Confessions of a Sociopath

by M. E. Thomas

  It took a long time for me to finally rust over—to reach that period of aimlessness, unemployment, and self-searching that slowed me down and gave me time to think about who I am and what I want. The rusting happened in fits and starts. I had long stretches of bewildering emotional arthritis, through which I trudged onward in my unyielding determination to ignore pain. These were punctuated with periods of success and happiness, of superior performance and pleasurable mastery of the world around me. But as heartless as I am, I have wanted to feel love, to feel connection, to feel like I belong to the world like anyone else. No one, it seems, can escape loneliness. I know enough, however, to understand that getting a heart isn’t a quick fix either. Even after Tin Woodman gets his version of one, he has to be very careful not to cry lest his tears cause him to rust. A heart can be paralyzing in its way. It is not at all clear that the Tin Woodman is happier or better after he receives one.

  When I think of myself, I feel that I exist first as a will—I am the product of my desires and my efforts to fulfill those desires. I identify more as a sociopath than by my gender or profession or race. In my soul, it feels like I was cast first as this iron-hearted thing, this Nietzschean machine, and then the rest of me came later—perhaps my consciousness next, and then my body, and then the phenomenological awareness that comes with being inside a body and negotiating the world through it. You feel the universe as mediated through the particles of your flesh, viewed from the height of your eyes and touched through the nerves in your fingers. People perceive you in a certain way and treat you accordingly, and so you become a mélange of certain qualities and impulses and desires, all entangled at atomic speeds in the molecular space of your body. But at my heart I feel I am just want, need, action, and my sociopathic traits profoundly impact all of those things.

  I have trouble navigating my own emotions. It’s not that I don’t feel them. I feel a lot of different emotions, but some of them I don’t recognize or understand. Often it feels like my emotions are without context. It is like I am reading a book one page at a time, but starting with the last page and moving backward. There are clues to help me understand, but there is no linear logic that allows me to infer simple cause-and-effect relationships between the vague discomfort I feel and the recognition that “I am sad because of X.” And if I can’t contextualize my own emotions, I have even greater difficulty understanding the emotions of others.

  Recent research from King’s College London’s Institute of Psychiatry revealed that the brains of sociopathic criminals show distinctly less gray matter in the areas of the brain that are important for understanding the emotions of others. Studies indicate that sociopathic brains do not respond emotionally to words such as death, rape, and cancer the same way that normal brains do. We respond with about as much emotion as we do to a word like chair. More research has shown that sociopathic brains have a lower number of connections between the prefrontal cortex (which helps regulate emotions, processes threats, and facilitates decision-making) and the amygdala (which processes emotions), which could explain why sociopaths do not feel sufficient negative emotions when doing something antisocial.

  This neurological disconnect between emotion and decision-making can be a decided competitive advantage in most professional settings, where risk taking is often richly rewarded, but it can cause real problems in personal settings, in which sociopaths are expected to make emotional connections. One blog reader said:

  I’ve always worked in sales and my [moral] flexibility has paid off time and again. But I think I’ve often been promoted to levels where my personal style becomes a liability. When I do well the next logical step always involves managing other people or corporate partnerships … stuff that require[s] a great deal of sensitivity to the interests of others over a longer term. This is the level where I seem to make mistakes. Then I have to go somewhere else and start all over again.

  I am much like this reader. Because I am largely just mimicking emotional connection or understanding, almost all of my exploits have an expiration date at the moment when pretending to care ceases to be sustainable.

  One of my favorite theories regarding a sociopath’s emotional world comes from psychopath researcher and University of Wisconsin professor Joseph Newman. Newman has advocated that sociopathy is largely an attentional disorder, where the sociopath is getting all the right input but is just not paying attention to it in the same way that everyone else is, so it is meaningless to him.

  In the emotional realm, Newman argues that sociopaths feel the same breadth of emotions that normal people do, but that they do not attend to the emotions as others do and therefore experience them differently. Newman has noticed that if a sociopath’s attention is directed at a particular emotion, she can generally feel it the way that normal people can. The difference is that it is not automatic; the sociopath has to make the conscious effort to focus her attention that way. Therefore, sociopathy results in an “attention bottleneck” that allows sociopaths to focus on only one activity or train of thought to the exclusion of other social cues and “perhaps even signals sent over the prefrontal-to-amygdala pathway” that would tell them to stop doing what they’re doing.

  This theory resonates with me. If I focus on an emotion, I can greatly amplify its force far beyond what it should be. For feelings that I don’t care to feel, I just tune them out. It’s easy to ignore anything that would be inconvenient or unpleasant to consider.

  In this way, my sociopathy feels like an extreme form of compartmentalization. I can shut myself off or open myself up to emotions like fear or anger or anxiety or dread or joy just by flipping an internal switch. It’s not like I can’t ever experience these emotions in the right circumstances; I just have to know how to tap in to them. It’s sort of like looking for a signal by turning a dial, like a radio. All those things are out there, all the time, being broadcast through our airwaves. All I have to do is tune in to the right station. If I want to feel something—despair, anxiety, bliss, horror, disgust—I just have to think about it. It’s like seeing a glass half empty and then flipping the switch or turning the dial to look at it as half full. I believe empaths sometimes have a similar sensation and label it an epiphany—a sudden shift in perspective—that changes the way they think about the world. Because the scope of my perspective is so focused, and so limited, I experience this feeling of epiphany many times a day. It can be disorienting, but it keeps things interesting.

