My question is quite short.
It is simply: Is there actually any way I can help myself?
To explain, I am a sociopath.
I am twenty years old, living in England. I had a normal upbringing in a
good household.
It dawned upon me quite suddenly when I was at the funeral of someone
'close' to me (a man I definitely respected and liked) and I noticed that as
everyone was sad, I felt nothing. I didn't feel anything evil, but simply
nothing. Looking back on it, I basically faked being sad (in a kind of
stoical way because I couldn't cry) because it felt like that is how I
should be.
I was reminded of a program on Anti-Social Personality Disorder I'd seen a
bit of, and I did some research online. I am by no means a fool and it did
not take me very long to diagnose myself as a sociopath; the evidence was
quite resounding.
These were the things that apparently makes up a sociopath that I
immediately identified with:
I am a compulsive liar, a proficient thief, a good manipulator and actor
with a sharp tongue, people regularly call me arrogant, I dislike authority,
I am constantly compulsive, I used to terrorise my animals as a child. The
best one I read was 'may actually state that their goal is to rule the
world', something I've done many a time. There were others, but you get it.
Anyway, all I can find is help for people dealing with sociopaths, most of
which starts and ends with 'get away from him and stay away'.
I've also noticed phrases similar to 'a sociopath cannot be helped because
he never wants to be helped because he always feels self-righteous'.
But given that sociopaths are meant to often be of high intelligence, and I
am by no means stupid, I do not think that the above quote can be correct,
because it suggests that sociopaths are always so self-righteous that they
are naive to what they actually are.
However I, alone, have identified what I am and I understand that I have a
complete lack of empathy, and have never loved another human. It's funny to
think that I've only just realised I am a sociopath, yet stating that I have
never loved in my entire life sounds like something that would be hard to
miss. I'm not sure I can describe in words what I thought of myself before I
had this online epiphany, but needless to say, this realisation has changed
how I think of myself and the world; It's like I'm having an internal
philosophical breakdown.
I am undecided whether being a sociopath is a good thing or a bad thing,
given that I don't believe I've experienced the 'normal' way of things.
However, all I am wondering is if there is a way that a sociopath can 'learn
to love', or at least to change at all, or am I destined to pretty much not
care what happens to anyone else for the rest of my life?
I am truly intrigued to see the response, if I get one.
Thank you,
David.
Hello, David--
Judging from your letter, your self-diagnosis of sociopathy may very well be correct. The list of traits you used to reach your diagnosis sounds almost like the classical definition of sociopathy. But while some sociopaths may be naive to their condition, as you wrote, such naivete is not so common. Most sociopaths, lacking the anxiety and guilt which they see all around them, eventually come to understand very well that they lack the conscientiousness and empathic feelings which most people have. In fact, many, if not most, sociopaths have learned, just as you say you did at the funeral, to mimic or imitate the conscientious and empathic behaviors of others in order, for purposes of their own, to fit in or blend in with the crowd.
In her book, The Psychopath Next Door, Martha Stout opines that around 4 percent, or one person in every twenty-five, falls into your category, so your condition is not so rare as you might think. The American Psychological Association estimate is lower (3 percent of all males), but even using the lower figure, one understands that people such as yourself are found everywhere but normally go unrecognized due partly to their skill in simulating a "normal" personality, and partly to the kind of psychological blindness which causes many people to assume, on no real evidence, that other people are pretty much like them.
Now to your question. In my experience, there are four main obstacles to successful treatment of sociopathy, 1) lack of knowledge about what sociopathy is; 2) ability of the sociopath to fool the therapist; 3) inability of the therapist to understand the sociopath; and 4) the sociopath's ambivalence and resistance to change. I will take them one by one:
In the first place, no one understands what sociopathy really is. The term "sociopath" is only a description, not an etiology. In other words, "sociopath" is a name for a person who evinces certain traits such as callousness to the feelings of others, or the ability to use another human being as a pawn without guilt or regret, but saying that name says nothing about the causes of sociopathy. Is sociopathy a disease as the "pathy" in its name implies? Or, since one in every twenty-five people is a sociopath (to use Stout's figure), is "sociopathy" not a disease but a normal human personality variant which, since it served its possessors well in the struggle to survive and multiply, has perdured over the countless eons of human evolution and so persists as part of the psychological spectrum of present day humanity? And make no mistake about it, society may label sociopathic behavior as ""cold" or "criminal," but in many social roles, for many purposes, the sociopath is useful, and society makes good use of him or her.
This is what leads me to ask if sociopathy is not a normal variant which evolved and endures because it works. For example, in a combat unit, who would be the sniper? Who could sit in a tree waiting all day to kill a perfect stranger in cold blood? The sociopath, of course. Who could be James Bond? But even in more mundane circumstances sociopathy might confer advantages not just on the sociopath, but for society in general. How about a surgeon who can cut into human flesh without feeling anything?--who can do the job, in other words, without hesitation, nerves, or fear. And so, if sociopathy is deeply and genetically rooted in the human psyche, how can it be "cured," or even treated?
