#the research basis for how 'psychopath' kept developing as a medical and pseudomedical category

[whetstonefires]

Thank you for your comment about personality disorder stigma on that empathy vs. mirroring post. As a Probably Allistic who's dx'd Cluster B, it's always something else coming across any of the multiple #actuallyautistic posts out there that can be summarized as: "STOP painting autistic people as remorseless narcissist-psychopaths - maybe it's harder for us to express, but we DO feel our fellow human beings, and we ARE capable of love, unlike those abusive, *truly* empathy-lacking freaks!!" -

- which makes me feel very.... shut the fuck up maybe? Only *I* get to call me a loveless psychopath?? Are you aware that there exist autistic people with personality disorders and/or by-your-definition Evil Psychopath Lack of Empathy, and you've wound up and punted them under the bus as well??? Anyways it's rare for people to speak up on behalf of PD havers, and I really appreciate that you did.

Aw, thank you for the message! This is good to hear. I was pretty nervous about that post add, honestly. Disagreeing with an angry person is always scary! (For me lol.)

And once I'd edited my addition down to the essential points, having learned over time that exhaustive covering of every possible point of ambiguity etc just annoys people and doesn't really aid communication, I felt like I'd probably become so imprecise as to be rudely reductive.

But it seemed important to say! So I'm glad. To hear you found it constructive. 😄✌

Heh yeah I thought about the people in the overlap zone too but I didn't think bringing that up would do anything but sow confusion--like, I wanted to keep it clear that this was a disagreement over categorization systems and being a dick about other people's brains, and not come across as trying to like, subtext, 'hey op i disagree with your experience of autism so much i'm going to hint i think you are in fact a psychopath.' Which I do not. And also it would be none of my business anyway.

But yeah, it's like--it pisses me off. Too. The language around empathy is both inadequate and seriously in flux so it's not that I care whether people use 'the right words'--I'm suspicious of demands to use the 'right' words in order to be allowed to speak--but that sentiment rubs me the wrong way. Especially in the context of autism!

Like, I often say insensitive or clueless things because I can't model other people's mental states well enough or fast enough to figure out how it's going to sound outside my head, or pick up hints I'm 'supposed' to, or because I get so wrapped up in what I'm talking about that I forget to even try, which plays out functionally as self-absorption. Decades of practice and I'm still deeply sub-par at this.

And I've gotten so much shit for it! Both as power plays and because it's caused some real harm and hurt feelings, and those categories don't sort neatly into boxes, either. Sometimes it's both. This is just, a lot of misery associated with my deficits.

(Mostly for me but like, I'm not going to pretend my obnoxiousness is without consequences.)

But you can also see people with perfectly normal base empathy stats be just as bad, when it's someone they don't want to care about, or they're tired, or they're dealing with someone sufficiently different from themselves that their assumptions trip them up. That shit's not magic.

A bunch of times I've seen people with really high empathy stats be, like...everyone knows about the kind of asshole with high empathic perception but low reactivity who uses it for evil. That's a cliche. But you know what's not any less scary and way more volatile? Someone who's got high marks in both kinds and is furiously angry with you for making them feel bad.

Because having a knee-jerk empathetic reaction to someone's hurt when you don't feel sympathetic toward them is really annoying, and can tend to feel like manipulation even when it isn't.

It's very easy for a high-empathy person with power over others to slip into abusing those people in retribution for the pain their pain causes.

I have absolutely been punished for triggering someone's empathy reactions in a way they don't like, just by existing! It sucks! Sometimes these are people with like, strong natural empathy who haven't learned good skills for processing it etc, but sometimes it's the socially adept people who are really sweet and kind and supportive and thoughtful in like 90% of life so therefore you must deserve it, when that doesn't extend to you.

But sometimes they've just burned themselves out on the rest of the world and you're inconvenient or too much or some other disqualifying thing, so you just. Are their exception. The one they get to kick.

An empathetic person who has wronged you can go absolutely feral about making it your fault. Because otherwise they're stuck feeling twice as bad, once reactively and once in guilt.

Theoretically, ideally, this is a control mechanism that keeps people from wronging one another in the first place, that's why we link empathy and morality as much as we do, but it...doesn't necessarily work that way. Sometimes it just works out to a motive for dehumanization.

Because that's the lower-effort route to less mental pain.

...and if you're in the habit of just trusting your natural impulses to ensure you behave decently, you can develop a whole entire toxic coping mechanism down that route before you even notice you're doing anything wrong. Instinct is not a sufficient substitute for self-reflection and principle even when you're naturally blessed with good ones!

So like. My point being. That someone's empathic capacity on any scale is just a tool they have to use, that usually makes it easier and/or more likely for them to achieve pro-social conduct on a regular basis the more they've got to work with, although it does have the capacity to backfire.

It's statistically predictive, to an extent. But it doesn't actually guarantee jack shit about whether a person can or will exercise compassion.

You know?

So I feel like autism and that cluster of personality disorders are in very similar boats with excessive emphasis on...social toolsets as definitional to personhood, rather than factors affecting social cohesion etc. So when I see that kind of side-punching. Feels bad.

#empathy #autism #personality disorders #like i'm not an expert! #but this is my understanding #ask #a nonny mouse #hoc est meum #mental health #bit of a ramble #i do totally get hating the misunderstandings associated with #the decades of awfulness attached to the concept of #'low empathy autistic' #and wanting to clarify what's going on there #but you can do that without shitting on other people i think! #i remember ages ago i was digging into like #the research basis for how 'psychopath' kept developing as a medical and pseudomedical category #and there was this note that most of the research pool was people in prison and i was like #Well That Sounds Real Fucking Flawed Then #and like the researchers acknowledged rather pointedly that this was the pool of 'failures' as opposed to say successful politicians #and other people too smart to get caught #but like are those the only two options you think?? #and yeah it was like #this was the result of an ambiguity of definition #between the behavioral and the perceptual #i think we're developing in a positive direction when it comes to frameworking these things #france is a social construct