who have some presentation like that.

Is it because part of it’s obviously a tool? And that’s blurry? Like, the compensatory grandiosity and narcissism versus trait narcissism and grandiosity. Like, I view the former as a reaction I would have, and I view the latter as something I do because I know it works.

Tiffany: Yeah, we’ve discussed that. That makes a lot of sense. I think that is one thing that I don’t have enough access to, because I completely misinterpreted how it works socially. But the other thing is like… The sorts of experiences that people often tell me about, the sorts of neglect that people often tell me about… like I can find sort of small parts of that in my life, but they were probably late enough, mediated enough, that they had completely different effects on me. So I can’t really make the connection between that and make that useful in some fashion for empathizing with where they are coming from.

And so I’m trying to ask them lots of questions, and then try to understand better that way, rather than trying to link it to my experiences with not having the opportunity to express emotions and such.

Tiffany: Yeah, I’ll help you with that. I think I can jumpstart with it, because I can empathize with those. I can imagine a more broken version of myself. A better treated version of myself. Etc. Like I had similar struggles at a young age, and I can imagine some traits having been more distinct when I was younger.

Dawn: Yeah, like in particular, when you tap into this empty version… like you have all of these introjects, most of them from your dad, I suppose, some of them from cats, that were helpful in some fashion, and some other ones that were detrimental. But they are definitely sort of there. But you also had like these areas where there was just nothing, like you mentioned how you forget how pleasant doodling is for you.

The Disavowed Self

Tiffany: Well, one concept I want to think maybe to wrap this up that’ll help you. It’s the concept of The Disavowed Self. That’s normally in literature talking about a part of you you suppressed or don’t acknowledge, and you did that early enough that it’s pre-verbal. So those capacities, or those leanings in yourself, do exist, but you’re really going to access them only via mindfulness and meditation and stuff, when you get everything else to shut up.

Or like in my worst meltdowns, when I come back from them with better awareness now… That just… the screaming infant. Feeling like nobody’s gonna come to help her. That no, it’s not going to be okay. But also more nuanced stuff, like your creativity, etc. There’s stuff that if it’s… if you’re suppressing it well before you know what shame even could be. But it’s pre-verbal. Really, the language centers and even most of the abstract parts of your brain aren’t going to register it at all.

It’s buried so deep. And like I said, some of these parts of me are painful enough, they can come out and lead to my worst meltdowns. But there’s other parts that are instead of a terror, or a negative, they’re a positive, unexpressed. And they’re absolutely still there. Like, I don’t have to doodle for even 5 minutes, and it’s there immediately. Right. I can remember my one ink pen – the multiple colors – being taken away in first grade. Or just having the avenue taken away from me well before I had a strong attachment to it.

And so keep that in mind, that stuff like that… even in a mind with strong, harsh introjects can have these empty aspects, because they’re pre-verbal.

Productive Anger

Dawn: Yeah, I suspect that investigating my anger could be helpful for that, because I didn’t used to have any access to it, and then I experienced some at one point, and it was very interesting. And now through therapy, I have sort of a more… like I experienced something, but it’s super mild, and I describe it as “miffedness.”

But I also noticed that when something happens that I intellectually know “this is the sort of thing that would make someone angry,” then I also have some thoughts coming up on some intuitions that are kind of passive-aggressive. And so I’m like, “Okay, there must be some kind of anger there somewhere that I cannot experience.”

Tiffany: My suggestion would maybe be re-diving back into your guilt about feeling like all the problems in the world are yours? Because a reasonable reaction would be to be angry at what set it up for the people, etc. Like, you haven’t lived a life where that would turn into resentment in the same way. So the anger’s probably a lot more fucking primal, to be honest. That’s the most obvious anger to me. And I think it’s a positive thing, it’s motivating, right? If you channel it right, it’s incredibly motivating.

Dawn: Damn. It’s also interesting that I generally only feel anger toward people I care about. So the fact that I will probably in many cases care about the perpetrators of all the suffering that I wish I were able to prevent… It’s probably going to work hand-in-hand with rediscovering that anger.

Tiffany: No, absolutely, that’s exactly what I mean. Just think about my mom. I’m just thinking about 4-year-old Tiffany. A blonde bitch that calls herself her mother swats her with a Teflon mixing spoon, and she’s screaming, and you watch that woman shove food into Tiffany’s 4-year-old mouth. And she just realizes that she has to give up and chew it and try and swallow it. Oh, that makes me angry!

