Aoide said:
Yes, very true. When I watched the videos about Jodi Arias I just couldn't understand how she could be so calm after such horrible crime. I tried to put myself into her position and I just can't. It starts to hurt so much, my psyche can't endure it. When I observed Jodi's "crying" I tried to imagine what's in her head at that moment that makes her capable of showing such emotion while actually being cold. I know how psychopaths are functioning (based on forum research), but I can't touch it fully, words are hard to find to describe that feeling. It's disturbing to observe them and to see all that coldness.
When you read about them is one thing, but to observe them, like in these videos, makes big difference in experiencing who they really are.
The closest I can get to putting myself in her position (or any out-and-out pathological type) is to remember the emotional numbness I've had for nearly two decades. From there I can look at patterns of behavior from non-killers, but still violent &/or manipulative. There, all other relative data is sifted through to see what emerges, but in my younger years I lacked all of this information & could only observe (in a fuzzy way) what I saw. Occasionally then (& regularly now - I find myself fighting tears for all sorts) I would feel really awful & hate it & try to stop feeling that pain. Anyway, this reminds me of my intrigue with "psychological thrillers" in the 90's.
Movies such as "kiss the girls", "along came a spider" & "se7ven" (to name a few) had an effect on me because of the profilers themselves. A conversation I once had with an acquaintance was based on a fictional profiler discussing how they did their job - "getting into the mind of a killer". I'm sure that a profiler can be drawn in too far, (in the movies a colleague or someone would accuse the profiler protagonist of "being to close" & admiring the killer) but maybe not exactly like movie depictions.
What held my attention in all of the horrors of those movies was the dedication to assessment, evaluation, research & a certain Sherlock Holmes type quality of discernment to clues that everybody else thought irrelevant. What I also noticed was how the profiler protagonist wouldn't have big emotional reactions that other law enforcement officials would have (understandably) but perhaps, smaller ones that would be mis-read as "being cold". I would think that maybe they too had some emotional block that allowed them to go deeper into a particular case, despite claims to the contrary by others exclaiming disgust & other associated words, the profiler might care
too deeply to let any emotions cloud their thought processes, after all, a lot of the time they were trying to anticipate the killer.
But after catching the killer & even getting a conviction, the profiler could have an outpouring of emotion behind closed doors which is something that wouldn't be thought of by others, that this person would have to be stronger than others, put on their "game face" (probably to portray discipline) & engage in "psychological jousting" with individuals that aren't "hampered" by emotions that grants them access to so much goodwill & faith by virtually all others, meaning that the stimulus - grandiosity, narcissism, boredom & wanting control over everyone in every situation - is constant. If the profiler would let any larger emotional displays arise they might not be able to be as effective. It seems that many of us here have been preparing to learn this difficult & most pressing subject matter for most of our lives. I certainly admire the strength & courage of profilers more now.
Hopefully we can provide an adequate language of all psychology for minds across the spectrum, because in the most traumatic of times, i.e. now, major rebuilding & reintegration work is most definitely needed to deal with the mother of all traumas: cosmic & global upheavals.
