Being able to simulate other people's experiences in your mind is a base skill required for empathy.
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.
A few more questions probing the source of the psychopath belief:
- 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?
> Do you take advantage of people, or do you think of ways to take advantage?
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.
You describe a lot of processes that aren't fully conscious or intentional, whereas an average person would have control over that piece of consciousness.
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.
Living in a world of chaos means you have more opportunities to see potential darkness within yourself than the average person.
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.
The person existed external to the DID system, but your internal system came to depend on their continued existence in your life. The DID system changed how it worked to adapt to the existence of this person. When that person left (stopped collaborating), the internal systems that depended on that person's existence collapsed.
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.