Confessions of a Sociopath

by M. E. Thomas

  At the time of this writing, thousands visit the site a day; since the blog’s inception, there have been more than a million discrete visitors from all over the world. An active online community of aggressive narcissists, violent sociopaths, and morbid empaths comments daily—some are sensitive and thoughtful, while others are crude and sophomoric. To my occasional amusement, their discussions often divert wildly off topic—they engage in bullying and peer pressure, express territoriality, shame and tease—setting up a complicated social dynamic I had not imagined. Some lay out the facts of their lives, as if confession would offer absolution, or at least a modicum of self-acceptance, which I can understand. Still others quietly skulk on the site—perhaps trying to glean what they can from it to gain some mastery of their own lives, or simply to feel closer to a largely anonymous group of deviants of which they feel they are a part.

  My favorite part about running the blog has been encountering scores of other sociopaths. I managed to tap into a hidden community, populated by complex characters and rich with histories. Despite these differences, I recognize myself in them and they in me. I am different than a killer or rapist or serial-embezzler sociopath who has no check on her behavior, but we all cross Hare’s threshold line into the category of sociopath. We share a kind of capital that we have each been cultivating largely in isolation, learning in our own private ways how to be. Maybe the world hates us, and maybe we do not know or even like each other, but at least we can understand one another, in our way, and know that there is a precedent for people like ourselves. Via my exposure to the myriad variety of sociopaths and other personality types that I’ve run into on the blog and in real life, I have also been able to eliminate many misconceptions I myself had about sociopathy—for instance, that all criminal sociopaths are overly impulsive and low-functioning. I’ve also reaffirmed to myself that sociopaths really are different from the average person, often in very dangerous or scary ways. Once they’ve targeted someone, I’ve seen sociopaths on my blog fixate on that individual like the proverbial pit bull, slowly eliciting information from them until they’ve acquired enough leverage to out them to their friends and family, and marriages are disrupted and homes are broken, all for the sport of it. Sociopaths have both the power and inclination to ruin lives, and this is just what they do to strangers on the Internet.

  I don’t ever mean to give the impression that no one should worry about sociopaths because I am not so bad. Just because I’m smart, high-functioning, and nonviolent doesn’t mean there aren’t a lot of stupid, uninhibited, or dangerous sociopaths out there who genuinely should be avoided. I try to avoid people like that; after all, it’s not like sociopaths all give each other hall passes to avoid harassment. And the really extreme ones probably aren’t commenting on my blog from their isolation cells, so who knows in what ways they would be similar to or different from the sociopath next door. We share many things in common, but we differ in how those traits manifest themselves in our behavior.

  In my experience, sociopathy exists on a spectrum of severity, from the death row inmate to the ruthless venture capitalist to the calculating cheerleader mom. Consider, as an example, someone with Down syndrome. I have two relatives that have Down’s—one blood and the other adopted. The blood relative does sort of look like the rest of his family, his siblings, and his parents, but he also looks unmistakably like his adoptive sister who also has Down syndrome. In fact, most people would probably say he looks more like his adoptive sister than his blood siblings—unless the observer was intentionally trying to look past some of the more obvious Down’s markers, such as the distinctive broad, flat face, creased eyelid, short stature, and so on.

  Down’s is an interesting condition. Throw an extra chromosome in there, and it affects the way seemingly every other gene is expressed. It’s almost as if you take the individual’s raw genetic material and put a very distinctive mask over it.

  I think that sociopathy is something like this. My personality resembles my siblings’ quite a bit. And it resembles the personalities of many people around me, my colleagues and friends, people whom I have chosen to surround myself with due to our mutual or complementary views of the world. But my personality also resembles those of other sociopaths a great deal, sometimes in ways more conspicuous because of our relative rarity in the general populace. It’s amazing to me how much of my habits of mind and proclivities of action I can share in common with strangers—with people who are of different genders, ethnicities, races, nationalities, backgrounds, ages. But I am not just like every other sociopath. From what I have seen of us we are all very different. But there is no mistaking a certain family resemblance.

  When I first started my blog, I struggled in writing my posts with this issue of what it means, day to day, to be a sociopath. On the one hand, if I talked openly about the limited role sociopathy played in my life, I ran the risk of not seeming sociopathic enough. But I also wanted to present myself as a real person, not a caricature you’d expect to see on television. I’ve decided to lean more on the side of authenticity and less on the side of titillation. I have a similar goal for this book. I know I will live for a long time. I have managed to remain undetected so far, but there’s no telling how long that will last. Will I end up being shipped off to a sociopaths-only gulag? Perhaps if I’m lucky. Many visitors to my blog have called for much worse, including our total extermination. I’m hoping that once you get to know one sociopath, you’ll show even this cold heart some compassion when the cattle cars come to ship me off somewhere.

