The Sociopath Next Door (14 page)

To suspect, and to try to explain to others that one has been targeted by a sociopath, is to be gaslighted. Jackie Rubenstein was a good example of this phenomenon when she confronted Doreen Littlefield with the cruelty she had done to Dennis. Afterward, Jackie phoned a friend for support because she felt she was losing her mind. And when she tried to relate her discovery about Doreen to the unit director, he politely but clearly echoed Doreen's implication that Jackie had gone a little crazy along with her paranoid patient.

When Jackie accused Doreen of a vicious act toward an unoffending patient, the natural question was, Why would a person like that do such a horrible thing? This is the question others always ask, overtly or by intimation, and it is such a bewildering, unanswerable question that the one who suspects the sociopath usually ends up asking it, too, only to find that she has no rational-sounding explanation. And like the innocent new bride in
Gaslight
, she may come to lose faith, partially or completely, in her own perceptions. Certainly she will hesitate to tell her story again, since trying to expose the sociopath casts doubts on her own credibility and maybe even on her sanity. These doubts, our own and other people's, are painful, and readily convince us to keep our mouths shut. Over the years, listening to hundreds of patients who have been targeted by sociopaths, I have learned that within an organization or a community, in the event that a sociopath is finally revealed to all and sundry, it is not unusual to find that several people suspected all along, each one independently, each one in silence. Each one felt gaslighted, and so each one kept her crazy-sounding secret to herself.

Why would a person like that do such a horrible thing? we ask ourselves. By “a person like that,” we mean a normal-looking person, a person who looks just like us. We mean a person in a professional role, or an animal lover, or a parent or a spouse, or maybe a charming someone we have had dinner, or more, with. And by “such a horrible thing,” we mean a negative act that is inexplicably bizarre, because there is no way, based on our own feelings and normal motivations, that we can explain why anyone would ever want to do it in the first place. Why would a smart, handsome, privileged boy like Skip want to slaughter small animals? In adulthood, why would fabulously successful Skip, married to the beautiful daughter of a billionaire, risk his reputation by breaking the arm of an employee? Why would Dr. Littlefield, a psychologist and the nicest person in the world, suddenly mount a brutal psychological attack on a recovering patient, and a VIP at that? Why would she, an established professional person, knowing she would be found out, make up a meaningless whole-cloth lie just to scare a young intern?

These are the kinds of questions we ask ourselves when we are exposed to sociopathic behavior, and in most cases, we cannot come up with answers that sound plausible to us. Speculate as we may, we cannot imagine
why.
Nothing sounds believable, so we think there must be a misunderstanding, or maybe we have greatly exaggerated something in our observations. We think this way because the conscience-bound mind is qualitatively different from the conscience-free mind, and what sociopaths want, what motivates them, is completely outside our experience. In order to harm a mentally ill person intentionally, as Doreen did, or to break someone's arm, as Skip did, most of us would have to be seriously threatened by the person we were hurting, or be under the influence of a compelling emotion such as rage. Performing such actions calmly, for fun, has no place in the emotional repertoire of normal people.

Sociopaths, people with no intervening sense of obligation based in attachments to others, typically devote their lives to interpersonal games, to “winning,” to domination for the sake of domination. The rest of us, who do possess conscience, may be able to understand this motivational scheme conceptually, but when we see it in real life, its contours are so alien that we often fail to “see” it at all. Many people without conscience will behave self-destructively simply for the purposes of the game. Stamp Man spent half his life in jail for the thrill, every few years, of making a few postal workers and police officers scurry around for an hour or so. Doreen gleefully put her own career at significant risk just to damage her colleague's a little. These are behaviors we are not prepared to understand, or even believe. We will doubt our own sense of reality first.

