Confessions of a Sociopath

by M. E. Thomas

  I engage in this kind of self-promoting calculus in almost everything I do, often when the stakes are much higher. When my good friend’s father was diagnosed with cancer, I cut off all contact with her. It sounds like a ruthless thing to do, and it was. It wasn’t that I didn’t love her; in fact, I loved her very much—perhaps too much. But I found I could no longer enjoy any of the benefits she had provided to me—superior advice, interesting conversation—because she was horrible to be around most of the time. I had overinvested and was running many months into the red with no improvement. I found that I could not wear the mask of compassion or selflessness indefinitely without acting out in ways that were hurtful to us both.

  And so I cut off all ties and walked away. There were damages on all sides, but I had no other means of mitigating them, so it was an efficient breach. I think she would agree with me, even when I include her hurt and suffering into the equation. That alone would typically make the end of a friendship in this way a net negative. In this situation, though, my abandonment of her was to her benefit, particularly considering that my behavior was only going to get worse—that I was already tapped out in terms of being able to be supportive. I didn’t leave her because I stopped caring for her. I left her because I did care for her very much. It was efficient. Still, the first couple of months apart I was just so relieved. If I was reminded of my friend, it was with gratitude that I was no longer in that unsustainable situation. As the months went by, however, I began to feel the empty space in my life that she used occupy. It was unfortunate. But this too is part of the cost-benefit analysis, when I realize that situations can often turn regrettable even though I do not regret any particular decision.

  Of course, there are negative real-world effects of making efficient breaches. In the marketplace, breaking promises decreases confidence and thereby discourages actors from engaging in future contracts. For instance, if you have been divorced too many times, people don’t trust you, and so they don’t want to play the game with you anymore. It’s a problem. No matter how rational I may be in choosing when to follow rules and when to break obligations, it is often insufficient for the people I am dealing with. They want more: more feeling, more attachment, more commitment, more of what they’re used to. At some point, I have to wonder if all of my rational decision-making can make up for my inability to empathize, and I conclude that it doesn’t. People take for granted the empathy with which they were born, and the morality that they somehow internalize. Crying when someone you love cries—I was not born with this shortcut into the hearts of other people. Feeling guilt when you hurt someone you love is an internal safeguard to prevent you from losing them, but I have never been able to learn it. The work-arounds that I have devised for these things often fail me.

  Fortunately, however, it is another of my sociopathic traits to persist with optimism and unflinching self-regard, and I’ve learned that few broken things cannot be mended. The angry neighbor never bothered me again. After my friend’s father died, we reconnected and have become friends again. Friends and family have moved on from past hurts and forgiven me. The narrative of the sociopath has been told in the language of pathology, but sometimes I feel like Achilles. In exchange for superhuman might he had a single vulnerability. It was a fair exchange, I think—his demise was extremely improbable.

  But I am not completely immune to feeling blue. Of the negative emotions I feel, regret is the saddest and strongest. I acknowledge that much of life is chance and all sorts of bad things might happen to me during life. I’m fine with that. The thing that haunts me more than anything else is the thought that I could unwittingly be the author of my own unhappiness—unhappiness so surprising that it never entered my mind that things could play out that way. It is the ultimate in powerlessness—not just the thought that nothing I do really matters, but that things I do could matter and actually make things worse.

  Midway through college I met a girl in the music program who brought my true nature to the surface. We met at an audition for the same part, and even though she was the better musician, I won. She was one of those good-natured people whose infectious laugh rallied friends to her side. She was people-pleasing, serious, and friendly, uncomfortable enough in her own skin that people never envied her, but not so much that they were repulsed. They couldn’t help but like her.

  I had always stayed casually close to her so that my reputation would be aligned with hers; I capitalized on her easy likability, making certain that it would rub off on me rather than contrast with my affectations. But maybe this was where I failed. I tried too hard to understand her, as if her delicate balance of coquettishness and earthy charm was something that she had purposefully fabricated and that I could therefore dissect and re-create, but what she had was an accident, an empty convergence of quirks and unforeseen circumstances that she herself could barely describe or detect. She was who she was—it wasn’t an act.

  I know this because I secretly pored through her personal letters and journals, trying to understand—to eat up all the insecurities she seeped onto the pages. One day she caught me doing it. She avoided me completely after that, as did everyone else in the program.

  No one really talked about it. But my ostracism was especially jarring because ignoring personal boundaries like this was the kind of thing I did all the time. Now they acted as if I was a monster. It was such a trivial, stupid transgression, something I imagine that most everyone has done or wanted to do but was somehow apparently so terrible that shaming me made everyone else a better person. I had violated a moral rule that I didn’t fully understand, and no one wanted to be associated with me.

  Without the benefit of social goodwill, I was forced to do everything the hard way, since the trust required for all my secret schemes had been destroyed. It was the best thing that could have happened to me. My actions had finally caught up with me in a way that I could not ignore. Faced with total social isolation, I had no choice but to try to be completely honest with myself.

