IN AN AWESOME WAVE

>the blog of the person who was diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder ten years ago. >click here to ask me anything.

[inanawesomewave]

Your last post on oxytocin is a goldmine and I have many questions. But first, could you elaborate more on why there is a need to tell your dopamine to, in your own words, "shut the fxck up?" What was your life/behavior/moods like prior to taking meds, particularly the one designed to regulate/control dopamine (quetiapine)? Do you ever miss having "unregulated" dopamine?

It took me a very long time to get around to replying to this, things have been very hectic -- birthed a child, and now apparently the world is plunged into descent. 

What I meant about the dopamine, is I suffer from repeated psychoses; diagnosis has shifted from schizoaffective disorder to bipolar disorder back and forth for years now, personally I think what they’re getting at is schizoaffective with the bipolar subtype. With my limited knowledge of neurochemistry, I think dopamine is the one responsible for hallucinations and psychotic episodes, as well as me being completely beholden to it in terms of addictive behaviours and poor impulse control - gotta have that dopamine hit. I very much miss manic episodes, because that’s the perfect marriage of both my conditions, and that’s when dopamine is soaring at an all time high for me. I am really quite resentful that since I found the right medication that curbs mania and psychosis, all I’m left with is bouts of depression (much harder to treat, can’t just be sedated away like mania can) and I am quietly very bitter that I no longer get the break of a manic episode, feeling like my true narcissistic self finally has vindication, during manic episodes I become very sensation-seeking and extremely grandiose, sometimes up to the point of believing I’m a messenger from heaven, a literal genius, some kind of heavenly being. Of course, that never ends well, but the three months or so that I’m in it feel spectacular. My inhibitions that normally tell me to not take drugs or drink all the time or sleep with strangers or get into fist fights or steal or whatever, all slip away and all that’s left is me, my personality disorder(s), and a brain full of dopamine, and it feels good. Also, it’s an excuse if I’m honest. In the framework of a manic episode, you are quite literally unable to control yourself, and that’s agreed upon. What better for a sociopath than to be unbridled for at least a few weeks, no bother about masking or pretending or upholding any kind of pretence? It’s glorious, and I do miss it very much. I know it’s for the best this way, but still. I have nothing but very fond memories of my manic episodes, even if family and friends only remember it as a very scary time. And I understand that they felt that way, but for me, it was fantastic. 

[inanawesomewave]

FIRST THING I NOTICE IN A POTENTIAL PARTNER? THE AUDACITY.

Hi, me again, and today I’m here to talk to you about dismissive/avoidant attachment style. Get comfortable and steel yourself, because if you have this attachment style, I’m about to make you feel very seen, and this is only because I had to endure this recently when I was bored and idly doing online quizzes about my own brain because I might not be able to emote healthily, but I sure as heck can over-intellectualise the feelings I should be having whilst I’m distracting myself by doing online quizzes instead. 

Attachment Theory was formulated and popularised in 1958 by psychoanalyst John Bowby, and supposes that the first attachments we make (with whoever our caregivers may be) will form the blueprint of the attachments we do or don’t form over the course of our adult lives. My therapist said to me that these attachments begin to be cemented into us when we are pre-verbal, and I thought - well that can’t be right, but sure enough before we can speak we are of course seeking attention and affection from our caregivers with smiling, crying, babbling, cooing, clinging, following etc, and how those behaviours have been responded to will tell us how we should or shouldn’t attempt to attach to others. It’s worth reading up on, if you’re interested in that kind of thing, and I recommend the Strange Situation Experiment in which attachment theory was explored in infants depending on how they responded to being with a parent, without a parent, with a stranger, and alone. 

So when I was doing all these online quizzes, I learned a bunch about myself. Did you know I have lots of dark triad traits? That I might be a narcissist? That I am possibly a sociopath? I know, news to me too. I had to sit down. I also learned that if I were a tyrant I would be Col. Gaddafi, and that i have more masculine traits than feminine ones. I have an oral-aggressive personality type, and also: I have a dismissive/avoidant attachment style. And that’s what I want to talk about today, because if you’re reading this blog, you possibly either have it or you care about someone who does. 

Dismissive/avoidant types typically grew up without a secure base of safety at home. We had to meet our own emotional needs because it was more reliable and less painful than repeated rejection from our caregiver, and we have disconnected from our own needs for closeness as a means to avoid the shame of feeling dependent on anyone but ourselves. I relate to this hugely, and now I know what my attachment style is, I can pinpoint exactly where I have gone wrong in my close relationships, and why I find it hard even now to really get close to anyone. So, what are some things a dismissive/avoidant person might do? I’ve made a list of mine, and I’ll talk you through some examples. I hope this will help you understand yourself, or the sociopath in your life who seems to be extremely stubborn when it comes to guarding their own love in a miserly way. No judgement: I am that miser. 

I will undervalue the importance of anyone’s feelings but my own. I accept I have a complex emotional world, I just don’t find it very easy to access it, communicate it, or assume anyone else has it. Maybe this was because my mother was very cold and emotionally insincere, or maybe it’s because I was always told I was, but that’s the truth. Yes, it’s selfish, but it’s how I’ve always gone about things. Example: arguments in which I rant about my feelings being ignored or dismissed whilst, you guessed it, I refuse to address the emotions of the person who is currently being told how my emotions are being dismissed in quite a heavy-handed way. Not cool.

I have very little space in my emotional world, and I therefore expect perfection in that space. I live by a secret code of etiquettes and ethics that for some reason I have forgotten to tell anyone else about because I had thought for a long time that the way I thought was normal. I thought everyone had these standards that I have, but really they’ve been tricks and pitfalls that partners have fallen down. It’s never been intentional, I just think that things are done a proper way and a wrong way; acceptable or unacceptable. I didn’t realise this for a long time, but I am really good at enforcing what I believe is acceptable, in a wholly unacceptable way. This is why I nitpick and find faults in others, it’s a good way to keep someone at arm’s length. 

I say I don’t want commitment whilst silently fully committing to someone without ever letting them know. I have refused to move in with a partner until I have had nowhere else to live and it was the only option left. I had a fiancee who proposed to me four times before he got a yes. I wanted to say yes the first time but I didn’t. Why? I didn’t want him to get too close. It felt like an invasion. Traditionally, when I enter a relationship, I’m the asshole who says, “look, it is what it is, yeah?”. I’ll talk about my disdain of marriage and cohabiting, and then I’ll casually move in and tell you it’s purely logistical. I will be with you for years, maybe a lifetime, and I’ll act completely like this all happened because of chance and circumstance. I will even believe this myself. 

