(it/her)
stormykat
Karma: 11
Wondering how you’d characterise someone with characteristics more like me.
I’ve been described as sociopath-like by my partner, a close friend and a psychiatrist. I have essentially no capacity for empathic concern or guilt (although this is confounded by being highly alexithymic and autistic) - even at times when I’ve intentionally done very obviously bad and harmful things that seriously distress loved ones. I don’t have the instinctive sense of taboo / repulsion that seems to come naturally to most people and have socially gotten in trouble for this (talking to people about the moral nature of bestiality for fun not realising people were becoming genuinly repulsed at the concept- not understanding when I’m supposed to ‘boo’ vs ‘yay’ if you know what I mean).
However I have a very strong drive to be liked and have always been hyper sensitive to peoples opinions and perceptions of me (maybe related to this: I score very above average on covert narcassism scales). I am also a woman which might have something to do with the patterns I’ve learned too, I don’t know.
Oh wow thanks for the response! Also sorry I’m so late in replying as well, long story.
In terms of your NPD thing about having an unusually strong reaction to others attention- how might you explain the difference between overt and covert narcisissm through this? Its always seemed to me like narcasism is surely a reaction to or coping mechanism that arises from persistent insecurity early in development, or something like that. But is there not actually good evidence for this? I guess maybe the early-life insecurity in general and the narcisissm more specifically are both mutual effects of the ‘unusually strong reaction to others attention’… But then you would expect sensitivity to others opinion to correlate with narcissism far above and beyond insecurity specifically.. I will look into this (I guess it depends on whether you think the heightened reaction is the root cause, or if its just downstream of ‘early-life insecurity’ or something like that. by default the second feels more intuitive but i dont know) (EDIT: did research. you’re probably right. there seems good evidence narcissism and self-esteem are pretty strongly dissociable and its more just that people higher in narcissism simply fluctuate in self-esteem way more depending on the approval/disapproval of others, which matches your hypothesis)
I think your alexithymia comment makes a lot of sense and matches anecdotally very well. I was hyper emotional as a child, I even originally had a righteous sense of justice and could become very horribly distressed at watching my beloved heroes on TV lose battles and such (vivid memory of being a pre-adolescent watching a documentary on Hitler scream-crying fantasising about torturing him for eternity in my mind- a very very alien kind of reaction to the present-day me). Cue teenage years with a lot of dissociation and emotional-suppression, followed up by an adult me who has learned how to act kind pretty reliably but feels little for others and has little to no ‘moral feeling’.
I do agree the alexithymia certainly matters a lot in my phenomenology- for example one of the worst things I ever did I did feel an unpleasant pressure in my head when thinking about it, which was definitely in retrospect a kind of guilt, functionally speaking at least. It didn’t have the default phenomenology of ‘I can’t believe I hurt this person, how horrible, I must apologise to make up for it!’ that the average person seems to describe guilt as having, but it played a similiar-ish role in my behaviour, and did seem to be ‘punishment at hurting someone you’re not supposed to hurt’, so…
I don’t think its just ‘its there but you don’t notice it’ though- given how intense the reactions were in early childhood I do think I could notice. Like I can notice very strong, straightforward emotions in myself but I have done / seen things that would trigger any typical persons guilt / empathy very very strongly but I feel no meaningful physiological symptoms at all. Because of this I think its also largely just that guilt/empathy got heavily inhibited/surpressed over time from being so exhausting and miserable for me to feel. Empathy was often awful for me to feel and I’m happy to feel much less of it (‘empathy’ here meaning emotional contagion, not empathic concern specifically).
The thing with empathic concern is that from what I understand, it requires a kind of additional component on top of emotional contagion empathy? Like ‘youre in pain and that hurts me’ + ‘so i will care for u’. Even when I was young and the first component was in full swing I’m not sure I ever really developed the second. So that might be less of a ‘alexithymia’ + ‘emotional suppression’ thing and more of a social stunting thing?? Because even when I absolutely did not know how to suppress those feelings the care still never naturally came, so that seems like something is lacking beyond the influence of those two components. I had friends in early childhood who never really showed sympathy ever and if anything tended to ignore or make fun of me for crying when hurt and stuff like that. Given these sorts of childhood learning experiences plus the intrinsic difficulties growing up with autism, it seems plausible to me I just never quite learned how to turn second-hand distress into concern reliably, so that social instinct just never really healthily developed. But I could be wrong.
Even nowadays very occassionally when I’m presented with extremely strong stimulus I will feel emotional contagion- such as feeling really awful because my girlfriend feels awful, but this will never really become any meaningful impulse towards helping or attempting to alleviate that suffering for her. (If anything it will often [although far from always] tend to become anger or irritation). Thanks to my narcissism issues i tend to have anger issues where if my loved ones aren’t behaving the way im supposed to, such as feeling distress when i dont want them to, i can develop regular bursts of anger. this ties into ur ‘anger issues’ thing i think. writing this out it seems to my ‘sociopathy-like symptomology’ are maybe just quite polycausal in origin >//<
I’m also very sadistic which is a final thing that I guess could be influencing me, I can get a very strong rush of pleasure from cruelty, even when its not totally fake / consensual. This probably hepls surpress any empathetic response further depending on context.
so then perhaps… alexithymia + emotional suppression + autism in general + childhood experiences + some kind of subclinical narcissistic anger thing? = the reason why.. ?
By writing this out I think I’ve developed a historical model of myself. Although I’m interested if you think I’m very likely mistaken about any of this. Thank you!!! Fun!!