faustianslip

[faustianslip]

Does anyone else deal with like…an extreme territorial feeling when it comes to your space? Like specifically your room and anything in your room.

I see something as mine and I don’t like it being encroached on. Sometimes I don’t even care if I invited them in my room, it still upsets me. It’s to the point where I don’t like if anything in my room starts to not even smell the way I want it to. It’s kind of embarrassing because it makes me feel like some animal but I can’t help feeling overcome with agitation.

In a way my space is me, and when people encroach on it I feel as if they’re trampling over me in a way, so it just kinda ticks me off.

[faustianslip]

One thing that Ive been struggling to deal with is an almost anger or frustration that stirs when I see or interact with people who I deem as too emotional or too empathetic. I just have a hard time wrapping my head around it, because I view being too emotional or too empathetic as weakness or vulnerability, an almost “how in the world can someone be so controlled by their emotions? It leaves you open to manipulation from me or others…”.

I know the logically it is unfair to be so irritable towards people like this, which is why I’ve been trying to temper it. But I cannot shake this learned apathy I’ve built around myself like a shield, and I can’t help then showing puzzlement with others who don’t take the same defensive precautions as me.

I would describe my experience with ASPD almost as a shield of armor or defense mechanism that my brain built through childhood. I learnt to be apathetic, to not be vulnerable, to be conniving, and thus to not feel— as a way to shield myself from trauma and now I’m just like this. Slowly I am learning to maneuver life with it!

[faustianslip]

Friendship and ASPD

In a cluster b server I’m in, someone asked about how ASPD impacts friendships and I was encouraged to cross post my response on here so here we go.

Firstly, I’m going to go through how I figured out friendship and how to make it work for me starting from my lowest functioning point to where I am now.

So to begin with, I had no true circles. I floated between groups of people who could give me what I wanted in that moment and just manipulated them into giving it to me if my request alone was not satisfactory. Sometimes all I wanted was social camouflage, sometimes i wanted money or food or a distraction. It was arbitrary and there was no real long term plan - at least, when i was no longer in an environment where long term strategies were vital.

Eventually, as I started working on my recovery, I managed to maintain relationships that were exclusively online. The convenience in putting away my laptop and my social obligations disappearing along with it was immensely helpful and it gave me a way of experimenting with being a little more open and a little more attached that had no Real Life repercussions. It was still transactional, all my relationships still are to this day, but they started becoming less Obviously transactional. I was still getting physical, tangible stuff from people, but I was also getting support, a safe space to figure out how to relate to my emotions, and somewhere to practice empathy and other social skills like it. There was a lot of trial and error but when I ruined something in one space I could just start again somewhere else and not have to worry about the two overlapping.

Now that I am Recovered™️ sort of, I’ve developed Exceptions, who have at some point shown that they are trustworthy and nonjudgemental and understand the antisocial side of my personality and are happy to help me work around it. My symptoms sort of change around them. I don’t have remorse but with Exceptions I will feel a kind of visceral disgust directed at myself for how I could have hurt them like that and that will quite often spark a narc crash.

I decided a long time ago what I didn’t want to be, so throughout the entire process I was watching for patterns of behaviour that were harmful for the sake of being harmful. I created a quite intricate set of rules that I couldn’t loophole my way out of and that was very much an important factor in how I continued to develop my skills and ability to interact and maintain relationships.

I am still bad at a lot of stuff though. I don’t reach out to people, I never start conversations so a lot of people just disappear until I’m reminded of them. I’m also awful at vocalising appreciation and while I know logically that people like to help their friends, I constantly have an internal debate about whether I am taking advantage of people I don’t want to be taking advantage of (given that taking advantage of people tends to make them pissed off eventually). And there are days where I don’t want to be around anyone at all and thats ok. It’s better for me to let myself be by myself than to force myself to interact with people when I really dont want to.

Recognising where I lack skills and reflexes prosocials have has been a skill in and of itself and it took a long time to develop it. But it’s been worth it to me, I’m now able to experience and enjoy so many aspects of life I thought weren’t meant for me.

And I’m very smug about being able to get it despite it being implied I never would.

[faustianslip]

I allowed myself to believe that we as a society were trying to become more accepting of demonized mental disorders like cluster b personality types and schizophrenic spectrum disorders but nope I was wrong, it is actually legitimately becoming worse.

