Am i turning into a psychopath?

[Rise Against]

Ive always been extremely self conscious and used to have social phobia. Something ive always had and valued was my empathy, my ability to recognize others feelings and try to help them... but lately my mindset has been changing and im honestly getting scared.

Well, here is a little hind site on my life... Honestly I am very good looking, very smart, very athletic, and others really like me... but for some reason i have yet to figure out, i hate myself. Its so frustrating, i mentally and physically abuse myself and feel like im inferior to everyone. I have severe ADD, and believe this to be the root of my self hatred and depression. In the past i have always disliked myself but loved others - even to the point where i would go out of my way to comfort people in need. I have always been a great friend, and valued my comforting nature.

About a year ago, i moved across the country my senior year of high school. I didnt fit in. I isolated myself and developed social phobia. My grades slipped from straight A's to C's and D's. This is when i developed a strong sense of self hatred. I began developing intense cravings to hurt myself. Like, i would brand myself on the stove... or shoot myself with a paintball gun... and cut myself. These cravings would come and go. These cravings scared me. I began abusing Adderall (amphetamine/speed) to combat these cravings and my depression/social phobia. Adderall soon became my only friend, it made me love myself and confident - feelings i have never felt before. Soon addiction took over and my life really went down hill.

I went off to college, only to flunk out. I was still addicted to amphetamine and extremely depressed, however i did manage to over come my social phobia. Around christmas time i moved back home. I was a mess and nobody knew about my addiction or any of my problems. I met this girl and she really helped me get my life back on track. I went to rehab and counseling for my addiction and depression. I got rid of the adderall and for the first time was content with myself and my life. We dated for about 5 months and then she broke up with me...

... i didnt handle this very well. I instantly went back to drugs and self medicated my depression. It got to the point where i tried to kill myself. I slit my wrists. I was pretty messed up in the mind at this point. I took pictures of my arms and sent them to my x-girlfriend. She called the police and i went to the hospital and then to a mental institution for a few days. They put me on anti depressants.

Its been about a month since i got out of the institution and i have developed lots of anger. It seems like i no longer have empathy or care. All i want to do is get back at my x-girlfriend so i can hurt her mentally. Ive said really really really mean things to her, things that would never had entered my mind a few months ago. It seems like my main focus is now revenge, which scares me. Like its to the point where i will cut myself not because i want to hurt myself, but because it hurts her. Yesterday i was planning on how i could get her to come back to me in the future, just so i can hurt her. These thoughts are over powering my mind.

I have moments where snap back to my old caring self and feel extremely guilty. To the point where i break down in tears and want to kill myself for all the things i have said to her. I dont know whats going on... its like im turning into a completly different person. I mean i still love this girl, but for some reason i am starting to turn all my hate from myself to other people. I dont know what to do... is it OCD or something or am i turning into a psychopath?

 

[P+G]

I'm really not sure what to say but I want to say something. I think you don't understand why your girlfriend left you and because of that you're angry towards her and yourself. Maybe you don't know who to blame because it was no one's fault. Your compulsion to think and be aggressive is scaring you and yet it fuels your ideas for revenge. If this girl was your first serious girlfriend then it will inevitably mess with your head. I probably haven't said anything to help you and don't want to waffle on about something so personal to you. If you want to talk more then please email me. Sometimes thoughts are just thoughts, they're not real.

 

[I_jailed_me]

"Love and hate are not opposite ends of the same spectrum; they are one and the same thing. They are much closer than kissing cousins."---Ug

You dont love her and what your doing is not love. You say you love your girl friend or wife. In that love is involved sexual pleasure, the pleasure of having someone in the house to look after your children and you. You depend on her; she has given you her body, her emotions, her encouragement, a certain feeling of security and well-being. Then she turns away from you; she gets bored or goes off with someone else, and your whole emotional balance is destroyed, and this disturbance, which you don't like, is called jealousy. There is pain in it, anxiety, hate and violence. So what you are really saying is, `As long as you belong to me I love you but the moment you don't I begin to hate you. As long as I can rely on you to satisfy my demands, sexual and otherwise, I love you, but the moment you cease to supply what I want I don't like you.' So there is antagonism between you, there is separation, and when you feel separate from another there is no love. But if you can live with your wife without thought creating all these contradictory states, these endless quarrels in yourself, then perhaps - perhaps - you will know what love is. Then you are completely free and so is she, whereas if you depend on her for all your pleasure you are a slave to her. So when one loves there must be freedom, not only from the other person but from oneself.


