aftermath/empathy

So the episode now makes sense. I had audhd and ptsd, I got drugs that made me depressed, then more drugs that made me insane and addicted, then I had to use meditation to break the addiction, achieved a major insight into no-self, liberation, but the depression-inducing drugs were increased and I nearly killed myself again. And now I’m free of those drugs I am able to process things. I had no idea about stream-entry but apparently you are warned not to act on grandiose ideas for for the first couple of months afterward; oops. Well… total transparency. It’s settling now.

But the reality is that this has hurt the people around me, and some of them have hurt me. Pretty badly it seems.

One of the major triggers for me spinning out so much was an accusation from a family member that I have never - in 41 years of life - shown empathy or seemed to care about other people. This scarred me so deeply because I still believe I am an empath. But I also believe that this has been honed to an anxious edge by an early life filled with unprovoked violence from my peers and reprimands from authority figures. I further honed it by working in an industry where your income depends on keeping people happy. My entire life has been about mind reading.

But also I feel emotions more acutely than most, because of the dysregulated highly sensitive person thing. I blocked my ability to cry when I was young, because of how much it hurt to process these emotions. Everything went into the traumabank. I further crushed it down with alcohol and then training… and the reason I started doing so much art was to try to open the door to my emotions because a lifetime of repressing them was getting too much. It didn’t work; I needed drugs.

But anyway. This whole episode in itself has been a huge trauma for both me and my wife, and other members of my family I am sure. The drug-induced side of things, that is. Unfortunately from the outside, the meditation seemed ‘drug induced’ and even I didn’t know at the time that it was my final attempt to cling to this life. So when I mention it to my close family they say it is something they don’t want to hear because it is part of their trauma.

I have a lot of mess to try to clear up with my immediate family, but I also still need to focus on my recovery. But as I mentioned, I do not think this incident is mystical, as such. I think it was a consolidation of rules learned to this point in life. So a lot of my deep-rooted trauma from violence and addiction and rejection is gone, but some of the newer trauma from the episode itself remains.

When the family member who accused me of being unempathetic was mentioned I realised that I hadn’t thought about them since the incident. I think I blocked them out. And hearing about them being ‘an empathetic sounding-board’ for someone I care deeply about… it hurt me. 

I realised that I probably never want to rebuild that relationship. I realised that I never *had* a relationship - I had someone who thought I was being a dick while I thought I was … happily … I don’t know. Maybe not happily. I was dancing to their song and trying to make them happy, all this time, I guess.

I think a lot of my old relationships were based on a desire to be loved. Rsd, clinging, craving, dvar, self-image, insecurity, whatever. I had learned that I was not enough without outside approval. I no longer feel like this; I have a modicum of self-respect now. And unfortunately the way this counterpart viewed our relationship all these decades came to the fore and fed into my suicidality. 

I think I am done with that relationship. This is the case with adhd families, isn’t it? I know it’s the case with my own family up once side of the tree. Rifts and ruptures and broken relationships.

I had someone I thought was a friend, but who turned out to be an egomaniac, threaten to kill me after we got dumped with an old dog that was dying because he left it alone for 2 months to go on holiday. I was still coming off aripirazole but I saved that dog’s life, after my wife initially caught it at the gates when it wasn’t breathing. I took it to the vet, called them back, and sat up all night with the dog. He said he would ‘fucking kill’ me. The dog survived and is recovering; it was dying of loneliness. But even after the event he holds on to this delusion because the alternative is to look in the mirror and realise that he was the one who nearly killed it. I’ve been there; when you are so swallowed by ego that you need to paint someone else as evil just to retain your self-image. Good riddance to this guy, but also a shame; he is almost certainly adhd and possibly autistic and… well there’s a reason we attracted each other - I was the same, before all this. But you have to save yourself, I guess.

