Danger Has A Face

We are acutely aware of being under the influence of many things: drugs, alcohol, jealousy, manipulative media, and racism. We fight to create awareness so we can move beyond the influences of these negative emotions and situations. Just as important as letting some things go, there is the importance of bringing new things toward us. One of the influences that we can and should embrace is joy. Being under the influence of joy has the ability to shift your focus and change the trajectory of your life.

How Can I Create Joy

Redefine who you are. Do not allow others’ opinions and attitudes define you. You know who you are, and even if others up until now have not seen the real you or supported you, it does not change who you are. If you wish to change, create a new vision and move steadily toward it through incorporating new thoughts, actions and beliefs.

Emerge Through Crisis With love and respect for yourself and others intact. 

When we carry the burdens of every crisis (lesson) on our backs, we become hunched over. It is not necessary to carry the weight of rejections, fear, loss and disappointment with us throughout our lives. Life is hard, and if we can learn our lessons and not be diminished by them, we create the conditions to experience joy.

 Willing To Let Joy “In”

When we rush through events and moments by being results driven, we do not see the joy that is available. When we think back to the precious moments with our children, if we let our fatigue or worries take precedence over the moment, that moment is lost forever. Be conscious of those times when joy is present and acknowledge it, enjoy it and be grateful for it. Promise to allow joy to stay once it arrives.

When you are in the midst of turmoil, uncertainty, pain or sadness, remember to be love in action — and this includes forgiveness. In every dark moment there exists its opposite. Continue to hang on and know you have the strength within you to find joy. It is there — I promise.

It seems that fear is manufactured before our eyes through the news and our interactions with others, and it appears most often without our permission and it permeates our lives. Because fear is contagious, it can control us effortlessly, if we let it. The destructive power of fear no longer has to control our lives.

How to Reduce Fear in Your Life

1. Monitor your thoughts. Watch for fear-producing emotions such as anger, sadness, jealousy and judgment. To be negative is easy. When negativity is allowed to flourish, it generally will produce more fear. Choose thoughts that produce emotions that make you feel comfortable in your body: love, happiness, peace, joy.

2. Place painful memories of the past on pause. Just because something happened to you or someone else in the past and it had a negative outcome does not mean it will happen again. The pain of something that happened in the past is an indicator of the need for a change in direction. Once you evaluate the memory, you will be able to see the situation more clearly, and if nothing can be changed thenstop thinking about it immediately. When you allow yourself to recall a fearful memory, you pull yourself out of balance. Change what you are doing. Spend your mental efforts and energy on creating a new direction for you.

3. Do not hang on to your fears — fear of illness, fear of financial loss, fear of losing someone, fear of death, fear of losing your “stuff,” the fear of rejection or the fear looking stupid or weak. When we choose fear, we are making the choice to keep fear inside of ourselves and in doing this, we let fear dictate our futures and we limit our options for greater security, peace and comfort. No matter what challenges life gives you, you can choose to respond in a new way.

4. Become calm. Work at being the “calm in the eye of the storm.” We can prevent ourselves from becoming overwhelmed with the extreme situations surfacing all around us. Regardless of what is happening in your life at this moment, know that you have the strength, courage and wisdom you need to move forward without fear.

5. Find a way to let fear go and start again. No one who has been in the grip of fear would underestimate the challenge that lies in front of us in order let fear go. Finding strength, balance and faith will save us from debilitating fear. As we know from experience, fear and faith cannot coexist… you must choose one. Let us find the determination to choose faith over fear.

Each moment of our choosing builds upon the previous moments. Our thoughts, words, feelings and actions are powerful beyond our knowing. It is critical that we stay focused on the positive possibilities, and let the unrealized fear dissipate. Let this moment be your starting point, so to speak, for a release of fear, and enjoy the peace and comfort that will surely take its place.

Psychopaths make up an astounding 1 to 2 percent of the general population and occupy virtually every niche in society. Often ruthless, callous and completely devoid of empathy, they impose an incalculable toll on individuals and society. And science is increasingly learning that psychopathy may actually be a genetic disorder — one that could eventually be eliminated.

 There’s growing consensus among clinicians and neuroscientists that psychopathy does in fact exist as a meaningful and identifiable personality disorder. A growing community of experts are starting to use psychopathy as a clinical diagnosis. 

