#and worry is in no way mutually exclusive with ASPD

[aspd-culture]

living in a society that’s so ableist is so wild because as someone questioning if they have aspd the ableism makes you wonder if you REALLY do because you’re just “too human”. like yeah, i see children hurt and i get uncomfortable, i see parents post pictures of their children and i worry. is it really true worry? who knows! point is, the idea that you’re inhuman for it is just drilled inside you so hard that anytime you show any sort of “humanity” you wonder if you are actually antisocial, even if you fit the criteria fine because the idea of being antisocial is boiled down to being evil and incapable of emotions; subhuman in a way. I hope that makes sense and resonates with anyone; been questioning for a while if we (system :)) could have aspd because ableism keeps making us believe a false idea of how it appears on people.

aspd-culture is

[inanawesomewave]

Psychopathy & The Myth of Moral Obligation

I’m going to kick this particular post off with an overwrought analogy if I may, because this is a knotty subject and I can’t dive into it just assuming that the neurotypical understanding of antisociality/amorality/sociopathy/psychopathy/whatever term we’re to use for the sake of ease, at least, is as rudimentary as it seems. It’s obviously not, and why should it be? You have no obligation to empathise those who will not empathise with you, but if you’re going to dilly-dally between these apparently mutually exclusive and monochromatic in nature opinions, then it might be worth reading this. Or anything at all that goes some way to explain the experience of antisocial personality disorder et al, straight from the psycho’s mouth. So if there’s a website that has some good-looking stuff on there you might want to buy, maybe it’s heavily discounted designer clothes, for example, and your friends have been hyping it for some time, of course you’re going to check it out and make your own mind up. So you go there, and you browse, and pretty instantly, you’ve added several things to your basket and you’re happy you came here -- it’s almost too good to be true, you wonder if the seller is aware of how high quality these clothes are. Click, beautiful dress. Click, insanely cheap fine leather boots. You’ll look fucking amazing in those. However, it’s not long before some of your friends warn you that the whole site in fact hinges on a phishing scam, and they’ve all been conned out of hundreds of pounds, and you’d be wise to stay away. You have other friends who used the site without a hitch, but they’re kind of unreliable friends. In fact from hereon in, assume that everyone in your life is unreliable as a narrator in some way. Anyway, you are now faced with a decision - do you want to risk it all and input your sensitive information on the off-chance that you’ll get lucky, be spared, even, or do you walk away and know fully that your bank account is safe and protected? You have reason to believe you are about to be left vulnerable, so ultimately, if you choose not to hand over your sort code and account number, are you discriminating? You notice the site is operational from China, you fucking racist, mate? You a fucking racist now? You privileged? Wanna check that privilege? And conversely, if you do disclose your information, are you advocating fraud? Are you going to contact the site’s owners and empathetically tell them they can be saved? Are you going to loudly advertise the site to your friends and, when they say they’ve heard it’s a scam, are you going to say: “You fucking racist, mate? You a fucking racist now? You privileged? Wanna check that privilege?” You’re poor and losing money would fuck things up for you for a long time, but those boots, those amazing boots will make everyone jealous and project an image of a version of you you’d like to be more often. So what do you do? What’s morally right? What dozen things are you doing when you perform the singular act of making a should-I-shouldn’t-I decision? The truth is blindingly and infuriatingly simple, and that is - you’re doing none of those things. If you take the risk, you’re merely taking a risk. If you protect yourself, you are merely protecting yourself. You are aware that “bad” people exist, that exploitation is real, but you don’t have to have any strong opinions on it. The only thing you have to do is decide if you want to be in it or not. And it would be you putting you in it - in this case the threat you would be facing is not violent or unexpected, it’s not that someone will break into your home, locate your safe, shoot at the lock, threaten you with knives. It’s that you willingly left your doors unlocked and advertised to your neighbourhood that this was the case. But who would do that? Who would ever do that? As it turns out, a lot of you would. When you White Knight the psychopath you are protecting your own morality to a degree that will potentially cause you harm, and signalling that your acceptance and altruistic levels of empathy are - to you - far more important than protecting yourself from real — not guaranteed, but potential — danger to yourself and maybe even your loved ones. But it seems we have reached a place in our endless search for good, that we are — okay, you are — putting yourselves at risk. And it’s interesting what that says about you. Think about what that says about you. Because no matter what, the psychopath isn’t suffering. You cannot be sectioned for psychopathy/ASPD alone, same as with narcissism. You are not experiencing pervasive distress and upset because of your disorder. You’re doing just fine. So mercy isn’t wanted, there is an ambivalence in its reception; not being a welcome surprise and not being an outrage, it’s a nothing, and if the psychopath ever does thank you for it, they are being insincere and you have become the mark (probably in a minor way, calm down). Why? Because psychopathy is at the stark end of ASPD, and ASPD is a pervasive and persistent disorder with a dazzling array of rigid symptoms that make no sense to a lot of people; disregard for societal norms (i.e the law), amorality, a marked deficit in/maybe even complete lack of spontaneous empathy, varyingly low levels or remorse/guilt/shame. Hard to understand, yes, but nobody is asking you to. This is the ugly truth: it’s not that psychopaths are running on hot at all times just maintaining this facade because it’s no facade. It's not that psychopaths simply don’t understand morality because they do. It’s not that psychopaths are overcompensating for not being loved because mostly psychopaths can be loved whenever the hell they want. Don’t feel sorry for the psychopath, they don’t feel sorry for you. Do you see where I’m heading with this? 

