Thank you for such a good explanation! Also, your example about "what would I think or feel if my boss yelled at me" really helped me out. I had something very similar happen to me today. It helped me understand what happened and it helped me process the situation afterwards.
I was at the train station taking a wide picture of the sky because the clouds (lighting, color...) were very pretty. I also wanted to include the train tracks and a bit of the platform. And it just so happened that two security guards were standing there. One of them approached me aggressively while saying "delete that video inmediately!! You can't do that". He didn't even let me explain anything and I was panicking because it was very sudden (I'm also a petite person, when such a big person approaches me aggressively...). He wouldn't stop repeating it again and again ("No, no, delete that inmediately").
I felt like crying and ashamed (it probably has to do about him being an "authority figure") in that situation. I somehow managed to show that it was a picture, not a video. I then cropped him out of the picture (I just wanted the clouds and the tracks) and showed it to him.
Afterwards, while I was sitting inside the train feeling very emotional and trying to restrain my tears, I remembered your post. Why should I feel shame? I didn't mess up anything and provided a solution to his problem. Why did he have to be so aggresive and hostile about that situation? There was no need. It was a simple thing. He didn't want to appear in my picture. He just had to say "I don't want to appear in your video (since he thought it was that...), please delete it". In those situations, people generally would have no problem cropping the image or deleting retaking it. Did he want to use that attitude to make me obey him? Was he just pissed off and taking it out on me?
Usually, it would take me very long (hours) to calm down, and that feeling of shame would persist. But thanks to your post, I calmed down in 15 min and was able to objectively see the situation.
Ever since I started to read your posts, I can't help but notice how everything is "covered" by emotions (movies, emotion driven actions, all the interactions...). Why the f*ck is such a simple thing as asking someone to delete something so full of emotions. It's so unnecessary.
Thank you so much for creating this site!!! (or do you call it a blog?) I learn so many new things about psychopathy (which in turn helps me to understand myself since I compare it with my thoughts, emotions, actions...)
I would guess that his reaction was a very unevaluated one. If you asked him, he would be unlikely able to explain why it was so upsetting to him. Perhaps he could, and there is an answer, such as a past experience, but more likely it is that he had his own emotional response to whatever he perceived as happening, and reacted without thought, just giving a voice to that emotional response that screamed to exit his body in the moment.
I think Substack defines itself as a newsletter, but I am more inclined to call it a space. A place to think about new and interesting things, hear stories, and consider the world at large.
I become (internally) homicidaly rageful if photographed without consent, however innocuously. There are many past reasons for this. Nowdays I frame it, I think reasonably, as 'you have no right to my image, the laws and ethics just haven't caught up with the technology and social norms yet, the natives who thought their souls were being stolen were on the right track'. Massive button push for me, but I try to be civilised about it. I used to be naive about people from other cultures objecting to being photographed. Eventually the penny dropped. So now it goes both ways.
yeah... he probably just acted on his emotions. The more I read your posts, the more I feel that emotions are very unreliable. If you don't examine them, you pretty much go on autopilot, giving control to emotions...
I totally understand being so emotionally reactive, I am the sameby nature, and I'm so glad you managed to pull back from that, stand to the side, however you want to phrase it. In this respect we can all gain from working towards being more like Athena, its so liberating.
What if it's not as much a closed circuit situation, as much as a " circuit breaker " that activates whenever a certain emotional intensitivy is reached, upon which moment the psyche instantly snaps to a 100% rational side?
What if it doesn't snap to the rational side, but rather to a extraneous "witness" position wherein the person dissociates in a way that establishs emotional and rational clarity that is ideal for both self-preservation and social networking?
What if the development of that exact same "circuit breaker" is the reason why people meditate?
And for anyone who feels like indulging the occasional wacky musings and preposterous possibilities.... brace yourselves as I'm going all out now:
What if all of the above could suggest that if there were such thing as reincarnation, the birth of a psychopathic child signal the return of a soul who had mastered meditation in the previous lifetime - or who maybe had one final lesson to learn or karmic entanglement to sort through, before "graduating"?
That could explain quite many a good deal of things.
"Neurotypicals are open emotional circuits. They genuinely need other people for their emotional wellbeing.
Psychopaths are closed emotional circuits. They do not need anyone to be emotionally stable and well."
I have had a very similar thought actually, and have considered that Buddha was psychopathic, and trying to teach the world to be more detached from all the things that made the world so noisy, and to think more like him. Buddha's examples of goals to focus on through meditation are very similar to the idea of how psychopaths experience the world from my recollections of reading it.