Dawn: I won’t think about that too long. It’s not very productive anger.

Tiffany: But…

Dawn: The problem is like… I very quickly go to hate with these things. Like, I really need to care about the person first to be able to access anger.

Tiffany: Maybe imagine you could be in that scenario, and you have… Maybe you’re a significant friend of the family, and you just didn’t know this is what the home life was like for me. Right? And you find out about it. And then there’s like this parent-teacher conference. And my mother tries to advocate for discipline in the school system. And you’re now in a position to make a difference.

And you know, maybe even some part of you would want to shame her in front of the entire parent-teacher conference or something, you know? Or some righteous anger of, “I’m not letting this bitch get away with this, and she’s gonna know, going home today, that what she isn’t doing isn’t right to that child, and she’s going to know it from every other mouth in the room, including mine, because I’m going to spell it out.”

Right now. How, like, the anger of, “How dare she come in here, and say that! To other adults!” Argumental? Yes! Like, I guess there I get anger at the willful ignorance. My knee-jerk was like stupidity, but like the just ignorant audacity. Ignorant arrogance. The willful ignorance. And I think those are things that really tear down people and tear down society, too.

I’m trying to help you theorycraft a situation where your anger could be productive, even if you don’t have a strong attachment to the person. But you have a strong attachment to somebody they affect. And so you suddenly have a reason to care about her opinion. But not because you care about her.

Dawn: Yeah, gosh, so difficult for me to… like, but I can probably come up with some examples where I care… I probably need to know more about the perpetrator, let’s say, in order to be able to expand sort of my identity toward them, to be able to empathize with them, and I think at that point, I can actually be angry with them, as opposed to just hating them.

Tiffany: That’s so weird to me that you would need empathy to be angry.

Dawn: But is it really like anger that you experience toward people that you don’t empathize with? Or is it like, for me, it’s like when there is some perpetrator that I cannot empathize with, and they are doing some crap, then I think of them like a software bug. Like, I just want to fix them, and ideally, I want to go back in time, distract their parents on the day of their conception so someone else gets born.

Tiffany: I guess here, for me, if it’s personal… let’s say she was doing this and it might affect my kid. You know, I’ll get angry for my kid’s right as an extension of myself. Or if it affects me directly. Like let’s say some idiot at work, and it’s a union meeting, and some idiot chimes up, and I’m like, “Don’t you dare think you’re gonna do that kind of shit that’s gonna do that to me?”

And so, in the same way, if this were reversed, and my mother were your mother, and I was in that situation, I would be identifying with you. And I would be angry for your right. I mean, there could also be hatred, but…

Dawn: I would actually, in a situation like that…

Tiffany: I wouldn’t want empathy. I don’t want someone that’s that nasty to have the power over me to make me feel bad for whatever the fuck they went through. That’s like their own demon to face. Like, I wouldn’t say that they would be unrecoverable, just like… That’s not my problem! Because this person is the person being the problem, and they’re an adult, and they can take ownership of that.

Dawn: Yeah, but like you respect these people more than I would. Like, I don’t want to use your mother as an example, because I don’t know, I’m about to say something fairly extreme, but there are like all sorts of warmongers around the world who are responsible for the deaths of thousands and hundreds of thousands of people, and I feel like zero anger toward them, because I don’t respect them as people. These are bugs to me.

Tiffany: Let’s see what you mean. I’m like angry at their actions, and the consequences of their actions, and the system that enables them, but I do hate the individual person, and my mind would light up with grotesque things I would enjoy doing to them for hours.

Dawn: Haha.

Tiffany: I know, strangely almost relatable. But, no, no, that’s a good distinction. I really wouldn’t be angry at them! I would be angry for the sake of somebody else, and angry at the things happening, because it’s just such an affront to society.

Dawn: Yeah.

Tiffany: Maybe ask yourself… no, you are telling me, because it’s a respect thing to you. And I get that, I use that as a defense. Or a strategy, too. That someone can demote themselves of their respect from me, and it will allow me to be much colder.

But in the same way, if let’s say I faced someone like that, I would be somewhat subduing my hatred, because I know that if I start screaming, I’m gonna look like the crazy person, and no one’s gonna listen to me. But I wouldn’t necessarily subdue my anger, at least to motivate me to do something about it, and hopefully to get people empathizing with me over what should be righteous anger.

