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http://www.wikihow.com/Cultivate-Compassion-in-Your-Life
If nothing else, read through the section on using commonalities.
If something happens and I can't do anything to control it, I simply forget about it and it doesn't bother me. Basically it boils down to having two options for any given situation. Actively do something to correct it or forget about it.
I mean, I understand that bad things happen and I understand it makes people upset, but I won't take time out of my day to feel bad about something I cannot control or cannot help correct.
For example, you hear about national disasters on the news. "What a huge tragedy! 128 people died!" My two options present themselves. Help to forget about it. Since I can't control natural disasters, I forget about it. I don't know those people. Why should I mope about saying, "Oh, how awful!" when in all honesty, I couldn't care less?
Maybe I'm broken on the inside but I lead a pretty healthy life. I have a good job, a relationship of many years and a solid circle of friends.
If that happened, and then one of your friends called you, crying, and said that their sister was badly injured in that tragedy and might die, would you be able to understand why they were upset and empathize with them?
Because that is the difference between what you've described (a rational detachment from distant tragedy) and what the OP described (a complete inability to empathize.)
Neither of them are what I would consider positive traits, but the negatives of one (Sociopathy) are slightly worse than the negatives of the other (Libertarianism.)
... did you read the thread? There's a huge difference between what you are describing, i.e. not caring about other people, which just makes you kind of a dick (actually, a huge dick), and not understanding why a father would care that their child might die.
In other words, what you describe is not what the OP has described.
The OP MAY have sociopathic tendencies that he should seek a professional diagnosis on based on the information. But you are definitely just a dick who needs a good slap in the face and to be sent outside to socialise with people in the real world.
I don't have any friends or close relationships with anyone. I've never felt comfortable letting people get that close to me.
Most sociopaths would just continue on not giving a fuck, till they die and get buried someday in a pine box in an unmarked graved.
Yes, let's judge the man for things that happened to him that affected his development.
Anyways, if this is a problem for you, OP, definitely get into therapy.
Pretty much everyone on the planet could benefit from therapy, but if it's a big problem like this it should be a priority.
edit: Nevermind, didn't read the thread. Good job on seeking help, that can be the hardest part.
err...wtf? care to expand?
this might start to explain some of your problems.
and yes, see a qualified person about this.
Eh, probably not any worse than stuff other people had to deal with. Just the usual stuff with a shitty family growing up. The usual beatings, burning, choking, stuff like that. And my sister liked going through my pets, at least till my parents quit buying new ones. I learned to deal with it.
Other people may have gone through 'worse', but some kids end up drowned in the bathtub, it's not really a good standard to compare yourself to. I notice you used the word 'usual' twice, but it's really not. If you went through that kind of stuff it's not so surprising that you (and apparently your sister) ended up the way you did.
I know that might sound really abstract, and I don't know pants about psychology, but I have a feeling that your breakthrough would be found in learning to be good friends with someone.
Xbox Live: GZOTP | Origin: Khuutra
This was kind of a harsh post. Because assuming the guy isn't making this up to get attention and everything he's said is true, he was abused as a kid and that messed up his development big time.
I'm not a huge fan of calling somebody an asshole for having that happen to them. Stuff going on in your brain has a huge effect on everything in your life. It is why I am always annoyed when somebody says "oh it is just in your head" because your "head" is everything.
Basically long-term professional help is the only thing to be done here. And he definitely needs to stick with it. The way he is right now is the opposite of good.
http://atlanticus.tumblr.com/
(to all the people calling him a terrible person for not having empathy, I hope you realize the irony of what you're saying)
I don't know man, this reminds me on the response you get from every racist when you accuse him of intolerance. "Yeah well, you're intolerant of my beliefs!"
I don't know. I've found people don't like to hear this stuff. If the conversation turns around to family and stuff, I just like to keep quiet. I don't remember a lot of stuff and what I do remember just gets a really odd reaction. Like the time people were talking about birthdays and started telling stories about the ones the remembered. Well, I remember is the time my sister was mad I got a hamster and she didn't so she took it and made me watch while she pinned it to a corkboard and saw how many pins she could stick into it. And they just looked at me like I had two heads. I really don't like talking to other people beyond a superficial level at all now.
Your parents did these things? I got a belt to my arse only if I was misbehaving, if you just got treated like shit for nothing, that does seem like it could be part of the problem.
Also going through my pets! she killed your pets? again, not normal.
You're most likely not telling us 100% of your story, but these two examples right here are things a kid should be extremely upset about, and if you've learnt to stop reacting emotionally to bad situations... there's the root of your problem.
You should bring up past events similar to this with a Counselor or Therapist.
Not normal? Hell, that's a major red flag for serial killer. I am glad the OP is getting professional help. Good luck with it.
Currently painting: Space Wolves [flickr]
Alright, fine.
