#aspd thoughts

[maybe-an-aspd-angel]

[lemony-ink]

having low/no empathy doesn't make you evil or less-than someone else

you don't owe empathy to anyone

having NPD or ASPD doesn't make you a bad person

[divinerapturesys]

Welcome to my Ted Talk about AsPD, or Antisocial Personality Disorder, which the internet likes to coin as sociopath 👌🏻 if you don’t like long infodumps about stigmatized mental disorders from someone who is diagnosed, move on.

Quick toxic rundown: People with AsPD are generally characterized as emotionless, violent, manipulative abusers who kill animals and like to make other people their bitches. The biggest pet peeve we have is the emotionless, sadistic and abusive generalization.

Personally, we are highly neurotic, with highs and lows of: depression, frantic drive, self abuse tactics, chronic fear, lapses of rejection, overwhelming over-analyzation, grey area thinking, false goods and false bads, ultimatums, obsessive compulsive behavior, harsh self demands, and irritability.

AsPD is a disorder that is caused primarily (according to current research) by trauma and abuse in childhood; most notably being emotional neglect and absent caregivers that cause a child to have emotional shutdowns and repression episodes in an attempt to self soothe. Primary caregivers who do not bond with their children are also a factor. Children learn how to behave from those around them. If a primary caregiver is emotionally distant and unavailable, children will learn that is normal behavior and that’s how people are. If a primary caregiver does not provide empathy and sympathy during moments of distress and fear, children will learn that aloofness and disregard of others feelings is normal behavior. If a primary caregiver does not keep a child safe, children will learn that they should not prioritize their own safety or the safety of others. You can find my follow up post regarding this here.

Neglected and abused children often act out trying to get attention and help, often acting out in bad ways because they lack the ability to articulate what they’re feeling and what is happening to them. The pipeline for AsPD typically is: Oppositional Defiance Disorder as a child, Conduct Disorder as a teen, AsPD as an adult. There are a lot of warning signs cueing that AsPD is becoming a risk for development, but often kids do not have a support system to help negate it as it’s their support system that is usually a factor in its creation.

Being AsPD is like being an emotional La Croix 70% of the time. If you’re depressed, then it’s like someone in the other room has depression and is telling you about it. The other 30% of the time, if you’re depressed, your brain doesn’t understand how to handle it so it’s an ultimatum between doing something drastic to remove the Trigger or ignoring and dissociating for days on end.

People with AsPD are very good at ignoring things. Honestly it’s problematic as fuck but it’s not hard to ignore major issues when you just, don’t care. It’s not in the terms of being cruel or making ourselves not care, but the fact that finding the emotional willpower is so far out of our feasible reach we don’t do it. This causes us to piss people off because we don’t have the capacity to care as much as they want us to, even if we can and do to an extent.

Think of it this way: empathy/sympathy is a deep tub of water that everyone has. They can easily fill their measuring cup for the needed amount of empathy without any issues and it’s easy for them. People with AsPD don’t have a tub of water. We have shallow skillet. When we try to dip our cup to fill it, we can’t, it always comes up short and it is difficult to get any water in it as there is no room for the cup to dive. Our ability to care is limited because we do not have the same emotional resources everyone else does.

❌ False Positives & False Negatives ❌

I operate on what I’ve learned are called false positives and false negatives. These are things that are trained into the brain from an early age based off of childhood trauma and other factors. False positives are a distorted version of why we do something to help ourself and for our own good, meanwhile a false negative is something we do because it’s a threat, or based out of fear.

❌ Some of my false positives:

- It is good to be afraid of nothing

- It is good to adapt to someone’s personality if they are stronger than you

- It is good to isolate yourself

- It is good to be a silver tongue because you can get into any place you want

- It is good to become a social chameleon and shape yourself to whatever those around you need/want most, because then you have no chance of being abandoned

❌ Some of my false negatives, which can explain the false positives as well as core beliefs:

- it is bad to be afraid, if I am afraid then I am vulnerable and it can be used against me

- It is bad to be emotional or show concern for others emotions because they do not care for mine

- It is bad to be able to be exploited, because I believe it is everywhere

- It is bad to allow myself to be bored, because boredom begets bad thoughts and no one can or wants to help me when I spiral

- It is bad to not shape yourself to the social circle, because people quickly grow tired of those who do not match them perfectly and being discarded means I failed

My core beliefs can be viewed as the root for the false positives and negatives, because they are based on the core of trauma, abuse and neglect. They come from patterns and instances that make someone with AsPD become the opposite of what they experienced:

- eat or be eaten

- If I don’t show that my bite is worse than my bark, I will be taken advantage of and I must remain on top because the ones on top are safe

- I must look out for myself because nobody will do it for me

- It doesn’t matter what happens to me, therefore it doesn’t matter what people think of me

- If I cannot do something well, then I should not do it at all

- If you are dependent on others for emotional and mental well being, you are weak, therefore I must isolate myself to avoid becoming codependent and a burden and useless

- If I can handle the stress of a situation better than everyone else, therefore I will keep the problem (financial, emotional, mental, etc) to myself to reduce chances of being abandoned due to failure of perfection

People with AsPD are hard to get along with. We often:

- are always anticipating a fight

- lack respect for authority

- ignore social structures to an extent

- tendency to lie if it’ll lessen punishment or if we feel the lie is more acceptable than our actions

- limit social support because it’s wrong to be dependent on others

- have an inflated view of our own importance — which turns into a self ridicule for believing someome like me could be found important to others —

- can be rude and inconsiderate of others feelings somewhat unintentionally

- are unable to read the correct social cues in relation to empathy towards people and animals

- am constantly confused by others dependence upon empathy and inability to make desicions from logic based standpoints

We can’t speak for everyone who has AsPD, nor are we saying that no one with AsPD is capable of being a murderer/abuser etc. but we are saying that y’all need to stop automatically classifying someone as a certain “type” as soon as you know about their disorder.

