Bonnie
How did I find out that I am a psychopath?
I arrived at this conclusion because every 2 to 3 years my life blew up. Eventually, in my mid-30s, I realized the only common variable in those explosions was me. Enough cycles of that and you either double down on blaming everyone else, or you look inward. I finally chose the latter.
At first, I explored Narcissistic Personality Disorder, but it didn’t fit. I’m not running on insecurity, nor am I delusional. From there I shifted to Anti-Social Personality Disorder (ASPD). The criteria made more sense, but my behaviour while sometimes anti-social, has rarely been impulsive. When I have decided to damage, it was generally planned and deliberate.
The turning point happened partially by chance. I listened to an interview with a man diagnosed with ASPD with psychopathic traits. To my surprise, nothing about it disturbed me. The way his mind worked felt familiar, easier to understand, in fact, than most of the minds of the people around me.
That’s when I dug specifically into psychopathy and realized a few things I’d missed because my cognitive empathy is so high: torturing and killing animals as a child is highly unusual and typically tied to callous-unemotional traits, remorse for most people isn’t contingent on being caught, and the sympathy/empathy line was always quite blurry simply because I had never experienced affective empathy, while having had nothing but practice with sympathy.
Crucially, I didn’t declare victory with a self-diagnosis. I went to a psychologist with forensic experience to rule out autism, dissociation, and alexithymia among other things. The conclusion was that I reside on the psychopathy spectrum: high-functioning, low affective empathy, with a likely congenital origin. While I technically would meet the criteria for ASPD based on history and affective/interpersonal traits, I lack the behavioural issues at the core of ASPD that are required to provided me with the official label. Scientifically, this is best described as primary psychopathy (High Factor 1, Low Factor 2). My preferred self-labelled term is simply “affectively atypical.”
Since I live in Canada, details of assessments and therapy remain confidential unless a serious crime is committed, which I am quite averse to at this point in my life. Diagnosis informs treatment, treatment informs behaviour, and behaviour changes outcomes. I was tired of rebuilding my life from scratch, so I sought assistance to change the pattern.
Therapy didn’t waste time fixing impulsivity I don’t have. Instead, we focused on optimizing around my neurodivergence. Basically, without my own deep emotions, I cannot naturally feel anyone else’s. However, I can compensate. I now use emotional language with better understanding of what those words mean to the people around me, I consciously mirror somatic expressions of emotion, I have stopped blaming others for not matching my internal landscape by learning theirs instead, I have adjusted my communication so intent doesn’t get lost in translation, and most importantly I practice better patience with others. I don’t need to feel an individual’s sadness to strive to understand it as fully as possible, respect it, and act accordingly.
So, where does that leave me? I am currently seeking the assessment of a second psychologist to explore the possibility of severe emotional dissociation due to trauma. If it turns out I am actually a quivering pile of emotions hammering against a steel door of dissociation, I want to know. But either way, on this journey I have learned a hell of a lot about psychopathy, and I am here to share that information in an effort to help reduce the stigma caused by having a particularly lazy amygdala.