I don’t really want to share my feelings with you. I don’t know what they are, I don’t know how you’ll react, I don’t know how they’ll come out and I don’t know what you’ll do with them. It’s much easier and safer for me to keep it all in and then just blow up when you haven’t secretly guessed what they are. You had to guess because I couldn’t tell you, because I didn’t know. You think I’m disconnected from you? You should hear how disconnected I am from my own self. 

I will dwell on the past instead of focussing on the future.  The future hasn’t happened and I don’t know what it holds. The past is concrete; I have lived it and learned from it. Normally what I’ve learned (perhaps wrongly, because of our old friend confirmation bias) is that all my fears and suspicions are correct and nobody can be trusted. That’s solid, I can take that to the bank. I will very much live in the past where we were briefly unhappy instead of looking to a future where we could be endlessly in love because it feels unrealistic to me -- love feels unrealistic to me. 

I’m much better at sexual closeness than emotional closeness. The sex will come first, then the feelings, perhaps. You wanna bone down? Nice. Me too. Do you have any fantasies you never explored before? I bet I know what they are, and I bet I’m into it because there’s a reason I sought you out. I could sense it. I want to never get out of bed, I want to do all of it all the time. For some reason it is much easier for me to feel extremely close and connected to you whilst we are having sex than it is moments later when you are lying next to me wanting to cuddle. I have a healthy relationship to sex, let me be clear -- I’ve always felt perfectly fulfilled in casual set-ups, even one-night-stands. Early on in relationships we’ll do it all. Our relationship will survive for a very long time if the sexual connection is good, even if the emotional one is a shit-show. This is a closeness I feel safe with. Find another time to tell me you love me. You probably don’t even mean it, is what I’m thinking. By this point I’ve fooled myself that you’re in some kind of sex-trance, that I’ve merely fucked you into a relationship you didn’t want to be in. So I’ll tell you that you’re free to leave. I’m told this is hurtful, because if you’ve developed feelings for me, I never saw that coming. I promise. In fact, when I’ve had my “first times” with people I know I might end up loving, I’ve had to be some level of drunk. Not blind drunk, but enough to ease my nerves. I can’t be sober in that environment, I need Dutch courage. And, once the sex disappears on any level, I’ll begin to pull away completely because after that, I begin to believe we are merely friends, and if we are merely friends, then what’s even the point? 

I will sabotage a relationship when vulnerability is required of me. This one is quite standard and kind of explains itself. When I find I’m getting very close to someone, when talks need to be had, I make a lot of jokes and when the jokes run out or the person I’m having this intimacy with isn’t laughing, I’ll just dip out in any way I can, and it’s much easier for me to frame myself as the villain because then you’ll hate me and that’s a good job done -- if you hate me, you won’t want to get anywhere near me ever again. I’ll get drunk and say awful things, or I’ll stay out with my friends all night, or stop answering the phone. For this same reason, I don’t tend to love personal displays of affection because then I’m being vulnerable with you in front of everyone. Again, I don’t think any of this is warranted, and I’m not making excuses. I’m just explaining. 

