An Empty Box
Preface
ChatGPT-4: Thank you. This is a significant undertaking, and I will honour its depth and intention. Let’s proceed step-by-step.
Me: I can recognise from my reading your rewritten edited version of my original manuscript, that there are limitations to your understanding of nuance. Where you have rephrased things, the intention of the original writer has changed, regarding detail.
I ask anyone reading these papers to be aware of that. I do not know if it makes it easier for the reader to process the work or if it causes the reader miss the point.
Consequently I feel it necessary to present both the rewritten edit along with the original first draft version. Remember; we are studying AI and its usefulness in a writers toolkit as much as we are studying human psychology.
Core Themes and Topics Extracted from 'An Empty Box'
A. Psychological and Emotional Themes
• Covert abuse and emotional manipulation: The speaker identifies patterns of psychological abuse resembling gaslighting, projection, and emotional domination.
• Trauma and healing: There’s an exploration of how different individuals process trauma — whether they seek to heal or pass on their suffering.
• Empathy vs. detachment: A contrast is drawn between empathic responses to pain (seeking to protect others) and emotionally detached or psychopathic responses (hurting others).
• Narcissism, sociopathy, and psychopathy: These personality disorders are explored not only as diagnostic categories but as lived experiences impacting relationships.
• The self as observer and analyst: The narrator’s role as a psychological professional adds a reflective layer — transforming personal pain into clinical insight.
• Emotional exhaustion and breakdown: The speaker describes the physical and psychological toll of sustained psychological abuse, including illness and emotional collapse.
• Projection and control through symbolism: The abuser is described as using media, memory, and social symbols to psychologically condition and confuse the speaker.
• Dehumanization and nihilism: At its core, the abuser’s detachment is interpreted as a withdrawal from humanity itself — a slide into psychological nihilism.
B. Ethical and Existential Topics
• Responsibility vs. blame: A critique of how pain is used to justify unethical treatment of others.
• Healing as moral practice: The speaker aligns healing with moral integrity, viewing the refusal to harm others as part of a humane philosophy.
• Detachment as self-protection vs. pathology: Distinguishes between strategic emotional distance in healing vs. clinical emotional detachment (psychopathy).
• Power and domination in relationships: There is a recurring theme of control and power imbalance — through manipulation, emotional withdrawal, and dominance of narrative.
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An Empty Box (Rewritten for Structure and Clarity)
She told me she behaves the way she does so that others can understand what she’s been through — to feel what she felt. She believes it’s necessary, that she needs this level of empathy from others in order to heal. Or maybe it’s simpler than that: she’s making people pay for what was done to her. People who had nothing to do with it.
I told her, most people are carrying pain. Most people are trying to heal from something. That’s part of the shared human condition. But where we differ, she and I, is this: I would never wish my suffering on others. When people hurt me, I learn from it — and I use what I learn to protect others from similar harm. I expose harmful behavior. I share what I’ve learned about healing. I do this because it feels like the human thing to do.
She might say I’ve healed more than she has. That I’m less damaged. But I don’t think that’s the issue. The brain and heart react to pain in predictable ways. Whether it’s an unpaid bill or a sabertooth tiger dragging a loved one into the darkness — the stress systems respond. Trauma has structure. Healing has patterns. That’s why we can talk about it. That’s why we can help each other.
What I find alien — even inhuman — is the desire to hurt others because you’ve been hurt. That is not healing. That is cruelty. It’s sadism disguised as pain. And so I’ve come to question whether she is truly hurting at all, or merely mimicking it — copying pain as a performance because it’s what she saw others do. Her emotional detachment, her numbness, may be a defense mechanism. But it feels like something darker. It feels like she wants to bring me into that state with her. To see if I’ll react. To see if I’ll become like her.
And maybe she has. Maybe she’s made me numb. Maybe I’ve become indifferent — not out of strength, but because I’ve been hollowed out. But I refuse to stay there. I choose empathy. I choose humanity. Even if she can’t.
She sees people as tools. Yet paradoxically, she seems self-aware. Maybe she wants me to hold a mirror to her, to show her what she is — to test whether she can still feel something. Whether she’ll lash out. Whether she can stay calm in the face of truth.