Buddha may well have been, but if so, his intentions were largely doomed to fail. If you're not wired like that, you just can't (or maybe you can up to a point if you devote years and years and much work to it). It's futile trying to tell others to 'just' think like we do, look at it this way, adopt this attitude, it's so easy! No it isn't, we are all very different, this rarely works. Maybe one day the cog sci people will be able to tell us why this is so.
Indeed, and one of the reasons that I am inclined to think that he was. It is difficult to understand the power of emotions when you aren't dealing with strong ones. It does appear from the outside that you can just see it differently, you can just react differently, because there is no basis of understanding.
It takes significant cognitive empathy to understand what degree people are affected by emotions, and he didn't really seem to have that deep understanding. It wasn't so much, I did it, so you can do it. It seems more like his mentality was, I see the world this way, and this way is better. You should join me over here. It seems to be without understanding of how oud those emotions can be and how overwhelming that they can present themselves as. It took me a long time to understand it as well, and I still fail.
Oh god I so despise the 'If I can do it, you can do it too' fallacy. But yeah, Buddha, or anyone else advocating the same- his way was better, sure, but for most unattainable. Few will want to spend decades in a monastery to achieve what he may well have had naturally as a matter of brain wiring. Never umderestimate the strength of neurotypical emotions- we CAN with effort learn to largely detach our intellect from them, as we must, but we mostly cant mitigate the subjective pain and internal chaos they cause.
I agree. I think the best thing to do is be the best version of yourself that you can be. The only person that can determine what qualifies as that, is the person that is living within their own skin. No one else.
And that thought - to me - is the absolute quintessence of the books from Fallon and, much more, Dutton (Psychopath Inside and The Wisdom of Psychopaths).
Thank you, Doso and Athena.
One could think that even further and expand it to Greek mythology (Prometheus and others) and the Judeo-Christian tradition, to prophets in general? No, they do not necessarily all must have been psychopaths and psychopaths are not necessarily the better human beings. But what surely many of these wise guys have in common, is the ability to look on the human emotional struggle from above. To ‘transcend’. To see clearly. And on the other hand, the great longing of people for this state of being detached from the all-too-human always having to feel.
Hm, I don't know. A lot of people think that they are normal, but then find out they have some sort of neurodivergency. Perception is certainly a part of life, but perceptions can be wrong. Then I suppose that there is the argument that they believed that they were normal, and to them they were normal, and when their perception changed, their understanding of themselves did as well, therefore they have been as they thought themselves to be all along.
I get asked "What's wrong?" all the time because people don't realize I'm perfectly fine with minimally interacting with them or not at all. This can be a problem with girlfriends.
Also, I have a relative that always screams "Acknowledge me!" whenever I talk to her. The last time I said "Bitch I'm staring right at you and listening to what you're saying." She responded that I have to be more social.
Some of the new, "expert" articles on it are really annoying but it does show me more about some NT thinking... they used language like "mimicking" a lot. Low level, dehumanizing language. Not... "modelling" and "researching" or anything like that. (I found stuff by Jane Goodall etc. about our primate cousins really helpful for human behavior, esp. aggression. The stuff I read about certain theater methods sorta fits what I figured out how to do too. I might feel most of the same emotions as NTs but don't have the same motivations sometimes, or automatic face expression reading etc. So, different from psychopaths, but must also mask often, and forgot how not to sort of. Am 58.
I will try to find a decent article to post here...
Here is one article that resonates for me more than many, but it still has issues from my perspective. It's framed in a certain social perspective, uses the words "marginalization" and such. There are pluses and minuses for that; I sometimes like to try to abstract these issues even further -- for me, that involves trying to see things at a species level, with game theory, trying to speculate what evolutionary processes might be involved, those sorts of things. Maybe we all always see things through some lens or another though.
This journal includes numerous autistic adults in the reviewing (and often as researchers too), so I tend to prefer it to researchers who use "deficit" in almost every sentence...
To find this article, I went specifically to this journal (Autism in Adulthood) and searched on "camouflage".
A Conceptual Analysis of Autistic Masking: Understanding the Narrative of Stigma and the Illusion of Choice
This one, I *don't* really agree with -- for some of the same reasons that (I think) Athena differentiates her masking from what, say, NTs might do, if placed into an unusual/unfamiliar social situation etc. There are different levels of adaptation and masking that this article doesn't seem to really understand, not that I can "prove" that. But being unable to "prove" any of this seems common!
“Masking Is Life”: Experiences of Masking in Autistic and Nonautistic Adults
Danielle Miller, Jon Rees, and Amy Pearson. Autism in Adulthood.