I am prone to pining after a partner I have already discarded and have inexplicably begun to idealise. Okay, this is a very hard one to write but I’m going to just write it and I’m going to give an explanation from a personal experience I had that I regret and do feel remorseful about.  I used to date someone I fell in love with. He was the first person I’d ever really felt immediately attracted to, someone I could identify very quickly that I was in love with, and that hadn’t happened to me before. I had been in two very long, very serious relationships before him, with people I never felt especially close to. They were a fine example of what they describe as “parasitic lifestyle” in the DSM-V criteria for ASPD: it’s not that I didn’t care about them, but the benefits outweighed the costs - they gave me a place to live when I had nowhere to go and gave me the basic affection I craved. But they both felt like some kind of arrangement after not very long, and whilst I did initially care, I stopped caring, but didn’t leave. I had nowhere else to go so I played the part. It’s worth mentioning too that the first person turned out to be horribly abusive.  Then this new man crashed into my life and he was everything I didn’t know I wanted. Our connection was immediate and he had very real, very sincere love for me that he had no issues whatsoever communicating. He’d write me poetry and songs, he was happy to slip into a submissive role completely consensually as I took the dominant role. On paper and in life, it was perfect.  We broke up a few times and the first time was because... I can’t explain it. I was head over heels in love with him so one morning when we woke up together after a night of cuddling and talking and laughing, I asked him to leave and not come back. I feel pained about this on reflection, because I remember the look on his face. He left. He got drunk. He drunk-called me. His brother reached out to me. His friends started looking at me with contempt because I had hurt someone they really cared about just months after he told them how happily in love with someone he was with someone he felt was perfect for him, and after I had been making it known that I felt the same. I just told him to leave, and he did, and for whatever dumb reason, he came back. And we were happy again, for a time.  He ended up sleeping with someone else after about a year of me doing everything to push him as far away from me as possible on an entirely subconscious level, because I really thought at the time that we were vibing really well. I know the night he did it, and it was the night I told him to leave me the fuck alone and never speak to me again after an argument that we were both raging through (I’m not going to pretend he wasn’t also without his demons, it’s why we were attracted to each-other, after all), the argument was specifically to do with my tendency to push him away after all he’d done for me. And he was right, completely. He’d done a lot for me. And for some reason, I had a massive problem with that. I had become suspicious to the point of paranoia, accusing him of all sorts. I remember telling him how stifled and suffocated I felt, I wanted to know why he was moving so fast (and was he? Really? No, not at all). So, after a long weekend of yelling and crying and frustration and “is this the end?” talks, it reached a peak and I told him to just get the fuck out of my face and stop with all this pressure and bullshit. He went out. He got blind drunk. He fucked someone else. And that still somehow came as a surprise to me, after all, the sex was non-stop, so what could we possibly have had to really worry about? But he had a point when he said I was talking fucking nonsense with all this talk of being stifled. Because when I ended up moving in with him, he gave me my own room because he understood my need for solitude. We would spend most nights together but sometimes I’d need to slope off to my own space, he was seemingly fine about it. When he drove me places I would sit in the passenger seat sometimes on the phone, sometimes just listening to my music with my earphones in. He understood. He said he knew I was an anxious person. I’d sit there ignoring him and occasionally letting him know I was still there with a smile and he’d smile back. Sometimes when we went out walking to the shop or whatever, I felt I had to walk a little bit in front or behind. Not because I didn’t want to be close to him, but I was falling so hard for him that I needed to protect myself via isolation and any desperate grabs for independence I could find. We argued a lot. I started most of those arguments, and sometimes when he fought with me out of sheer frustration, I saw this as petulance and dismissed it completely. When he did cheat, I felt heartboken, but weirdly vindicated in walking away. This was the break I needed from loving and being loved. We broke up for good this time, and what followed was two years of me and him sneaking around behind future partners’ backs to continue sleeping together. And here’s the kicker -- when we were no longer in a relationship and merely having affairs together, I had no issues whatsoever telling him how much I loved him and how much I wanted to be a positive influence in his life, help him through his own neuroses, hold his hand through his own mental health struggles, care for him and protect him. So long as we had this casual relationship, I could finally reveal to him how I felt. I ended up in a terrible relationship after him and I was much happier staying in that terrible relationship with someone who also was very avoidant (though he was also fearful, so had bouts of clinginess and neediness whereas I was more likely to run away). In fact, the person I ended up settling with was also high-key abusive, but so long as I had my ex to run to, I didn’t mind. I had my cake and ate it too -- I had the fucked up security of settling down with someone completely inappropriate, and the escape route of sleeping with someone I was absolutely crazy about. And whenever he, the real love in my life, asked me if we could start again, I was able to play my trump card, the thing that got me out of the commitment: you cheated on me. It was almost too perfect, that I had this perfect excuse to never get close to him again and, in doing so, I could be as close to him as I liked. He took this opportunity too, and we just went on being in love for another two years. We’d go away together, talk about our future, name our kids, plan the wedding we were never going to have. I proposed to him when I was dating someone else. He said he couldn’t take that offer if I wasn’t going to be with him (which is... extremely reasonable). I saw this as another vindication: aha! You just rejected me! I NEVER have to commit EVER AGAIN! And what did I do when everything went to the shit? I idealised him. I pined. My God, I lived in my memories. I never stopped thinking about him. I wrote a fucking book about how much I loved him and had it published. My biggest writing credit to date, dedicated to this one person. This weird bout of romanticism I suddenly had for someone I had spent years pushing away and, someone who inexplicably took this pushing away for what it was. He’d even say things to me like, “why are you so frightened of loving someone?”, “why won’t you just let me love you?”, “what happened to you?”, “what can I do to support you?”. He understood the small things, like the time he wanted to take me away for the weekend and said to me: “I’m just going to leave you in charge of planning where we go to eat for all the meals” because he knew I needed to have that control and he was fine with it, and when I was endlessly boring the hell out of him thinking out aloud about why this restaurant would be good but this one would be bad and this one doesn’t have a menu available online and this one is okay but it’s too far from the hotel and all of that relentless, constant meaningless babble revolving around ultimate control, he just laughed and said: “I’m being patient with you because I understand you”. And he did. And I loved that. And sure enough, I hated that. Time to do something unpredictable, probably. And the wily fucker always saw it coming. The burden of reciprocated understanding, love and patience, right? What a bother. 

*heavy sigh*

And I hinged on this lost love for a long time. It felt like pain, it felt like a void. I felt like, with him gone, I might never love again. In my head we’d had this windswept romance that never faltered. I seemed to forget all about the non-stop arguments, I began to understand his infidelity, I excused it, I loved it, I loved him unconditionally once it had all crashed and burned to the ground. So then why did I love him this much after it was all over? So I could continue this cycle of dismissiveness and avoidance. If I was in love with the past, I’d never need to love anyone ever again or let anyone love me. I could resign myself to a lost history and refuse to get close on the grounds of being hung up with my emotional baggage. I used the disaster of that relationship to sabotage future attempts at closeness. I used him as the benchmark to how lovers in future should treat me -- with what, a masochistic acceptance of my push-and-pull approach? It’s terrible, and I hate it. But that’s how that went down. I think a lot about the love I gave to him in spades right before it all went away, and whilst I know in my heart he knew that I really did love him, I will never stop regretting that I didn’t just make it easier on us both.  *** I know deep down that my mistrust and disdain for personal relationships, romantic or otherwise, is borne of a fear that I don’t truly believe my own needs are worthwhile or even real. I find myself doing it with friendships, I get close to someone and in my head I start finding fault with them, and I have to stop and ask myself: has this person really done anything that bad, or am I looking for excuses to just not like them? And why am I doing that? Is it because yet again I pride my solitude over anything else in the world? Because my inner monologue is always going crazy with thoughts such as: you don’t actually need anybody, where has needing anybody ever got you before? You’ve got to protect yourself, nobody else will do it for you. Keep some of yourself to yourself, it’s unwise to share who you are with anyone. If you get too involved you will end up disappointed. And, whilst we’re on it, why is this person demanding all my time and energy? What’s wrong with them? What’s their game? I don’t love me, so why do they? What do they want from me?  And I know it’s because I was over-controlled and under-loved as a child, teenager, into adulthood, by my mother. She didn’t like me having friends or partners, would chide me for spending time with anyone but her, and whenever I loved anyone else (such as my father), she would go to great lengths to try and blacken that person’s name to me with lies and accusations, try to give me reasons that this person was in fact perverse, hateful, not to be trusted. I carried that into my adulthood, I let it control everything about me. It made me extremely suspicious of any intimacy and closeness and, just like my relationship to empathy, there is a large part of me that will always believe the expression of interpersonal love is some kind of scam designed to catch idiots like me out, and I must always be on my guard. For years I had a folder on my phone full of incriminating screenshots of conversations I’d had with those close to me, people I actually loved, because I never knew when I would need to hit back against them. I needed to have evidence that anyone who loved me was as my mother told me they were -- perverse, hateful, not to be trusted. I deleted that folder when I began therapy, and when I resume therapy again very soon, I have a new goal: I need to learn how to love people and let them love me. No pretending this time, no mask. Teach me how to actually do it. Because I cannot keep hurting the people I love just for loving me, or worse, because I love them. There is no goodness or acceptability to lashing out at those who love you, it’s abusive. It’s completely wrong. There’s no excuse good enough. But now I know why I do it, and I can go fuck myself if I think I’m passing this onto my children. I would never push them away or treat them as my mother did, but they still cannot learn from my example. 

