Confessions of a Sociopath

by M. E. Thomas

  I discovered that you could love almost anyone, really, and make them your reason for living at least for a time—whether it is an evening or a week or a few weeks. It wasn’t just that you could have more power over someone through love than through any other means, but you could have access to more parts of them. There were more levers to pull and buttons to push, endless modalities. I could bring relief to pain of which I was the direct and sole cause. I thought nothing of deceiving or manipulating them.

  My love interests disappeared from my thoughts immediately upon my return to the United States. Back home, I had to do a few things. I didn’t want to have what I learned in Brazil corrupted by contrary American sensibilities. I wanted to expand and deepen my Brazilian operations, including trying to form relationships with real people in my life.

  I realized I had thus far been blind. I had unknowingly denied myself the pleasures of really leaping into and consuming the emotional inner worlds of others. Why did I ever think that it was sufficient simply to make people do things for me when I could make them want to do things for me? Now that my eyes and mind were opened, I wanted to keep them open forever. Love was the newest thing to add to the long list of things I wanted to be so good at that people would cry.

  I did become pretty good at it. But when you are back in your home country, you can’t start shoving your tongue into the mouth of every person you come across, especially when you attend a religious university with strict rules about that kind of stuff. On the flip side, however, because everyone around me was starved for sex, people were almost too easy to snare, especially the boys.

  I remember a date with one especially innocent boy. He had all-American quarterback good looks—a dimpled wide smile showing straight rows of white teeth and fluffy blond hair bleached by the sun. After a movie, we sat in my car for a long time, because he wanted an invitation into my apartment and for access to my body (in particular, my breasts). It was long past the university-imposed curfew and against several moral code rules, and I had no real interest in him. About fifteen minutes into the date, I’d known that I had him, so I was really only going along for the ride, taking the opportunity to observe him and therefore collect information for later use. I was in it more for the chase, and he was too sick a gazelle to provide any real challenge.

  As he sat there across from me, I wondered what he fantasized about in the shower and what kinds of girls he’d kissed. He was almost too generic, like he was acting out youthful boyish nervousness for a television show. With people like that, you’ve got to wonder if they have inner lives at all, or if the extent of their consciousness ends when the television writers shut off the office lights and go home.

  I unsettled him. He couldn’t understand why I was so confident or why he was so attracted to me. On the surface of things, I was nothing special. I wasn’t particularly striking, nor did I have any real popularity to speak of; I in fact was odd enough that I could see flits of doubt flutter across the surface of his skin as he tried to decide if he even regarded me as a worthwhile person. With his traditional good looks, he could have attracted the attention and affections of many a blond coed, his female counterparts, so the fact that he felt so disarmed by me bred a lot of insecurity in him.

  Just like the junior associate version of me had Jane, the nineteen-year-old me could have had the all-American quarterback if I’d wanted him. I could have made him do my homework, buy me things, and marry me. But I didn’t want him. That night outside my apartment, after a long while of patiently humoring him, I began to wish he would get out of my car so that I could go home to sleep. He tried to contact me many times after that date, but it was too late for him. He had already vanished from my thoughts halfway through the night.

  That’s the trouble with seduction as a game played for the thrill of it. You can innocently go about seducing people, even enjoy the attention and affection for a time, and then suddenly, when you’re ready to move on, you’re left with this dependent besotted person who can hardly stand to live without you.

  Typically when I set out to seduce someone, I cut the target loose as soon as I know I have won. My rationale is to treat it like sport fishing: the fun is in catching the fish, not in gutting, cleaning, and cooking the fish afterward, so why not throw the fish back to be caught another day?

