#spent a borderline unreasonable amount of time making this i got way too into it 😭

[ourfag]

was tagged by @blakbonnet to make a picrew (link) of what my blog would look like as a person YAY thank you ive never been tagged in one of these before!!! so exciting!!!!

no-pressure tags (apologies if i’m double tagging anybody): @margaritaville @bird-divorce @adamarks @shawsbear @t4tgb @ um

there are for sure more of you id like to tag but ive just forgotten all the names of anybody ive ever met on this website. FUCK

[inanawesomewave]

SOCIOPATH WALKS INTO A THERAPIST’S OFFICE, PART 2

The last post I did about the therapy I’m currently receiving seemed to get a lot of response, quite a few of you have got in touch and reached out to talk about your own sociopathy, or the sociopathy of someone that you care about, and especially about the care or lack of care that you have as someone with a personality disorder, specifically antisocial personality disorder. So, I thought I might make this a regular thing -- I love hearing from you all, and I think it’s probably a good idea to be honest and personable, so here’s instalment two of my therapy journey. We got really into it today. I had been quite tentative about how much I was going to reveal to my therapist about the true nature of myself, the parts of my personality that, whilst I’m not ashamed of and may even hold some pride in, would be considered unacceptable, or ugly, kind of shamelessly defective. There’s a shame there, not in myself, but in how I have to be perceived, and that in itself is a ridiculous and sociopathic conundrum that even has roots in narcissism -- I should get to be who I want, and the public image that I project should be justified and accepted at all costs. I can see objectively how that stubbornness and wilful ignorance forms a sizeable chunk of my ASPD, and that feeling alone made me understand why people say that sociopaths and psychopaths do not want or benefit from therapy. I wondered if the truth was we’re just harder nuts to crack, and we need someone we can trust, and gaining the trust of a person with perceived authority over our care and therefore autonomy and natural freedom is very hard for us. I wonder if the fact is a lot of therapists don’t want to try, that the abhorrent parts of us cloud their desire to effect real, compassionate change. The slog must seem like a thankless one when your job is to stop a sociopath from being a sociopath. You’ve got to work from the foundation up, but that’s what my therapist does. And I won’t lie, sometimes it feels like low-hanging fruit. I have to put my cynicism aside, because hearing “are you really angry at [whoever I’m angry at today], or are you angry at your mother?” over and over again does get weary, but for all the work I do talking about how childhood abuse, neglect and trauma are the biggest predictors of cluster B personality disorders, and however aware I am of my own rotten beginnings, there’s still a blind spot in me that would much rather blame something vague and mythical; The Human Condition, or even just The State Of Things, I’d rather rage against any and all minor authority or threat than accept the fact that everyone I end up being like this with, bears some striking resemblance to my mother. You can see how I’d be pessimistic though; oh, you’re a psychologist and now you’re telling me “it’s your mother”? Cool way to get into obscene amounts of debt and break your back in further education for years only to end up spouting the one Freudian cliché that every layman knows to be ubiquitous in psychotherapy. But, in my case, it’s just true. And maybe you’ve had that too, a father or mother who was narcissistic and abusive, and now you’ve ended up like this and you fucking hate anyone you think may be even slightly trying to manipulate and control you until you see that threat everywhere and must always attack. And maybe it’s your father, or maybe it’s your mother. The difficult thing we come to talk about in therapy is narcissism. Namely, my own narcissistic traits. I narcissistically thought I’d got out scot-free, and that sure I was confident and assertive but not narcissistic, there’s nothing in me that’s narcissistic. Hell, I’m so great at being not narcissistic. I’m the fucking best at being modest. Come give me praise for how great I am at not being a narcissist and fuck it, in general, I deserve it. So maybe it really is there.

