What It’s Like to Be a Sociopath Part Two

Let's do this thing...

Seriously, where are these quotes about sociopathy coming from? They are just garbage. I know where the first one came from, which was Martha Stout. She’s a whole different level of unintelligent when it comes to sociopathy. She is a worse version of Robert Hare with a hatred for people she assumes are sociopaths whom she has never met. She’s a real treat.

Her claim to fame is a book called, “The Sociopath Next Door”, and you would think, wrongly, that meant that she actually had met and interviewed sociopaths for the context of the book. Nope. Why do something so complicated when you can just have patients complaining about their partners in therapy, decide that they are sociopaths without meeting them, and then write a book about that? It’s so much easier to label people you have never met based on second-hand, obviously biased information, than doing hard work. Sociopaths are dangerous, don’t you know?

Anyway, back to the article. We have a bit more to go through. You can find part one, here:

What It’s Like to Be a Sociopath A New York Times Magazine article...

This author also wrote an article speaking about her Significant Other, which I believe in her case would be a husband, so let me know if you want me to compare that one as well to my own experience. It could be interesting to see the differences.

The interview picks back up with the interviewer asking a strange question, and there isn’t any indication what prompted him or her to ask it, so this will seem sort of out of nowhere:

What’s an invasive question you want to ask me?

Why are you interested in me? Why are you interested in sociopathy? Talk to me about your darkness. I’m not expecting answers.

I have been interviewed a few times, and no interviewer has asked me to ask them an invasive question. Perhaps this is because the term “psychopath” has a much darker connotation attached to it, so they really aren’t interested in me probing into them too much, but I don’t know.

The answer makes some sense to me, as in, asking what the interviewer’s interest in sociopathy is, I can understand that. I don’t ask people this question regarding psychopathy, because the interest seems to me to be self-explanatory. I would think it would be the same for sociopathy, but what do I know?

However, the second part, “Talk to me about your darkness”, is never a statement that I would make. They are going to download all of that onto me without my prompting, so there is no point. In fact, asking might make them clam up about it for longer than they would have otherwise, so why prolong the conversation when I already know where it’s going to go? Seems self-defeating.

You want to get into it?

Oh, yes. I find neurotypical people absolutely delightful!

Based on what though? First of all, and again, sociopaths are neurotypical in terms of the neurological understanding of sociopathy. There is no evidence to suggest that they are not. If she is trying to claim the brain scans of psychopaths to also be representative of sociopaths, she is out of luck. That’s not how it works. Sociopaths require very specific circumstances to be created, and psychopaths are born. We have brain structure and functioning changes because our DNA has dictated it to be so. Sociopaths do not.

On to finding neurotypicals delightful. That’s weird to me. Interesting… sure, but delightful indicated enjoyment of being around them that is rather emotionally defined. Perhaps this is a difference between psychopathy and sociopathy. I find people interesting, I can also find them fascinating, but “delightful” indicates the ability to feel delight, and I am not certain that I can.

Moving on. Keep in mind, I am bringing you this interview exactly as it appears in the article, so this next question might seem a waste of volume space, and while I agree with that, here we are.

I’ll give you two reasons I’m interested: I was sent the book, and I started reading, and the opening involved you as a second grader stabbing a kid in the head with a pencil. I thought, Holy moly, readers will be interested in this! So there was a mercenary quality to my own interest. Then also, there are times when I’ve wondered if the skills that I’ve learned from doing my job over the years are basically just forms of interpersonal manipulation, and I was curious to talk to you as a roundabout way of exploring that question for myself.

Where does that question reach you?

The first part of the question, describing her book, if that is a true story about stabbing a kid, she should have been placed somewhere. That is a very negative childhood behavior that isn’t going to improve without significant intervention. I am not so much interested in the act itself, but rather what the response of both her family and the school was to this action.

If she comes from a household that created a sociopath, I would guess that they didn’t care. If she had already been removed from those circumstances by the state, this would have been cause for them to consider residential treatment, if she wasn’t, it should have gotten her suspended or expelled. Granted, there are times when schools do nothing, so I don’t know. It’s interesting, but apparently not for the same reason that it is interesting to the interviewer.

