I think the nature of Developmental Trauma is that some small children develop, very early, what amount to “alters”–alternative personalities, sub-personalities–whose job is to feel the pain and misery going on in them.
Narcissism and Sociopathy exist on a continuum. This much has always seemed intuitively obvious to me, and what I will suggest is that these alters are the hidden triggers behind the behavior of those who grow up to have full blown Personality Disorders.
Narcissists believe that they can only exist at the cost of those around them.
Sociopaths believe–and this is at a deep, unconscious level–that they can’t exist at all. This is why moral codes don’t apply to them. There is no stable sense of self possible for them. Sensations become the only reality for them, and since they are evanescent, they must be sought continually. Stimulation is the only permanent reality.
And I would argue the opposite: that continual stimulation regresses the sense of self, and that people who grow up with it never develop strong senses of self.
Without a sense of self, no moral or social contextualizing is possible.
I think I want to argue this is the root problem in America–and indeed much of the world–today. It doesn’t matter your politics but it seems to me those who are set on destroying the world do so because they are like children torturing small animals because it is stimulating, and they feel no connection, no remorse, and no context. It is all about the sensations, those of rage, of anger, of an assumed righteousness, of a grief at the “crimes of the world” whose superficiality they would need context to understand and realize.
Functionally, I think I want to claim, continual overstimulation from an early age prevents the development of adult sociality, and in effect induces de facto sociopathy.
Niceness is not a creed. It is a default suitable even for the most disconnected, the least emotionally aware, and for the most latently cruel and violent. The logical culmination is sadism in the name of compassion, something which has been seen many times over the past several centuries.
In the time of the Bolshevik coup, and in the time of the French Revolution, there were real crimes being perpetrated by the governments, real hunger and misery.
And yet in the most safe, most comfortable, most affluent, most cozy and easy nation in the history of the world, large segments of our society have come to see themselves as oppressed, and believe that violence–emotional, verbal and physical–is the only answer. It beggars the imagination. It should not be possible. But here it is.