#antisocial tag

[inanawesomewave]

HOW MANY TIMES

This just in: I still have antisocial personality disorder. The diagnosis I was given still applies. Some other breaking news: antisocial personality disorder is a disorder of interpersonal functioning. Some insider knowledge: it cannot be cured.

I cannot practise radical kindness and universal empathy. I have a low tolerance for a lot of behaviours and therefore people that I cannot make space for in my life and when I am expected to go against that for  the sake of someone’s feelings, I am completely incapable. That is the personality disorder I have. I cannot make space in my life for people I don’t like, I do not have the empathy. I do not have the compassion.

I love the people I love. The myth that ASPD is a disorder of lovelessness is exactly that, a myth. I have friends I would walk to the ends of the earth for, I have been in love in ways that made me want to do all I could to be a better person, and I have children that I adore and am happily devoting my life to loving and protecting. But you know what I’m not good with? People I didn’t want in the first place. 

I do not have an obligation to make space for people I do not like, or find problematic. I see people I love as people. I see everyone else as functioning systems, for want of less quite obviously sociopathic language. I can see those flaws, I can see the weak spots (and please don’t think for a second  this means I am not critical of myself or I cannot use  that tool with which to examine myself, no sociopath likes themselves, we’re not out here thinking we’re better than everyone -- we know we’re worse. We’re  trying to get through the day just like you are, and sometimes in order to get through the day we have to not accommodate for every single person we find problems with which is what we’ve been doing since childhood). I have no duty, emotionally or morally, to objectively love anyone in light of the things about them I do not like. I do not know how to love someone I do not like or do not know. The concept of practising universal love to me is like asking someone with severe depression to practise universal joy. It is not possible. It does not fit. 

I don’t have in me a tension between wanting to love people and wanting to question their motives and morals, because I’m not an empath. I don’t struggle with that quandary, for me that quandary does not exist. I don’t look at a person I do not like and think, “but what’s really going on? I wonder if they’re actually just sad? I wonder what their life is like? I wonder if I could overcome this with love?”. I have not got that capability. 

I do not have empathy for people I have not actively decided to have empathy for. My lack of empathy is full of contempt and it is hostile. I am angry, chronically so, and I do not pretend that I am not bitter. I see my flaws but I see yours too. I’m contemptuous that you do not see your own. I’m furious about that. The audacity of it. The outright hubris of demanding my empathy from down there in the gutter where you are, where we all are. 

My contempt isn’t based around me wanting your love and secretly being sad I didn’t get it. My sense of unlovability has nothing to do with you, it has to do with me and my trauma. The only people I expect love from are the people I give love to, and I understand, with my antisocial perspective, that love isn’t always infinite and has to come with boundaries. To expect my boundless love is disgusting. To expect it of anyone when you know you are incapable, just as we all are to varying extents, makes me feel sick for you.

None of us are morally pure. None of us live in an unproblematic way. We should try and strive to fight the injustices we see, we should do all we can to address our own privileges. But life is a game and everything is hierarchical. It would be great if it wasn’t, but it is. There’s a system, a structure, a way things currently are and have been for a long time, and that system/structure is detestable, loathsome, but real, and its realness is the foundation of all of my hate. I see that I am not better than anyone, but that’s the difference between you and me. I am not trying to pretend that I can exist in a beautiful way. I do not claim that I can live, laugh, and love. In the same way that I am not better than anyone, I feel strongly and truthfully that nobody is better than me. I see people adhering, falling into power dynamics, playing up to authority, accepting the self-appointed greatness of others, and I see a weakness that throws me into a spiral of anger and disgust that I cannot express to you in words because it is something that I’ve never been able to explain to people who are not Cluster B, or specifically antisocial. You don’t know what this feeling is like, but it’s not nice. The word antisocial does not mean asocial. It means, to be critical of societal norms and structures, to disregard and disrespect them. It’s why antisocials break the law. We don’t respect it. Not because we’re trying to be edgy and not because we want to be seen as tough. It’s because we do not understand it. There are no consequences when this isn’t real. 

I have a diagnosis of Antisocial Personality Disorder. Sometimes, SOMETIMES, this means I might be... I dunno, what’s the word... got it. ANTISOCIAL. You know why people really hate sociopaths? Because it’s someone in the world you know you can’t trick into loving you. You know that a percentage of the population exists that might never, ever tolerate you. And you’re frightened of that. And that’s pathetic.

You are all so fucking tolerant of mental illness when it’s something cute, aren’t you. Let me word this in a way you might be able to understand:  I DO NOT HAVE THE SPOONS REQUIRED TO LOVE AND PROTECT PEOPLE I DO NOT LIKE OR KNOW. STOP ASKING ME TO. I HAVE GOT ANTISOCIAL PERSONALITY DISORDER. GET THAT INTO YOUR FUCKING HEADS.

