Alexithymia
In entry 390 I speculated, that a man, who does not feel any affection for his partner when passively in his presence, even though his pleasure center is responsive to direct stimulation by the infatuation with her body, could have some form of what I called 'emotional anhedonia'.
In entry 391 I defined a jerk as someone, who perceives and treats a woman as a commodity, causing her a lot of suffering due to his not feeling affection for her, and who is also afflicted with the narcissistic entitlement and grandiosity delusion, which makes him unable to acknowledge his own attitude and treatment as inappropriate.
After some googling, I discovered the concept of alexithymia as a personality trait. If someone with alexithymia would develop reactive narcissism as a form of comorbidity, his behavior could be experienced by his victim the same way as in my suggested 'emotional anhedonia', but for very different underlying reasons.
Simplified, alexithymia means limitations to the ability to understand, describe and interpret the own and other persons' emotions.
A conscious psychopathic jerk, who decides to enter a friends with benefits relationship, which is based upon nothing more than infatuation with her body, lacks affection. There is no bonded commitment with someone, who is considered as insignificant, who is not trusted, not respected, who is not expected to meet emotional or intellectual needs. The conscious jerk knows, that he does not love but use the woman.
The alexithymic jerk is different. He can be in a relationship, which is a mismatch, but he is oblivious of this. He treats the woman as a commodity, but he confounds it with love. He subjectively may even believe her to be the love of his life, because he is unable to distinguish between infatuation and caring love.
He treats her in accordance to what he does not feel, as merely a friend with benefits. His treatment represents his true attitude. Were he to meet the woman, whom he would experience as someone worthy to respect, to trust, to share emotional and intellectual intimacy with, he would consciously experience the same kind of love, but he would treat her much better, his behavior determined by affection and care.
As a result of the same confusion, he also cannot understand her expressions of affection any better than his own emotions, nor what she expects from him but misses.
Therefore he is oblivious and unable to comprehend, why and how she experiences his treatment as a humiliation. To her, he is a jerk, because he does not take responsibility for her pain.
In entry 390 I speculated, that a man, who does not feel any affection for his partner when passively in his presence, even though his pleasure center is responsive to direct stimulation by the infatuation with her body, could have some form of what I called 'emotional anhedonia'.
In entry 391 I defined a jerk as someone, who perceives and treats a woman as a commodity, causing her a lot of suffering due to his not feeling affection for her, and who is also afflicted with the narcissistic entitlement and grandiosity delusion, which makes him unable to acknowledge his own attitude and treatment as inappropriate.
After some googling, I discovered the concept of alexithymia as a personality trait. If someone with alexithymia would develop reactive narcissism as a form of comorbidity, his behavior could be experienced by his victim the same way as in my suggested 'emotional anhedonia', but for very different underlying reasons.
Simplified, alexithymia means limitations to the ability to understand, describe and interpret the own and other persons' emotions.
A conscious psychopathic jerk, who decides to enter a friends with benefits relationship, which is based upon nothing more than infatuation with her body, lacks affection. There is no bonded commitment with someone, who is considered as insignificant, who is not trusted, not respected, who is not expected to meet emotional or intellectual needs. The conscious jerk knows, that he does not love but use the woman.
The alexithymic jerk is different. He can be in a relationship, which is a mismatch, but he is oblivious of this. He treats the woman as a commodity, but he confounds it with love. He subjectively may even believe her to be the love of his life, because he is unable to distinguish between infatuation and caring love.
He treats her in accordance to what he does not feel, as merely a friend with benefits. His treatment represents his true attitude. Were he to meet the woman, whom he would experience as someone worthy to respect, to trust, to share emotional and intellectual intimacy with, he would consciously experience the same kind of love, but he would treat her much better, his behavior determined by affection and care.
As a result of the same confusion, he also cannot understand her expressions of affection any better than his own emotions, nor what she expects from him but misses.
Therefore he is oblivious and unable to comprehend, why and how she experiences his treatment as a humiliation. To her, he is a jerk, because he does not take responsibility for her pain.
It is a sad pattern, when a man has some kind of personal problem, no matter if it is by naming just a few examples, alexithymia, asperger's, ODD, ADD, NLD. With the support of a caring partner, coping with the problem would be a shared task.
Instead he reacts with narcissism and becomes a jerk, who considers himself as god's gift to every woman. He hurts her, he dislikes her reaction to the pain, and he blames her to be the one with a personal problem. It is a sad pattern, that someone in need of a partner's support is locked behind a wall of a delusion that deprives him of what he needs.
Alexithymia could also be a relapse to earlier stages of evolution, as I speculated about hedonists in entry 390. In those past epochs, when higher emotions like affection and the attraction of bonded monogamy had not yet evolved, men procreated purely by physical infatuation with the body of a woman and they were very successful in multiplying the human species. But the price for this was paid by the suffering of the women, who were used predominantly as breeding bodies.
Many of today's jerks would have been successful cave men.
