Sociopath Community

You've probably heard lot about narcissistic supply in the media. In this context, supply is merely positive boosting of the narcissist's ego from other people via admiration. I would like to introduce the concept of supply in terms of autism spectrum disorders. If "supply" had a general definition in psychology, I'd define it as something a person needs on a consistent basis to function properly on an emotional and cognitive level. Similar to how a restaurant needs consistent food supply to live on, some people have psychological needs that in some cases such as NPD, can seem a bit unreasonable. 

And so, supply having been defined in a more general way, I can now begin to think of it from the lense of an autism spectrum disorder. So, what factors do autistic people oftentimes need to feel comfortable? A big one is routine. Autistic people swear by their routines as if they were written in a religious text. If there is a break in the routine, it rocks the autistic person's world and renders them unable to function. Another thing is interests. Autistic people typically zero in on their on fascination and exclude everything else. This ties into routine in a big way, because oftentimes the routine is designed by the autistic person to maximize time to focus on these interests. This is a big part of what at least in my experience as somebody with asperger's made me go off over a small change in the routine. Autism is also associated with ADHD, and has an interent boredom that is like a constant itch, and engaging in the interest is like giving that itch a good scratch. To put it all together, I'd say autistic people derive supply off of interests to fight crippling boredom and need for stimulation, and reinforce that interest with routines catered for it. This is starkly different from the also perpetually bored sociopath, who prefers a far less organized approach to fighting their boredom.

And herin lies an issue. A special interest could be ANYTHING. And that includes another human being. Look at AliceInWonderland and TPG. She became his interest. But sadly unliked more mechanical interests, human being don't necessarily follow predictable patterns. That doesn't mean that we don't TRY to generalize rules and patterns to try to model a person's behavior. We oftentimes will do this in a relationship. But since we are not the most socially attuned to begin with, these models often turn out to be wrong, and when the person acts in a way that breaks from what we expected, mental chaos ensues. Because at that point, not even our special interest aka autistic supply is being predictable. 

And sometimes, we get angry. We call the person out and say- "Why aren't you acting like what I thought you were, you need to go back to how you were because I do not understand this." This looks narcissistic but in actuality it is the result of our expectations totally missing the mark and the mental chaos from it. Like TPG, he flipped the fuck out when Alice quit talking to him. He never would have thought she'd do that.

Now, luckily for autistic people, we don't just have to have people be supply. Our supply can come in the form of topics that we are obsessed with, or video games, or subjects. We can focus on things that ARE predictable and master them to the point of genius. This is our strong suit and this is where we succeed. And so in the autistic individual you see a unique feature of not necessarily needing supply from others to function. We can get it from anything that an interes in can be formed in. And that in my opinion is the healthier route and the logical reason that a lot of people with autism would rather work on a machine than go to a social event.

As always, hope you enjoyed.