Read: 2026-01-16
Recommend: 10/10
This book provides valuable insight into how sociopaths think and behave from a first-person perspective. Understanding this has helped me better comprehend some challenging individuals in my life.
Here are some text that I highlighted in the book:
As a child, while other kids in my neighborhood were riding bikes and having playdates with friends, I was reading mysteries. True crime, mostly. I was fascinated by the darkness in people. What is it that makes them evil? What is it that makes them capable? I wanted to know.
For weeks I’d been engaging in all manner of subversive behavior to make the pressure disappear and none of it had worked. But now—with that one violent act—all traces of pressure were eradicated. Not just gone but replaced by a deep sense of peace.
It was the first time I realized that fear couldn’t be used against me. It wasn’t that I was immune to it, per se, just that mine was muted. I understood this wasn’t the case for most kids. While my classmates lived in constant terror of Mrs. Ravenel, I was never intimidated by her antics. While my cousins were afraid to leave the house after dark, I had no problem wandering around the neighborhood alone. And while my sister was quietly playing in our room after school, I was breaking into nearby homes. Could I have gotten caught? Sure. Was I worried about the consequences? No. I had decided fear must be a useless emotion. I pitied people who seemed to be afraid of everything. What a waste! I was content to follow my own rules and live with impunity. I saw no purpose in apprehension.
Inflicting pain (or distress) was a guaranteed, instantaneous method of pressure elimination. I didn’t know why. All I knew was the release after stabbing Syd was the best feeling I’d ever had. It wasn’t just that I didn’t care. It was that I didn’t care that I didn’t care. I was a kite flying high in the sky, beyond the reach of pressure and stuck stress and any expectations of emotion. Yet somehow, I knew there was an inherent risk in allowing myself to do something so amoral. It was dangerous, for one thing. But worse, it was addictive.
“Why do you want to be invisible so much?” “Because when I’m invisible, I don’t have to worry about people noticing I’m different,” I replied candidly. “I feel safest when people can’t see me because that’s when I can just be myself.”
“I love you,” he said softly. Those three little words took me by surprise. A tune from Cinderella sprang to mind. So this is love, I thought. Except it didn’t feel transactional. Or conditional. Or dangerous or useless. This feeling was perfect—perfectly symbiotic in that I was simultaneously experiencing what it was like to care about someone not related to me and, by the grace of that connection, what it was like to care about myself. For the very first time.
To be clear, it wasn’t approval that I craved. It was integration. I didn’t want to stand out in a crowd. My entire life, I’d wanted to disappear. But once I got to college, I realized I’d been going about it all wrong. The trick to going unnoticed was not to isolate but to infiltrate, to assimilate. By assuming the personalities of other people, I was no longer getting the look. Dishonesty, once again, had proven to be the safe choice. Hidden behind my personality fabrics, I was, for all intents and purposes, invisible. This was a huge breakthrough. I hated that people always sensed I was somehow different. It made me more conspicuous. It made me easier to spot. But now I had the tools. Whatever it was about me that made others uncomfortable no longer mattered. I could simply distract them by impersonating them. It was like casting a spell. The second I’d meet someone new, I’d adopt their stance. Imitate their mannerisms. Copy their cadence. Find out their likes and dislikes, then project them as my own. The effect was like holding up a giant mirror. Men, women, old, young—it didn’t matter. People were always charmed—not with me, but by my reflection of them. All I had to do was mimic behavior. Behavior I was observing—and also practicing—at various social gatherings.
Psychopaths are believed to suffer from brain abnormalities. It’s why they make the same mistakes over and over. They are biologically incapable of learning from punishment or understanding remorse or even experiencing anxiety. But sociopaths are believed to be different. While their behavior is often just as bad as psychopaths’, they appear to be more capable of evolution. Their issues seem to be more environmental than biological.”
“Empathy, guilt, shame, remorse, jealousy, even love—these are considered social emotions,” she said. “We’re not born with them. They’re learned.” “Okay…” “Well, sociopaths and psychopaths both struggle to connect with the social emotions,” she said. “Some researchers believe they aren’t capable.”
The temptation to hurt was always there, a blinking cursor on a computer screen waiting for input.
Everything I read indicated I was a sociopath. I was lacking in empathy. I was fluent in deceit. I was capable of violence without remorse. Manipulation came easy. I was superficially charming. I engaged in criminal behavior. I struggled with connecting to emotions. I never felt guilty. And yet I knew I wasn’t the monster the media described. I also recognized that my symptoms didn’t exactly match those on Cleckley’s psychopathy checklist.