There is actually a very utilitarian aspect to it, too, there. That even if those emotions would lead me towards a certain strategy, and giving a certain presentation that is, again, motivated from but not necessarily aligned with how I feel.

Dawn: Yeah, I suppose I’ve been probably also conditioned. Like, I have for forever always cared about things that no one around me cared about, and so I imagine that if I had gotten angry about them, I would have looked crazy, and so I didn’t.

Tiffany: But you have a… I guess this is the entitlement of me. Yeah, but you have a fucking right to be angry. This is the thing I guess we talked about like NPD versus BPD growing. Right? If I were you, I wouldn’t stop thinking that I had a right to be angry. I would just think everyone’s being an asshole to me for shutting me up.

And then I think, “Okay, well… I’m still angry, I still want to do something about it. How do I do this and not make myself look crazy? How do I follow out? How do I find ends to the means of my anger?” That would make me angry, telling me I can’t care about something that’s good and important.

Dawn: Yeah, I think I just, I’m afraid of the helplessness. Like, first of all, I start out being like super angry about this thing. Then notice, okay, there are 100 people in the world who agree with me, I’m not in touch with any of them, I’m completely alone, everyone else perpetuates these things, benefits from them, contributes to them. And if I’m outwardly angry now, then I will just look ridiculous because I won’t find any allies. So I need to find like some kind of clever way of gradually influencing people or something, and then that is something that just doesn’t bear fruit for like 10 years or so, and so I’m really demotivated. Don’t want to have like this anger just make me feel so helpless, permanently.

Tiffany: Well, you don’t have to let it make you feel helpless, or be angry that it would make you feel helpless, because it’s not fair. Like, I’m thinking of a time where it did work. This trans lady was elected to some office. She was one of the other elected officials. And people are being introduced to go on a proceeding of some committee. But she got introduced as “Mr.” or “Sir” or whatever. And so at first, she very smartly addressed the guy as “Miss.” And he was trying to take issue with it, but not expose that anger. And then some other guy came to her rescue.

And it had what looked like might be an unhelpful effect, but I think it’s ultimately helpful, because with some bullies, you have to just force them to tear their own shit down and not let things happen. And then go and try and do it again anyway. That you have to show them that they can’t throw a temper tantrum to get what they want.

So that’s what happened. He started going, “Is this what a civilized rule of law place is like? Is this how we’re going to treat people? She’s a duly elected official, just like you and me.” And they adjourned the meeting because of it. But that means that asshole also didn’t get what he wanted. And he can only self-sabotage so far.

So this is one of those things where it’s kind of like how if you’re trying to escape an abuser, they might do some really nasty things as you’re successfully escaping. But it’s part of that situation dying. Even if it might seem frantic and catastrophic in the moment. Right? That maybe it hurts right then, but that is what a bully losing in an emotional and practical sense looks like. They will not be able to continue to go on doing what they’re doing. And they’re just throwing a temper tantrum.

So that’s a very small case, but then that’s gonna have an impact in that whole state, let’s say. At least where legal proceedings are concerned in that state. That will have weight. This man has now set the precedent that you can’t just do this. So there is value in it. Depending on how you execute it, that it doesn’t let the bullies just silently get away with it.

And yeah, sometimes it’s gonna come out as raucous anger, and sometimes it’s anger motivating something more subtle that you do to stymie their efforts. But giving you the motivation to maybe act nice and respectful, but be completely uncompromising.

Maybe there’s only 100 other people that do it, because maybe… you don’t know! Maybe those other 99 people feel the same way as you do, and disempowered. And you don’t know… But you might have the opportunity to set the precedent the opposite way, instead of let everybody being bullied.

I’m not gonna say it’s a sure thing, I’m just saying it’s like worth considering. And the anger for me is like, “How dare you… how dare you think you’re gonna be an uncontested bully, you arrogant jackass? Standing up there? Haha! Don’t you know today that I am here as well?”

Dawn: So I think there’s utility to it, even if…

Tiffany: Maybe even acting like that if you don’t immediately feel that way. Like I said, setting the counter-precedent. And it is, I guess, a sort of antisocial punishment. Even if you followed out in a very pro-social way. It is still a form of antisocial punishment, because some people… Given either the position, or just how uncompromising piece of shits they are, they’re not gonna respond to anything other than just being shown that they can’t get away with it, they’re gonna get pushed out. And they’re not the only person capable of being an asshole in the room. Even if it’s an asshole with a big, smiling, nice face.

