I was astonished, and more than a little put off. I think I would have liked him better if he had said “staying out of jail,” or even “getting money.” Also, I was mystified. Why would this man—why would anyone—wish to be pitied, let alone wish to be pitied above all other ambitions? I could not imagine. But now, after twenty-five years of listening to victims, I realize there is an excellent reason for the sociopathic fondness for pity. As obvious as the nose on one's face, and just as difficult to see without the help of a mirror, the explanation is that good people will let pathetic individuals get by with murder, so to speak, and therefore any sociopath wishing to continue with his game, whatever it happens to be, should play repeatedly for none other than pity.
More than admiration—more even than fear—pity from good people is carte blanche. When we pity, we are, at least for the moment, defenseless, and like so many of the other essentially positive human characteristics that bind us together in groups—social and professional roles, sexual bonds, regard for the compassionate and the creative, respect for our leaders—our emotional vulnerability when we pity is used against us by those who have no conscience. Most of us would agree that giving special dispensation to someone who is incapable of feeling guilt is a bad idea, but often, when an individual presents himself as pathetic, we do so nonetheless.
Pity and sympathy are forces for good when they are reactions to deserving people who have fallen on misfortune. But when these sentiments are wrested out of us by the undeserving, by people whose behavior is consistently antisocial, this is a sure sign that something is wrong, a potentially useful danger signal that we often overlook. Perhaps the most easily recognized example is the battered wife whose sociopathic husband beats her routinely and then sits at the kitchen table, head in his hands, moaning that he cannot control himself and that he is a poor wretch whom she must find it in her heart to forgive. There are countless other examples, a seemingly endless variety, some even more flagrant than the violent spouse and some almost subliminal. And for those of us who do have conscience, such situations, no matter how brazen, seem to present us emotionally with a kind of embedded figure puzzle, in which the background design (the appeal for pity) continually overcomes our perceptions of the more important embedded picture (the antisocial behavior).
In long retrospect, sociopathic appeals for pity are preposterous and chilling. Skip implied that he deserved sympathy because he had broken someone's arm. Doreen Littlefield represented herself as a poor overworked soul who was too sensitive to witness her patients' pain. From prison, a lovely and endearing Barbara Graham explained to reporters that society was preventing her from taking proper care of her children. And as for the likes of the aforementioned death-camp official—in the 1945 interrogations that preceded the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal, testimony from actual death-camp guards included their descriptions of how awful it was to be in charge of the crematoriums, on account of the smell. In interviews highlighted by British historian Richard Overy, the guards complained that it was difficult for them to eat their sandwiches at work.
Sociopaths have no regard whatsoever for the social contract, but they do know how to use it to their advantage. And all in all, I am sure that if the devil existed, he would want us to feel very sorry for him.
When deciding whom to trust, bear in mind that the combination of consistently bad or egregiously inadequate behavior with frequent plays for your pity is as close to a warning mark on a conscienceless person's forehead as you will ever be given. A person whose behavior includes both of these features is not necessarily a mass murderer, or even violent at all, but is still probably not someone you should closely befriend, take on as your business partner, ask to take care of your children, or marry.
Poor Luke
What about the most precious component of the social contract? What about love? Here is one woman's quiet calamity, a story that will never be on the six o'clock news.
My patient Sydney was not pretty. At forty-five, she had dirty blond hair that was turning gray and a round motherly body that had never been glamorous. But she owned a fine intellect and a long list of academic and professional accomplishments. At a university in her home state of Florida, she had been promoted to an associate professorship in epidemiology before she was thirty. She studied the population effects of substances used in indigenous medicines, and before her marriage she had traveled extensively in Malaysia, South America, and the Caribbean. When she moved from Florida to Massachusetts, she became a consultant to an ethnopharmacology group based in Cambridge. But I liked her most for her gentle demeanor and the thoughtful, introspective approach she took to her life. One of the things I remember best about her was the soft warmth of her speaking voice during the brief fifteen therapy sessions we had together.
Sydney was divorced from a man named Luke. The divorce had drained her life savings and caused her to go into debt, because she had needed to make sure she got custody of her son, Jonathan, who was eight when I knew Sydney, and only five at the time of the divorce. Luke had put up an expensive struggle, not because he loved Jonathan, but because he was enraged with Sydney for making him move out of her house.
The house in South Florida had a swimming pool. Luke loved the pool.
“Luke was living in this shabby little apartment when I met him,” Sydney told me. “That should've raised a red flag for me right there, a thirty-five-year-old man who'd gone to graduate school at NYU—city planning, actually—living in that awful little place. But I ignored it. He said he really liked the big pool his apartment complex had. So when he saw I had my own pool, he got all happy. What can I tell you? My husband married me for my pool. Well, that's not entirely true, but in retrospect, it was definitely part of it.”
Sydney overlooked Luke's lifestyle, and his attraction to hers, because she thought she had found something rare, an extremely intelligent, attractive thirty-five-year-old man, with no wife and no ex-wives, whose interests seemed similar to hers, and who treated her well.
