weird day at the theme parks

yesterday was fun but kind of stressful at one of the local theme parks. i was stupid and got out to protect our spot in the parking lot. a dumb move on my part, I'll admit that. I stood in front of another car but they pulled forward and hit me.  Then I stepped out of the way and they pulled forward and hit me with their mirror. It ended up that security came and asked me and if I was ok, and they called the cops and there was charges that could have been filed and all of that. I was like a victim and all of that. I later thought wow, I could have gone for huge bucks and sued them and everything but I just can't imagine doing something like that. I said hey, its just holiday tension and it's disney property. I am fine. Let it go.

Intention Dr appointment 11/26

The second to last appointment that I went to at dr. m's she warned me of boundaries with the whole b situation. Boy do I need to remember that. I really don't want to deal with all of the stuff that B brings. I'd really like to just live my life and not have to worry about what she is doing or not doing. I am so close to just saying do what the hell that you want to do.
I frett and look, it really is just one of those things that I need to let go of. I need to just follow what we want on the contract and then we'll all be meeting expectations. When I say look, I mean check on her room to see what it is found.
God is good and may the angels be with me today to let these things follow through and happen.
here are my prayers for the rest of the day.
1. I get in and out early with dr. W/CRC
2. I get more pain meds
3. I get to Divya's and E is in a good mood
4. there is a parking spot for me at the student lot
5. JD goes home early or calls in sick today
6. I get the project thing completed.

intention peace

PEACE

intention money

we have enough money to be debt free
i got a promotion

Mad Pride

Mad Pride: mental illness liberation
sethhfarber.com
awakeninthedream.com

connecting with survivor

wow, i am watching survivor, and it is weird that I am connecting with Lisa on survivor. It is weird that i normally view myself as an outsider. i connect with people like Dexter who is a serial killer and you can't be more of an outsider than that. but now I see where this child star has always been performing and thinking about what people think about her. her looks and her actions. She said that even before she was performing that she always felt like she had to be the good girl. I was like wow....even pretty people, someone that I've looked up too since I was a kid...sort of attracted to before I realized what that meant....it's weird that she has the same types of issues that I feel.

My boss is a fucking asshole

So my boss continues to be a bitch. She is just so full of herself. I hate that she thinks she knows everything & is never wrong. I hope she goes home early today. Of course I wish that everyday.

Blah...people suck

B has been in a free fall for at least two month now. Her first nine weeks sucked. I don't even want to try to get into to much detail or analyze too much here but long story short she was sneaking out of the house in the middle of the night, she was drinking and doing drugs, she failed more than half of her classes and was skipping school. She was doing hard core drugs too. Huffing plus she was abusing some percocets that she had from getting her wisdom teeth out and then she was stealing my pain meds too (I had just had surgery).

My boss continues to be a complete bitch and total hypocrite. 

Divya said to me that she feels like we're drifting apart, but then she is never home. 

I have to be stricter with B just for my own self interest as well as for B's. 

Sometimes my life just feels like it is one ongoing task with no downtime and everything is turning gray, and blah. 

I feel like I am just going through the motions.

Just blah, people suck.

Just a little side note on good drugs

B stole one of my good drugs just as I had just one left. They she stole another of my not so good drugs. This really pissed me off. The little bitch was prescribed 7.1 mg of percocet which is stronger then my shit. so I was able to make a switch for her good shit. I am hoping the I' be able to make a switch some more out after her next prescription but we'll see.
If have my ass sliced open rates 5 mg then it seems unfair that B should get 7.1 for stupid ass teeth and I am so fucking pissed that she took my last one that I was saving for my appointment for your doctor. Anyway, I am fucking going for an upgrade if at all possible. God willing.
I am sick of this kid taking advantage and not having any consequences so here's to to a little payback. 

