The Cruelty Of A Psychopath

and why it is often simple miscommunication, and sometimes it isn't

Psychopathy comes with muted emotions, but there is more to it than that. there is also the inability to grasp the extent and depth of the emotions of those around us. You can tell me what you feel is X, but X is only understandable to me through watching, conversation, and cognitive empathy. That can make for a complete inability to understand one another and the chance that I may dismiss what you tell me because I can’t comprehend it. It may seem like I am just being a terrible friend or mate, but that doesn’t change what I experience, and what that is is very different than you.

Neurotypicals tend to think that their emotional world covers everyone, and that is a problem for someone like me. It may seem that I feel what you feel because my mask is very convincing. That makes for a lot of difficult aspects to relationships with other people. We are both starting from an incorrect perception of the world in that we are both going to believe that how we see things is the default way that others do. Often, even when I know and understand that my concept of the world is very different from those around me, there are things that I learn that I still mistakenly thought were normal.

A good example of this is the emotion trust. Up until the last few years I had no idea that trust had anything to do with emotions. I thought it was something that you decided to give to someone when they demonstrated that they had earned it. It wasn’t until I was researching the role of oxytocin that I came to understand that my version of trust, and neurotypicals’ version of trust were not at all the same.

It certainly answered questions for me. I was able to understand that trust was an automatic emotion, and that it wasn’t something given, so much as it was something that could be taken. Very interesting to me, and we will touch back on this later in another post. The difference, however, brings me to the topic of this post.

Due to the fact that our emotional worlds are miles apart and nearly on different planets, a lot of the communication between us is getting lost in the minutia of the social game. I get complacent sometimes about digging into the motivations and needs of those around me, and often people forget that I do not share those needs and wants. This can lead to dramatic miscommunication, and hurt feelings.

A lot of the things that create an emotional response in neurotypicals are completely foreign to me. I have no idea why that response is there. I had to learn in a lot of the more direct categories, like fear, but there are more subtle ones that can arise for different circumstances.

Jealousy is one that took me a lot of time to understand. Not only jealousy as a concept but all the different places that emotion would rear its head. Someone might be jealous over two of their friends going out, but not inviting them. Someone may be jealous that their spouse was nice to an attractive person. Someone might be jealous when their ex gets a new mate. Someone might be jealous if they think that the person that they are interested in might find their friend to be the one they are focused on.

That is a lot of places that one emotion might pop up, and they all have different underlying causes that I have to learn, understand, interpret when I see it, and apply to the situation at hand. There were a lot of examples there, but that isn’t nearly all of them. Many I have never encountered, or if I have I thought that they were silly so I wrote them off. If one of these two things are in place, I may completely miss the jealousy cues, and appear dismissive of them in the person that I am dealing with.

Let me paint a picture for you. Two friends are out to dinner. Both are female and both are attractive. One of them is a psychopath but engaged, the other is neurotypical with high levels of sensitivity and emotional reactivity, and also single. They have been friends for years, but there are frequently places where their differences create problems between them.

Enter the waiter. He is young, attractive, and very friendly. He finds a rapport with the psychopathic female because he finds her mask easy to banter with. The other female takes this as flirting and is jealous of the attention her friend is receiving. The waiter is attractive, and she doesn’t understand why he is flirting with her friend, and not her. She takes this as an indictment of her worth and level of attractiveness.

The psychopathic female on the other hand knows that the waiter is simply doing his job, and his job means that he works for tips. He finds the interaction with the psychopath comfortable and understands that an affable personality usually nets bigger payouts when the bill comes. Because she is easy to deal with there is more willingness to engage, and have friendly banter with her.

In this situation, I would have no idea why the friend would be remotely jealous. As far as I would be concerned the waiter is simply looking for the best possible outcome, and I am looking for the best possible dinner. The guy has no interest in me as far as I know, and even if he did, it wouldn’t matter. As I stipulated, the psychopath in this scenario is engaged, so someone else’s s interest is a nonissue to me.

The friend on the other hand takes this very personally. The assumption by default is that the friendliness is flirting, and that this waiter has determined her friend to be more attractive and of higher value. Because she is feeling jealous, and insecure at that moment she doesn’t talk as much, nor does she engage the waiter in the back and forth that has both him and her friend laughing. This leads to her feeling left out, and angry at the situation as a whole.

I would miss all of that internal processing because to me this is not a situation in which I would think, jealousy belongs here. When living through things like this, I had to learn that this was the thought process and that even if it makes no sense to me, that doesn’t change the emotional reaction of the other person. Not only would I have to anticipate it, but I may also have to counter it, or lay the groundwork ahead of time so they understand that this benefits them in the long run, and to respect the outcome instead of hating the process. Once it is evident that how I interact with people in these situations ends up netting them a net positive, and that the waiter’s behavior is motivated by the money, there will be a much more pleasant dinner for all involved.

Psychopaths may be very good at reading people, but mind readers we are not. A lot of the responses that neurotypicals have are baffling to us. Why on earth would jealousy have anything to do with going out to dinner with friends? In my mind, that is a ridiculous thing to have happen, and yet the car ride home isn’t going to get any less silent, and I still have to figure out what went wrong so I can prevent it in the future. One thing that I always am looking to do is minimize my having to deal with emotional drama. It isn’t enjoyable for me at all. I like to have fun and be relaxed. All the rest of it can bugger off.

