Confessions of a Sociopath (8 page)

This linear grading system is in line with recent evidence that, in Robert Hare’s words, “psychopathy is dimensional (i.e., more or less), not categorical (i.e., either or).” Those with higher scores are more outwardly antisocial, but even those with lower scores “may present significant problems for those around them, just as those with blood pressure readings below an accepted threshold for hypertension may be at medical risk.” So Dr. Edens also had me take several other personality tests designed to look for sociopathic personalities. The most specific to sociopathy was probably the Psychopathic Personality Inventory–Revised (PPI-R), a self-report questionnaire developed to tap various personality characteristics historically thought to be indicative of psychopathic personality. This scale provides both a total score indicative of a global index of
psychopathic traits as well as eight subscales that assess more specific traits. Dr. Edens reported: “Perhaps more notably, Ms. Thomas’s results were beyond the 99th percentile for any sub-sample within the PPI-R’s normative database, regardless of age or gender. Needless to say, these findings are highly consistent with a psychopathic personality structure.”

Other tests included the revised NEO Personality Inventory, also a self-report questionnaire, for which Dr. Edens noted that my profile mirrored that of “the prototypical psychopathic personality among females.” Finally, I took the Personality Assessment Inventory, for which I scored very high for traits like egocentrism and sensation-seeking characteristics, interpersonal dominance, verbal aggression, and excessive self-esteem, as well as very low scores on measures tapping negative affective experiences (e.g., phobias, traumatic stressors, depressive symptoms), interpersonal nurturance, and stressful life events.

I liked Dr. Edens. He seemed like a reasonable person—a genuinely caring person. At one point during our interview I thought that he might cry, he seemed so distressed on my behalf. I don’t remember what we were discussing, perhaps some story about my father beating me. I think if anything he was worried for me—worried about what a diagnosis like “sociopath” would mean for me in my life. Of course it’s hard for me to worry about things like that. If I can’t manage to care about my own health and safety, I’m not likely to care about the potential fallout in my professional and personal life from being officially diagnosed a sociopath. He must have realized that too. Maybe that’s why he seemed troubled.

We talked about how none of the tests are designed for someone like me, who seeks the diagnosis of her own free will and choice. Criminals have an incentive in an institutional
setting to lie and distort their self-assessments, particularly in situations like a parole hearing. The diagnostic tests were designed to be administered with a healthy dose of skepticism. But what to do with an individual who seems to have an incentive to be diagnosed a sociopath? Several times he noted how I could possibly be tricking him by lying to him to make myself seem more sociopathic than I was, but he had to admit that lying for the purpose of self-aggrandizement was also consistent with sociopathy. Still, I wasn’t really tempted to lie. It would have seemed silly to lie. I was genuinely looking for answers and insight—as much as you can get from a three-hour appointment with a stranger.

Whenever suspected sociopaths write to me and ask whether they should get tested, I almost always tell them no. It’s just too risky. Because there is no real treatment, the only upside to a formal diagnosis is peace of mind, that you know who you are. The downside is having a major blemish on your record that could affect every aspect of your life, should it fall into the wrong hands. Even Dr. Edens showed an overabundance of caution in sanitizing the e-mailed version of the report, lest the “Internet gremlins” intercept it.

At the end of our several hourlong sessions Dr. Edens asked me, “What would you think if I told you that you are not a sociopath?” It was a question I had asked myself many times before. What if I just stopped the blog? What if I stopped trying to find answers in new psychological research? “I don’t know, I guess I would be annoyed that I spent all day traveling and talking to you for nothing?” I replied. He laughed. When it was time to leave he told me how much I owed him for his time. I had forgotten my checkbook. We both joked at how that was a likely story from a sociopath.

I left his office having no clue what he would put in the
report. But I knew we shared a perception that sociopathy was understudied, overvillainized, and an important issue to get right. When I got the report back a couple weeks later it confirmed what I had suspected for a while—both in terms of my own diagnosis and also understanding better the inconclusiveness and subjectivity of the modern psychiatric diagnostic process.

A final question regarding detection is, why do we need to detect sociopaths? When I was growing up, my grandfather raised chickens and other animals on his ranch. Each chicken laid approximately one egg a day, so if he had seven chickens at the time, we would expect to see seven eggs. My grandfather was always very careful to feed the chickens and collect the eggs every day and taught me to be equally diligent when I stayed with him. If not, he said, the chickens might turn to eating their own eggs, and once a chicken has a taste for egg, it will continue eating eggs and have to be killed. I don’t know if it is really true that there is no cure for a cannibalistic chicken, but that is what he told me to scare me into feeding the chickens and collecting their eggs regularly. One time while I was gone, he got sick and couldn’t visit the chicken coop every day to feed them and collect their eggs. When he finally did get out there, he saw broken eggshells everywhere, the evidence of egg eating. Ever after, there were always one or two eggs missing from or pecked over in the daily collections. At least one chicken had gotten a taste for egg and wasn’t willing to give it up, even with the renewed ample food source.

“How are we going to find out which one of them it is?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“We need to kill the chicken that is eating the other eggs.”

He just laughed.

“No, seriously, Grandpa. One of these chickens is eating our food, taking up room in our coop, and ruining our eggs. We have to find out which one it is and kill it, right?”

“I don’t have time to sit watching chickens. Plus that chicken actually helps. It helps to remind me to stay vigilant about caring for the other chickens and collecting the eggs. It also reminds me that nature is cutthroat, and that human nature is just that.”

I wasn’t satisfied with my grandfather’s reasoning. The next day I woke up early and kept watch over the chicken coop. I saw the chickens go into the nesting area and lay their eggs, one by one. I also saw one of the chickens begin toying with an egg with its claws and pecking at it with its beak. I thought about killing the chicken. I had learned how to slaughter a chicken by hanging it up by its feet, securing its head in my weak hand, and with my strong hand locating the jugular vein with a knife and slitting it open, spilling the blood on the ground while the chicken flapped itself to death. The whole process took no longer than five minutes. Instead I yelled at the chicken, causing it to scurry away. I gathered the remaining viable eggs and walked back into the house.

I wondered if the chickens knew which one was the egg eater, and if they didn’t, what they would do if they found out.

I grew up in a home with many siblings, but my favorite has always been my older brother Jim. When he was eighteen he snapped and became what he later called “the Lone Wolf.” On a trip with some of his friends he got sick and soiled himself in the parking lot of Walmart. The embarrassment and anxiety from this incident seems to have triggered a fugue state; he didn’t tell his friends or even have the common decency to go inside the store to clean up. Instead he stripped his underwear off and left it on the asphalt of the parking lot, and segregated himself from the rest of the group. After searching they found him wandering around a different section of the lot and with skill convinced him to return to the car. For the rest of the now-awkward trip he wore a single set of dirty clothes and refused to wash himself. For the most part, he couldn’t speak in coherent sentences, or really do anything to function like a human being. After a few days, he became Jim again, but he couldn’t answer questions about the Lone Wolf and still can’t.

For lack of better words, I would describe the adult Jim as
fragile. He is very sensitive to stress, easily overwhelmed by the most insignificant things, and almost consistently nervous. He acts like an abused dog that has been kicked one too many times in the stomach to feel at ease around strangers. Despite intensive therapy, he still can’t seem to keep it together and will lash out in passive-aggressive ways or retreat completely, leaving a shell of himself behind. When I look at him I sometimes wonder, is this what empath M.E. would have looked like? I could never imagine myself turning out like Jim, which makes me wonder—how did the same stimulation produce two opposite characters? I often think about Jim—my empathetic counterpart—when questions arise about whether I was born as a sociopath or made into this by the circumstances of my childhood. There is compelling scientific evidence to suggest that sociopathy has a strong genetic component. Studies also show that sociopathic traits are stable and consistent through an individual’s lifetime. Identical twins who share 100 percent of their genes have been found far more likely to both exhibit sociopathic traits than fraternal twins, who share only 50 percent of their genes. The closest thing I have to a twin is my brother Jim. At a little more than a year apart in age, we were often mistaken for fraternal twins. Jim and I did everything together. It’s safe to say that we had nearly identical upbringings and experiences, but we turned into starkly opposite adults.

In a large park in the city where I grew up there was a giant concrete dinosaur, a brontosaurus. Most of him lay beneath the surface of the sandlot, his massive body never to be excavated. Only his long neck and purple tail stuck out into the world—perfect for us kids to climb and swing on. My brother Jim and I spent a lot of time with the brontosaurus in
late afternoons and early evenings—sometimes many hours—when my mother was meant to pick us up after school. It was near to the school but remote enough that it was out of sight of the school monitors. No one would suspect we had been forgotten by our parent, and we had prepared stories for ourselves in case anyone approached us: “Our mom is at the principal’s office discussing our progress,” or “Our mom was just called away for an emergency. She is having a neighbor come get us right now.” The truth is we had no idea why our mother never seemed to be able to pick us up on time, but we didn’t want to deal with the hassle of concerned strangers, so we lied. The story always involved a responsible adult just footsteps away, even as the sunlight waned.

One sunny afternoon when I was around ten years old and my brother eleven, my parents took us down to the park. It must have been a primary school holiday, because I remember that our older brother still had high school, but there were no other kids around. They deposited us by the brontosaurus and went off to do their own thing while we played our warrior and submarine games with each other and our old, slightly decrepit dinosaur friend, flipping ourselves onto his neck, reaching our arms into the dark crevasse of his lazily half-open mouth. When we tired of him, we hiked into the bamboo-infested creek and pretended we were Vietcong soldiers padding soundlessly through the jungle.

After an hour or so of this, we headed back to the parked car just in time to see our parents get in. I remember seeing my father open the door for my mother and her taking her seat in the leisurely, elegant way that she often did. Since my parents appeared to be getting ready to leave, my brother and I picked up our speed and walked a little faster toward them. We were looking forward to going home and getting something to eat,
as our soldiering play had worked up our appetites. We were about 150 yards away from them when we heard the car start, but we didn’t begin sprinting until we saw the car’s reverse lights flash on, indicating that they had shifted out of park. I am not sure when I realized that our parents were leaving us. Even as the car drove through the narrow park roads, and we ran as fast as we could and screamed at the top of our lungs, I didn’t think that they would leave. I wonder if they saw their kids trailing them in their rearview mirror like a scene from a horror show, monsters from whom they were trying desperately to escape in a low-speed chase—the low rumbling of their car in contrast to our wild gasping and hoarse yelling, our animal footfalls haphazard against the pavement.

We followed my parents’ car for a half mile or more, but we weren’t quite able to keep up with them through the park roads. When they hit the main road, we couldn’t keep up at all, and they were soon gone.

The moment when you stop running after your parents’ car is the moment that you lose hope.
The gods are fallen and all safety is gone
. It is a physical realization, in which hope drains out of you in direct proportion to the dwindling adrenaline that propels your body forward. Hundreds of pounding heartbeats later, doubled over and gasping for breath in the middle of the road, we might have listened for the sound of brakes and a car turning around. If we did, we didn’t share it with each other. Instead, we made suggestions as to why they would leave us. Maybe they forgot that we had come with them, or there really had been some kind of emergency, perhaps involving dismemberment or maiming. Maybe they had gotten into an argument. We attempted to find patterns in their behavior, any sort of predictability that we could rely on, but their actions were often unexplainable. We sensed, though,
that they would not come back for us. Actually, we knew they wouldn’t, and they didn’t.