Can a skilled empath and a functioning psychopath form a lasting and meaningful relationship?

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What’s actually happening when someone develops emotionally? They’re connecting their cognitive thinking mind with their emotions. This forms deep neural interconnections that allow a person to see into their own feelings and emotions just as another person would see them.

When you can see yourself as another would see you, you can be a source of good feelings and not just someone who needs them. You can, essentially, have an emotionally-fulfilling relationship.

If your limbic system is non-functional, then your brain simply doesn’t process emotions. Emotions regulate human interaction, they’re a neuro-chemical dance that’s been in constant evolution, not just in humans, but all mammals, for tens of millions of years.

Something always just feels ‘off’, and the more emotionally-developed the person, the quicker they’re going to pick up on it. Those with limbic deactivation need to figure out how to avoid throwing off these signs.

Cue the mask. The mask is a wholesale recreation of the limbic system in the forebrain. I’ve seen it described as “putting your personality on along with your clothes in the morning.” Anybody whose limbic system isn’t fully-functioning has to make a mask and the wearing of the mask never seems natural to the person. What’s natural is never dealing with the feelings that they’re not having, not pretending to have them.

The mask is created through long, painstaking, detailed observation of human social behavior. If you think carefully about how the three-house brain works, you’ll see how mask creation is driven out of all of this. The basal ganglia, the so-called ‘lizard brain’, deals with basic survival tasks. The fight or flight response originates here. It can override the whole brain in order to safeguard survival.

The limbic system also can override conscious brain activity. When you see people ‘getting emotional’, it means something they hold dear to their heart is getting threatened, and so the emotions get triggered to give the person energy to protect it.

But the limbic system also does a lot of little overrides that don’t have anything to do with being threatened, this is how non-human mammals manage to communicate with each other without the aid of language. A dog looking fearful looks exactly like a human looking fearful, we can make that connection because limbic systems all affect beings similarly.

So you can see how, if yours doesn’t function properly, you need some way to trick people into thinking yours is. Operating smoothly in an emotionally-driven society demands it.

Relationships, in my experience, tend to be of two varieties. Emotionally-connected or not. I’ve seen many marriages with little if any emotional connection in it. I’ve seen many relationships where one person is emotionally unfulfilled. Very few relationships I’ve seen have both participants fully fulfilled.

Why is this? Well, in a nutshell, it’s due to the lack of emotional development that I described above. If you don’t develop your emotions then the back and forth limbic communication that all mammals use is going to be stunted. Your existence will be primarily determined by the cognitive mind, thinking and analyzing will take on the role that is traditionally held by the limbic.

This is fine for many people. But for those with limbic deactivation, where everything has to be seen and processed and made conscious, it’s necessary. So a psychopath is going to be very finely attuned to the emotional needs of their partner, even if they can’t quite feel them themselves, due to a lack of inherent empathy. It’s cognitive empathy.

If the “neurotypical” never thinks to consider neurology, they may never sense that they’re in a relationship with someone who doesn’t feel love the way they do. The neurological differences can just be attributed to eccentricity. And the limbically-challenged is going to be conditioned to never take off their mask, no matter what, especially around their spouse.

A “psychopath” (quotes are used here to highlight the difference between common social conception and actuality) is going to be tirelessly, ceaselessly, performing what the rest of the world calls “emotional labor” in order to maintain a place in society.

A “skilled empath” is likely going to attribute emotional traits in a psychopath that the psychopath doesn’t possess, and the psychopath is simply going to recognize this and not rock the boat. Maybe it’ll work and the relationship will last, maybe it won’t. Because whatever it is that the “skilled empath” needs, the psychopath just won’t be able to provide because that need is an emotional one.