I feel this lack of understanding breeds a frantic need to know it all. And that makes sense, the truth isn’t palatable or even rational. But it's the truth. Instead of sainting the psychopath, sate your need for closure by learning about what and how the psychopath thinks, without any desire at all to change their systems and constructs, and you may begin to understand why no antisocial (at the very least) on this whole earth is ever going to sincerely express upset if they feel they are being essentialised, or that people are over-cautious around them. When you speak on behalf of psychopaths and demand compassion in place of them, you are assuming that antisocials and psychopaths are not capable of grabbing compassion all on their very own. At best, you are reaching at the tragically tenuous idea that antisocials et al are able to change with specifically your intervention, that love and affection and a warm cup of cocoa will fix them, that the reason we are seemingly so cold and blunted is because we've never known real love, or that some tragic life event has left us broken, we’ve seen some things, man, and you’re the hero who noticed the tears behind the scowl and decided to bandage our wounds and begin the healing. But listen to me: ASPD is no insanity defence. It is no excuse. It is no justification or rationalisation, and we’re not fighting for that (or anything). The empaths are. Because really, antisocials don't need saving, and we’re not interested in giving you retribution via a sincere self-improvement that metaphorically pats you on the back and says, “good job”, I mean if we don’t have to save ourselves then we certainly have no desire to save you, that's for sure, however indirectly (and we do notice when you’re doing that. We see you.). Because at worst, you are making the blind assumption that the traits of the antisocial personality - specifically reduced capacity for empathy, remorse… aren't even real, that you know better than they do, than anybody does. However, it makes sense that people want to understand something that seems a directionless and motiveless threat, something or someone that goes so against the grain of what is good and right that their whole personality is based on not caring about you -- that is a deeply unpalatable thought to mostly everyone else, because people run from the truth, and if they can’t do that then they’ll just go to great lengths to hide it from themselves, and construct quasi-fantastical distractions to participate in, delusions to hide in, because the truth of badness as a concept is too much. For many the delusion is “they have some light in them somewhere”. But it’s not your place to go looking, and to think otherwise, does not make you the bad person. Thinking otherwise does not make you the psychopath, stop worrying, calm down, go home. Walk it off. Take a nap.  This isn’t a call to arms, none of this is a rousing declaration of intent — leave your card details or don’t, you’re your own person. But if you’re reading this and thinking, “but I CAN change them, societal revolution will change them!” or find yourself caught up in any more of this hysterical and labile sense of moral obligation to the broken, baby birds you see in us, twitching on the snowy ground, then please do consider my final three questions, and answer them to yourself before doing anything else at all?  1. If you can change someone’s entire personality can you also change a person’s sexuality? Give that a go and get back to me.  2. What about you is so special that — after leaving yourself open to attack in order to prove some altruistic point — you’ll be spared, even celebrated and revered? And 3. With a messiah complex as audacious and inflexible as yours, have you ever considered you might have a personality disorder? Because I can save you. Don’t tell me what it is. I’ll save you. 

[aspd-culture]

Hi I'm new here so sorry if this has already been answered, people with aspd are often referred to as callous and cold but the rate of anxiety and depression with them is quite high thanks to it being a trauma disorder, so how do the two things coexist? Shouldn't they be mutually exclusive?