Life's a Bitch When You Finally Have to Put Your Money Where You're Mouth Is

How hilarious that Divya finally has to start being fucking responsible for the B. She always gets to set bitch about how I do this wrong or that wrong but she doesn't have to do shit. Just backstreet drive...Only fucking bitch about how everyone else is a fuck up. So now, I gave her the bull shit for her teeth. She acts like I through a fit....I'm not going into all of the minute details her but she bitches about leaving drugs out but she doesn't fucking manage them. She doesn't want to make appointments. She doesnt want to take her to the damn appointments. She wants to get all of this credit for taking care of B but she doesn't do shit to make changes.
Anyway, long story short, Divya got shitty about how I leave stuff out for B to steal, which is half right. So I am going to say a prayer that B leaves her room and I can look around for drugs that she has stored in her room and in a place that I can easily find this.
I have reasons in another posts that I'll explain but it will be easy to turn this pain in the ass over to Divya on Thursday because I'll be going back to Indiana.
Then I'll be giving the whole responsibility for the B shit over to Divya by this weekend.
This will be awesome for me but could totally suck for the two of them.

Who's taking care of the other crazy person in the house

I have got to get off of this merry go round with B.

I am tired of feeling fucking guilty and responsible for stuff that isn't my shit.

You know me I have always document how I got here. I hate that everyone looks like it is fucking me that has been pushing this. B was missing tons of school last year for puking. I took her to the fucking doctor for that. She mentioned feeling sad and we were off. Anyway, we're at a place where the more that I read about bipolar the more if makes sense including her lack of ability to concentrate which was originally diagnosed as ADD

Angel messages from my cards:
Trust: Move from a place of knowing within you rather than as a result of adaptation to outer experience. Let go of your assumptions and need to control life's creative proccess. 

Expect the unexpected and enjoy it!

Just Let Go

Today as I was driving in, I saw a vanity plate that said GOALS. I'm sure that it was a soccer player at school (it was a university student with a specialty plate), but it felt like it was for me to see. I've come across other  plates that seem to hold a message and have thought that I should write them down. But I never have. We'll see if I keep it up or not.

I do need to let go of all of the little stuff. I think that I need a vanity plate that says JUST LET GO.

I also want to start keeping track of when random songs pop in my head at times that make me think that it is  my subconscious giving me a message as well. Today it was "Nothing you can do that can't be done. Nothing you can say that can't be sung. It's easy. All you need is love." Don't know if those are the exact words of the song but it is what went through my head.

Your're weird but I Like You

Angel of May is Contentment

Inspirational Message

Savor what is in your life now. The creative process is never finished. Let go of striving and rest in satisfaction and joyous fulfillment.

Be at peace with what is, give yourself permission to gently reside in the present. Recycling the past is not 'ego-logical' and worrying about the future is a distraction, both cause the state of satisfaction to elude us.

Calming our interior prepares us for the emergence of what is new and gives us a container to receive grace when it is offered. How we hold the content of our lives determines the quality of content-ment we feel.

Letting go of pre-determined decisions and conclusions instantly shifts our attention. It is like turning our head to look in a different direction and we come alive for a moment. Something in us awakens and giving us a glimpse of reality beyond our experience and conditioned responses.

There is something emerging within humanity that may not have occurred before. With no clear path or map outlining how this step toward a global consciousness happens, contentment allows a quiet certainty to develop. Savor the moment, there is nothing more fulfilling.

We hope the Angels continue to inspire your life.