  I try to cultivate a persona that makes seduction easy. People are attracted to my confidence, but the thing that really hooks people is how I don’t seem like anyone else they’ve ever met, and in deliciously exotic ways. My accent is unplaceable. I am darker than most white people, but not in a way that would clearly indicate “other.” My natural style is androgynous, but I don’t care to have my clothing reflect my personality too closely so I rarely choose it myself. Consequently I frequently wear the soft, flowing dresses and structured heels that are more my friend’s taste, a fashion-forward woman who is happy to select most of my clothing. Underneath the lush material, it’s clear that I am firm, even muscular. I have remarkably beautiful breasts. But I have always been acutely sensitive to the beauty of things—in bodies and faces, and in numbers and landscapes and logic, too. Pleasure to me is paramount and I am always looking for new sources of it. The pleasure of a seduction conquest lies in both the physical satisfaction and the mental challenge of completely occupying a space in a person’s mind until it’s yours, like a squatter. The one caveat is, you may find that the space you’re occupying is more trouble than it’s worth.

  When I met Morgan, I didn’t know she would be so much trouble. She had the same name as me, which constituted 90 percent of my interest in her at the beginning. It amused me to think that I could be making love with myself. She was a senior trial attorney in an office in which I was very junior, and her apparent abilities, as viewed from a casual distance, were pretty sexy.

  The first time we actually had a conversation was when we ran into each other leaving the office early on a Friday afternoon, like being caught red-handed by someone you know could never tell on you without revealing her own misdeed. I knew we would take the elevator together, then walk through our building’s maze of halls for at least five minutes more, and then walk in the same direction toward the parking garage. Because I had already begun to admire her, I was a little nervous making so much small talk. I had nothing to worry about, because she instantly shared her life story with me in the time it took to get to our cars. I just listened. It’s amazing how much more effective listening is in seduction than anything else. It helped that her life had been tantalizing in a way that fed into my desire to know people’s vulnerabilities—abusive relationships, crimes, gender identity disorder, and so on.

  The infatuation between us quickly became mutual. Mine was firmly rooted in my own narcissism and a desire to exploit the weaknesses in someone I had initially admired, hers in an apparent attraction to people who enjoyed hurting her. I’ve never had someone react so strongly to me as Morgan. Her growing attachment to me even warped her appearance. Her once-firm jaw began to appear weakly skeletal, and her steady brown eyes now flitted about in avoidance of mine, hesitant to rest on any one thing. I think her hair even began to fall out.

  It was puzzling because she had seemed such a strong and confident person in doing her job, facing judges, juries, and some pretty tough lawyers with self-possession. Morgan had a social power at work of which I wanted to have a piece, and in particular, an outsider’s hard-won respect that I in many ways wanted to emulate. At first, I really relished the power I had over her. I got sick from enjoyment every time I noticed a crack in her voice or a nonsensical sentence escape from her lips. In those moments my breath would catch, my eyes half-lidded. My pleasure in her discomfort was very visceral, my tongue instinctively running over the jagged edges of my teeth the same way one might salivate and even become overwhelmed a little at the smell of a succulent slab of meat. I think I ran away with it a little.

  Morgan couldn’t recover. I was winning by too great a margin for her to remain interested
in playing the game. I tried to alleviate her nervousness in the same way you’d try to calm an overexcited animal or child—making slow movements, explaining what you are doing, assuring her that there’s nothing to worry about and no harm will come. There was a certain amount of condescension in it, an active effort to shame her into seeing how ridiculous it was to be scared of little ole me. The whole thing was a lot of work. I made things worse by getting increasingly disgusted by how weak and afraid she was. One afternoon, she canceled her dinner plans with me, and I could see that it was for no other reason than that I made her nervous. I sat in her office, staring at her with motionless judgment, unable to let myself let her off the hook. It was too satisfying for me to feed her masochism. I pushed the shame tactic too hard, and she stopped speaking to me. I can’t remember what in particular I did that ended it. Maybe I implied that she was worthless and teased her about the poor quality of her skin. I was genuinely surprised that she wanted to end things, but I shouldn’t have been—I had inadvertently made it more appealing to forfeit than to surrender.