To answer his question regarding his own personal skills, yes, they are without a doubt manipulation. All human interaction is, so career skills are no different. You don’t need to interview a sociopath to understand that, you just have to remove the veil of denial that most people live under. You are all manipulative, that’s just part of life. Manipulation does not mean evil or bad. It means, living life to the best of your ability.

What do you mean?

Do you manipulate people in order to execute your job?

I have no idea why this is ongoing or why she is even asking this question. Yes. Of course he does. Everyone does. This is not probative, this is filler, and it’s boring filler at that.

I think there is a degree of manipulation, but what do we really mean by manipulation? Is manipulation by definition negative, or does manipulation just mean intentionally creating a certain interpersonal context?

That sounds like a justification to me, which means you’re sidestepping shame or sidestepping guilt.

All right, I guess we’re still going on about this. He actually is correct, but she tries to make it sound like something that he should feel bad about. That isn’t what she says, of course, it is something that she says that she hears him saying. She is trying to make him take ownership of something that he doesn’t feel. This is emotional manipulation, and it’s rather poorly done. He does manage to stand up for himself, so good on him.

I disagree. That would be like saying therapists are always guilty of “manipulation.”

Just so we’re clear, when I said justification, I wasn’t trying to say that what you were doing was bad. You’re talking to a sociopath! I don’t think anything that you’re doing is bad. Yes, you are manipulating people to a certain extent — to your point — in the way that I might manipulate somebody in therapy, but I would never feel the need to justify it, and your justification came so quickly. That’s why I was like, Hey, what’s happening that you felt the need to defend your answer?

This is also emotional manipulation, and again, it isn’t good emotional manipulation. Yes, she did mean that what he was doing was “bad”. She specifically indicated that he seemed like he felt guilty about it. That is negative connotation. The part where she says, “You’re talking to a sociopath”, she is indicating that she is likeminded, and will justify his actions even if they are something that might be inducing guilt. However, he has indicated that he doesn’t feel that way at all. This is an attempt to paint it in a certain way, and then telling him that she has no issue with him doing something that might make him feel guilty, because she’s a sociopath. She also says that he is justifying his behavior, when the reality is he was just trying to self-reflect in order to answer what she asked.

We don’t usually say we have to justify a positive thing. That’s probably why I reacted that way. What else?

How much of that dark side of sociopathy can you relate to? And if you don’t have an easy answer for that, was it comforting to read about somebody who was open with their experience of being fully immersed in their darkest impulses and a lot of times carrying them out?

Sigh… all humans can relate to the dark sides of sociopaths or psychopaths. That is what makes people interested at the root. It isn’t the darkness, it is the lack of shame and guilt regarding it, and the lack of care what people think. At least, that’s what Dutton thinks about it, and I happen to agree with him. I imagine that it is very freeing to imagine being able to do whatever you want without being concerned with the consequences of doing so.

The next part is so self-indulging. It’s cringy. I am trying my best not to be judgy, but this comes across as someone who is not only trying to speak about how scary and dangerous they are, which apparently is what the book is about, but also trying to elicit someone who read it how impressed the reader was with how badass they are. This reminds me of Danny Rolling’s book. He was a serial killer (was? is? I think he’s dead, I don’t know and don’t care either). He talked about his crimes. While he did talk about indulging his “dark impulses” it came across as so self-indulgent and annoying. It was a combination of how dangerous he was, and how awesome he was. It basically made it unreadable.

Well, I would say that one question that the book raised for me was the extent to which a lot of behaviors that people do could be considered sociopathic, and we just don’t understand them that way. Plenty of us do things that we know are bad because the transgressions feel good.

It feels good. Why? I think it feels good because it feels free. To do something bad, it’s like, I don’t give a [expletive]. The consequences — be it internal guilt or getting thrown in jail — happen after. In this moment, I’m going to do this because it feels [expletive] great to just not care. That is what the sociopath experience is almost all the time. One piece of advice I would give to anyone who sees themselves in my description is to find an external philosophy that works for you. I liked karma. It seemed clean. It seemed organized. Find that philosophy for yourself, because you’re not going to get to rely on internal checks and balances.

This whole passage is an excellent example of why “sociopathy” and “psychopathy” being defined by behavior is asinine. If you want to be able to define something, it needs to be something that can be identified by common history, neurological differences, or concrete things that can be found in every occasion of that thing existing.