This belonging to another, being psychologically nourished by another, depending on another - in all this there must always be anxiety, fear, jealousy, guilt, and so long as there is fear there is no love; a mind ridden with sorrow will never know what love is; sentimentality and emotionalism have nothing whatsoever to do with love. And so love is not to do with pleasure and desire.

Love is not the product of thought which is the past. Thought cannot possibly cultivate love. Love is not hedged about and caught in jealousy, for jealousy is of the past. Love is always active present. It is not `I will love' or `I have loved'. If you know love you will not follow anybody. Love does not obey. When you love there is neither respect nor disrespect. Don't you know what it means really to love somebody - to love without hate, without jealousy, without anger, without wanting to interfere with what he is doing or thinking, without condemning, without comparing - don't you know what it means? Where there is love is there comparison? When you love someone with all your heart, with all your mind, with all your body, with your entire being, is there comparison? When you totally abandon yourself to that love there is not the other.

When you lose someone you love you shed tears - are your tears for yourself or for the one who is gone? Are you crying for yourself or for another? Have you ever cried for another? Have you ever cried for your son who is killed on the battlefield? You have cried, but do those tears come out of self-pity or have you cried because a human being has been killed? If you cry out of self-pity your tears have no meaning because you are concerned about yourself. If you are crying because you are bereft of one in whom you have invested a great deal of affection, it was not really affection. When you cry for your brother who dies cry for him. It is very easy to cry for yourself because he is gone. Apparently you are crying because your heart is touched, but it is not touched for him, it is only touched by self- pity and self-pity makes you hard, encloses you, makes you dull and stupid.

When you cry for yourself, is it love - crying because you are lonely, because you have been left, because you are no longer powerful - complaining of your lot, your environmment - always you in tears? If you understand this, which means to come in contact with it as directly as you would touch a tree or a pillar or a hand, then you will see that sorrow is self-created, sorrow is created by thought, sorrow is the outcome of time. I had my brother three years ago, now he is dead, now I am lonely, aching, there is no one to whom I can look for comfort or companionship, and it brings tears to my eyes. You can see all this happening inside yourself if you watch it. You can see it fully, completely, in one glance, not take analytical time over it. You can see in a moment the whole structure and nature of this shoddy little thing called `me', my tears, my family, my nation, my belief, my religion - all that ugliness, it is all inside you. When you see it with your heart, not with your mind, when you see it from the very bottom of your heart, then you have the key that will end sorrow. Sorrow and love cannot go together, but in the Christian world they have idealized suffering, put it on a cross and worshipped it, implying that you can never escape from suffering except through that one particular door, and this is the whole structure of an exploiting religious society.
So when you ask what love is, you may be too frightened to see the answer. It may mean complete upheaval; it may break up the family; you may discover that you do not love your wife or husband or children - do you? - you may have to shatter the house you have built, you may never go back to the temple.

But if you still want to find out, you will see that fear is not love, dependence is not love, jealousy is not love, possessiveness and domination are not love, responsibility and duty are not love, self-pity is not love, the agony of not being loved is not love, love is not the opposite of hate any more than humility is the opposite of vanity. So if you can eliminate all these, not by forcing them but by washing them away as the rain washes the dust of many days from a leaf, then perhaps you will come upon this strange flower which man always hungers after. If you have not got love - not just in little drops but in abundance if you are not filled with it - the world will go to disaster. You know intellectually that the unity of mankind is essential and that love is the only way, but who is going to teach you how to love? Will any authority, any method, any system, tell you how to love? If anyone tells you, it is not love. Can you say, `I will practise love. I will sit down day after day and think about it. I will practise being kind and gentle and force myself to pay attention to others?'

