Confessions of a Sociopath
Page 8
Danielle had a “normal” brain, with no sign of genetic mental retardation, but she behaved as if she were severely mentally handicapped. One doctor called it “environmental autism,” although as she put it, “even a child with the most severe autism responds to [hugs and affection].” Danielle did not react to people in any way. “In the first five years of life, 85 percent of the brain is developed,” she said. “Those early relationships, more than anything else, help wire the brain and provide children with the experience to trust, to develop language, to communicate. They need that system to relate to the world.”
Danielle will never be normal. After several years she was able to be potty trained and taught how to feed herself, though she still does not speak. When she was taken in by an adoptive family, the Miami Herald asked, “Will their love be enough?” The short answer is no. Her brain had missed too many windows of opportunity—too many neural connections were never made.
Sometimes I hear people say that they were “born this way,” whatever way that happens to be. To say you are born a sociopath is like saying you were born smart or born tall. Yes, you may have the genetic predisposition for intelligence or height, or indeed to speak or walk upright, but the existence of feral children is an important reminder that no one is destined for any outcome at birth, that we rely on the most basic daily interactions, nutrition, culture, education, experiences, and myriad other influences in our development to become who we become.
Was I born to charm? Born to harm? If we can’t say for sure, then how did I get here? Given that a propensity for emotional problems runs in my family, I think my genetic predisposition to sociopathy was triggered largely because I never learned how to trust. In particular, my parents’ erratic emotional lives taught me that I couldn’t depend on anyone to protect me. Rather than looking to other people for stability, I learned to depend on myself. Because interaction with other people is inevitable, I inevitability learned manipulation, particularly how to direct and misdirect people’s attention to achieve my desired outcomes. For instance, my experiences taught me that it was useless to appeal to people’s love or sense of duty, so I appealed to other, more salient emotions like fear or people’s own desperate desire to be loved. I viewed everyone as objects, pieces in my chess game. I had no awareness of their own internal worlds and no understanding of their emotional palette because their bright hues were so different from my own drab shades of gray. Perhaps because I never thought of people as being distinct individuals with their own senses of self and manifest destiny, I never learned to think of myself that way either. I had no definite sense of self to adhere to or otherwise be invested in. Largely without structure, my life became an endless series of reactions to contingencies, impulsive decision-making driving me from one day to the next. Unlike people without my genetic predispositions who might have come out of these experiences desperately searching for love to fill the void, I felt largely indifferent.
After my brother Jim and I walked home from the park that day, our parents’ car was parked outside in the driveway, just like it always was. Inside, they didn’t ask us any questions. In general, they didn’t worry about our suffering. I think our suffering did not register with them because they could feel no consequences resulting from it. And because we were the kind of children that accepted silence as explanation, they never experienced recrimination. It was as if it had never happened. They went to bed that night satisfied that their children were safe and warm like anyone else’s.
Now that I am grown and can see my family dynamics with better perspective, I am more convinced than ever that the environment in which I was raised had a significant role to play in my development into a sociopath. Lots of children live in families with unreliable parents, physical discipline, and financial instability—these things aren’t uncommon. But I can see how the antisocial behaviors and mental posturing that now define me were incentivized when I was growing up—how my own emotional world was stifled and how understanding and respect for the emotional world of others died away. But there’s a chicken-and-egg problem here: it’s hard to know whether my distrust of my dad’s overt displays of compassion caused me to downplay my own sense of morality, or whether I never really had much of a conscience to begin with, and that is why my dad always seemed so ridiculous to me.
I don’t ever remember thinking differently than I do now, but I do have a sensation or memory of an early cognitive fork where I chose to think more proactively. I must have been somewhere between ages four and six. Here’s an example to illustrate what I mean: Have you ever been a pedestrian at a traffic light? There’s always a moment of hesitation when you arrive at your corner and see the red hand telling you it’s not safe to walk. You could follow what it says and just wait your turn. Or you could make your own assessment of whether it is safe to cross by looking at the cars and studying the traffic light patterns. There are advantages to both approaches. The one is safe and doesn’t require mental effort. The other one is risky and possibly will only shave a few seconds off your commute at best and land you in the hospital at worst. But if you get good at it, those few seconds could multiply by the thousands over years of commuting. And there’s something demoralizing about standing on a corner while a host of braver souls plows into the intersection, eager to get on with their lives.
I could sense this was true about life, even at the age of four or so. I could choose to take charge of my life, to leverage my time, talents, and health, and to potentially profit or die trying. Or I could contentedly get in line and wait my turn. It was not a difficult choice to make, but rather a decision made in direct response to my environment and how I could best survive and even thrive in that environment. My way seemed to offer a competitive advantage. I chose to eschew relying on instinct and instead to rely on rigid mental analysis and hyper-awareness of all of my thoughts, actions, and decisions.
