Currently studying psychology. I have done a lot of therapy myself. I have been a bit flabbergasted by Elon and his behavior. My stance before his radicalization have always been that he has a been a good guy, with good values etc. But also a complicated guy with a dark history. It haven’t looked like he has been motivated by money. What he has done with Tesla and Spacex is incredible. He put every money into these companies at a bad period in the economy when there was a slim chance of success. For me this indicated that he cares more about the future of humanity than money and power; climate and existential threat more than money.
From my therapy work with my own trauma, there is one of model that is used in emotional focused therapy (EFT) to understand the psychological defenses at work when going through trauma in childhood. It is something called trauma related disassociation. How this works is that your personality gets fragmented into «parts» that are in conflict with each other. Almost every people have this to some degree, but the most extreme cases you get a non integrated personality with several personalities. This diagnosis is called dissociated identity disorder.
When people are going through trauma, they need to protect themselves from the difficult emotions they are experiencing. If one does not have competent parents who talk about or validate emotions, this can make things even worse. When it comes to trauma-related dissociation, there are primarily three parts (though there can be more depending on the situasjon) of thought patterns that is being integrated parts of the personality.
First, there is a “well-functioning part”. This part is the "functional" part of the personality. The well-functioning part is often the most visible in daily life and maintains the functions necessary to navigate society. This part can have a good ability to function in work, school, and social life. Often, this is the part that people around the individual see, as it takes care of everyday tasks and relationships. The well-functioning part can also be the one that holds everything together and tries to maintain a sense of "normality."
The "wounded child" is a part of the personality that carries the emotional and psychological pain from the traumatic experiences. This part may represent the child who experienced trauma and was unable to process or understand what happened at the time. When emotions are not processed and integrated, they remain as latent pockets emotional charged energy in the psyche that can be "triggered." The wounded child carries the pain, sorrow, fear, and helplessness from the trauma that is stored.
The “control part” is often a part of the personality that takes on the responsibility of maintaining control over the difficult emotions of the wounded child. This part can function as a protection against emotional overwhelm when the feelings from the wounded child arise. The main goal of the control part is to prevent chaos, fear, and emotional suffering. It controls thoughts, actions, and feelings to prevent the traumatic experience from "breaking through" to the conscious experience.
A brief example to illustrate how this structured gets created in childhood; a child has experienced trauma in the form of bullying in the schoolyard. The child may sit and cry during recess, holding onto painful emotions. When recess is over, it will be embarrassing to walk into class crying. Due to the social pressure, the control part steps in to "shut down" the wounded child. The internal dialogue from the control part might be, "Shut up," "You're so ugly," "You're so stupid," "What's wrong with you?" etc directed at the wounded child. The goal is to suppress the emotions to such an extent that the child can go back into class and pretend everything is normal. The optimal experience for a child in this situation would be to talk to another person to get an understanding of what has happened and process the emotions and experience (hence getting it integrated).
The way I understand this model, and personality in general, is that personality is not a fixed defined thing that you are at any given moment, but rather an area that you move within. You are in a specific part of you personality at any given time based on the needs you have in the moment.
What I find interesting and have that I have noticed in myself (before I worked on integrating these parts) is that my control part was antisocial and without empathy. During periods of my life when I was struggling, facing a lot of adversity, and feeling depressed (and had little access to my emotions – this is really important because empathy is a physical feeling in the body), I was mainly placed in my control part. I externalized the bad feelings I had onto others by for example being mean and committing vandalism. A big part of why I exhibited this behavior, I believe, is because I didn’t want to be alone with my own pain by inflicting pain on others. This is something I feel can be seen in all people who are somewhat antisocial and lacking in empathy. There may be moments or situations that trigger feelings of empathy and warmth in these people towards others. I think it is genuine and that most people that are bad have something good within them. When it comes to people with strong antisocial personality disorder or psychopathy – I believe these individuals are forever stuck in the control part and have little to no access to their emotions.
So how does this relate to Elon Musk? As mentioned, I believe it's undeniable that this person is an extremely complicated individual. He has been pretty badly bullied throughout his childhood, and his father was violent. Additionally, he is autistic, which means he may have less empathy. I know this might sound extremely strange, but I believe that when Elon Musk started taking Ozempic, it could have had a significant impact on his psyche and demeanor. I personally took this medication a year ago and experienced an unbelievable amount of side effects. One thing Ozempic does is numb the feelings in the stomach and chest. You don’t just lose your sense of hunger, but also other emotions. And empathy is an emotion that resides in the body. I think it can numb this too. I noticed that when I was on Ozempic, my control part was much more prominent than usual.
I know Elon Musk doesn't function well as a person in the companies he has started and that he has people around him with high emotional intelligence to hold things together. The person he has appeared as in the public eye has probably never been his entire persona. But there has been a very large shift in how he behaves. He goes against everything he has ever said before. I think it's highly likely that there is a factor within him that has changed him. And I believe Ozempic could be one of several possible factor in how he has changed. For me, the radical shift in the way Elon Musk behaves suggests that he is primarily placed in the control part of his psyche. He is on an neverending externalization trip against the left.
I know this hypothesis is quite a stretch and probably very far-fetched. Maybe I'm hypermentalizing. But I still find these observations pretty interesting based on my own personal and clinical experience.
