I always knew I was different, I didn't know I was a sociopath

Actually it's becoming much more common for teenagers to label every single thing about themselves. There are certain boxes they have to fit in, and if they do fit, they have to fill the box entirely. You can have multiple labels, but there's no room for unlabeled activities, and if you participate in any label, you must do so entirely.

I thought this was a joke at first. I guess her story adds up!

>>Rational person would know that you can't force someone to like you.

True, but TBF, it takes experience to realize that, and the psychopathy kind of hinders getting that experience? (Reading could also help, but not in the same way)

> Wow, that doesn't jive with my personal experiences or what I've ever read about sociopathy. It sounds more like you're describing folks on the autism spectrum.

The amount of undue hate that people on the spectrum get for being sociopaths or narcissist is awful. You are correct that they may misunderstand or "not get" social situations. You are incorrect in that they don't care / can't feel the emotion of a situation. Often they are overwhelmed by this and it's what makes "dealing" (passing as NT) difficult.

The amount of times I have had people socially manipulate situations against me is difficult to count. Any time you speak up about this you are the "crazy" one. These have mostly been situations where sociopaths are abusing me for the entertainment / social benefit reason.

They DO NOT CARE about the pain / suffering they cause. This has been a source of extreme stress, pain and suffering in my life. YMMV obviously but the amount of time I have to spend explaining this to people is disheartening. It's like nobody wants to believe that people can be so awful... and this belief can hand wave away any bad behavior being described.

> because even if you have little empathy, behaving like a creepy scumbag is generally not going to be beneficial in the long run.

I think you significantly underestimate the benefit to risk ratio. There are a lot more terrible, manipulative, sadistic people out there than "kind but misunderstood" people. The averages are not in our favor.

If nothing else, the comments here show me that we need a new word to describe people on the "sociopath spectrum" who intellectually decide to not be evil.

There is a reason ASPD requires the anti-social element to be diagnosable, but it seems we lack a popular word to describe ASPD without the AS. Psychopathy and sociopathy have too much cultural baggage because everyone thinks of extreme cases like American Psycho, or the most overt narcissistic sociopaths they've personally interacted with.

There is a whole class of people on the sociopath spectrum who go unnoticed because they're just better at hiding it and living normal lives, even if they don't feel emotions as strongly (or at all) compared to most people, they can decide to intellectually value other peoples experiences and simulate it.

I suspect there's also a lot of overlap with high functioning autism, where intellect and desire to model people accurately can make up for emotional hardware / mirror neuron deficiencies.

If we had less polarizing language to describe the spectrum of non-evil sociopathy, more people in this category would feel safe publicly describing their experiences, and the discourse wouldn't be dominated by grifters and subsequent backlash.

I think it's good to accept people on this spectrum as long as they chose to not be evil (and succeed at it), it is pointless judge people on their own internal experience of the world if it's not affecting others! They have every right to find community and support structures, and work towards integrating healthily with society, just like those with BPD, autism, bipolar, etc.