sure, then how did I get here? Given that a propensity for emotional problems runs in my family, I think my genetic predisposition to sociopathy was triggered largely because I never learned how to trust. In particular, my parents’ erratic emotional lives taught me that I couldn’t depend on anyone to protect me. Rather than looking to other people for stability, I learned to depend on myself. Because interaction with other people is inevitable, I inevitability learned manipulation, particularly how to direct and misdirect people’s attention to achieve my desired outcomes. For instance, my experiences taught me that it was useless to appeal to people’s love or sense of duty, so I appealed to other, more salient emotions like fear or people’s own desperate desire to be loved. I viewed everyone as objects, pieces in my chess game. I had no awareness of their own internal worlds and no understanding of their emotional palette because their bright hues were so different from my own drab shades of gray. Perhaps because I never thought of people as being distinct individuals with their own senses of self and manifest destiny, I never learned to think of myself that way either. I had no definite sense of self to adhere to or otherwise be invested in. Largely without structure, my life became an endless series of reactions to contingencies, impulsive decision-making driving me from one day to the next. Unlike people without my genetic predispositions who might have come out of these experiences desperately searching for love to fill the void, I felt largely indifferent.
After my brother Jim and I walked home from the park that day, our parents’ car was parked outside in the driveway, just like it always was. Inside, they didn’t ask us any questions. In general, they didn’t worry about our suffering. I think our suffering did not register with them because they could feel no consequences resulting from it. And because we were the kind of children that accepted silence as explanation, they never experienced recrimination. It was as if it had never happened. They went to bed that night satisfied that their children were safe and warm like anyone else’s.
Now that I am grown and can see my family dynamics with better perspective, I am more convinced than ever that the environment in which I was raised had a significant role to play in my development into a sociopath. Lots of children live in families with unreliable parents, physical discipline, and financial instability—these things aren’t uncommon. But I can see how the antisocial behaviors and mental posturing that now define me were incentivized when I was growing up—how my own emotional world was stifled and how understanding and respect for the emotional world of others died away. But there’s a chicken-and-egg problem here: it’s hard to know whether my distrust of my dad’s overt displays of compassion caused me to downplay my own sense of morality, or whether I never really had much of a conscience to begin with, and that is why my dad always seemed so ridiculous to me.
I don’t ever remember thinking differently than I do now, but I do have a sensation or memory of an early cognitive fork where I chose to think more proactively. I must have been somewhere between ages four and six. Here’s an example to illustrate what I mean: Have you ever been a pedestrian at a traffic light? There’s always a moment of hesitation when you arrive at your corner and see the red hand telling you it’s notsafe to walk. You could follow what it says and just wait your turn. Or you could make your own assessment of whether it is safe to cross by looking at the cars and studying the traffic light patterns. There are advantages to both approaches. The one is safe and doesn’t require mental effort. The other one is risky and possibly will only shave a few seconds off your commute at best and land you in the hospital at worst. But if you get good at it, those few
After my brother Jim and I walked home from the park that day, our parents’ car was parked outside in the driveway, just like it always was. Inside, they didn’t ask us any questions. In general, they didn’t worry about our suffering. I think our suffering did not register with them because they could feel no consequences resulting from it. And because we were the kind of children that accepted silence as explanation, they never experienced recrimination. It was as if it had never happened. They went to bed that night satisfied that their children were safe and warm like anyone else’s.
Now that I am grown and can see my family dynamics with better perspective, I am more convinced than ever that the environment in which I was raised had a significant role to play in my development into a sociopath. Lots of children live in families with unreliable parents, physical discipline, and financial instability—these things aren’t uncommon. But I can see how the antisocial behaviors and mental posturing that now define me were incentivized when I was growing up—how my own emotional world was stifled and how understanding and respect for the emotional world of others died away. But there’s a chicken-and-egg problem here: it’s hard to know whether my distrust of my dad’s overt displays of compassion caused me to downplay my own sense of morality, or whether I never really had much of a conscience to begin with, and that is why my dad always seemed so ridiculous to me.
I don’t ever remember thinking differently than I do now, but I do have a sensation or memory of an early cognitive fork where I chose to think more proactively. I must have been somewhere between ages four and six. Here’s an example to illustrate what I mean: Have you ever been a pedestrian at a traffic light? There’s always a moment of hesitation when you arrive at your corner and see the red hand telling you it’s notsafe to walk. You could follow what it says and just wait your turn. Or you could make your own assessment of whether it is safe to cross by looking at the cars and studying the traffic light patterns. There are advantages to both approaches. The one is safe and doesn’t require mental effort. The other one is risky and possibly will only shave a few seconds off your commute at best and land you in the hospital at worst. But if you get good at it, those few
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