Welcome To My Ted Talk About AsPD, Or Antisocial Personality Disorder, Which The Internet Likes To Coin

Welcome to my Ted Talk about AsPD, or Antisocial Personality Disorder, which the internet likes to coin as sociopath 👌🏻 if you don’t like long infodumps about stigmatized mental disorders from someone who is diagnosed, move on.

Quick toxic rundown: People with AsPD are generally characterized as emotionless, violent, manipulative abusers who kill animals and like to make other people their bitches. The biggest pet peeve we have is the emotionless, sadistic and abusive generalization.

Personally, we are highly neurotic, with highs and lows of: depression, frantic drive, self abuse tactics, chronic fear, lapses of rejection, overwhelming over-analyzation, grey area thinking, false goods and false bads, ultimatums, obsessive compulsive behavior, harsh self demands, and irritability.

AsPD is a disorder that is caused primarily (according to current research) by trauma and abuse in childhood; most notably being emotional neglect and absent caregivers that cause a child to have emotional shutdowns and repression episodes in an attempt to self soothe. Primary caregivers who do not bond with their children are also a factor. Children learn how to behave from those around them. If a primary caregiver is emotionally distant and unavailable, children will learn that is normal behavior and that’s how people are. If a primary caregiver does not provide empathy and sympathy during moments of distress and fear, children will learn that aloofness and disregard of others feelings is normal behavior. If a primary caregiver does not keep a child safe, children will learn that they should not prioritize their own safety or the safety of others. You can find my follow up post regarding this here.

Neglected and abused children often act out trying to get attention and help, often acting out in bad ways because they lack the ability to articulate what they’re feeling and what is happening to them. The pipeline for AsPD typically is: Oppositional Defiance Disorder as a child, Conduct Disorder as a teen, AsPD as an adult. There are a lot of warning signs cueing that AsPD is becoming a risk for development, but often kids do not have a support system to help negate it as it’s their support system that is usually a factor in its creation.

Being AsPD is like being an emotional La Croix 70% of the time. If you’re depressed, then it’s like someone in the other room has depression and is telling you about it. The other 30% of the time, if you’re depressed, your brain doesn’t understand how to handle it so it’s an ultimatum between doing something drastic to remove the Trigger or ignoring and dissociating for days on end.

People with AsPD are very good at ignoring things. Honestly it’s problematic as fuck but it’s not hard to ignore major issues when you just, don’t care. It’s not in the terms of being cruel or making ourselves not care, but the fact that finding the emotional willpower is so far out of our feasible reach we don’t do it. This causes us to piss people off because we don’t have the capacity to care as much as they want us to, even if we can and do to an extent.

Think of it this way: empathy/sympathy is a deep tub of water that everyone has. They can easily fill their measuring cup for the needed amount of empathy without any issues and it’s easy for them. People with AsPD don’t have a tub of water. We have shallow skillet. When we try to dip our cup to fill it, we can’t, it always comes up short and it is difficult to get any water in it as there is no room for the cup to dive. Our ability to care is limited because we do not have the same emotional resources everyone else does.

❌ False Positives & False Negatives ❌

I operate on what I’ve learned are called false positives and false negatives. These are things that are trained into the brain from an early age based off of childhood trauma and other factors. False positives are a distorted version of why we do something to help ourself and for our own good, meanwhile a false negative is something we do because it’s a threat, or based out of fear.

❌ Some of my false positives:

- It is good to be afraid of nothing

- It is good to adapt to someone’s personality if they are stronger than you

- It is good to isolate yourself

- It is good to be a silver tongue because you can get into any place you want

- It is good to become a social chameleon and shape yourself to whatever those around you need/want most, because then you have no chance of being abandoned

❌ Some of my false negatives, which can explain the false positives as well as core beliefs:

- it is bad to be afraid, if I am afraid then I am vulnerable and it can be used against me

- It is bad to be emotional or show concern for others emotions because they do not care for mine

- It is bad to be able to be exploited, because I believe it is everywhere

- It is bad to allow myself to be bored, because boredom begets bad thoughts and no one can or wants to help me when I spiral

- It is bad to not shape yourself to the social circle, because people quickly grow tired of those who do not match them perfectly and being discarded means I failed

My core beliefs can be viewed as the root for the false positives and negatives, because they are based on the core of trauma, abuse and neglect. They come from patterns and instances that make someone with AsPD become the opposite of what they experienced:

- eat or be eaten

- If I don’t show that my bite is worse than my bark, I will be taken advantage of and I must remain on top because the ones on top are safe

- I must look out for myself because nobody will do it for me

- It doesn’t matter what happens to me, therefore it doesn’t matter what people think of me

- If I cannot do something well, then I should not do it at all

- If you are dependent on others for emotional and mental well being, you are weak, therefore I must isolate myself to avoid becoming codependent and a burden and useless