May you have many moments this month to savor

Different

mental strategy:Find a way to keep from thinking it

The Willpower Trick

• By Jonah Lehrer January 9, 2012 11:21AM

• 
  January is the month of broken resolutions. The gyms are packed for a week, Jenny Craig is full of new recruits and houses are cleaned for the first time in ages. We pledge to finally become the person we want to be: svelte, neat and punctual.
  Alas, it doesn’t take long before the stairmasters are once again sitting empty and those same dirty T-shirts are piling up at the back of the closet. We start binging on pizza and beer — sorry, Jenny — and forget about that pledge to become a kinder, gentler person. Human habits, in other words, are stubborn things, which helps explain why 88 percent of all resolutions end in failure, according to a 2007 survey of over 3,000 people conducted by the British psychologist Richard Wiseman.
  The reason our resolutions end in such dismal fashion returns us to the single most important fact about human willpower — it’s incredibly feeble. Consider this experiment, led by Baba Shiv, a behavioral economist at Stanford University. He recruited several dozen undergraduates and divided them into two groups. One group was given a two-digit number to remember, while the second group was given a seven-digit number. Then, they were told to walk down the hall, where they were presented with two different snack options: a slice of chocolate cake or a bowl of fruit salad.
  Here’s where the results get weird. The students with seven digits to remember were nearly twice as likely to choose the cake as students given two digits. The reason, according to Shiv, is that all those extra numbers took up valuable space in the brain — they were a “cognitive load” — making it that much harder to resist a decadent dessert. In other words, willpower is so weak, and the conscious mind is so overtaxed, that all it takes is five extra bits of information before it becomes impossible for the brain to resist a piece of cake.
  This helps explain why, after a long day at the office, we’re more likely to indulge in a pint of Häagen-Dazs. (In fact, one study by researchers at the University of Michigan found that just walking down a crowded city street was enough to reduce measures of self-control.) A tired brain, preoccupied with its problems and run down by the world, is going to struggle to resist what it wants, even when what it wants isn’t what we need.
  The problem is only compounded by studies showing that the very act of dieting can make it even harder to resist temptation. In a 2007 experiment, Roy Baumeister — the influential psychologist behind the ego-depletion model of willpower and co-author of the interesting Willpower — gave students an arduous attention task, in which they had to watch a boring video while ignoring words at the bottom of the screen. Then, the students drank a glass of lemonade. Half of the students got lemonade with real sugar, while the other half got a drink made with Splenda. On a series of subsequent tests of self-control, the group given fake sugar performed consistently worse. The literal lack of sugar in their prefrontal cortex, that neural “muscle” behind willpower, made it even harder to not give in.
  Is there a way out of this willpower trap? Are there secret exercises that can make it easier to stick with our new year resolutions? Not really. Baumeister has found that getting people to focus on incremental improvements, such as the posture of the back, can build up levels of self-control, just as doing bicep curls can strength the upper arm. Nevertheless, it’s not clear that most people even have the discipline to focus on their posture for an extended period, or that these willpower gains will last over the long term.
  But there is a neat way to circumvent the intrinsic weakness of the will, which helps explain why some people have a much easier time sticking to their diet and getting to the gym. A fascinating new paper, led by an all-star team of willpower researchers including Wilhelm Hofmann, Baumeister and Kathleen Vohs, gave 205 participants in Würzburg, Germany a specially designed smartphone. For seven days, the subjects were pinged seven times a day and asked to report whether they were experiencing a strong desire. The participants were asked to describe their nature of their desire, how strongly it was felt, and whether it caused an “internal conflict,” suggesting that this was a desire they were attempting to resist. If a conflict existed, the subjects were asked to describe their ensuing success: Did they manage to not eat the ice cream? The researchers suggest that this is the first time experience-sampling methods have been used to “map the course of desire and self-control in everyday life.”
  Christian Jarrett, at the excellent BPS Research Digest, summarizes the results:

  The participants were experiencing a desire on about half the times they were beeped. Most often (28 per cent) this was hunger. Other common urges were related to: sleep (10 per cent), thirst (9 per cent), media use (8 per cent), social contact (7 per cent), sex (5 per cent), and coffee (3 per cent). About half of these desires were described as causing internal conflict, and an attempt was made to actively resist about 40 per cent of them. Desires that caused conflict were more likely to prompt an attempt at active self-constraint. Such resistance was often effective. In the absence of resistance, 70 per cent of desires were consummated; with resistance this fell to 17 per cent.