I don’t know what to blame for this more aggressive attitude towards demonized mental illnesses, especially those with npd and aspd, but it’s just something I’ve been noticing lately. It’s especially bad on TikTok, where those extremely clickbaity “how to combat someone with [insert demonized disorder]” or “5 signs you’re dating an undercover psychopath” videos get popular. It’s like everyone is suddenly a licensed psychologist-

I don’t know how to tell you this but no, not every evil person or abuser in your life is some sociopath or someone with NPD. Abusers are abusers, their bad behavior is not synonymous with a mental disorder they might have. Just as a mental disorder isn’t an excuse for bad behavior, a mental disorder isn’t the reason why someone has bad behavior…they’re just a bad person.

People seem to use these disorders as a synonym for “monster”, and that is a dehumanizing thing. I, as someone with ASPD, don’t exactly jump for joy at being treated like a monster. I don’t like being treated like a time bomb and I don’t like knowing that most people, even therapists, seem to believe that I’m not entitled to care or having access to getting therapeutic help. It’s isolating, I find it hard to make friends, I find it hard to even be myself in any community or even be open about me having ASPD.

If you want to make a world that is more accepting and where people should have access to help, this must include people with demonized mental disorders. You can’t just pick and choose who deserves help or not-

[faustianslip]

my anhedonia is eating me alive so i’m making these mental illness memes to cope

[faustianslip]

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.

[faustianslip]

I love and hate when I feel nothing. I go through periods where my mind is radio silent and where I don’t lash out. I’m not happy, I’m not sad, I’m not angry, I’m just nothing. It’s nice to feel nothing until my life is consumed by it. I crave to feel something, because numbly staring out into space gets boring and makes me feel fake. But, when I do feel, it’s all I feel. It’s always so intense and I never get a break. I just want to feel and think normally without having these thoughts take over and ruin everything for me. I hate feeling broken, why can’t I just be normal?

[faustianslip]

ASPD Resource Dump

feel free to reblog! here are some resources related to ASPD that i've collected since i've being diagnosed (roughly 5 years).

Sympathetic Articles

An Autistic Sociopath's Story, Cassy, through Special Books by Special Kids (video. an autistic pwASPD talks about her life and experiences with both.)

An Interview with a Sociopath, Dyshae, through Special Books by Special Kids (video. a pwASPD and bipolar disorder talks about his life and experiences with both.)

Life With Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD), Andrew, through mind.org.uk (a pwASPD's account of their life and experiences with it.)

The Hidden Suffering of the Psychopath, William H. J. Martens, MD, PhD (a sympathetic view of pwASPD, and some information on the neurobiology of ASPD.)

Factors for Development

Antisocial personality disorder in abused and neglected children grown up., B. K. Luntz, C. S. Widom (from 1994. provides evidence supporting the fact that child abuse/neglect is a predictor of antisocial behavior.)

Antisocial Personality Disorder with Childhood- vs Adolescence-Onset Conduct Disorder, Risë B. Goldstein et al. (from 2006. discusses how symptoms vary in pwASPD whose conduct disorder began in childhood vs in adolescence.)

Predictors of antisocial personality: Continuities from childhood to adult life, Emily Simonoff et al. (from 2018. draws connections between childhood behaviors, diagnoses, etc., and antisocial behavior in adulthood.)

Risk Factors in Childhood That Lead to the Development of Conduct Disorder and Antisocial Personality Disorder, Stacey E. Holmes, James R. Slaughter, Javad Kashani (from 2001. covers multiple categories that may lead to development of CD and/or ASPD, including environment, genetics, and individual differences.)

Miscellaneous Articles

Antisocial Personality Disorder: Neurophysiological Mechanisms and Distinct Subtypes, Sean J. McKinley (from 2018. proposes three diagnostic subtypes for ASPD: primarily detached, primarily disinhibited, and combined.)

Executive function, attention, and memory deficits in antisocial personality disorder and psychopathy, Michael Baliousis et al. (from 2019. discusses some neurobiology of ASPD, and how it effects executive function, attention, and memory.)

Self-mutilation in antisocial personality disorder, M. Virkkunen (from 1976. reports on self-injury behaviors in pwASPD, and details their motivations.)