  I started to realize how little I knew about myself or why I did the things I did (and still do). I didn’t like not knowing who I was, so I decided to develop a friendly curiosity about myself. I watched myself for about nine months without judgment or self-manipulation. I wasn’t an ascetic, but I was intent on discovering my true self. My guiding principles during that time were unflinching honesty and acceptance. I thought that if I could garner enough self-knowledge, I could inch myself to happiness or whatever else it was I wanted in life, like a prisoner carving his way out of a concrete wall with a makeshift pick.

  At the end of the nine months I had come to a few conclusions. First, I didn’t really have a self at all. I was like an Etch A Sketch, constantly shaking myself up and starting over. And somewhere, somehow, in the last few years, I had come to believe certain things about myself that weren’t really true. For instance, because I often am very charming and outwardly good-natured, I thought that I must be a warmhearted person. Pretending to conform to societal expectations had become so easy that I forgot I was pretending. I read all of these coming-of-age books about people growing up and growing out of childhood quirks and I felt like that is what had happened to me. In reality, I had just lost the self-awareness that I had as a child and even as a teenager. Several things that I had come to believe were mirages, and when I inspected them closer they disappeared, leaving absolutely nothing. I quickly realized that, almost without exception, this was true about everything in my life. All of the stories I had recently been spinning about my life were illusions—gaps occupied by part of my brain to fill in a hole, the same way our brain will sometimes fill in gaps in an optical illusion. I had told myself that I was normal, perhaps just a little too smart, but that my feelings were genuine and typical of a young woman my age. Now I felt like I had woken up from a dream. Without actively spinning stories, I had no self. If I had been Buddhist on my path to seeking Nirvana, this lack of self would have been a huge breakthrough, but I didn’t feel a sense of accom
plishment at having achieved that state. Instead I felt the only way anyone can ever feel without a sense of self—free.

  Of course I knew that there were things that I did when I was “engaged.” I laughed and plotted. I manipulated a lot, I realized. Manipulation was my default mode of relating with people. Every relationship felt like a dance of giving and taking that I was constantly trying to choreograph, gauging which dance partners would serve my interests best. I liked things like power and excitement. I had no real interest in the content of my activities, just the skill with which I did them. I loved to seduce, not just sexually, but to inhabit someone’s mind so completely, and it was easy—easy to charm. I was a prolific liar, often for no real reason. I was a pleasure seeker, and although I had no real sense of what my self was, I still thought very well of myself. I didn’t need a self to exist. I had a unique role in the world: I was like an enzyme among molecules, catalyzing reactions without being affected myself. Or a virus, looking for a host. I was different from normal people, but I knew that I existed. I acted and interacted. I was largely an illusion, but even an illusion is real in its own way—people experience it, and more important, people respond to it.

  I believe that a lot of the sociopath’s traits such as charm, manipulation, lying, promiscuity, chameleonism, mask wearing, and lack of empathy are largely attributable to a very weak sense of self. I believe that all personality disorders share a distorted or abnormal sense of self. The concept of a sociopath having an extremely flexible sense of self is not entirely original to me, but it is not often clearly stated in the scientific literature. I compiled my information from piecing together seemingly disparate elements of the literature on sociopaths in a way that conformed with my own personal experience. Psychologists look at the list of sociopathic traits and think they understand the “what,” but they don’t understand the “how.” I believe the “how,” the origin of many of our observed behaviors, is that we don’t have a rigid sense of self. I believe that this is the predominant defining characteristic of a sociopath.

  The person who has gotten closest to identifying this attribute of sociopaths is a professor at California State University–Northridge, Howard Kamler. He argues that “it is not just that [the sociopath] is lacking a strongly identified moral identity, he is likely lacking a strongly identified self identity almost altogether.” When the sociopath feels no sense of remorse, it’s due less to a lack of conscience and more to the fact that the sociopath does not feel that he has betrayed himself: “If a person has no strong sense of self in general, then of course he will probably have no strong sense of lost integrity when he violates life projects which for the rest of us would be central parts of our self identities.” For example, I never get upset when I break up with someone, primarily because I never had any emotional attachment to my status as a “girlfriend.” Similarly, I do not define myself as a successful professional of a certain intellectual or socioeconomic class, so it does not really bother me to be summarily discharged from prestigious positions and remain unemployed for long periods of time living on government payouts and the generosity of friends and family members. I know what I am capable of and that is enough. My particular status in any given moment is insignificant to me except to the degree that I am aware of its significance to others in the way they view me and treat me.

  What is it like being self-aware without a self-construct? Much of my self-awareness is the result of indirect observation of the effects I have on people. I know I exist because I see people acknowledging my existence, just as we know that dark matter exists in the universe not because we can see or measure it directly, but because we can see its effects as its invisible gravity distorts the motion of objects around it. Sociopaths are like dark matter in that we typically keep our influence hidden, albeit in plain sight, but you can certainly see our effects. I watch for people’s reactions to me so I am able to understand, “I make people feel scared when I stare at them this way.” My awareness of self is made up of a million of these little observations to paint a picture of myself, like a pointillist portrait.