  But not everyone was equally successful at resisting the psychological conflict triggered by unwanted wants. According to the survey data, people with higher levels of self-control had just as many desires, but they were less likely to feel that their desires were dangerous. Their desires also tended to be less intense, and thus required less inner strength to resist.
  These findings are incredibly revealing, as they document the banal secret of willpower. It’s not that these people have immaculate wills, able to stare down tempting calories. Instead, they are able to intelligently steer clear of situations that trigger problematic desires. They don’t resist temptation — they avoid it entirely. While unsuccessful dieters try to not eat the ice cream in their freezer, thus quickly exhausting their limited willpower resources, those high in self-control refuse to even walk down the ice cream aisle in the supermarket.
  This experience-sampling study neatly confirms the influential work of Walter Mischel, which I wrote about in the New Yorker. In the late 1960s, the Mischel began a simple experiment with four-year-old children. He invited the kids into a tiny room, containing a desk and a chair, and asked them to pick a treat from a tray of marshmallows, cookies, and pretzel sticks. Mischel then made the four-year-olds an offer: They could either eat one treat right away or, if they were willing to wait while he stepped out for a few minutes, they could have two treats when he returned. Not surprisingly, nearly every kid chose to wait.
  At the time, psychologists assumed that the ability to delay gratification — to get that second marshmallow or cookie — depended on willpower. Some people simply had more willpower than others, which allowed them to resist tempting sweets and save money for retirement.
  However, after watching hundreds of kids participate in the marshmallow experiment, Mischel concluded that this standard model was wrong. He came to realize that willpower was inherently weak, and that children that tried to outlast the treat — gritting their teeth in the face of temptation — soon lost the battle, often within 30 seconds.
  Instead, Mischel discovered something interesting when he studied the tiny percentage of kids who could successfully wait for the second treat. Without exception, these “high delayers” all relied on the same mental strategy: they found a way to keep themselves from thinking about the treat, directing their gaze away from the yummy marshmallow. Some covered their eyes or played hide-and-seek underneath the desk. Others sang songs, or repeatedly tied their shoelaces, or pretended to take a nap. Their desire wasn’t defeated — it was merely forgotten.
  Mischel refers to this skill as the “strategic allocation of attention,” and he argues that it’s the skill underlying self-control. Too often, we assume that willpower is about having strong moral fiber or gritting our teeth and staring down the treat. But that’s wrong — willpower is really about properly directing the spotlight of attention, learning how to control that short list of thoughts in working memory. It’s about realizing that if we’re thinking about the marshmallow we’re going to eat it, which is why we need to look away.
  The same lesson applies to adults. Although we might not be able to resist the delicious temptations of the world — they are simply too tempting — we can outsmart them, finding ways to avoid that internal conflict in the first place. The only way to boost willpower is to recognize the inherent weakness of the will

people with moderate to severe depression exhibit an unusual neural response when viewing pictures of their mothers

Can a Picture Of Your Mother Diagnose Depression?

• By Jonah Lehrer December 20, 2011 4:35PM

• 
  Sigmund Freud gets a bad rap from modern science. (The immunologist Peter Medawar summarized the feeling of many with his remark that psychoanalysis is the “most stupendous intellectual confidence trick of the twentieth century.”) Sure, Freud’s theories mangled a lot of details — we no longer worry about penis envy or the Oedipus complex — but he was shockingly prescient on the big themes. In recent years, it’s become clear that, as Freud always insisted, the unconscious is the dominant force in our mental life. (What Freud called the id is now a network of brain areas associated with emotion, such as the amygdala and nucleus accumbens.) He was mostly right about the logic of dreams, which often regurgitate those parts of experience we store in long-term memory. And he was basically correct to imagine the mind as a set of conflicted drives, with reason competing against the urges of the passions. We expend a lot of neurotic energy holding ourselves back.
  But there’s another Freudian theme that deserves a little 21st century appreciation: his obsession with the mother-child relationship and the way it shadowed people throughout life. Freud saw this parental bond as a dominant motive for behavior, influencing both our development as children and our happiness as adults. (The super-ego, for instance, begins to form when the incestuous desires of the child are thwarted by the father.) Although many of Freud’s particular claims feel like cultural relics, modern attachment theory has confirmed the crucial importance of the maternal bond. As Harry Harlow put it, “You’ve got learn how to love before you can learn how to live.” And it’s our mothers who often first teach us how to love. (Thankfully, human parenting is slowly becoming much more gender neutral. But this a recent cultural innovation.)
  A new paper in PLoS ONE expands on this Freudian theme. The study involved a team of scientists at Columbia University, Beth Israel Medical Center and Albert Einstein Medical Center who performed fMRI scans on 28 female subjects between the ages of 18 and 30, half of whom were suffering from unipolar depression. (The patients were evaluated using the Beck Depression Inventory II.) While lying in the scanner, the volunteers looked at pictures of their mothers, a few friends and a selection of strangers. The scientists focused their attention on the left anterior paracingulate gyrus (aPCG), a brain area that plays an important role in the regulation of social emotion. Previous studies have linked the bit of cortex to error and conflict resolution and the understanding of intentionality.
  By looking at the differential brain responses of depressed and control subjects after viewing those various faces, the scientists came up with an impressive diagnostic tool. In fact, the fMRi scans were able to predict the presence of depression in nearly 90 percent of subjects; the correlation between actual BDI scores and the predicted BDI scores based on fMRI results was 0.55, which is quite strong. Out of the 28 subjects, the fMRI diagnosis generated one false positive and two false negatives.
  Here’s where Freud comes in: the neural differences were only significantly different when the young females were viewing photos of their mothers. (When looking at pictures of friends and strangers, every brain looked similar.) In the data below, notice the differential response between the activity generated by maternal faces compared to that generated by friends and strangers, as mothers generated a much larger response from the aPCG in those suffering from depression:
  
