The Gate To The Outside World

Learning the value of how you treat people as a psychopath...

In the last post, I spoke about how stories taught me things that I was unable to understand on my own. You might think that meant that I have a good grasp of cognitive empathy based on these things, but the reality is, these things helped me get by. Nothing more.

Cognitive empathy was something that I didn’t see a lot of value in, and that was shortsighted by me. It took me actually seeing the differences from my way in the world versus other people’s, specifically those that I keep around me.

First came my Significant Other, but before we get there, let’s take a look at how I perceived the world prior to his arrival. While I could pretend to feel what other people felt in order to get along and blend in, by no means did I understand why people did the things that they did.

When you are psychopathic, the rest of the world operates on an autopilot that we do not have installed. Assumptions are everywhere, and people get one another, for the most part, in an emotional world that we lack the passport for. This means that we can mimic, but not get it. I have often said, I can understand what emotions look like, what they sound like, in what situations they appear, but I do not know what those emotions feel like, nor why they are tied to different things. For instance, if you have never felt fear, you don’t understand why other people are afraid.

With my level of understanding of emotions, frankly, I found most people to be perplexing, and therefore I wasn’t interested in engaging where I didn’t have to. People were, for the most part, unpredictable. Learning the how and why of emotions in others was an ongoing and not welcome process. I really didn’t want to do more than was absolutely necessary, because I didn’t see any value to doing so.

Then I met my Significant Other. He has a unique ability that I have not seen in many people. He watches people, it is simply part of who he is. Not only does he watch them, he builds an understanding of precisely what I was missing in my experience. When I met him, he saw that I was basically unwilling to interact with people without a reason, and that my lack of understanding of their motives could result in me being very cold to people that were having a difficult time emotionally.

Just because I lacked an interest in interacting with people that would require more effort to understand, it didn’t quell my wondering what their deal was. I would see something that, to me, seemed utterly ridiculous, and ask aloud, “Why do they do that?” Interestingly, he was able to tell me, in terms that I understood, what is going through that person’s mind at the moment. This wasn’t done through emotive language, this was done in a much more analytical sense. He could describe the steps of a person’s thoughts and emotions, the situations that they are in, and describe them to me in an accessible way. That alone interested me to a degree, but not as much as his magic powers, which we will get to in a moment.

In my life, I have always had people approach me, want to be around me, talk to me, and all of it is more or less an annoyance to me. I would make it clear that I wasn’t interested in their attentions, which often had the opposite effect. It made no sense to me that people, when told to bugger off, would try to get closer. I think this has to do with their own projections. They want that attention from me, so they assumed that I wanted it from them, they just had to be more aggressive. This behavior led to a few weird outcomes, including, when people can’t get close to you when they want to, they will literally construct a fictional life for you.

I have come across several of these fictional lives in my time, and they are always totally bizarre. You have no idea how often I have heard, “Oh, you’re THAT Athena…”

Never once did I have any idea what they meant by THAT Athena, and when they tell me, it’s always some absolutely insane story. I have had this happen over on Quora as well. You have no idea how many people have made up things about me because they couldn’t get what they wanted out of me. From creating screenshots of answers that I never wrote to questions that never existed on the site, to people pretending to be my Significant Other. People pretending that they know me, that they have met me, where I live, what I do, all the way down to doxxing people that have nothing to do with me, and creating fake psychologists to “debunk me”.

You can sort of see why I didn’t care about the reasoning behind people’s behavior. All of the above is such a waste of time. What happens on Quora is a snapshot of what I have dealt with in the real world, and frankly I saw little value in bothering with others.

However, now we get to my Significant Other’s magic powers, and that is, people want to solve problems for him. It could be anything. He has a way of interacting with people that makes them want to do things for him, and I am a very pragmatic girl. I wanted to know, how does he do that? In a prior post I wrote about this process a bit, meaning what I learned from him. You can find that here:

Treat Me Well And I Will Treat You Better...

I start off that post by saying that the title is more or less my philosophy, but it wasn’t always. I think prior to meeting him, it was, treat me well, and go away. Don’t get me wrong, I still liked getting stuff, but in my estimation, stuff was not worth the trouble from most people. Most people are emotional landmines that I didn’t want to deal with.

It might sound like I am blaming them, but the reality was I simply didn’t understand their thought process. It was totally foreign to me. Granted, the idiots that make up weird crap about me, I still don’t get them. Seriously, get a freaking hobby, no one has time for your nonsense, but the rest of the world was still a pain that I would prefer to get at arms length.

Watching my Significant Other, however, showed me that there was a better way. How he interacted with others had this effect on them that I saw as greatly beneficial, and I would ask him about it all the time. He patiently explained things to me, and in time, I began imitating him, and the success was immediate. People really have a different response when you make them feel seen and heard. Give them a moment of grace, and they are so willing to do whatever they can to make your life easier. It isn’t much trouble to do. Or, at least it isn’t for a psychopath.

I am not sure, but I could imagine that there is a difference in how these things affect neurotypicals. Emotional handholding is easy when you don’t have a stake in the game. This is just a series of actions to me, I am not invested in these people at all. If they feel good, my life is easier. That’s the equation to me. Perhaps it doesn’t work that way for NTs, and I won’t assume that it does, so this is just from my perspective.