Now, imagine that you are married to a psychopath, but neither of you knows that. Neither of you has any idea what psychopathy actually is, and as far as you know you are both normative human beings. This brings immediately to the table difficulties in understanding one another, but you may have no idea that is what’s happening. Instead, you are applying your own interpretation to the other person and assigning to them motivations that may never occur to them.

What if the above situation happened, but instead of the two friends, it was a psychopathic husband and neurotypical wife, with an attractive female server? It may seem reasonable to you that the husband should know that the wife would be jealous, but to a psychopath, there is nothing to be jealous of. He is just playing the server’s game to get the best service and possible experience out of her. The wife, however, she feels disrespected and angry. There will be a fight on the way home, and neither of them is going to understand the other any better at the end of it.

The wife is going to use a lot of emotionally loaded words in an attempt to get her husband to see her side of things. She will think that she is in the right, which will fuel the anger, especially when he looks at her like she’s a lunatic. She will think that he’s just an assh*le, and if the shoe were on the other foot, then he would be the one angry.

This is a good place to make a point. All the emotional words that she is using in the argument in order to clarify why she is so upset, she believes that those words have the same impact in his brain that they do in hers.

They don’t.

Emotional language has no effect on the psychopathic brain. We can hear your words, but those words don’t fire any neurons other than intellect. The ability to process emotional language is impaired in psychopaths. They investigated a group of psychopaths with the use of fMRI.

What they learned was that when psychopaths processed emotional words, the parts of the brain that were most responsive were the reasoning and language areas, not the emotion areas. We can hear the words, the words register to us, but there is no feeling with those words. The words are processed cognitively only.

They ran the same tests with non-psychopaths and found exactly the opposite. The emotional processing center of the brain, the limbic system, lights up like the fourth of July. In non-psychopaths, the emotional language was not only heard but it was also felt.

I will never understand neurotypicals’ emotional lives, and a lot of the things that they think should be obvious to me are not at all. Unless I have some experience to draw from that I can connect to and see the likeness in the current situation, I am probably completely clueless to an emotional reaction that I cannot comprehend.

This brings me to the cruelty. When you read about “psychopaths” in the tabloid-type articles that speak about the horrors of the psychopathic partner, there is no attempt to see things from the eyes of that psychopath, assuming that there was a psychopath involved in the first place, which usually is not the case.

However, let’s say for the sake of argument that the ex was a psychopath. If you read the articles there is never anything in them that steps into the shoes of that psychopath and tries to understand why the relationship had so many problems from another perspective.

Instead, they are miles-long diatribes about the level of dismissiveness and evil from the other person. In some cases, I can understand the person’s point about their psychopathic partner being aloof, distant, uncaring about their needs or problems, but as much as I can understand that, I find the application of assumption to the exes motivations often are so full of hyperbole that I can’t imagine having a rational conversation with the person writing.

Relationships are two-way streets, and I understand that. I know that both partners need to try to find a reasonable ground to deal with the other person from, and that includes developing well-honed cognitive empathy for the other person. I don’t just mean on the psychopath’s side, I mean from the neurotypical’s as well. If you are simply applying to that psychopath your own understanding of motivations, “If I did X, it would mean Y, so that is clearly the other person’s intentions”, you are doing them a disservice. The same is true from the psychopathic perspective as well.

I have to learn all about the emotional breadth of those around me, and try to find commonalities threading through it so I can anticipate what might come about. It means that because I have done this my entire life I am fairly good at sussing out the reactions that someone may have, but there are many experiences that I have never encountered, and many things that bring about reactions that make no sense to me at all.

When I fail to respond to distress it isn’t because I am cruel, it is because what upsets those around me are not things that upset me. My lack of response can be misinterpreted as lacking interest. That isn’t it at all, but that doesn’t change the fact that is how it is received.

Unless psychopathy can be spoken about without all the trappings of “evil incarnate”, there will never be an opportunity to have reasonable discussions in relationships between neurotypicals and psychopaths. I think a great deal of the hatred that NTs have for us comes from their inability to truly understand how we think. It makes us "the other”, and that frightens them.

Most of the pain that psychopaths inflict is inadvertent. We really do not feel what you feel, and cannot understand that what you feel is that deep and that impactful.

Love

Hate

Rage

Fear

Worry

Doubt

Sadness

Loneliness

Bonding

Trust

These are just words to us. They don’t hold the same context as they do for you. We use them, but not like you do. I say, “Oh, I love that,” all the time. Or, “Ugh, I hate that,” quite often. What I really mean is, “that’s awesome”, or, “I’m not fond of that”.

I don’t have the emotional depth or the chemical processing ability to fulfill either one of those statements. I use the language of those around me because that is the world in which I live, but that isn’t the way my brain works, however, and the disconnect between it, and the standard issue of human beings causes a lot of problems. How those problems are navigated is best handled through communication, but sometimes there simply is no meeting of the minds. Sometimes we are just too different.

The perception of cruelty, or the reality of it. It is in the eye of the beholder quite often.