Yvonne, as soon as you mentioned the autistic mask construct and a test to determine the extent of your masking- A test! A test! - I began searching for the online test like a heroin addict wandering the neighborhood for a fix.
I have been doing this for my entire life and it's only been recently that I realized that what I was doing was different than what other people were doing
I think neurotypicals can have some idea of how disturbing the unmasked psycopath could be. There are parallels. As you say, the emotional feedback loop for neurotypicals is essential, and yet thrown out completely during the 'silent treatment', an acknowledged cruelty that on the face of it 'should' be nothing at all. Or even dealing with people who are so depressed as to be largely unresponsive and unreachable, it's not just dismaying, it's freaky. Possibly the worst is dealing with someone close who is experiencing an episode of psychosis- all the cliches apply: 'you're scaring me', 'who ARE you right now?', 'I just want YOU back'. It's terrifying. The brain we know is absent. I imagine the unmasked psycopath to be similarly upsetting.
OMG my first reaction is: "Creating and maintaining this mask must be exhausting." And having to figure this out by trial and error, lots of error, during one's childhood? I cannot even begin to imagine what a challenge that was. It does sound like you have largely succeeded. I'm glad you have both an SO and a good friend in your life. It sounds like that is one source of some happiness for you. Along with a LOT of curiosity about all sorts of stuff.
My cognitive empathy and masking have improved lately, partly after I figured out that emotional experiences I used to lump together were likely individual. Some things I thought were very common among neurotypicals turned out to be not so. Some are as strange to them as they are to me.
I got injured very stupidly once, it was funny and so most of my friends have heard the story and seen the illustrations for it. Two of them didn’t really enjoy the story and the photoproofs, as expected. Their reactions could confirm my idea of how people react to such things in general, but only if I didn’t have other two friends, none of which were bothered by them and they both are empathetic and rather emotional.
Another thing is with the emotional words tests. I have given them to all of my friends and none of them had any reaction to words, they were all surprised that it was possible to have different reactions to words at all. It was interesting.
Many emotional experiences vary greatly among neurotypicals and many of them that I lack most less emotional neurotypicals at least, lack too. At the same time there are fundamental experiences that all neurotypicals seem to have, that I lack as well. And only this difference is what I have to make up on my part.
Knowing what experiences are “optional” and are only expected to be relatable by some people is helpful, but figuring it out is difficult.
That was a very clear discription for sure. Must be a real pain though. It's nice that you have people around you that understand. Are you different around certain people? I noticed my youngest is, and I can tell who he's talking to just by his tone of voice and how he interacts with them. So you change some with different people too?
Athena, I was so delighted with your content that I didn't realize I had run out of battery on my phone by the time I had finished writing my comment. Now I have to write again lol. Imma try my best to remember...
Being a neurotipical emotionally, as with everything, comes with a different range of pros and cons. Having feelings can be beautiful: I remember when I was 8yo and I was in love with a girl. She brought chocolate for me at lunch... I brought her sweets. She asked me to be her boyfriend. We sat together, played together...It was heaven. Nothing can describe it. And then one day her parents went to another city. I didn't even say goodbye. Oh my lord was I pissed off. But I enjoyed getting my heart ache too.
Regular life goes away from such level of romanticism though. When it comes to masks, I used to call it being fake. I took pride in being authentic with whatever I felt, and although in majority of cases this was projected to some good end, the world doesn't necessarily appreciate or intends to reciprocate your authenticity, whatever form it is.
Wearing a mask per se is a neutral action, and with experience you learn that anybody could be using one, for whatever reason be it good or bad. I used to believe that there was no reason why someone would be "fake" or have bad intentions lol. I was young and naive, so the illusion of safety. People can hate you for anything. Either good or bad qualities could trigger or threaten them. Now I know I need to remind mysel to watch my back at all times.
Certain people you can only get to know them after seeing them exposed in a large range of situations, preferably even when they think nobody is looking around. If a proficient masker roams freely, they will always show you only what they want, for the purpose that they want. There is some merit to "shit testing" I guess...
I wanna have a new mask. A psychopathic one! So I can be a tiny little Athena... jk. But, like really. Dealing with evil people with glasses of benevolent emotions is basically digging your own grave. They will use this against you time and time again. Like a stab in your mind or chest. If you manage to remove the feelings, then you are back to full health. Tell me athena, do you think I could achieve a mask like that? And perhaps interiorize it. I wanna be stronger. I need it. I am open to any advice!!
Thank you for the post. It was highly enjoyable and knowledge nurturing.