Years later I questioned whether I had made a mistake—and whether it was possible for me somehow to still be normal. Maybe there were legitimate reasons why everyone else thought the way they did about life. Maybe crying really is the best response to being hurt instead of vengeance. Maybe love is more valuable than power in relationships. But by then it was too late. The windows had closed.
Growing up, everyone in the family was inclined to interpret things that I did as normal. There were other words for what I was, words other than “sociopath.” “Tomboy” explained why I was reckless all of the time. Did you know that drowning deaths for boys are four times what they are for girls? No one really has a good explanation other than that boys tend to be more reckless, less judicious, and more impulsive. So when I was a child jumping off ocean jetties into heavy surf, no one thought I was a sociopath—they thought I was a tomboy.
“Precocious” explained my fixation on the power structures of the adult world. Most children are content to live in their own child worlds. I found my peers, particularly my non-siblings, to be unbearably simpleminded. Unlike them, I was obsessed with learning everything there was to learn about how the world worked, on both micro and macro levels. I would hear something in school or in casual adult conversation like Vietnam or atomic bomb and then spend a week or two obsessed with learning everything I could about this new thing, this thing that seemed to matter so much to other people. I remember the first time I heard about AIDS. I must have been seven or eight years old. My aunt was babysitting me. She was a childlike woman and I could tell from her interactions with my parents that she had no power or influence in the outside world (there were plenty of those people, I had already noticed). She doted on us because she had no children of her own (there were many of those people as well, easy marks for a child’s manipulation). We heard AIDS on the news. My aunt got upset and started crying. I didn’t know at the time but found out soon that her uncle, my great-uncle, was sick, and gay, and that was one of the reasons why AIDS seemed so fraught for her and others. I asked her what AIDS was. She gave me a child’s understanding of the disease
that should have satisfied me, but it didn’t. My need to know the whys and hows of the world was not easily sated. I continued to ask other adults (the only people who seemed interested in the things I was interested in were adults) and they laughed at my interest, calling me precocious. They didn’t call me a sociopath. They never wondered why I wanted to know. They assumed that I wanted to know for the same reason that they wanted to know—fear. And that was partly true, but I was not afraid of AIDS. I only wanted to understand completely why AIDS made everyone else afraid. So it never mattered much what I did because they would readily excuse my behavior in whatever way was convenient or simply ignore it.
As a child, my outsize inner life seeped out onto the surface in all sorts of messy ways that my family pretended not to see. I talked to myself all the time, repeating everything I said sotto voce as if I were acting in a dress rehearsal. My parents ignored my blatant and awkward attempts to manipulate, deceive, and inveigle adults. They neglected to notice the odd way that I associated with my childhood acquaintances without really forming connections, never seeing them as anything more than moving objects—instruments in my games. I lied all the time. I stole things, but more often than not, I would just trick kids into giving them to me. I snuck into people’s homes and rearranged their belongings. I broke things, burned things, and bruised people.
And I played my part beautifully. I never failed to up the ante in our neighborhood games. If we were jumping off the diving board into the pool, I asked how much more fun it would be to jump off the roof into the pool. If we were dressing up in paramilitary garb, I suggested that we might as well kidnap our neighbor’s lawn ornaments and make elaborate ransom notes for them. We cut out letters from magazines and made a “proof of life” video. Because the neighbors were so good-spirited and we had taken such pains in accomplishing our absurd adventures, we got away with smiles all around.
That was the thing with me. I made people smile so much that it was easy to laugh off anything I did as harmless and silly rather than dangerous or reckless. I was a natural clown, an entertainer. I danced with gusto. I yelled and told stories. If there had been YouTube back then, I would have gone viral. My family could often ignore my other quirks because I was so charming and kooky. They could imagine they were just living inside a Saturday-morning television show involving a high-spirited kid and her colorful high jinks. At the end of each episode, they would smile, shrug their shoulders, and shake their heads.
But my lack of inhibition also meant that it all came out unfiltered, the charm interspersed with the awkward and disturbing. When I was on, I could delight everyone. But sometimes I could be too much. I would demand too much attention, pushing past cuteness to an uncomfortable grotesque. Other times, I would turn off, withdrawing completely into myself as if no one else was around me. I felt like I could turn invisible.
I was a perceptive child, but I couldn’t relate to people beyond amusing them, which was just another way for me to make them do or behave how I wanted them to. I didn’t like to be touched and rejected affection. The only physical contact I wanted entailed violence, and that I craved. The father of one of my best friends in grade school had to pull me aside and sternly ask me to stop beating his daughter. She was this skinny, stringy thing, all bony and with no muscle, with this goofy laugh; it was like she was asking to be slapped. I didn’t know that what I was doing was bad. It didn’t even occur to me that it would hurt her or that she might not like it.
