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divinerapturesys · 7 months

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Welcome to my Ted Talk about AsPD, or Antisocial Personality Disorder, which the internet likes to coin as sociopath 👌🏻 if you don’t like long infodumps about stigmatized mental disorders from someone who is diagnosed, move on.

Quick toxic rundown: People with AsPD are generally characterized as emotionless, violent, manipulative abusers who kill animals and like to make other people their bitches. The biggest pet peeve we have is the emotionless, sadistic and abusive generalization.

Personally, we are highly neurotic, with highs and lows of: depression, frantic drive, self abuse tactics, chronic fear, lapses of rejection, overwhelming over-analyzation, grey area thinking, false goods and false bads, ultimatums, obsessive compulsive behavior, harsh self demands, and irritability.

AsPD is a disorder that is caused primarily (according to current research) by trauma and abuse in childhood; most notably being emotional neglect and absent caregivers that cause a child to have emotional shutdowns and repression episodes in an attempt to self soothe. Primary caregivers who do not bond with their children are also a factor. Children learn how to behave from those around them. If a primary caregiver is emotionally distant and unavailable, children will learn that is normal behavior and that’s how people are. If a primary caregiver does not provide empathy and sympathy during moments of distress and fear, children will learn that aloofness and disregard of others feelings is normal behavior. If a primary caregiver does not keep a child safe, children will learn that they should not prioritize their own safety or the safety of others. You can find my follow up post regarding this here.

Neglected and abused children often act out trying to get attention and help, often acting out in bad ways because they lack the ability to articulate what they’re feeling and what is happening to them. The pipeline for AsPD typically is: Oppositional Defiance Disorder as a child, Conduct Disorder as a teen, AsPD as an adult. There are a lot of warning signs cueing that AsPD is becoming a risk for development, but often kids do not have a support system to help negate it as it’s their support system that is usually a factor in its creation.

Being AsPD is like being an emotional La Croix 70% of the time. If you’re depressed, then it’s like someone in the other room has depression and is telling you about it. The other 30% of the time, if you’re depressed, your brain doesn’t understand how to handle it so it’s an ultimatum between doing something drastic to remove the Trigger or ignoring and dissociating for days on end.

People with AsPD are very good at ignoring things. Honestly it’s problematic as fuck but it’s not hard to ignore major issues when you just, don’t care. It’s not in the terms of being cruel or making ourselves not care, but the fact that finding the emotional willpower is so far out of our feasible reach we don’t do it. This causes us to piss people off because we don’t have the capacity to care as much as they want us to, even if we can and do to an extent.

Think of it this way: empathy/sympathy is a deep tub of water that everyone has. They can easily fill their measuring cup for the needed amount of empathy without any issues and it’s easy for them. People with AsPD don’t have a tub of water. We have shallow skillet. When we try to dip our cup to fill it, we can’t, it always comes up short and it is difficult to get any water in it as there is no room for the cup to dive. Our ability to care is limited because we do not have the same emotional resources everyone else does.

❌ False Positives & False Negatives ❌

I operate on what I’ve learned are called false positives and false negatives. These are things that are trained into the brain from an early age based off of childhood trauma and other factors. False positives are a distorted version of why we do something to help ourself and for our own good, meanwhile a false negative is something we do because it’s a threat, or based out of fear.

❌ Some of my false positives:

- It is good to be afraid of nothing

- It is good to adapt to someone’s personality if they are stronger than you

- It is good to isolate yourself

- It is good to be a silver tongue because you can get into any place you want

- It is good to become a social chameleon and shape yourself to whatever those around you need/want most, because then you have no chance of being abandoned

❌ Some of my false negatives, which can explain the false positives as well as core beliefs:

- it is bad to be afraid, if I am afraid then I am vulnerable and it can be used against me

- It is bad to be emotional or show concern for others emotions because they do not care for mine

- It is bad to be able to be exploited, because I believe it is everywhere

- It is bad to allow myself to be bored, because boredom begets bad thoughts and no one can or wants to help me when I spiral

- It is bad to not shape yourself to the social circle, because people quickly grow tired of those who do not match them perfectly and being discarded means I failed

My core beliefs can be viewed as the root for the false positives and negatives, because they are based on the core of trauma, abuse and neglect. They come from patterns and instances that make someone with AsPD become the opposite of what they experienced:

- eat or be eaten

- If I don’t show that my bite is worse than my bark, I will be taken advantage of and I must remain on top because the ones on top are safe

- I must look out for myself because nobody will do it for me

- It doesn’t matter what happens to me, therefore it doesn’t matter what people think of me

- If I cannot do something well, then I should not do it at all

- If you are dependent on others for emotional and mental well being, you are weak, therefore I must isolate myself to avoid becoming codependent and a burden and useless

- If I can handle the stress of a situation better than everyone else, therefore I will keep the problem (financial, emotional, mental, etc) to myself to reduce chances of being abandoned due to failure of perfection

People with AsPD are hard to get along with. We often:

- are always anticipating a fight

- lack respect for authority

- ignore social structures to an extent

- tendency to lie if it’ll lessen punishment or if we feel the lie is more acceptable than our actions

- limit social support because it’s wrong to be dependent on others

- have an inflated view of our own importance — which turns into a self ridicule for believing someome like me could be found important to others —

- can be rude and inconsiderate of others feelings somewhat unintentionally

- are unable to read the correct social cues in relation to empathy towards people and animals

- am constantly confused by others dependence upon empathy and inability to make desicions from logic based standpoints

We can’t speak for everyone who has AsPD, nor are we saying that no one with AsPD is capable of being a murderer/abuser etc. but we are saying that y’all need to stop automatically classifying someone as a certain “type” as soon as you know about their disorder.