And often our self-doubts are extreme. As an illustration, there was the remarkable public reaction, which continued for thirty years after her death, to a career criminal named Barbara Graham. In 1955, at the age of thirty-two, Graham was executed at San Quentin for her part in the especially brutal murder of an elderly widow named Mabel Monahan. Mrs. Monahan, like Ingrid Bergman's murdered aunt in
Gaslight
, had been rumored to keep a cache of jewels in her house. Graham and three accomplices entered the house, and when no jewels were forthcoming, Graham (nicknamed “Bloody Babs” by the media) pistol-whipped the elderly woman, nearly obliterating her face, and then suffocated her to death with a pillow.

Recorded at her execution, Bloody Babs's last words were, “Good people are always so sure they're right.” This assertion was delivered calmly, almost with an air of sympathy, and as an effective gaslighting technique, it was a fairly good line. It caused many to doubt their own sense of reality concerning Graham, and refocused the public's attention on her role as an attractive mother of three young children, rather than on her grisly behavior. After her death, she became the subject of emotional debate, and even today, against the weight of considerable evidence, there are those who maintain that Graham was innocent. Out of the public's self-doubt sprang two films about her, both entitled
I Want to Live!
The first starred Susan Hayward, who won an Oscar for her performance, and a 1983 television remake featured Lindsay Wagner. In both versions, Graham, the sadistic murderess, was portrayed as a poignantly misunderstood woman who was framed.

Barbara Graham's last words—“Good people are always so sure they're right”—had a gaslighting effect precisely because the truth is quite the opposite. In fact, one of the more striking characteristics of good people is that they are almost never completely sure they are right. Good people question themselves constantly, reflexively, and subject their decisions and actions to the exacting scrutiny of an intervening sense of obligation rooted in their attachments to other people. The self-questioning of conscience seldom admits absolute certainty into the mind, and even when it does, certainty feels treacherous to us, as if it may trick us into punishing someone unjustly, or performing some other unconscionable act. Even legally, we speak of “beyond a reasonable doubt” rather than of complete certainty. In the end, Barbara Graham understood us far better than we understood her, and her parting remark pushed an irrational but very sensitive psychological button in the conscience-bound people who survived her—the fear that they had made a decision based on
too much certainty.

Adding to our insecurity, most of us comprehend instinctively that there are shades of good and bad, rather than absolute categories. We know in our hearts there is no such thing as a person who is 100 percent good, and so we assume there must be no such thing as a person who is 100 percent bad. And perhaps philosophically—and certainly theologically—this is true. After all, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the devil himself is a fallen angel. Probably there are no absolutely good human beings and no utterly bad ones. However—psychologically speaking, there definitely are people who possess an intervening sense of constraint based in emotional attachments, and other people who have no such sense. And to fail to understand this is to place people of conscience, and all the Mabel Monahans of the world, in danger.

How Do We Keep the Blinders Off?

My daughter's fifth-grade class had a field trip, and I was one of the chaperones. We went to see a play called
Freedom Train
, about Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad. On the noisy bus ride back to school, one of the boys was picking on another boy, poking him and pulling his hair. The quiet boy being poked was developmentally delayed, friendless, I am told, and did not have a clue how to defend himself. Even before one of the adults could intervene, a petite girl seated just behind the two boys tapped the tormentor on the shoulder and said, “That's really mean. Quit it.”

The person who recognized this antisocial behavior and publicly objected to it was ten years old and all of four feet tall. The boy she had spoken to stuck his tongue out at her and leapt over to another bus seat to be with one of his pals. She watched him go and then calmly resumed the game of rock-paper-scissors she had been playing with the girl next to her.

What happens to us while we are growing up? Why do adults stop saying “Quit it” to the bullies? The grown-up bullies are more powerful, but then, so are we. Will this healthy little girl behave with the same kind of dignity and self-assurance when she is thirty years old and a foot and a half taller? Will she be another Harriet Tubman, albeit with a different cause? Sadly, given our present child-rearing practices, the odds are against it.