I love your explanation for the mask though it does raise one question for me. In the article where you talk about being diagnosed with psychopathy, I wondered why you went through all the hassle you did to get the diagnosis when you could have just dropped your mask( in other articles, you have mentioned that is obvious especially to neurotypicals when you dropped your mask because you stop providing emotional cues for them to respond to) and the doctor would have known immediately you were a psychopath or at the very least strongly suspected you weren’t neurotypical.
That wouldn't tell them anything. If the mask is an act, the rest should rightly be considered an act as well. If they had diagnosed me on something so minor, they should have had their licenses pulled for gross incompetence.
Makes sense. There needs to be documentation and clear evidence to support their diagnosis. Also I still think that the doctor was trying to whittle away at your patience with the whole half hour wait before the test lol.
I find it very similar to autistic mask (mine, at least), with a few exceptions - instead of manufacturing emotions, I have to manufacture words. Emotions, I mostly had to suppress (because if I feel any emotions, those are probably my own projections) so now they are absent.
I will mostly understand the bigger picture and I know it's futile to always bring it up - if they were able to see the full picture, they wouldn't have whatever is it that happened to them, happen in the first place (or at least their reaction to it would be notched down to a more manageable level). So my challenge is to manufacture emotions as well (how am I supposed to feel sympathy if I see their half of the fault?) as things to say (the truth hurts, especially without sympathy involved). If I feel anything, it's most likely disappointment or impatience, due to my inability to communicate the bigger picture at that point in time.
Of course, my friends are mostly autistic as well, so it's not a problem. In fact, perhaps that's precisely why I cannot always communicate my perspective to them - they have to learn it themselves, understand it on their own, by introspection. So one might reasonably conclude that they feel the same way about me. In fact, I'm grateful to my luck/authenticity/whatever is to be grateful for having them in my life. But you can imagine that it's hard for me to acquire new friends - not as hard as it is for you, granted, but still harder than for NT-s, especially when living in a smaller town and/or country. Strictly statistically speaking.
So I guess there's quite an overlap in autistic vs psychopathic masks.
Also, I'm talking real friends here, not acquaintances or friends for this/friends for that. I find that my mask works TOO good for the latter ones - I tend to impress them up to the point where it's hard for me to maintain those expectations. But that's another story, probably one I would call "overcompensating".
I know just what you mean about seeing people's own hands in their problems, and it can certainly make it difficult for me to have time to listen to them complain. It is something that I have seen so many times it is mind numbing.
I wrote a long comment about how your work has helped me out but due to the vagaries of internet browsers being launched from apps and whatnot it got lost during the login process.
Having said this, you are responsible for a whole lot of personal growth on my part. Improvement in my personal relationships etc etc. the development of a mask even.
I fractured my skull at one, three, and twelve. I have always felt very separate and disconnected from people and all their for lack of a better word, bullshit.
I suspect I am a genetic psychopath, Whether I am or not, realizing that I wasn’t the only person who experienced life without all the constant emotional feedback was eye opening.
I had always thought it was odd that many people, even those who know me well, think that I don’t like them or feel that I don’t want them around.
I would tell them they are stupid.
I am going to make a list of questions to ask you, as soon as I can think of them. It’s very difficult for me comprehend the gaps in my awareness sufficiently enough that I can form the questions which would enlighten me.
She probably has that demeanor due to having to protect herself in that environment. She probably doesn't have any memory of anything else, and she would also not likely have the skillset to deal with someone that is completely opposite from her.
Thank you for such a good explanation! Also, your example about "what would I think or feel if my boss yelled at me" really helped me out. I had something very similar happen to me today. It helped me understand what happened and it helped me process the situation afterwards.
I was at the train station taking a wide picture of the sky because the clouds (lighting, color...) were very pretty. I also wanted to include the train tracks and a bit of the platform. And it just so happened that two security guards were standing there. One of them approached me aggressively while saying "delete that video inmediately!! You can't do that". He didn't even let me explain anything and I was panicking because it was very sudden (I'm also a petite person, when such a big person approaches me aggressively...). He wouldn't stop repeating it again and again ("No, no, delete that inmediately").
I felt like crying and ashamed (it probably has to do about him being an "authority figure") in that situation. I somehow managed to show that it was a picture, not a video. I then cropped him out of the picture (I just wanted the clouds and the tracks) and showed it to him.
Afterwards, while I was sitting inside the train feeling very emotional and trying to restrain my tears, I remembered your post. Why should I feel shame? I didn't mess up anything and provided a solution to his problem. Why did he have to be so aggresive and hostile about that situation? There was no need. It was a simple thing. He didn't want to appear in my picture. He just had to say "I don't want to appear in your video (since he thought it was that...), please delete it". In those situations, people generally would have no problem cropping the image or deleting retaking it. Did he want to use that attitude to make me obey him? Was he just pissed off and taking it out on me?