One last thing I do want to point out is that it is not uncommon for people with AsPD to derive some sort of enjoyment in causing harm, doing something illegal, hurting someone or animals, etc. This entirely stems from lack of environmental control as a child. Being able to control what happens to others or being able to control the things you say or do that hurts someone else is a hefty high to get addicted to; it soothes the underlying itch of not being able to control your own trauma and abuse, so in turn you push these behaviors onto others and enjoy it because it gives you a sense of power and control. Some people with AsPD do genuinely love hurting others, and some enjoy hurting others when they believe it’s deserved or their ire has been stoked. Some enjoy causing pain to those they think deserve it, and others don’t care who they hurt as long as they feel like they’re in control of the situation.

Hope this have some insight into AsPD 🤙🏻 if y’all have any questions, shoot.

[autopsyfreak]

another mental illness meme i made out of boredom

[funnier-with-aspd]

I need you guys to understand that “psychopath” means “person with ASPD of an assumed psychogenic/mostly psychogenic nature who scores high on the PCL-R” and “sociopath” means “person with ASPD of an assumed traumagenic/mostly traumagenic nature who scores high on the PCL-R”. Nothing more, nothing less… Certain personality factors may be more common in one instance of ASPD than another, but it is a myth that everyone with the disorder is either “calm, charismatic, and emotionless” or “impulsive, unstable, and violent”.

[onethousand825days]

maybe it's the like npd/aspd but my brain automatically categorizes people into like little classes. like I meet a person and as I get to know them they get sorted. like there's a class for younger female sibling type friend, a class for older male person who I like but barely speak to, a class for doctors and medical professionals, a class for people my age who are like me, a class for people my age who are nothing like me, etc. and my brain has a predetermined set of mannerisms and vocabulary for interacting with each one

[lowempathychick]

Having no empathy makes me feel uncomfortable when people have empathy for me because it feels like pity and lowkey demeaning

[truthful-apologiesxoxo]

One thing that people with mental disorders besides cluster B disorders will never fully understand is that it’s near impossible for us to get help. Not saying that it’s not hard opening up to people about other mental disorders such as depression, but usually if someone opened up about their depression, they’d be responded with sympathy. But for people with cluster b disorders, if we open up about our disorders, we’ll be labeled as fucking psychos who just like manipulating people for pure evil.

[aftonsreprise]

“Having ASPD doesn’t make you a bad person.”

Okay, but having ASPD makes it so easy for me to screw over the people I love. Yes, you mean so much to me and I truly do want you to be happy, but I can rob you in your own home and feel nothing about it, and then I can lie to your face about it. Yes, I want to spent my life with you, but if you annoy me, I can slap you across the face, and to me, it doesn’t… feel as if that contradicts my love for you. It isn’t just selfishness because I would hurt myself for you, and I have, and yet I’m hurting you. Why doesn’t that feel contradictory?

It takes a lot of willpower to not be horrible when you are this way. It’s not just lacking guilt as an emotion, but about this weird gap in between affection as an emotion and… having the emotional drive to affectionate, or even decent. I’m not devoid of love. I’m devoid of… something quite different that I can’t quite put my finger on, and I don’t think ��guilt” or “empathy” as it’s understood quite describe that.

Of course, I’m not sorry for being this way, but I almost wish I was.

[k4ijynxx]

Shout out to the age regressors / system littles who have a cluster b personality disorder. You being a narcissist, sociopath, borderline, or histrionic does NOT make you a bad person and does NOT invalidate your experience. Take care <33

Edit: radqueers please stop interacting, it makes me uncomfortable /neg

[maybe-an-aspd-angel]

[suffering-from-melancholy]

"Omg I let my intrusive thoughts win!! I dyed my hair!!"

Och! Okay, if I'd let my intrusive thoughts win I will be in jail!

[yggdrasil-00]

A really dumb vent but tbh you don't have to feel empathy, guilt, sympathy, compassion, remorse, etc. to be a good person. You can feel none of these and still decide to do the right thing. In fact people who DO feel those things and STILL continue to do horrible things are worse imo.

[autopsyfreak]

the urge to stop trying and to let myself get worse

[ieatratsforbreakfast]

Something that pisses me off to high heaven is when people tell me to "have empathy."

Genuinely what am I supposed to say to that.

"Oh man I never thought of that! Let me take one minute to rewire my fucking brain so I can experience empathy."

[bpdcodone]

You ever open up to someone and feel gross afterwards and weak?