Confessions of a Sociopath

by M. E. Thomas

  The general consensus has held that sociopathy is an untreatable disorder, but as evidence mounts that the brain is more plastic, or changeable, than we thought, researchers are beginning to propose that young sociopaths might be susceptible to early intervention. Perhaps children can be trained to develop their vestigial sense of empathy or learn to react appropriately to the emotions of people around them.

  As any sociopath knows, people are hardwired to be aggressive and selfish, but it turns out that most of us are also biologically programmed for basic human compassion. Even children from abusive, chaotic homes, the kind who are the most troublesome in school, can learn to listen to that whisper of empathy that seems to be hidden somewhere in them. A Canadian organization is sending mothers and young babies into classrooms to help schoolkids learn the basics of parenting skills. The students try to imagine what the baby is experiencing, so they practice “perspective-taking.” The children observe the baby on his stomach barely able to lift his own head and then attempt to understand the baby’s perspective by themselves lying on the floor on their stomachs trying to look up. Perspective-taking is the cognitive dimension of empathy, and one that is not familiar or automatic to many of these schoolchildren. A developmental psychologist who has studied the program attests to the larger successes of the program: “Do kids become more empathic and understanding? Do they become less aggressive and kinder to each other? The answer is yes and yes.” Or, as Paul Frick says regarding child sociopaths, “you can teach a child to recognize the effects of their behavior.” Despite the genetic code written indelibly in our cells, the human mind is amazingly malleable and easily influenced by our experiences.

  I am very impressionable. I know that my genes might predispose me to the way I think and interact with the world, but I also take full responsibility for the amount of control I have over the rest. Every day I am in motion, sensitizing myself or desensitizing myself, constantly reshaping my brain, making and breaking habits, making myself more or less inclined to act or think a certain way.

  Everything I have done has changed me, for better or for worse. I didn’t realize this when I was a child. I’m lucky that I was raised in a very sheltered, devout religious home. We were not allowed to swear, not even damn or hell. We could not watch PG-13 movies until we were actually thirteen and we could never watch movies that were rated R. My father had a temper, but my parents never drank, did recreational drugs, or were otherwise out of their heads. My community was so conservative and predominantly born-again Christian that I suspect few of my friends in high school were sexually active—or if they were, I certainly wasn’t aware of it.

  It’s through experiences that normal-gened people can be desensitized to things like killing, and sociopathic-gened people can be sensitized to things like being aware of the needs of others. I was not desensitized to violence. If anything, I was sensitized to music. I learned to be quiet and to listen beyond the surface of things. I was sensitized to spirituality—I was taught to be self-reflective in prayer and other forms of worship. As a middle child and power broker, I cultivated an awareness of the needs of others. Like the children lying facedown on the floor attempting to see the world through a baby’s eyes, I was often forced to engage in perspective-taking focused on service and care for others. Even though my mind was not naturally directed to recognizing and responding to the needs of others, my parents, church leaders, and teachers actually did make a difference in making me acknowledge and address these issues.

  Not long ago, I read about a Mormon teenage girl who murdered a small child, luring her outside to play, strangling her to unconsciousness, and then slitting her throat to watch the blood drain away. After giving her victim a shallow burial, the girl went home to write in her journal of her breathless excitement and noted that she had to hurry off to church. At her trial, defense counsel demanded that the jury consider the difficult circumstances of the teenager’s childhood, characterized by parental abandonment and abuse.

  I am not violent. Despite having imagined it many times, I’ve never slit anyone’s throat. I wonder, though, if had I been raised in a less loving home, or a more abusive one, whether I would have also had blood on my hands. It often seems to me that these people who commit such heinous crimes—sociopath or empath—are not so much more damaged than everyone else, but that they seem to have less to lose. It’s easy to imagine an alternate universe in which a sixteen-year-old version of me would be handcuffed in an orange jumpsuit, on my way toward scheming for dominion over the juvenile prison population. If I had had no one to love or nothing to achieve, perhaps. It’s hard to say.

  A well-known recent example of nurture trumping nature is neuroscientist and University of California–Irvine professor James Fallon. Fallon specializes in studying the biological roots of behavior, and he is famous for his work with the distinctive brain scans of killers. While discussing his work at a family function, his mother told him that Lizzie Borden was a cousin of his. Startled by the revelation, he investigated and discovered that on one line of his family there were at least sixteen murderers—“a whole lineage of very violent people,” as he described it.

  He decided to check the brain scans and DNA of his family members for indications of sociopathy. He discovered that everyone was relatively normal, except for him—Fallon himself had the brain-scan signature of a killer as well as all of the genetic markers predisposing him to impulsivity, violence, and risky behavior. When he disclosed this information to his family, they were not surprised. “I knew there was always something off. It makes more sense now,” his son said. “Everything that you would want in a serial killer he has in a fundamental way.” His wife added, “It was surprising but it wasn’t surprising … he’s always had a standoffish part to him.” And Fallon, being honest with himself, admitted, “I have characteristics or traits, some of which are … psychopathic.” He gave the example of blowing off an aunt’s funeral. “I know something’s wrong, but I still don’t care.” Why didn’t he end up a killer? “It turns out that I had an unbelievably wonderful childhood”—he was doted on by his parents and surrounded by a loving family.