If what you're describing is truly how you grew up, it's no surprise that you've been left with a big pile of steaming dookie for your psychological health. See a therapist, etc. There's nothing we can do to really help with that.
I will say that I empathize with your reactions to other people's problems. I'm not one who really cares about your problems, or that I have any realistic means of making things better. I accept that if your newborn is brought out too early and is in constant danger of death you're going to be a mess. At the same time I understand that you aren't going to be a productive member of a team unless your mind is off your newborn. The trick is not, necessarily, to make yourself all weepy and to feel Jim's pain as if it were in your own chest, but to rationally and calmly find a way to acknowledge other people's suffering while finding a solution to the issue that effects both of you.
I supervised a young woman awhile back who was in the midst of a pretty nasty battle against alcoholism. She got pass after pass for showing up intoxicated. Often we'd dock her pay and send her home. We understood that she was fighting, and her work was really very good aside from her overt problems. That didn't mean that we bent over backward to make things as easy as possible for her. It is easy to mistake empathy for something subjective, as if we, ourselves, should be able to feel the suffering of others. This really isn't the case.
In my case (and I've dealt with similar) Jim's baby being in bad shape doesn't pull at my heartstrings, yet I do have to understand that he's in a bad spot. What you need to remember is that we all get into "bad places" from time to time, and that we all rebound and recover. That isn't to say that the response to Jim should be "suck it up, either she'll live or die!" but to calmly present a solution that meets both party's needs. In the "Jim" example, I believe that you actually approached the situation in a rather logical way: "Either get your work up to par or take time off." I would have probably said about the same.
To begin, you don't have to have much more than an understanding of why another person feels the way they do. For Jim, you have to rationally understand that he's scared shitless of his kid dying. This doesn't effect you aside from his work, so that's your frame of reference. "Jim is in a bad spot and therefore his work output has dropped" is far from "Jim's output has dropped".
You already showed a small hint of empathy by realizing that Jim needed to take some time off. If you didn't realize that you would have, probably, had a different conversation.
Keep with the therapy, and look into the "steps" that others have posted, as well.
In your case, and I say this rarely, I recommend a psychodynamic therapist.
How long have you been going to the therapist?
What are you guys working on? Getting through your past? That's going to take a while all things considered.
I feel for you...and this is why:
When you relayed the story of your sister torturing/killing your hamster, I put myself into your shoes and tried to imagine what it might feel like. I felt terror/confusion/disgust/rage.
I understand, now, seeing how you lived through that kind of abuse that at some point, you just stopped caring...or showing that you cared.
There are three replies in this thread I think you should pay attention to:
check - good on you, mate! It's not easy to seek help, let alone, know you need to.
-this is already hard for you to do, but I have to believe that at some point you can see, even from a practical standpoint, what that person might be feeling.
This is good stuff.
Good luck.
Eh... I looked at this guide and saw it as more of an Asperger's Guide to Empathy. It teaches empathy from the standpoint of "you just didn't happen to develop this ability, here's a functional approach to faking it".
But from what the OP has said, this isn't like that. OP is just seriously seriously messed up and requires many sessions of therapy for a long time. The point is that he did know how to empathize, he was probably a reasonably good child once upon a time. He blocked his ability to feel emotion to stress in order to deal with that sort of brutality and trauma at home. That means the innate ability is still there, it's just not very well developed and, more importantly, heavily heavily blocked.
The key here isn't to just pave over psychological damage and go "well teach you how to fake it" but rather to uncover all the crap that's gone on in his life and get to the very core of it until, having worked through past trauma, he's able to start developing a sense of empathy again. But I do emphasize that first the trauma has to be worked through and then real empathy needs to be worked on, rather than confusing the whole thing by starting with fake-empathy.
As to the problem of telling those stories? You just have to learn about what kind of stories you can and can't tell. It may just be easier not to share thos stories at all - or, when prompted, "I had pretty shitty birthdays because I come from an abusive background." They may be uncomfortable when they hear that, but people will (try to) understand.
Accepting that your past is full of experiences that other people would find absolutely horrifying is just one of the tricks of the trade, I guess? It shouldn't stop you from forming connections.
Xbox Live: GZOTP | Origin: Khuutra
No not really. It is like yelling at someone who is dyslexic for not being able to read well.
Kind of.
Dude is broken and needs to get fixed.
http://atlanticus.tumblr.com/
...Yeah, there is a serious problem here. It seems like this is incredibly unlikely to be Asperger's; for one thing, people with Asperger's don't usually post on forums asking for help on how to fake it because they don't actually realize what they're missing. No one with Asperger's self-diagnoses as being abnormal.
Sociopaths, on the other hand, do.
