M. Thomas: Confessions of a Sociopath

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.

A reader of the blog wrote to me:

Hello.

I think I might be a sociopath, but I’m not sure. I don’t have a conscience per se, it’s more like a logical guide for what is right and wrong. Nothing turns my stomach, no type of immoral behavior enrages me unless I’m on the receiving end. All of my responses, even my “emotional” responses, are calculated and performed.

I know I’m not the smartest person on the planet—VERY WELL, but I feel it. As far as my heart and soul are concerned, there is nobody smarter on this planet, even though the very mind in question knows that’s not the case.

I use people when I can, so long as it doesn’t hurt them in the process. I’m not sure if that’s because I don’t want to hurt people or because I’d like to believe I’m not manipulative. Generally speaking, I don’t lie about anything except for my feelings.

But I don’t go out of my way to hurt people. I actually go out of my way NOT to hurt people. Pretty much my entire life IS an act, and I don’t really know who I am … but I’m definitely not normal, nor do I fit all of the negative aspects of the sociopath stereotype.

What does this sound like to you? I’m asking because as much as I’m able to make sense of the world around me, I cannot for the life of me make sense of myself. That is the one thing that my mind can’t penetrate. I can state facts about what I do, what I don’t do, my habits and tendencies, etc, but trying to form an opinion about myself is like walking through a minefield of self-deception and convenient stray thoughts.

This kind of question is common. Many of the people who identify as sociopaths who read and post on the blog are self-diagnosed. There is little advantage to being formally labeled sociopathic by the psychological community, but I believe that a lot of self-understanding can come from deciding for yourself that the label fits you. Here is how I answer these people:

You sound like a sociopath to me, but don’t be disheartened. I think you will find that as you continue to learn more about your condition and yourself, the world will begin to seem very right.

Self-deception is a classic denial symptom. Denying the sociopathic aspect of yourself distorts how you see others and impairs your judgment. It is important that you realize that you are different from others—this will help you to avoid hurting them. For instance, most people assume that everyone else is like them and project their own feelings and emotions on others, e.g., “I wouldn’t be offended by that comment, so they shouldn’t be, either.” This is faulty thinking. What you think or feel has nothing to do with what most people think or feel. In fact, it is best to avoid all normative judgments in favor of descriptive ones. Normative judgments hide a million different biases and self-deceptions that will lead you astray.

You are special. You are very smart, I am sure, but better than that, you think in a way that very few other people think. Your success at utilizing the intellect that you have likely lies in your ability to think outside of the box all the time. This is easy for you because you have never been inside the box—you don’t even know what it looks like. You can see things that no one else can because you have entirely different experiences coloring your clarity of vision—their blind spots are where you excel and vice versa.

You seek answers. You seek logic and structure. You probably see behavior around you from empaths that you cannot explain. The explanation for their behavior is the most complicated and difficult thing for a sociopath to understand, but in seeking those answers you will learn much about yourself as well. You will also learn that just because we can manipulate others does not mean we choose to do so. Just because we can exploit does not mean we choose to do so. Sometimes you find weaknesses that you do exploit, and sometimes you find flaws in society that you patch. Sociopathy includes both variants. Personal preference, upbringing, and life objectives can all influence why we choose to do what we do. What makes you a sociopath is not that you choose to do certain things, but that you are presented with an entirely different set of choices than a neurotypical person.

I would add that sociopaths are important to society because we are original thinkers. I like ingenuity; it’s probably the thing I admire most about humanity. Theo Jansen, the Dutch artist/sculptor/engineer responsible for Strandbeests (“beach animals”), gigantic moving sculptures made out of plastic piping that crawl along the Netherlands’ coasts, had this to say about the benefit to society of original thinkers:

Mine is not a straight path like an engineer’s, it’s not A to B. I make a very curly road just by the restrictions of goals and materials. A real engineer would probably solve the problem differently, maybe make an aluminum robot with motor and electric sensors and all that. But the solutions of engineers are often much alike. Everything we think can in principle be thought by someone else. The real ideas, as evolution shows, come about by chance.

Sociopaths’ minds are very different from most people’s. Our brain structure is different: smaller amygdala (emotional center), poorer connections between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex (decision-making, inter alia), what has been described as “potholes” in our brains, and a longer and thinner corpus callosum separating the hemispheres of our brains. What that means is our thought is not as dominated by emotions, nor do emotions drive our decision-making, and we can transfer information between the hemispheres of our brains abnormally fast. In other words, give us a problem to think about and we will naturally process it in a different way than people with typical brains. How that plays out in the individual sociopath depends on a lot of different factors, but I have met sociopaths who have both the innocence of children gleefully hurling their bodies into ocean waves and the ruthlessness of single-minded predators under threat. There’s something sort of refreshing about our brutal approach to the world. And when we live in a world where “everything we think can in principle be thought by someone else,” it might be nice to be around someone who is an entirely different “someone else” than you are.

I like who I am. I like that I am methodical, relentless, efficient, able to capitalize on any situation. I have friends, I value my family, I am a good colleague. Still, I often wonder what other things I may be missing out on in life. Love? Human understanding? Emotional intimacy? Do I experience those things in their fullness? Is my experience of these things a mere shadowy approximation of what is normal or a legitimate human experience in its own right? And if I have in any way chosen this life, have I chosen the better part?