One last thing I do want to point out is that it is not uncommon for people with AsPD to derive some sort of enjoyment in causing harm, doing something illegal, hurting someone or animals, etc. This entirely stems from lack of environmental control as a child. Being able to control what happens to others or being able to control the things you say or do that hurts someone else is a hefty high to get addicted to; it soothes the underlying itch of not being able to control your own trauma and abuse, so in turn you push these behaviors onto others and enjoy it because it gives you a sense of power and control. Some people with AsPD do genuinely love hurting others, and some enjoy hurting others when they believe it’s deserved or their ire has been stoked. Some enjoy causing pain to those they think deserve it, and others don’t care who they hurt as long as they feel like they’re in control of the situation.

Hope this have some insight into AsPD 🤙🏻 if y’all have any questions, shoot.

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aspd-culture · 21 hours

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Welcome back. You’re very informative.

I’m very confused about how numerous people, from you, to other antisocial people speaking from their experiences (some of which I learned are actually friends) to prosocial researchers of ASPD say that antisocial people see relationships as transactional. It’s not weird that you guys see it that way, it’s more like “and prosocials… don’t???” Because I’m certain I’m prosocial. I’m neurodivergent, sure, but no signs of ASPD. So, how do most prosocial people typically view relationships if they’re not transactional?

So I find prosocials and pwASPD both tend to think “but doesn’t everybody” when we hear this - it’s a super undescriptive term - but we’re thinking different things define something as transactional. We also see the reason for that transaction to be different.

From a prosocial generally, they’ll mean “I only want to be around people that ‘don’t drain my energy’, that don’t just take take take, that we mutually enjoy the friendship/relationship and want to be around each other”. That’s kinda their definition of getting something out of it, and they want everyone to get something out of it. If they’re draining you, they want you to be free of it so you can be happy, and the transactions involved can be purely emotional/vibes. The reason they feel this way is a desire for positive and enjoyable social connection; the consequence for an uneven/bad/missing transaction is discomfort and wasting their time in negative experiences and generally feeling bad in association with that person.

PwASPD see those transactions very very literally. There’s no vibes nor emotions in the transactions, those are either a reaction to the transaction or a bonus. We mean that we are getting something tangible or practical out of it. Rides, help with things we can’t or don’t want to do alone, sex, maybe even the social relief from the annoyance of “why don’t you ever talk to anyone?” coming from all sides. We also don’t always care if it’s even on the other person’s end. If they’re ok driving me everywhere/if they do it and don’t say or show they’re uncomfortable, then I will assume they are fine with that piece of the transaction. If I’m taking more than I’m giving and they seem chill with that then I’ll accept it. However, I won’t give them *nothing* and that’s because of our reason for transactions - it’s dangerous otherwise. First off, I have shit I need I can’t get myself as much as it sucks, so I need to be around people. But if we need something from them, what we learned in our childhoods is that we don’t get that for free. There’s always something over your head. A lot of pwASPD had friends or caregivers that would hold favors or even *basic, legally-mandated caregiving* over our heads as though we didn’t deserve it. Often our value was determined as a child by what we provided, and since children can’t provide much, we were worthless and not deserving of good treatment.

This is part of the reason (TW non-descriptive CSA mention, skip to the next paragraph if you want) that people thought ASPD was directly correlated with CSA for a long time - many cases of long term CSA come from either “I’ll give you x/do x for you if you help me with this” or worse, doing something first then saying “but I gave you X!/did X for you! I wouldn’t have if I knew you’d act like this”, often call us selfish if we tried to say no and maybe get aggressive or forceful after, and that is an easy lead-in to our view of interactions.

So a lot of us see it that if we want to be safe/know we can continue to get what we need, we HAVE to be giving them something. If you claim you like being around me “just to be around me” or worse that you’re willing to do something for me “just because I want to”, that’s not safe. You want something from me and I’ll give it to you - just tell me what it is. If you’re not telling me, that means it’s not good or you’re just gonna decide later that I’m selfish. You might hurt me to get what you want and justify it with this. Take something from my side so we’re even, because even means safe. Even means I get access to what I need and you get access to what you need - so now we’re both using this relationship/friendship/etc for something and you wouldn’t wanna mess that up by putting me in danger any more than I’d want to mess it up by putting you in danger.

Of course, not every prosocial sees it the first way and not every pwASPD had those experiences and/or sees it that way. But that’s what I’ve found to be common. If you see “they make me happy” as what your or their end of the transaction is, it’s definitely a prosocial response, maybe with the exception of thinking of it as “getting their brain to dopamine/oxytocin” vs caring how they’re actually feeling. If not, if you need it to be practical, that’s definitely transactional.

It’s important to note this is personal relationships with no practical consequences to ending the relationship - most people see relationships (platonic) with coworkers or managers as transactional and that’s a way I usually explain it to prosocials (“do you deal with your boss bc you like them or bc they sign your check - and would your boss keep you hired if you didn’t do your job because you make them happy just by being there?”). But with a romantic or sexual partner, a friend, etc. this is not a typical view of relationships.

That said - you can *absolutely* not have ASPD and have transactional view of relationships. It’s not a 1:1 thing there; not everyone with ASPD has it and not every prosocial doesn’t. It’s just a really common piece of the puzzle that is this personality disorder.

Edit: ack I’m so sorry I forgot to add the csa tw tags they’re there now.

Plain text below the cut:

Edit: ack I’m so sorry I forgot to add the csa tw tags they’re there now.

#tw mentions of sex #tw csa #tw csa mention #tw abuse mention #tw sa #tw sa mention #tw child abuse mention #tw child abuse #aspd-culture-is #aspd culture is #aspd culture #actually aspd #aspd #aspd awareness #actually antisocial #antisocial personality disorder #aspd traits #anons welcome

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