  As a child, my self was easier to define and therefore to ignore: I was a part of my family, a student at my school, a member at my church. I didn’t have to worry about betraying myself with bad behavior, only others; I was used to people looking over my shoulder all the time, so keeping my behavior in check was a constant concern. As an adult I don’t have that same external structure. I make more of my own decisions as an adult, but my actions also have much more permanent and serious consequences. That is why my prosthetic moral compass has been so useful to me, in helping to define me and restrict my behavior; my personal code of efficiency and religion have, for the most part, kept me on the straight and narrow.

  While I rarely break the rules, I tend to bend them. Mormons are well known for having dietary restrictions, most famously a prohibition on tobacco, alcohol, and caffeine. I drink green tea and Diet Coke, which seemingly puts me on the wrong side of the law, but I take an originalist interpretation of this provision. The actual language relating to caffeine prohibits “hot drinks,” which presumably does not include ice-cold cola. At the time of the provision’s inception, there was no green tea readily available, so it was unlikely to have been included in the prohibition. Consequently, I have a raging caffeine addiction.

  The prohibition on sex before marriage has a much more considerable effect on church members, but it too contains some ambiguity. I’m told that in my grandparents’ generation, the line was drawn at “sexual intercourse,” and apparently people walked right up to that line. My dad once told me a story about how a church leader advised young men to “stay moral, go oral,” although he now denies he ever said it. That loophole has since been tightened up, if not closed, with the prohibition on the potentially broader category of “sexual relations.” With such vague terms, the church appears to be asking its members to interpret the complexity of sexual experience on their own terms. Don’t mind if I do. I find richness in my sex life within the church’s parameters, like a poet who chooses to write in sonnets over free verse.

  Mormons are expected to pay a specific percentage of their “increase” to the church as a tithe, but that rule, like most everything, is subject to interpretation. I treat it like paying my taxes: I comply, but I maximize every possible deduction within the letter of the law. Indeed, I have never paid a tremendous amount of attention to the church’s reasons for doing what it does or asserting what it asserts.

  Rather than feeling a moral certainty about the rightness of the church and its articles of faith, my affiliation with the church makes sense to me in the language of efficiency. In fact, I have to acknowledge that there is no empirical certainty for the existence or nonexistence of a Creator in the cosmos. I simply proceed as if I could know, and believe. If the church’s tenets by which I have lived are true, then I have invested wisely in my everlasting future. If they are untrue, then I have at least invested wisely in my present life by adhering to a reasonable moral code, with no measurable effect on my uncertain future. I understand my faith as a foundation for living—the infrastructure on which I create a life that provides me with immense pleasures and essential joy.

  Even without a religious or ethical code, high-functioning sociopaths eventually learn that they can use their powers for good. Sociopaths cannot willfully blind themselves to exploitable weaknesses in others, but they can choose to use that special vision to be productive rather than destructive. Sometimes in choosing to manipulate or exploit weaknesses in others, you create vulnerabilities in yourself, for example by harming your reputation or feeding an addiction to increasingly outrageous antisocial behavior. Controlling our impulses also allows sociopaths to overcome our isolation by forming long-term, meaningful relationships. Sociopaths who truly seek to cultivate power realize that the greatest power they can acquire is power over themselves.

  Chapter 6

  SAINTS, SPIES, AND SERIAL KILLERS

  I re
cently visited New Zealand and learned that it has a very diverse ecosystem. Until the arrival of humans, it was populated almost entirely by birds. They occupied every niche in the food chain, from tiny flightless things to predators so enormous they could snatch a hundred-pound prey for dinner. For millions of years, birds dominated their man-less, mammal-less world, a universe of feathers, beaks, and talons, knowing of no other form of higher life. The birds acquired a host of abilities and natural defenses optimal for their environment.

  But then in the thirteenth century, while the Europeans were still busy with their crusades, Polynesian explorers came, and with them came rats—with fur instead of feathers, teeth instead of beaks, and tiny paws instead of fearsome talons. The defense mechanisms that worked well against other birds failed against the rats. Small flightless birds who, when sensing danger, would remain perfectly still to avoid being spotted by predators flying overhead, would do the same when encountering a rat. Fighting for its life, in its passive way, the little bird focused its every effort on not moving a single muscle—only to be gobbled up where it stood.

  The scientific term for animals like the little bird who had not encountered rats or humans is naïve. I find this charming, as if the little bird existed in a moral universe of which his New Zealand was a kind of Eden, its inhabitants living a peaceful existence disrupted only by the victimization of a cunning intruder, preying on their relative innocence.

  I often think the people I encounter are naïve, but only because they may never have encountered someone quite like me. Sociopaths see things that no one else does because they have different expectations about the world and the people in it. While you and everyone else are doing emotional sleight of hand meant to distract the average observer from certain harsh truths, the sociopath remains undistracted. We are like rats on an island of birds.