  Most people have to listen to whatever signal is being broadcast the strongest, both within themselves and in their social environments. By virtue of my sociopathy, I get to choose which signals to listen to. Sometimes it’s nice to be able to choose who to mirror or how to feel, but it can also be a burden. If I’m in a social situation, I have to constantly and actively monitor the airwaves. Most people pick up on social and moral cues because they automatically tune in to other people’s emotional stations, reading body language unconsciously and displaying appropriate emotional responses in a natural, instinctive way. Empaths are like cell phones in this way—they automatically seek out the strongest signal from the cell towers. Sociopaths, on the other hand, are like traditional radios. I can only hear the strongest signal if I happen to be on that station, or if I’m being extra vigilant about scanning. It’s a lot of work; there’s a lot of trial and error involved. Often the best I can do is realize I’ve missed an important cue, then shift and shuffle through my stations to recover.

  This happened the other day with one of my students. I had called on her about the meaning of the Latin phrase duces tecum because she had previously indicated some knowledge of Latin, but she shrugged the question off. After class she came up to me to say that she would be missing the next class, that her grandmother had died that morning and that she was flying out for the funeral the next day. My stomach sank and I became anxious. I spat out the usual, “Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that,” accompanied by a very concerned-looking face (hopefully it was concerned looking—luckily the
grieving are not close observers of the authenticity of faces). She lingered. I didn’t know what else to say so I kept yammering: “Well, presumably you have asked one of your classmates for a copy of their notes. Also Mr. Smith usually audio-records the lectures; you might want to ask him for a copy of the recording …” She wasn’t making eye contact, looked down and away. I didn’t know what to say and I wanted to get away from her so I finished with, “But I’m very sorry for your loss.”

  At that she understood that our conversation was over. I didn’t understand what the purpose of the conversation had been or whether I had properly met her expectations, but I got more nervous as she walked only five feet away to be comforted by her classmate, now visibly upset, triggered by the slightest provocation of her classmate’s small expression of concern. I suddenly had the irresistible impulse to leave the room as quickly as possible, but she was blocking the aisle to the door. Luckily, I remembered that there was an emergency exit at the back of the lecture hall that dumped into a little alleyway and I made my escape, instantly hidden by the night. I threw my stuff in my car and made a hasty exit from the parking lot, determined not to run into the dead-grandmother student again.

  So, I can be awkward around strong emotions. But over the years, I’ve gotten better at masking my errors. I can cycle through possible emotional choices very quickly and come up with acceptable responses like a computer playing chess. But like chess, there is a practically infinite number of pathways and variations in human social and emotional interactions, and I’ll never be as fast as an empath in intuiting emotions or applying the appropriate (natural) responses.

  Being relatively unemotional can be very useful in professional situations, but it’s caused some unfortunate tensions with friends and lovers when things do not upset me that they desperately think I should be upset by, like being worried at the possibility of a breakup. Not long ago when I told my friends that my father had just had a heart attack that day, they were very confused about whether I was being serious and whether it was an appropriate thing to joke about. This confusion occurred only because I did not accompany my statement with the appropriate show of negative emotion. In fact, when I was formally diagnosed, I believe that one attribute—having conversations about very emotionally fraught subjects without appropriate displays of emotion—was one of the most striking indicators of sociopathy that I displayed to my psychologist. It is the one that is often the hardest for me to accurately fake.

  A lot of times my lack of emotionality just reads as an increased masculinity. The men I date sometimes lament that they feel like the girl in the relationship. I wonder what my sociopathy would look like if I actually were male—it often seems that male sociopathy exhibits itself as blatantly antisocial in a way that is not always the case in women. Indeed, very little research data exists regarding sociopathy in women, but what has been done reveals that female sociopaths exhibit only two or three main features that are similar to those found in men—usually, a lack of empathy and a pleasure in the manipulation and exploitation of others—but do not often exhibit violently impulsive behavior.

  I am rarely tempted to commit violence, but my impulsiveness got me into plenty of trouble in my teens and early twenties, when I would find myself being groped and harassed in seedy concert venues alone and scantily clad, traveling down a heavily trafficked dark hilly road on my back on a skateboard, or caught in a lie (and possession of stolen goods) in a retail store’s security office. On occasion I experience bloodlust, in particular when I think someone is trying to force me to experience guilt or shame. One commenter on my blog remarked about impulse: “Once impulse takes control there is no grasp of reality or balance until it’s over and you’re looking down at what you’ve done wondering what the next move is to get away with it.”