We raise our children, especially girls, to ignore their spontaneous reactions—we teach them not to rock the societal boat—and this is a good and necessary lesson when the spontaneous reaction involved would be to strike out violently with fists or words, or to steal an attractive item from a store, or to insult a stranger in a supermarket line. But another kind of spontaneous reaction, equally suppressed by our conflict-avoidant society, is the “Ick!” reaction, the natural sense of moral outrage. By the time she is thirty, the valiant little girl's “Ick!”—her tendency to respond, to rock the boat, when someone's actions are “really mean”—may have been excised from her behavior, and perhaps from her very mind.

In their book
Women's Anger: Clinical and Developmental Perspectives
, gender psychologists Deborah Cox, Sally Stabb, and Karin Bruckner document the ways girls and women perceive social responses to their outrage. Cox, Stabb, and Bruckner write that “the majority of interactions they [girls and women] describe involve rejection of either the anger, the girl or woman, or both. This takes the form of either direct attack through criticism or defensive response, or more passive rejection such as withdrawal and minimization of the girl's or woman's concerns and feelings.” And based on her studies of adolescent girls, educator Lyn Mikel Brown maintains that idealized femininity can dangerously endorse “silence over outspokenness.”

To keep the blinders off our life-enhancing seventh sense, as with most improvements in the human condition, we must start with our children. A part of healthy conscience is being able to confront consciencelessness. When you teach your daughter, explicitly or by passive rejection, that she must ignore her outrage, that she must be kind and accepting to the point of not defending herself or other people, that she must not rock the boat for any reason, you are not strengthening her prosocial sense; you are damaging it—and the first person she will stop protecting is herself. Cox, Stabb, and Bruckner argue emphatically that “the requirement to suppress outrage at the other robs the woman of an opportunity to develop this kind of autonomy.” Instead, as Lyn Mikel Brown has said, we need to suggest “the possibility, even under the most oppressive conditions, for creative refusal and resistance.”

Do not set her up to be gaslighted. When she observes that someone who is being really mean is being really mean, tell her she is right and that it is okay to say so out loud. Jackie Rubenstein chose to believe her patient Dennis, and not to believe her dangerous colleague Doreen Littlefield. It was a good, moral choice. She said, effectively, “That's really mean. Quit it,” though saying so out loud caused her to be viewed as a troublemaker by many of the less insightful people around her.

As for the boys—in
Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys
, leading child psychologists Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson record their concern about the frequency with which “vulnerable fathers turn to time-honored defensive responses to maintain the fiction that ‘father knows best.'” Parents, especially fathers, typically teach their sons to obey authority no matter what, and given the wrong cultural and political circumstances, circumstances that have occurred with morbid regularity throughout history, this is a lesson that may well come with a suicide clause. That parents wish to foster a certain respect for legitimate authority is understandable, and probably important for the functioning of society as we know it. But to drill children in reflexive, no-questions-asked obedience is to beat a horse that is more than half-dead already. Obedience to apparent authority is a knee-jerk reaction in most people quite without training, and to sensitize this reflex is to make our children hypervulnerable to any aggressive or sociopathic “authority” who may come along later in their lives.

To everyone's detriment, obedience and the higher values of patriotism and duty can become indistinguishable motivations. Enhanced in this way, reflexive obedience can consume the individual before he even has a chance to wonder whether he himself might be the best authority when it comes to his own life and his own country, and long before he can ask questions such as “Do I and my countrymen really want to fight and perhaps die for this external ‘authority's' self-interest?”

Still, I believe we may now be standing at the edge of a modern possibility thousands of years in the making. In the past, for stark reasons of survival, human beings truly needed their children not to upset any hard-won applecarts, not to question things too much, not to disobey orders. Life was physically hard and precarious, and children who challenged our authority might all too easily end up as dead children. And so, until recent centuries, we raised humans for whom moral outrage was an extreme luxury, and to whom the questioning of authority felt life-threatening. In this way, generation after generation, we were unwittingly set up for sociopathic takeovers. But now, for most of us in the developed world, survival conditions no longer hold. We can stop. We can let our children question things. And when they are grown, they can, without doubting their own senses, look the grown-up bullies in the eye and say, “That's really mean. Quit it.”