From The Wall Street Journal:
Whenever I ask my mother if she remembers the time in second grade when I stabbed a kid in the head with a pencil, her answer is the same: “Vaguely.”
And I believe her. So much about my early childhood is vague. Some things I remember with absolute clarity. Like the smell of the trees at Redwood National Park and our house on the hill near downtown San Francisco. God, I loved that house. Other things aren’t so clear, like the first time I sneaked into my neighbor’s house when they weren’t home.
I started stealing before I could talk. At least, I think I did. By the time I was six or seven I had an entire box full of things I’d stolen in my closet. Somewhere in the archives of People magazine there is a photo of Ringo Starr holding me as a toddler. We’re standing in his backyard—not far from Los Angeles, where my father was an executive in the music business—and I am literally stealing the glasses off his face. I was not the first child to ever play with a grown-up’s glasses. But based on the spectacles currently perched on my bookshelf, I’m pretty sure I was the only one to swipe a pair from a Beatle.
To be clear: I wasn’t a kleptomaniac. A kleptomaniac is a person with a persistent and irresistible urge to take things that don’t belong to them. I suffered from a different type of urge, a compulsion brought about by the discomfort of apathy, the nearly indescribable absence of common social emotions like shame and empathy.
I didn’t understand any of this back then. All I knew was that I didn’t feel things the way other kids did. I didn’t feel guilt when I lied. I didn’t feel compassion when classmates got hurt on the playground. For the most part, I felt nothing, and I didn’t like the way that “nothing” felt. So I did things to replace the nothingness with…something.
This impulse felt like an unrelenting pressure that expanded to permeate my entire self. The longer I tried to ignore it, the worse it got. My muscles would tense, my stomach would knot. Tighter. Tighter. It was claustrophobic, like being trapped inside my brain. Trapped inside a void.
Stealing wasn’t something I necessarily wanted to do. It just happened to be the easiest way to stop the tension. The first time I made this connection was in first grade, sitting behind a girl named Clancy. The pressure had been building for days. Without knowing exactly why, I was overcome with frustration and had the urge to do something violent.
I wanted to stand up and flip over my desk. I imagined running to the heavy steel door that opened to the playground and slamming my fingers in its hinges. For a minute I thought I might actually do it. But then I saw Clancy’s barrette. She had two in her hair, pink bows on either side. The one on the left had slipped down. Take it, my thoughts commanded, and you’ll feel better.
I liked Clancy and I didn’t want to steal from her. But I wanted my brain to stop pulsing, and some part of me knew it would help. So, carefully, I reached forward and unclipped the bow. Once it was in my hand, I felt better, as if some air had been released from an overinflated balloon. I didn’t know why, but I didn’t care. I’d found a solution. It was a relief.
These early acts of deviance are encoded in my mind like GPS coordinates plotting a course toward awareness. Even now, I can recall where I got most of the things that didn’t belong to me as a child. But I can’t explain the locket with the “L” inscribed on it.
“Patric, you absolutely must tell me where you got this,” my mother said the day she found it in my room. We were standing next to my bed. One of the pillow shams was crooked against the headboard and I was consumed with the urge to straighten it. “Look at me,” she said, grabbing my shoulders. “Somewhere out there a person is missing this locket. They are missing it right now and they’re so sad they can’t find it. Think about how sad that person must be.”
I shut my eyes and tried to imagine what the locket owner was feeling, but I couldn’t. I felt nothing. When I opened my eyes and looked into hers, I knew my mother could tell.
“Sweetheart, listen to me,” she said, kneeling. “Taking something that doesn’t belong to you is stealing. And stealing is very, very bad.”
Again, nothing.
Mom paused, not sure what to do next. She took a deep breath and asked, “Have you done this before?”
I nodded and pointed to the closet. Together we went through the box. I explained what everything was and where it had come from. Once the box was empty, she stood and said we were going to return every item to its rightful owner, which was fine with me. I didn’t fear consequences and I didn’t suffer remorse, two more things I’d already figured out weren’t “normal.” Returning the stuff actually served my purpose. The box was full, and emptying it would give me a fresh space to store things I had yet to steal.
“Why did you take these things?” Mom asked me.
I thought of the pressure in my head and the sense that I needed to do bad things sometimes. “I don’t know,” I said.
“Well… Are you sorry?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said. I was sorry. But I was sorry I had to steal to stop fantasizing about violence, not because I had hurt anyone.
Empathy, like remorse, never came naturally to me. I was raised in the Baptist church. I knew we were supposed to feel bad about committing sins. My teachers talked about “honor systems” and something called “shame,” which I understood intellectually, but it wasn’t something I felt. My inability to grasp core emotional skills made the process of making and keeping friends somewhat of a challenge. It wasn’t that I was mean or anything. I was simply different.
. . . .
For more than a century, society has deemed sociopathy untreatable and unredeemable. The afflicted have been maligned and shunned by mental health professionals who either don’t understand or choose to ignore the fact that sociopathy—like many personality disorders—exists on a spectrum.
After years of study, intensive therapy and earning a Ph.D. in psychology, I can say that sociopaths aren’t “bad” or “evil” or “crazy.” We simply have a harder time with feelings. We act out to fill a void. When I understood this about myself, I was able to control it.
Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal