Confessions of a Sociopath (10 page)

Some of the most formative environmental factors for sociopaths may have happened before the sociopath’s earliest memory. Although the brain doesn’t reach maturity until twenty, according to Dr. Goleman, the first twenty-four months of a human being’s life are most central to her development, as it is the period of greatest growth. For mice, the corollary period is the first twelve hours after birth. Baby mice who are licked and thus nurtured more by their mothers during these hours thrive better and are more clever and self-assured; those babies that are less licked become slower learners, easily overwhelmed, and anxious. Scientists have hypothesized that for humans the equivalent might be empathy, attunement, and touch. Dr. Goleman’s research accords with the infant attachment theory first developed by psychiatrist and psychoanalyst John Bowlby, who conducted research on orphans after World War II. He and other scientists found that children who had not been regularly touched in their infancy failed to thrive, did not grow, and even sometimes died. According to attachment theory, infants who receive insufficient or no responses from their parents during distress grow to be rebellious, independent, and detached children, failing to prefer their parents over strangers. As adults they have trouble making lasting, meaningful relationships.

When I was an infant I had a particularly bad case of colic, a poorly understood condition affecting infants whose main symptom is frequent, inconsolable crying. My parents complain about it even now, what a difficult child I was, especially because I came so soon after my brother Jim, who was needy in his way.

My parents have very vivid memories of taking me to functions with my extended family during which I would wail the entire time. Each aunt, uncle, or grandparent would think they had the solution, and each would eventually give up in desperation. When my parents recount the stories now, they express a hint of vindication that no one else could console me. It seems to reflect a happy truth for them—that there was nothing wrong with them as parents, only something wrong with me. My father openly acknowledges that he would frequently just leave me in a room to cry myself to exhaustion. At the age of six weeks I was finally taken to my pediatrician—I had ruptured my navel due to excessive crying. I’m sure my parents did as well as they could, but it no doubt must have been difficult to tolerate such a child, much less nurture it.

Long after my colic days were done, my mother says that I was a remarkably independent child. When I was left in the church’s nursery for the first time, I was the only baby who didn’t cry or ask for my parents, playing quietly and happily with the unfamiliar toys of the schoolroom until I was picked up. It was as if it made no difference to me where I was or who was looking after me. Maybe I missed a window of opportunity, like those less-licked baby mice.

The brain learns different skills at different stages that are tied to neural development and growth. If a child misses the correct developmental window to learn a particular skill or concept, for example empathy, that child’s brain may never be able to catch up or become normal. The most extreme examples are of children who grow up in isolation or in the wild, sometimes known as feral children. The
Tampa Bay Times
reported the story of Danielle Crockett, who was rescued by police from her mother’s trash- and vermin-filled home in July 2005. Upon discovering Danielle locked in a closet and living
in her own filth, one of the officers, a rookie, staggered out the front door to vomit. A veteran investigator of the Florida Department of Children and Families was spotted hunched over the steering wheel of her parked car, sobbing. “Unbelievable,” she described it. “The worst I’ve ever seen.” Danielle was six years old at the time but looked more like a four-year-old. She wore diapers, was nonverbal, and was unable to walk or feed herself. As the police officer flung her over his shoulder, her diaper leaking down his uniform, her mother shrieked at him, “Don’t take my baby!”

Danielle had a “normal” brain, with no sign of genetic mental retardation, but she behaved as if she were severely mentally handicapped. One doctor called it “environmental autism,” although as she put it, “even a child with the most severe autism responds to [hugs and affection].” Danielle did not react to people in any way. “In the first five years of life, 85 percent of the brain is developed,” she said. “Those early relationships, more than anything else, help wire the brain and provide children with the experience to trust, to develop language, to communicate. They need that system to relate to the world.”

Danielle will never be normal. After several years she was able to be potty trained and taught how to feed herself, though she still does not speak. When she was taken in by an adoptive family, the
Miami Herald
asked, “Will their love be enough?” The short answer is no. Her brain had missed too many windows of opportunity—too many neural connections were never made.

Sometimes I hear people say that they were “born this way,” whatever way that happens to be. To say you are born a sociopath is like saying you were born smart or born tall. Yes, you may have the genetic predisposition for intelligence or height,
or indeed to speak or walk upright, but the existence of feral children is an important reminder that no one is destined for any outcome at birth, that we rely on the most basic daily interactions, nutrition, culture, education, experiences, and myriad other influences in our development to become who we become.

Was I born to charm? Born to harm? If we can’t say for sure, then how did I get here? Given that a propensity for emotional problems runs in my family, I think my genetic predisposition to sociopathy was triggered largely because I never learned how to trust. In particular, my parents’ erratic emotional lives taught me that I couldn’t depend on anyone to protect me. Rather than looking to other people for stability, I learned to depend on myself. Because interaction with other people is inevitable, I inevitability learned manipulation, particularly how to direct and misdirect people’s attention to achieve my desired outcomes. For instance, my experiences taught me that it was useless to appeal to people’s love or sense of duty, so I appealed to other, more salient emotions like fear or people’s own desperate desire to be loved. I viewed everyone as objects, pieces in my chess game. I had no awareness of their own internal worlds and no understanding of their emotional palette because their bright hues were so different from my own drab shades of gray. Perhaps because I never thought of people as being distinct individuals with their own senses of self and manifest destiny, I never learned to think of myself that way either. I had no definite sense of self to adhere to or otherwise be invested in. Largely without structure, my life became an endless series of reactions to contingencies, impulsive decision-making driving me from one day to the next. Unlike people without my genetic predispositions who might have come out of these experiences desperately searching for love to fill the void, I felt largely indifferent.

After my brother Jim and I walked home from the park that day, our parents’ car was parked outside in the driveway, just like it always was. Inside, they didn’t ask us any questions. In general, they didn’t worry about our suffering. I think our suffering did not register with them because they could feel no consequences resulting from it. And because we were the kind of children that accepted silence as explanation, they never experienced recrimination. It was as if it had never happened. They went to bed that night satisfied that their children were safe and warm like anyone else’s.

Now that I am grown and can see my family dynamics with better perspective, I am more convinced than ever that the environment in which I was raised had a significant role to play in my development into a sociopath. Lots of children live in families with unreliable parents, physical discipline, and financial instability—these things aren’t uncommon. But I can see how the antisocial behaviors and mental posturing that now define me were incentivized when I was growing up—how my own emotional world was stifled and how understanding and respect for the emotional world of others died away. But there’s a chicken-and-egg problem here: it’s hard to know whether my distrust of my dad’s overt displays of compassion caused me to downplay my own sense of morality, or whether I never really had much of a conscience to begin with, and that is why my dad always seemed so ridiculous to me.

I don’t ever remember thinking differently than I do now, but I do have a sensation or memory of an early cognitive fork where I chose to think more proactively. I must have been somewhere between ages four and six. Here’s an example to illustrate what I mean: Have you ever been a pedestrian at a traffic light? There’s always a moment of hesitation when you arrive at your corner and see the red hand telling you it’s not
safe to walk. You could follow what it says and just wait your turn. Or you could make your own assessment of whether it is safe to cross by looking at the cars and studying the traffic light patterns. There are advantages to both approaches. The one is safe and doesn’t require mental effort. The other one is risky and possibly will only shave a few seconds off your commute at best and land you in the hospital at worst. But if you get good at it, those few seconds could multiply by the thousands over years of commuting. And there’s something demoralizing about standing on a corner while a host of braver souls plows into the intersection, eager to get on with their lives.

I could sense this was true about life, even at the age of four or so. I could choose to take charge of my life, to leverage my time, talents, and health, and to potentially profit or die trying. Or I could contentedly get in line and wait my turn. It was not a difficult choice to make, but rather a decision made in direct response to my environment and how I could best survive and even thrive in that environment. My way seemed to offer a competitive advantage. I chose to eschew relying on instinct and instead to rely on rigid mental analysis and hyper-awareness of all of my thoughts, actions, and decisions.

Years later I questioned whether I had made a mistake—and whether it was possible for me somehow to still be normal. Maybe there were legitimate reasons why everyone else thought the way they did about life. Maybe crying really is the best response to being hurt instead of vengeance. Maybe love is more valuable than power in relationships. But by then it was too late. The windows had closed.

Growing up, everyone in the family was inclined to interpret things that I did as normal. There were other words for what I was, words other than “sociopath.” “Tomboy” explained why I was reckless all of the time. Did you know that drowning
deaths for boys are four times what they are for girls? No one really has a good explanation other than that boys tend to be more reckless, less judicious, and more impulsive. So when I was a child jumping off ocean jetties into heavy surf, no one thought I was a sociopath—they thought I was a tomboy.

“Precocious” explained my fixation on the power structures of the adult world. Most children are content to live in their own child worlds. I found my peers, particularly my non-siblings, to be unbearably simpleminded. Unlike them, I was obsessed with learning everything there was to learn about how the world worked, on both micro and macro levels. I would hear something in school or in casual adult conversation like
Vietnam
or
atomic bomb
and then spend a week or two obsessed with learning everything I could about this new thing, this thing that seemed to matter so much to other people. I remember the first time I heard about AIDS. I must have been seven or eight years old. My aunt was babysitting me. She was a childlike woman and I could tell from her interactions with my parents that she had no power or influence in the outside world (there were plenty of those people, I had already noticed). She doted on us because she had no children of her own (there were many of those people as well, easy marks for a child’s manipulation). We heard
AIDS
on the news. My aunt got upset and started crying. I didn’t know at the time but found out soon that her uncle, my great-uncle, was sick, and gay, and that was one of the reasons why AIDS seemed so fraught for her and others. I asked her what AIDS was. She gave me a child’s understanding of the disease that should have satisfied me, but it didn’t. My need to know the whys and hows of the world was not easily sated. I continued to ask other adults (the only people who seemed interested in the things I was interested in were adults) and they laughed at my interest, calling me
precocious. They didn’t call me a sociopath. They never wondered why I wanted to know. They assumed that I wanted to know for the same reason that they wanted to know—fear. And that was partly true, but I was not afraid of AIDS. I only wanted to understand completely why AIDS made everyone else afraid. So it never mattered much what I did because they would readily excuse my behavior in whatever way was convenient or simply ignore it.

As a child, my outsize inner life seeped out onto the surface in all sorts of messy ways that my family pretended not to see. I talked to myself all the time, repeating everything I said sotto voce as if I were acting in a dress rehearsal. My parents ignored my blatant and awkward attempts to manipulate, deceive, and inveigle adults. They neglected to notice the odd way that I associated with my childhood acquaintances without really forming connections, never seeing them as anything more than moving objects—instruments in my games. I lied all the time. I stole things, but more often than not, I would just trick kids into giving them to me. I snuck into people’s homes and rearranged their belongings. I broke things, burned things, and bruised people.

And I played my part beautifully. I never failed to up the ante in our neighborhood games. If we were jumping off the diving board into the pool, I asked how much more fun it would be to jump off the roof into the pool. If we were dressing up in paramilitary garb, I suggested that we might as well kidnap our neighbor’s lawn ornaments and make elaborate ransom notes for them. We cut out letters from magazines and made a “proof of life” video. Because the neighbors were so good-spirited and we had taken such pains in accomplishing our absurd adventures, we got away with smiles all around.