Confessions of a Sociopath (13 page)

For my parents, their denial that anything might be wrong with me came from a deep insecurity that they had irrevocably damaged me. They had viewed me as troubled from birth, and everything they did after that seemed to make me worse. My tomboyishness made them worried that I would become a lesbian. My proclivity for violence, stealing, and arson made them anxious that I would become a criminal. I imagine that my colic as a baby must have set the tone for my parents in their relationship with me. There was nothing that could be done for me; my high-pitched complaints indicated to my parents that I had already decided they were inadequate. Even as a baby, I didn’t tire; I was relentless, unreasonable, and immoderate. They must have approached me with such consternation, as there were mysteries in me that simply could not be solved.

If I had grown up today, some elementary school teacher would probably have had a serious conversation with my parents and asked them to get me psychological testing. As it was, I wasn’t sent to a therapist until I was sixteen. By that time my mother had emotionally emancipated herself from my father’s dictatorial rule. She was keen to also get us the “emotional help” we needed, but I was the only one she deemed so damaged as to warrant professional help. By then she had noticed that I was not just fiercely independent and reckless, but also emotionally apathetic. And it didn’t seem like I was going to grow out of it. It was too late, though; I was already too smart for the therapist. Or maybe I was never amenable to therapy. Either way, I wasn’t going to change. I had already chosen to view the world as a set of opportunities at winning or losing in a zero-sum game, and I used every encounter to gain information to my advantage.

Everything I learned about people’s motivations, their expectations, desires, and emotional responses, was cataloged in
my mind for later use. Therapy was a treasure trove in this respect. It taught me about what was expected of me as a normal person and therefore made me better able to disguise myself, to scheme my manipulations with greater precision. In particular, it crystallized a valuable piece of data that I had already internalized—that frailty could excuse anything. I learned to capitalize on my vulnerabilities, real or imagined. Therapists helped me find them, as their job was to look for them, coming up with reasons for my deficits and digging for trauma wherever they could find it. So many valuable tactics for seduction and exploitation were uncovered in my teenage therapy sessions. And school was the society in which I could exercise those tactics.

When people on the blog and elsewhere ask me how they can know if they are sociopaths, I often ask them about their childhoods: If you were always on the outside looking in, separated from the other kids and maybe even from your family by a wall of emotions that they seemed to feel effortlessly while you did not; if you could instinctively get a sense of how power flowed between various cliques, between the students and the staff, and within your family; if belonging never meant anything to you yet you found you could easily enter and then manipulate any group at will; then maybe, just maybe, you were a tiny wolf in lamb’s wool, a young sociopath without knowing it.

My childhood was unusual only in that it never had a start and never had an end. From a very young age, I filled my life with minutiae and little conquests. While others were learning to play kickball, I learned to play people. I was not subtle. I used friends as pawns purely for access to their toys or whatever else they could offer me. I generally didn’t need to play out elaborate ruses of the kind I’d spin a few years later;
I simply did the minimum necessary to insinuate myself into their good graces so I could get what I needed: food at lunch when my family’s pantry was empty, rides home or to activities when my parents were MIA, invitations to birthday parties at fun venues that I was otherwise priced out of, and the thing that I craved more than anything else—the fear of others that let me know that I was the one in power, I was the one in control. I think it unnerved people how little I cared about things that other people cared about, like the well-being of others or my own physical safety. When one of my classmates cried about having a split lip from my punching him, I just stood there, watching, and left when I got bored with the blood and drama of it. I liked toys and candy like every other kid, but I couldn’t be blackmailed or manipulated with them, refusing to be tricked into sharing or playing nice like the other kids were.

