Mutual beneficial

I understand. I think empathy and “couldn’t care less-ness” is on a continuum. If two low empathy people can create a good life with each other this is a very good thing. It is good for the people involved, and also good because the s’path is not playing the field and having tons of opportunities to create more victims. (This is an observation in general, and is not meant to suggest that your partner would create victims if she weren’t with you).

I’ve never liked the idea of diagnostic labels. So often people get mis-labeled and then they get mis-treated (as in the wrong treatment, not that they are treated badly in general). CPTSD is a relatively new diagnostic label. Prior to this (women mainly) were diagnosed as borderline personality disorder. In mental health circles this is a trash can diagnosis. It is assumed to be an incurable character flaw and the person is manipulative. That makes therapists and doctors often protect themselves by not really working to help the person, but just to “keep them safe”, which is more like a mental health holding pattern rather than treatment to effect change. This would be torture to a victim of childhood emotional abuse because it parallels the cold distancing of their parents.

I think many, many people who have been given the trash can diagnosis of borderline (who are erroneously seen as very manipulative) are actually complex trauma survivors (who are emotionally overwhelmed a lot, which can be misidentified as manipulation). This is grossly unfair and anti-therapeutic. Overwhelmed complex trauma survivors don’t get the benefits of manipulation (as sociopaths do) so this is a huge “tell” about the cause of emotional “storms”. One is effective in getting what one wants (ie a sociopath having a trantrum) the other achieves the opposite (rejection and alienation of the trauma survivor).

There are also people on the autism spectrum who also rate low on empathy, and I bet that lots of (mainly female) Aspergers people have got misdiagnosed as borderline or sociopath. Again, the tragedy is they get ineffective treatment and very damaging labels that put them in the therapeutic trash can. Mindfulness and DBT, which is the (current) gold standard treatment for borderline, won’t necessarily help these people, so they probably get unfairly blamed for sabotaging their own treatment.

Whatever the “real” diagnosis or low baseline “normal” state of empathy, just because someone is low on empathy does not make them bad or evil. It is the INTENT of their actions that determines how evil they are IMO. Doing cruel things to another person for personal gain is how sociopaths are FUNCTIONALLY identified. ie it is what they do that makes them sociopaths IMO, not whatever their score is on state and trait states of empathy and fearlessness. Mental health diagnoses are pretty much based on self-report, and sociopaths are pathological liars who know what to say to get a clean bill of mental health.

Even if the person is “normal” and has no diagnosis, if they are spiteful and mean then I cut them off too. If I feel bad because of what another person is doing, I don’t hang around that person. I hang around people who make me feel good.

Intent is more important to me than any diagnosis or lack of diagnosis. The nastiest people I have met in my life have had no diagnosis at all.