Soul searching

A reader asks: "How is it that sociopaths can 'see' someone's soul or see people as they truly are? How come the rest of society doesn't see the person for who they really are?" My response:

That is such a good question. I feel that you probably only notice the sociopath's ability to see because it is such an unusual perspective, everybody else's perceptive abilities are so familiar to you that they have become emotional background noise (Von Restorff effect?). As a thought experiment, stop and listen to all of the noise around you. Try to identify the source of all the noise you hear, whether street noise, other people, television, radio, automobile noises, wind, etc. You never pay attention to this noise, never even notice it is there most of the time because you are so used to it. You only notice things that are out of the ordinary.

I think a similar thing happens with empaths reading people. You are probably very used to other empaths seeing things about you that you never told them, e.g. when people see your face and realize that you are sad, when people don't stand too close to you because they realize you need your personal space, when people don't either scream at you or whisper at you. With all these behaviors, other empaths are seeing parts of who you truly are and acting accordingly.

Sociopaths see things that you never told them too, just not always the same things a typical empath would see. First, sociopaths have a very different focus, different expectations about the world and the people in it. While you and everyone else are doing emotional sleight of hand meant to distract the average observer from certain harsh truths, e.g. you no longer love your spouse, or hate your boss, or are having an affair, or can't stand your children, the sociopath remains undistracted. It's like telling a joke to a kid with autism -- your attempts at subterfuge will simply not always have the same effects on a sociopath as they have on empaths. Second, sociopaths are students of human interactions, closely studying others so they can pick up on the right social cues to blend in, imitate normal behavior, etc. The truth is that the more you pay attention to something, the more aware you will be. I am a musician, and I can listen to a recording and tell exactly what is going on, who is playing what, even the way the music was mixed in the studio. You could learn that too, if you practiced as much as a musician does.

I think this is what you are referring to when you say that sociopaths seem to be able to see a person's soul or see people as they truly are. Or maybe it is more of an extraordinary bias in which you honestly don't expect a sociopath to understand anything, so when they do they seem very clever? I don't actually know, these are just my guesses.