“He treated me very well at first, I must say. He took me out. He always brought me flowers. I remember all those birds-of-paradise in long boxes, all those orange flowers. I had to go out and buy some really tall vases. I don't know. He was soft-spoken and sort of quietly charming—we had great conversations. He was another academic type, like me, or so I thought. When I met him, he was working on a planning project through a friend of his at the university. Always dressed up in suits. Actually, that's where I met him, the university. Nice, upstanding place to meet somebody, wouldn't you say? He told me he thought we were a lot alike, and I guess I believed him.”
As the weeks passed, Sydney learned that since Luke had been twenty or so, he had lived with a succession of women, always in their homes, and that having a place of his own, even an inexpensive one, had been an unusual departure from his preferred situation. But she overlooked this information also, because she was falling in love with Luke. And she thought he was in love with her, too, because that was what he told her.
“I'm just a frumpy academic. No one had ever been so romantic with me. It was a good time—I should probably confess that. Too bad it had to be so short. Anyway . . . There I was, this frumpy thirty-five-year-old career type, and all of a sudden I was thinking about a white wedding, the whole nine yards. I'd never done that before. I mean, I always thought it was a silly fairy tale they tell little girls, not something I'd ever have—or want—and there I was, wanting it, planning it even.
“As for the fact that he'd lived off those other women—do you believe I actually felt sorry for him? I thought he was searching for the right person or something, and they usually just threw him out after a while. Now I understand why, but I certainly didn't then. I thought, How lonely, how sad. He said one of those women was actually killed in a car crash. He cried about it when he told me that. I felt so bad for him.”
Six weeks after they met, Luke moved into Sydney's house, and eight months later they were married, a big church wedd
ing, followed by a formal dinner reception paid for by her family.
“Doesn't the bride's family always pay for the wedding?” she asked me wryly.
Two months after the wedding, Sydney discovered she was pregnant. She had always wanted children, but had believed she would never marry. Now her dream of motherhood was coming true, and she was overjoyed.
“It seemed like such a miracle to me, especially when the baby started to move. I kept saying to myself, There's a brand-new person in there, someone who never was before, someone I'm going to love for the rest of my life. It was incredible. Luke was obviously a lot less excited than me, but still he said he wanted the baby, too. He said he was just nervous. He thought I was ugly while I was pregnant, but I figured he was just being more honest than most men are about it. Ironic, huh?
“I was so happy about the baby that I didn't let myself know what I think I already knew, if that makes any sense. I think I realized the marriage wasn't going to work while I was pregnant. The doctor told me the worst risk of miscarriage was over after the first three months, and so of course I took this literally, and at the fourth month, I went out and bought a crib. I remember it was on the day they delivered it, Luke came home and told me he'd quit his job. Just like that. It was as if he knew that now he had me. I was about to have a baby, and so I would definitely take care of things. I would take care of him financially because now I didn't have a choice. He was wrong about that, but I can see why he thought it. He must've thought I'd do just about anything to hold on to that semblance of family.”
Of course, that was not what Luke said to Sydney, or to her friends or her family. He told them all that he was depressed, far too depressed to work, and whenever others were around, he fell silent, looked hangdog, and in general played the part of a depressed person. To make matters even more confusing for Sydney, a number of people told her that depression among first-time fathers was common.
“But I never really thought he was depressed,” Sydney told me. “Something didn't seem right. I've been a little depressed myself at times, and this just wasn't it. For one thing, he had way too much energy when there was something he really wanted to do. And also—this seems like a small thing, but it made me pretty nuts—he wouldn't get help. I said we should spend some money for a therapist, or maybe some kind of medication. But he avoided that idea like the plague.”
When Jonathan was born, Sydney took a two-month maternity leave from her teaching, which meant that all three members of the family were at home together, since Luke was not working. But Luke seldom even looked at his new son, preferring to read magazines by the pool or to go out with his friends. And when Jonathan cried, as newborns will, Luke would get angry, sometimes enraged, and demand that Sydney do something about the noise.
“He acted like a martyr, I think is the best way to put it. He'd hold his ears and make these tormented faces and pace around, as if the baby were crying just specifically to create problems for him. I think I was supposed to feel sorry for him or something. It was creepy. I'd had a C-section, and I really could've used some help at first, but I ended up wishing that Jonathan and I could just be alone.”
The same people who had told Sydney about depressed first-time fathers now assured her that new dads sometimes felt uncomfortable around their newborns and so kept their distance for a while. They insisted that Luke needed sympathy and patience.
“But Luke wasn't ‘keeping his distance' the way they thought. He was totally oblivious. Jonathan might as well have been a bundle of rags, for all he cared—an annoying little bundle of rags. Still, don't you know, I wanted to believe those people. I wanted to believe that somehow, somehow, if I could manage enough understanding and patience, everything was going to be okay. We were going to be a real family, eventually—I wanted so much to believe that.”
When her maternity leave was over, Sydney went back to work and Luke stayed by the pool. Sydney contacted an au pair agency to find daytime child care, because it was clear that Luke was not going to take care of Jonathan. After a few weeks, the young sitter confided in Sydney that she felt “weird” keeping the baby with the father always present but never showing any interest.