  For all these children like me, born with the monster genes of sociopathy, there are many paths to travel. The brain grows and changes in response to many influences. “Brain research is showing us that neurogenesis can occur even into adulthood,” says psychologist Patricia Brennan of Emory University. “Biology isn’t destiny. There are many, many places you can intervene along that developmental pathway to change what’s happening in these children.” Rather than waiting for sociopaths to turn violent or criminal and become a burden on the justice system, it seems conceivable that if we notice unusually antisocial traits in a child at a young age, we could prevent them from turning into criminals by redirecting them to a more positive route, through warm and affectionate parenting, as one early study has hinted, or through targeted therapy.

  I would not, like James Fallon, describe my parents as doting. I firmly believe that they taught me the skills to manage my sociopathic traits in a productive way, but I also believe that the way I was raised brought those traits to the surface. My father’s facile sentimentality made me distrust excessive displays of emotion, and my mother’s inconsistent care led me to believe that love could not be depended on. Though I never suffered from trauma or abuse, my parents’ own quirks of personality shaped who I am.

  Over the last couple of decades, psychiatric researchers have identified a dozen or so gene variants that can increase a person’s vulnerability to mood or personality disorders like depression, anxiety, risk taking, and sociopathy, but only if the person suffered a traumatic or highly stressful childhood or life experience. Through complex “gene-environment interactions,” it was believed that your “bad” genes could set you up for problems, and life events could then knock you down. Recently, however, a new hypothesis has emerged: These “bad” genes are not simple liabilities. In an unfavorable context, these genes can cause a person
problems, but in a positive context, the same genes can enhance a person’s life. An article by David Dobbs in the Atlantic describes this theory as “a completely new way to think about genetics and human behavior. Risk becomes possibility; vulnerability becomes plasticity and responsiveness. It’s one of those simple ideas with big, spreading implications. Gene variants generally considered misfortunes … can instead now be understood as highly leveraged evolutionary bets, with both high risks and high potential rewards.… With a bad environment and poor parenting … children [with these genes] can end up depressed, drug-addicted, or in jail—but with the right environment and good parenting, they can grow up to be society’s most creative, successful, and happy people.”

  This theory matches up with what I’ve observed in my own upbringing, and that of other successful sociopaths I know and hear from on my blog. Our genes and childhoods may have made us sociopaths, but we’re not destined for lives of unfettered evil. Instead, with the right kind of care, children like us can learn to do great things—even if they never learn to fully empathize with others:

  I’m no world leader, but I do have a well-paying professional job in a Fortune 500 company rather than languishing in prison, so I guess you could say I am a successful sociopath. I’m as capable as anyone else of learning from mistakes. I certainly never learned empathy, but I’m intelligent enough to learn rules and learn that breaking them often has consequences that are unpleasant. As to wanting to follow the rules, if following them benefits me sufficiently, then I’m fully capable of following them. If breaking them will bring consequences I don’t like, then I don’t break them. No empathy is involved, simply a logical examination of cause and effect.

  It is becoming increasingly clear that it is possible to be a sociopath and still be successful in normal society. Dr. Stephanie Mullins-Sweatt’s research into successful sociopaths confirms this, suggesting that a trait as simple as “conscientiousness” can make all of the difference between a successful and a criminal sociopath.

  I believe that sociopathic traits can be managed and even changed, particularly via early childhood intervention. This belief, although still not popular within the psychological community, is finally getting some traction. I believe that the existence of successful sociopaths suggests that this is true, that sociopaths are incredibly malleable and impressionable. Sociopaths are not influenced in the same ways as empaths, but sociopaths are just as susceptible to their own range of outside influence, perhaps even more susceptible. In research involving the propensity of toddlers to share, psychologist Ariel Knafo of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has researchers spend an hour of quality time with the toddlers. During a snack break, the researcher brings out two bags of a popular peanut-butter-flavored Israeli snack—Bambas. The youngster opens his pack to see the proper number of Bambas, twenty-four, but the researcher opens his to discover only three, to which he exclaims, “Mine has only three!” Some of the toddlers volunteer some of their own Bambas. Interestingly, the toddlers most likely to share are the toddlers who have a gene variant highly correlated with antisocial behavior in children. Leading researcher in child development Jay Belsky explains: “These genes aren’t about risk, it’s about a greater sensitivity to experience. If things go well for you when you’re young, the same genes that could have helped make a mess of you help to make you stronger and happier instead. It’s not vulnerability but responsiveness—for better or worse.” It’s this “for better or worse” aspect that is concerning when considering the possibility of raising a child genetically disposed to sociopathy.