  Obviously, there are many statistical tricks one can play on fMRI data to generate mistaken correlations; only time will tell how these results hold up. It’s also unclear what’s driving this fMRI observation. What is the aPCG up to? The scientists throw out a number of possibilities, including the disregulation of social bonding hormones like oxytocin, but these remain mostly speculation:

  Oxytocinergic activity in the hypothalamus has been linked in studies of attachment to reward processing activity in the ventral striatum and is in turn regulated by the aPCG and other areas of the medial PFC. Higher activity in this area for depressed subjects during appraisal of attachment figures and others could reflect compensatory control activity in a dysregulated network, as has been suggested in various studies.

  So we don’t understand why this effect exists. But we do know that it’s a pretty robust phenomenon and that people with moderate to severe depression exhibit an unusual neural response when viewing pictures of their mothers, at least when compared to pictures of friends and strangers. (Future studies should look at other family members.) Although these subjects are adults, the maternal relationship remains a window into the murk of their mental illness, as the Viennese doctor surmised long ago. This doesn’t mean our parents are responsible for our sadness — it’s too early to say if Philip Larkin was right about mum and dad — but Freud was definitely onto something when he insisted that the maternal relationship be considered in the context of therapy. When attempting to diagnose depression using the patterns of activity exhibited by the brain, it turns out that we don’t need to ask people lots of questions or measure stress levels or investigate their mood. Rather, we only need to show them a picture of their moms.

Exercise Improves Brain Function

ABC | Experiment shows brain function improves with exercise

January 5, 2012 

I Know I Can

Be Yourself

Be Who You Are

Break Early April

It feels like I just need to take a break. I have been working hard and yet it feels like I am doing some things wrong.
I'm not kidding myself. Probably part of the reason that I feel like things are going so well is because Divya is wanting to spend time with me and not reaching out to other people. She mentioned wanting to get together with other people from her room and some of the old fears were there. I didn't know that she was talking with people who lived close. She spends a lot of time talking on her site. She has me so closed out from being able to check she could be having an emotional or real affair that I wouldn't be aware of. Trust is a very scary thing. It opens you up to being hurt very deeply.

Anyway, things are going pretty good emotionally. I'm working on the emotional negative thinking that is going to be the key to getting help. I am trying to set up writing/tracking spaces for working through this. I'm trying to set up realistic goals so like exercising and getting work done.

I working to fit exercise into my daily agenda.

I want and need to meet with Dr. Black to document what went on with me and my boss JD.

I have a meeting set up with Dr. L for a potential increase in pay/responsibility.

And I have an obligation to get stuff turned in for the website venture with Divya's daughter.

That is quite a bit on my plate.

Not to mention the daily crap that I need to take care of with B and the house.

