“It’s not true that people with ASPD have no feelings.”

I have a diagnosis of ASPD and have most of the symptoms needed to fulfil the diagnostic criteria. If you Google ASPD, you’ll find a list of these on the NHS website that sum up some of my behaviours pretty much to a tee; repeatedly breaking the law, repeatedly being deceitful, being impulsive or incapable of planning ahead, being irritable and aggressive, having disregard for their own safety or the safety of others, being consistently irresponsible and a lack of remorse.

You actually need a minimum of three of these to gain a diagnosis of ASPD. I meet more than three but my biggest symptoms by far are being irritable and aggressive. I prefer to refer to it as hostility. I also struggle with feeling any level of empathy towards other people. I still experience the other symptoms, but they aren’t as problematic for me in everyday life. You have to be at least 18 years old to gain a diagnosis of ASPD- most professionals won’t diagnose before then- and there is usually a history of some kind of conduct disorder as a teenager before diagnosis. For me, my symptoms became much more noticeable around the age of 17-18.

ASPD is really stigmatised and people often think this is something that I chose. I didn’t. Like a lot of people with ASPD, I got my diagnosis after experiencing severe trauma. In my case this was a kidnap and rape at the hands of an ex boyfriend. I can’t remember much of the situation itself because I was in such a state of shock and trauma, but my diagnosis came very soon afterwards. I was offered talking therapy but I haven’t engaged with it recently. Mostly because I’m still so traumatised by what happened to me.

I struggle a lot to deal with the anger inside of me. As well as being generally hostile towards those around me, I have huge fits of temper. I fly into a rage over nothing and I can become really dangerous if I don’t control myself. The only way I can describe it is like a fire inside my body. I even lose control of my senses and stop hearing. The feeling is so intense, I just want to smash everything around me when I get like that. The only thing that works to calm me down is keeping my FP (favourite person) with me, who is my best friend. They are my safety net and they know how handle me in situations like this.

It’s really easy to piss me off. Sometimes, even if someone just asks me how I’m feeling, I’ll snap at them. I know it’s a problem, but to a certain extent it’s masked by the culture I live in. I’m from a country where the way we interact is more hostile than other places, just in how we speak and talk generally. So here it’s not a big problem but I don’t like that I do it.

Having ASPD also makes my relationships really difficult. Most people don’t understand the condition, although that’s true of all Cluster B disorders in general. My friends have learned to accept it and deal with it over time, to the point that it doesn’t have much of an influence on my friendships. It’s not like I spend all my time being horrible to people. I am capable of having relationships with others even if I don’t feel empathy. My family on the other hand just ignore it and pretend it doesn’t exist.

That said, ASPD has impacted on who I am friends with.  All of my true friends have known about it- some really don’t mind at all and are fine about it, others have weaponised it in hurtful ways. Some of them think it’s funny to tell men they’re dating not to mess up, else their crazy friend with ASPD will come after them. It’s disappointing. It might be a joke to them, but for me it isn’t.

Romantic relationships are tricky. I am always upfront about having ASPD. If someone wants to be by my side, they need to know and I disclose this when it looks like things might be getting serious, although obviously I am nervous about telling people because I don’t know how they will react to it. Recently I was dating a guy and when I told him, he began to act weirdly around me, like he was afraid, and he ended the relationship to go back to his ex. It’s not true that people with ASPD have no feelings. The whole situation made me feel sad, lonely and angry.

I wish that people could see what people with ASPD are really like. What you see on the internet and the media is completely untrue and really harms us. We are not all murderers or abusive. Yes we have our problems and we aren’t perfect, like most people aren’t. A lot of us are self-aware and are actively working on being better people. I don’t have therapy with a professional anymore, but I do my own therapy, give tarot readings and dance to keep my focus on habits that aren’t destructive.