All humans are psychopaths when they are infants.  That’s why we are so cute, we need to be.  🙂    As you age you begin to form complex emotions from the emotional primitives despair and bliss.  This is the creation of your conscience.  Your conscience is essentially a relational database.  It recalls not only what feelings are associated with a memory but what memories are associated with a feeling.  An adult is naturally overwhelmed with a flood of memories when the complexity of this structure that encompasses the entire brain (more or less) pops up and says ‘hi’ and they do not know why they feel what they do.

Why is this important?  Many people have trouble knowing why they feel something.  Getting to the root of a feeling is what modern psychology is all about.  It’s important too.  Many people envy psychopaths because they are not overwhelmed with feelings or memories in many stressful situations.   If psychopathy was a choice (it’s not) it would be as if they threw away a great volume of useful information.  Overall, tossing away volumes of context rich information does not make someone more adaptive to change.  The conscience isn’t just a nanny, it’s your intuition and your imagination too.

So we need this information, but we need to stay rational when we retreive it right?  Know yourself.  If you know WHY you have a particular feeling at a particular time, you can eliminate it’s surprise and minimize the debilitating effects caused by that flood of emotion.

It’s a difficult road and one with a big surprise.  As you get close to goal of knowing yourself, you may find yourself having unconscionable thoughts.  This is literal as you have negated the superego’s effect on your behavior.  That’s what knowing yourself gets you.  Don’t be disappointed.  You STILL have the information from conscience, but it does not rule your actions.  It can be part of a rational AND conscionable decision.  You have the wisdom of an empath, but rational composure of a psychopath (in most situations.)  You have all of their strengths without their weaknesses.