Are psychopaths really as emotionally barren as they say?… Am I, as a psychopath myself, really as emotionally barren as everybody seem to think?A lot of psychopathic people seem to have fallen prey to the normal majority’s definitions of what we are, of what it is that makes us different from them.
I am not barren!
I make the above statement right away, so there’ll be no mistakes about how I view myself in this respect.
…..
I often hear people with psychopathic personalities say things like:
“I understand I’m empty because I can’t feel Empathy and Remorse, and I rarely feel fear!”….”I am an Empty Shell!”
Sometimes I hear these kinds of statements from people whom I find otherwise show uniqueness, intelligence, who have the ability to apply their intelligence and actually analyze and see through the facade which makes up the farce which is the normal majority’s version of reality, and have the sprite to oppose their naïvete and their fallacies, and the drive to assert it in writing when you find someone who is worthy of hearing what you have to say.
That is not empty!
And it’s a shame that so many see it that way.
…..
Then again… Yes, it is empty. But only if we see ourselves from THEIR position, if we evaluate ourselves on the basis of THEIR emotional viewpoints!
But that is the greatest danger:
Whereas we have to take on their terms to some extent in order to communicate in their world – which is largely ours too – there is nothing that says we must take on their conclusions of what our differences from themselves mean.
So when they f.x. call me ’empty’, I call it ‘Clear Headed’, ‘non-deluded’… I even call it: ‘Having Depth that goes beyond what their own shallow capacities enables them to comprehend’!
This doesn’t mean I don’t recognize that there are emotions I really cannot experience, and perhaps it is true that many, or perhaps all, of the emotions they claim I can not feel… Things such as Empathy (at least in their sense of the word), Remorse (in any sense of the word), Sadness, Fear (beyond a certain “superficial” level), etc., I really can not and never will feel.
The point is that I can experience a lot of things that the neurotypical majority of people can’t, and never will, be able to experience!
I will create two categories of examples:
A.)
I can sense and experience aesthetic pleasure from most forms of art (some from a purely intellectual level, but nevertheless, I experience it and find a form of pleasure in it.
I know about pleasure in the sight of a beautiful woman.
I can know the satisfaction on the end of a day where all of my efforts have bought fruit and turned out well, perhaps beyond my expectations.
I also know the satisfaction and relief when someone close to me, who has been worried or depressed for some reason and therefore made their company less joyful and relaxed, suddenly gives me that certain special smile that tells me I’ve succeeded in making them feel good. – It does not “bright up my whole day” like I’ve heard many normal people describing such an experience, but the experience itself, when it happens, is real.
So yes, I can experience – if not the exact same things, then at least varieties of the same things that normal people describe.
B.)
But! …I can also experience the same aesthetic pleasure from some of the things they call horrible or even disgusting, such as f.x. a mutilated corpse in a pool of blood. I can see the aesthetic notion that drives a killer to leave their victim in a certain arranged position, even if I myself would never dream of killing someone because of an inspiration of this kind. I am not an artist, though I could picture myself doing something like that in the context of directing a movie.
I can also relate to the victim of year-long physical abuse who takes a horrible revenge on their abuser, just as I can relate to the abuser who has worked maybe for years on molding their victim into becoming Negative Still of negation to what they were when they meet the abuser. I can relate to that drive towards touching someone so deeply, and acquiring the ultimate power that enables them to force the other person to willingly become the instrument of their own destruction.
These things, in the B.) Passage, to the majority of people is merely horrific, distasteful and ‘bad’. They will never be able to see the aesthetic aspects in both of the two categories I’ve listed above.
To me that means I have a wider range of emotional capacity in some respects than they do. But I also recognize that in other respects they have a wider range of emotional capacity than I do. That is why I say we’re different, but both groups – the psychopaths and the normal majority – are human, and one no more so than the other.
The point is that we… or I, anyway… may in fact be not only not emotionally barren, but quite the opposite!
It’s a question of the ability to see things from a variety of perspectives, and not always only from the viewpoint of your own ingrown viewpoint!
…..
It is always a matter of perspective, and from my definitions of what I can feel or not feel I do not look so barren after all. In fact I’ll say that:…
I am not Emotionally Barren! And it feels damn good to be me!!
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