azurelunatic: DW: my eloquence cannot be captured in 140 chars (twitter)
Azure Jane Lunatic (Azz) 🌺 ([personal profile] azurelunatic) wrote2010-05-22 11:55 pm
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[identity profile] lady-angelina.livejournal.com 2010-05-23 05:07 pm (UTC)(link)
Saturday, 0059: @Celtic_Maenad The problem with sociopaths is that they don't seem to care about *anyone*, even the people close to them.

Sometimes, I wonder if I'm really a sociopath underneath it all. =/ I have my moments where I can't be assed to care about anything, believe it or not. (My dad passing away a couple of years ago... I hate to say this, but I didn't care about that even a fraction as much as my co-workers insisted I did. If they wanted to believe that, fine, I can't change their minds, but the fact remains, I was actually relieved when he did, which is a horrible thing to say, but...)

And in spite of my overreacting to many things and seeming to care a great deal about things... how much of that is really genuine, and how much of that is just subconscious affectation that's been ingrained into me over the years?

Probably, the fact that I'm even thinking of all this means that I am NOT a sociopath, but then again, how would I or anyone really know?
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[personal profile] azurelunatic 2010-05-23 05:25 pm (UTC)(link)
Relatives dying is really not the best benchmark to establish caring-about-other-humans. The usual circumstances for relief at the death of a relative are when your relationship was sufficiently weird and bad that you genuinely wanted to never see them again, but you couldn't sever the ties, or when someone (generally elderly) has suffered a long, lingering illness, their quality of life has gone down past the point of diminished returns, they may have even already left the building, and you have already mourned their loss long before their death.

Grandma's death was somewhat like that. There was no Grandma left in there. She wanted to die a few years before she actually did. When I visited in ... '03? ... she was ready. She was very ill, she was no longer able to live on her own, she'd had a good long mostly-happy, vividly lived life, she had a few precious hours a day of coherent thought, and she was ready to just go to sleep in the sun and never wake up. She didn't get that. She got a nursing home and a medical nightmare, and a daughter who's kicking herself for not having the courage to give her a compassionate overdose.

[identity profile] lady-angelina.livejournal.com 2010-05-24 02:34 pm (UTC)(link)
Ah, yeah. My dad fell in the latter category, but he got excellent end-of-life care from Mom. My condolences on your Grandma and that she didn't even get that level of dignity. =(

The former situation would be more awkward to even bring up in polite company, but I can definitely see that happening, so it's a relief to know that even that isn't such a horrible thing.
Edited 2010-05-24 14:35 (UTC)
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[personal profile] azurelunatic 2010-05-24 05:29 pm (UTC)(link)
Some of the socially-correct phrasings include "He suffered a lot at the end, so I'm thankful he's finally at peace", in case you have to explain it to someone again.
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[personal profile] azurelunatic 2010-05-23 05:42 pm (UTC)(link)
And one of the "really know" factors is how someone behaves when unobserved or thought to be unobserved. If a sociopath has gotten the idea that something is wrong, they avoid doing it not because doing it is wrong and they should not do it, but because other people think doing it is wrong and they should not get caught.

The average person's level of "people think this is wrong and I should not do it" is along the lines of picking the nose, scratching embarrassing parts of the body, petty theft. A sociopath's level is more like torturing small animals.

I would say that you are likely to have too much *squick* at the various suffering of others to be an actual sociopath. You've already a diagnosis that explains a lot of your distance from emotion and having to learn socially proper responses to things by rote, without adding another thing to worry about on top. And indeed, "Oh god what if I am a sociopath" is not really a sociopath type worry; it's the "Oh god, will that draw attention to my other problematic behaviors, and can I still get away with X" that's ... time to back away slowly.

[identity profile] lady-angelina.livejournal.com 2010-05-24 02:46 pm (UTC)(link)
Uhmmm... well... >.> I HAVE done things like petty theft (although, can you really count nicking dishes and utensils from the college campus cafeteria, and that sort of thing? XD ) and jaywalking, but those are hardly what you're talking about. Also, I did some pretty... appalling things to my family's cats when I was really young, but I would never do it now. ^^;; So yeah. xD;

And yeah. I think the best example is the movie Fargo, which a friend took me to see. I swear, I was the only one in that theater who wasn't laughing their ass off at the scene where the kidnapped wife was trying to struggle free. ^^;; The infamous wood chipper scene... I couldn't even watch that one. (I also loved Sweeney Todd, but I couldn't bear to watch the parts where... okay, you get the point.)
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