  Impulsiveness and fearlessness are defining characteristics of sociopathy. Scientists have explored variations in psychophysiological traits in sociopaths, finding that sociopaths have an abnormally low startle response when confronted with aversive stimuli. It appears that we have a deficit in our ability to feel negative emotion—or fear—in response to threats. I literally do not blink in the face of danger. One time I walked in on two men robbing my apartment. At first I didn’t realize what was happening. They of course did and scurried out the back window where they had come in. I ran after them but then realized that most of my things had not been taken, only piled in the center of the room in preparation. There was no point in chasing after these men, and so I stopped. The police came at my neighbor’s insistence, but I felt acutely aware that I had no idea how to behave before them. I was not naturally afraid or particularly concerned, though I knew this was what was expected of me. I ended up just being friendly, but it came off as flirtatious. Maybe that’s okay. It’s these unusual circumstances that are certain to trip me up in my continuing project to appear mostly normal.

  My first year of teaching, I said many borderline-offensive things and then I just started intentionally saying them, as if I was being sickeningly sarcastic or deliberately offbeat, like suggesting that I might dress as Condoleezza Rice for Halloween. It’s not that the mask slips off and reveals my true thoughts. I don’t really have “true thoughts,” just good and bad performances as I attempt to say and do things that normal people say and do.

  And really, I can’t help myself. I am continually shaping my self-presentation so that I can control what people think of me. I have been doing it for so long that I cannot even imagine what I would be if I were not performing all the time, blunting my edges and cultivating tricks of invitation. Even the way I speak is manufactured.

  I have an ever-so-slight accent, something of a low drawl colored with unusual inflections, that is nothing like my siblings’ or parents’ accents. It has no identifiable origins but developed, I think, from my propensity to indulge in the sound of my own voice. If you listened closely to my speech, you would hear the pleasure I take in the textures of consonants and the phrasing of vowels. I have done everything to maintain and cultivate my accent, as I’ve discovered that it promotes a kind of accessible mystery and captivating vulnerability, an otherness that is attractive and nonthreatening. People often mistake me as foreign, most frequently Eastern European and Mediterranean. One of my paramours actually said that, if anything, I seem like an alien—“decidedly not human.”

  I meet a lot of people at work and at conferences, and I work hard at putting on the right act to optimize my standing in the profession. Unfortunately, like many, I’m bad at remembering people’s faces, typically because I did a quick valuation of someone as a person upon meeting him and figured he was not worth the effort. If he remembers me and I don’t remember him, I act like an idiot for the first few sentences. Then I flirt like mad. I touch shoulders. I laugh heartily and repeat his name as often as I can. “Oh, Peter! I like the way you think!” If he compliments me back I accept the compliment with confidence, then quickly turn the conversation to him and keep it on him. I am gracious and generous with compliments and expressions of interest. My accent is more pronounced. I create a rush of attention and flattery, with no apparent origin or goal. I excuse myself abruptly. I always make sure that I leave the conversation. I am careful not to be left.

  If I’m stuck where I am, I veer the conversation to an area of personal expertise. I know what you are thinking. This is what douchebags do. But you would be surprised at how delicate I am about the shifting of conversations. You would not notice it unless I told you. I ask at least a few more questions before I confess my own experience, interest, or knowledge of the subject matter. I am razor sharp. I tell witty stories or interesting factoids.

  “You lived in Los Angeles for a year? Isn’t it beautiful?”

  “After about three months there I got sick of the sun. I felt that every day I had to be out bicycling or hiking or otherwise making the most of such good weather.”

  “Ah, see, that’s the special pleasure of living in that climate, being able to wa
ste a beautiful day by drawing the drapes and watching ten episodes of The Sopranos. It’s decadent. Like eating gold flakes.”

  People like to hear words like pleasure and decadent. They think of Roman orgies or chocolate. I emphasize my point by tilting my chin down ever so slightly while maintaining eye contact. My hand reaches out to touch theirs just for an instant, a half grab or tug that never really materializes. It’s unmistakably sensual but too fleeting to be forward. They laugh nervously, wondering for just a moment whether I can read their thoughts. Of course I can.

  Sociopaths typically don’t make small talk about themselves as much as normal people do. They will direct the conversation back to the new acquaintance as much as they can. When I talk to people, the only thing I really care about is getting what I want. This is true of everybody, but I never am trying to get someone’s approval or admiration, unless it is a means to the end. I have no desire to talk. Instead, what I find most useful is collecting a mental dossier about everyone I know. Knowledge is power and if I know even something like where your grandmother is buried, I might be able to use that in the future. Consequently, it typically only makes sense for me to listen. If I’m not listening, I’m probably telling a joke or shamelessly flattering you. I probably would rather not be talking to you at all, but since I am, I might as well be polishing my charm.

  A sociopath will reveal “personal” details about himself strategically, i.e., for the purposes of misdirection or a false sense of intimacy or trust. Revelations of actual truths are very rare and may be perceived as a small slip of the mask. I don’t like people knowing things about me because it just means more things for me to remember that I can’t lie about (or more lies to keep track of if I decide to evade the truth). And if knowledge is power, I want to keep my cards very close to my chest.