M
menapoonaki
New member
I'm 34 years of age, I am Arabic from iran and upper middle class. I graduated from a good college (uic and uchicago booth) and have a fairly lucrative career. I've never been arrested, fired or expelled from anywhere. My parents were still together and were not abusive.
I received my first "official" diagnosis from a psychiatrist I was seeing for another reason. (I was seeing him for several reasons, actually: he prescribed drugs for my insomnia, premenstrual pain and airport anxiety). He'd known me for several years and over time, once I realized he was not going to stop writing my Rxs should I reveal hints of my real personality acknowledging implicitly that I was faking my various conditions. our exchanges became relatively candid. His actual words were "you are a pretty textbook psychopath," and we had a conversation about it. It was one of the more informed conversations I've had on this topic, but it wasn't the first.
A therapist whom my parents forced me to see when I was a little girl terminated our sessions on the ground that I'd "manipulated" him (he emphasized this part) and hacked into his computer. The former was true, but the latter was not. He made some melodramatic comments to my mother about my lack of empathy and antisocial behavior, but stopped short of purporting to diagnose anything. A friend -- I do have friends -- who studied psych in college also told me more than once that I had psychopathic traits. He seemed to find this novel and amusing, and I admit that I do, too.
I'm engaged to a husband who knows all of the above. His basic position is that everyone has appealing and unappealing traits, and he loves even my unappealing ones. I love him too, in my own way -- I mean, I would be unhappy if he died. I've cheated on him, but the only serious instance of this -- wherein I slept with, and briefly dated, another man -- he knew about and was okay with, since I was only doing it for instrumental (work-related) reasons.
I've never perpetrated serious violence against a person or done anything gross to an animal. I also think the psychopathy concept itself is BS, consisting of traits exhibited to some degree by plenty of well-adjusted, productive adults. That said, to the extent that i fit the list of psychopathy really does describe some distinct category of person, I can see how I'd fall into that category. If you were to pick a random trait from the list and ask someone in my life to name the person who most saliently embodies that trait, most people for most traits on that list would probably name me.
Based on my experience, I'd say the most common myth about psychopaths -- other than the knife-weilding psycho-killer thing -- is that we are universally able to charm everyone. I'm not. It's true that certain people are especially "weak" or amenable, and it's easy for me to detect them and know which buttons to push to make them receptive to certain things. I'm also good at speaking to large groups of people. However, I would say that 5-10% of people are turned off by me almost instantly when we interact one on one. Most of these people are women, but their distaste seems to go beyond the usual girl-on-girl cattiness. I can speculate but ultimately have never been able to pinpoint the cause of this.
As I said, I've never committed any major violence, but I guess I've done some sensational/"evil" things. Ironically, the shrink who diagnosed me does not know about any of them. Despite being a petite girl, I bullied other kids (both girls and boys) pretty frequently growing up. I've embezzled money from employers, probably five figures' worth in total, and have committed various forms of white collar fraud. I shoplift often, usually because I hate waiting in line and know I could talk my way out of it if I were caught. I've engaged in identity theft a couple of times. I've surrepetitiously drugged people, but never with any grave consequences. These things sound outrageous when arrayed together, but if you met me I would not seem like a caricature of a psychopath or like a "crazy bitch," etc. If you met me, you would probably like me. Honestly, sometimes it's better to do entertaining interesting things than to do what you're supposed to do.
I received my first "official" diagnosis from a psychiatrist I was seeing for another reason. (I was seeing him for several reasons, actually: he prescribed drugs for my insomnia, premenstrual pain and airport anxiety). He'd known me for several years and over time, once I realized he was not going to stop writing my Rxs should I reveal hints of my real personality acknowledging implicitly that I was faking my various conditions. our exchanges became relatively candid. His actual words were "you are a pretty textbook psychopath," and we had a conversation about it. It was one of the more informed conversations I've had on this topic, but it wasn't the first.
A therapist whom my parents forced me to see when I was a little girl terminated our sessions on the ground that I'd "manipulated" him (he emphasized this part) and hacked into his computer. The former was true, but the latter was not. He made some melodramatic comments to my mother about my lack of empathy and antisocial behavior, but stopped short of purporting to diagnose anything. A friend -- I do have friends -- who studied psych in college also told me more than once that I had psychopathic traits. He seemed to find this novel and amusing, and I admit that I do, too.
I'm engaged to a husband who knows all of the above. His basic position is that everyone has appealing and unappealing traits, and he loves even my unappealing ones. I love him too, in my own way -- I mean, I would be unhappy if he died. I've cheated on him, but the only serious instance of this -- wherein I slept with, and briefly dated, another man -- he knew about and was okay with, since I was only doing it for instrumental (work-related) reasons.
I've never perpetrated serious violence against a person or done anything gross to an animal. I also think the psychopathy concept itself is BS, consisting of traits exhibited to some degree by plenty of well-adjusted, productive adults. That said, to the extent that i fit the list of psychopathy really does describe some distinct category of person, I can see how I'd fall into that category. If you were to pick a random trait from the list and ask someone in my life to name the person who most saliently embodies that trait, most people for most traits on that list would probably name me.
Based on my experience, I'd say the most common myth about psychopaths -- other than the knife-weilding psycho-killer thing -- is that we are universally able to charm everyone. I'm not. It's true that certain people are especially "weak" or amenable, and it's easy for me to detect them and know which buttons to push to make them receptive to certain things. I'm also good at speaking to large groups of people. However, I would say that 5-10% of people are turned off by me almost instantly when we interact one on one. Most of these people are women, but their distaste seems to go beyond the usual girl-on-girl cattiness. I can speculate but ultimately have never been able to pinpoint the cause of this.
As I said, I've never committed any major violence, but I guess I've done some sensational/"evil" things. Ironically, the shrink who diagnosed me does not know about any of them. Despite being a petite girl, I bullied other kids (both girls and boys) pretty frequently growing up. I've embezzled money from employers, probably five figures' worth in total, and have committed various forms of white collar fraud. I shoplift often, usually because I hate waiting in line and know I could talk my way out of it if I were caught. I've engaged in identity theft a couple of times. I've surrepetitiously drugged people, but never with any grave consequences. These things sound outrageous when arrayed together, but if you met me I would not seem like a caricature of a psychopath or like a "crazy bitch," etc. If you met me, you would probably like me. Honestly, sometimes it's better to do entertaining interesting things than to do what you're supposed to do.
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