#also can we just stop infantilising things and people well past childhood?

[stellacaerulea]

I'm fully aware I'm going out on a limb here but

Can we just agree to not take opinions based on false premises? That's how we end up having senseless debates in the world (let alone the internet)

[inanawesomewave]

MY FRIENDS SAY I HAVE NO EMPATHY, BUT I DON’T UNDERSTAND WHY THEY FEEL THAT WAY.

Since I started therapy a while ago I’ve started to notice there are parts of my personality that are cooling down when before they’d spill over and reach boiling point. I’m still combative but I know which battles to walk away from -- no, I know which battles to not forcibly insert myself in even though they had fuck all to do with me and all I wanted was an excuse to fight. I’m better at laying down a healthy boundary rather than puffing my chest out and becoming as intimidating as possible to someone who didn’t know they’d flouted a boundary I forgot to lay down, and instead plotting to harm them for doing such a thing. I have started to accept that my rage about my childhood isn’t something that can ever go away and it shouldn’t have to, but that I can move with it without having to convert it to something I can’t accept like forgiveness or acceptance. I know how to be angry at one thing, and I’m learning how to compartmentalise that anger without turning it into anger at everything else. I’m not great at these things, but I’m getting aware, and I’m trying. 

Something peculiar has happened, possibly for the best, since we hit our stride with the therapy. We’re doing some schema stuff, that’s what worked for me in the past, and my therapist goes over some old traumas with me and we look for repeating patterns, why that might be, and how I’m reacting to things, how I might be contributing to my own unhappiness and fury. But also, without him telling me, “here’s how to empathise, and here’s why you should do it”, I’ve started to look at empathy in a new light. Let me explain.

It happens when I’m watching a tv show or a film. A character will say something to another character, something hurtful or cruel, and for the first time in my life I’m stopping to think, not even consciously, “I wonder how that other person feels having heard that?”. I’ll think, “I say things like that all the time and it doesn’t mean anything to me, but that other person seems hurt. Don’t they know it doesn’t mean anything?” and then I realise, “no, they don’t.”. It’s not like I’m consciously scouring for empathy, but i’m noticing it. Right now, it’s only in fiction, but it’s the first awareness of concerted empathy I’m having about myself. And it’s funny, because I sit there and I’ll hear a character say the kind of things I would normally quite casually say, and I’m starting to confront why it is cruelty can often spill out of me without me noticing what the big deal is. I think it’s because, for antisocials who are made by their environment (i.e are abuse victims), the language of cruelty is the one we were taught fluently. I remember being a small child and saying something quite hurtful to my dad (he wasn’t abusive in any way, he was very compassionate and supportive). He didn’t shout at me, but he sat me down, and said: “That thing you said to me, that was really hurtful and it’s made me sad. Why did you say that?” and I remember bursting out into tears. It wasn’t so much that I’d hurt him, though that was part of it, it was that I was stunned at my own obliviousness as to how I could have hurt someone I really loved. How could someone I care about so much be hurt by something I said? How did I not notice I was doing that? With my mother it was always different, she used to refer constantly to “a battle of wills”, so cruelty was something she wanted to match word for word. Her punishments were bizarre and severe, and if I didn’t react to that punishment with deference and regret, she would tell me, “I won’t enter into another battle of wills with you”, and the whole thing would become a face-off. She never told me, “that thing you said to me was hurtful”, or “I’m sorry I said that hurtful thing to you”. It was always, “yeah? You think that’s hurtful? You should hear what I’m about to say to you next”. It was a rally, a back and forth, a constant testing of boundaries on both sides. I was punished for not being subservient enough, and then forced into that subservience by any means necessary. Of course I didn’t learn how to be considerate of others, I was having to feign empathy and consideration for my abuser so she’d leave off me and believe I was on her side, and then learn how to resent myself for at least appearing to display weakness to her. If I were a gold star sociopath, no other personality disorder, I’d probably be able to rationalise this pretend subjugation as being part of the game. But I have at the very least some significant traits of narcissism, so the battle going on in my head was one of survival, and self-loathing at how I appeared to survive. Of course, in this melee, I never really learned what empathy looked like. I only ever saw empathy as: 1. Something I have to perform to stay safe. 2. Something people perform so they can exploit you. 3. A lie people tell to get what they want. 4. A foolproof way to collect allies. 

Now, at the ripe old age of 30, I still don’t fully understand or trust the safety of empathy, and I’m not sure how deep into the empathy rabbit hole I want to go. Do I want to learn how to naturally experience it, the automatic ping of it when I witness pain in another person? Not really, no. I’m still stubbornly holding onto my personality disorder like a shield. After all, that’s why they form. Survival. I’m not even sure how I feel about having the nature of empathy unfold before me like this. I feel... deficient. There’s nothing quite so infantilising as having to go through the motions of empathy through tv characters, like a child being taught by a therapist through play. I feel confused, because there’s three ways in which I can be mean: there’s the concerted, applied way in which I work out what would hurt that person the most and then I say it. There’s the panic move when I’m in a conflict and I need to get out of it on top, looking like I have some power, so I say the thing that will push the red button so I can leave the situation having tricked myself that I won it. Finally, there’s the one I’m currently learning -- there’s the fluency of my day to day cruelty, my natural speech which is peppered with insults and personal bait, the things I don’t realise I’m saying. The things I don’t try to say, or craft, or plan. Just the way I am, the language I speak. And that’s what I’m confronting right now, and it’s coming through when I see it reflected back to me on television. I’m not sure how I feel about it. I’m not sure that I like it. Admittedly there’s a blackness in me that wants to learn from this in a bad way, like: “Oh, I see. So that’s what people look like when they’re upset or hurt. I’ll make a note of that. This could make me powerful.”. But then I think of an old friend of mine who ended up in a medium secure unit after doing some quite... reckless things... who had a diagnosis of ASPD and also NPD. He emailed me from in there, telling me, and I quote: “And when I'm out I won't have changed, I'll still be me, I'll just have learned and I will be much more careful. “. It took him two more years to come down from his tower and what did he find when he got to the bottom? That sometimes loving people leads to being loved, and sometimes showing empathy leads to being empathised with. Our thinking is very transactional, as sociopaths. I’m sure we’re being empathised with all day long, but as we are so primitively minded, we haven’t noticed. So long as what we’re putting out is insincere, then we are convinced that what we get in return must therefore be insincere. I realise it’s not about faking it well but trying it hard, and I’m not sure where I want to be with that. After all, this personality disorder and its narcissistic little brother kicking at my shins all the time has kind of protected me. At the very least, it kept me alive. 

Empathy. What a bizarre concept indeed.