47 Comments
Jan 25, 2022·edited Jan 25, 2022Liked by Athena Walker

Tired of people judging others as if they know what everyone is doing in there lives, how dare that bitch asking you if you commit any crimes, that's not her business, she should tape her nose on her face so it don't fly into someone else's business, lol about the autism, superpower to spot psychopaths and sociopaths, like STFU and sit the fuck down girl, and people with low emapthy don't feel right to you, eh who is asking? No one asks for your opinion, if the world only have people with empathy, then it would be a bag of flipping pool and emotions running and ruling the earth or whatever you call it, it needs to be balanced, not people with their emotional crap alone, better to stay in your place and don't run into us people with low empathy

Them going on with that HSP (empath) mindset about spotting psychopaths as a superpower? They watch too many marvel movies so fecking immature and i can't stand people like them lmao 🤣🤣🤣🤣

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Jan 26, 2022·edited Jan 26, 2022Liked by Athena Walker

A while back, I shared some of what I've learned from you with an acquaintance. She refused to believe it.

A long time ago, I told a coworker about an article I'd read about mirror-image sugar molecules that scientists were studying as a sugar substitute. She said the idea of lef or right handed molecules was ridiculous. She didnt believe it. She knew nothing about chemistry.

I don't run into that kind of attitude often, but when I do, I'm baffled. How can they make any kind of claim unless theyre familiar with the subject? And how can they think that their beliefs about it impacts the fact of it in any way?

People make uninformed opinions on all kinds of things. I agree with your reasoning about psychopathy, but with other topics,. I just don't get it.

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Jan 27, 2022Liked by Athena Walker

It is so true what you say about applying our experience of the world to others. We are sort of brought up that way, these are emotions, these are situations, this is what people usually do and feel. It took me the longest time to even question that simplistic model let alone get past those assumptions. I know someone who does not have the full typical range of emotions, but having no idea that that even existed, it caused years of misunderstanding. I was shocked to find that my (already partly controlled) visceral emotional reactions were seen as performed attempts to manipulate, they were shocked to hear that their conduct could be callous to the point of cruel. Even regarding a friend of ours, who suffered a lot as a child, they cannot understand why what occurred was a problem. Needless to say it took many years and many conversations to work through all this.

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Jan 26, 2022Liked by Athena Walker

People are strange animals. For some reason they want special powers .

I don't think anyone not properly trained can say that someone is a psychopath. Even some or most professionals can't do it. That's why there are a battery of tests made to figure it out.

I think you'd have to know someone for a very long time and have a lot of knowledge, to even get close to being able to make a good guess.

I do think there are a number of people that can tell when something is off, with someone else, not normal.

To say someone is a psychopath, without the proper testing, I think it's really far fetched.

Usually when I read that kind of thing on Qura, what they describe is someone closer to NPD, and I see no way that you can be a primary psychopath and have NPD , there's just to much emotion in NPD, which requires empathy, not for people sometimes but for themselves.

I just think there are way too many disorders out there that people think are psychopathic because of of...x y or z, when they cannot see the whole picture just by some actions that are similar to what is described as psychopathic. People fill in the blanks and think they have figured out everything.

I don't think it's ever that simple and no one has psychopath radar.

This whole ASPD thing isn't helping as far as I can tell either, its like taking apples, oranges, and bananas and saying they are all the same fruit.

I also think it's lazy, grouping them all together and treating them the same. You can't get orange juice from a banana. Sure they're all fruit but it ends there.

Anyway I'm with you on this one. I think it's just rediculous. I've seen some of the things that people say to you on Qura and I just shake my head. They seem to be hell bent on being right, no matter what information you pass along.

I could go on, but I'm sure you know the reasons why they do this stuff by now.

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Jan 25, 2022·edited Jan 25, 2022Liked by Athena Walker

Oh Boy…

This might get interesting.

Presupposition: all psychopaths fool everyone all of the time, or masking is always perfect.