“I can't understand why he never even looks at his baby. Is he quite all right, ma'am?” the sitter cautiously asked Sydney.
Using a variant of the excuse Luke had provided, an embarrassed Sydney told her, “He's going through a hard time in his life right now. You can just kind of pretend he's not there and you'll be fine.”
Sydney recounted how the sitter looked out through the glass doors of the den toward the swimming pool, presumably seeing a relaxed and tan Luke sitting there in the Florida late afternoon. Cocking her head to one side in curiosity, she said softly, “Poor man.”
Sydney told me, “I'll always remember that. ‘Poor man.' Poor Luke. It was how I felt about him, too, sometimes, despite myself.”
But the truth was that the person Sydney had married was not “poor Luke” at all, nor was he a depressed first-time father, nor was he going through a hard time in his life. Rather, he was sociopathic. Luke had no intervening sense of obligation to other people, and his behavior, though not physically violent, reflected this dangerous fact. For Luke, societal rules and interpersonal expectations existed only to serve his advantage. He told Sydney that he loved her, and then went so far as to marry her, primarily for the opportunity to ensconce himself as a kept man in her honestly earned and comfortable life. He used his wife's dearest and most private dreams to manipulate her, and their son was an aggravation he moodily tolerated only because the baby seemed to seal her acceptance of his presence. Otherwise, he ignored his own child.
Soon he began to ignore Sydney as well.
“It was kind of like having a boarder, a boarder you don't like very much and who doesn't pay rent. He was just kind of there. For the most part, we lived these parallel lives. There was Jonathan and me, always together, and then there was Luke. I really don't know what he did most of the time. Sometimes he'd leave for a day or two. I don't know where he went—I stopped caring about it. Or sometimes he'd have a friend over for drinks, always unannounced, which could be kind of a problem at times. And he'd rack up big phone bills. But mostly he just sat around by the pool, or when the weather was bad, he'd come in and watch TV, or play computer games. You know, those computer games thirteen-year-old boys play.
“Oh, and I nearly forgot—for a couple of months, he collected lithographs. I don't know what put him onto that, but he was really excited about it for a while. He'd buy a new one—they were expensive, let me tell you—and he'd come bringing it in to show me, like a kid, like nothing was wrong between us and he wanted me to see the new addition to his art collection. He must've collected about thirty of them—never framed them—and then one day he just dropped the whole business. No more interest in lithographs. Over.”
Sociopaths sometimes exhibit brief, intense enthusiasms—hobbies, projects, involvements with people—that are without commitment or follow-up. These interests appear to begin abruptly and for no reason, and to end the same way.
“I had a new husband and a new baby. It should've been one of the happiest times of my life, and it was one of the worst. I'd come home from work, really tired, and the sitter would let me know that Luke hadn't so much as glanced at Jonathan all day, and after a while my own husband began to disgust me so much that I couldn't even sleep in the bedroom. I'm ashamed to tell you this, but I slept in my own guest room for a year.”
Overall, the greatest difficulty Sydney had in telling me her story was her painful embarrassment about what had happened to her life. As she put it, “You can't imagine how humiliating it is to admit, even just to admit to yourself, that you actually married somebody like that. And I wasn't a kid when I did it, either. I was thirty-five already, not to mention I'd been around the world several times. I should've known better. But I just didn't see it. I didn't see it at all, and, to give myself a little break, I don't think anyone els
e who was around at the time saw it, either. These days, everybody tells me they never dreamed he'd end up acting that way. And everybody has a different theory about ‘what's wrong with Luke.' If it weren't so embarrassing, it would be funny. Different friends have decided it's everything from schizophrenia to something like attention deficit disorder. Can you imagine?”
Unsurprisingly, not a single person guessed that Luke simply had no conscience and that this was why he ignored his obligations to his wife and his child. Luke's pattern did not fit anyone's images of sociopathy, even nonviolent sociopathy, because Luke, though he had a high IQ, was essentially passive. He did not go about cutting throats, either literally or figuratively, in an attempt to achieve power or wealth. He was no corporate shark, and certainly no fast-talking, high-octane Skip. He did not have enough vitality even to be an ordinary con man, or enough physical courage to rob banks (or post offices). He was not a mover. He was, in effect, a nonmover. His predominant ambition was to be inert, to avoid work, and to have someone else provide a comfortable lifestyle, and he exerted himself just enough to reach this middling goal.
And so how did Sydney finally recognize his remorselessness? It was the pity play.
“Even after that really ugly divorce, he still hung around the house, and I do mean nearly every day. He got another crummy little apartment, and he always slept there, but during the day he'd hang out at my house. I know now that I shouldn't have let him, but I felt sorry for him, and also he was paying a little more attention to Jonathan. When he'd come home from kindergarten, sometimes Luke would even meet him at the bus, walk him home, give him a little swimming lesson or something. I felt nothing for the man. I really never wanted to see him again, but I wasn't going out with anyone—like I'm going to trust another man, right?—and I thought it was a good thing if Jonathan could get to know his father, get a little attention from him. I figured it was worth the nuisance if my child could have at least part of a dad.
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