Study: Psychopaths DO Feel Fear

You may not have met a psychopath but someone with autism…

I have to agree with Eyes on that possibility. As someone who is autistic, or certainly on the spectrum, what you described rings true to me.

I don’t personally like hurting people, and I work very hard to avoid doing it, but I’ve still done it several times in my life due to being mistaken about something, misunderstanding, or just being careless and selfish. And it was possible at least on some level to not feel bad about it if I didn’t want to. I don’t know if I can actually choose whether or not to feel bad about something like hurting someone, but I know that there are ways of compartmentalizing or rationalizing them that can counteract feeling bad or remorseful about them. It seems like they can at least be mitigated without too much trouble (at least with things where you’re not being malicious, because I can’t think of a time that I’ve actually been malicious toward someone to know for sure if the same things apply).

When my dad was dying recently, I had a session with a psychologist because I wasn’t sure how I was going to handle it or whether I’d be able to cope with what was going on or what I was going to have to deal with and be partially responsible for (he was on hospice, and we had to care for him at home because we couldn’t afford anything else and there weren’t any other options available). In the hour I was talking with her, one of the common themes that kept going through my session was that with every issue or concern that I brought up to her, when she asked me about them, my responses to her kept being basically what she’d have gone over with a regular patient over several sessions, and she commented that I seemed to be very capable of working through problems on myself and that I had a surprising amount of insight into myself and how people work psychologically. She essentially was saying that I seemed to be able to conduct my own therapy with the issues I was facing, and that I just needed to follow through with the things I thought were good ways of dealing with them. She had very little to add other than to come back if I ever had difficulties or needed help with something, but that it didn’t seem as if I’d probably need to.

The reason I bring that up is because I think that may be the core of why I feel like it might be possible to not feel bad about hurting someone. I suspect that because of the insight I have into myself and into human psychology, it may just be that I’m able to quickly work through feeling bad over something such that I don’t need to let it bother me much if I don’t want it to. In real life, there are limits on that however. It depends on my being in a really solid place and having enough psychological and emotional energy to take that on, because it’s actually pretty heavy to do it, and there are times where I’m faced with too many obstacles at once and I’m not able to do it, and if I’m not very careful with my self-management, I can easily get into a situation where I can’t get myself out and I become a bit paralyzed and have a really hard time actually functioning. I have to be able to have my space and my time and engage in my routines in order to build up the reserves necessary to cope with day to day life. I happen to be really good at that, so mostly nobody notices that I have to do it, but it’s definitely a lot more than most people are dealing with day to day, and that much is really obvious to me.

There are times where my own analysis of people and situations can be really off too. It takes conscious, deliberate effort to get that right. I’m very good at it most of the time, but there’s nothing automatic or intrinsic about it— it’s many years of observation, introspection, and effort. I’ve been a people watcher since I was at least 3 years old. When my mom and sisters would go shopping on the way home from school as a kid, I’d crawl under the clothing racks in the department stores they were shopping in and just watch people and try to figure out who they were, what they were like, how they lived their lives, where they lived, what they did, that sort of thing. It’s how I entertained myself as a kid and basically through my whole life.

As an example of how well I’ve done at that, I worked as a chauffeur for 5 years in Arizona, and even when I’d have a client that I had to drive to some event at the other end of the state, sometimes I’d run into another local chauffeur there who had a client at the same event, and we’d talk while we were waiting, and there were several times where as soon as they knew my name and the company I worked for, they already knew of my reputation. To this day, I still don’t know how or why that happened. I can’t think of any reason for it, I was just doing my job, but I did have tons of clients tell me that I was the best chauffeur they’d ever had. Even the president of one of the big German automakers told me that one night, and he said he wasn’t saying that as the president of the company, but as someone who was trained to do my job for Rolls Royce when he was young. So it’s obviously not my imagination that I can be great with people. Lots and lots of people have told me that. But again, none of that is automatic for me, it’s a result of lots of observation, introspection, and conscious effort.

