Anything and everything concerning mental health will always interest me. Coming from a family that’s absolutely riddled with chemical imbalance, I’m always looking to compare and contrast my past, present and future experiences with those who have done the leg work on their illness. Sort of like a WebMD, but in my own head. It’s a real gas!
I enjoy almost everything that comes out of The Cut, and this article sucked me in, top to bottom. This woman is a diagnosed Psychopath, and she discusses the struggle of having to “fit in” everyday while simultaneously hiding this disease. The article references the obvious public perception that all psychopaths are murderers and criminals. It also references how people are very cavalier when talking about psychopaths, which resonated with me – I call every crying girl on TV a psychopath. Basically every time someone exerts some sort of over the top emotion, I label them that way. It’s taken me a while to try and snap out of that generalization, but this article helped to see it in a different light.
Importantly, Neumann notes, psychopathy is a scale. “It’s not that you’re either a psychopath or not,” he says. “In the same way someone can have severe depression but it’s also possible for someone to have mild or moderate depression.”
I’ve NEVER thought about it this way. But why wouldn’t we? There’s a spectrum for everything, and we’re all on it in one way or another. Take depression for example. How I feel when an event I was looking forward to gets cancelled is much different than how I feel when I’m sitting in the dark at 4am trying to figure out where my life went wrong. Not caring about someone else’s dog dying is different than being able to drive a knife through someone’s chest. Being a psychopath is all about lacking emotion and frankly, we’ve all lacked the “right” level of emotion at inappropriate times.
People believe that if you have a lack of empathy, that automatically opens a floodgate of antisocial behavior. That’s not really how it works. I may not care, I may not have an emotional reaction to someone’s pain, but that doesn’t mean that I’m going out of my way to cause pain. It just means that I don’t have that emotional response.
Here here. I find this extremely relatable at the moment given the country’s climate – no, I’m not about to go on a political rant but it’s true. We’ve become numb to so many things. School shootings, friends overdosing, terrorism. If I don’t change my Facebook profile picture to the affected country’s flag after a gruesome terrorist attack, does that mean I hope it happens again?
For me, life is very much in this immediate moment. This moment is all you have, and the fear of it going away is just nonsensical. This is a huge disconnect for me. People explain it in ways that they very much understand: they’re afraid of dying, they’re afraid of not being important, they’re afraid of being forgotten. And none of those things are important to me, so it’s sort of like saying I’m afraid of not being the color blue.
I don’t necessarily have a fear of death, because once you’re dead you don’t have to pay your credit card bill, but the act of dying scares me. Mostly just how my body will look afterwards. Will I be wearing a good outfit? What if I die in a brutal way, and they’re scraping me off a sidewalk somewhere? Bleh. It’s all very superficial. It’s interesting that there are people who don’t have the desire to be remembered or be important. It kind of sounds like a relief to me. I’d LOVE to stop caring about anything and everything in this way, but it’s just not how I’m made up. I would say I’m sure this woman wishes she could feel these things, but I know for a fact, she doesn’t! She just does not feel the need for any of it. Honestly, I’m starting to get a little jealous.
She goes on to describe how this illness works in her relationship.
I feel attraction, and he’s very attractive. But psychopaths don’t process oxytocin like neurotypicals do. What oxytocin contributes to in your brain is chemical love, so that feeling of a roller coaster. Bonding is another one we don’t have. You bond to your significant other, you bond to your children, you bond to your pets. There’s also trust, which is a weird one, because I didn’t know oxytocin had anything to do with trust. Most people feel trust as an actual emotion. I never knew that. To me, trust was always: You show me how you’re going to behave, and I will determine whether or not I want you around. I always knew I didn’t trust people, and I always had a disconnect, because I didn’t know it was a chemical reaction for most people. I didn’t have an explanation as to why I didn’t trust people, but then I started digging into oxytocin. It made sense.
Learning about oxytocin was a bit of an eye opener for me. I don’t think I’ve ever thought of trust as anything BUT an emotion, either extremely strong or completely broken. I’m not the type of person who trusts slowly; it’s either I trust you, or I don’t, and I don’t typically change my mind. To think of it in an analytical way, which is the vibe I get from this woman, seems almost more practical. Removing the emotion, grudges, paranoia from it all. You do something good, I trust you. You do something bad, I don’t trust you anymore. Seems impossibly simple.
People think we have no emotion, which is absolutely not true. We just feel them way turned down. If most people feel an emotion between seven and eight on a dial of ten, I feel it between zero and two. Negative emotions are background noise. We can’t tune into that frequency because our brains just don’t process enough information for them to ever be loud enough to feel or direct behavior. We enjoy things, get excited about things, like adrenaline — that’s great. I laugh with people, I enjoy intellectual discussions. A lower functioning psychopath probably wouldn’t enjoy intellectual conversation. They’d rather go and rob a liquor store. But that’s why they spend most of their lives in prison.
This probably helped me to understand the most. Scales are always helpful. It’s also fascinating that adrenaline is what seems to be the most powerful emotion, despite being so low on the scale of things. When you think about it, isn’t that already true for those who aren’t diagnosed? Adrenaline comes in different forms, whether it be jumping out of a plane, getting a text from the love of your life, getting more than a thousand likes on Instagram. A Psychopath just needs a bit more oomph.
She goes on for a while answering other questions, and I recommend you take the time to check it out. I can’t decide if it’s concerning that I was able to understand this article so clearly, and that I even felt a bit of envy over how peaceful it seems. I’ve never even taken the time to hear the perspective of an actual Psychopath, who isn’t a “crazy person.” Despite being able to detach yourself from the overwhelming emotions of everyday life, having to work overtime to come across as a present, in-tune, emotional person when you physically do not possess these qualities has to be exhausting. While I wouldn’t go as far as to say I think there are positives to being a Psychopath, I definitely feel a lot more sympathy for those affected. Guess that means I’m not one.
Whine With Kelly 