Expecting it to always be perfect, the psychopath will have to have been exposed to not only the average person, but also the above average, and those were special skill sets of observation, and had enough time to practice with that as well.

No it doesn’t have to be perfect, it just have to be perfect enough, because people assume neural normal by default, and so any supplemental cute as well just slip past the RAS And get filtered out

Presupposition: The psychopath would know that they’re masking works or not in every situation, even if someone doesn’t indicate that they see through it

This assumes that a psychopath is getting honest feedback and behavior from their targets of influence, but it is likely that some of them are giving false feedback or keeping their cards to their chest.

Presupposition: some people claim to have special powers to spot a psychopath, and they are motivated by ego or other similar drivers.

A lot of people believe a lot of false things about themselves, and have magical thinking.

But this does not preclude the possibility that Bona fide skill sets of observation do not exist that would notice psychopathic traits.

Professional magicians, pickpocket artists, card sharks, and hypnotists might be in the category of possibility here.

In summary, your arguments are mostly true, but you cannot know objectively, but you fool everyone all of the time, simply because you don’t always get the feedback to tell you so

I can tell you my own personal experience. I’m a hyper alert person with PTSD, and I mean or have been a clinical hypnotherapist and stage hypnotist.

And I’ve learned a lot from you quite frankly.

What I pick up on his “something is off “and it’s at the domain of nonverbal communication.

But I’ve never had a box to put it in, I didn’t know if it was autism Asperger‘s, narcissism, psychopathy or whatever.

But there are Tells, like poker tells.

Of course you could simply say those are psychopaths that aren’t good at masking, but there’s no way of proving that.

and I have no idea of how many psychopaths I’ve encountered where I detected no tells at all.

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Jun 28, 2023·edited Jun 29, 2023Liked by Athena Walker

"The better tuned emotional empathy might pick up on the hollow emotions if they aren’t able to mimic them accurately".

I must admit that I was someone who claimed to be "able to read people"! Haha though would never specify any disorder. Just a broad idea.

Nowdays my understanding is that I can read only what people shows, and people definitely can show many things even if unconsciously. I remember crystal clear instances when someone was playing a performance and something tiny in their facial expressions screamed fake.

They decided to show me their performance, and I was capable of seeing something. If maybe they didn't show it and acted indifferent I would have not been able to wonder about their motives on playing a performance and put their character or intentions on a certain ballpark. I saw what they shown.

In my experience women were better at going under the radar than men. It's situational dependant too, there might be people who feel more or less comfortable playing a malicious act to you than to others for many reasons and you can pick up on that.

In regards to cognitive empathy, regular interactions can be more reasonable to gauge. But I've seen the craziest cognitive processes when romantic relationships, or honor, were involved. It's nearly impossible to predict what a person is trully feeling or thinking in certain scenarios. And it can be beyond a lenses concept but rather disorders that maybe they refuse to treat - it takes courage to admit smth isn't quite right with you lol.

I want to finish my comment by asking you something:

You've never seen a picture or a person IRL and their body composition (composition, yes) or facial features gave you the impression that they "aren't a good person"? Purely based on phisycal appearance.

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Jun 6, 2022Liked by Athena Walker

I was curious to see how you dismantle the argument of schizoid personality disorder, because reading your posts made me think of that diagnosis to be the CLOSEST to how I imagine you to be after reading your posts:

-The emphasis is on behaviors and appearances, rather than emotions and feelings;

-The behaviors under that diagnosis do sound like something which NT-s would make out of trying to connect to you, provided that you did not have sufficient motivation to act differently in their vicinitiy;

-It's a highly misunderstood and misdiagnozed disorder (too many similiarities with schizotypal and even some autistic subtypes);

-Its' prevalence (around 5% in USA) does sound much more intuitive to me than 1-2% for psychopaths (I have my own reasons for such an intuition, one which cognitively wouldn't make sense to you now).