After some gentle coaxing I gave him some examples of some of the things in the past I’ve done and said that maybe even I will concede might have been unreasonable, it was posited to me that I might have just been blazing through not necessarily on narcissism, but on grandiosity, an inflated sense of my own importance. I told him how just the other day I’d got into a very vicious, very visceral slanging match with someone I have known to be a malignant narcissist for some time, someone who is the partner of someone I love, and how the gloves fully came off and his partner, my friend, had to hear the full force of my sociopathic fury, and looking back, it might have been narcissistic injury. He spoke to me like I was small, weak, like talking to me like that was normal or acceptable. My outrage was first at his own behaviour toward my friend, but it quickly became about the attack on my ego and my battle to the top. I spoke to my therapist about how, after that argument, I switched into a familiar mode -- predator. It was like my mind was prowling, shooting off in all directions. I didn’t know fully what my prey specifically was, what point I needed to prove, but I needed to prove it. I have a burner facebook, and logging into that just to keep tabs on everyone I don’t like and have ancient grievances with for a couple of hours felt like an uncontrollable, necessary, cathartic compulsion, and it felt horrible and it felt fantastic. Like a narcissist, and like a sociopath, today I learned that my predation of anyone at all after a slight to my ego is fragile. Because we sociopaths wear all the masks, and the most well-tended-to one is one of absolute control, power and authority. And we don’t have as much control over that as we think we do. Sociopathy is a mask that eats into the face. What came next was a crack in that mask and through it bled the black sludge of horrid and bitter self-awareness -- when people tell me they wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of me, that I’m not to be fucked with -- are they humouring me? Have I been pathetic all this time? Apparently not, but fucking hell my fellow paths, think about that for a moment if you fancy looking into parts of your mind that you’ve spent a lifetime pretending are absolutely not there. I have blind spots, we all have blind spots. I don’t know about you, but that’s mine, and it’s the only thing that’s made me feel anything closely resembling true shame in quite some time. And I seek out narcissists. I hate them and love them. I’ve had several significant friendships fall apart because I’ve always known they were narcissistic but one day I realise I despise what I thought I loved about them. From the neurotic and overbearingly bitter grandiose dominatrix I thought I cared for, to the hypochondriacal self-autobiographical, self-confessed empath (lol) I spent years trying to have friendly affection for, I knowingly and willingly give such large portions of my time and energy to instantly-identifiable narcissists, and by the time I come to hate them, it’s a mystery to me why I was drawn to them to begin with. But it’s really not a mystery, is it? My mother used to tell me a story that her father told her as a child, something of a fable: A grasshopper could fall in love with a blackbird, but where would they live? Like will always go with like. But before I had time to really spiral about the possibility I might be just as bad as my own worst enemy, my therapist told me that I may currently be occupying a middle place, that true narcissists can’t access: that is, the space between self-aggrandisement and self-loathing. I mentioned to my therapist that I’d written two books, and he reassured me that if I were a narcissist that would have been the first thing I told him, and he wouldn’t just be hearing about it now. So I guess that’s something. But I did still tell him.

It’s funny when someone asks you questions about yourself, when you’ve spent a lifetime being so self-analytical and playing the part of your own biographer, because when it’s time to answer the tough questions, you realise you haven’t practiced for this, or the way you feel about recounting those stories is not what you’d anticipated -- by which I mean, I was very aware of what I was saying. And sometimes it’s beneficial to talk out loud to someone who makes a career out of being impartial, and can’t judge you, because then they can start joining dots you never thought to, but were glaringly obvious. My early to mid 20s were a chaotic binge of drugs and alcohol, but I think the thing I chased the most was the company of older, wealthier men, with natural privilege and dominance. Subconsciously, the goal of these relationships, with hindsight, seems to have been to assert my own dominance, or encourage submission, from this specific kind of person. All these relationships followed a very similar pattern, but it wasn’t until today that I realised that they were vehicles for my revenge on the people who could have helped me as a child, and whilst we know that sociopaths use people, and it’s never a good thing to do, we never think about why, even as sociopaths. Today I learned that we are all angry, vengeful, spiteful and bitter, but just like narcissists and borderlines, we’re protecting ourself from that truth by rewriting our own narrative. I never consciously masterminded those relationships, and it’s neither a good or bad thing that this was, seemingly, just my natural state of being, but I wonder if all sociopaths are a little less self-aware than they first thought. I guess they wouldn’t know the answer to that question. I didn’t, until today.

And none of it felt like bragging. I had no pride in what I was telling my therapist, just as I had no shame. But imagine you’re in court, and your charges are being read against you, but in your voice, by someone with your face. It’s just destabilising enough to spur off lots of chains of thought, but not so much that it’s causing distress. This may still be relentlessly sociopathic, but knowledge is power, and, even if what you learn about yourself isn’t what you’re expecting, I still see it as extremely beneficial that I know as much about myself and my processes as possible. Maybe next week I’ll find out why that is.