Dawn: Right?

Tiffany: Right? Pardon my pedestal, I just believe we can beat them.

Dawn: Okay, sure, no, thanks for the pep talk.

Tiffany: I’m glad I got there. I didn’t intend it, I had no idea where that was gonna go.

Dawn: Yay, I didn’t know I needed that. I actually am rethinking some career decisions right now, and yeah…

Tiffany: I know, I did that once. I had, I did it with the system, but when I was in high school, I had all these bullies. And of course, you know, I was presenting as a man then, because I was a teenager. And all these bullies were just like calling me gay, and even like assaulting me. One like rubbing the back of my neck and going, “Oh, do you like that?”

And this was… the best part is one of them was a jock. And so I knew that anything like that that could stick would be the end of the world for the school, and so I knew it would compel the principal to act. So, I very rightfully accused them of assault. I just brought up the harshest accusation that fit the facts. Like… one shot. And the biggest, toughest, most stoic motherfucker in the entire building wouldn’t approach me again. It worked in one shot, motherfucker. And he ended up being nicer to me later that year. It worked.

Wow, I forgot about that! I am fucking proud of that! Because I demonstrated strategy and self-control.

Dawn: Congrats! And shit, and… Yeah, I think like M.E. Thomas also has a cool story about getting rid of some bullied teacher. I like it.

Taking Down the Bully

Tiffany: One time I had to engineer the takedown of a co-worker when I was 22. He was a big piece of shit. He really was! Every… he like… pardon me, but I don’t want to sugarcoat this. So, he was a redhead, he was a ginger, and he had no couths to speak of, and he called a customer a “matchstick.”

And pardon my Polishness, but I think I would have… that’s not that culture. Those cultures exist. If I met another Polish person, and there was like a right moment of stopping a dumb Pollack, they would giggle! And I’ve even joked that if you walked down Wilkes-Barre and you yelled “Hey, Pollack!”, three people would turn around and look at you and go, “What!”

But I don’t think that exists within the culture of redheads, of gingers. And he was a bully to everybody in the place. And when I started it, I found out almost every single person in the building had something damaging to say about him. And almost every single person in the building had the same fear that “Oh, but everyone likes him!” No, everyone was afraid to say anything.

And that empowered everybody. You know, aside from literally the most loser person in the place had something to put in writing. Something to say about this guy. And it took him right down. He got fired. No problem, because I empowered everybody else to say it, they now felt safe. Safer.

I started talking about the plan to my assistant manager, who really didn’t like him for the same exact reasons I didn’t like him. I was close to her! So that started the conversation, and I went, “Alright, I have my one person in power on my side. That means if I talk above her head, he can go and ask her, ‘Are you really?’ ‘Alright, if that’s true, we’ll collect statements.’” And they did. And they took him right down.

Dawn: Cool! It was very…

Tiffany: Very well-meaning, but it was deliciously dastardly, too. So, no, that… I wanted to give that. That is a specific example of everybody actually being afraid to say anything bad to him because of the kind of jackass he was. And interpreting everybody else mistakenly as not wanting to say anything. Meaning of a differing opinion, of thinking he was nice or popular. Nobody thought it. So… It depends. Maybe turn the tide. Socially engineer it.

Dawn: I’ve had a colleague like that once, and he was talk-to-able, so that was a plus. But he was also not strategically smart. I think lots of people wanted to have him gone, would have improved the climate at work a lot. But what happened in the end is when he picked a fight with one of the co-founders, that was the mistake that actually got him fired in the end, so…

Tiffany: I’m pretty okay with that. If you can have a conversation with them about it, yeah, maybe not take them down personally. That’s okay, he wrote his own epitaph. You know, you can’t help that.

Dawn: Yeah, I was wondering like whether we want to get to my final question?

Tiffany: Yeah, yeah, no, I just thought all that was important to say.

Dawn: Yeah! Very encouraging.

Tiffany: We’ll break this later. Yeah, what’s your final question?

Dawn: The final question is: what tips you would like to share with other people who want to recover from sovereignism?

