Feelings (part 3)

The reader responds (edited for length):

What I can say for sure is that I have changed. Yes, of course we are different people now than when we were young, thank the gods and the nine circles, but... The extent of how much my personality and my behavior has altered - and how different I am aware that I act while on the pills - will have to be my character witness. When I was young I was impulsive and brash, a bit clueless and devil-may-care. I was also very honest for a child, and a bit sensitive since I had self-esteem issues, which is part of what led to my depression. And I know I had a sense of guilt, because of a few admissions I can recall I made voluntarily. Not so much the case after [the emotional dissociation]. And I think that's another crucial point; when I take the pills (Metamina 5mg capsules, by the by) much of my hesitation to stop and to go back to "normal" is out of what I think is a sense that I am betraying someone or something.

And if that isn't guilt, then perhaps I never did know the feeling of it, or the definition. And isn't guilt really the crucial point, when it comes to the separation of the socios and psychos from the normals?

M.E.: I wanted to comment a little bit about what you said about guilt.

I don't really know what people mean by guilt. I find that particular diagnostic criteria difficult to pin down and I'm not entirely sure that sociopaths never feel a type of regret or cognitive dissonance that is essentially what people mean by guilt. By regret I mean wishing things had gone a different way or you had made a different choice (without necessarily assigning moralistic values to your choices). By cognitive dissonance, I mean that you do something that is not in harmony with your personal view of yourself.

Now I think that guilt definitely must have elements of regret and cognitive dissonance to it, but is it something more? Is there a third ingredient, perhaps in which you feel the hurt you caused another as if you had hurt yourself, or perhaps for the religious you feel like you are being cast further away from the divine? I think the emotion "guilt" is a lot more complicated than people acknowledge. I think when people say that sociopaths are "remorseless" or "don't feel guilt," at the very least they mean that sociopaths are able to do certain things that most people would consider morally wrong without seeing or feeling the "wrongness" of them. I don't know if that means that a sociopath is categorically incapable of feeling "guilt," but I guess it would depend on one's definition.

But self-knowledge is such a Sisyphean endeavor, don't you think? At least I have recently found it to be a cycle of self discovery and self doubt.