  When I consider the possibility of having sociopath children and how I would raise them, I think the ideal situation would be for child sociopaths to be exposed to both a sociopathic parent or adult figure and an empathic person. An empathy role model is important for a sociopath in order to learn to respect how most of the world thinks. Steinbeck describes the origins of the sociopath Cathy’s mind-blindness to others:

  Nearly everyone in the world has appetites and impulses, trigger emotions, islands of selfishness, lusts just beneath the surface. And most people either hold such things in check or indulge them secretly. Cathy knew not only these impulses in others but how to use them for her own gain.

  It is quite possible that she did not believe in any other tendencies in humans, for while she was preternaturally alert in some directions she was completely blind in others.

  This description is particularly poignant for me because it provides a readily understood explanation for why Cathy cannot respect the inner worlds of others in a way that would allow her to check her antisocial behavior. All she sees are people’s frailties, which, when hidden from the outside world and only acknowledged and indulged in private, drive Cathy to conclude that people are gross hypocrites. She does not respect them, does not even consider their needs and wants worthy of her own consideration, largely because she cannot see the many ways in which empaths are worthy of her admiration and respect: “to a monster the norm is monstrous.”

  This is why I think it is so important for sociopathic children to be consistently exposed to a loving and admirable empathy figure, in order to realize that empaths are much more than the sum of their basest desires. A sociopathic child would need someone like my friend Ann, who, after I spent decades objectifying all other humans, finally got me to see that empaths were just like me, but different. And after I understood that basic fact, I was finally able to trust that things like “love” and “goodwill” were actual concepts that empaths felt and not just window dressing on lives lived in a collective delusion.

  I think that sociopathic children, like the schoolchildren who are learning empathy from babies, should be sensitized to the fact that there are others out there who are different from them, and in fact that most people are different from each other. I think most child sociopaths grow up thinking, first, that everyone is like them, but just not as good or smart or skilled; later they think they’re entirely alone and no one else is like them. If children sociopaths grew up realizing that they were different, and more important, that other people are also different from each other, I think they could be taught to respect those differences in a way that would make them uniquely sensitive to the needs of normal people.

  I also think a sociopath child should have a sociopath role model in his life. A fellow sociopath would help the child to know that he is not alone, that he is not a monster, “only a variation.” A sociopathic role model could help him guide some of his impulses into positive, pro-social activities. Children have legitimate needs and wants, and a sociopath role model might be able to address the special needs and wants of a sociopath child without alienating him with hints of moral repulsion. According to psychiatrist Liane Leedom, the author of Just Like His Father, the sociopath child’s needs must be acknowledged as legitimate but limited in socially acceptable ways through the use of redirecting the child’s attention to acceptable substitutes until the child can learn to meet his own needs “in a way that is productive rather than destructive.” It’s not a complete cure, but it is probably the best that can be hoped for.

  Who knows how children should be raised, really? In a New York Times Magazine article titled “How Do You Raise a Prodigy?” Andrew Solomon speaks of a prodigy as “a monster that violates the natural order,” who presents his parents with unique difficulties as “bewildering and hazardous as a disability.” Parents fear that they might either fail to cultivate their child’s unique gifts or push too hard and break their child’s spirit. These parental anxieties are even greater when it comes to children who are labeled special or different.

  With the benefit of adult hindsight, I believe that my parents remarkably managed to strike a proper balance for me. I’ve hated them sometimes, but for the most part, I’ve loved them the way one loves the sky or the ocean or home. I recently read an interview with the virtuoso and former prodigy Lang Lang in which he described what it was like to grow up with a tyrannical father: “If my f
ather had pressured me like this and I had not done well, it would have been child abuse, and I would be traumatized, maybe destroyed. He could have been less extreme, and we probably would have made it to the same place; you don’t have to sacrifice everything to be a musician. But we had the same goal. So since all the pressure helped me become a world-famous star musician, which I love being, I would say that, for me, it was in the end a wonderful way to grow up.”

  My hope for a sociopathic child would be that she might learn to leverage her gifts in order to achieve her own version of success—to find a sustainable and joyful way to appreciate a world of infinite possibilities and realities. Sociopathy does not necessarily equal misanthropy. It hasn’t been that way for me, and I think my parents have had much to do with that, even if their methods seem draconian or aspects of their personalities seem harmful. They made me feel like there was a place for me in the world, and to me that made all the difference.

  Perhaps if we treat sociopathic children more like prodigies and less like monsters, they might direct their unique talents toward pro-social activities that reward and sustain society rather than to antisocial or parasitic behaviors. Perhaps if they feel like there is a place for them in the world, they would say, as one child prodigy did, “At first, it felt lonely. Then you accept that, yes, you’re different from everyone else, but people will be your friends anyway.” Perhaps we could make the measured judgment that, even if we could, we wouldn’t want to train or love the sociopath out of them, because sociopaths are interesting people who make our world a more diverse, colorful place in ways that we can’t predict.

  EPILOGUE

  A reader of the blog wrote to me:

  Hello.