The Sociopath Next Door (13 page)

Why are conscience-bound human beings so blind? And why are they so hesitant to defend themselves, and the ideals and people they care about, from the minority of human beings who possess no conscience at all? A large part of the answer has to do with the emotions and thought processes that occur in us when we are confronted with sociopathy. We are afraid, and our sense of reality suffers. We think we are imagining things, or exaggerating, or that we ourselves are somehow responsible for the sociopath's behavior. But before we discuss in detail our own psychological reactions to shamelessness, allow me to put these reactions in context by clearly describing what we are up against. Let us first take a careful look at the formidable techniques used by the shameless to keep us in line.

The Tools of the Trade

The first such technique is charm, and as a social force, charm should not be underestimated.

Doreen could be extremely charming when it suited her purposes. Our old friend Skip used his considerable charm to influence his business associates and to grease the fast track to corporate dominance. And charm—though the link may seem counterintuitive—is a primary characteristic of sociopathy. The intense charm of people who have no conscience, a kind of inexplicable charisma, has been observed and commented on by countless victims, and by researchers who attempt to catalog the diagnostic signs of sociopathy. It is a potent characteristic. Most of the victims I have known in my work have reported that their initial involvement with a sociopathic person, and their continued association even though she or he caused them pain, was a direct result of how
charming
she or he could be. Countless times, I have watched people shake their heads and make statements such as, “He was the most charming person I ever met,” or “I felt like I'd known her forever,” or “He had an energy about him that other people just don't have.”

I liken sociopathic charm to the animal charisma of other mammals who are predators. We watch the large cats, for example, and are fascinated with their movements, their independence, and their power. But the direct gaze of a leopard, should one happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, is inescapable and tetanizing, and the fascinating charm of the predator is often the last thing the prey ever experiences. (I speak of noble leopards, but I have heard abused and enraged victims use metaphors that were decidedly reptilian.)

Enhancing the animal charisma of sociopaths, there is our own mild affinity for danger. Conventional wisdom has it that dangerous people are attractive, and when we are drawn to sociopaths, we tend to prove out this cliché. Sociopaths are dangerous in many ways. One of the most conspicuous is their preference for risky situations and choices, and their ability to convince others to take risks along with them. On occasion—but only on occasion—normal people enjoy minor risks and thrills. We will get out our wallets and pay for a ride on a monster roller coaster we cannot imagine surviving, or for a seat in a movie theater showing a bloody thriller we are certain will give us bad dreams. Our normal affinity for the occasional thrill can make the risk-taking sociopath seem all the more charming—at first. Initially, it can be exciting to be invited into the risky scheme, to be associated with the person who is making choices outside of our ordinary boundaries.

Let us take your credit card and fly to Paris tonight. Let us take your savings and start that business that sounds so foolish but, with two minds like ours, could really take off. Let us go down to the beach and watch the hurricane. Let us get married right now. Let us lose these boring friends of yours and go off somewhere by ourselves. Let us have sex in the elevator. Let us invest your money in this hot tip I just got. Let us laugh at the rules. Let us walk into this restaurant dressed in our T-shirts and jeans. Let us see how fast your car can go. Let us live a little.

Such is the flavor of sociopathic “spontaneity” and risk taking and “charm,” and though we may chuckle about the obvious come-ons when we read them, the overall approach has met with noteworthy success time and again. Someone who is unfettered by conscience can easily make us feel that our lives are tediously rule-bound and lackluster, and that we should join him in what is typically represented as a more meaningful or exhilarating form of existence. Beginning with Eve and the serpent, our history books and our classic fiction are filled with tales of people who have been taken in and sometimes destroyed by the slick talk and magnetism of risk takers and evildoers—Dickie Greenleaf and the talented Mr. Ripley, Samson and Delilah, River City and Harold Hill, Trilby and Svengali, Norman Mailer and Jack Henry Abbott, Empress Alexandra and the seemingly immortal Rasputin. And from our own lives, we have memories of brushes with such people that send little cold chills up our spines. That is, if we are lucky we have had only brushes. The unfortunate must live with the indelible memories of outright personal catastrophes that occurred when they fell victim to the charm of the shameless.