Usually, it would take me very long (hours) to calm down, and that feeling of shame would persist. But thanks to your post, I calmed down in 15 min and was able to objectively see the situation.
Ever since I started to read your posts, I can't help but notice how everything is "covered" by emotions (movies, emotion driven actions, all the interactions...). Why the f*ck is such a simple thing as asking someone to delete something so full of emotions. It's so unnecessary.
Thank you so much for creating this site!!! (or do you call it a blog?) I learn so many new things about psychopathy (which in turn helps me to understand myself since I compare it with my thoughts, emotions, actions...)
I would guess that his reaction was a very unevaluated one. If you asked him, he would be unlikely able to explain why it was so upsetting to him. Perhaps he could, and there is an answer, such as a past experience, but more likely it is that he had his own emotional response to whatever he perceived as happening, and reacted without thought, just giving a voice to that emotional response that screamed to exit his body in the moment.
I think Substack defines itself as a newsletter, but I am more inclined to call it a space. A place to think about new and interesting things, hear stories, and consider the world at large.
I become (internally) homicidaly rageful if photographed without consent, however innocuously. There are many past reasons for this. Nowdays I frame it, I think reasonably, as 'you have no right to my image, the laws and ethics just haven't caught up with the technology and social norms yet, the natives who thought their souls were being stolen were on the right track'. Massive button push for me, but I try to be civilised about it. I used to be naive about people from other cultures objecting to being photographed. Eventually the penny dropped. So now it goes both ways.
Thank you for explaining a possible explanation for the security guards thinking.
yeah... he probably just acted on his emotions. The more I read your posts, the more I feel that emotions are very unreliable. If you don't examine them, you pretty much go on autopilot, giving control to emotions...
That has been my observation as well.
I totally understand being so emotionally reactive, I am the sameby nature, and I'm so glad you managed to pull back from that, stand to the side, however you want to phrase it. In this respect we can all gain from working towards being more like Athena, its so liberating.
What if it's not as much a closed circuit situation, as much as a " circuit breaker " that activates whenever a certain emotional intensitivy is reached, upon which moment the psyche instantly snaps to a 100% rational side?
What if it doesn't snap to the rational side, but rather to a extraneous "witness" position wherein the person dissociates in a way that establishs emotional and rational clarity that is ideal for both self-preservation and social networking?
What if the development of that exact same "circuit breaker" is the reason why people meditate?
And for anyone who feels like indulging the occasional wacky musings and preposterous possibilities.... brace yourselves as I'm going all out now:
What if all of the above could suggest that if there were such thing as reincarnation, the birth of a psychopathic child signal the return of a soul who had mastered meditation in the previous lifetime - or who maybe had one final lesson to learn or karmic entanglement to sort through, before "graduating"?
That could explain quite many a good deal of things.
"Neurotypicals are open emotional circuits. They genuinely need other people for their emotional wellbeing.
Psychopaths are closed emotional circuits. They do not need anyone to be emotionally stable and well."
I have had a very similar thought actually, and have considered that Buddha was psychopathic, and trying to teach the world to be more detached from all the things that made the world so noisy, and to think more like him. Buddha's examples of goals to focus on through meditation are very similar to the idea of how psychopaths experience the world from my recollections of reading it.
Buddha may well have been, but if so, his intentions were largely doomed to fail. If you're not wired like that, you just can't (or maybe you can up to a point if you devote years and years and much work to it). It's futile trying to tell others to 'just' think like we do, look at it this way, adopt this attitude, it's so easy! No it isn't, we are all very different, this rarely works. Maybe one day the cog sci people will be able to tell us why this is so.
Indeed, and one of the reasons that I am inclined to think that he was. It is difficult to understand the power of emotions when you aren't dealing with strong ones. It does appear from the outside that you can just see it differently, you can just react differently, because there is no basis of understanding.
It takes significant cognitive empathy to understand what degree people are affected by emotions, and he didn't really seem to have that deep understanding. It wasn't so much, I did it, so you can do it. It seems more like his mentality was, I see the world this way, and this way is better. You should join me over here. It seems to be without understanding of how oud those emotions can be and how overwhelming that they can present themselves as. It took me a long time to understand it as well, and I still fail.
Oh god I so despise the 'If I can do it, you can do it too' fallacy. But yeah, Buddha, or anyone else advocating the same- his way was better, sure, but for most unattainable. Few will want to spend decades in a monastery to achieve what he may well have had naturally as a matter of brain wiring. Never umderestimate the strength of neurotypical emotions- we CAN with effort learn to largely detach our intellect from them, as we must, but we mostly cant mitigate the subjective pain and internal chaos they cause.
