The valuable sociopath

A reader discusses what she appreciated about her sociopathic ex:

your site has been such an amazing source of information. it's been a learning curve for me and i feel like i've reached the part of the curve where i can say, "oh, i get it! i get what that must be like!" i think i am an extreme empath and want to understand others "from the inside out". i have an almost need to enter that person's mindset and feel it for myself. really interesting, your goal of making the world a bit "safer" for sociopaths to make themselves more known. wow. 

i had a sociopathic boyfriend for a few months, he was non-violent but definitely expressed desires to kill and i know that he could. and yet, as i told a friend once, it was the most freeing person to be around. because he had no filter and no care, i could tell him any darker thoughts or any politically and socially incorrect thoughts and the conversation would just flow. there was no punishment for thinking "incorrectly." that felt valuable. he also taught me to be very wary of people's motivations, he read them like an open book. empaths can be just as clandestine as sociopaths, though for different, less malicious ends.

I liked how this reader mentioned that he had no judgment for thinking incorrectly. I think that is one of the biggest things that my friends and paramours like about me. Apparently closed-mindedness is quite common, and exists within every belief system, conservative/liberal, religious/non, etc.

The relationships that tend to not work out are the ones where the person doesn't realize how tolerant I am being of their opinions and idiosyncrasies. Instead, they have this weird notion that I must just agree with them on every point (and of course why wouldn't I, because their opinions are always correct). I would say this is true (at least to some extent) with 80% of the population that I encounter.

Being seen

I've written before about how sociopaths have an uncanny ability to see, understand, and predict people's likes and behaviors. I've also suggested that if people are trying to throw a sociopath off their scent, they poison the well of information. But even if there isn't a sociopath specifically targeting things, people have mentioned that there is something unsettling about being seen for what you truly are. A reader writes:

I read a blog entry from July 2011 from a reader who is married to a sociopath and is herself an 'uber-empath'.  Her comments and your response resonated with me a great deal.  You said:

I think it's really interesting that him being able to see you to your core is a plus in your eyes. Do you think that is atypical for empaths? Don't they like to hide certain parts of them. Isn't that what I sometimes hear marriage self-help types preach? That there should be mystery in marriages? I have sometimes wondered whether that ended some of my relationships. I am always fine seeing people in all their imperfection, but sometimes I think the people I was with were not fine -- did not feel comfortable being laid bare like that.

I don't think 'regular' people do want to be seen so clearly at all, but that it's not something they consciously contemplate or contrive.  Life is mostly about being accepted and I think there is a great deal of fear-driven, unconscious shaping of personality in order to avoid rejection.  If someone is truly balanced, they will let others 'in' over time and with trust, which is a healthy protective mechanism.  They don't have a need to hide parts of themselves but nor do they need to be exposed unnecessarily.  People 'just know' when the boundaries of thought processes they are willing to share with others are being intruded upon and will move away from that.  

Why don't people want to be seen?  I'd guess at vulnerability.  For the same reason people don't reveal all their personal information and thoughts to say coworkers or people they've just met, they don't want someone to come along and just 'take' that information from them.  I'm just guessing but that may be how people feel if they sense that you know a lot about them that they haven't revealed at will.  I'd probably feel that way if I felt that someone who could be a threat to me did it.  Someone I shared an apartment with who has many sociopathic traits once told me that "he knew a lot more about me than I thought".  At the time, I didn't really know what to make of it and didn't worry too much because I didn't see him doing anything harmful.  But when I have thought back to that comment, I find it revealing that he felt the need to let me know that.  Only someone wanting to assert power would make such a comment.  It was a fairly innocuous attempt at letting me know that he was in charge of things... but some subsequent behaviour revealed that he had a pretty serious sense of grandiosity.  Perhaps people feel a loss of control if they feel that you know things about them?  

As a uber-empath myself, I do want to be seen in my entirety, flaws and all.  Otherwise my relationships are unfulfilling; not complete.   