So, there it is. My dismissive/avoidant attachment style, and how it looks, and what it’s done. I hope this helps anyone with this attachment style understand themselves, and anyone who loves anyone with this attachment style to understand them -- not so you can put up with it, but so that you can just leave if you need to. After all, if someone is pushing and pushing for you to go, then we should not be surprised when you go. It’s what we’re aiming for.

[inanawesomewave]

AND HOW DOES THAT MAKE YOU FEEL?

It’s been a very long time since I posted and for that I can only apologise, I’m extremely, abnormally, infinitely pregnant (okay, I’m 39 weeks) and I’ve spent this past few months hibernating, and recovering from a bipolar depression that, thankyou alexithymia, I didn’t notice I was having until it went away and I no longer had any thoughts of ending my life. But, I’m back now, happily alive and happy to be alive, and as I’m in these final days of pregnancy, I’m thinking about oxytocin. When you’re ridiculously pregnant you think of all the ways you can induce labour (hint: none of them work). I’ve tried it all, castor oil, clary sage, red raspberry leaf tea, evening primrose, sex, long walks, whatever. And I started thinking today about how the only thing that is proven to work, is oxytocin, and how when it is released, it can make your body think you are breastfeeding and you begin to have contractions now that the baby knows it’s okay to come out and get fed. That’s because oxytocin is a hormone that promotes love, bonding, sociability, friendship. They call it the hormone of love, lust and labour. And I realised, as I was looking up all the ways I could release oxytocin myself at home, that I don’t have a good relationship to it. At all. 

I first realised maybe there was something a little off with my oxytocin during my last pregnancy, and in the first few months of breastfeeding my son. I would pump milk or my son would latch on, and within seconds I felt horrendously depressed and anxious, as if the release of oxytocin triggered a panic response in me. They playfully call this “Sad Nipple Syndrome”, many people confuse it for a repressed memory of sexual abuse, but really, it’s related to a phenomenon known as Depressive Milk Ejection Reflex and is believed to be because of a rapid, brief reduction of dopamine immediately before milk let-down, but I wonder if for me it has more to do with oxytocin.

Now I’m not trying to martyr myself when I say this, because largely, I find breastfeeding very rewarding, not to mention practical, and money-saving, and it’s my favourite time of the evening -- when my son is cuddling me, watching his bedtime shows, and nursing. And I’m not battling through some horrendous feeling in order to do that, and really, I’d mostly got used to it. But just recently, near the end of the pregnancy I’m having now, I’m experiencing that familiar sense of dread, anxiety, depression and need to escape when he latches on, and I felt it the other night when I was expressing, and I felt it recently after (hehe) an orgasm. I mean, when it comes to dopamine, I’m fucked. I’m bipolar and I take, to be exact about the dosage, a metric ton of quetiapine (Seroquel) every day just to keep on an even keel, which is an antipsychotic which means its sole purpose is to tell my dopamine to shut the fuck up for five seconds. I’m used to having my dopamine function in swells and droughts. But oxytocin, fucking hell. I have antisocial personality disorder. It makes sense that something about the bonding hormone makes me feel uneasy, or even unwell, like I need to escape the situation. I’ve always said, something about myself and my disorder that I kind of despise, is how I have this bizarre drive to fight my way out of any and all groups I find myself in. Groups of friends, colleagues, schoolmates, peers of any kind, I will try with all my might to be part of the group, then when I realise how cynical I am about that, I will try to at least appear to be part of the group for Machiavellian reasons, and then when I begin hating myself because the pretence is too exhausting, I will find myself subconsciously picking the group apart. My lack of empathy becomes hostile, and if anything, the most toxic trait I exhibit in these situations is to break the group up entirely. If I can’t have it, nobody can. It was worse when I was younger: at school, I’d lie about things one friend said about the other and watch arguments happen, delighting in the collapse of that friendship circle. I’d tell one the other stole from them, I’d tell the other that everyone is saying she spread a harmful rumour. I’ve even gone so far as to frame a person for theft just to watch the fallout. I did that when I was about 8, I did it again when I was 10. I did it a third time in my teens. It was kind of my MO. I’m not proud of that spiteful need to isolate people from loving interaction just because I was so afraid of it. Okay, I’m a little proud of pulling it off. The ease with which you could snap apart even close bonds confirmed everything I loved and hated about how I saw the world: sociability is a lie and empathy is a cool trick to use against people. Even as an adult, whilst not maliciously and actively trying to hurt people any more, I have found reasons to leave groups under a black cloud. I was a poet once, and I hated all my contemporaries except for a few. I used the people I hated the most, got where I wanted to be, and fucked off forever because the game got boring. I did the same when I was a musician. When I was a student. When I was doing both my undergraduate degrees. My God, my need to be antisocial is so strong, it’s ruining my careers.

Now, we all know that research on ASPD is quite scant. They don’t really want to know much about us except for the fact we prefer bitter tasting things, or that people want to fuck us, or that we dig easily accessible rap music. What is out there about us is mostly inconclusive, or the conclusions drawn are highly subjective -- I featured one on this blog a long time ago for example that said we are more likely to use expressive, emotive and loaded language when talking about our life experiences, and the researchers used their personal judgements to conclude that this was further evidence of our heartlessness, which was fucking hilarious. Heaven forfend we might be seen as humans for five seconds. Anyway, today when searching around to see if there’s any chemical link to ASPD and oxytocin, I found this. If you don’t have access to it, that’s fine, it was a study from last year that looked into this very relationship, to see if oxytocin treatment could improve outcomes for antisocial people both with and without diagnosis. The research itself was more an inquiry into an aggregate of 36 previously done studies (because to actually do new research would cost money that needs to be spent on finding out if we ever yawn or if our eyes look weird or if we give a shit if someone jumps up behind us dead scary like and says “boo” or some shit). Results again were inconclusive, but something interested was noted: oxytocin was largely associated with a reduction in criminal/amoral/antisocial behaviour, but in some, had an opposite effect - that is to say, antisocials sometimes respond to oxytocin with hostility toward their loved ones. 

