If you write a document and only consider how you read it, it's fundamentally a document only designed to be read by you.
Or simulation. People have mistaken me for some kind of high-tier empath because my brain constantly (consciously or unconsciously) runs simulations on everything I do. Things I write are based on how I think it will be interpreted, not by whatever decides to come out of my brain. And things that other people are feeling are instantly understood because I can easily run a simulation of what that would feel like for me.
Maybe this happens because I'm autistic, maybe it happens because I have a dissociative disorder (DID), but whatever the case is, I definitely think it's interesting.
I think given the normative social allistic approach, the autistic person generally has a higher pressure to over develop their ability to compensate. Additionally, as this process uses the self as referent, it is less swayed by differences in the other and more prone to being activitated.
I believe that this is neither good nor bad, but the austistic person often suffers on people's assumption of being able to choose where their empathy is directed, and doubly due the effects of this trait. Things like strong, real, emotional connections to inanimate objects are an instance of this that can both cause suffering or joy, but socially can be a burden.
Thus I can fully believe that your approach is functional and high performing. And that others are often flawed by it. There's an innate integrity in it, because you put yourself directly "in the shit" when you do it. I wouldn't discount it as Machiavellian or as dissociative. Could it be that the dissociation is the cost, not the cause?
I don't know. I know that the dissociation mostly developed as an attempt to escape from reality... my theories on this range from "I just really liked computers" to "autism and ADHD ripped away so much control over my body that I don't even want to try to control my body anymore, I just want to be an internet creature". It doesn't have much to do with the simulations, it just makes them better since I have the ability to dissociate, I guess.
I will admit you're right, though, about me putting myself in the position of others. I can feel exactly what I would feel if I were there, in that exact moment. Because, in a way, I sometimes am. Since the mind is a complex thing and all that. I'm constantly in multiple places at once, not physically or spiritually, but mentally. It happens when I'm having multiple conversations at once, it happens when I'm context-switching between multiple situations at once, it happens when I'm having cognitive dissonance, and that's not even counting the situations where there are actual other personalities active at the same time because dissociative identity disorder really is a giant clusterfuck.
Facing difficulty happens to be a shortcut to empathy: you can imagine how others feel if you experience difficulty in many aspects of existence. You end up with a lot of parallel experiences to run simulations with.
These things combined create someone who can regularly act with empathy, or...an empathetic person!
Although spooking people by pretending to be an empath is fun.
I don't usually do that, but I have some very cold moments (the autism doesn't help).
Plus I'm really good at scaring people by being honest about how much I could be faking my emotions at any given moment.
- Do you take advantage of people, or do you think of ways to take advantage?
- Does your empathy turn off for no discernable reason?
- You tell others that you "could be" faking your emotions. Does your external body often display emotions that are different from your internal emotions?
Usually the latter, but I've done both. I don't really know which one I do typically though.
> Does your empathy turn off for no discernable reason?
Sometimes. It can depend on mood or it can turn off after a trigger (i.e. someone tells me something that they shouldn't have). I typically have really shitty opinions about things like wars and charities because I just really don't care even if I probably should.
(The shitty opinions are a shared trait with some people who have borderline personality disorder, but I don't know if I have that? Never been evaluated.)
> You tell others that you "could be" faking your emotions. Does your external body often display emotions that are different from your internal emotions?
This is honestly kind of a trick question because this will happen anyway because of autism. The body does not express me well. It's why I prefer online interaction, because at least there I can express my emotion. But in person it's very very difficult and takes actual intentional acting in order to display what I'm feeling.
This could also partly be attributed to the dissociative disorder.
Your world sounds chaotic. Making sense of chaos is never easy. Your strongly held beliefs may be a reflection of this: without them, there would be even more chaos. With them, you can eliminate extra conflict by avoiding people with different values.
This doesn't look like psychopathy. You're coping with extraordinary circumstances. How other people interpret what your body is doing is a choice they make. You're not lying if your body doesn't match social expectations of meaning. It's just doing what it wants regardless of your intention.
Also, be wary of mistaking coping mechanisms with a pathology.
They're conscious in the way that I can understand and explain them, but not in the way that I came up with the idea to do them. They just happened and I haven't done anything to change that. Part of that is ADHD's fault, because as soon as I started stimulants, I could just Decide that I didn't want my OCD anymore and it would go away. It's legitimately life-changing when that happens.
> Your world sounds chaotic.
Yeah, especially when there are multiple of me living multiple lives in parallel, and they interact in really weird ways ;-;
> Also, be wary of mistaking coping mechanisms with a pathology.
I know a lot about coping mechanisms. Basically everything I do is a coping mechanism. Even reading HN is a coping mechanism!
But I know I have the potential for dark things given the right "push", considering my entire DID system died and basically started over when one person left.
Thinking about dark things can be a side effect of being exposed to the dark parts of the world constantly. Suffering is inherently dark.
Systems are complex. It sounds like the DID system within your brain collapsed when a key part of the system stopped collaborating. That doesn't reflect on you: it would be like judging yourself for having an autoimmune condition, where your body is attacking itself. You don't have control over your autoimmune system.
I visualize it like this. There's the part of the brain that runs the DID system, and there's the part of the brain that culminates in your consciousness, which experiences the DID system. There's cross-talk between these systems because they use the same pathways.
Sorry, it was not someone within the system, it was someone external. It was heartbreak after a period of deep discomfort.
Don't worry, I spend a lot of my life trying to make sense of DID stuff. It's the curse of being autistic, I guess.
System dynamics are universal. :)