  And hopefully you’ll gain something too—awareness and understanding of a type of person that you probably see and interact with daily. I don’t think that I’m the prototypical sociopath. Not everything I do in my life is straight out of a sociopath handbook. A lot of readers question whether I am a sociopath at all. Certainly not everything I do falls in line with all the diagnostic criteria psychologists have developed for sociopathic behavior. I think this surprises people, particularly those whose only idea of a sociopath comes from the psycho killers they see in movies. But to the extent that we share these things in common, particularly a common mind-set, I understand other sociopaths in a way that is often eerie. I want to reveal my internal dialogue and motivations, because I believe that to learn to understand the mind-set of one sociopath is to get an uncommon insight into the minds of all other sociopaths. You might even find that the way I think is not that different from your own.

  Archaeologist Klaus Schmidt has opined that the presence of monsters and hybrid creatures in modern human culture, unknown to Neolithic man, indicates a high degree of development. The idea is that the further a society is from nature and, inevitably, a healthy fear of it, the more it finds itself inventing things of which to be afraid.

  There is a romantic poem believed to have been written by Chrétien de Troyes in the twelfth century called Yvain, le Chevalier au Lion. In search of chivalric adventure, Yvain comes across a monster in a clearing—“so passing ugly was the creature that no word of mouth could do him justice.” I imagine the creature as a young girl. She is lying in the bedroom she shares with her sister in her parents’ large house, dark tendrils of hair touching her eyelashes ever so slightly. She daydreams of throats split open in effusions of brilliant red.

  In order to ascertain whether a fight is in store for him, Yvain engages the monster in conversation:

  “Come, let me know whether thou art a creature of good or not.”

  And the creature replied: “I am a man.”

  “What kind of a man art thou?”

  “Such as thou seest me to be: I am by no means otherwise.”

  People are interested in the mind of a sociopath, and understandably so, but I suspect for the wrong reasons. This book is sure to disappoint if you are looking for graphic tales of violence. They don’t exist, and in any case absolutely anyone could be a gruesome killer if put in the right situation. I don’t think there’s anything very interesting about that, or at
least I don’t have anything to add to that particular fact about humanity.

  I think it’s more interesting why I chose to buy a house for my closest friend, or gave my brother $10,000 the other day, just because. I recently got an e-mail from a friend with terminal cancer, saying I give the most thoughtful and useful gifts and how she is so grateful to know me. I am considered a very helpful and considerate professor and am consistently rated one of the best in the school. I am devoutly religious. I am functionally a good person and yet I am not motivated or constrained by the same things that most good people are. Am I a monster? I prefer to believe that you and I simply occupy different points on the spectrum of humanity.

  Chapter 2

  DIAGNOSIS: SOCIOPATH

  How did I eventually come to think I was a sociopath? With all of the benefits of hindsight I can see that there were plenty of signs. But it took a professional and personal collapse in my late twenties to make me care enough to investigate.

  My family likes to joke about my inability to stick to one thing for longer than a few years. High school was a little bit of a farce but I tested well enough to become a National Merit Scholar. In college I majored in music on a whim. I chose percussion because the core requirements were split to cover four instruments, and I didn’t have the attention span to focus on just one. I chose to go to law school because it was one of the few graduate programs without prerequisites and I needed something to do. I tested well on the LSAT and got into a top law school, despite having the GPA of someone who, though clearly intelligent, is easily bored.

  After law school I was hired as an attorney at a self-described “elite” law firm. All of my colleagues were recruited from the top of their classes at their top ten schools. I barely made the firm’s grade cutoffs, and I had graduated with honors. We were supposed to be the best of the best, and the firm charged a premium. Just two years out of law school, my base salary was $170,000 with a double bonus totaling $90,000 and I was in a lockstep pattern of significant raises every year I stayed. But I was a terrible employee.

  I have never been able to work well unless it directly benefited my mind or my résumé, no matter how lucrative the work was. I spent most of my effort in dodging projects and scheduling my day around lunch appointments and coffee breaks. Still, when I got my first bad review I was surprised. I was even more surprised when I eventually got called into my supervising partner’s office and told to shape up or ship out.

  I didn’t shape up. I interviewed with other firms and got an offer from a similarly prestigious firm that paid more, but I wasn’t interested in continuing to be a well-paid paper pusher. I was meant for greater things than being a junior legal associate; I was sure of it. A couple months later I was out on the street with a banker’s box of personal belongings, waiting for a friend to pick me up.

  Around this same time, a close friend’s father was diagnosed with cancer. Whereas she had once been a pleasure to be around—intelligent, wise, independent, and insightful—she was suddenly emotionally fragile and beset by family obligations. I was exhausted by trying to accommodate her, and I felt that I was suddenly putting more effort into the relationship than I was getting out of it. I decided to cut off all contact with her. At first all I felt was relief. Eventually I missed her, but I had expected that, and I tried not to let it bother me too much.

  I spent the next couple of years receiving unemployment insurance checks. My family was worried for me. They wondered what I was planning on doing with my life. But I never had those sorts of existential crises. I always live in two-year increments. I figure anything beyond that is just so uncertain that it can basically be disregarded as a possibility.

  This compounding of losses was unusual for me, though—even my two-year plan seemed bleak. I found myself at loose ends, directionless and, I had to admit, fairly mindless. I had squandered a prestigious and lucrative job in my chosen field. I considered going to business school, but for what? To repeat a cycle of success and devastation for the duration of my life? I had heartlessly put aside a friend in her time of need. How many more relationships did I have to destroy? I knew these were not the actions of a normal person, and I began to admit that my life was not sustainable. If I wasn’t normal, what was I?

