Confessions of a Sociopath: a life spent hiding in plain sight.

M.E. Thomas

Hooboy.

This was a ride.

If you want to hear about the life and experiences of someone with a VERY different way of looking at life and processing the world around them, this is the book for you. Unless of course, you are a sociopath, in which case I imagine it would be quite interesting to hear someone else's account of what it is to look at the world through that lens.  Either way, a good read.

As you might guess, this book was written under a pseudonym. However, a quick google search has shown that the internet thinks it has figured out who she is based on details she includes in the book. There is some online drama about whether or not the book is genuine. I don't think that there is sufficient evidence to believe it is not so I will just assume it is someone's best representation of their own story and take it all with a grain of salt.
This is the disclaimer at the start of the book: 

"It is a true story according to my best recollections; however, in addition to the inevitable flaws of memory, this story is told through the lens of how I see the world, including my megalomania, single-minded focus and a lack of understanding about the inner worlds of others."

I say that this was a ride because I experienced a WIDE range of emotions and thoughts while listening to it. I went from seriously considering whether or not I might actually be a sociopath myself to feeling entirely alienated by the narrator's thought process. And then back and forth a couple times between these two entirely opposite sides of the spectrum. 

See, apparently sociopathy is much more common than I thought. I think she said somewhere up to 1 in 25 people are sociopaths. And that some people don't realize that they are. She herself did not really figure it out until she was a full adult (somewhere in her twenties, I believe)*. The first chapter of the book is a lot of talk about the common traits of sociopaths and the tools and tests used to identify them. I would guess that most if not all people would have at least one or two sociopathic traits. Or at least be able to identify a situation in their past or present where they acted in a way that aligns with a sociopathic trait. I mean, maybe not, but I definitely did. I am reasonably adept at prioritizing my rational thinking over emotion and I can be a very self-focused and selfish person. Listening to this book really brought up to the surface all of these small little stories of times I acted coldly or in blinding self-interest or failed to emotionally react in the correct way. But while I am sometimes get annoyed at overt displays of emotion, especially when I feel they are being used to try and manipulate me, I do not lack the ability to feel empathy. 

*(sidenote: the problem with listening to a book instead of reading it is that the facts do not stick as well in my head when I do not see them written down. Also there is no convenient way to backtrack and fact check so I am left with vague ideas of the details. This annoys me greatly and makes me think I would really be better off reading and maybe I shouldn't do the audiobook thing.)

Anyways, this post is not about whether I am sociopath, it is about the book. So back to business. This book both educated and horrified me. Actually, horrified is not the right word. Maybe shocked is better. Sometimes I felt extremely alienated and unable to connect at all with the authors thought process. It was so wild to hear her go from speaking about loving her family and using her religion's rules as a self-imposed system of morality to telling stories of stealing thousands of dollars from her university and how satisfying it can be to emotionally destroy people for the fun of it. 

But here's the thing. I think we all are full of contradictions, just maybe not to quite the same extreme. We all choose to do bad things sometimes, but because we feel sorry about it later we think we are still good people. Because we have the ability to feel remorse about our actions and can't understand what it would be like to not feel remorse, we find it easy to vilify and condemn someone who has made the same bad choice as us but is biologically unable to feel remorse about it. It is worth thinking about. 

You should really read/listen to this book. It will open your eyes to an entire new and different experience and it will make you think very hard about what is right and wrong and how we decide if people are good or bad. There is also a lot of information from recent and historical studies done on and with sociopaths. 

You are lucky it was an audiobook and therefore difficult to pull out sections to make you read. If I had a paper copy I could highlight and go back through this blog post would probably just be the entire book typed out for you to read. Anyways, here are a few good parts. 

"... the suggestion that we need to experience guilt in order to behave in a morally is patently false and offensive in the same way that equating atheism with moral indifference is. Although hardwired emotional moral compasses typically help people to do what is good and avoid what is bad, there should be other reasons that people do good things besides a sense of morality. It is rational for me to obey the law, because I do not want to go to jail; it is rational for me not to harm or injure other people, because a society in which everyone acted harmfully would inevitably cause me harm too. If there are legitimate, rational reasons for the moral choices we should make, we should be capable of choosing the right without relying purely on gut instinct. If there are not rational reasons for our moral choices, why should we continue to make them?

While I don't think sociopaths have any sort of moral urge to do good things, I think they can and do act morally in the context of pursuing their own advantage. A good analogy would be a corporation. There are a lot of corporations that do things that you like, maybe even good things, like produce vaccines or electric cars, although the primary motivation is to make a profit. But just because you are trying to make a profit doesn't mean you can't do it by doing things you like, or that you are good at, or that comport with the way you see the world, or want the world to see in you. In fact, behaving morally and well might smooth the path for you to pursue your own interest. Society functions better when we treat each other well, and you will personally do better if is in good working order."

I know this next part is long, but it is so good and I didn't feel like I could cut any out with out decreasing its value. Sorry, but you are just going to have to read the whole four paragraphs.

"Sometimes I think people talk about sociopaths being 1 to 4 percent of the population as if the other 96 to 99 percent are normal, maybe even the opposite of the sociopath. Maybe we believe that if sociopaths have low empathy, then everyone else has robust empathy? Maybe we believe that if sociopaths do not feel guilt, everyone else must? Maybe we believe that if sociopaths frequently engage in crime, then no one else does?

The truth is many people are just assholes. You don't have to be a sociopath to be an asshole, nor is a sociopath an asshole to all people all of the time. When I first started writing about sociopathy on the blog, I hoped to help people realize that sociopaths are natural human variants. I thought at the time that the big challenge would be to try to showcase some of our strengths in a more positive light, to demonstrate that we are not as bad as people might think. Recently I have been thinking that the real problem is not in getting "normal" people to believe that we're better than they think, but in getting them to see that the "normal" ones are actually worse than they believe themselves to be. Sometimes it seems that most people assume that they are that minority of "normal" people instead of thinking that they might also be a little bit "off."

Some people balk at saying that "normal" people might actually be in the minority: "How could the psychological world label half or more of us with a diagnosis?!" But so what if the majority of people qualify for a psychological label? Doesn't that seem equally if not more probable than assuming that half of the people in the world are pretty much interchangeable in terms of brain and emotional functioning?

It is convenient to define normal as whatever you happen to be. No need to confront the possibility that maybe you aren't as empathetic as you seem. Maybe your conscience doesn't have quite the sway that you thought it did. Maybe you are both capable and incapable of much more that you had hoped. Maybe you have a lot more in common with sociopaths that you'd like to think. Maybe it is just one big long spectrum with only a few people at the extremes and the rest huddled closer to the middle. Some have derided self-diagnosed sociopaths as poseurs, clinging to the label as sanctuary from the disappointments of an average existence. Could it be that self-diagnosed sociopaths are just much more honest with themselves that the rest of you who claim "That's not sociopathic, everyone does that"? Could both be true, that acting a particular way could be both sociopathic and something that everyone does? Or that most people do? Specifically, you - that you sometimes do those things? Does that make you normal, or me?"