On the bright side! You're asking for help. That's pretty awesome. BE AS HONEST AS POSSIBLE WITH YOUR THERAPIST. Do not try and fake your way through therapy. Many people with varying degrees of sociopathology will endeavour to "fake it" during therapy because they see it as a means to an end. Remember that you need to actually improve your mental health -- having a "professional" declare you well by itself doesn't count.
It's not even kind of. It's far far past that point.
At least with dyslexia, there's a level of distance in that there are often both biological and environmental factors so you can be like "well, I don't understand what his problem is because I wasn't born with a brain that had difficulty processing ______".
But here? Every one of you would turn out equally messed up as OP if you grew up like that. There's no personal choices being made at the age of 5 about whether or not to enact defense mechanisms. His reaction and subsequent problems are the absolute norm, and honestly, pretty much only option. The only difference between him and you is that perhaps you wouldn't have the self-awareness or balls to go back to your past and deal with it. Plenty of people have personalities which are just the embodiment of their psychologically damaged past but are unwilling to deal with it.
That said, given the full circumstances that came out on page 3, I imagine plenty of the posters would retract their earlier comments. For every 1 person with an actual seriously messed up background leading to serious psychological damage, there are 20 middle-class White boys with perfectly fine backgrounds posting about how they think they have Aspergers or they're sociopaths when in reality they're just mal-adjusted unpopular nerds who haven't gotten the whole social skills thing together yet so they try to displace it onto various disorders. And in those 20 instances, calling the person a dick is pretty much accurate and just what they need-- to be told to stop blaming other entities for their own lack of development.
It teaches empathy from the standpoint of "it doesn't matter, here's a functional approach to faking it".
or
It teaches empathy from the standpoint of "here's a functional approach to faking it until you can start developing a sense of empathy again so you don't look like a total human douche when your next employees baby might die".
Is it better for him to go about his business being unempathetic for the years of therapy this is going to take or fake it to some degree until then?
We can empathize with the OP because he has given us a small peek into his childhood but I doubt his subordinates are going to be understanding or empathetic because they don't know the intimate details and nor should they. Some level of empathy, fake or not, may or may not be needed here but I can't see where it would hurt the OP.
I agree with (limed).
The OP sounds very intelligent and I doubt he will be confused with the fake-empathy that he uses now (if he chooses to) and the real-empathy he rediscovers later on.
And I hope know one here thinks I was advocating faking anything in his therapy sessions.
In case that was somehow a leap off of my post -- no, I didn't think that. I mentioned the possibility of "faking" in therapy because it's an incredibly common defense mechanism utilized by all manner of clients, and particularly among those who exhibit some of the same opinions and behaviors as the OP. Depending on which schema of social/emotional development you happen to believe in, Trust versus Mistrust is one of the earliest (if not the earliest) values we learn, and from what the OP's written here, I would expect him to have some serious trust issues with...well, everyone. He's already expressed an opinion in favor of superficiality over letting people get close (although, problematically, he relates it as a social issue -- he doesn't focus on how the interaction makes him feel, and actually, if you're paying attention, he doesn't focus on how other people feel, necessarily -- the language he uses isn't about the Other's emotional response, it's about whether or not the Other likes the social interaction).
I'm not sure why it's important that Cognisseur's proverbial 20 maladjusted White boys be White with a capital W (in other words, you might want to take the socio-economic background noise to Debate and Discourse) but be that as it may -- the 20 mal-adjusted youths who have delayed social development at least know how they feel about being mal-adjusted and developmentally delayed. They feel angry or sad. The OP hasn't really signalled to me that he's capable yet of identifying how he feels about these things, which is actually probably the step he needs to work on here.
EDIT: My wife wants me to ask how old you are, and what sort of professional you're seeing -- are you pursuing psychodynamic therapy, or cognitive behavioral therapy, or...?
I don't know, I always have this idea in the back of my head that I could've ended this all sooner if I had been able to cut everything off sooner.
I don't know, maybe something will change or I'll get "better". Some days seem easier than others. I guess I'll keep trying.
Xbox Live: GZOTP | Origin: Khuutra
By the way, as much hatred as you experience for your sister, here's an unsettling thought: she probably isn't actually possessed by demons. There isn't some easy "oh shes an evil person" answer for her no more than "hes a dick" is an adequate explanation for your lack of empathy. The shit you've described her doing is terrifying and horrifying to watch, but I can't even begin to understand what was going on in her brain to make her do that. Maybe it's purely biological and her brain runs on crazy, but my bet would be she's endured some pretty horrifying stuff too... and happened to turn to much much more horrifying ways of dealing with it than just depersonalizing.
Xbox Live: GZOTP | Origin: Khuutra
His sister sounds like the psychopath.
Tangent: How do you tell the difference between psychopathy and alexithymia?
You are so on the right road...so keep on truckin.