[inanawesomewave]

I GIVE UP

I can’t keep doing this fight any more. I have never known how to be a good person, but all I know is, I’ve been consistently told since my earliest memories that I’m irredeemably bad, unlovable, worthless and selfish, that this is why the parent who abused me did what she did -- I deserved it.

I try hard to be a good person, and when you don’t know what that is or how people function, it can’t work out. I’m angry all the time and the more I try to do the right thing, the more I find myself coming up against much harsher criticism than I ever did when I wasn’t trying in the least bit to do the right thing. I can’t see past myself, my lack of empathy brings a great lack of awareness and understanding that I don’t think people really consider when they talk about what a lack of empathy really is. How can I really assimilate in any meaningful way if I have such a wall up between me and the world? How can I ever try to pretend that I’m part of the world, part of society, part of human interaction, when I only have an extremely rudimentary understanding of people, and that understanding is based off of trauma, abuse and neglect? Violence? How do I know what good looks like? How do I know what bad looks like? How do I know where I am in all of this if goodness and badness is something I don’t understand? I make stabs in the dark about what I think is wrong and right according to my own moral compass: don’t hurt children. Don’t assault, rape, abuse, neglect. Nothing in-between. How am I even getting that wrong? Because I don’t know how to come across. I don’t know how to care about the things I care about without caring about them in purely antisocial and narcissistic ways. If everything I do to help anyone is filtered through these dark triad lenses, then is the output the same as if I never cared or never tried? 

I don’t fit here. I have never fit here. I used to cope with that by being hideously awful. My question is, which is better? Being awful and knowing you are? Or being awful when that awfulness is clouded by a drive to be a better person? Should I be a self-aware asshole or a completely blinkered asshole who has started to believe they’re doing good work? Which is the more toxic thing? Because those are my options. I’ve been here for thirty years and trust me, those are my options. I have exhausted every other avenue. 

I tried to learn empathy. I’m bad at it. I tried to learn remorse, I’m in the way of it. I try not to flout boundaries but then who the fuck am I to know what a boundary is? I don’t like people. I profoundly do not like or trust 99% of people. My pain comes entirely from having to be in their world and not my own. The whole pain of sociopathy is having to fit in a world that resents you and that your resent, and trying to mask that contempt with primitive efforts that convince nobody, not even myself, if I’m honest with myself. 

My understanding of the world is primary colours. I cannot see people for the whole of the person. I do not know how to fix myself and I haven’t had the will to, maybe ever. I learned very quickly in my efforts to be nicer and more appealing that this disorder has kept me alive for a reason. For three years I have tried and I’ve ended up in a worse place than before. 

Sociopaths run riot, there’s nothing here for us. I’m tuning back out and pretending no more. There’s a lot about love and compassion that I simply do not know and have tried to learn and cannot. I know I’m loving my children and my friends properly, but if I carry on trying to accommodate for anyone else at all then I know my empathy and love is finite enough that my own badness will find ways to spore outward, it always does. I’m going back to being honest about having no room, and when being honest isn’t in my best interest, I’m going back to outright lying. That’s what everyone else does. Those are the rules of the game. 

[inanawesomewave]

Study discovers abnormal expression of genes in psychopathy | University of Helsinki

Psychopathy is known to be strongly hereditary, but whether or not it is associated with abnormal expression of genes or proteins in neurons has remained unclear– up until now.

The expression of many genes that have previously been associated with autism is abnormal also in violent psychopathy, a new study shows. The researchers used stem cell technology to analyse the expression of genes and proteins in the brain cells of psychopathic, violent offenders. Published in Molecular Psychiatry, the findings could open up new avenues for the treatment of psychopathy. These new findings support the idea of abnormal opioid system function being a factor underlying psychopathy. This suggests that using long-lasting injections of naltrexone or buprenorphine to balance the opioid system could be feasible treatment for psychopathy. So what does this mean for psychopaths?  - It could mean that psychopathy as a spectrum (as we all know it is) could be viewed as just that, a spectrum disorder, to use the comparison, then sociopaths would be the autism equivalent of Asperger’s, with all antisocial presentations existing on a Spectrum of Psychopathic Disorders.  - This means psychopathy would have to be reclassified as a developmental disorder and not a mental illness, meaning that treatment would have to be optional and not mandatory. It also means that psychopaths could indeed consent to treatment rather than incarceration. Countless studies have shown that psychopaths simply do not respond to prison time or punishment, because of a breakdown in understanding that a punishment is supposed to put you off doing that thing again - psychopaths are known to reoffend shortly after release, and find themselves happy to fit into whatever environment they are placed in, such as prison. This new finding could change how psychopaths are treated. - The word “psychopath” itself could be officially seen as a slur! Imagine someone tells you, “God my boss at work is a real asshole, cut my holiday pay and made me do overtime” and you say “ugh. I BET he’s a fucking autist.” How awful does that sound? That’s because it is awful. The word “psychopath” has long been a word that simply means, “bad person”, this might finally have to change.  -  In reclassifying psychopathy as a developmental disorder, a lack of empathy and conscience can no longer be seen as being the fault of the psychopath, this is huge news especially for children who show psychopathic traits such as Oppositional Defiant Disorder and Conduct Disorder, who are vilified by social workers and health professionals, and traumatised by their parents for being “bad”. That is to say, people will have to start treating psychopaths with empathy, which has been shown to actually work in helping the psychopath to develop remorse.  - Charities will pop up claiming to cure psychopathy, and these will be seen in the same vain as Autism Speaks, Psychopathy Advocates will be able to exist to discuss the ethics of forcibly “treating” psychopathy or suggesting it should indeed be treated. Psychopathy is now a neurodivergence and has an organic cause, and whilst there was no excuse previously to treat it in this weirdly puritanical way, there really is no excuse now. 

