(looking forward to some psychological professionals popping in to tell me i'm full of shit, with an outside chance of also telling me that everything i have to say is obviously cribbed from some obscure but well-established corner of that literature i've been dodging)
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the reason i'm motivated to try to understand psychopaths in a non-demonizing way, incidentally, is that on balance i like and enjoy them, thinking that they should get to have good lives and that the rest of us have valuable things to learn from them
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so: where i think a psychopath starts is as someone whose primary neurodivergence is that their mirror neurons work *extremely well*. like, Olympic well. so well that they experience other people's emotional states overwhelmingly, yanking them around like a collar and leash
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this is, obviously, intolerable. so heavy-duty coping strategies are enacted down to the neurological level to fix this situation. these vary a lot in detail because any solution that gets the fishhook out of their brain is good enough and there isn't exactly a requirements doc
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but dissociation by neural inhibition is the theme. some people stop experiencing any of their emotions. some people stop experiencing a subset of emotions. most's intervention comes at some level prior to the mirror neurons, so they stay shockingly good at reading people
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for obvious reasons, control of social situations tends to become an area of major concern. you sometimes get what i think of as the "internal Omelas" effect, where some emotive core is locked away from being experienced but still produces a feverish degree of mental energy
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once you've enacted synapse-pruned neural roadblocks to keep other people's emotional states from yanking you around, of course, you might find that you care about other people's emotional states rather less than they think you should. and they might demonize you for it. oops
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but that's the guts of my working model. i hope you liked it and that it induces you to consider that perhaps our psychopath friends are people operating the way they do because it solves real and serious problems for them, not monsters who were just born bad!
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Interesting, new to me, way to look at it. I have been overwhelmed with other’s emotions sometimes to the point I’m a shitty friend. I wanted to be a caregiving friend, but was too busy hiding under a rock. Sorry, didn’t mean to make this about me. Food for thought today.
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JoAnn, you go ahead and make anything you like about you, it'll be an improvement
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