Sociopaths and strong emotions

What emotion is greater than the feeling of grief of a loss of a loved one. I've listened to some discussions on the matter and it really struck me how much my experiences/perspective on dealing with death as a sociopath differ from those discussed. Both in respect of others dying and contemplating my own death. While yes, I’ve lost people close to me and even I loved, genuine grief is something that never really happened. I did not cry or feel depressed about it. I felt some sort of sadness, but could not really relate to the emotions of people around me. I’ve seen major manifestations of grief, which do lead to irrational and self-destructive behaviors. I find such sort of actions rather pointless as the person in question is already gone and there is nothing that could really be done. It seemed to be from the lack of those connections of emotional feedback stemming from empathy that bind people together socially. I can easily observe those connections at play and both the benefits and drawbacks that they can bring. I can easily empathise with the physical pain that people may be feeling, but emotional hurts and concerns are all but alien.

I guess, that sadness that I experienced came from the feeling of absence of a person that has been discussed. In my view, some people make my world better by being in it and the world without them is worse. A special person in my life did die; she was my childhood friend since kindergarten we had been friends until her death after college. When I was in the third grade I went through the trouble of persuading my parents and school administration that I needed to change schools and I openly said that the only reason for that had been that “I want to attend that school because there is a person that I like in it”.  After college I moved to another city and we have not met or even talked for a couple of years before she died, but the story of her dying made me really sad. She was a religious person, and though I am an atheist I would sometimes order mass to be done in her name, as a token of respect, I guess. But that sadness had been much greater than that what I experienced when some of my close relatives died. There currently are a couple of other people in my life about the departure of whom I believe that I would be sad.

As for my own death, I am completely disinterested in what kind of “legacy” I leave and not too concerned with my death itself. The whole legacy thing also relies on some sort of emotional connections between the departing person and those that that person is leaving behind and/or vanity. I have neither. I am not looking forward to death, but as nothing really can be done about then there no need to worry. The inevitability and absoluteness of death is rather apparent, so worrying about it is exceedingly unproductive. On this note, I would not choose immortality, even if I had been a choice to be immortal. All things must end really, and any life over say 120 years would essentially be too repetitive and pointless. And I believe that I would strongly prefer to die alone, rather than having anyone beside me.

This brings me to the point of "fitting in" and faking the expected reactions. The whole "fitting in" thing used to be a real problem when I was a kid or a young adult. But since my mid-20s it has lost most of its relevance. Now I am in my mid-30s and it is hardly a matter of concern to me. Now I can choose freely who I associate with and there are hardly any situations where a forced "fitting in" is required. As I understand, the main issue with dealing with a sociopath is that people tend to have certain expectations as to how a person must react to different situations. And sociopaths may not "live up" to these expectations of other people.

 One answer to this problem is transparency. I am pretty upfront and "out of the closet" about who and what I am. If I am close to the person to a degree that my condition may affect them, I would openly explain what to expect and not expect of me and why, and I've written a number of articles on the matter to give some knowledge as to how the whole thing works. Then I would leave it to the other person to decide whether they are willing to associate with me or not.

 Of course, such an approach often proves to be problematic. One problem is the rampant prejudice and discrimination against sociopaths. Just look at the BS media portrayals of the matter - especially the movies and books, with maybe 1 or 2 doing a decent job at portraying the matter accurately. But generally it is the grossly inaccurate pieces like "American Psycho" or "Silence of the lambs" that go mainstream. Plus there are thousands of hate groups against sociopaths openly pouring out stupidity founded in ignorance. On one hand, can't really blame the people in these groups, because people do rather personally take the fact that some sociopaths do not live up to their expectation. On the other hand, it is well established that sociopathy is a biological condition that one is born with, that has very high similarity in to autism. And autistic people do not really have to go about their life being forced to justify their existence. But as a result of such an approach, when given the knowledge, there were people who were not willing to associate with me because of what I am.

 Then there is the second problem. There are people who will associate with me even knowing of my condition. But even then, they can't really comprehend it because they are quite literally wired differently. And problems do arise occasionally, where I did not act in a manner that they expected. People find it difficult to accept that I genuinely can't empathize with some of their feelings or circumstances, simply because I can't comprehend/experience them.

I guess, that grief would fall into this category. When something like that happens I found that the best way is to keep my distance. Because things that I might say or do that would comfort me, tend to be the exact opposite of what people need to hear. This is a fairly significant problem. On a number of occasions I've been told that what I say/do "devalues" the feelings that the person is having and even have been directly and unambiguously told by these people to pretend and act as if I were "normal". I was curious about it, so I asked whether it would bother them knowing that I am pretending  and my actions are not legit. Oddly, I got the answer that it does not really matter whether I am sincere or not, the experience of receiving such comfort/emotional feedback or something is way more important than such considerations of fakeness. And the exact thing happened on a number of occasions with different people, so I feel that this could be generalized pretty much to the whole population of "normal people" with rather high fidelity. The irrationality of this approach totally blew my mind, by the way. It is not unexpected, of course, because do use "fake" substitutes for many of their needs: porn for sexual desires, books for communication/relationships et c.

But my approach has always been that I would not pretend/act in a "fake" way. I do not believe that I should go about apologizing for the fact that I was born this way. It is not that chose it. If me being this way is a dealbreaker for some people, then godspeed.