As far as missing certain aspects of connecting with people, when I had a girlfriend years ago, she thought I was amazing to the point that she pursued me rather vigorously for a couple of months, and kept having to be pretty explicit about her intentions, saying things like “why don’t you introduce me to people as your girlfriend?”, or “why don’t you ever call me? Why do I always have to call you? Aren’t you interested in me?” I didn’t introduce her to people as my girlfriend because I didn’t know we were boyfriend and girlfriend. I thought we were just friends doing things together. I didn’t call her because I didn’t want to disturb her or interrupt her and I never knew what she was doing, and I let her always call me because she was never interrupting me or disturbing me because I wanted to talk to her and spend time with her because I really liked her. I didn’t ever pursue her because I couldn’t tell if she was interested in me, so I assumed that like most people, she wasn’t, as that’s the safe bet. I don’t like making people uncomfortable or imposing on them, so dating just isn’t a thing I do. It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s that I can’t figure out how to. When she broke up with me months later, one of the things she said to me was that I was really great and she really fell in love with me, but she said that once she got close to me, it was as if at a certain point of getting close to me, it was like there was just nothing there.

As good as I am at reading people and situations, with certain kinds of interactions, I’m like a blind person. I can’t find my way through them even with directions. The reality is that most social situations are made up of about 10% of all the various kinds of social interactions you can have with people. The majority of the possible social interactions you can have with someone make up a very small minority of all social situations. The 10% or so of common social situations are comprised of maybe 90% of possible social interactions, while the remaining 90% of social interactions only show up in about 10% of all social situations. Dating and romantic relationships fall into the 10% of all social situations category that are made up of the remaining 90% of social interactions. Think about it, the things you do and talk about with a romantic partner or spouse consist of tons of things that you don’t say or do with anyone else. Since those situations are so uncommon by comparison, I have little observational experience or insight into how those interactions take place, so I don’t know what I’m doing in those situations and I have a hard time figuring them out or interpreting them correctly. This is why it seemed to her that “nothing was there” once she got past a certain point of getting close to me. It’s not that nothing was there, it’s that I don’t know how to make the rest available, because I don’t understand those social situations or the interactions that make them up, and since I don’t like to upset, hurt, impose on, or make people uncomfortable, I take the safest route and do or say nothing instead. It’s not that there are no feelings or anything else there, it’s that I don’t know how to make another person a part of them, so I stop, which appears as “nothing there” or something else that’s “off” to the other person.

I also tend to interpret things literally, and miss the emotional meaning behind what someone says or does. It takes conscious effort to spot that, and it uses up an enormous amount of psychological and emotional energy to do it, and sometimes something catches me off guard and I fail to do it. I’m pretty good at taking something that I take literally and determining from tone and context what it probably really means, but I do get those things wrong somewhat often. I also find a tremendous amount of humor in them at times, but I often can’t share that humor because other people don’t understand it or think it’s dumb, or they’d be offended by it for a variety of reasons. But it’s one of the core roots of my sense of humor, so that’s definitely there. It makes me really good at bad puns too, for that matter.

I don’t know if these things strike a chord with you regarding your friend or not. I also don’t know if your friend was really autistic or not. Maybe they really were a sociopath/psychopath. But I do agree with Eyes that it’s possible that they were actually autistic. And what I can say about autistic people based on the several I’ve observed over the years is that they rarely have a lack of empathy. They usually have a high amount of it. It’s actually one of the things that causes them so many problems in life. They have all this empathy and they have all these feelings, but they don’t understand them or know what to do with them, which causes an extraordinary amount of anxiety and stress which gets dealt with by many of the observable traits of autism, like rocking, having to follow strict schedules or routines, placing things in very specific orders, excessive focus on numbers and patterns, spending a great deal of time off “in their own world”, displaying an apparent “hyperfocus” on specific topics (why you’ll hear a functional autistic kid talk on and on and on and on for hours about trains without any concern at all that you were done listening an hour ago etc.), and why they’re often bothered or disturbed by outside stimuli, like too much movement, too much sound, too many people, certain textures or shapes or numbers, etc. All of the traits and symptoms of autism tend to group together around just a couple of key things, and the things that you’re describing about your friend all fit with the kinds of things you might see with an autistic person.