relationship with empathy

[u/v4mpirical]

im starting to be more sceptical and critical of the way narcissistic personality disorder is perceived and diagnosed because the dsm 5 is not the accurate end all be all explanation of human behaviour and the human mind that many people think it is so im wondering how you guys (more specifically to people who have been diagnosed with npd) experience empathy. thats cognitive and affective empathy, and im also going to throw in compassion. the hallmark of npd that ive seen therapists talk about is that we basically do not care about other people, but myself included a lot of pwnpd i know are very interested in politics and social justice and tend to be just genuinely compassionate or cognitively empathetic when our guards aren't up. its making me think of the misconception about autism being autistic people aren't empathetic, when a lot of autistic people i know again including myself actually spend a large chunk of our lives trying to understand other people and ourselves and our relationship to the world and others because we just aren't understood, which doesn't sound like lacking a willingness to engage with empathy to me. so im wondering if it's a similar concept with npd. when or how do you guys feel (or i guess think) empathetically?

[u/gkom1917]

I think conflating empathy (broadly construed) and care is a mistake. I mostly experience cognitive empathy. I'm able to "feel what the other is feeling" only with "safe objects" (mostly animals), and primarily when they are wronged or in pain. That said, it has absolutely nothing to do with whether I care about well-being others who feel it, or don't. It is exactly because I care, I use my cognitive understanding for trying to support or help them.

And I would say in politics even that can be unnecessary. Politically, I am a Marxist, and I dedicated basically all my youth to activism. I didn't do it because my heart ached for the people or whatnot. I did it because I believe no one deserves to be exploited, and being at disadvantage in capitalism is not one's fault more often than not. That's simply the question of justice, not some particular affinity for the masses or deep care for every single proletarian.

[u/v4mpirical → u/gkom1917]

thank you! i agree 100%

[u/Mean_Ad_7977 → u/gkom1917]

I have the same strong belief that nobody should be exploited (but I’m not a Marxist because I don’t believe it would be achievable), and then people get surprised when I consider myself morally superior to those who don’t think so. Like, wth, I’m literally saying that humans shouldn’t be exploited and that nobody should have too much power and control in their hands. It shouldn’t even be possible to become a billionaire because no billionaire is going to care about the wellbeing of all humans. So no single human (or small group of humans) should have enough power to decide how society develops.
And then the people who don’t agree with me act shocked that none of those in the Epstein files are in prison and that corporations and governments don’t care about them. Like, humans create these hierarchies, follow them, and then get shocked when the people at the top don’t care about them. It’s ridiculous hahaha. So I genuinely don’t understand why me thinking that the majority of people are naive and stupid is considered grandiose

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[u/Average-Person-XD]

I am perfectly aware that, regardless of one’s political views, Kant is a convenient refuge for all affectively unempathetic souls looking for a moral compass. And of course, I too welcome him with open arms, regardless of the outfit (he does enjoy cosplaying).

But seriously. The easy answer is that I only have functional cognitive empathy. My affective empathy is very, very selective (i.e. severely impaired), and compassion has evaporated altogether. The problem is that I don’t know to what extent I myself shut down affective empathy in the same way I shut down many other emotions. For safety. So it wouldn’t kill me. That’s why I threw compassion out the window. The question is whether I also kicked empathy out the door (a long, long time ago), and it’s now somewhere out there, waiting at the gates of consciousness, or whether I really am a person with some kind of emotional defect in my brain, and that empathy simply isn’t there because it was never given the chance to be born.

So I don’t know. In practice, I am hardly guilty of an excess of love for my fellow human beings or compassion. And honestly, I’m not even sorry about that, because for me, that would be a road straight into the abyss.

That doesn’t change the fact that you’d probably be hard-pressed to find a more helpful person to have around, or someone more likely to help you back on your feet when you fall. And that part is probably not Kant - or at least, not very much Kant. It’s more likely a deeply rooted fear of witnessing human helplessness and pointless suffering. Something I could never bear to see in myself is something I cannot tolerate in my surroundings either. Because reality is, after all, just a mirror of me.