- Psychopathic traits can be better understood by psychologists who can now see primary and secondary traits: primary being those that are directly organic, this could be the lack of empathy, alexithymia, inability to properly code people’s facial expressions (often confusing lots of expressions for fear, hate, disgust, contempt); secondary could be the traits that have come from a lifetime of having to adjust to the specific neurodivergence of psychopathy: cynicism, contempt, manipulation, lying, conning, stealing, etc.  We will have a very long way to go, but we are some of the way there. 

[inanawesomewave]

IT IS DOUBLE PLEASURE TO DECEIVE THE DECEIVER

Today I want to talk about what happens when the antisocial personality disordered service with complex care needs and behavioural issues -- ah fuck it -- the sociopath, finds out they have been lied to.  What’s your normal reaction when someone you trust and/or love comes at you with a lie? It may take you a while to figure it out, or maybe they’re a bad liar or have lied to you before and you can watch the lie play out as it comes out of their mouth, and a normal reaction would be anger, sadness, despair, all of those things. So what would you do in the wake of that lie? If you were healthy and strong, you might confront it in a controlled way. No matter how strong you are, you may behave irrationally, you may become suspicious or go into paranoia overdrive, perhaps you’ll find yourself becoming increasingly sarcastic or mean, you might just burst into tears, and all of those are normal reactions when you find you’ve been lied to. But today I want to talk about what I think might be the antisocial reaction to lies.  When I’m lied to, there will always be a part of me that feels wounded and in pain, if the person lying to me is someone i’ve let into my life and my mind. Yes, it’s true, we feel pain. I probably won’t know the name of the pain I’m feeling, and when this lack of emotional connection to myself happens, I react with -- yep, you guessed it -- rage. That’s my default setting. I’ve been told in the past, “what you’re experiencing is despair”, “it’s probably because you feel so insignificant”, “it makes sense that right now you would be going through a sense of unease”, or whatever, and when it’s pointed out to me, I can sometimes grab onto that description and root around in my psyche to see if that was a correct assessment, and if it is, I can latch onto it somewhat. But anger is what happens to antisocials who experience alexithymia (an inability to identify or explain one’s own emotions). Like this: 

I often need someone to tell me what they think I’m feeling, and then, if it starts to make sense, I’ll assume that’s what’s what. I’m not the kind of sociopath who will brag about how little I like to hear about other people’s emotions, because really, I love hearing about people’s emotional worlds. Yes, perhaps I despise the assumption that it’s my job to feel on behalf of someone else, that being a good person isn’t so much tied in helping someone with a problem as it is feeling that problem, but listening to how people process their emotions is useful to me, and also kind of fascinating. If you’ve heard that sociopaths have no feelings, what’s perhaps more accurate is we don’t know we have feelings.  So, we lash out. Anger is the most deregulated emotion in antisocial personality disorder, and I believe that’s because it’s our real emotions that are deregulated, but rage and hostility is the other mask we wear, the most pervading one, the one that we have even convinced ourselves with.  So, when experiencing a lie, we’ll get angry.  But it doesn’t end there.  Antisocial personality disorder comes with many choices. I once likened it to living in a constant click-and-point video game, and I stand by that. In moments of violent conflict or threat you might see a glass bottle on the ground and quick as lightening your brain will light the thing up and you’ll run through the options: do I want to pick up this bottle? Do I want to use it as a weapon? Do I want to hide it and come back to it? Do I want to leave it and scan the room to see what else is here? And, in times of interpersonal conflict, something rather more abstract, you may experience anger, and the angry part of your brain will light up (🎵hello amygdala my old friend🎵 ) and your rationale (if we can ever really have that) will say: what do I want to do with this anger? Do I want to direct it to the threat? Do I want to harm them with it? Do I want to pretend it isn’t there? Do I want to hide it and come back to it? Do I want to leave it and scan my brain to see what else is here? But then there comes the big one -- do I want to accept the truth of this anger? Do I want to display it?  Do I want to play the game? 