Moreover, the shameless know us much better than we know them. We have an extremely hard time seeing that a person has no conscience, but a person who has no conscience can instantly recognize someone who is decent and trusting. Even as a child, Skip knew which boy he could talk into acquiring his fireworks for him. As an adult, he immediately perceived that Juliette could live with him for decades and never question his florid activities. Doreen Littlefield saw an easy mark in Ivy, the receptionist, and understood perfectly well that Jackie Rubenstein was a caring person who could be counted on to assume more than her fair share of responsibility.

When a sociopath identifies someone as a good game piece, she studies that person. She makes it her business to know how that person can be manipulated and used, and, to this end, just how her chosen pawn can be flattered and charmed. In addition, she knows how to promote a sense of familiarity or intimacy by claiming that she and her victim are similar in some way. Victims often recall statements that affected them even after the sociopath was gone, such as, “You know, I think you and I are a lot alike,” or “It's so clear to me that you're my soul mate.” In retrospect, these remarks can feel supremely demeaning. Outrageously untrue, they haunt the mind nonetheless.

Relatedly, people without conscience have an uncanny sense of who will be vulnerable to a sexual overture, and seduction is another very common sociopathic technique. For most people, a sexual liaison involves an emotional tie, even if only fleetingly, and such ties are used by the coldly remorseless to get what they want—allegiance, financial support, information, a sense of “winning,” or perhaps just a temporary relationship that has the appearance of being normal. This is an easily recognized story, and another one that repeats itself often in our literature and history. But seldom do we recognize the degree of power it bestows on sociopaths, power over individuals, of course, and also over groups of people, and institutions. A sociopath who is hiding out in an organization can have his or her tracks hidden indefinitely by just one or two normal individuals who have made the single mistake of consummating their attraction to this charmingly dangerous person. Doreen, for example, was able to pose as a psychologist primarily because letters of reference were written by two people she had manipulated sexually. And when Jackie tried to expose Doreen's sociopathic behavior, a third person, the unit director, ran interference probably for the same reason, and the seductive “Dr.” Littlefield remained at the hospital for six additional years.

And sexual seduction is only one aspect of the game. We are seduced as well by the acting skills of the sociopath. Since the scaffolding of a life without conscience is deception and illusion, intelligent sociopaths often become proficient at acting, and even at some of the particular techniques employed by professional actors. Paradoxically, the visible signs of emotion at will can become second nature to the cold-blooded—the appearance of intense interest in another person's problems or enthusiasms, chest-thumping patriotism, righteous indignation, blushing modesty, weepy sadness. Crocodile tears at will are a sociopathic trademark. Making sure that Ivy would see and be psychologically seduced by them, Doreen cried crocodile tears over her patient Dennis, and no doubt she cried them in front of Ivy again, profusely, when she inevitably made up the terrible, painful illness that “forced” her to have her little dog put to sleep.

Crocodile tears from the remorseless are especially likely when a conscience-bound person gets a little too close to confronting a sociopath with the truth. A sociopath who is about to be cornered by another person will turn suddenly into a piteous weeping figure whom no one, in good conscience, could continue to pressure. Or the opposite: Sometimes a cornered sociopath will adopt a posture of righteous indignation and anger in an attempt to scare off her accuser, as Doreen did with the hospital directors when she was finally fired.