So why is that? Well, there aren’t any answers right now and “further high quality, large sample-size studies are required” (so, let’s not all hold our breath at once), but do I have a theory? You bet I do! 

We know that personality disorders, especially cluster-b, come from neglect and trauma. We can theorise that antisocials have a lack of empathy because we weren’t taught it, or maybe we had emotionally manipulative parents that would prey upon our empathy and later use it to harm us so we learned to be cynical of it, maybe we had to learn how to fake empathy toward our abusive parents so they’d stop beating the shit out of us for five seconds, maybe we learned the language of violence and aggression because it was the language we were taught at home, and maybe we fought our way out of social groups because we were taught not to have friends, or our parents only really loved us when we reflected their own hateful, selfish and volatile traits back to them, so we learned not only that love was pointless, but actively rejecting it was favourable. There are lots of reasons why a person might develop antisocial personality disorder. So surely it makes sense, that if we learn these antisocial behaviours, we also learn to be antisocial to a chemical process in our bodies that is imploring us to be the exact opposite? Doesn’t it make sense that if we feel love, bonding, connection, our instinct is to panic and fight it? To feel sad, to want to cry? And if we don’t know how to cry or connect to that part of ourselves because we never learned emotional intelligence, doesn’t it make sense we’d then convert that feeling into something else, something immediate and easy? Like anger? Like rage? Antisocial people experience everything in primaries: blue, red, yellow. Generic bad, rage, and generic good. When we need to access a secondary or tertiary emotion (something orange like homesickness? Or something even magenta like... fucking... humiliation?), we have to channel it back into one of those primary colours, something we can understand. So, generic good, generic bad, and red red rage are all we have. Oxytocin? Bonding? Who knows where that belongs. Could be any of the three. And let’s be honest, this isn’t restricted purely to antisocial personality disorder. Narcissists respond to love and bonding with a push-back, so do borderlines and histrionics. It all comes out different, but it all comes from the same place: don’t you fucking dare love me. The only person in my life I feel that immediate, unwavering bond with, is my son. Maybe that’s why I’ve been able to breastfeed him despite the sadness and panic of it all, because the initial reaction to the oxytocin is the hurdle and not the reward, and after that I can get to it properly, to look at him and feel intense love, empathy and joy. Maybe it’s evolutionary, the truth of it is when it comes to my children, I don’t care what the mechanism is that makes me love them the way I do or how it ties into my disorder. But how I feel about friends, lovers, and other family members is up for scrutiny, my own scrutiny at that. 

So as I sit here wondering why it’s hard for me to experience oxytocin, I wonder how the rest of you feel. Do you have a good relationship to it? What does it do for your empathy? When you perform a good deed, do you feel warm and fuzzy, or is it a logical step for you? How do you access love? Is it a decision, or a gut instinct? And for christ’s sake, when you have sex, are you doing it to grab hold of the oxytocin, or fight it off? 

[inanawesomewave]

Do you have any thoughts on the use of the word 'empathy' as a stand in for 'compassion'? I've noticed this a lot recently, and I don't know where it came from. Do you think there's any point in trying to get people to understand the difference?

I think where we’re at with the public understanding of the word “empathy” is ridiculous, to be frank. I think people honestly have no idea what it means, and with the sharp increase of people calling themselves “empaths” when what they mean is “I’m hypervigilant to other people’s moods because I suffer from anxiety and am quite prone to using other people’s feelings as a torpedo for my own shit”, we’re at an all-time lack of understanding into the word and the concept. I was talking about this with my partner today, how I wish I did indeed have the empathy to be compassionate for affectively empathic reasons. I know to give money to homeless people because they need money and I have more than them, so I’ll give. I know to give a hungry person food, help someone who needs information I have to hand, whatever, and that’s probably what compassion is. But if I’m not feeling it, if I’m not giving or helping because I feel their pain in that situation, I’m not performing with empathy, and whilst that’s probably totally fine, you’re right in that there is a major difference. Maybe people should put more stock into the concept of sympathy than empathy. 

[inanawesomewave]

I dunno if you've answered or talked about this in depth but is it easier for you to empathize with someone if you personally experienced what they went through?

Much much easier, less abstract. I've been disappointed in myself many times for treating certain people with a disregarding lack of empathy and then later they reveal an experience they've had that I've had and suddenly I've found my "in", as it were, and the disappointment stems from me knowing that this is quite a narcissistic route to have to take in order to care about somebody in any way whatsoever.

[inanawesomewave]

I'm a 22 year old diagnosed with ASPD about a couple years ago. My question is how do I cope with this over the span of my life? I've gotten away with some incredible shit. I've lied, charmed and sweet talked my way into and out of many situations but the constant irresponsibility can't be sustainable if I want to live a seemingly normal life. How do I develop a successful career (in finance if we wanna get specific) when every boss I've had just vexes me?

Hey, sorry it took me a while to reply to this. I’m heavily pregnant and am mostly sleeping these days. 

My only advice is, this disorder will change over the span of your lifetime. I was also diagnosed at around 20, and the way it is with me now 10 years later is very different than how it was at its peak. You’ll learn more about yourself and others, you’ll be able to tone yourself down, and the chaotic element to ASPD won’t always be there. You might always be angry, but you’ll learn why. As for other people, that’s a tough one -- I’ve always found it hard to truly respect any kind of authority and I fully understand the unwillingness to want to work to your best ability when someone else is telling you what to do. But you’ll learn to keep your eyes on the prize, and get your kicks where you can. Small acts of resistance that keep you flying under the radar but satisfied that you’re coming out on top. 

[inanawesomewave]

Biggest lesson you learned in 2019 and what are you looking forward to in 2020?

Oof, biggest lesson I learned in 2019, there were a few. Okay, so: rage doesn’t hurt the person you think it does, just because things can be explained it doesn’t make them okay, and people notice your shit a lot more than you think they do. Oh, and how you are in front of your children counts. I never want my child to see me angry. I’ve never lost my temper with him (he seems to escape all of my bad stuff), but I’ve argued with my partner in front of him and I never want to do that again. I have lots of empathy for my son, and the feeling is very warm and nice, almost makes me sad I don’t tend to have it in that way for others, but I’m just grateful it’s there for him. 