Other children weren’t my only targets. Adults tend to believe children, especially when they make their faces seem so expressively open with emotion, especially when the child seems to be the victim of adult overreaching or abuse. I knew what that looked like in other children, the face of the victimized. They would widen their eyes quizzically, pause, then slowly reflect on the reality of their situation (was that man with the van and free candy really being nice, or was there something more insidious going on?) with the wheels turning in their tiny little heads and their mouths half-open. Looks of consternation would manifest on their chubby, soft faces, and then a sad realization would slowly spread across them, their faces falling—they have been victimized and you, adult, are the only one who can help them. Sometimes I would watch myself in the mirror, seeing if my face could also make those faces.

I was better at manipulating adults than I was at manipulating other children, which is why I often wonder about child
sociopaths who can’t manage to remain undetected. Adults do not inspect children’s behavior closely. It’s been so long since they saw the world through child eyes that they don’t really remember what is normal behavior for children. There are times when they do not understand children, but they also have vague memories of being misunderstood as a child. Careful not to make that same mistake, adults tend to have a much greater tolerance or margin of error when it comes to unusual childish behavior. They’re much more willing to write off a child obsessed with collecting worms during recess as being a simple variation of the eccentricities of childhood, whereas the child’s peers would more readily classify that child as an anomalous freak.

Children sociopaths are not obvious to adults, which is perhaps why people debate their very existence. It’s rare to hear stories of child sociopaths that seem ripped from the pages of
The Bad Seed
. In a
New York Times Magazine
article titled “Can You Call a 9-Year-Old a Psychopath?” the author told the story of Michael, a boy who had been terrorizing his parents since soon after his baby brother was born. Michael would fly into a rage at the slightest interruption to his life, like being asked to put on his shoes, punching and kicking walls while screaming at his parents. When his mother tried to reason with him with reminders about how they had talked about his behavior and that she had hoped they had gotten past it, he stopped cold in his tantrum and replied, “Well you didn’t think that through very clearly, did you?” Other horror stories included another nine-year-old boy who pushed a toddler into the swimming pool of a motel, then pulled up a chair to watch it drown. When asked why he did those things he replied, curiosity. Unfazed by the threat of punishment, he seemed to welcome being the focus of attention.

This sort of behavior is by far the exception. At least to adult eyes, the behavior of a typical child sociopath is much more subtle. Paul Frick, a child psychologist with the University of New Orleans, explains that more common behavior might be the lack of remorse shown when caught. For instance, normal children tend to feel conflicted about getting caught with their hand in the cookie jar. On the one hand, they wanted that cookie. On the other hand, they feel like there is something morally wrong about stealing. A child sociopath would not show this same type of remorse. The only thing the child sociopath would regret is getting caught. Even the
New York Times
journalist who interviewed Michael was surprised at how normal he seemed: “When I entered the house, of course, I was thinking of adult psychopaths who have led criminal lives for decades, which is normally how they come to our attention. I was maybe expecting a child version of that, but of course that’s kind of ridiculous. Even among adult psychopaths, that would be a small minority.”

No, fooling adults was never my problem; it was always my peers who were more sensitive and exacting in the homogeneity of “normal” behavior that they required. I’m good, but I’m not flawless, and they required near perfection. Let me give an example of what I mean. If a person were to go to a Mormon church for the first time, there would be many things that might give them away as a non-Mormon—perhaps the newcomer would be wearing jeans, or would be a woman wearing slacks instead of a dress or a skirt, or even a woman wearing a skirt cut above her knees. There is an extremely high degree of homogeneity in Mormon culture, and in ways that may not be immediately obvious to the uninitiated. It is not just a pressure to conform that makes everyone so uniform; it actually reflects a shared underlying belief system and similar experiences.
You can try to imitate the physical trappings of Mormonism all you want, but unless you’ve studied and practiced Mormon culture extensively, you will never be confused for a cultural Mormon. Similarly, since I did not share the same worldview and underlying beliefs and experiences as my childhood peers, I could pretend and imitate all I wanted, but there would still be small discrepancies that would give me away, or at the very least make me seem quirky to my peers.