  With a ruthlessness I usually reserved for other people, I stripped away my own artifices to discover who I really was. I realized that all my life I had been trying to be like the chameleons I had learned about as a child in my big book of small reptiles. The social part of me had evaporated, making it apparent that all of my efforts to entertain were designed to sit on the very outer surfaces of me, separate and apart from what existed inside. And those insides—they were impenetrable. I had never liked people to look at me; I wanted to be the only one doing the looking. But now I realized that I never bothered to look closely at myself.

  I had grown accustomed to believing my own lies. I would fixate on moments that made me feel normal. A monster would not cry at a sad movie. Her heart would not break from a lover’s departure. So my tears were proof that I was normal, as was the pain in my chest, about which so many songs have been written. How could my heart be broken if there was no heart to break? It had been easy to convince myself that I was not the one with the problem.

  It is one thing to lie to others, but I had been lying to myself for years. I had become reliant on self-deception and forgotten who I was. And now I didn’t really understand myself at all. I wanted to stop being a stranger to myself; for the first time in my life, that bothered me enough to want to do something about it.

  Though it would prove to be a turning point, this was not my first period of deep introspection. During college, I got myself into an awkward social mess (I’ll relate the details in chapter 5), and my life went completely to hell. I didn’t have any label to identify with, but after a long period of unflinching honesty and self-analysis I recognized that I was a very manipulative, cunning person who was unable to connect to anyone on more than a superficial level, obsessed with power, and willing to do anything to get ahead, among other things. To the extent that those things were negatively impacting my life, I tried to tame and control them—or to at least divert them to situations where the stakes were lowest.

  I didn’t know then what a “sociopath” was nor did I have any inkling that I might be one until a few years later during law school, when a coworker raised the possibility. We were working together as summer interns, largely busywork that didn’t matter. I was bored, so when I learned that she was an openly gay woman who had been adopted as a child, I started to pry into her personal life, hunting for insecurities. Slightly overweight, cheerful, and gregarious, she appeared to be a treasure trove of plush emotional vulnerabilities. It turned out that she was much more than that—she was intellectually curious and wide open to the possibilities of how to live in the world. We shared offices and spent hours talking about politics, religion, philosophy, fashion, or anything else that would distract us from the drudge work. From the very beginning, she felt compelled to mother me, giving me advice on how to dress appropriately at work and feeding me quinoa salads she had prepared for me to keep me from dining on cheeseburgers every day. I noticed and began to analyze how she made everyone feel comfortable around her. I hoped to replicate little nuggets of her charm, and I told her so. Whereas I viewed the world through the lens of bloodless rationality, she could not have been more touchy-feely; though she was an intelligent woman who valued rationality, she made a deliberate choice to abandon it occasionally in favor of soft intangibles like “compassion” and “mercy.” Even though I don’t naturally value those things, I respect that they are legitimate interests that people have, the same way that I acknowledge that not everyone will have my exact taste in, say, music or automobiles.

  She had a master’s degree in theology, and I loved to probe her beliefs, first about whether God made her gay, but later about anything that seemed important to her. I remember specifically questioning her about altruism, with w
hich I had little personal experience. I explained to her that, to my mind, to have the ability to measure with such stark precision the utility of a person—just as any other thing—made it senseless to regard that person in any other way. At that time, I had yet to abandon my friend whose dad had cancer, but there were plenty of other ruined relationships that I could have been referencing—I routinely disposed of people once their burden to me exceeded their utility. I told my coworker that one of these disposed-of people had accused me of lacking altruism. Perhaps, I had conceded. But perhaps this thing that I allegedly lacked—altruism—was nothing more than garbled thinking that did no more than freeze people in a moment of indecision, whereas I was free to cut off entanglements at will. My coworker nodded sympathetically.

  One day, not long after our altruism conversation, we were discussing how to behave appropriately in situations in which I was expected to comfort anguished loved ones. Perhaps she could see that I seemed clueless, because she asked me then if I thought I might be a sociopath. I remember not knowing how to answer and having to look the word up, not sure exactly what a sociopath was or why she would think I was one. Socio-for social or society, -pathy for a morbid affliction or disease: a disorder of social conscience. That did sound familiar.

  I was not offended. I was already well accustomed to the idea that there was something pointedly different about me that could not be altered. I realized early on that other people did not treat their lives as if it were a complicated game in which all events, things, and people could be measured with mathematical precision toward achieving their own personal satisfaction and pleasure. Somewhat more recently, I also noticed that other people felt guilt, a special kind of regret that did not arise from negative consequences but from some amorphous moral dictate that had taken root in them from consciousness. They felt bad in a way that I never felt when they hurt others, as if the hurt they had caused was so cosmically connected to the goodness of the universe as to reverberate back to them. These things I had pretended to feel for many years, had attempted assiduously to mimic the manifestations of, but had never actually felt in my life. I was more curious than anything. If there was a label for who I was, then maybe I could learn something more about myself. In fact, I had no trouble recognizing myself in the descriptions I found in my research.