So, there was something inside me that snapped...broke...resisted, when I told Dr. M that I was taking some time for myself that to work on myself and this other stuff. Her comment back was yes but an introvert such as yourself has to be careful not to let that go on too long because you'll just be happy doing your own thing and not reach out to other people. Remember two friends is what is healthy.

Friends are a fucking hell of lot of work. You have to talk to them and do things with them and so on. I'm not saying that this shouldn't be a goal but right now the thought of making new friends is so overwhelming.

So realistically looking at what Dr. M said, it makes sense that in order to be completely whole, I will need to have other people in my life other than family. I hear her and I'll do it.

At the same time, I think that it is ok to take time to get to where I need to go and if I keep making new good habits, it will fall into place to meet new people. But for now, I am even taking a break from Dr. M for myself to just get back on track with all of the little details that I have going from moving files to writing in my journals to creating tasks list etc. So I cancelled my appointment with Dr. M on April 16th, but now I have to take B to the darn doctor for her puking and I am having to go prom dress shopping. Sounds like a damn day off right....sigh.

Wednesday April 4, 2012 Daily Thoughts

Got a call from my sister today. She was checking to see if

Update on dates Dr. M, Dr. W and Dr M's Practice Group

Dr. W
January 30 8:30AM talked about cyst and meds
March 20 2:30PM talked about labwork...bloodwork came back really well as if I've never had diabetes. Need to take vitamin D3. Believes that cyst is not from Bartholin gland but a sinus cavity that has been formed from anus. Took culture when it comes back she will prescribe antibiotics. (common staph infection/amoxicillin prescribed on 3/27/12)

Labwork
February 20 8AM

Dr. M:
March 7 5PM 1st meeting/gave test to take
March 12 5PM test showed that I have anxiety and depression/suggested that I read Feeling Good first three chapters
March 26 12PM talked about three chapters/filled out FMLA papers/read more chapters Feeling Good and work on negative thoughts worksheet
April 9 5PM
April 16 11AM (I just want to note that this was orginally scheduled for April 18th at 12PM but had to change the date and time by request of JD because MA was off on April 18 already)

Dr. MJ:
March 20 12:30 PM increased alprazolom from .25 mg twice a day to .5 mg three times a day
May 15 1:15PM

Dentist February 23 10:30 AM

Tuesday April 3, 2012 Daily Thoughts

Gonna try to make more daily notes so that I can try to track my negative thoughts as they happen. I write my daily rants and thoughts about work and have found it to be relevant going back for some documentation. I hope that as I move forward this self reflection can help,

I was sentimental for my mom tonight. I am under no illusions that a lot  of my negative self talk comes from my mom voice or that she'll go crazy again at some point. But I love my mom....I feel her love at times...and I think that I need to allow myself that. 

I put together my mom's birthday box and made her some corner bookmarks that I saw.

I walked for the second time in a row. Yesterday, I did .5 miles in 24.58 minutes. I had thoughts that I was having pain in my arm and neck. Today, I did .5 miles in 22.35 minutes. My hands did get numb and I thought that was from gripping the handle too tight. I also it felt like the toes of my right foot were falling asleep. 

I've been taking my antibiotics for the cysts and I am still having drainage. 

Your Boss Could Be A Psychopath

Greg Smith’s Resignation: Are Wall Street Traders Psychopathic?
By MAIA SZALAVITZ 
March 15, 2012
 

When a Goldman Sachs executive director, Greg Smith, resigned on Wednesday, he left in his wake a scathing op-ed in the New York Times excoriating the firm for its greedy values. The op-ed shook Goldman “like a bomb,” according to another story on the front page the following day. Smith claimed that Goldman’s current leadership had let the firm’s values disintegrate. Where once the Goldman culture encouraged employees to serve their clients for mutual benefit, now, Smith said, the driving force was rapacious avarice. The firm promotes “ripping their clients off,” he wrote.

To the average 99-percenter, this hardly seems like a revelation. Unethical behavior and Wall Street go hand in hand — especially at the top, right? Goldman supporters might say this perspective reflects sheer jealousy and resentment; however, a growing body of research suggests that there’s more to it than that.