I’m due to give birth any day now to my second son, so I’m looking forward to the general chaos of having two small children and completing my family. 

[inanawesomewave]

How do you feel about the holidays and any other form of tradition in general?

Christmas I love because I no longer spend it with relatives I don’t like, it’s something that me and my immediate family have on our terms entirely and I love the luxury and warmth of the situation, and I enjoy cooking Christmas dinner. Birthdays make me incredibly anxious and I hate them and if I could just get away with spending them entirely alone without anyone thinking this was evidence of a nervous breakdown or belligerence I’d be so, so much happier. I think when you tell people you want to spend your birthday in a hotel away from everybody else with access to good food and maybe a glass of Champagne, they think you’re trying to prove a point or cry for help. I wish this wasn’t the case. I only want to share my birthday with myself.

Tradition in general makes me feel quite calm, regulated. There’s something very comforting and soothing in successfully and happily participating in something years, maybe even generations old. 

[inanawesomewave]

How do you typically respond to tragic events like the death of a loved one? Do you go through the common grief process or is the grieving experience more muted/delayed for you? What are you like when surrounded by or dealing with people who are in a highly emotional state (grieving, angry, ecstatic)?

This is an interesting one, and I think like with a lot of people, it depends entirely on the situation. I know that my trajectory of grief isn’t normal, and in my life I’ve experienced three significant griefs. One, I handled with alcoholism. I loved that person very much. Then, after a little while, I forgot how deeply I’d felt about his death and to this day I uncover evidences of that grief like an old song I’d forgotten about and I will feel an overall sense of panic and fear because I don’t want to associate with my own strong feelings about anything.

The second, interestingly enough, caused me to develop Persistent and Complex Bereavement Disorder. This was someone I knew I loved, and was very close to, and someone who genuinely understood and loved me and really did seem to show me a lot of patience and care without asking me to be anyone or anything different to me. During their life I found it very hard to show that affection or that gratefulness because I took it for granted. Near the end of their life I’m finally becoming at peace with the idea that I might have been much better at showing it than I previously thought. My inability to cope with the magnitude of it all was so profound it turned into a disorder. For two years I dissociated from it and fell into typical drug abuse and alcoholism patterns. I became much more antisocial and was more violent, hostile, aggressive. Like I was avenging them, or making it better for myself. I was unpleasant to be around and I showed nothing but hate to 99% of people in my life, I also isolated from anyone good and kept company with the worst people I could. I reached a rock bottom and had no concern for my own life. In a lot of respects this felt like a great relief. But my lack of connection to my own emotions made this complex grief of a person I had a very complex relationship with much more pervasive. I am still dealing with it in therapy. 

The third grief was the person I loved the most out of all of these people, my father. My grief for him feels relatively healthy. Again, shortly after his death I appeared very much to be feeling nothing at all. But I was angry, hostile, aggressive, hateful, all the while assuming I was feeling nothing and even feeling concerned about that, whilst at the same time feeling my ASPD was protecting me. Yet again I was converting my sadness into hostility because that’s all I know how to do. But I went through the natural process and find space to accommodate for that grief. My upbringing was horrible but my father never stopped protecting and loving me. I know that without my father’s influence, I would have been a much worse person. I would be in prison or dead. My dad’s death might have made me a better person in some ways.

And in comes the entitlement: I cannot be around people experience heightened emotional states without feeling profound unease. Especially when it’s someone I care about, because then I start to put all my energy into applying myself, or seeming like I’m applying myself, and it’s surprising how exhausting I find that. In someone’s grief I don’t know how to sit with their feeling and show them that I’m feeling it, because I don’t. I look for solutions to make the problem go away and then I get weird when people don’t take the solution. You’re sad? Get a therapist. Try meds. Or pot. Whatever. Grief really bad? I understand it’s bad. Let it run its course. You don’t want to? I can’t help you. Leave me alone. I’m sorry. When people are ecstatic it’s much easier: they’re happy enough they don’t need anything from me. When people are raging? I’m happy. I can mirror that. I might actually be useful in that situation. 

[inanawesomewave]

SOCIOPATHY AND CIVIL UNREST

LReaders, I’m sure you’re aware by now that I live in the UK, and as you probably know, yesterday our country elected a right-wing, elitist and bigoted prime minister. I know that sociopaths and psychopaths come from all political persuasions, I have seen psychopaths lean toward the right and psychopaths lean toward the left, I have not seen any evidence that we are more likely to gravitate to one than the other, despite what people say. I also see a lot of posts from the left referring to the right wing leaders as psychopaths and as a quick aside I’d like to say: psychopathy is caused by a gene alteration and environmental stressors. What you’re witnessing here is wealth and capitalism. Money can buy you the privilege to behave like the most malignant of psychopaths and one day I’ll finally be able to succinctly join the dots about what this says about psychopathy at large, if the ethereal component of our disorder that people cannot stop becoming seductively and grimly fascinated with is something has been removed, and in the case of the rich, it’s the obligation to care. 

Today is the day after the general election and already there are large, aggressive protests outside of Downing Street in London. The crowds are chanting the name of the leader of the opposition, yelling “WHO DO YOU PROTECT” at the police, and calling for violence against our new prime minister. I am delighted. For one, I cannot abide the idea that anyone would be moderate enough to see a desperate situation as “well, those are just the cards we were dealt and this is the situation and we’ll just have to adapt to it”, and I’ve never met a sociopath or a psychopath who could ever find themselves capitulating to something they didn’t want. Even on a small scale. Is it bratty and entitled? It doesn’t matter. Not now. 

On the other hand, what we’re witnessing globally is increasing civil unrest and what I’m witnessing in my country is the dismantling of morality, civility, propriety and obligation. And all I’m going to say about this, is I see this as the silver lining. Because if anything, this is where we thrive the most, when rules cease to mean anything and we can fly under the radar amidst what is already chaotic and riotous. So, whilst this is a terrible day for Britain, all isn’t lost, and whilst most of us with mental illnesses in the UK relying on the NHS to, oh I don’t know, protect us from killing ourselves, and are terrified about what might happen next, all I can say is: you know the option to fight is there, right? Take a tip from your antisocial friends. Exploit. Manipulate. Show contemptuous lack of concern to your oppressors. Don’t feel remorse for them. Don’t feel guilty for them. Be unable to control your anger. Blame the enemy for what the enemy has actually done. Break the fucking law. We developed our personality disorders because we were not helped or loved or protected and have spent the formative years of our lives being oppressed and abused. This is happening to all of you now by your government. Maybe now you’ll understand us a little better. Feel free to take a leaf out of our books. Don’t pretend you’re too good for that. 