Firstly welcome!/pos

So unfortunately, the public's perception of ASPD has gotten very mixed with the understanding of the actual symptoms of ASPD. Callous and cold are certainly personality traits that are more likely to appear in pwASPD, but that is not all of us. In personality disorders, due to the nature of them being baked into our personality, which is part biological and part environmental, you will see heavy variations in symptoms.

Additionally, a part of the actual evaluations for ASPD (at least both of the ones I took to get diagnosed - I am from the US for reference) is questions relating to being charismatic/charming and "masters of manipulation". Even the public perception hits on this - saying we are "always playing a social chess game". Those things aren't really compatible with being callous and cold all the time.

To get more into this in the context of your question, though, as you mentioned, ASPD is almost always caused by some amount of trauma. To my understanding as someone with a background in child development, especially in early childhood, our brains basically got here one of two ways if it's trauma based.

The first is our brains developing under the belief that the symptoms of ASPD are just how everyone is, due to being exposed to poor examples or a lack of exmaples of things like remorse, empathy, warmth, etc. This generally comes from abusive/neglectful/emotionally unavailable adults in the child's life and a lack of presence of adults that would guide the child's brain into the natural development of these things because children are literally always learning in the first few years of life especially, and the brain is forming itself around the understanding that the adults give the child of how a human being thinks/acts/behaves/responds.

The other is having specific trauma break down the prior, proper development under the belief that it was either entirely mistaken and people are supposed to behave another way, or as a protective reaction when the brain believes it cannot survive any other way. Research has pointed to trauma directly impacting the neurology of people with PTSD at any age, and that is especially prominent in the ages that ASPD first starts showing up at (15 and younger).

Regardless of which it is, there is more than *just* ASPD being made most of the time in either of these circumstances. When things are unstable in a child's life, they become very likely to develop any number of anxiety disorders. When led to the belief that nothing will ever be good, anyone of any age tends to end up depressed, and pwASPD generally have experiences that have made us see things that way for a *very* long time.

Depression especially is very compatible with ASPD even in public perception - lack of motivation, disinterest in socializing, maladaptive understanding of the world (believing nothing will get better), etc. are symptoms of both ASPD and Major Depressive Disorder.

As for anxiety, it isn't incompatible, but it is probably fairly far removed from the anxiety that prosocials have, specifically in what the anxiety centers on. It is less likely (but definitely not impossible) that a pwASPD would have anxiety about wanting others to like them or worrying about social interactions, but it is very likely to see pwASPD having anxiety about the risk of harm coming to them, people being "out to get us", or that anything good in our life may be unstable and can be lost or taken from us. Insecurity in relationships is common in ASPD because of that type of anxiety - we tend to struggle with the belief that the other shoe will drop, so to speak, any time things seem good or calm in our life. That alone causes a serious amount of anxiety.

These kinds of misconceptions generally come from a specific misrepresentation of ASPD - the idea that we have no emotions or cannot feel certain particular emotions. While sometimes our emotions can be blunted, and some pwASPD are incapable of feeling particular emotions, which ones in particular vary greatly. Boredom and anger/irritation are pretty much always able to be felt by pwASPD to some degree, but outside of that there's a lot of different presentations of the muted emotions trait (not a diagnostic criteria required for diagnosis btw, it's just a common trait seen in many pwASPD). Some people find themselves incapable of feeling things like fear/anxiety and/or depression, sure, but others like me actually feel those at full force but experience heavily mutes positive emotions like happiness. And again, not all of us even have blunted emotions at all, removing any reason we wouldn't be able to have depression or anxiety.

By the way, nothing bad against you for this question!! It absolutely makes sense that this would be confusing to understand what with the common ways that ASPD is talked about and shown in pop culture, documentaries, and often even academic materials. I hold no ill will towards anyone with any genuine misunderstanding of ASPD. It is extremely difficult to grasp the truth of life with this disorder because even the sources that should be reliable often aren't - with small sample sizes, poor sample randomness (so many studies about ASPD are taken exclusively on prisoners), self-reporting (why the hell would we trust a random researcher), and even people who were diagnosed on the stand without advisement from any mental health professional (so people who may not even *have* ASPD, but they have what someone in the legal system *thought* was ASPD). It is so heavily stigmatized and misrepresented that I also had many of these perceptions well into my teen years, even as I recognized symptoms of ASPD in myself. This whole post is /info, I just have terrible issues with tone due to my autism.