In terms of definition, psychopathy is a personality disorder characterized by severe emotional dysfunction, especially a lack of empathy and remorse. Psychopaths exhibit consistent disregard for the feelings of others and the rules of society. They are completely unable to recognize such things as anger and fear in individuals, either based on facial expressions or verbal exclamations. In terms of behavioral traits, psychopaths are generally regarded as being callous, selfish, dishonest, arrogant, aggressive, impulsive, irresponsible, and hedonistic. At the same time, psychopaths often exhibit higher than average intelligence and a superficial kind of charm.

Scientists are increasingly finding a genetic basis to psychopathy . Work in genetics has revealed that the heritability coefficient for psychopathy is a shocking 50%. Psychopathy, it would appear, runs deeply in the family.

But while genes may be a key factor, there’s still plenty of room for environmental factors. It’s thought that, while genetic factors may generally influence the development of psychopathy, the environment still affects the specific traits that predominate.

It’s also worth noting that virtually all psychopaths exhibit anti-social traits as children , but that half of them “grow out of it”. This gives therapists hope that the condition could be treated environmentally.

Psychologist Robert Hare, a leading expert on such matters, has argued that psychopathy may actually be adaptive. He has observed how many male psychopaths have a pattern of mating with and quickly abandoning women — and as a result, have a high fertility rate. His contention is that these children may inherit a predisposition to psychopathy.

And there appear to be physiological differences between psychopaths and everybody else — a recent study showed that the psychopathic brain has significantly less grey matter in the anterior rostral prefrontal cortex and temporal poles than the brains of both non-psychopathic offenders and non-offenders. These areas of the brain appear to be important for reading other people’s emotions and intentions, and seem to be active when people think about moral behaviour.

Neuroscientists have also found that the amygdala is impaired in psychopaths. The amygdala is responsible for stimulus-reinforcement learning and responding to emotional expressions, particularly fearful expressions. It is also involved in the formation of both stimulus-punishment and stimulus-reward associations.

At first blush, the estimate that 1 to 2 percent of all people are psychopaths seems astonishingly high. In a country like the United States, this implies that there are between 3 to 6 million psychopathic Americans. Psychopaths also make up roughly 15 to 25 percent of the prison population, and are responsible for the lion’s share of brutal crimes and murders. And according to the neuroscientist Fabrice Jotterand, psychopathy affects 3 to 5 % of all CEOs.

But not all psychopaths are dangerous. Given the high prevalence of psychopathy in our gene pool, and given that many seem to fare rather well in society, it’s fair to say that we run the risk of generalizing about this condition and pigeonholing all psychopaths as being inherently dangerous.

Robert Hare, co-author of Snakes in Suits , takes a hard-line when it comes to psychopaths, referring to them as “intraspecies predators.” He argues that they lack the very qualities that allow humans to live in social harmony and is concerned about their ability to blend in, undetected, in a variety of surroundings, including corporate environments. By conceptualizing psychopaths as remorseless predators, he feels we can better understand what often appears to be senseless behavior.

Indeed, it may very well have to be the human toll that’s considered. Psychopaths, given their indifference and often insatiable desires, can harm people in any number of ways, whether through physical violence or ruthlessness in the workplace. It’s the continuing prospect of having psychopaths around in the general population that may eventually determine whether they should be filtered from the gene pool.

Psychopathy is not an all-or-nothing proposition. Like autism, it falls along a spectrum. The Hare Psychopathy Checklist , a standard inventory used in law enforcement, has a top score of 40. Psychopaths tend to get a bit scary when they score in the early 20s. A very demented and dangerous psychopath would score around a 30. As journalist Jon Ronson has noted , “There are absolutes in psychopathy and the main absolute is a literal absence of empathy. It’s just not there. In higher-scoring psychopaths, what grows in the vacant field where that empathy should be is a joy in manipulating people, a lack of remorse, a lack of guilt. If you’ve got a little bit of empathy, you’re kind of not a psychopath.”

This is why Ronson and others feel that some psychopaths make for great CEOs. “I think the other positive traits for psychopaths in business is need for stimulation, proneness to boredom,” Ronson told Forbes. “You want somebody who can’t sit still, who’s constantly thinking about how to do better things.”

Taking a step back, an overarching question that needs to be asked is one about end-goals. What’s more important: changing someone’s behavior, or changing a person’s state of mind? A consequentialist would argue that it’s behavior, and that it doesn’t matter what a person thinks or what kinds of empathic impairments they might have — all that matters is how they act. Subsequently, an argument can be made that, if we can root out criminally harmful behavior, our task is done.

But as Robert Hare has argued, that may not be good enough. The absence of empathy, he argues — the very definition of a psychopath — will always result in malevolence.

That may very well be the case, but the truest expression of humanity is the ability to extend empathy towards others — even those incapable of mustering empathy themselves.