Recovery is Self-Acceptance

Tiffany: Mmm, the first part I want to express is my opinion that recovery from any Cluster B personality disorder is broadly a challenge and struggle of self-acceptance. Because all of our adaptations are there just because we weren’t just allowed to just do and be ourselves. And you know… And I think that’s just important to never forget, because I think anybody else with sovereignism can vibe with: We would like to be our most awesome, most self possible. And that was taken from us, in a way.

But we have all the capacity in the world to find it and get it anyway, and undo or reverse, or defy the cards we were dealt. And just go to a different table, and get another hand out. Play the chances again, but on our terms this time.

And I want to share something from my friend whom I used to date: the phrase “People are hell. But they’re also heaven.” And I think that’s a good enough reason to at least investigate what’s good and bad in ourselves, and in other people, and worth chasing down.

Something a little more vulnerable. Comes back to the first thing I said. To be your most powerful self would be to overcome the hand you were dealt. And this world has a lot of cruelty and unfairness with it. And someone like me, someone like us with sovereignism would most likely really understand that. Since we’re adept at dealing with it. And in a world so cruel, we should not deny ourselves from the help of those we see as worthy, or those that see us as worthy. There’s no weakness in having help facing the hardest things within us and outside of us in such a cruel, often cruel and unfair world. And if anything, we need all the advantage we can get, and we deserve any of it.

You know… maybe more finer points? You might not be a spiritual person, I’m not. But mindfulness doesn’t have to be about Buddhism or Zen. It’s just learning harmony in your mind, learning to control the chaos in your brain, learning to quiet it when you want it. And learning to be at peace and enjoy that fucking rest after all the bullshit you go through in a day. Or all the shit you’ve had to do to get where you are or want to be. It’s all of those things. And so rest… Rest is important. Because getting there is tiring, no matter what. And that’s okay. Doesn’t mean we’re not gonna get up and do it again once we’re done resting.

What else? You probably have a complicated relationship with your parents. It’s possible you hate them both. I truly hate my mother. I love my father, but I’m glad he’s dead. He gave me hell, but he did his best to give me what he could. He was a troubled individual like mine. And it makes sense that navigating that might be complicated, because maybe the one parent you do love gave you just as much bad as good, even though that bad was atrocious. And you’re doing yourself a disservice to throw out the good as well. You don’t have to respect them for it. But respect yourself enough to unweave that.

Own your evil. Own your capacity to dispense cruelty. There are times when it might be necessary? If you’re knocking down that asshole in your life, or the life of somebody you care about, or an ally, there’s no shame in taking joy in it. It would help you to do it in measure, but it’s a good motivating factor. Definitely take delight in the opportunity. And don’t let anybody else tell you otherwise, and you don’t have to hide that from the rest of yourself. That’s striving to do better or more. If you hide it from yourself, it’ll sneak up on you. Instead, own it.

And above even other people: Try to learn to trust yourself. But relearn trust, but reteach yourself trust as a commitment, not as a command to yourself. You’re committed to that you’ll do better tomorrow. That trust is not all or nothing. That you will trust yourself to learn. Not trust yourself to never fail. And you have the choice of what and how you trust yourself. And others. And that was just simply a complicated thing for me to learn. It wasn’t obvious, and I wanted to give that very hard-to-figure-out answer back.

And finally, a subtler thing. You don’t have to be like the rest of the people they call narcissists. That’s okay. You always will be a little different, even from the weirdos. And that’s okay, they’re different from you. Because this inflated term of narcissist, even if you don’t get torn down by how society demonizes that word – to the point where maybe we need a new word? Like we’re doing with sovereignism instead of malignant narcissism. Even if it doesn’t tear you down. Don’t mistake what people call narcissism for the magnificent complexity within you.

One last thing. All my beautiful narcissistic psychopaths, all the people with sovereignism. I believe in you, and I don’t care what you think about that. If you really think you know better. Is that how you want to prove me wrong? Do you want to give me that power? I don’t want it! I don’t care. But I think you do. And I think you want to prove yourself right. Good luck. I think that’s it.

Dawn: Oh, thank you so much for all the insights. It’s a wonderful second interview, that final speech with all the recovery tips. Yeah, sweet! Then, I’ll stop…

Tiffany: I love leaning into my grandiosity like that. Especially speaking from like my soul.

Dawn: Sweet! Yeah, and goodbye to all the listeners!

Tiffany: Good luck on your journey, or maybe just, I hope you learned something.