I was not a typical child. That was obvious to everyone. I knew I was different, but there were no real indications to me of how or why I was different. Children are all selfish things, but maybe I was a little more self-interested than most. Or maybe I was simply more adept at accomplishing my self-serving ends than others, unfettered by conscience or guilt as I was. It was not clear. Young and powerless, I developed my own forms of power by convincing people that pleasing me was in their own best interest. Like many children, I objectified everyone around me. I envisioned the people in my life as two-dimensional robots that turned off when I wasn’t directly interacting with them. I loved getting high marks in my classes; it meant I could get away with things other students couldn’t because I was one of the smart kids. I made sure to stay within the realm of socially acceptable childish behavior—or at least to have a sympathetic narrative prepared in case I was caught. Other than being adept at childish manipulation, I never seemed different from my peers, at least not in a way that could not be explained by my exceptional intelligence.
Everything I learned about power—how great it feels to have it and how terrible it feels to be without it—I learned from my dad. Our relationship for the most part constituted a quiet wrestle for power—he demanded dominion over me as part of his home and family, while I enjoyed undermining what I believed to be his undeserved authority. When I misbehaved I would sometimes get beaten black and blue by my father, but I never reacted. If anything, what bothered me about the beatings was that he thought he was winning our power struggle, but I knew it wouldn’t last. If someone who loves you is hitting you that hard, you have more power than he does. You’ve provoked a reaction in him that he cannot control, and if you are like me, you will use this incident however it suits you for as long as you are associated with him. For my image-obsessed father, the threat of my disclosing these beatings was enough to torture him. Perhaps at a church social gathering I might wince as I lowered myself gingerly into a chair, making meaningful eye contact with my father when well-meaning third parties asked if I was okay, a look of terror flashing over his features as he anticipated my response. Strategically speaking, the beatings were the best thing to happen to me. His guilt and self-hatred were more potent than any other weapon in my little child arsenal and more enduring than any bruises that I may have suffered.
My father often made ridiculous demands of his children. He would tape lists of demands like “build a fence” and “fix the sink” to the doors of our bedrooms so we would see them when we woke up. I had gotten used to attempting the impossible when my father requested it. The way he asked me always made it seem like a dare, questioning whether I had the smarts or the courage to make things happen. Because that’s what I prided myself on, getting stuff done. Unlike my father, whom I considered to be largely inefficient, I was great at taking care of business. That was my role in the family.
His narcissism made him love me for my accomplishments because they reflected well on him, but it also made him hate me because I never bought into his self-image, which was all he ever really cared about. His dossier of civic duty and success meant nothing to me, because I knew better, and mine was and would be far greater than his. I think I did a lot of the same things he did—played baseball, joined a band, attended law school—so that he would know that I was better. I lived my life so that I had no reason to respect him.
One night in my early teens, driving home from the movies with my parents, I got into an argument with my father about the movie’s ending, which he thought was about overcoming obstacles and, of course, I thought was about meaninglessness, as I did about most everything those days. I was full of a teenager’s petulance and contrariness mixed with a little more intelligence and cruelty than the average kid.
I didn’t mind arguing with him. I in fact made it a point not to back down from any of our arguments, particularly if they presented an opportunity to challenge some part of his provincial worldview, which I had already concluded was distorted in self-serving ways. We were still arguing by the time we pulled into the driveway of our house, and I could tell that he wasn’t going to let it go. I told him, “You believe what you want,” and went into the house. My impassivity often provoked his worst behavior.
I should have known that he wasn’t going to let me get away that easily, or maybe I knew but didn’t care. He followed me up the stairs, because it bothered him that his daughter—who was just a child—refused to agree with him, didn’t care if he disagreed with her, and thought nothing of ca
sually dismissing him.
At the time, my parents were going through one of their rough patches. My father would bully my mother and she would have momentary breakdowns in which she would lie on the bathroom floor and respond to us by rhyming whatever it was we said to her:
“Mom, are you okay?”
“What did you say?”
“Do you need help? Are you well?”
“No, I’m feeling swell.”
Sometimes when my parents fought, she would try to assert herself using whatever she had learned from the self-help books that lined the headboard of their bed. One of her favorite lines was “I’m rolling up my window on you.” It meant that she was refusing to let him affect how she felt, which drove him mad. In retrospect I wonder who it was that wrote that self-help book and how many of its readers ended up with swollen lips and bruised eyes. The idea that my father couldn’t make an impact on a person was enraging to him. Had my mother actually rolled up a car window on him he would have smashed the glass.
That night as my father became increasingly hostile about our argument over the movie, I told him, “I’m rolling up my window on you,” and then I slipped into the bathroom at the top of the stairs, shutting and locking the door.
I knew there would be consequences. I knew he hated that phrase, and that my repetition of it presented the specter of another generation of women in his house who refused to respect or appreciate him, and instead despised him. I also knew that he hated locked doors. I knew these things would damage him, which is what I wanted. And in any case, I needed to pee.
It was only a moment before he was pounding on the door. I imagined his face on the other side, getting redder and redder, contorted in an ugly display of anger. I remember wondering detachedly how long I would have to wait for him to go away. He began to shout.