  I knew I had only one chance to get her back, so I let things cool off for a couple of months before I sent her a seemingly heartfelt but factually insincere e-mail confessing my love and apologies. The apologies were profuse but vague, so that she could apply them to whatever thing she perceived I had done to wrong her. The love was dripping with honey-hued affirmation. I named all the things that I admired about her, or rather, the things that she hoped to have admired. I was sure to include confessions of my own “vulnerabilities,” that I thought about her every day—though I thought about her almost every day as a lost object I needed to reclaim. In the e-mail, I said that I loved her several times and made sure to use the past tense, because I wanted her to feel regret for something she didn’t even know she had. There isn’t anything more crushing than lost love, and there are few more compelling motives than to recapture it. Because she never knew I loved her, and because I didn’t, she never even got to savor it. At the end, I threw in a few mild recriminations disguised as insecurities (she made me feel abandoned and bereft) and suggestions that things would be different were we to reunite (though I claimed I had no reason to believe or hope that we would). It was an effective e-mail.

  A few weeks later, I heard back from her. She had received my e-mail while on an island vacation with a new girlfriend, the arrival and discussion of which precipitated a minor spat and then a breakup. It gave me satisfaction to know that thoughts of me plagued her while she lay on the beach with her lover. When she came back, we took up again. Her self-devouring weakness hadn’t gone away but seemed to have grown exponentially. She wanted more and more hurt from me, and because I was sufficiently disgusted with her and wanted to oblige her wishes, I was happy to deliver.

  After a few months we drifted apart. Morgan quit or was fired from her job and fell into an abyss of eating disorders and substance abuse. I was shocked by how quickly she fell from excelling in her career as a successful trial attorney to jobless dysfunction—it was really only a matter of months. It’s a wonder that she’s still alive. I cannot take all of the credit for this extreme decline. It was inevitable in her life, due to her desire to be abused. She has almost managed to kill herself so many times you would think she would have succeeded by now if she really set her mind to it. But I guess if she died she would lose any further opportunities to suffer, and the prospect of experiencing more vast and varying shades of pain is what keeps her alive. I guess that made our relationship mutually positive: She wanted to be hurt and I liked to hurt and watch her sink further into depravity. I was only sated when she hit absolute bottom.

  I still see her sometimes, but the thrill of the chase disappeared a long time ago. I never loved her of course, but she loves me in her twisted way. I made her believe that I understood needs and desires that she had kept hidden from most everyone else out of fear and shame, that I looked at everything about her and wasn’t scared of what I found. It’s true that I did. People always say to be careful not to confuse sex and love, but I think they should be more wary of confusing love and understanding. I can read every word of your soul, become deeply engrossed in the study of it until I’ve comprehended every nuance and detail. But then when I’m done, I’ll discard it as easily as if it were a newspaper, shaking my head at how the ink has stained my fingers gray. My desire to know every layer of you isn’t feigned, but interest isn’t love, and I make no promises of forever. Perhaps I do every so often, but you have no business believing me.

  One of the manifestations of sociopathy in me is an ambivalence in regards to sex and sexual orientation. Sociopaths are unusually impressionable, very flexible with their own sense of self. Because we don’t have a rigid self-image or worldview, we don’t observe social norms, we don’t have a moral compass, and we have a fluid definition of right and wrong. We can also be shape-shifters, smooth-talking and charming. We do not have an established default position on anything. We do not have anything that we would call conviction. This extends, at least in some degree, to our sexuality.

  Indeed, the characteristic of asexuality or sexual ambiguity is noted as one of the symptoms of sociopathy under many of the diagnostic criteria. For example, Cleckley’s criteria for psychopathy include sex lives that are “impersonal, trivial, and poorly integrated.” I would say that this accurately describes mine. But I feel pretty okay about it.