[faustianslip]

i’m afraid that one day my anger will overshadow the little love i still have left for the world

[faustianslip]

Tw : vent

ASPD culture Having an exception that you realize is slowly fading as an exception and you’re caring about them a lot less, you can feel that connection you had to them fizzing out and you have trouble knowing how to feel about it. I wouldn’t say I feel guilt or grief but there is a understanding this is happening and denying and hoping it stays, and trying so hard to pick up the pieces of care together you have left and grasping it in a chokehold. I wanted to spend my life with them, you were the closest person to ever understanding me, I told you about my aspd symptoms and you didn’t see me any differently…. The moment I realized the empathy and excitement I had for them was fizzling I fell into a small mopey depression. I continue to keep denying it and outrunning it, at this point I’m using every fiber I have left to make them mine and connect with them more until it runs out. I just hope it sparks up again. I know this can happen with exceptions. If it doesn’t I still will hold everything I’ve been through with them and them as a person close to me, indefinitely.

Every exception I’ve had in my life, even if they ended wrong or have been faded out for years, I remember all of them, and it’s like I hold them like little pearls in my mind, even if I still couldn’t give less of a shit about who they are as a person. They made me feel and for that reason alone they’re held like time capsules permanently in my memory

[faustianslip]

hey

how are you doing? so, yesterday I learned that there different types of Borderline Personality Disorder, like Impulsive BPD. There is different types of ASPD, if yes which ones?

My my, I am quite sorry that I am late to answering this. I am not too active on this blog these days.

There are not any subtypes of ASPD really recognized by the DSM or ICD. But that doesn’t mean ASPD subtypes aren’t theorized about or presented in the world of psychology.

Theodore Million suggest 5 subtypes of ASPD. The Nomadic, Malevolent, Covetous, Risk-Taking, and/or Reputation Defending Antisocial.

You have more theories being brought forward as well, with some even using two categories (Anti-Social Only and Psychopathic) as seen in this paper: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2021.677975/full

Or F1 and F2 subtypes in research specifically about psychopathy; https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4461490/

I am simply stating what psychologists are presenting though so don’t take me linking any of these as me agreeing with them. If these subtypes help you make sense of yourself then by all means, embrace them. Or not- it’s up to you.

[faustianslip]

i need you all to know…when kids are raised by parents that ignore them or stifle them or criticize or neglect them… personality disorders other than bpd can occur. i need you to understand that neglected children can and do have NPD as well.. narcissistic personality disorder is not.. an inherently evil or bad thing

[faustianslip]

While I'm happy that the word "gaslighting" is more known than it used to be, and that people at large are learning to recognize what it looks like, I feel like we need to be careful not to turn it into something soft and casual we throw around off the cuff without meaning.

Being gaslit is psychological abuse that fucks you up very badly, very slowly, at such a gradual pace that you don't usually know it's happening until it's already re-wired your brain.

If you're unfamiliar with the term, "to gaslight" is to intentionally persuade someone that they cannot trust their own perceptions of reality. It's a destabilizing form of manipulation that leaves you constantly anxious, off-balanced, confused, and dependant on others.

This is done by lying about events that have happened or about things that are happening, invalidating feelings and observations, and either denying, refusing to acknowledge, or deflecting away from hard facts.

As someone who has experienced gaslighting as a form of abuse, this is what I remember from when I didn't know anything was off:

"Oh, I must have forgotten what really happened."

"I'm just not seeing it from their point of view."

"Everyone has their ups and downs. This is normal."

"I guess I wasn't thinking about what I was doing."

"I must have been wrong."

This is what I remember from when I first started realizing something was weird:

"How come every time I'm convinced they did something wrong, they just talk to me a few minutes, and I end up asking for their forgiveness? What has me so convinced I was right in the first moment?"

"I should start writing things down when they happen, so I can go back and check later when I'm confused."

"If every relationship like ours (familial, romantic, platonic) works this way, how come I never hear about it, or read about it, or see it anywhere else?"

Getting out and adjusting to the real world is hard, too, and comes with rapid swings of unfounded guilt, shame, fear, anxiety, and self-deprication that are completely unfounded in reality.

You've been conditioned to believe that you are entirely helpless and unable to think for yourself, possibly "crazy" or otherwise fundamentally impaired, and that there is a singular source of guidance that knows exactly what is right, and all of a sudden that pillar of support has vanished.

The immediate "after" that I recall looks like:

Constant uncertainty. Because nobody is there to tell you what's real and what isn't, you approach every situation thinking at it from all angles. Every question has fifty possible answers and most of them are wrong and you don't know which. If you choose wrong, the world will end.

A sense of helplessness. You feel that nothing you do is correct, and it's easier to make no choices at all- or you make wild, reckless, impulsive choices, because you feel you have nothing to lose.