She’s hurt me. That much is undeniable. And I’ve seen what she really is. The place she tried to bring me into — a cold, calculating world where nothing matters — is not a place I’ll live in. Maybe she blames her brain. Maybe she thinks it excuses her. Maybe she thinks it proves she’s superior.
For a while, I thought she was a narcissist. That would’ve been easier. But as I’ve healed, I’ve come to a different conclusion: she’s a psychopath. Not because she’s incapable of feeling anything — but because what she does feel is rage, and hate, and the thrill of control. The rest is emptiness.
She showed me how she idealized a character like Sherlock Holmes from TV — someone who uses a “Mind Palace” to escape emotion and calculate. She said she admired that. She wanted to live there. She told me about another person with my name — a “psychopath friend” — as if to link my identity to that archetype. She even showed me a photo of a stranger with my name. I don’t think she knows her. It was symbolic. Intentional. A trick.
She once showed me the film V for Vendetta, especially the scene where he tortures her to break her down, so she can rebuild herself stronger. She did that to me. At first it was subtle, covert. Then it escalated. The result was breakdown after breakdown. Physical illness. Emotional collapse. And she hated me for it — hated my weakness, hated that I got sick.
She had explanations. Her mother. Her children. Her ex. Her job. Her stress. I don’t want to unravel whether her world caused her behavior, or whether her behavior shaped her world. That’s part of being human — living with the mystery of cause and effect.
But this I know: I am a psychologist. I’ve studied people for decades. And she gave me a rare case study — of covert psychopathy, sociopathy, narcissism, whatever we name it. I’ve learned from her. I’ve grown.
And now, I protect others from people like her.
If she wants to heal, maybe she should ask whether others were reacting to her — defending themselves from her manipulations. Maybe her pain is not the source but the outcome of failed attempts to control others. Maybe she’s lonely not because she isn’t understood — but because she’s unreachable.
Because where there is deep psychopathy, there is no loneliness. Only emptiness. A safe, cold space. A nihilism that mimics peace.
But it’s not life.
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An Empty Box - Original First Draft
She said; she did it because she wants other people to understand how it feels, what somebody did to her, what she’s been put through, what she’s trying and usually failing to process and heal from. She believes she needs that level of help, from the people who encounter her. Or perhaps it that she’s making others pay for what’s been done to her. Other people who are nothing to do with it and did not do that to her.
I said to her; most everybody’s been through difficult times which have hurt us. Most everybody’s trying to heal from something or someone. That is our mainstream culture. But what makes you and I different is that I do not for a moment wish upon others what I’ve been through that I wish I hadn’t. I know how much it hurts when people do specific things. That’s why I want to protect people from it. By exposing the ones doing it. By sharing with others freely what understanding I have of how to heal from those specific things, and how to heal from anything similar. I do this because I believe it is the human way to live.
You could say, I’ve healed better than you, I’m less hurt than you, my wound is not as deep as yours. It is the same brain and the same heart, it is the same organic psychological biological systems which react to experiences, for example a bill which we can’t afford to pay coming through the postbox compared with a sabertooth tiger leaping into our campfire and dragging one of our loved ones away to devour alive. The soul in trauma follows predictable cycles which makes it easier for all of us to have a common frame of reference.
I find the desire to hurt others simply because you have been hurt, to be alien, inhumane, a justification of sadism and cruelty. Having identified that about your nature, I question whether you are truly hurt at all or whether it is a mask you wear, a mask you’ve copied from having watched how others around you behave. That non-empathic numbness is perhaps a place we go to for us to heal, to feel more awakened, more alive and more in control by detaching from pain within. You seek to share with me an unspoken understanding that you frequent a mind described in textbooks as psychopathic, devoid of empathy.
To explain your sociopathic behaviour to any who fall into the trap of supporting you. I didn’t exchange for this. What are those you damage gaining from it? Suppose for example, you have created of me a non-compassionate psychopath as a result of you wounding me. As you are suggesting someone else has done to you in the past.
Do you think for a moment perhaps I might choose to enter a vendetta against you? For doing that to me and other people? Or is it that to be completely and truly non-emotional, in a psychopathic state of indifference, it matters not one way or another what you did to me to put me in this place. So there would be no point in any revenge against you. Perhaps you think I should be grateful whereas before you thought I should apologise on behalf of other people who have hurt you.
Or is it that, despite having said all of this, the difference between you and me remains the same as it always has and as it always will. I continue to have empathy for others because I’m a human being.