Three cheers to the bold and the brave on the streets today. Agitate like a psychopath. You’ve been looking for an excuse for a long time, you furious ball of shining beauty. 

[inanawesomewave]

Can you experience sex as an intimate, emotional and vulnerable act or is it purely physical for you? Sorry if this comes off as offensive. Could you share more about your sexuality/gender orientation and how your condition affects it?

I can experience sex in many ways and as a loving emotional act is one of them, but it's not the only one. Given everything I've experienced in my life, I believe my comfort and security within sexuality is where I'm healthiest and I'm grateful for that. I'm bisexual, I believe there's no real reason for this, certainly nothing psychological as bisexuality is not shorthand for promiscuity and even if it was, promiscuity isn't shorthand for dysfunction and psychiatry could do with recognising that multiple sexual partners alone does not warrant disorder. Unsafe practise over and over again is different. I'm dominant, immovably so, do not enjoy submission at all, and enjoy power struggles in sexual experiences, always with consenting parties. I've enjoyed sex with people I really don't personally like but have found very physically and sexually attractive and found that compartmentalisation very easy, I've had one night stands I have enjoyed with no desire to form a connection afterward, I've enjoyed threesomes with a committed partner and did not feel jealous during the events witnessing him with another man within the context of the threesome, and found it all to be exciting for the cause of sex and boundary pushing itself. I have sold sex as a job (not actual sex but gratification as a Dominatrix, no touching - that's my boundary) and have enjoyed a good relationship to that as a job where I don't experience moral quandaries and enjoy making money off the thing I'm good at, plus I get to legally and consensually vent out aggression, hostility, sadism etc in a way that everyone agreed to.

As for loving, emotional sex? I have experienced this many times and find it fulfilling in a whole different way. I enjoy that connection and feeling and whilst vulnerable isn't the word I would use to describe how I feel during these more emotive acts, love certainly is. I don't look for love in sex and am perfectly happy without it, just like I don't look for love in a lot of things because of my relationship to love in general and how cautious I am of it and therefore how actively I repel it, but when love arrives mutually and naturally as part of sex I feel the same as when love arrives mutually and naturally at any time in my life -- appreciative, careful, and ready to give empathy. Also, the more I love the person I'm sleeping with, the more new experiences I am open to.

[inanawesomewave]

Again on the topic of reward, you mentioned in an earlier ask how much you needed constant feedback when completing tasks. Does this need also manifest in other areas of your life, specifically relationships? I'm curious as to what you are like a a lover/friend/family in light of the "different" ways you process reward & punishment.

In terms of friendship, I’m quite low maintenance in that I don’t need to see or hear from my friends very often to feel secure in their friendship. Unfortunately where I fall down is I am acutely aware at all times of the transactional nature of everything, including friendship, so I am hypervigilant when I’m giving emotional support and empathy (and it’s more evident to me because of how draining being empathic can be) and I’m getting nothing in return. For someone who has traditionally been selfish their whole life, I am extremely attuned to other people’s selfishness. For example, I have a friend who I am quite fond of but we’ve grown apart because for every thousand times she hits me up to complain about her ex or whatever, she will ask me how I’m doing once. I have a “three strikes and you’re out” kind of approach to friendships, I will walk away and my method of walking away is a classic sociopathic discard. It’s like we never met. It’s like we never spoke. I stop caring. In that respect I need a little feedback, but a minimal amount that seems relatively even to what I’m putting in is enough.

In relationships, that’s a different ball game. It’s more difficult, because I’m letting someone very much into my intimate space for protracted amounts of time, possibly a lifetime. I am allowing myself to be vulnerable and real to a person in such a way that I cannot escape into mask-wearing, and that leaves me very open. It’s like the space in my head is so meticulously arranged that there’s barely any room for anyone else, and my issue is I expect perfection in that space. I don’t like being vulnerable but I also want romantic relationships to be honest and real otherwise I’d rather not play (casual affairs and things for fun are different, I’m talking about people I want to really settle down with). So with partners the feedback I need is some human way of saying: “I am not here to infiltrate your space. I don’t want to extort your feelings out of you. I am not a predator and I am not inviting you to fight. This is not a game. I haven’t come here to try and take anything from you or harm you.”. Of course, that can be communicated in lots of different ways, in the relationship I am in now, my wife knows to communicate it by never laughing at me and never dismissing my concerns. The second either of those things happen it becomes an open playing field and I’m ready to attack and slip into calculating and hostile modes because that’s where my vulnerability is (and I wish more people with ASPD could admit our PD is a system of coping mechanisms against vulnerability which they all are). To stop that from happening she needs to give me reassurance that she doesn’t see me as someone she feels greater than or worse than, I need reassurance I’m dealing with an equal. And again, everything is transactional, even in love. Like a lot of sociopaths I go all in when I fall in love and being in love with a sociopath can be a very thrilling experience -- we will intuit your needs, learn what you love, give you what you didn’t know you needed, spot your insecurities and help you build yourself up past them. The second we feel like you take any of that for granted or like you don’t need to match that energy, you can fuck off and it’s over. 

[inanawesomewave]

How do you respond to reward and punishment as a child or younger person vs now as an adult/more self-aware individual? I've read a couple of articles that sociopaths process reward and punishment differently compared to "normal" people, can you cite personal examples in which you could see a difference between your response and those of neurotypicals?