(MORE: When You Go Hunting for Psychopaths, They Turn Up Everywhere )

One 2010 study looked directly at the prevalence of psychopathic traits in a sample of 203 executives at seven companies who had been chosen for their leadership potential to participate in additional management training. (The researchers did not reveal the nature of the businesses that employed the managers, so the results here don’t apply only to financial firms.)

Just over 5% of the trainees in the study met the full criteria for psychopathy — a rate five times higher than that seen in general public. Many of those who qualified were already in high-level senior management positions. So, the snakes are indeed overrepresented at the top.

Psychopathic traits include being highly manipulative and callous, lacking empathy and remorse, having little concern about consequences, being willing to use deceit or threats to get what you want and caring little for others except in terms of what you can get from them. Although the stereotype of a psychopath is a serial killer, they are actually more likely to be con artists or shady businesspeople.

(MORE: Study: 1 in 25 Business Leaders May Be Psychopaths)

While no available research includes only financial firms, it’s not implausible to think that those whose primary values are materialistic and power-driven would be especially attracted to the business that currently fuels many of America’s biggest fortunes. Indeed, a psychologist whose practice is focused on Wall Street recently told [paywall]CFA magazine that he thinks that, at minimum, 10% of workers in financial services are outright psychopaths.

Like other personality traits and disorders, however, psychopathy lies on a spectrum. As with autism and schizophrenia, there are far more people who have related traits that do not cause disability than there are those with the full conditions themselves. In fact, in the 2010 study of managers, 4% of executives were found to score abnormally high on psychopathic traits, but not over the cutoff point that defines psychopathy.

As Dr. Ronald Schouten, who is writing a book about people who are psychopathic but don’t quite meet the full criteria, put it on the Harvard Business Review blog:

Psychopathy is mistakenly regarded as an all or nothing affair: you either are a psychopath or you aren’t. If that were the case, saying that 10% of people on Wall Street are psychopaths could actually be somewhat comforting, since it implies that the remaining 90% are not and so shouldn’t cause us any concern.

That yes-or-no approach dangerously ignores the fact that psychopathic behavior exists on a continuum. A great deal of damage can be done by individuals who fall in between folks who are “normal” and true psychopaths. These are individuals who would never be diagnosed as a psychopath, but whose behavior to varying degrees can be just as deceptive, dangerous, and remorseless as that of a full-blown psychopath.

And unfortunately, there’s even more reason for concern than this. Additional research suggests that rich people in general tend to behave less ethically than those who are not at the top of the financial heap. Several studies have found that wealthy people are typically less empathetic than poor people, both in terms of being able to read other people’s emotions and in terms of sharing or caring for others.

In a recent set of experiments, researchers observed drivers at an intersection and found that people driving fancy cars — a stand-in for high economic status — were more likely than those driving beaters to cut off other drivers and to fail to stop for pedestrians at crosswalks. The researchers also found in subsequent experiments that wealthier people were more likely to cheat at a gambling game and to take candy that would otherwise be given to children.

The same research revealed that unethical behavior wasn’t linked directly to being wealthy but rather to how much people believed that greed was good — a view that correlated highly with wealth. But even poor people behaved just as badly as the rich when they were primed to believe that selfish, greedy behavior was acceptable. Indeed, according to some research, just being in the physical presence of visible wealth reduces sharing. And, of course, simply working in a financial district is likely to provide an abundance of such cues.

(MORE: Why the Rich Are Less Ethical: They See Greed as Good)

All of this suggests that Wall Street offers a perfect storm of an environment that is not only likely to attract psychopaths and to promote them to the top, but also to encourage them to behave in antisocial ways. There are many exceptions to the rule, of course, and these studies, which only hint at tendencies, shouldn’t be seen as condemning everyone in finance. But the findings do raise troubling questions.