  A friend tells me that what she dislikes the most about my religious values is the ban on premarital sex. Of course I still manage to do a lot of things, but she worries that because sex is so much fun, it’s a shame for me to be missing out on any of it. She’s a deeply emotional person, though, and I am not at all. I can’t help but think the emotional component of sex for her is what makes it so great, whereas the emotional connection I have from physical intimacy is roughly the same as I have while eating junk food (cheeseburgers are great, too!). This is true even when I am in a serious relationship. And because it’s that way with me, being physical with someone is pretty fun, but it doesn’t mean anything to me in the way it means things to other people, and it never leads to tears (for me). This is also why seduction for me is more about the chase and less about the final act.

  My lovers, if you can call them that, can sometimes be put off by this nonchalant attitude. I am shockingly comfortable with my body, which I think is a turn-on for a lot of people. I try not to be too reckless, but my indiscretion with things like nude photos must seem unusual since I’m neither a stupid teenager nor a drug-addled stripper. But then again, I have always related better to people who feel they have nothing to lose. Once it becomes clear that I just have no sense of shame or emotional attachment to physical intimacy, though, I suspect I just seem damaged, in the way of teenagers and strippers, or women with sexual hang-ups or abuse in their background. If anything, you would think that my religious beliefs would have encouraged me to think of sex as a special communion of souls, rather than the emotional equivalent of a massage.

  My cavalier attitude toward sex extends to my choice of gender in partners. I was not always sexually attracted to women. I was always open to it, always was attracted to certain people for their strength or for their unique worldview, but I didn’t feel much of a sexual pull to members of my own sex—not at first. As an adult I realized that there was such pleasure to be had in expanding my horizons, so to speak, and certainly no point in making fine distinctions based on the equipment people were born with. So I trained myself. I started incorporating members of the same sex into my fantasies, substituting women for men gradually more and more until I could have a completely same-sex fantasy. Now same-sex attraction is second nature to me, and I am very satisfied with the expansion of my opportunities.

  As a sociopath, I feel I have no particular sexual identity. Even the term bisexual is misleading as it implies some sort of preference. I think equal opportunity is a more apt label in that I see no reason to discriminate. In fact, I like to think of the sociopath a
s the bonobo of the human world—engaging in frequent, casual, utilitarian sex. I believe that ambiguous sexuality is one of the best identifying traits of a sociopath.

  In fact, early in its history as a psychological disorder, sociopathy was thought to be connected to homosexuality or other “abnormal” sexual behaviors. The original Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), released by the American Psychiatric Association in 1952, listed homosexuality as a sociopathic personality disturbance. By the second DSM, the link between sociopathy and homosexuality was abandoned, and homosexuality was removed completely as a mental disorder from the third DSM.

  In later editions of his book, Cleckley criticized this early association of psychopathy with homosexuality, arguing that homosexual tendencies, “though of course occurring in psychopaths, are not sufficiently common to be regarded as characteristic.” However, he also acknowledged that “[t]he real homosexual seeking an outlet for his own impulses often finds it possible to engage the psychopath in deviated activities, sometimes for petty rewards, sometimes for what might best be called just the hell of it.” Cleckley related several stories of sociopaths engaged in homosexual acts, like Anna, and the story of this wealthy young scion, for whom “any idea that he might be a homosexual seemed absurd”:

  In the absence of any persistent or powerful urge in this specific direction, the patient, apparently without much previous thought, hit upon the notion of picking up four Negro men who worked in the fields not far from his residence. In a locality where the Ku Klux Klan (and its well-known attitudes) at the time enjoyed a good deal of popularity, this intelligent and in some respects distinguished young man showed no compunction about taking from the field these unwashed laborers, whom he concealed in the back of a pickup truck, with him into a well-known place of amorous rendezvous. At the place he chose, “tourists’ cabins” were discreetly set up in such a way that women brought by men to them for familiar purposes could enter without the possible embarrassment of being identified by the management. Despite these facilities suspicion arose, and the patient was surprised by the man in charge of the resort while in the process of carrying out fellatio on his four companions. He had chosen to take the oral role.