Why The Mask Is Born

The inevitable realization that it is necessary...

Photo by Edilson Borges on Unsplash

I have been asked a great deal about when I realized that I was not like everyone else, and what made it apparent to me that I would have to mask to blend in.

It wasn’t one thing. There was;t a moment that it was an “a-ha” epiphany. It was a gradual understanding at an early age that what I thought was playacting for some unexplainable reason, was in fact quite real and totally foreign to me.

Children are very naive about the emotional experiences of others. They are still figuring out a great deal about the world and understanding the emotions of people around them is too far outside a child’s limited worldview. Normally, this is not a problem for children because they do have the spectrum of emotions that people expect them to have. They cry when they are sad, or frustrated, they get angry when they feel that some injustice has been done to them such as bedtime, they are afraid of the dark often, and they love their parents.

This is not the case for a psychopathic child. Psychopathic children are existing in a world where they think all those “normal” behaviors of other children are solely for the purpose of getting what it is that they want. It was the most reasonable and logical thought to me, so I did the same thing. This isn’t the mask though, this is just mimicry of those around you. All children do it, and psychopaths are no different in that respect. What is different is the creeping understanding that things are not what they originally seemed to be. There is a difference here, and not one we have any touchstone to understand.

How does this start?

We ask questions. The responses we get to our questions are confusion, sometimes shock, disgust, or anger. Obviously, we’re doing something wrong, and what everyone keeps telling us doesn’t make any sense to how we think. So, we learn what not to ask, what not to do, and what not to say. We watch our siblings should we have any. Other children as well. We see their interaction with adults, and how they don’t have the same troubles as us.

Light bulb! They somehow think differently than us. How they think is like trying to crack a safe. Nothing neurotypicals do makes sense to us. It’s like trying to figure out a foreign film without subtitles and no scene context. We just begin to mimic. As we get older, this skill increases and we do better, but in the beginning, we are bad at it. Another issue we face is having to learn the value that neurotypicals place on certain behaviors that to us seem worthless.

Sharing. Why? This is mine. Go get your own, and yes, I will hit you with it to keep you away. What? I don’t care that I took it from you.

Stealing. This one was very difficult for my parents. I was quite brazen about it and made no apologies about it either. No matter what they did they could not get me to acknowledge that I was in the wrong, or that I should feel bad about taking something from someone else. Psychopaths can’t be conditioned through guilt. That’s simply a nonstarter with me. Not knowing what else to use, they found themselves at a stalemate with my impulsiveness and my lack of care that they were upset with me,

This was a very common conversation with my parents.

“Taking something from someone is wrong”

This declaration is met with a blank stare.

“Why?”

“Because now they don’t have it”

Still not following along here...

“Right, because I do… and I wanted it… so… yay me.”

“Now their feelings are hurt, they’re sad”

“Sounds like a ‘them’ problem to me. They should get one of these” me holding up whatever I took from them. “Maybe that will work?” I try to leave the room with my newly acquired toy.

“Give it back to them”

“No”.

This can go on until I have driven my parents crazy. I know because it did. This is not reasoning that goes anywhere for me. I don’t care how that person feels or what they want out of the situation. I care about me.

Fear. Just what? The lights are out and you’re crying? Why? Crying is for when you want something and they won’t give it to you. What do you mean you won’t go down into the basement at night? What’s the problem? Fear was a huge indicator to me that there was a very deep divide between my understanding of the world and my sister’s. I tried to understand the concept but was left with more questions than answers. I didn’t understand nightmares, I didn’t understand scary things on the TV, I didn’t understand scary noises or shadows that my sister’s brain could make out into the form of a monster.

My sister was afraid of her closet. I made a fort in mine that I could go and read in after I was supposed to be asleep.

We went camping, and my parents had to make sure I didn’t go wandering off into the forest alone at night because I wasn’t worried about anything.

Killing scary bugs? That was my job.

Telling the truth. Explain this to me. I want X, and I told you that. My reason, because I want it, didn’t impress you. So, I told you a different reason, and I got what I wanted. Why is this bad? I got what I wanted. I accomplished my goal. You people keep changing the rules on me. You don’t want me to lie because it’s dishonest, but you can’t tell me in reasonable terms why that matters. And no, it’s ‘bad’ does not count.

Crying. Children do this all the time. I used it to manipulate, and it worked like gangbusters. I assumed this was why all children did it until my sister talked about this ‘fear’ thing. Then it was sadness. Then it was happiness. Will you people pick a reason why water comes out of your eyes? This is a nightmare!

Crying to me came about for one of two reasons. One being that it worked. It got me what I wanted. The second reason was frustration when I lacked communication skills.

When you live enough of your life constantly in trouble for not being as expected, you learn that it is in your best interest to act like they want you to. When you do, things change, and it is easier to get the things that you want. This was not lost on me at all, and I did my best to conform to people’s expectations.

Here’s the thing though… I didn’t have any cognitive empathy. I didn’t have any notion of what that was, and even if I did, it wasn’t as though I knew how to cultivate it. That came with age and experience, but age and experience doens’t help when you’re a kid without any. I made loads of mistakes. There were constantly situations and events that I had no frame of reference for, so I couldn’t respond according to the norm.

Its construction was primarily made up of failure. People often claim that psychopaths don’t learn from their mistakes. That’s not true. We don’t learn the lessons that people want us to learn from our mistakes, but we definitely learn lessons that are beneficial to us from them. Mask failure is an example of this. If one version didn’t get me what I wanted I changed it to be more effective. I learned what people responded to, and I practiced until I mastered them.

Did you realize how attuned to tones people are? This escapes the attention of a good portion of the population which is quite beneficial to me because I am an excellent mimic. It’s interesting to me that most people are unaware of how much tone plays into how you are received. Usually, when I mention this they assume that I mean how I say something like, “Why did you do that?”? This phrase can be said with different affectations that will change its reception, that’s true. Where you place emphasis on the words and the volume of your voice all comes into play, but that isn’t what I mean at all.

What I mean is the tone of true emotion versus created emotion for emotional manipulation. People often say that psychopaths are excellent manipulators. We are, because we have lived in your world and listened to you speak in a variety of situations. We know how you sound like when you are sad, and we know what you sound like when you want us to believe that you’re sad because you are trying to get something out of us. Because we can hear this tonal difference we can also effectuate it on demand. I can make a person feel the urge to cry just by emulating that sound without here being anything more than my voice. No crying, no red face, no dramatic wiping of the eyes, just my tone.

I am quite proficient at making people see of me what I want them to see because I have spent my life learning what I have to create to make that be the case. The mask allows me to be like everyone else, but it wasn’t always that way. There was a time I sucked at it hard, and had to fail constantly to do better. This starts when we are children, and it continues until we die or cease caring. I wonder which one I reach first.