I agree. I think the best thing to do is be the best version of yourself that you can be. The only person that can determine what qualifies as that, is the person that is living within their own skin. No one else.
And that thought - to me - is the absolute quintessence of the books from Fallon and, much more, Dutton (Psychopath Inside and The Wisdom of Psychopaths).
Thank you, Doso and Athena.
One could think that even further and expand it to Greek mythology (Prometheus and others) and the Judeo-Christian tradition, to prophets in general? No, they do not necessarily all must have been psychopaths and psychopaths are not necessarily the better human beings. But what surely many of these wise guys have in common, is the ability to look on the human emotional struggle from above. To ‘transcend’. To see clearly. And on the other hand, the great longing of people for this state of being detached from the all-too-human always having to feel.
There does seem to be a theme of cognitive understanding of the human condition, I agree
Very odd, as it happens I practice meditation and have found that there are advanced practices that I can perform quite naturally.
That makes sense to me. I have always found meditation to be a waste for me, because the goal is where I am already at naturally.
"As a man thinketh, so is he". How does this fit?
Hm, I don't know. A lot of people think that they are normal, but then find out they have some sort of neurodivergency. Perception is certainly a part of life, but perceptions can be wrong. Then I suppose that there is the argument that they believed that they were normal, and to them they were normal, and when their perception changed, their understanding of themselves did as well, therefore they have been as they thought themselves to be all along.
I can imagine that this saying does not mean the perception of one’s self. But the objective look on the thinking of an individual?
I think that is a reasonable assessment
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NOI7KsEE8wq3KHnX5hYJYJhp_fjGx7fR/view?usp=sharing
PS - "Did the Buddha (un)make himself a psychopath?" seems like a fun idea to keep in mind for a future article here.
A very good question. I would have to reread a fair amount of his writings before writing such a post.
I get asked "What's wrong?" all the time because people don't realize I'm perfectly fine with minimally interacting with them or not at all. This can be a problem with girlfriends.
Also, I have a relative that always screams "Acknowledge me!" whenever I talk to her. The last time I said "Bitch I'm staring right at you and listening to what you're saying." She responded that I have to be more social.
You don't have to do anything. She should realize that.
try changing your nickname, maybe they'll stop asking what's wrong
She doesn't know about it. It wouldn't matter. She desperately wants attention.
Thank you for this brilliantly written and fascinating piece!
I hope to be able to write a bit in response in a few days. Crazy at work right now. Autistic-masking with a cloth mask on too.
I have read about the autistic mask as well. It is really interesting.
Some of the new, "expert" articles on it are really annoying but it does show me more about some NT thinking... they used language like "mimicking" a lot. Low level, dehumanizing language. Not... "modelling" and "researching" or anything like that. (I found stuff by Jane Goodall etc. about our primate cousins really helpful for human behavior, esp. aggression. The stuff I read about certain theater methods sorta fits what I figured out how to do too. I might feel most of the same emotions as NTs but don't have the same motivations sometimes, or automatic face expression reading etc. So, different from psychopaths, but must also mask often, and forgot how not to sort of. Am 58.
I will try to find a decent article to post here...
Here is one article that resonates for me more than many, but it still has issues from my perspective. It's framed in a certain social perspective, uses the words "marginalization" and such. There are pluses and minuses for that; I sometimes like to try to abstract these issues even further -- for me, that involves trying to see things at a species level, with game theory, trying to speculate what evolutionary processes might be involved, those sorts of things. Maybe we all always see things through some lens or another though.
This journal includes numerous autistic adults in the reviewing (and often as researchers too), so I tend to prefer it to researchers who use "deficit" in almost every sentence...
To find this article, I went specifically to this journal (Autism in Adulthood) and searched on "camouflage".
A Conceptual Analysis of Autistic Masking: Understanding the Narrative of Stigma and the Illusion of Choice
Amy Pearson and Kieran Rose. Autism in Adulthood. Mar 2021. 52-60. http://doi.org/10.1089/aut.2020.0043
Published in Volume: 3 Issue 1: March 18, 2021
Online Ahead of Print:January 22, 2021
https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/aut.2020.0043
This one, I *don't* really agree with -- for some of the same reasons that (I think) Athena differentiates her masking from what, say, NTs might do, if placed into an unusual/unfamiliar social situation etc. There are different levels of adaptation and masking that this article doesn't seem to really understand, not that I can "prove" that. But being unable to "prove" any of this seems common!
