M. Thomas: Confessions of a Sociopath

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.”