Do Psychopaths Miss Others?

No, no we do not..

This post came about because of a comment that I received. The comment read:

Cage (The Friendly Psychopath)

As someone with psychopathy I'm not sure if this has to do with anything personal or the diagnosis. I have had zero contact with anyone I'm related to in 23 years, the same goes with people in my past. If they don't contact me I won't contact them I literally completely forget about them. They don't exist until if I ever run into them again. I'm always asked why did I disappear, i just dont care one way or the other. I only remember immediate people who serve a purpose. I don't have social media of any kind because I have zero interest in something like that, I know alot of people but have zero friends (i like it like that).I never missed anyone before, ever! if anything I only missed something sexual with them or something they provided to me or if they can cook good.I don't do all that I explained on purpose it just happens that way naturally. I don't know if this is just how i am or If this is part of psychopathy can you write about it if it is part of psychopathy.

Psychopaths are fairly unique in the fact that we are closed emotional circuits. Therefore we have no reliance on other people for emotional needs of any kind. This is something that most people cannot understand or relate to in any way. They cannot imagine a world in which there is no need for anyone else to be present. Nor can they understand what it means to not mourn a person when they are gone from their lives.

This comes from the inability to bond to others. We lack the processing of oxytocin and that is what is responsible for that bond to happen in the first place. When you couple this with our propensity for living in the moment, there is no “missing” other people. That reality can be very difficult for those that we know. It is not only something that they cannot understand, it also comes across to them as a value judgment on their value to us as people.

People place interesting requirements on what it means to be valued. When those parameters are not met by someone else it communicates that they as an individual doesn’t matter to that person. I imagine that can be very painful, but it isn’t something that we as psychopaths can comprehend. It is totally foreign to us. Just as much as it is foreign to you not to miss or mourn someone, it is equally beyond our understanding to feel what you do in those situations. This can lend itself to a lot of misunderstandings to those that are a part of our lives, but can be even more confounding to those that are no longer in our lives, but for some reason reconnect with us later on.

Chances are… we won’t remember who they are. Or, if we do, it is simply that this was a person that we once knew, but that is the extent of it. It doesn’t matter if that person was a good friend, a family member, or an ex. Once our participation in that relationship has expired that person no longer has any relevance to us. It doesn’t matter if the relationship parted on good or bad terms. Once it is over, to us, it is over. It isn’t thought of again.

No part of us wonders what that person might be doing, reminisces about all the good times we had together, or feels the need to observe death dates or other dates that once may have been relevant to that relationship. There is no eating a pint of ice cream on our anniversary that we would have spent with an ex, or the need to deliver flowers to a grave.

We certainly can see that these things are very much a part of neurotypicals’ lives. We see them in real life, in stories, on television, in movies, and everywhere else relationships are portrayed. When I was younger I found the whole thing rather perplexing. Scratch that, I still find it perplexing, but I am used to it and accept that I am the exception to the rule, not the other way around.

While I am writing this I am also watching an anime called, My Unique Skill Makes Me OP Even At Level 1. It’s another story about a guy that wakes up in a game. I am kind of on a kick with this sort of storyline currently, it seems. The main character worked himself to death, which, in Japan, is known as karōshi. He wakes up in a dungeon (a gaming dungeon, not an imprisonment dungeon) and finds himself in a world that gets all of its resources through dungeon drops.

For those of you that are uninitiated, when you are in a gaming dungeon and you kill something, they drop items. It depends on the game, but normal drops would be things like potions or money. In this game, they drop things like ingredients for food. Think, bean sprouts and carrots. I know, it’s a bit weird, but that’s the way it works. This guy is stuck at level one but has the ability to get superior-ranked drops. So his s-ranked drops far outclass anyone else’s in the entire world. So far, it’s super cute.

My reasoning for bringing this up is this. In the story, this guy lived a terribly lonely life. He never had friends, no one was waiting for him when he got home, there weren’t meals shared with loved ones, and he was miserable. In this new world, he suddenly starts making friends and having those experiences. It is a common thing for him to reminisce about how it used to be, how much he hated it, and how fortunate he is now that he has people to share his life with.