When you are used to anger being your default setting, you learn lots of different ways to express it, and whilst the explosive kind of “FUCK YOU AND FUCK EVERYTHING YOU STAND FOR” is what we’d most likely think of when thinking of what rage looks like, there’s many ways it can come through, and the example I gave here of reacting to a lie I think is a good place to start when talking about this. Because anger isn’t always fireworks. A lot of the time, it’s silence. Amusement. Catharsis. Comedy. It’s like we have to take the “generic bad” feeling, reroute it to anger, and let it come back out as something else. It’s like, when it comes to our feelings, we have taken a sentence, run it through Google translate into a foreign language, taken that foreign language and put it back through Google translate again, and try to make something of the broken English we’ve come back with. 

You’re trying to humiliate me and now I am angry lie. My angry lie is that I think you’re a bad person. I think you’re selfish. I have never liked you. This is hilarious to me. I deserve better than this...  I deserve better than this is the biggest lie we tell when we’re lied to, because deep down, we don’t think we deserve better than this at all. If antisocial personality disorder has its roots in deeply embedded cynicism, pessimism, isolation and trauma, then every single mask we wear is one of ultimate power, control, self-assuredness and confidence. I deserve better than this can never be true, because that would require empathy, and our lack of empathy is most evident when it comes to talking about ourselves. If we don’t know the names of our feelings, we cannot empathise with them.  So what’s the next step? You know the old saying, “fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me”? When you have a lowered ability to experience remorse and guilt, no propensity to feelings of regret, shame doesn’t come into it. I’m not ashamed I let myself be lied to. I’m... what’s the word? What’s the name of this? Oh right, that’s it. I’m angry. But I did the shouting, kicking off, the big display of ego when I was fooled the first time. The second time, the lie lights up in my head: do I want to pick up this lie? Do I want to confront this lie? Do I want to pretend it isn’t there? Do I want to leave it there for a second whilst I scan whatever else is going on, for example: does the liar seem to also be sad, confused, misunderstood, are they nervous? Playing with their hair, looking off in different directions, are they shaking or babbling or misdirecting? And what do I want to do with that? Do I want to tell them my suspicions? And just what is this? Why are these things lighting up? Is it a game? Is this a game?! Can I win it?! And this is why Machiavelli once famously said, “it is double pleasure to deceive the deceiver”, and this is why Machiavellianism forms part of the Dark Triad of psychopathy. Because it’s abnormal to see a lie as a game, it’s clinically weird, psychologically speaking, it’s crazy cuckoo. Why would anyone watch someone lie and feel a sense of relief washing over them (in an awesome wave)? Why would anyone in their right mind see a lie happen, and then wonder for how long the rally of lies can go back and forth, to see who will break first, to take the liar and lie to them so hard they’ll regret ever lying to you? As I outlined at the beginning of this blog, there are normal reactions to lies and even the explosive and distressed ones are normal. What’s abnormal is the willingness and even eagerness to throw oneself into the pit and get right into it. Because people with antisocial personality disorder are always seeking out conflict. Even when we’re evolved, doing better these days, in therapy, writing a blog -- we don’t like the things you don’t like, and nobody likes being lied to. The motivation, however, to not come back fighting and transform the sadness into rage and the rage into a comedy that only amuses ourselves is antisocial. It’s an unwillingness and/or inability to read the social situation, and it’s cynicism distilled. It doesn’t matter who, it doesn’t matter when. We believe that everyone is capable, more than capable, of badness, deceit, immorality and sadism, and what drives our utter lack of faith in humanity is the lie that people tell themselves to prove they would never display those traits. When someone shows their hand, a good person without a diagnosis, it’s double pleasure. It’s the pleasure of overcoming whatever pain you almost felt, and the exquisite pleasure of finally having your worst fears confirmed. Because after all, if it really is a dog-eat-dog world, as evidenced by someone else’s deceitfulness, then chaos can thrive. And, being justified, it doesn’t need to hide behind a mask. And it’s hard to trust a liar again. Our personalities are built around distrust, so the best we can hope for is to feel/not feel that way, and make it work for us. That’s what ASPD is. That’s who we are. And for you, the thought that people are fundamentally bad and self-serving might be a terrifying prospect, so it would make sense you’d want to protect yourself from that. But for us, that thought is what protects us, and it protects us in more ways than you know.