I also burned my professional reputation, which doesn’t bother me. That was baggage I wanted rid of, if I’m honest. I hated that job so much. I was so good at it because of years of unrecognised empathy and trying to figure out how to keep people happy as someone who a) is autistic and b) has adhd. I focus on the minutiae and I struggle to control myself, plus I have a short memory so tend to butt in or think aloud. But I am not unempathetic. I see all the microexpressions and register every millisecond pause I end up spending days with my stomach in knots thinking ‘not again James’ while these people walk off and chat with their friends and it’s all forgotten.

The reality, guys, is this:

I was deeply traumatised as a child and repressed it all.

This left my hypervigilant as to other people’s intent toward me. 

I feel emotions stronger than most.

Because I feel the emotions so strongly, I can’t possibly talk about them before I fix them. It is unfathomable. I feel like the boar at the start of Mononoke with the worms sprouting from its back when someone tries.

One of my autistic friends said he went to a class to teach him how to listen, on the recommendation of his wife who also claimed he was unempathetic. I can tell you without a doubt that this man is *not* unempathetic and he is a fantastic empathy interface *for me*.

He learned how to listen, and everyone told him how great he was at it, but he realised that the only reason he learned to listen was because he wanted to be loved.

Isn’t this the same for all of you? Do you not sit there and nod slowly with your fake weepy eyes just so that people will love you and you will feel good about yourself and you can sleep at night knowing you danced the same dance as the crowd.

Or are you so much ‘part of the water’ that this is natural to you? Is that how your brains developed? Just like how my brain figured out how to move these legs to walk, and how to spot issues with candidates months before they knew the issue themselves? Is this weepy-eye stuff as instinctive as breathing?

This is why I nearly went insane trying to figure out my ‘empathy supersphere’. Because autistic people are some of the most empathetic I have encountered. I am one of the most empathetic I have encountered but I am also too sensitive to just sit there and fake it so that people like me. I want to fix their problem, not ‘absorb’ it. Because if I absorb it, it *grows*. It does not dissipate like it does for all the people with a regular ‘tick tick tick’ of dopamine. I will give you absolution in the form of logic but then I will have to go away and ride my bike for 8 hours just to process the residual vibration that echoes in my body.

But I’m not bothered about whether these people love me any more. My self-image isn’t tied into their approval. I will care for the family that I chose and who I love deeply, and I will cut off the members of the old family that expect me to dance to their song and be a certain person so that they feel alleviated in their guilt or whatever. They are an actor for god’s sake; an actual trained actor. Of course they can pretend to empathise. They have probably learned ‘this is the way you act empathetic’ and internalised it so that anyone who doesn’t act like one of the troupe in Friends or Sex and the City is not empathising.

So yeah. Not all roses. But at least I know which relationships are worth focusing on.

The reality is that I left the UK. I hated that place. It abused me, and the people there abused me.

I am eternally grateful to my parents for coming over to look after me when I was recovering from aripirazole, though, and all of my baggage around my dad has dropped away, which is good. These deep-rooted delusions I had about who and how people were is gone, and that is good.

But at the same time some people showed their true colours and their true thoughts, for the first time. They stopped pretending, and they showed how they really viewed me and our relationship. They stopped acting.

So I’m done with them. The dog man I outgrew. The actor stopped acting. Neither of them will help me become a better person, husband, father. Cutting them off, however, will. I am no arahant and I still need to cultivate what I feed into my brain, especially now.

But how much of this supposed ‘empathy’ is just people acting out an imagined social norm?

Shouldn’t we meet in the middle? I realise that some people might be too far on the other end, but actually, no. My wife is not. She is a very different type of thinker to me; the polar opposite at times. Yet we still empathise.

And I think this is because we actually meet in the middle. We meet in *our* middle. She makes an effort, as do I. We don’t both struggle to meet at an imagined social norm. But if you’re a trained actor, then you have learned ‘how people present’ when they are being empathetic or angry or happy or whatever.

No, darling. You have not. You have learned to act. You have learned the imagined societal norm, and you have coded it deep. And that is pretty damned unempathetic of you.

So I’ll go on doing real empathy but I’ll not bother with the fakers any more. That dance nearly killed me.

/jb202508240813