While I appreciate that this is a normal aspect of human existence, it isn’t something that resonates with me at all. I find this part of the story sweet in the sense that he is finally feeling like he belongs, but that’s cognitive empathy at play, not a feeling about his situation. Other people who might share his sentiments, or may find themselves in the sort of lonely life that he had led previously could very well feel a deep sadness when reflecting on that, but it isn’t something that I can possibly understand.

I cook. I know I have mentioned that before, but there is a reason I mention it again. I cook, and people really enjoy eating what I make. Someone once mentioned to me that they thought that I cooked because I have people to cook for. That if I were alone I wouldn’t cook. Their perspective regarding this comes from their own lives. If they have no one to cook for, they wouldn’t do it, and they are assuming that it would be the same way for me.

I got the impression that they had some sort of emotional connection to the act of cooking that simply doesn’t exist for me. When I am alone, I still cook. What’s more, unlike the character in the anime that I am watching, I very much enjoy my meals alone. I don’t mind other people being there, but they don’t add to the enjoyment of my meals. I don’t have a sense of longing or loneliness when I cook for myself and when I eat that meal. The person who assumed that I wouldn’t bother cooking has a very different experience with those things that I cannot share.

Everything in a psychopath’s life is self-focused. Accommodations for others are intentional external actions, but the things that we do because we enjoy them, we will do those things regardless of others being present, because we only do them because we enjoy them for ourselves. Our habits don’t change because there are other people about unless we intentionally make that be the case. A meal cooked and shared is the same as a meal cooked and enjoyed alone.

Sometimes, if we have to make an adjustment because of another person’s presence, it can mildly downgrade the enjoyment of an activity because it is a watered-down version of what we wanted to do. Think, having to pass on skydiving because the other person is too afraid. Instead, we go on a roller coaster. Still fun, but not the same, and not what we wanted in the first place.

Because we are self-focused, because we cannot bond, because we live in the moment, there isn’t a loss when people that we once knew, even if they were very close, are no longer around. It isn’t a value judgment, as I mentioned above, but that doesn’t change the fact that is how it is perceived by those who know us. For them, it can feel very dismissive. I don’t think that it is something that can really be overcome by any sort of negotiation. It is such a fundamental difference between the two neural functions that it simply has to be something that has to be cognitively understood and dealt with accordingly. As much as we cannot understand why our lack of missing a person counts as some sort of indictment on their importance, neurotypicals cannot understand how we do not experience loss as they do.

As we age and are more exposed to death, we see what that looks like in other people. I have seen what the loss of a parent or a child looks like for others to experience and it is never pretty. All that raw emotion and devastation seems to be overwhelming. It is also totally outside our ability to feel. We notice a person’s absence when they die, and may well prefer their presence to their absence, but we don’t experience what most people do. If necessary, we can fake it, in order to not appear uncaring, but our wiring doesn’t allow for us to have those feelings of loss and mourning.

People that I know still tear up at the loss of their pets that have been gone for years, I don’t have any sort of response to the pets that have already gone on. I enjoyed them while they were here, I would have preferred they not have to go, but there isn’t an emotional yearning or sadness at their absence. I simply see their lives as what they were, and I see their deaths as the way that it is.

Psychopaths and neurotypicals have very different views of the world, and there are a lot of places that we will never see eye to eye. It just cannot be done. We cannot experience your pain, and you cannot experience our lack of it. What can be done, by both sides, though I think that psychopaths have been doing a bit more of the heavy lifting in this regard, is to understand that while we cannot personally experience the other side, we can acknowledge that it is real to those exist in that realm, and no less important than our own experience.

I get that this is more difficult for neurotypicals, because of that whole emotional aspect, but assuming that your way of thinking is the correct way because it is how the majority sees things isn’t reasonable. We are meant to complement each other, not be adverse to differences just because of a lack of understanding.