Seth's Somewhat Scattered ASPD Thread

[Skiagrapheo]

I think it would be good to have a thread where I just talk about my ASPD and what it's like and how it's impacted my life. Not necessarily because I'm good at writing, but because people seem to have some pretty impressive misconceptions about what ASPD is and how it works.

Let’s start at the beginning with how I acquired it, which is a lot less mysterious and aesthetically striking than what Hollywood would have you believe is like for the start of a sociopath. The 'start of darkness’, as people online like to call the conditions that give rise to NPD or ASPD, were unglamorous. An Appalachian town of ten thousand people, a house in the more rundown part of town with two bedrooms, and a house of four, later five people: myself, my mother, my father, my older sister, and eventually my younger sister.

My parents were so uninvolved that for most of my life, I was cared for by my older sister, Car. (I was bad at saying her full name as a toddler and 'Car' ended up being the nickname that stuck.) She isn't sure if I had signs of mental health problems early on because those years are a blur for her of trying to take care of me and keep her grades up so our dad didn’t snap at her. By the time she was eleven she was taking care of a five year old and a newborn. How she managed, I don’t know. I know I was always good at lying. I had to be. Keeping my parents pacified was in everyone's best interest.

I didn’t torture animals, contrary to the stereotypes. I did light fires, but I put them out, because I was terrified of what my dad would do to me if I didn’t. Animals, though, I always liked. Our neighbors had a mastiff mix named Gunner who I renamed Pancake as a kid, and he would hop over the fence from his yard into ours and come into the house with me. He would bark if Bean, my younger sister (not her real name, but her eternal nickname, much to her chagrin) needed something, so having him around meant Car and I could relax marginally and play a bit. I’m allergic to both cats and antihistamines, but I found that out because as a child I once tried to keep a kitten in my room.

This is not the ‘start of darkness’ Hollywood promised you gave rise to sociopaths. It’s also the truth.

In the opinion of my last therapist - who sadly retired recently - whether or not I had it from the get-go, I very much had the risk factors associated with developing ASPD later on: poverty, absent parents, growing up in an area with a high rate of crime and drug use, witnessing violence, being the victim of sexual violence, and inconsistent parenting. My father was an alcoholic until his dying day. He also raped me from very early on as a form of punishment. My earliest memory of it happening was when I was still in diapers. For some reason he didn't take the diaper off, he cut a hole in the back. (I thought I'd made that detail up - or maybe I just wanted to believe I had - until I confirmed it with Car as an adult. I don't know how much she saw. Too much, however much it was.)

Drunk him wasn't able to get it up, so as much as I hated him screaming at us or my mother, I knew if I hid with my sisters up in the attic I would at least avoid that. He sometimes raped our mom, sometimes beat her, but the only child he raped was me, and the only child he beat was Car. Bean, he just didn’t speak to. He had an irrational belief she was someone else’s child and our mom was a whore, so he simply didn’t interact with her. She could speak to him, but he wouldn’t reply. He never touched her. There were no nice church clothes for her and she only appears in pictures alongside the rest of us, never in pictures taken only of her.

My mother had some kind of mood disorder and sometimes self-medicated with opiates. She was usually functional enough to go to work and be seen as quirky, cheerful and funny. She was rarely functional enough to remember to keep food in the house. Sometimes she would be manic, invested in a new get rich quick scheme. Sometimes she would be so depressed she’d tell me to call work and make up a lie so she didn’t have to go in that day. Since I was the best liar, I did. The plan was simple: call her boss and say something, then tell Car to talk about that same lie to her friends at school. One of her friends was the boss’ niece, and so word always got back to him about whatever it was from a ‘reliable’ source. He thus thought we just had incredibly bad luck. How he didn’t catch on, I don’t know. Maybe he just didn’t care enough to ask himself if something was actually wrong. When my mom wasn't at work or high, she was out doing something or other that she assured me, this time, would be the thing to make us rich and make all our problems go away.

Gen Z has this term they use on Tiktok and Instagram and sometimes Twitter: promoted to parent. That's my sister, Car, in a nutshell. She taught me to read, to speak, to put on clothes, how to help change my little sister's diapers, once kindergarten rolled around my dad stopped driving me so Car walked me, she managed feeding the three of us, etc. I was initially confused when my therapist said I had absent parents because I instinctively went, "No, Car was there all the time." That my brain doesn’t connect ‘parent’ to the people who created me is why I instinctively, pathologically lie as an adult when asked about my parents. I talk about Car and call her ‘Mom’ without thinking about it. I’m not trying to lie to people. I just think of myself as having been raised by a single mother.

That’s the thing they always leave out of videos on the ‘start of darkness’: why the lying and manipulating people started.

I don’t think that’s entirely due to anti-ASPD/anti-NPD prejudice. That’s a factor, certainly, but in the words of psychotherapist and author Georgia Dow, “all of us perceive our own actions as externally motivated, beyond our control, and the actions of others as internally motivated, perfectly within theirs.” This is how you get even people like Paul who are otherwise progressive regarding mental health issues thinking that the lying and manipulating must just be done for the hell of it. But even my friend Cherry, who has ASPD without an abusive background, still has an underlying motive, and that motive is to stay safe. You’re safest when people around you don’t perceive you as unusual and the abusers in your life are given as little material to work with as possible as an excuse for snapping at you.