I usually had friends despite my perceived oddness, but I experienced periods in which I was avoided or even ostracized by everyone. I could overwhelm people, put them off. I was too aggressive for them, or they could see how deceptive, untrustworthy, and scheming I was. Sometimes my considerable charisma could outweigh the off-putting aspects of my personality, but sometimes it went the other way. My ability to understand my occasional status as a social pariah was spotty; I was good at observing the way other kids reacted to me, but I didn’t always care enough to do anything about it. I was too impulsive, too willing to sacrifice several months of social capital in exchange for a moment’s indiscretion.

Of course I was never bullied or picked on. If anything, my peers were afraid of me. And I usually had enough sense to be selective about whom I targeted—no one too likable. Kids love vigilantism, so I frequently went after bullies. I remember this one set of white trash twins. One of the kids had something wrong with his legs, so he would show up to school with braces or special shoes. He far exceeded children’s tolerance for diversity. Perhaps because they were identical and to distance himself from the less fortunate twin, the other one became a big bully. He was little but scrappy, and since he couldn’t really pick on the true alphas, he would pick on everyone else, hoping merely to establish his dominance as
a beta. Everyone hated him, but no one wanted to provoke his wrath. I didn’t care either way about him. I think maybe I scared him. But one time he was basically forced to confront me during an undersupervised game of capture the flag. I had cheated somehow and his team goaded him into calling me on it. Words turned into shoves and pretty soon I had him pinned to the ground and I beat the crap out of him. Not too long, lest we draw attention. Just enough that he didn’t get up for several minutes. The other kids loved me for that for at least several months. I was happy to do it. To me, stopping a bully was like helping put out a fire. It may not have reached my house yet, but fires are unpredictable and they spook the surrounding wildlife into behaving unpredictably. The probability that it will somehow affect me is high enough that any preventative measures on my part are often warranted. And beating on a bully makes you a hero in people’s eyes. I guess that’s why Batman does it.

I often wonder how my life would be different if I had been educated outside the public school system (or even outside the U.S.). Maybe I would pretend less or be less good at it? As it was, trying to blend in with the other children required me to learn the skills of an anthropologist. As an outsider trying to fit in, I had to learn about people through observation and the recognition of patterns. I became very perceptive. I also became good at acting. I could see that other kids thought and behaved differently from me, often reacting emotionally whereas I stayed calm, and so I began to mimic them. I think my first attempts at imitating normal behavior were honest attempts to actually be normal, in the same way that an infant imitates the speech patterns of its parents not to try to trick, but in an honest attempt to communicate. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I would never be normal. Maybe it was the cognitive fork in the
road when I was four years old. Maybe it was the code written in my DNA. Either way, it was too late by that time to turn back—if I ever indeed could have. I was irrevocably different from other people, in ways that I had yet to fully understand. I wasn’t able to articulate that then of course, but I knew it in my bones.

In the years when I played observer, I’d watch with contempt as the kids who weren’t popular fawned all over the kids who were. I’d see them for the weaklings they were and wonder why they thought belonging mattered so much that they were willing to debase themselves. I couldn’t even conceive of the idea that anyone or any group was important enough for me to humiliate myself. After I had observed long enough and learned what I needed to know, I easily became one of the popular kids. But even when I was schmoozing with the jocks and the cheerleaders and the class clowns whom everybody loved, even when kids from lower grades wanted my attention, I knew I was not one of them. I’d known that I would never really belong no matter how many people claimed to love hanging out with me, because the person they thought they knew was not the real me.

I did however enjoy playing my games with them. With my friends, I’d usually find little ways to prey on their insecurities. Have you ever picked a scab? Or poked at a tender tooth? Probed a sore muscle? There’s something exploratory about it, and I was this way with my friends’ insecurities. They fascinated me. I have never had an insecurity. I know it sounds absurd. It’s not like I think that I am the best at everything. I am well aware of my many failings. I guess it’s just that they don’t bother me, and I certainly don’t identify with them in this bizarre, fixated way that I often see people do.