i have something of an axe to grind today, chums, and before I go on, I want to make a clarifier: if you need emotional support you have every right to ask for it. You can consensually request someone help you by asking them if they are able. This is a fair exchange. That’s how it works.
Someone I’ve never met, interacted with, acknowledged or invited into my life has been sending me TEN THOUSAND MILLION messages on facebook today, opening up to me about her whole emotional life, needing my comfort, telling me her entire story from birth to the present day, giving me her traumas, leaving a breadcrumb trail of inferred statements that may point to a larger intention, wanting my help, wanting my empathy, wanting my emotional labour. And why does she think this was a perfectly acceptable thing to do? Because she has a mental illness. Now, I’ve said the bare minimum to her and even said: “I have antisocial personality disorder. I do not form immediate emotional connections with people. There is nothing I can offer you in this situation.”, and in return I have received dozens more messages. So today I want to talk about something we never talk about: we should start disclosing our diagnoses so we too can be treated with basic respect.
Why is it in situations such as these the onus is fully upon us to be cooperating, compassionate and open because of someone else’s mental illness? It seems to me that if sociopaths don’t perform emotional tasks that we are literally incapable of, think-pieces pop up and subreddits appear that focus on how cold, robotic and cruel we naturally are. It is not so much that we invited a person in and later discarded them, iit’s that we made it clear we didn’t want them in the first place, and that’s because we have a mental illness that makes it very difficult for us to do so, even on the rare occasions when we want to. So let me make this clear, in language we can all understand:
I have a lack of empathy. I can empathise with people I have chosen to love, people I care about, but in general I cannot and do not empathise with strangers, members of the general public, etc. i can’t empathise with you by proxy just because I’m friends with one of your friends, that doesn’t mean I’m automatically able to empathise with you. My lack of empathy is directly related to my childhood trauma.
I am not very emotionally available. I feel hostile and agitated when someone tries to force emotional labour out of me, or is clearly trying to elicit some predetermined emotional reaction (such as guilt, shame, sadness, fear). I feel aggressive when this continues and it’s clear someone is trying to extract empathy from me, like trying to get blood from a stone. You may as well give up. It’s ridiculous you’re even trying. If you are told to stop, you have to stop, because if you continue, you are being abusive. When I was a child, my emotions were manipulated often and the person who abused me would use guilt, shame and big emotional outbursts as a mean of controlling and isolating me. I am triggered when you try to force me to have a specific emotional reaction, it reminds me of my trauma. When I am triggered, my reaction is anger.
I have a profound lack of connection to the feelings of others and I also have this same lack with regard to my own emotional processes. If I cannot navigate the names of my own emotions, their purpose or their resolution, then I certainly cannot do that job for you. This is because I was mocked and derided for emotional expression as a child, and eventually all my emotions were dismissed entirely so that I could exclusively cater for the person who was abusing me. I cannot give you emotional support because this was a large part of my childhood trauma.
Finally, my personality formed around a trauma. All of the things I just mentioned came from adapting to and surviving trauma. It doesn’t make me a cold-blooded demon to not want to give you all the emotional shit you are demanding from me, it makes me a survivor of trauma. Sometimes, survivors of trauma don’t look like victims, in fact to you we may seem that we came out on top and you’d love to believe that this is because we were born bad, evil, irredeemably malignant. But the truth is, we had significant childhood trauma and it has irrevocably damaged every part of our emotional development.
I just wanted to make sure we’re all on the same page here. If someone isn’t offering you the emotional support you seem to need in that immediate moment, without hesitation, it’s not a good enough reason to call that person out for being inherently bad, and it’s not emotional abuse. You should question yourself, too. You can’t then leave clues that something bad will happen (which is called coercive control and is illegal and abusive no matter what your diagnosis is) and then accuse us of being the problem when we don’t respond. This is abusive and hypocritical. If you would not try to force a person paralysed from the waist down to walk, then you must not try to force a sociopath to empathise with you. Your need to be the exception to the rule is self-obsessed, grandiose, and toxic. The reasons why you hate us and think we’re selfish monsters is because we are not catering to you when you’re being a selfish monster. You are not a victim of sociopathy because you tried to force something we were obviously not able to give. You have not experienced sociopathic abuse just because we were not able to give you therapy, become your family, fix your problems and call you sweetheart whilst brushing your hair. That’s on you. That’s your thing. And your thing is abusive, you are reminding us of our abuse. You are not the only person suffering, and fuck it – this doesn’t even apply to just sociopaths. You cannot and should not try to force emotional labour out of anyone. Reaching out to a friend when you need help is fine. Asking for consent is reasonable (”hey, can I talk to you for a second?” “sure”). Trying to make people perform specialist roles in your life so that you can *heal* is abusive and toxic, and it’s not everyone else’s responsibility to keep you happy, some of that – a lot of that – is your job.
Sociopaths are seen as evil because we will walk away or cut you out when this kind of fuckery goes on. But we’re just like everyone else, only we have the lack of inhibition to actually say it, and that’s a large part of sociopathy that people miss – the only difference between us and you is we’ll say it, we’ll do it, we won’t need to find an excuse. But sociopaths got hurt really bad, and we too are reacting to trauma. We had trauma. We might still be having it. We are here too. And you need to leave us alone.
blakekathryn
vaporwave
discoholicmusic
stormborns
andulkaphoto
titsay
germansingergirl
pixelskylines
origamiaround