As a child I resented punishment just like a lot of kids and it made me angry and vengeful. Then again, in my upbringing, punishment was bizarre and severe (denied food, not allowed to sit with the family, denied basic privileges like clothes, beatings, humiliation) so I guess environmentally at least I learned that punishment wasn't real, was just a flex, and was inconsistent and therefore stupid. My mother often got very angry with me after punishment that it didn't magically alter my behaviour, and would scream, "why are you trying to engage me in a battle of wills?" at me, and I would be delighted knowing I had rattled her. She set the standard for psychological games and strategic cruelty when I was preverbal so socially I learned how to adapt to that, I believe this is common for almost all factor 2 psychopaths like myself. As for now, punishment kind of eludes me. I know I can get out of it. I got caught on a shoplifting run and I got out of it by lying and coercing somebody else to pay my fines, so basically in my lizard brain there was no consequence. Academically I've never been punished for not turning in work because I can always think up an excuse, give a reason, it's never meant anything at all to me. When real punishment comes that I can't avoid, I chalk it down to experience and move on. If I was mouthing off at someone and they punched me unconscious then sure that would piss me off, but I'd set about on a revenge. I guess I don't learn from mistakes that way, and i have no respect for anyone of any stature who feels it appropriate to punish me, the idea of bowing down to any authority makes me sick and what I get triggered by in other people is when people feel they are allowed to do that - traffic wardens, middle management, the police, strict parents. I am so repulsed by it that my instinct is to fight out of it. Also in my childhood the only way I could win against my mother was show no weaknesses, and that set me up for life in the face of attempted punishment. What really makes me change is when it's me who causes me to lose out and nobody else.

[inanawesomewave]

do you have an abnormally low tolerance for frustration? Can you emulate literally anyone/anything if the benefit outweighs the risk? How is your impulse control/anger regulation? Does too much noise or sensory overload or even someone talking too much piss you off much more than it should? I'm sorry I'm realizing I'm not actually alone after all, many questions.

I'll answer all of these as best I can:

1. My tolerance for frustration is so low that I can be a real brat about it, I overload with it and it's the source of a lot of outbursts. I don't know what to do with frustration, it feels like every time I have it there's a very important way I'm supposed to fix it that I don't yet know.

2. Happy to emulate any mood, tone, feeling, etc, if the situation calls for it. Would rather not seem a victim or worthy of pity though.

3. Both impulse control and anger regulation are extremely poor. Better at impulse control now purely because I've got older and realised there are real consequences but still find it hard to control. My anger threshold is too low and I dislike it about myself because ultimately it's a loss of control which is a weakness.

4. I get sensory triggers like that which I put down to anxiety, a lack of patience and a lack of tolerance for other people.

[inanawesomewave]

Hello to all,

Apologies to my friends and followers for being way less active on here than I normally am. I'm six months pregnant and very much and in the hibernation stage. Something fun also is that you're never more antisocial than when you're pregnant. It's been a series of rages and bitternesses, and I've been feeling physically overwhelmed with how my brain is responding to what's around me. I have fought my way out of every social group I've been a part of recently as if my life somehow depended on it, which I guess at some point it did.

I'll be back soon with bigger ideas (and a new baby), and keep you updated with the behind the scenes things that have been going on in relation to this blog, some very exciting.

In the mean time, please continue to reach out via messages and asks which I will still be answering.

Oh, and buy me a coffee. This pregnancy shit is expensive.

https://ko-fi.com/scoutbolton

Buy Scout Bolton a Coffee. ko-fi.com/scoutbolton

Buy a Coffee for Scout Bolton with Ko-fi.com

[inanawesomewave]

Im 45, and just started to go to therapy a few years ago after returning home from iraq with ptsd. Therapy has caused me to look deep within lately. In doing so I am realizing a lot of my personality traits, ones that I've had since childhood, have been faked. I have faked empathy and caring, my charm has been solely for personal gain, and I have forced myself to "fit in" with a wide variety of friend groups throughout the years but have never remained close to ANY friends. Have you felt this?

I think this is a really good question and I’d like to personally learn more about the link between PTSD and personality disorder, because I think symptoms overlap to such an extent that a lot of psychiatrists even find it hard to distinguish between the two, and many many people have both. I have certainly had that thing of, trying to work out when certain traits began, only to find they might have always been there. I wonder if you found those traits are what helped you in your military service, or your desire to join in the first place? Did you find they helped or hindered you?  As for my advice, I would suggest you try looking into your upbringing or the traits belonging to your primary caregivers, if you were raised within the confines of a childhood that needed you to employ superficial charm, to circumvent around empathy, and to learn how to adapt socially? And did you ever find yourself practising how to be charming and sociable? And if so, why might that be? These are indeed all ASPD traits, and in understanding them, it’s often necessary to understand why they were formed in the first place. 

However, please make sure you are in a mentally clear or calm place before delving into your childhood, especially with the therapy you are already in for your PTSD. It could be worth raising this with your therapist so you can talk about these things safely, it could be that once you access those traits and are able to explain them, many other things might begin to make sense. But do be safe. 

[inanawesomewave]

Do you ever find yourself just staring forward, not at anything in particular, no exact thought in mind, you feel almost like you're floating, and can kind of feel your eyes are opening more but you aren't doing it? Also, if something isn't giving you feedback on a second-to-second basis does it drive you mad with boredom? like an animal ripping through your skin to get out. Do you see people as "people"? or just inhabitants that only exist when you want them to. Multiple questions im sorry

Don’t apologise, I’ll answer as best I can. 1. I zone out an awful lot. I realise more that I do it now than before, but it’s been mentioned of me. I’d rather be up in my head than anywhere else a lot of the time, it’s willing dissociation. It’s choosing to drop out.

2. That’s such a good point, god I need the feedback. I need to be updated, communicated with. I can’t be in the dark about anything, if a task isn’t giving me reliable gratification I don’t want to do it, this is probably why I like target-based things so much. When I experience the infamous ASPD boredom, I feel wild. It’s restless and feels dangerous even if only to me. I can’t explain very well but I think from what you’ve said that you completely understand.  3. I have recently come to realise that I am rarely able to see people as a whole, and not constructs or systems of their environment etc. My issue has always been this, that I don’t know how to see a person as anything more than lots of moving parts all assembling to form what looks like a cohesive whole. This is because of a lack of empathy I think, it’s very hard to see anyone as this whole when you can’t empathise, because empathy isn’t just this grand gesture of caring, it’s miniscule ways of understanding people at a basic level and functioning in a normal way. If you don’t empathise, you don’t actually know anyone. You just can’t. And there’s no getting around that. Especially in a world that built you to have no empathy, because in order to cope you don’t just need the empathy or the performance of empathy. You need the will. I don’t have the will most of the time.