One time my father raped me after preschool because the teacher told him how lacking in empathy I had been for another kid who had cried when I spilled paint on her shirt.

Manipulating people was vital. I knew that in that moment. It crystallized for me that I needed to act like the other kids. I behaved – and continue to behave – not out of respect for authority but out of fear of what would happen if I didn’t. It clicked with me that I needed to play pretend that I was like other kids so then no one would have an excuse to hurt me. If I was good, I reasoned, I might be able to live a good life. When I was in first grade and the school counselor told me I should take notes on what good kids did, I, as many people with ADHD do, took that literally and wrote a little list in the back of my notebook on what to do and not do.

In second grade I got caught in a lie and when taken aside by the teacher to explain myself, feeling like I could trust her, because I believed her when she said ‘you can tell me anything’, I told her about my dad, about being thrown onto the couch and having my pants ripped off and the stabbing pain inside me, about how lying made him less mad. I thought she would help. I thought she would do something. I thought she’d at least cut me some slack.

She told me I was lying. She went to school with my dad, she knew him, and he wasn’t like that. She told him what I’d said and the next week in my mind’s eye is a blur of rape/being locked in a closet/rape/being locked in a closet naked/rape/laying on the ground staring at the carpet. The pattern of that carpet is burned into my mind’s eye with more clarity than either of my parent’s faces.

The truly destructive, endangering behavior started then. Setting fires and playing with them, almost burning myself, not quite; goading the drunk man at the gas station to just go ahead and kill me already; stealing from a teenager with his daddy’s gun in his truck and not caring when he reached for the gun; playing chicken with a semi-truck to impress the other kids. Little incidents stick out to me, though I’m sure there’s a lot more my self-serving, selective memory has shelved out of reach. I was a very angry child who did not know he was angry. I was lying and trying so hard to be good in the eyes of my peers, but unconsciously had already decided authority could not be trusted under any circumstances. Having been reading since I was four (thank you, Car), I was well-read thanks to the library, and argued with my teachers constantly, picking out all the things they got wrong, pointing out their mistakes, making them acknowledge their faults and watching the hatred build in their eyes for me. I wanted things to get better and also wanted to die. I thought I was better than other people due to my lack of fear and also knew I was no one.

That last part still resonates with me. I am better than a large number of people I know. I don’t drink, I don’t rape, I don’t beat anyone, and I don’t cheat on people. I am also irrelevant. There’s a lot of power in being irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. People overlook you. They can’t target someone they don’t notice. And their opinions can’t impact you if you realized as a child that you don’t actually care, you’re just going to pretend to in order to get off their radar. In the words of one person with ASPD on tumblr, “It’s like a part of me thinks I may be a god, but no part of me would mind if I was struck down and proven wrong.”

(I think that's part of why I default to art for avatars/icons instead of pictures of myself. Art looks human, but is not. Might be special, might be trash. And the answer would not change what's in front of you.)

When I was ten, my father broke Car’s shoulder. I waited until he was passed out drunk, then took a bunch of his favorite shirts out and burned them in the pile we burned some of our trash in. I put the lighter in the pocket of my mom’s jeans, thinking about all the times she’d seen us being hurt and said nothing, done nothing, and hadn’t even comforted us afterwards.

I have ASPD. I am, technically, a sociopath. I wanted certain people to suffer. If I couldn’t protect Car, I could at least make the people who hurt her be just as miserable as they deserved to be. That was, not coincidentally, the year I started stealing cash from my parents, something they would reliably blame each other for. I was a little bundle of diagnosis criteria for Oppositional Defiant Disorder, unnoticed: often angry or resentful, deliberately irritates others, defies and refuses to comply with requests/rules made by adults, and vindictive. All of my grudges live on in my head, not tormenting me, but never forgotten, never fading in importance thanks to time passing the way a healthy mind is supposed to process things. A part of me is angry at the girl whose shirt I spilled paint on for getting me in trouble when I was four even now.

But now, I know how to act. Nowadays, I know how to apologize almost pathologically and beg forgiveness and promise a new shirt and how to rip out a few of my eyelashes to make my eyes look like I’m about to cry. Now I know how to get through a situation safely. That’s not hyperbolic. That’s how my mind processes everything. Everything feels like an opening for someone or something to try to lash out at me. So either I have to lash out at first – which I can’t do because I can’t afford that reputation – or I have to deescalate the situation.

I didn’t get to the middle school years and what changed in my life to get me to get my act together enough to function as an adult but this is already far, far too long*. On the off chance anyone is reading this obscenely long post, this seems like a good point to stop and go, “and this was part one of two” rather than push my luck.

(* I'd like to note talking too much is an ADHD thing, not an ASPD thing. This flaw is not emblematic of the whole group.)

[troebia]

My earliest memory of it happening was when I was still in diapers. For some reason he didn't take the diaper off, he cut a hole in the back.

As Paul will say sometimes on the podcast while reading surveys: "You simply cannot make this shit up."

I felt myself knotting up with tension, anxiety and sorrow as I read through your whole post. Considering the bad cards you were dealt right from the crib, it's a miracle you've turned into an articulate, reflecting person. Oh the pain...

[Mental Fairy]

I agree totally. I found it very difficult to reply. Familiar with the sexual abuse a little too much.