“Masking Is Life”: Experiences of Masking in Autistic and Nonautistic Adults
Danielle Miller, Jon Rees, and Amy Pearson. Autism in Adulthood.
https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/aut.2020.0083
Thank you for the links. I can imagine that masking is very fatiguing for sensitive people like those in the autism spectrum.
Yvonne, as soon as you mentioned the autistic mask construct and a test to determine the extent of your masking- A test! A test! - I began searching for the online test like a heroin addict wandering the neighborhood for a fix.
My results:
Total score:77
Camouflage: 32
Masking:24
Assimilation: 14
Might you share a URL pls? :-)
I have been doing this for my entire life and it's only been recently that I realized that what I was doing was different than what other people were doing
It is pretty weird to know that the world functions very differently than what you know as normal.
I think neurotypicals can have some idea of how disturbing the unmasked psycopath could be. There are parallels. As you say, the emotional feedback loop for neurotypicals is essential, and yet thrown out completely during the 'silent treatment', an acknowledged cruelty that on the face of it 'should' be nothing at all. Or even dealing with people who are so depressed as to be largely unresponsive and unreachable, it's not just dismaying, it's freaky. Possibly the worst is dealing with someone close who is experiencing an episode of psychosis- all the cliches apply: 'you're scaring me', 'who ARE you right now?', 'I just want YOU back'. It's terrifying. The brain we know is absent. I imagine the unmasked psycopath to be similarly upsetting.
Probably, yes
Thank you Athena. I really appreciate the insight and your honest impressions of people.
Thank you for reading, Shelly
OMG my first reaction is: "Creating and maintaining this mask must be exhausting." And having to figure this out by trial and error, lots of error, during one's childhood? I cannot even begin to imagine what a challenge that was. It does sound like you have largely succeeded. I'm glad you have both an SO and a good friend in your life. It sounds like that is one source of some happiness for you. Along with a LOT of curiosity about all sorts of stuff.
Indeed, it certainly creates a lot of things to investigate and learn about.
My cognitive empathy and masking have improved lately, partly after I figured out that emotional experiences I used to lump together were likely individual. Some things I thought were very common among neurotypicals turned out to be not so. Some are as strange to them as they are to me.
I got injured very stupidly once, it was funny and so most of my friends have heard the story and seen the illustrations for it. Two of them didn’t really enjoy the story and the photoproofs, as expected. Their reactions could confirm my idea of how people react to such things in general, but only if I didn’t have other two friends, none of which were bothered by them and they both are empathetic and rather emotional.
Another thing is with the emotional words tests. I have given them to all of my friends and none of them had any reaction to words, they were all surprised that it was possible to have different reactions to words at all. It was interesting.
Many emotional experiences vary greatly among neurotypicals and many of them that I lack most less emotional neurotypicals at least, lack too. At the same time there are fundamental experiences that all neurotypicals seem to have, that I lack as well. And only this difference is what I have to make up on my part.
Knowing what experiences are “optional” and are only expected to be relatable by some people is helpful, but figuring it out is difficult.
That was a very clear discription for sure. Must be a real pain though. It's nice that you have people around you that understand. Are you different around certain people? I noticed my youngest is, and I can tell who he's talking to just by his tone of voice and how he interacts with them. So you change some with different people too?
I am definitely different around those that are close to me.
Athena, I was so delighted with your content that I didn't realize I had run out of battery on my phone by the time I had finished writing my comment. Now I have to write again lol. Imma try my best to remember...
Being a neurotipical emotionally, as with everything, comes with a different range of pros and cons. Having feelings can be beautiful: I remember when I was 8yo and I was in love with a girl. She brought chocolate for me at lunch... I brought her sweets. She asked me to be her boyfriend. We sat together, played together...It was heaven. Nothing can describe it. And then one day her parents went to another city. I didn't even say goodbye. Oh my lord was I pissed off. But I enjoyed getting my heart ache too.
Regular life goes away from such level of romanticism though. When it comes to masks, I used to call it being fake. I took pride in being authentic with whatever I felt, and although in majority of cases this was projected to some good end, the world doesn't necessarily appreciate or intends to reciprocate your authenticity, whatever form it is.
Wearing a mask per se is a neutral action, and with experience you learn that anybody could be using one, for whatever reason be it good or bad. I used to believe that there was no reason why someone would be "fake" or have bad intentions lol. I was young and naive, so the illusion of safety. People can hate you for anything. Either good or bad qualities could trigger or threaten them. Now I know I need to remind mysel to watch my back at all times.