He also had this ability to remember what was important to people, as does the second person that I will talk about in a moment. That is relevant to this discussion as well, and we will get there.

My Significant Other taught me how to understand the inner workings of those around me to the point that I could start making connections between emotional process and behavior. I could better understand if a person is feeling in one certain way, what behavior options there are for that person, and how to predict which one was coming up next. Now, you must understand, he is still far better at this than I am. He reads people with a preternatural ability. I, am just a novice apprentice compared to him. That is one person that taught me a great deal about cognitive empathy.

Now, let’s talk about the person that taught me consideration. I learned a fair amount about consideration from my parents, and my Significant Other, but someone taught me through their actions toward me, what it was to be considerate on a much larger scale. In some of my previous posts, I spoke about Jess. She is the person that will be answering your questions on the, Ask A Psychopath's Friend, thread. If you have questions about what it is like to be friends with a psychopath, go over there and ask them. I can’t make any predictions about when she will finally get around to answering them, as this is the same person that took nearly twenty years to make me a pasta salad, but I did finally get it, so maybe there is hope in the air.

Anyway, she has a very giving nature, sometimes to her own detriment, which I will tell her when I see that aspects. If ever you need someone to tell you where you are vulnerable to being taken advantage of, a psychopath is the best person for that job. We see all those angles. In fact, that is likely one of the reasons that I was uninterested in learning the emotional gears of neurotypicals. I observed actions, and often those actions were pretty damn underhanded. She, on the other hand, when I met her, had a much more forgiving nature toward others. The degree that she has this forgiving nature has sharply declined in the years that she has known me, and she attributes that to being friends with me. For better or worse? If you are wondering that, go ask her. I can’t speak for her.

Her background placed her in situations where being giving was necessary for both her safety and her sanity. She has two distinctly different sides, one being rather cold, and one being very kind. She tended toward the kindness when I met her, because she decided that she didn’t want to be a negative influence on the world. She wanted to be better than that.

When I met her, she always thought about others. She still does, but that is mostly limited to people that she knows very well. She has learned from me, and my Significant Other, how to conduct business like we do to get the best outcome, but for the most part, she is kind and polite to strangers, but that is the extent of it. To those she knows well, she is considerate. What does that mean?

She always asks if there is anything that she can do for us.

She always wants to help.

She always thinks about the needs and wants of those closest to her before thinking about her own needs.

She would rather do for us than herself.

She takes herself seriously in this regard.

There are many others, but this post can only be so long, and it isn’t my place to talk about her to the point of invading her privacy. Watching her, I learned how to place others in my thought process. This is totally unnatural for a psychopath, and it was very difficult to program myself to do. Fortunately, I had a living example that I could watch to remind myself.

I will give you the most passive of examples. If she were going to the store, she would ask me if I needed anything. You might think, yeah… that’s normal, Athena. Not to me, it isn’t. It doesn’t compute to me at all naturally. My thought process is, I have to go to the store. Do you guys remember the story in my post about not knowing when you are supposed to be afraid, where I literally walked in front of a car to make someone stop to help me? That’s not only an example of what happens when you feel no fear, but also a prime one of psychopathic thinking. I needed a ride, and you are going to stop and give it to me.

There was no thought about him, what he had going on, how he felt about me expectations of him, where he was headed, none of that occurs to me naturally. It is, I need X, and this is the shortest path to get it. It took seeing a different way of being over and over for me to reflect on how I behave.

Her willingness to think about others demonstrated to me, in real time, my lack of it. I could also see that it likely was a better way to behave toward those I have in my life. I can only imagine that it is tiresome to deal with someone that thinks about themselves first and foremost, and has to be trained to manually include other people in that thought process. I at least have the understanding of how humans work to understand that my way in the world could be exhausting to deal with.

When I have relationships, I make it a point to try to be considerate of what other people need from me to some degree, but I am the first to admit, if someone doesn’t tell me precisely what it is, I am unlikely to glean it from them. This is because I prefer to conduct my relationships in a more direct fashion. Out in the world, I have to participate in the social ballet of emotional consideration. It is a lot of guess work, and observation. Frankly, when I am not in a position to have to do this, I would rather people just tell me what they need. Tell me, and I will do my best to accommodate. Don’t tell me, and the chances are that you aren’t getting it. Relationships with me are not the place to not speak up because of a worry of making me angry. Whatever it is, it won’t, and it’s the only way you’re going to get it out of me.

Because of what I learned from these two people, I am far better at human interaction. None of it is natural to me, but these things have shown me their value over time. I like things that make my life easier, and what they taught me certainly did that.

That is the Reader’s Digest version of what I have learned from those around me. I could have kept writing, but the post is already long. Ah, in closing, I remember something else that I learned from Jess specifically. I was about to write, “Let me know if you guys have any questions”. I wouldn’t even think about writing that in the past. I write because I like writing. What other people think about it, or want to know, wouldn’t have crossed my mind. I suppose the comment section over on Quora also taught me to consider others in this way, so kudos to Quora.

Oh yeah, let me know if you have any questions…