I thrive in emotional environments like funerals and heated arguments, when others don't know what to do.  When I saw a friend last week and asked if she was ok (she clearly looked upset to me), she was surprised that I could tell that she was upset and said that no one else seemed to notice. I've heard this before . I can clearly see people's strengths and weaknesses, why they have a certain perspective, and what piece of the puzzle they are missing.  But I have no desire to use this against them and feel a much greater degree of responsibility to others than the average person.  

I don't know whether my interactions with sociopaths have helped me gain a sense of people. I'd say they've encouraged me to want to understand more and to seek out knowledge about the variety in the emotional lives of others and how they think.  As long as I can remember, I always wanted to understand my own mind, because I knew my perspective of things was different from those around me from a young age.  This has a lot to do with the family and community I happened to grow up in, which was very bourgeois.  I believe my parents are narcissists and that I learned to cater to their emotional needs, so there was training there. Then the efforts to understand my own resulting feelings.  But I'd say it also has a lot to do with nature too.  

I'd say that in the past, sociopaths have been attracted to me because of my openness, flexibility, willingness to be seen and vulnerability.  I was attracted to the intensity I felt and what seemed like deep connections.  And to 'being seen'.  But the on and off nature of those connections is what can be damaging to empaths, and was to me.  

Eyes wide open

I spent years studying music. After a while my ears got very sensitive to even small differences in pitch. On the good side, I am a better musician because of it. I am more appreciative of people who play or sing truly well. But I am also very acutely aware of poor playing and singing. I hear bad singing on television and cringe. I go to church and hear bad music and lean forward with my head in my hands so no one will see my discomfort. I don't necessarily want to hear these things. Sometimes I wish I didn't hear them, especially when I don't have anything invested in the activity or can't change what's going on. In those instances, the knowledge is just wasted on me.

Sometimes hearing things no one else does even makes me a target of other people's distrust. One time I was involved in a performance using primitive instruments, each with a particular "pitch". The instruments were played as a group to form "melodies". Before the performance, the instruments must have gotten mixed up because when we started playing, parts of the melody were inverted. It nearly drove me crazy and as we walked off stage I immediately remarked to my colleagues on the issue. No one had noticed. They looked at my like I was loony. No one heard it. No one believed me. I don't know why, because they thought they heard something else? My word against what they thought they heard and they trusted their own senses more. A few days later we listened to the recording together. Everyone was watching me as someone pressed "play" -- either I was wrong or they were wrong and pretty soon we would know for certain. I was vindicated, but I wasn't happy about it. Not really. The didn't apologize. They looked at me like I was a witch.

It makes me trust people less too. Once I lost a competition to someone whom I thought was clearly playing out of tune. Because I believed that surely everyone else could hear how badly the intonation was, I thought there must be some other explanation for why his performance beat mine, something nefarious at work. I saw a conspiracy and cover up where there was none. It would be one thing if I could just convince myself that I  have idiosyncratic preferences that aren't shared by many people -- which is better, beer or wine? There's no certain answer in matters of opinion. But matters of pitch are objective. Either you are playing or singing the pitches that are being requested of you or you are not. A tuning machine would be able to make these fine distinctions and so can I, for all the good it does me.

As a child I saw and understood a lot of things that I know I was not supposed to. Even now I see things that I don't necessarily want to see. I see people's fear and their betrayal, how weak and unreliable their love is, how soft their convictions are. And especially when I was growing up I thought that a lot of the world must be corrupt. Because why didn't other people see these things and act accordingly? It seemed like a cover up. And when I mentioned it to people they didn't believe me. They thought that I was making things up, and in blatant bizarre ways. I learned to stop pointing these things out, but I did feel a bit like Alice in Wonderland.

By the way, does any one else hear the wrong notes in penultimate and ante-penultimate timpani pitches in the theme song for Fringe?