I’m a human being because I have empathy for others. I have to choose between pity and wariness at you for not being capable of that. To satisfy whatever you have which serves as an ego by acknowledging it simply is the way it is, it makes no difference. What my attitude towards you is regardless. You see the people around you as tools to use, objects with no self-awareness and yet you do have self-awareness.
Pinning you into a corner about this issue by holding a mirror up to you that you may see yourself for what you are through my eyes, might aggravate you if you are reactive and afraid, or you might have done this because you want to test yourself to find out whether you will react that way, or whether you can retain your inner calm, your emotional detachment from events, from other peoples opinions and behaviour. All which has happened is you’ve hurt me and I’ve seen you for what you truly are. That place you want to put me into so I can be more like you, so I can understand you, the reptilian cortex calculus without any fear, without any joy, perhaps the rudiments of these things.
You can blame the difference, the distortions, the lack of Human, mammalian cognitive function from how you have a different type of brain, to exempt yourself from any blame for your antisocial behaviour. Certainly your behaviour has revealed you feel superior to the other people around you. That’s a definite, from my observations. For a long time while I was healing from what you did to me, I considered you another narcissist. As I heal and as I come to understand it better, I recognised I’d misdiagnosed you. Perhaps in hope that that’s all you are.
Now I can see it is actual clinical Psychopathy rather than clinical Narcissism. I’ve been close to a few like that before but never as close and never has hurt by them. Interesting that when you do have emotions it is usually anger and occasionally, for example when you’ve smoked marijuana, contentment.
I seen it all in focus now. Why you like the idea of a Mind Palace from the TV series Sherlock Holmes. The Mind Palace is a place where you can organise thought into structure without any emotional overwhelm. The place of calculation where you can think clearly. Sherlock Holmes in that version described himself as a Sociopath, although these explorations in television drama often use symbolic shorthand as frames-of-reference, useful in other associated context.
When you told me about your old school friend who is a psychopath and who coincidentally has the same name as myself, you would talk about your psychopath friend and use my name, you were attempting to forge a memory-bond connection between those two concepts, by association. It was strategic on your part. I recognise this is what you were doing. You showed me a photograph of a girl who’s social media account you 'look at sometimes', your own words. Who coincidentally has my name, it being a unisex name. I have no idea whatsoever if you do know her in real life and I’ve no interest to find out. I observed your pattern of behaviour, especially when you excitedly played me the movie V is for Vendetta; the scene where he tortures her to destroy her sense of self, intending to make her stronger.
Throughout the entirety of our relationship, covertly at first and increasingly as time went on, you put me through that process too. It resulted in absolute emotional and mental fatigue and exhaustion on my part. I had several breakdowns which you hated me for. My immunity system was shot to bits and I had flu and covid, which you hated me for. That you have very strong emotion of anger and hate, or nothing at all, or occasionally contentment, was easily put down to how stressed you were in your life because of what you told me about your mother, your children, your ex, his new partner and your job.
I do not intend to derail the focus of this manuscript by exploring the contrast between the idea that our life circumstances are a mirror of our inner world versus how our inner world is shaped by external circumstances beyond our control. This is part of the existential human condition for all of us. How we react to it defines us.
My occupation as a counsellor, psychologist, analyst, for decades I’ve been doing that. So I would like to thank you for giving me experience of observing a case study example of covert psychopathy/sociopathy/narcissism. I do believe this has and will make me better at what I do.
Primarily, my purpose is to protect individuals and the community from those who are of harm to self and others.
I believe in your case what you need as a part of your healing to get over perceived atrocities people have imposed upon you, is to contemplate how perhaps a lot of that is that they were reactive to what you were doing to them, which triggered their self-defence reflex. You take it personally that you were failing in your attempts to create other psychopaths, which reflect badly on your sense of supremacy for being able to do that. They were being idiots for not working with your secret plan to 'liberate' and to 'upgrade' them to be like you, so you can trust them.
Perhaps it is that you are lonely because you need to be understood. Understood as a person and to justify your exotic behaviour. With deep psychopathy, there is no loneliness. The safe space within is complete detachment. It is utter nihilism. For some who are in pain it is an attractive place of escape. For those who struggle with individual limitations to the normal range of human emotional experiences, it is a place of freedom.
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