Memory loss. I don't understand this one, but it's not like memoriescare being erased, but more like... you're so used to treating your memories as dreams or imaginations that you reflexively dismiss anything you recall as fake, and you can't believe anything you recall because you don't think it was real. Your abusers voice is in your head, wiping things away and telling you that you did the wrong thing. And you believe them, because they're the only constant you can rely on.

Missing the abuser, or the abusive dynamic. Because you know now that it wasn't healthy, but at least you knew where you stood. As long as you said the right things and acted the right way, agreed and obeyed and did as they expected, you felt like thevworld made sense. Now you have to figure out which parts of you really are broken, and which parts are working fine in a really weird way, and it's like tuning a piano when you've never played one before.

The long term "after"- for which I can only speak for myself- looks like:

Having to double-check, triple-check, and continue checking hard evidence of an event before responding in an active way.

Consulting with trusted friends to verify that your observations are legitimate and that your perceptions are valid. Following up with them to see if someone is really angry at you, or if you're just projecting anger onto them because it's what makes sense to your old pattern.

Obsessive collection of "evidence"- saving pictures, writing detailed journals, making recordings and video, never deleting emails or old texts, because you still don't quite trust yourself all the way and you're afraid that someone will cause you to doubt yourself again.

Continued self-doubt and being "gullible": I have straight up seen people flip me off to my face in front of witnesses and then immediately tell me, "No, I was just waving", and my first instinct is to believe them. For a few seconds, I *really do* believe them. Your brain is so trained to latch onto what people tell you to believe that its really, really hard to hold onto information that you already have.

Learning to take ownership over your own actions. (I didn't mess up because I'm "crazy", I messed up because I'm a person and people do that.)

Instinctively seeking approval. (Takes a lot of work to remind myself that I don't exit to make people happy, and that some people suck ass, and I can tell them to piss off.)

I don't intend to invalidate anyone currently struggling with this- if you feel that something is wrong, it probably is. That's the thought that got me out. Trust that feeling that something isn't right.

I just want people who don't know what to look for to know what gaslighting *actually* looks and feels like, so they don't just roll their eyes and think, "Oh, that word doesnt apply to me- I'm not some snowflake".

('Cause we all saw what happened with "triggered", right?)

[faustianslip]

Being in college with ASPD is so hard because you’ll have friends and people you hang out with that think you’re a good person to vent to and I’ll just be standing there with nothing to say because I’m annoyed yet trying my best to be a supportive friend.

[faustianslip]

✨cluster B ask game pt. 2✨

might be some similar questions since my memory is bad

1. what cluster B disorder(s) do you have?

2. are you diagnosed? if not, how long have you suspected being cluster B / how long have you been self diagnosed? (i am pro self dx)

3. do you care about being a good person? why/why not?

4. do you have friends that are cluster B as well? if yes, how did you meet?

5. what’s the best part of having your cluster B disorder(s)?

6. what’s the worst part of having you cluster B disorder(s)?

7. do you care about people who aren’t close to you?

8. is it hard for you to let other people in emotionally? why/why not?

9. if you’re comfortable sharing, what is the worst thing you’ve heard about your cluster B disorder(s)?

10. what is something you’d want your non cluster B friends to understand about you and possibly accommodate you about?

11. what is your worst trait, according to society?

12. what is your worst trait that affects you?

13. what is your best trait that benefits you?

14. do you ever wish you didn’t have a cluster B disorder? why/why not?

15. what does your episodes/crashes look like at their worst? and what do they look like at their best?

16. do you care about looking good / the best, or would you rather not be noticed?

17. have you ever gotten yourself into a dangerous situation because of your cluster B disorder(s)? if you’re comfortable sharing, feel free to do so.

18. are you easily annoyed or are you hard to annoy?

19. how do you react to something that upsets you? emotionally or actions etc.

20. is there a trait from your cluster B disorder(s) you really wish you didn’t have?

21. is there a trait from a cluster B disorder you wish you had?

22. do you have a hierarchy of how you view people? if yes, what do the “levels” look like to you?

23. do you have a favourite/chosen/attention/exception person? what are they like?

24. if you experience black and white thinking, what does it look like for you?

25. is there something you want people to know about your cluster B disorder(s)?

26. what is the most common misinformation about your cluster B disorder(s) that you want people to know the correct information about?

27. what is something related to cluster B things that makes you really upset?

28. are you confident or the opposite?

29. do you experience any delusions of grandeur? if you’re comfortable sharing, what kinds of delusions?

30. do you like the cluster B community?

[faustianslip]

New comic (this time it’s personal)

(cw for mild gore)

[faustianslip]

without tiktok where will we get empath roleplaying like this