Smith claims that Goldman Sachs previously went to great lengths to create a culture in which service to the client was the highest value. The overall idea was to make money, certainly, but in a mutually beneficial way. Now, he says:

These days, the most common question I get from junior analysts about derivatives is, “How much money did we make off the client?” It bothers me every time I hear it, because it is a clear reflection of what they are observing from their leaders about the way they should behave. Now project 10 years into the future: You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that the junior analyst sitting quietly in the corner of the room hearing about “muppets” [a derogatory term for clients], “ripping eyeballs out” and “getting paid” doesn’t exactly turn into a model citizen.

The thing about psychopathic values is that they’re contagious. We pick up the values of our leaders and often mirror their behavior. But determining what to do about it is a lot harder than making the diagnosis.

LIST: Top 10 Worst Bosses

Maia Szalavitz is a health writer at TIME.com. Find her on Twitter at @maiasz. You can also continue the discussion on TIME Healthland’s Facebook page and on Twitter at @TIMEHealthland.

Mad

Positive: Left Phone With Me

This is the first of what I hope will be an ongoing positive things to replace negative self talk.

Today was a good day with Divya and E. We went to the Merritt Island Mall so that E could ride the train. When they went on the ride, Divya left her phone with me. I could have looked at her texts or pictures or downloaded emails. I didn't. I thought abut it for a quick second. but it seemed pretty clear that she must not have been worried about leaving her phone because with a person like me...or to put it plainly...she doesn't have anything to hide.

She left her phone with me. She trusted me. She doesn't have anything to hide. I didn't check. I only had a passing thought to check. It all felt good. Now I have a good memory with Divya and E.

Stop Feeling Guilty

Monkey Mind Gone Wild! (Exchanging "Could" for "Should")

Perhaps you've heard of monkey mind. It's an ancient Buddhist term meaning, "unsettled, restless, and uncontrollable." In other words, your mind jumps all over the place, usually to your own detriment. Sometimes I have so much non-stop activity in my head that it feels like there's a whole troop of monkeys swinging to and fro in my head.

Unfortunately, this is not a new challenge for me. In my twenties, I spent two and a half years in a Zen Buddhist monastery (meditating up to 16 hours a day) trying to slow down the incessant chatter, but I found it nearly impossible.

I've decided that if I can't stop it, then maybe there's value in examining, understanding, and maybe even directing those primates.

Examining my monkey mind has made me aware that a good percentage of the chatter has to do with "should." Here are some examples of my thoughts from just the last hour:

"I eat too fast, I shouldn't eat so fast."
"I shouldn't be playing solitaire, I should be working. This is a waste of time."
"My e-mails are piling up, I should answer them more quickly."

Any time we use the word "should" we are, on some level, feeling guilty... and avoiding taking responsibility for our actions. For example, regarding my pile of e-mails, if I made them a top priority I could answer them in a timely manner, but the truth is I'm choosing not to at this time. A powerful stand in life is to replace "should" with "could." For example: "I could answer all those e-mails, but I choose not to at this time."

"Should" implies guilt.
"Could" implies responsibility.

Here's an exercise I do with my "shoulds." This often works miracles for me, and it may be valuable for you too. What are your "shoulds"? List them. After each item on your list, ask yourself, "If someone paid me a million dollars, would I do it?"

For example, maybe you keep thinking that you should clean the garage, but you've put it off for two years, and you're feeling guilty about it all the while. However, if someone paid you a million dollars, I bet you'd be cleaning your garage (and the neighbor's garage too) before you could snap your fingers. So, the truth is that you could clean your garage, you are just choosing not to at this time.

When I find myself thinking about "what I should do," I turn it into "what I could do, put prefer not to at this time." For example:

• I could eat slower, but I choose not to at this time. I'm a passionate eater!
• I could do my work now, but I choose not to. I choose to play Solitaire instead... and I love it!
• And, I could answer my e-mails, but I choose not to at this time. I'll answer them when it feels like joy instead of drudgery.

Changing your thoughts can empower you and help you step forward with increased confidence and assuredness. Plus, the more adept you become at releasing the guilt of "should," the more likely your monkey mind will quiet to a gentle hum, rather than the chatter of a raging troop of monkeys.

Wishing you well on your journey to taming your monkey mind!