Certain people you can only get to know them after seeing them exposed in a large range of situations, preferably even when they think nobody is looking around. If a proficient masker roams freely, they will always show you only what they want, for the purpose that they want. There is some merit to "shit testing" I guess...
I wanna have a new mask. A psychopathic one! So I can be a tiny little Athena... jk. But, like really. Dealing with evil people with glasses of benevolent emotions is basically digging your own grave. They will use this against you time and time again. Like a stab in your mind or chest. If you manage to remove the feelings, then you are back to full health. Tell me athena, do you think I could achieve a mask like that? And perhaps interiorize it. I wanna be stronger. I need it. I am open to any advice!!
Thank you for the post. It was highly enjoyable and knowledge nurturing.
Oh my, I can see the tiny Athena now. Sort of like a bobble head or a POP Funko toy.
I love your explanation for the mask though it does raise one question for me. In the article where you talk about being diagnosed with psychopathy, I wondered why you went through all the hassle you did to get the diagnosis when you could have just dropped your mask( in other articles, you have mentioned that is obvious especially to neurotypicals when you dropped your mask because you stop providing emotional cues for them to respond to) and the doctor would have known immediately you were a psychopath or at the very least strongly suspected you weren’t neurotypical.
That wouldn't tell them anything. If the mask is an act, the rest should rightly be considered an act as well. If they had diagnosed me on something so minor, they should have had their licenses pulled for gross incompetence.
Makes sense. There needs to be documentation and clear evidence to support their diagnosis. Also I still think that the doctor was trying to whittle away at your patience with the whole half hour wait before the test lol.
I agree, that is exactly what I think he was doing.
That's a beautiful representation of a mask!
I find it very similar to autistic mask (mine, at least), with a few exceptions - instead of manufacturing emotions, I have to manufacture words. Emotions, I mostly had to suppress (because if I feel any emotions, those are probably my own projections) so now they are absent.
I will mostly understand the bigger picture and I know it's futile to always bring it up - if they were able to see the full picture, they wouldn't have whatever is it that happened to them, happen in the first place (or at least their reaction to it would be notched down to a more manageable level). So my challenge is to manufacture emotions as well (how am I supposed to feel sympathy if I see their half of the fault?) as things to say (the truth hurts, especially without sympathy involved). If I feel anything, it's most likely disappointment or impatience, due to my inability to communicate the bigger picture at that point in time.
Of course, my friends are mostly autistic as well, so it's not a problem. In fact, perhaps that's precisely why I cannot always communicate my perspective to them - they have to learn it themselves, understand it on their own, by introspection. So one might reasonably conclude that they feel the same way about me. In fact, I'm grateful to my luck/authenticity/whatever is to be grateful for having them in my life. But you can imagine that it's hard for me to acquire new friends - not as hard as it is for you, granted, but still harder than for NT-s, especially when living in a smaller town and/or country. Strictly statistically speaking.
So I guess there's quite an overlap in autistic vs psychopathic masks.
Also, I'm talking real friends here, not acquaintances or friends for this/friends for that. I find that my mask works TOO good for the latter ones - I tend to impress them up to the point where it's hard for me to maintain those expectations. But that's another story, probably one I would call "overcompensating".
I know just what you mean about seeing people's own hands in their problems, and it can certainly make it difficult for me to have time to listen to them complain. It is something that I have seen so many times it is mind numbing.
Why yes, why yes I would.
https://embrace-autism.com/cat-q/
I wrote a long comment about how your work has helped me out but due to the vagaries of internet browsers being launched from apps and whatnot it got lost during the login process.
Having said this, you are responsible for a whole lot of personal growth on my part. Improvement in my personal relationships etc etc. the development of a mask even.
I am glad to know that. Thank you for taking the time to read and consider what I write, and letting me know that it has been helpful to you.
I fractured my skull at one, three, and twelve. I have always felt very separate and disconnected from people and all their for lack of a better word, bullshit.
I suspect I am a genetic psychopath, Whether I am or not, realizing that I wasn’t the only person who experienced life without all the constant emotional feedback was eye opening.
I had always thought it was odd that many people, even those who know me well, think that I don’t like them or feel that I don’t want them around.
I would tell them they are stupid.
I am going to make a list of questions to ask you, as soon as I can think of them. It’s very difficult for me comprehend the gaps in my awareness sufficiently enough that I can form the questions which would enlighten me.
I can understand that. Hopefully you will get some more answers.
She probably has that demeanor due to having to protect herself in that environment. She probably doesn't have any memory of anything else, and she would also not likely have the skillset to deal with someone that is completely opposite from her.
She does indeed seem to have many aspects that are similar to me.
Sounds like me