Lack Of Empathy...

but not psychopathy...

Empathy, or the lack thereof, is this defining feature of psychopathy, and because it is so constantly talked about in regards to psychopathy, it is often believed that when a person lacks empathy that they must be a psychopath.

If you have read me for five minutes or more, you know by now that my respect for emotional empathy lingers around the zero mark. I do not find the arguments for it compelling, and I find that it is so situationally specific, without consistent presentation, that it might as well be a non-term. Noticing this as a psychopath is not unique, as I hear from people that are autistic, sociopathic, have BPD, or any number of other things that others cannot understand through their experience in the world. If they cannot understand it, they have no empathy for it:

However, because neurotypicals hold aloft on angel feathers this notion that they are oh so very empathetic that if a person shows a lack of empathy, surely they are a psychopath. They do not have an understanding of their own lack of emotional empathy, so they are completely incapable of recognizing that when others lack empathy that it doesn’t mean that they are a psychopath.

Of course, I could go into a discussion of narcissistic personality disorder to give an example of how a person can lack empathy, but in no way could ever be a psychopath, but instead, we all get to learn about something new, and something that I suspect has been often attributed to female psychopaths because of the “lack of empathy” component.

Have you ever heard of TIV? TIV, which stands for Tendency for Interpersonal Victimhood, is a personality construct that is new in the psychological field and one of its components is a lack of empathy. If you read about how “female psychopaths” are, you will find researchers that have their heads so far up their own behinds that they are licking their own eyebrows making claims like those found in this ridiculous article.

10 Signs of a Female Psychopath

I am not going through this whole article, but I will note the points that they are making, and then quickly debunk them:

1. They Develop Relationships With Their Victims

Psychopaths do not have “victims”. Neurotypicals like these need to get over themselves and stop assuming that we have victims, and that people that do have victims are psychopaths. Someone having “victims” is a personal choice, and has nothing to do with psychopathy. Often, “victims” are just one half of a toxic relationship that happens to be the louder whiner.

2. They Use Indirect Forms of Aggression

Not a female psychopath thing, this is a female thing. Most females are incapable of outright aggression so they go about it in more underhanded and sinister ways. I know a few of you did not like me saying that this is standard female behavior, but it is. Are there exceptions? Sure. But the exceptions do not outweigh the norm. Females are in direct competition with one another, and taking down the enemy is hardwired into the female experience.

3. They Play the Victim Card

Nope. I have no interest in this. I dislike sympathy, I am fiercely independent, and do not want to rely on anyone. I am far more likely to tell a person to go fondly fornicate with a fork than I am to ask for their help on anything, and god help you if you offer me pity of any kind.

4. They Can’t Hold in Their Anger for Long

…What anger? Female psychopaths still have the same wiring as males, and there are no deep emotions of any kind. If I am angry, you will never know, and it will pass before it has any impact on my behavior. If a female is angry at the drop of a hat, she’s not a psychopath.

5. They Use Deceptive Tactics to Get What They Want

This is a human trait, not a psychopathic one.

6. They Want Acceptance, but Sabotage Relationships

Acceptance? Have these people never done actual research on psychopathy and what that word means? Psychopaths do not care about others’ opinions or their acceptance. This is a very well-known trait of psychopathy, but apparently, because I have an inny this is somehow different. Not how it works. Next.

7. They Leverage Secrets & Personal Information

Good lord. Do you know how many people have told me their incredibly personal information? I couldn’t even begin to estimate. I don’t use their information for anything, but do you know who does? Toxic and sh**tty people. Most of those are going to be neurotypical.

8. They Get Other People to Do Their Dirty Work

…? What? I don’t have a crew of people around me that I can just beckon and then send. I have no idea who these people think that female psychopaths are, but I suggest that they stop watching bad movies, put some eye drops in, blink a little, get some sleep, and come back down to planet earth. There are people here that miss them… I’m sure.

9. They Are Emotionally Unstable

Sigh. So, the people that wrote this article should have a working understanding of how a crosswalk works given their education. One is an MD, and the other is, LPCS, LCAS, CCS. Do not ask me what those letters are because I don’t know, and frankly do not care enough to do a web search to figure it out. However, it is a lot of letters, and I am guessing that a fair amount of education was required to be able to list those letters. They also look very serious in their profile pictures, but I would trust either one of them around traffic based on their cognitive abilities that are being demonstrated in this article.

No psychopath ever is emotionally unstable. That is not how our brains work. Let me be clear, if you have wildly different “definitions” for how something presents in males and females, you do not have a definition at all. You have random garbage you are throwing in a pot including what you found in the barnyard, and are pouring it on a plate, all the while insisting that it’s a gourmet meal. Nope, and wrong. It’s literally crap, you know it’s crap, and everyone sees you.