Plain text below the cut:

Firstly welcome!/pos

So unfortunately, the public's perception of ASPD has gotten very mixed with the understanding of the actual symptoms of ASPD. Callous and cold are certainly personality traits that are more likely to appear in pwASPD, but that is not all of us. In personality disorders, due to the nature of them being baked into our personality, which is part biological and part environmental, you will see heavy variations in symptoms.

Additionally, a part of the actual evaluations for ASPD (at least both of the ones I took to get diagnosed - I am from the US for reference) is questions relating to being charismatic/charming and "masters of manipulation". Even the public perception hits on this - saying we are "always playing a social chess game". Those things aren't really compatible with being callous and cold all the time.

To get more into this in the context of your question, though, as you mentioned, ASPD is almost always caused by some amount of trauma. To my understanding as someone with a background in child development, especially in early childhood, our brains basically got here one of two ways if it's trauma based.

The first is our brains developing under the belief that the symptoms of ASPD are just how everyone is, due to being exposed to poor examples or a lack of exmaples of things like remorse, empathy, warmth, etc. This generally comes from abusive/neglectful/emotionally unavailable adults in the child's life and a lack of presence of adults that would guide the child's brain into the natural development of these things because children are literally always learning in the first few years of life especially, and the brain is forming itself around the understanding that the adults give the child of how a human being thinks/acts/behaves/responds.

The other is having specific trauma break down the prior, proper development under the belief that it was either entirely mistaken and people are supposed to behave another way, or as a protective reaction when the brain believes it cannot survive any other way. Research has pointed to trauma directly impacting the neurology of people with PTSD at any age, and that is especially prominent in the ages that ASPD first starts showing up at (15 and younger).

Regardless of which it is, there is more than *just* ASPD being made most of the time in either of these circumstances. When things are unstable in a child's life, they become very likely to develop any number of anxiety disorders. When led to the belief that nothing will ever be good, anyone of any age tends to end up depressed, and pwASPD generally have experiences that have made us see things that way for a *very* long time.

Depression especially is very compatible with ASPD even in public perception - lack of motivation, disinterest in socializing, maladaptive understanding of the world (believing nothing will get better), etc. are symptoms of both ASPD and Major Depressive Disorder.

As for anxiety, it isn't incompatible, but it is probably fairly far removed from the anxiety that prosocials have, specifically in what the anxiety centers on. It is less likely (but definitely not impossible) that a pwASPD would have anxiety about wanting others to like them or worrying about social interactions, but it is very likely to see pwASPD having anxiety about the risk of harm coming to them, people being "out to get us", or that anything good in our life may be unstable and can be lost or taken from us. Insecurity in relationships is common in ASPD because of that type of anxiety - we tend to struggle with the belief that the other shoe will drop, so to speak, any time things seem good or calm in our life. That alone causes a serious amount of anxiety.

These kinds of misconceptions generally come from a specific misrepresentation of ASPD - the idea that we have no emotions or cannot feel certain particular emotions. While sometimes our emotions can be blunted, and some pwASPD are incapable of feeling particular emotions, which ones in particular vary greatly. Boredom and anger/irritation are pretty much always able to be felt by pwASPD to some degree, but outside of that there's a lot of different presentations of the muted emotions trait (not a diagnostic criteria required for diagnosis btw, it's just a common trait seen in many pwASPD). Some people find themselves incapable of feeling things like fear/anxiety and/or depression, sure, but others like me actually feel those at full force but experience heavily mutes positive emotions like happiness. And again, not all of us even have blunted emotions at all, removing any reason we wouldn't be able to have depression or anxiety.

By the way, nothing bad against you for this question!! It absolutely makes sense that this would be confusing to understand what with the common ways that ASPD is talked about and shown in pop culture, documentaries, and often even academic materials. I hold no ill will towards anyone with any genuine misunderstanding of ASPD. It is extremely difficult to grasp the truth of life with this disorder because even the sources that should be reliable often aren't - with small sample sizes, poor sample randomness (so many studies about ASPD are taken exclusively on prisoners), self-reporting (why the hell would we trust a random researcher), and even people who were diagnosed on the stand without advisement from any mental health professional (so people who may not even *have* ASPD, but they have what someone in the legal system *thought* was ASPD). It is so heavily stigmatized and misrepresented that I also had many of these perceptions well into my teen years, even as I recognized symptoms of ASPD in myself. This whole post is /info, I just have terrible issues with tone due to my autism.