So, here's some good news I thought I'd share because I couldn't help noticing that you chose as your handle the ancient Greek word for "Evil Demon." Whether by accident or design -- dude, you're not evil, and you're not possessed.
1. APD is uncommon, but not obscenely so. Many people cope with this disorder through therapy over time.
2. It actually does tend to get better as time goes by for the vast majority of cases. It's worst when you're a late teen / young adult. No one really knows why (maybe it's a biological change, maybe it's simply that you put enough "good stuff" between where you are in your life and your troubled childhood) but by the time an APD sufferer has hit 40, they're likely to have seen noticeable improvement. There aren't any quick fixes, I'm afraid, but that's not your fault or your therapist's fault; it takes between 15 and 20 years for a child to develop socially and emotionally towards maturity. These things take time for everyone.
3.a You're likely to have had a lot of people tell you that you're a "bad person" (and not just on this forum) because of the criminal stigma attached with APD. While it's true that a very sizeable percentage of habitual violent criminals exhibit signs of APD, not everyone with APD becomes a criminal, much as not every sociopath ends up becoming a serial killer or a serial rapist.
3.b I obviously don't know you from Adam, but I'd guess it's unlikely that you're going to be a danger to yourself or others as long as you're committed to seeing professional help. You're already taking control and seizing the initiative in your life, just through the act of seeing a counselor. Many violent tendencies are the result of people who feel like violence is the only way to assert control. Meanwhile, I'm assuming you've gathered that acting out on a violent impulse isn't a viable long term solution to any of your problems. It would NOT have solved any of your problems if you'd killed your sister, for instance; removing your sister from the equation in that way only presents new problems. Likewise, the new problems presented by violence are always less preferable than your current problems if you stop to think it through, which I'm sure you've realized.
Do you actually want to connect with other people, or do you just want to be veiwed favorably by others?
For the record, I don't think there's anything wrong with you. Obviously you can feel, you just have a shitload of practice in burying those feelings. Other people don't. The circumstances which gave you that practice are relatively unique, and so not many people are going to instinctively appreciate that background. There might be a few, but they'll be exceptionally rare.
There's no point in getting upset with people because they lack practice. Sure, you've been facing your feelings and ditching the inconvienient ones for years- suffice to say you may very well be an expert by now. Like all kinds of expertise, when it comes to dealing with those who have less skill, you can be a douchey primadonna, or you can become a facilitator.
Take Jim for example. Handled incorrectly, that's a social powder keg. But you weren't neccessarily wrong in your opinion that he shouldn't worry about the things that aren't in his control. In fact, that idea, that you are only responsible for the things you have power over, can be a very healthy, de-stressing attitude to take. One could have, for example, given Jim a sense of control over his work, when other things in life are out of control, and gently pushed a 'sink into your work' ideology. Jim gets something tangible to work with, you get better performance- its win-win.
It's tempting to say that your instincts or your lifestyle or your persona is 'wrong'. Personally, I don't see things in this way. I see a very specific psychological skillset, one that is only obtained through dealing with extremely stressful and personally challenging things. Hard decisions, decisions requiring personal sacrifice and self-altered perspective. Most people do not have the life experiences that demand those actions and decisions. Certainly not as children, and only a few chance encounters as adults. The 'inability' to relate easily is simply a byproduct of having a history that is mostly unshared by those around you.
That being said, there are things that all human beings have in common. In a workplace, you have a shared experience being where you are. In light conversation, the past is irrelavent, there is only now and the very near future. Use those shared experiences to build connections. Coping with differences often means expanding on what you have in common. If that means never talking about your past socially, then thats what it means. You will eventually meet people who can handle it.
In the meantime, my advice is to stay away from viewing your skills and the skills of others as 'right or wrong' or 'strong and weak'. They are what they are- tools. They provide and accomplish certain things. Jim's worry, for example, may make him feel like a good husband or father, and allow him to relate to his wife; your instinctive objectivity may allow you to act decisively when others are still busy coping with a recent change.
Instead of thinking 'your feelings are pointless', try and see the bigger picture: Everything has a purpose, a reason for it to exist. Feelings, rationality, stress, rainbow baboon-asses; all of these things may seem unique and out of place at times, but they all have a function and evolved according to specific circumstances and situations. When you can discern the purpose, the function becomes predictable and useful. And that's growth. Discovering and learning new tools to use in daily life.
Keep seeing your pro. Your own tools are razor sharp, honed over a lifetime, and can do as much damage as good. You can see by many of the posts so far that people are generally concerned about the danger they pose. I'll tell you this, that the very same measure is the amount of good they can do when used well. In the end, people will connect with you if they see those tools used for thier benefit. And in return, you will connect with them.
It's a long road from here to there, step carefully and you could do great things. Rough start, but you can take it in a positive direction if you choose to.
One that the CIA would like to use, are you doing your part, if not would you like to know more?