Do you mean to say that you can discipline yourself to love, exercise the will to love? When you exercise discipline and will to love, love goes out of the window. By practising some method or system of loving you may become extraordinarily clever or more kindly or get into a state of non-violence, but that has nothing whatsoever to do with love.


-j.krishnamurti.

 

[Rise Against]

Ive thought about this more... and im not turning into a psychopath... my addiction is taking control again. The negative effects exactly mimic disorders such as bi-polar and schizophrenia (amphetamine psychos).

Its really driving me crazy, even without the drug im still having mental relapses. i havent abused for months but i think my cravings are triggering past addict behaviors. idk maybe there is a deeper underlying problem but this would make since. ill talk to my psychologist about it.

 

[I_jailed_me]

Ive thought about this more... and im not turning into a psychopath... my addiction is taking control again. The negative effects exactly mimic disorders such as bi-polar and schizophrenia (amphetamine psychos).

Its really driving me crazy, even without the drug im still having mental relapses. i havent abused for months but i think my cravings are triggering past addict behaviors. idk maybe there is a deeper underlying problem but this would make since. ill talk to my psychologist about it.

Your not turning into anything particularly into any label like schizophernia, thats absurd! Such labels only help you reinforce your belief that your not good enough, it only gives you a word to relate your problem and so you can practice it more. It helps reinforce your negative belief that you have something wrong. Thought is memory and if your not going to move away from that memory then you will find evidence that something is wrong with you.

 

[Brokenx]

To answer your Question 'Am i turning into a psychopath?' i would say No.

 

[Rise Against]

Your not turning into anything particularly into any label like schizophernia, thats absurd! Such labels only help you reinforce your belief that your not good enough, it only gives you a word to relate your problem and so you can practice it more. It helps reinforce your negative belief that you have something wrong. Thought is memory and if your not going to move away from that memory then you will find evidence that something is wrong with you.

no im not schizo, but i have experienced psychosis in the past, which is basically short term schizo. And i def. suffer depression, i try to stay positive, i think positive thoughts but i havent been able to pull it together by my self. With a friend, im perfectly happy. But all my friends have either abandoned me or live really far away.

And when i say they abandoned me, they really did. They told me im a psychotic low life who is either going to end up dead or in jail. They told me that they dont care about me, and if i ever try to contact them again they will call the police. - This was the first thing a few of them told me after i got out of the hospital. Ive tried telling myself that they arent worth being my friend.... but it still hurts...

 

[I_jailed_me]

no im not schizo, but i have experienced psychosis in the past, which is basically short term schizo. And i def. suffer depression, i try to stay positive, i think positive thoughts but i havent been able to pull it together by my self. With a friend, im perfectly happy. But all my friends have either abandoned me or live really far away.

And when i say they abandoned me, they really did. They told me im a psychotic low life who is either going to end up dead or in jail. They told me that they dont care about me, and if i ever try to contact them again they will call the police. - This was the first thing a few of them told me after i got out of the hospital. Ive tried telling myself that they arent worth being my friend.... but it still hurts...

Dude what are you trying to prove to your self? Do you want to show how much your suffering in hate and anger so some one will understand your problem and feel pity for you and help you out? I guess by now you must understand that people have their own vulnerable problems they must attend to. You better stop thinking about that women, you never loved her. Your love was merely self-love and self-help. Its better you get a job and move on if you cant work then start a back pack trip. Dont get stuck at some place.

P.S Did you read my first post? Whats your opinion of that?

 

[Lorraine Manca]

im no psychologist, but it sounds like you have double the emotions of a normal person, which i think is common and painful problem on this site. thats a mild problem compared to being a psychopath where everything really is left field, not just magnified. its ok to be angry. find a different way to express your emotions rather than cutting on yourself. im really sorry you're going through all this