Recently in therapy my therapist suggested I might be suffering from burnout. I’ve been listless, cynical (even more so), angry, jaded, unable to pin down a proper sleeping or eating pattern, up and down, sluggish, slow, and most of all, I can’t be near people without wanting to stab them in the eye. After a little googling when I got home about what burnout is, I found it’s a term most commonly used in the workplace to describe someone who has been burned out by their job, think nurses, doctors, etc. Someone who’s lost their job satisfaction, no get up and go, and a deep sense of pessimism in regard to their job and their colleagues. The more I read, the more I found that burnout itself is not part of any major mood event or preceding psychosis, because it’s not a problem within that person at that time. Burnout is what happens when a person has a complete lack of supportive resources, nobody to bounce off, no way of airing their troubles. No safety net. And if that’s not a perfect way to explain the ways in which antisocials do indeed suffer I don’t know what is. Here’s how I see it, anyway, the job of the antisocial. The career of empathy.
I recently spoke with a friend of mine about this burnout, I wondered if he’d had it before given his hectic job and busy home-life, and he did that thing that people do all the time where something quite obvious is said and there’s no way I would have spotted it myself. He wondered if a part of it was to do with extraversion, the need to take in other people’s stories and gorge on the emotional worlds of others, become involved in some way. This friend of mind does not have antisocial personality disorder so his extraversion is just that, but I felt like there was really something to that, the exhaustion of social interaction, especially when that social interaction is something we brought upon ourselves, that’s the bind of someone who doesn’t know their own boundaries. And let’s be honest, do we think people with ASPD know their own boundaries? Really? There’s overcompensation and avoidance involved in coping with anything when you have ASPD. We don’t have boundaries, we have maladaptive schemas, and the way these show themselves are: A person needs my emotional support –> I don’t want to give it –> I need to come off as intimidating as possible so they’ll leave me alone OR I need to tell them to leave me alone and never bother me again. Very antisocial. But surely the key to ASPD is a lack of automatic empathy, isn’t that the thing that’s supposed to help us coast through life? The magical ability to not care if we don’t want? I’ve heard people say so many times how much they wish they could switch theirs off, become sociopathic for one day, to stop feeling sorry for their manipulative friend or their awful partner or their neglectful parent, but the lack of empathy we feel is causing us to be in a near constant state of burnout. When you don’t have that empathic response to everything all the time, you become acutely aware of what empathy is and how it looks. You get good at learning it and feeling it when you’ve let someone in enough, but let’s be honest, you get very good at feigning it and pretending it’s there, usually because you really do care about that person enough to show them the empathy they want in that situation, even if it’s not really there. It’s still love, it’s a way to love people, it’s just – as I always say on this blog – going the long way around. But, if you’re someone this attune to what empathy is and how it should be given, and you’re great at pretending to be empathic, what happens then? You overcompensate. You seem to be so good at empathy that people who you don’t even like start seeing you as a therapist. But you’re in too deep, you can’t tell them you’re not listening and don’t care, so you sit, and nod, and expend a lot of mental energy in just sitting and nodding: what did that facial expression mean? She did that two minutes ago when she said something similar, should I mention that I’ve noticed? Is now a time to offer advice or just to offer a tilt of the head? Do I validate? What was the name of that person she just mentioned? Do I ask about them? What are they trying to tell me? What face should I be doing? What should I say?, etc. It’s hard work, pretending very hard to be something you’re not, fitting in, wearing that mask. We don’t have healthy boundaries, we didn’t learn them. We had punitive and dismissive caregivers who didn’t allow us feelings, didn’t teach us empathy, but more often than not used empathy as a bargaining chip with which we could be manipulated and harmed. But when you know that you’re surrounded by people with this naturally occurring gift, it’s easy to be cynical of them. Again, you overcompensate how you view them, you think that if they find it so easy to perform this task of empathy, why aren’t they doing it more? You imagine “empaths” to be philanthropists, benevolent forces of good, good friends – but they’re not. And you don’t understand that. Because you’re out here trying, failing, trying harder, exhausting yourself, and they aren’t. You start to become cynical, and you have no resources, why? Because you’ve used avoidance to make sure nobody can ever come near. Who else here finds themselves wanting to burst out laughing when someone who barely knows you comes to you in a motherly way saying, “The thing is, I know the real you. I see who you really are under all that, I get you.”? That’s avoidance. We refuse refuse REFUSE to let people in, truly in, properly in, because we’ve been taught that’s harmful too. We’ve been taught it’s weak, kind of gross. There is something going on beneath the surface but we’re fucked if we know what it is and if we don’t know what it is then surely other people shouldn’t just be taking stabs in the dark, who the fuck do they think they are? No match for me, no match for my fucking deal, bitch better try… overcompensation.
Sociopaths are burnt out all the time. Overwhelming cynicism is a thing we all share in common. Look at the disgust we seem to harbour for such innocuous displays of neurotypical functioning, the audacity of the normies. We have no resources, we have been told all our lives we don’t need them and shouldn’t ask for them, so now we’re really good at either faking our commitment to relative strangers so well that everyone around us sees us as nothing more than a vessel for all of their problems, or we’re so worn down from faking it that we outright do all we can to intimidate and abandon anyone who comes close. It’s knotty, isn’t it? But my advice here, if you’d want to take my advice, is if you know a sociopath: 1. Never tell them you know the real them, you don’t. They don’t. 2. The real them isn’t going to be found by you constantly talking about yourself and never asking them how they are. 3. If you knew the real them, you’d know how much of a front this is.
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