- If I can handle the stress of a situation better than everyone else, therefore I will keep the problem (financial, emotional, mental, etc) to myself to reduce chances of being abandoned due to failure of perfection

People with AsPD are hard to get along with. We often:

- are always anticipating a fight

- lack respect for authority

- ignore social structures to an extent

- tendency to lie if it’ll lessen punishment or if we feel the lie is more acceptable than our actions

- limit social support because it’s wrong to be dependent on others

- have an inflated view of our own importance — which turns into a self ridicule for believing someome like me could be found important to others —

- can be rude and inconsiderate of others feelings somewhat unintentionally

- are unable to read the correct social cues in relation to empathy towards people and animals

- am constantly confused by others dependence upon empathy and inability to make desicions from logic based standpoints

We can’t speak for everyone who has AsPD, nor are we saying that no one with AsPD is capable of being a murderer/abuser etc. but we are saying that y’all need to stop automatically classifying someone as a certain “type” as soon as you know about their disorder.

One last thing I do want to point out is that it is not uncommon for people with AsPD to derive some sort of enjoyment in causing harm, doing something illegal, hurting someone or animals, etc. This entirely stems from lack of environmental control as a child. Being able to control what happens to others or being able to control the things you say or do that hurts someone else is a hefty high to get addicted to; it soothes the underlying itch of not being able to control your own trauma and abuse, so in turn you push these behaviors onto others and enjoy it because it gives you a sense of power and control. Some people with AsPD do genuinely love hurting others, and some enjoy hurting others when they believe it’s deserved or their ire has been stoked. Some enjoy causing pain to those they think deserve it, and others don’t care who they hurt as long as they feel like they’re in control of the situation.

Hope this have some insight into AsPD 🤙🏻 if y’all have any questions, shoot.

NPD traits haver here! NPD affects literally every aspect of my life. Personal relationships are much harder because I either need people to think I’m better than them or I need to hate them enough that they’re automatically inferior to me so their opinion doesn’t matter.

My intense aversion to feeling inferior to anyone makes it really hard to be vulnerable with people and I rarely have stable friends. All my friends I befriended at a time in their lives when they were unstable, unsure of themselves and their opinions and socially awkward because they’re far more likely to have an inferiority complex which makes them far more likely to think I’m better than them.

The downside of that is that I then have very unhealthy relationships with people because stable people make me feel threatened so I immediately revert to hating them and two very unstable people in a friendship is a recipe for disaster.

I also end up getting very visibly frustrated at times when I’m not the one leading a conversation because I can’t stand to be in the background. I also have an intense need to be the one people go to for advice because why would they ever go to anyone but me for what they need? But then when they do come for advice I hate actually giving it because them being emotional and really needing something from me overwhelms me, which makes me frustrated and then that frustration turns into anger/apathy.

There’s also a part of me that really struggles to tell which of my feelings in a relationship are caused by what. All my relationships are somewhat superficial and not knowing whether I like this person for them or for the attention they give me can be worrying.

NPD makes things very hard but it gives me good traits too. I befriend loners, treat people how I want to be treated and even if my actions have greyer motivations I am strongly inclined to do the right thing no matter what.

For example whilst someone might see bullying and go “I have to stop it because it’s wrong” I would go “I have to stop it to prove I am morally superior and an amazing person”. At the end of the day we both end up doing the right thing and that’s what matters.

I rambled but yeah.

Anyone with personality disorders willing to share difficulties in relationships/intimate connections?? Asks, comments, rbs??

-Cluster b (borderline) trying to get to know more about the other clusters and PDs because you never really understand until you talk w em I find.

For me personally the main trigger is just fear of abandonment and emotional permanency. Which literally categorizes bpd but idk if other clusters are as interpersonally defined and recognizable as b???

You're all valid! This is a safe space correct me if I said anything wrong.

people talk a lot about how annoying it is to have people unnecessarily open doors for you as a wheelchair user and that is absolutely a thing

but i’ve also had people pretend not to see me coming and just shut the door in my face. i’ve had to ram a door open with my feet to the point where my mum called the school and told them to remind classmates to give me a hand with double doors because she was so worried. abled people either do everything for you and infantilise you or ignore you and pretend you don’t exist and both are equally ableist.

people with ‘scary’ and ‘weird’ mental issues i love you.

i love schizophrenics. i love psychotic people, i love people on the schizospectrum, i love people with DID and OSDD, i love people with NPD, i love people with PPD, i love people with SPD, i love people with ASPD, i love people with personality disorders, i love people who hallucinate, people who have delusions, and people who have paranoia. i love people who are mentally ill in ways that are viewed as strange and scary by society. 

it is not your fault that you struggle. you are valid. you are deserving of care and you are deserving of love. your issues do not negate any of that.

I don't care about getting better. I care about being happy.