I would add to that some things, change a few (such as sexuality - I've read articles where the opposite was proven to be possible for schizoids as well, so this portrait of that disorder is actually old and incomplete) and it really WOULD appear to be much closer to psychopathy than any other DSM V article.

If we can find an existing diagnosis to build on, rather than inventing a completely new one, I don't see a reason for ignoring such an opportunity. Please let me know what you think of that idea!

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Lol. After reading the first snip-it I just find it ironic that some random internet user, presumably from Quora fancies themselves a psychopath spotter... yet they have autism, a condition characterized by deficiencies in visual-spatial awareness that verge on intellectual disability in most cases. I wonder what kind of alternate meta reality this person is living in where someones eyes are a determining factor in how psychopathic they are.

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Jan 29, 2022Liked by Athena Walker

What would happen to a clouded, preoccupied mind, if everything suddenly fell silent? How occupied are our minds normally? Is our mind constantly on, taking on some unresolved stuff that we do not have answers to? Well, yes, for most people, the mind is probably pretty occupied. One day, my mind came to a complete halt. To be more precise, through a series of events, I suddenly gave myself the permission to come to conclusions on all things, without needing anyone’s else’s permission. And everything fell totally silent in my mind. “Well”, I thought, “I am experiencing enlightenment, what an amazing experience!”

For eight months following that day, I was in constant state of nirvana that I would rather not lose again. But I was not in a position to live my life as this state required me to, if I wanted to sustain it. After I fell out of this perfect state, I have been living in awe of psychopaths. It was not clear right away, but while analysing what happened, this has slowly been forming as the conclusion from this experience. And I am amazed at how the rest of us have screwed our lives up with emotional reactions that take away this perfect state that I got to know for a brief time.

When I try to evaluate if someone might either be a psychopath, or have psychopathic tendencies, I use this experience of mine. My working theory now is that the psychopathic state is a somewhat perfect state, that we should all try to achieve. We should start out in a psychopathic state, and we should be chasing that same state through out our life, if we have ambitions to live the life to the fullest.

What is it that stops us from thinking things through when we have information to do so? In my case, it was all kind of emotional blackmail – constant control through my ability to feel emotions from my surroundings. An intense manipulation, from weak people, that had settled for lies, decay, manipulations and delusions. For all kind of different reasons. When I stepped out of this indoctrination, that I should respond emotionally to all kinds of things on cue from manipulative people around me, everything fell in place. I developed super-powers. I had incredible memory, slept like a rock, woke up refreshed every single morning. Had increased mental powers. I could look over a room of people and I saw clearly differences in people that I had never been able to see before. I gave up constant philosophical ruminations and wanted just to enjoy and be in the moment. I possessed such a quick thinking, that I did not need the same perfection that I had been chasing all my live. If you are the fastest thinking person in the room, you will be the one controlling it. All kind of manipulations and lies had kept my mind occupied all my live, it could never stop, because the equations that I was being feed from my surroundings, were so dramatically wrong, that I would never have been able to come to conclusions about them. They did not add up. They slowed down my thinking and clouded my judgement. I shed all the inherited delusions that had been passed down to me after various traumas in my family tree, and after various traumas in the collective in my surrounding. And my mind fell silent, and became an incredible and efficient tool instead of being a constant source of pain and difficulties.

And this has come to be my guiding light in evaluating psychopaths. It is not some evil characteristics or coldness of emotions. It is this stillness of mind, that gives people an advantage over others. That could be used for evil things, for sure. But to be preoccupied with this one possibility, the evilness that having advantage over others could lead to - I think that is one of the grand delusions we have been chasing to doggedly because of our emotional reactions. Psychopathy has a far broader and much more remarkable meaning then we have been imagining up until now.

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Jan 28, 2022Liked by Athena Walker

Here's a thought. It would be fascinating to hear about you and your psycopath friend, what you though of each other when you met, any clues, how you ended up disclosing to each other. I do realise that this is a bit personal so I'm not holding my breath! Just a thought.

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