Being natural actors, conscienceless people can make full use of social and professional roles, which constitute excellent ready-made masks that other people are loath to look behind. Roles help us organize our complex society, and they are tremendously important to us. If we see suspicious behavior, we may eventually question someone named Doreen Littlefield, but we are quite unlikely to question someone called
Dr.
Doreen Littlefield, no matter how unusual her behavior. We relate to the title of
doctor,
which holds a clear and positive meaning for us, and we do not think too hard about the human being who calls herself that. To some extent, the same is true for people who have (legally or illegally) assumed roles and titles in the arenas of leadership, business, organized religion, education, or parenthood. Seldom do the neighbors scrutinize the behavior of the church deacon or the town selectman or the high school principal or a business prodigy like Skip. We believe promises from such people because we assign to the individual the integrity of the role itself. In like fashion, we almost never challenge a neighbor's parenting practices, even when we fear that a child is being abused, and often our logic is no more substantial than “
He
's the parent.”

In addition, we are distracted from a person's actual behavior when he represents himself as in some way benevolent, creative, or insightful. We do not suspect people who claim to be animal lovers, for example. We give extra leeway to those who identify themselves as artists or intellectuals, in part because we attribute any departures from the norm to eccentricities we, as ordinary people, could not possibly understand. In general, our regard for such groups is a constructive sentiment, but it does sometimes open the door for sociopaths who can mimic the others.

Worse, our respect for people who appear to be inspired and benevolent leaders can be abused—has been abused many times—to cataclysmic ends. With a leader, especially one who claims to have a sublime mission, as with a doctor or a priest or a parent, we tend to bestow the qualities of the role on the individual, and to follow the individual accordingly. Benjamin Wolman, founder and editor of the
International Journal of Group Tensions
, writes, “Usually human cruelty increases when an aggressive sociopath gains an uncanny, almost hypnotic control over large numbers of people. History is full of chieftains, prophets, saviors, gurus, dictators, and other sociopathic megalomaniacs who managed to obtain support . . . and incited people to violence.” Insidiously, when such a “savior” abducts the normal population to his purposes, he usually begins with an appeal to them as good people who would like to improve the condition of humanity, and then insists that they can achieve this by following his own aggressive plan.

In a confusing irony, conscience can be rendered partially blind because people without conscience use, as weapons against us, many of the fundamentally positive tools we need to hold society together—empathic emotions, sexual bonds, social and professional roles, regard for the compassionate and the creative, our desire to make the world a better place, and the organizing rule of authority. And people who do hideous things do not look like people who do hideous things. There is no “face of evil.” If we could somehow subtract all its horrifying connotations, the actual face of Saddam Hussein looks rather avuncular, and has often been recorded as having a big friendly smile. Hitler's face, had it not become an icon of evil because of the atrocities his life engendered, might be considered almost comical, Chaplinesque as it were, in its foolish expression. Lizzy Borden looked like all the other laced-up Victorian ladies in Fall River, Massachusetts. Pamela Smart is pretty. Ted Bundy was so handsome that women sent marriage proposals to him on death row, and for every leering Charles Manson, there is the radiantly innocent countenance of a John Lee Malvo.

We try, consciously or tacitly, to judge a person's character by his or her appearance, but this book-by-its-cover strategy is ineffective in nearly all cases. In the real world, the bad guys do not look the way they are supposed to. They do not resemble werewolves or Hannibal Lechter or Tony Perkins staring at a corpse in a rocking chair. On the contrary, they look like us.

Gaslight

Being targeted by a sociopath is a very frightening experience, even when that sociopath is not of the violent variety. In 1944, George Cukor directed a psychological thriller entitled
Gaslight,
in which a beautiful young woman, played by Ingrid Bergman, is made to feel she is going insane. Her fear that she is losing her mind is inflicted on her systematically by Charles Boyer, who plays her evil but charming new husband. Among a number of other dirty tricks, Boyer arranges for Bergman to hear sounds in the attic when he is absent, and for the gaslight to dim by itself, in a menacing house where her aunt was mysteriously murdered years before. Of course, no one believes Bergman about the noises in the attic or the gaslight or much of anything else, and her gradual descent into doubting her own reality has found its way into English idiom as “to be gaslighted.” Boyer is not violent. He never strikes Bergman. Much more sinister—he causes her to lose faith in her own perceptions.