A second obstacle to treatment is the ability of the sociopath to feign, simulate, imitate, and lie. Many sociopaths, if they found themselves in psychotherapeutic treatment, would have no trouble at all pulling the wool over the eyes of all but the very best psychologists. And seeing how easily the so-called "expert" is fooled, the sociopath in treatment would soon lose respect for the therapist (if indeed he or she ever had any respect for the therapist), and with that loss of respect any chance for real therapy would effectively end.
The third obstacle to treatment is inability of non-sociopathic humans, including psychotherapists, to empathize with the sociopath. In other words, David, although I understand quite well that you lack any deep feelings for the people around you, it is difficult for me to put myself very far into your actual experience, for I always see others, at the most basic level, as similar to myself in the ability to feel pain, and so to suffer. And in my experience this compassion extends not just other human beings, but all beings capable of suffering. It is remarkable to me, for example, that so many humans seem to find sport, amusement, and so-called "recreation" in killing defenseless animals (Dick Cheney), or in prompting dogs to maim and kill one another (Michael Vick), but that's another story.
Since I once spent a year interviewing rapists, murderers, and other violent criminals at the Penitentiary of New Mexico, I have gotten to know a variety of sociopaths and psychopaths and have listened carefully to many stories, but even so, I never could fully imagine hurting an innocent person, for example, and then feeling nothing--no regret, no remorse, no guilt, just nothing.
But my therapeutic work rests in large measure upon the understandings that I reach by means of empathic attunement to the inner life of the patient. For example, if a bereaved person comes to me for help, I may not be feeling his or her pain myself at that moment, but I have felt such loss and suffered it, so I can use the recollection of my own pain and grief in those past circumstances as a way of entering the mind of my patient. So if you were to come to me for treatment, and if you told me that you feel nothing much for anyone else, that you can steal, lie, cheat, manipulate, and use people with no guilt or remorse at all, how could I approach our work? Yes, I could understand your words on a logical level, but probably not with much emotional depth. You see the problem here, I assume.
The last obstacle to psychotherapy for the sociopath is the sociopath's own ambivalence and resistance to change. You suggest this in your letter when you say, "I am undecided whether being a sociopath is a good thing or a bad thing." I admire this statement for its honesty, and for your reasoning about being undecided (that you had no basis for judgment since you did not know anything about what "normal" humans really feel). I think this is the case for many sociopaths: deep ambivalence. On the one hand, sociopathy confers some real and undeniable advantages in life. Think of how many "successful" people: leaders of industry, religious hucksters, lawyers and other professionals, military commanders, politicians, etc. have advanced to those career heights in no small measure due to possessing the very same socipathic traits you mentioned in regards to yourself. In other words, not caring one whit about anyone but yourself seems to work pretty damn well in the marketplace, battlefield, corporate boardroom, or any other place where ruthlessness and the ability to lie, cheat, and manipulate may serve as assets. So why would a sociopath want to change?
For you, there is some pleasure, I understand, and no small amount of power, in slipping through the cracks, in being invisible, in stealing without getting caught, in manipulating others into serving your ends. But on the other hand, what about love? There's the rub. Although you have never felt love, you are not entirely sure that those who say they do feel love are fooling themselves. As a successful manipulator of people, you know that many humans fool themselves constantly--which is part of why they are so easily fooled by you--so it is tempting to put their "love" into that category too, self-deception, but something in you is just not sure at all. Perhaps there really is a repairable gap in your feelings, some damage that calls out for healing, some brain problem which needs a cure, or some maladjustment that requires a tune-up. And this gap, or lack, or call it what you will, apparently lies in just that area where so many people seem to find peace and fulfillment. So you wonder. And the wondering has grown stronger. And this is what you wrote to me about it:
". . . all I am wondering is if there is a way that a sociopath can 'learn
to love', or at least to change at all, or am I destined to pretty much not
care what happens to anyone else for the rest of my life?"
Here is my response, David: I do not know. I do not know if compassion can be taught to someone who says he does not have any to begin with. But I am not prepared to rule it out. Possibly if you had come to me personally with that question I would consider working with you therapeutically, but I would inform you first that that sociopathy has no known effective treatment--not known to me at least--so we would be working ad lib, so to speak, and with no guarantees of anything. Then I would ask for a strict agreement with you about the ground rules of our relationship: prompt and full payment, keeping appointments, absolute respect for my time and professional necessities--that kind of thing--and that violation by you of the agreement would be grounds for my firing you from therapy immediately. If you could live with that, and if you really felt motivated to see if some deeper feelings might be available to you (your words about having an internal philosophical breakdown seem promising as to motivation), we might be able to do something. I just don't know.
Be well.
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