10. They Are Good at Pretending

Oh goody, they got one thing right… huzzah for them, I am so very impressed. If we aren’t good at pretending, we have problems in life. Those of us that don’t like problems are going to be good at pretending. This observation, however, is a lot like the observation that water is wet, so they get very few points. It’s still a hard fail.

This is standard when you look up what “female psychopaths” are like. Male psychopaths are never so malleable in how they are thought of, but females will have everything and the kitchen sink lumped in with us.

Recently there is this concept of TIV, which is described thusly:

“an ongoing feeling that the self is a victim, which is generalized across many kinds of relationships.”

It will present itself in four specific ways:

An initial three studies established the TIV as a consistent and stable trait that involves four dimensions: moral elitism, a lack of empathy, the need for recognition, and rumination

I have heard all of these things assigned to female psychopathy, and you saw a few of them in the list above. Keep in mind, I didn’t do a deep dive into the concept of a female psychopath through the eyes of ignorant article writers for this post, as I have already done that, but I wanted to grab an overall profile that is usually presented.

With TIV something that they found was that the people that would be described with it would be more likely to want vengeance for perceived harm:

Two studies offered insight into the cognitive profile of those with TIV. The studies had participants consider scenarios that involved another person treating them unpleasantly — either by having subjects read a vignette describing a partner giving them poor feedback (Study 3) or by having subjects play a game that ended with their opponent taking a larger share of the winnings (Study 4). Interestingly, the two studies found that those who scored higher on the measure of TIV were more likely to desire revenge against the person who wronged them.

In Study 4, this desire for revenge also translated into behavior — those high in TIV were more likely to remove money from their opponent when given the chance, despite being told that this decision wouldn’t increase their own winnings. Participants high in TIV also reported experiencing more intense negative emotions and a higher entitlement to immoral behavior. Mediation analysis offered insight into how this revenge process unfolds. “The higher participants’ TIV, the more they experienced negative emotions and felt entitled to behave immorally. However, only the experience of negative emotions predicted behavioral revenge,” the authors report.

Very interesting. Or, at least it is to me. I find that the desire for revenge in most people is very different than that of a psychopath. I won’t care unless the trespass against me is great. Even then, it is a toss-up whether that will motivate me to bother. However, revenge for me isn’t about feeling any particular way. It is about leveling the playing field and teaching a lesson. If it is necessary, it will be done, but overall, I’m not interested in the effort.

A drive for vengeance for the sake of emotional satisfaction is not something that I can imagine. I don’t have that kind of investment in people, nor their actions. It is only when those actions dramatically affect me in a negative way that I might have a cognitive shift toward them being corrected.

The more I read about TIV, the more I saw aspects of personality constructs that are randomly assigned to female psychopathy. It fascinates me that psychopathy in females is so poorly thought out in terms of understanding, and that the discrepancies aren’t apparent to those that should know better. Psychopaths are cold, low emotion, lack empathy, are immune to anxiety, fear, negative emotions, are callous, ruthless, charming, incapable of experiencing chemical love, bonding, or trust…

Unless they’re female. They throw all of that out the window, because they are very high in unstable emotions, play the victim, and will hold a razor blade up to her wrist shaking with rage at the drop of a hat.

TIV is interesting, and I don’t know if it is going to become a more known construct in the personality disorder world. They seem to think that it is about primary attachment to caregivers, and how a person is raised that causes it. It is one more of many places that you will find that “lack of empathy” idea.

I wonder how long it is going to take for researchers to come to the rather obvious conclusion. The notion of lacking empathy is universal. All people lack empathy, and it fires only when the person across from the one feeling empathy is recognizable to them in the first place. You aren’t feeling empathy, you are feeling your own assumption of what that other person is going through. The less a person can relate to those around them, the less likely that it is that empathy is going to fire ever.

That is why you will find it in all humans depending on the circumstances. It isn’t that they are lacking empathy so much as it is why they are lacking empathy.

In psychopaths, we simply lack the wiring for it, which means that we will always and forever be limited to cognitive empathy. For other situations, however, like TIV, it is more likely that they do not recognize themselves in the people across from them. I imagine that it is pretty difficult to recognize yourself in people that you consider the aggressor, and yourself the victim, so of course, it doesn’t fire.

The lack isn’t interesting, the why is. Researchers are constantly barking up the wrong tree in a forest that they cannot see… because of that very same tree.

Researchers identify a new personality construct that describes the tendency to see oneself as a victim