Diagnosed psychopath who doesn't feel guilt or empathy opens up on 'toxic' trait that led her to get help
Jamie is a diagnosed psychopath. This is her story in her own words:
For psychopathy, you are like computer code just processing information. You get this information that says ‘here's a potential opportunity’, and it goes through the flow chart and it just comes up with the answer.
There's nobody in the driver's seat. There's not a car. There's not a self to be driven at all.
My feeling of difference from other people mostly looked like a feeling of superiority. I would look at other people and think this person is so caught up in their insecurities, this person is so caught up in their concerns for how they look to other people that it's pathetic.
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I thought, “Wow, why are they choosing to care what other people think?” It looked like they were choosing to suffer.
“What is empathy?”
When I was probably like nine years old, [my dad and I] were watching a commercial. I grew up in the 1980s and there was a famine in Ethiopia. There were a lot of commercials showing African kids with flies in their eyes suffering from severe malnutrition. And I was just like, “Why is this kid not getting the fly out of his eye?”
I said something about how this kid was so stupid. And then my dad said, “Have you no empathy?” And I was like, “What is empathy?”
I think he tried to explain it. And then I was like, “I guess I don't.”
That was like my first realisation that there was something that other people were feeling, that I was not feeling.
“Am I terrible at drowning opossums?”
I think a lot of people have a hard time with me killing a baby opossum.
My publisher [of memoir Confessions of a Sociopath: A Life Spent Hiding in Plain Sight] said something about killing animals, burning - like pyro, whatever - and then bedwetting, supposedly the three signs of psychopathy in children [called the MacDonald triad].
I thought, I've never killed animals. And then I thought, "Oh, I did that one time."
I was in my early 20s, teaching swimming lessons during the summers during college using my parents’ pool.
I saw this baby opossum in the pool, and I thought the thing that probably just has to happen in this situation is to kill it. That's the easiest solution. I'm not going to be able to fish it out with a net. I have this phobia. Opossums freak me out.
So I tried to drown it. I was hosing it. The baby opossum’s struggling to breathe. I keep hosing it. I hose it for five minutes, and I'm like, “Am I terrible at drowning opossums?” I guess so.
I got on the phone with the people who were gonna do the private lessons, and I said, “I'm sorry I have to cancel. There's a problem with the pool today.”
People always forget I didn't actually kill the opossum. I tried.
“I probably stole $2,000 of small goods”
I've done plenty of things that I could have been arrested for and imprisoned for - not just like probation or something.
One of my favourite ones was this giant shoplifting scheme I had at BYU - which is the Mormon University in Utah, Brigham Young University. I majored in music.
I probably stole $2,000 worth of small goods. I had this both respect and disrespect for BYU students, because they're so nice and they are always looking for the good in other people.
I just had every little scam I could find. I would steal bikes all the time at BYU, they would leave them unlocked. I treated it basically like a bike rental.
I would go to the lost and found, especially for books that I knew I could describe. I'd be like, “Oh, I'm missing my music theory book or something.” They'd be like, "Is this it?” Then I just go upstairs, two levels to the bookstore from the lost and found, and just sell it back to them.
“You may want to consider the possibility you’re a sociopath?”
After I failed at music - because I couldn't get into master's programs and I wasn't good enough to be a professional musician - I thought, “What can I pivot to? Oh, the law is easy.”
I loved law school. It was so logical, rational. I've come to learn I have an underlying preference for truth and reality.
After my first year, I had a clerkship with a federal prosecution agency. I shared an office with this other law student from a different school. I was very honest with her about the different things that I experienced compared to other people.
After a few weeks of very openly chatting, she said, “You may want to consider the possibility that you're a sociopath.”
So I looked it up on a search engine, and I found this website that had [the] criterion for when somebody's a psychopath. And I just went through the list, and I thought, yeah, check, check, check, that's me.
I didn't feel anything really about it. It was kind of like learning your 18th grandfather is the king of Spain.
In fact, I felt like it gave me a huge advantage. OK, other people like empathy, and maybe it's good for them, but it certainly seems to be good for me to not have empathy.
I still don't feel fear. I never had a sense of imposter syndrome. I see these motivational quotes being like, everything that we want is on the other side of fear. And I think, how must it be to live a life like that, where fear is keeping you from the things that you want, regularly.
Especially as an attorney - and honestly, even as a musician - it was just an advantage. I was just kind of like a robot doing things.
“It feels like you’re a god”
One of the things that I went to therapy for is that I realised I could not stop manipulating in my relationships.
I read my friend's journal in college. She probably would be like, that was like a massive invasion of privacy. And I would say, yes, that was a massive invasion of privacy. But at the same time, I need more information for manipulating you.
You don't like the job that your friend has. I could pretend to be my friend and send out a resume to another law firm she could work at.
You see that somebody's replied from work on something, and you shift it to archive where you know it's going to cause them problems. That would totally be something I would do. You see it's an urgent message, like call me right away, and then you just swipe off the notifications so they don't see it.
You don't see it as a bad thing, because you're just doing it to get them to have problems at work, so they'll finally quit.
You don't like the guy that your friend's dating. You intentionally show up late, so she has to wait for you. So then she shows up late for her date.
Sometimes it'd be more dramatic, where it'd be like, “It's either him or me.” But you'd phrase it in the terms of I'm doing you a favour because I, as a friend, cannot see you suffer like this.
One of the stupid things about being a psychopath is that you have this sense of superiority. You feel like you're a Cassandra where you see the future and you know better. It feels like you're a god.
“I had to get a sense of self”
I didn't understand personal boundaries for others because I didn't have them at all for myself.
I had no sense of self to even have personal boundaries for. I had to back up a couple steps and get a sense of self, and then learn how to protect that sense of self with personal boundaries.
I'd be like, “OK, I got really angry about that. That must be because this is really important to me.” That's just how I learned about myself over the years.
And then I realised what it’s like for everybody else to have a sense of self, and they have these personal boundaries. And when they get violated? It feels really bad.
I realised how toxic it was to not respect somebody's personhood and their autonomy. You know, if she wants to date somebody who's a bad guy, then that's her choice to make.
I think post therapy, there's still things that I don't experience, like empathy, and I don't have the emotional reactions that people expect. I still don't really feel shame or guilt.
“Can you imagine a life without self expression?”
You can see why [psychopaths] make good predators because there's no ‘them’ to get in the way. There's no self expression or no attempt to remain ‘true to oneself’, because there's no self to remain true to. And in the absence of that, they've just learned to try to live comfortable and mostly exciting lives.
Why exciting? Because can you imagine a life without self expression? It feels totally empty and meaningless, and that's the same response I get from all the psychopaths I meet. They feel a lack of meaning, and to self-treat that lack of meaning they are novelty-seeking.
They are thrill-seeking. They are willing to blow up a good thing, they’re willing to ruin a relationship, they're willing to lose everything because they don't have any real connection to the things they have.
I think for psychopaths, the root of most of your issues is that you are not finding regular means of self expression, daily self expression, because you're not enough in touch with your identity that you're able to even recognise those opportunities for self expression.
My advice to everybody is that nothing is worth sacrificing your self over - I think old fashionedly, we say your soul. It's never worth it to trade your soul for anything.
Jamie runs the blog sociopathworld.com exploring her psychopathic traits. She is also the author, under the pen name M. E. Thomas, of Confessions of a Sociopath: A Life Spent Hiding in Plain Sight.
Topics: Health, Mental Health, Originals
Simon Fearn