Well, I would say that one question that the book raised for me was the extent to which a lot of behaviors that people do could be considered sociopathic, and we just don’t understand them that way. Plenty of us do things that we know are bad because the transgressions feel good.

That part has nothing to do with sociopathy. Sociopathy is not and should not be defined by behavior. It is defined by childhood history and the internal workings of that person as a result of that childhood history. Tons of people do crappy things in the world, and tons of people indulge in bad impulses, it in no way makes them sociopathic. It makes them human. Entertaining the idea that bad impulses should be possibly considered “sociopathic” removes those aspects of humans in general and makes them something that “other” people do.

Her response is suspicious to me:

“The consequences — be it internal guilt or getting thrown in jail — happen after. In this moment, I’m going to do this because it feels [expletive] great to just not care.”

That indicates that she is divorcing herself from those emotions, not that they don’t exist for her. “It feels f^cking great to just not care”… That means that she is very aware of what it feels like to care and that caring is her norm. Not caring is a divorce from her normal experience. That doesn’t read like a sociopath to me. Again, I am not here to judge whether or not she’s a sociopath, but that seems strange to me.

I realize I didn’t quite understand what you meant when you said that you can experience empathy, just differently. What is empathy to you?

Eventually as I got older, what I started to realize is that if I can connect to something that I can internalize naturally, I use that as a bridge to broaden my empathic response. For example, I’ve found frequently that a lot of people who exhibit sociopathic symptoms have strong feelings for pets. That’s a great bridge: You would feel upset if something happened to this animal that you care about. Now let’s extend that feeling to someone close to you that you have a strong relationship with.

Umm… that’s just emotional empathy. You won’t empathize with someone who you don’t understand. This is not different from the experience of normative humans. This doesn’t make sense to me for a sociopath to say. From what I have read from other sociopaths is that they they don’t empathize with anyone or anything in their real lives, but can empathize with characters in movies. The reason being is that characters in movies cannot cause them harm, so it is easier to consider their circumstances and feel bad for them. Otherwise, they are on constant guard when dealing with others.

But when you say “extend that feeling,” is it cognitive understanding that you’re describing or an emotional response?

At first it is cognitive. Then, over time, that does grow into the emotion. It’s the understanding of it that leads to the feeling. I’m sure you’ve had a situation where someone is explaining something to you, and at first you’re like, I don’t care.

Right, he has had that experience. That isn’t sociopathic in nature. It’s just normal.

Multiple times a day!

[Laughs.] Great. Now, imagine if that’s your first instinct, but you understand that you have to be like, Oh, yeah, I understand that I have to care. That is cognitive empathy. You’re not faking it, but you’re internalizing it. That’s your first take on something, and then maybe you get to know the situation better, or you find something about that situation that you can anchor to, and then the feeling kicks in.

This exchange demonstrates my point. She just skipped over the fact that he stated this happens to him multiple times a day. She skips the fact that this is a normal response which means that her response is normal, not sociopathic in nature. She ignores that part and then says, “Now, imagine if that’s your first instinct”. He doesn’t have to, because if that happens to him multiple times a day, it is his static response. She is attempting to disassociate herself from that fact and make it sound like it isn’t pretty common.

Do you see your sociopathy as beneficial to you?

I think my sociopathy is entirely beneficial to me. I see my friends struggling with guilt. On an almost daily basis I think, I’m glad I don’t have that. The psychological characteristics of sociopathy are not inherently bad. Lack of remorse and shame and guilt has been misappropriated to mean this horrible thing, but again, just because I don’t care about you doesn’t mean I want to cause you more pain. I like that I don’t have guilt because I’m making my decisions based on logic, based on truth, as opposed to ought or should. Now, there is a flip side. I don’t have those natural emotional connections to other people, but I’ve never had those. I don’t feel like I’m missing anything. Just because I love differently doesn’t mean my love doesn’t count.

Based on her own words she does feel these things. She said that they come later, after her actions, but they do exist.

I don’t know what to think about this article. I have no idea what diagnostic process that she went through, so I have nothing to say about the veracity of her sociopathy. I will leave that to the experts and your own opinions. I find some things a bit weird, and maybe those questions that I do have would be answered in the article about her husband.

For the time being, however, I will leave it here with my comments on the inconsistencies in the article and allow you all to draw your own conclusions.