My apathy was like a dragon that needed feeding. If I ignored it, it consumed me. So I put it on a diet. I did exactly what I needed to give myself necessary “jolts” of feeling. I never took it any further—even when I was tempted, which was often. I scheduled my mischief like I would have a doctor’s prescription. And I never skipped a dose
“It’s all about attachment,” she continued after a beat. “People who suffer from borderline personality disorder are desperate for love. It’s why they tend to be hyperemotional. They will go to any length to avoid loss of affection, even if it means disrespecting boundaries or engaging in destructive behavior. They don’t care about anyone else’s needs or feelings. All that matters to them are their needs and their feelings. Other people are perceived as self-objects. In other words, borderlines don’t view others as separate individuals but as extensions of themselves. Their perception of the world is therefore purely egocentric and one-dimensional. “Sociopaths, on the other hand, are not motivated by attachment,” Dr. Carlin continued. “If anything, their view of the world is shaped by a lack of attachment. But that worldview is similarly egocentric and one-dimensional. It’s why people always get them confused.”
Normal people act out when their emotions become too stressful. Sociopaths act out when their lack of emotion becomes too stressful.
I was stunned. “Who am I to write a book?” “You’re a well-adjusted sociopath, for starters.” She laughed. “Right,” I said. “I’m a sociopath. Who the fuck’s gonna believe anything I say?” “Other sociopaths. Like you said: You can relate. You know what it’s like to live with this. You’ve got a unique perspective because you can dissect it from both a personal and a professional point of view. Even if you don’t have all the answers, you have the insight to understand other sociopaths and to help them just like you helped yourself.”
It was an odd feeling. Sitting there, I was anything but safe. If anything, I was flirting with disaster, about to embark on an adventure that was both illegal and risky.
He was like a recreational drug that made me feel invincible and strong. My saving grace was that I could only take so much. Being high on Max simply wasn’t something I could do all the time, nor was it what I wanted. He was too flamboyant for me, and his access to nearly unlimited resources made him a frequent magnet for chaos. I, on the other hand, preferred discipline. So I was mindful of the dosing.
Rational emotive behavioral therapy (REBT), developed by Columbia University psychologist Albert Ellis, is a treatment designed to help people recognize irrational and destructive beliefs, feelings, and behaviors and restructure them. The key component of REBT is the ABC Model. When examining behavioral choices, the model asks an individual to identify three things: the “activating event” (A), the “belief system” related to that event (B), and the “consequence” that results from that belief (C). I decided to apply the ABC Model to myself. Obviously, the stuck stress I’d experienced earlier that morning was the “activating event.” The conviction that I needed to act out to combat that anxiety was my decades-old “belief system” related to that event. And the “consequence” of that belief system would be the destructive behavior I would then commit.
“I want to understand my urges instead of reacting to them,”
I choose people like her specifically because they deserve it, because they do things I can use to justify my behavior. But it’s not good
I was upset. I just couldn’t connect to the feeling. It was like chewing something I couldn’t taste, which only added to my frustration.
Half the battle in clinical training is helping trainees compartmentalize their own emotional attachments
Overly dependent on the bond we’d forged as kids, we’d missed out on the opportunity to forge a new one as adults.
The music business, lucrative and sensational, was not a healthy environment for someone like me. From boozy lunches to creative accounting, there was something lawless about the entertainment industry. Left unchecked, there was no telling where I might end up or what unhealthy prescriptions I might find. Psychology, on the other hand, was more meaningful. The science of sociopathy mattered, not just to me, but to everyone like me.
There it was. Max, I knew, wasn’t in love with me. He was in love with the fact that he thought I couldn’t love, not really. Not normally. Max knew I’d never judge him or be jealous or clingy. I wouldn’t care if he was gone for months at a time. That made me safe. To him, I was a promise he didn’t have to keep. And to me, he was a hiding place I didn’t have to leave. A dark and murky cave where time didn’t pass and consequences didn’t matter. As long as I had Max, I could stay in the shadows. I could keep finding new prescriptions and stand still but pretend I was moving.
“With my patients, there’s no expectation for me to feel or relate or connect or even talk. I don’t have to do anything but observe.” A good analogy hit me. “It’s like the psychological equivalent of breaking and entering. Except instead of wandering around people’s houses, I’m wandering around people’s minds.”
General poverty in major affective reactions, I thought. Number ten on Cleckley’s list, intended to describe the sociopath’s inability to experience certain emotions. For the first time, I realized the gravity of its precision. This was how I always “chose” feelings. I had no conscience pulling me toward any one tile. They were merely choices available to me. Like clothes stolen from a stranger’s wardrobe, hanging limp and lifeless, without a natural spark of their own. This was my experience of emotion: a colorful menu of affective reactions, curated, no doubt, from a lifetime of observation.
Cognitive journaling is a CBT technique that asks patients to keep track of actions, beliefs, and reactions to isolate patterns, moods, and urges. I used a notebook to keep a precise record, in real time, of when I noticed feelings of anxiety, what preceded the feelings, and what compulsions they triggered. The more aware I became of my own destructive psychological patterns, both past and present, the more adept I became at addressing them. CBT offered me better ways to cope with my compulsions. On the (increasingly rare) occasions I felt the sensation of pressure (and subsequent urge to act out), I was able to employ healthier methods of stress reduction.
Each second stretched into an eternity. I stared at the clock as the minutes ticked by, forcing myself to monitor my thought patterns and subconscious urges as they arose from the depths of my psychological abyss. The things I noticed, I wrote down in my notebook.
I didn’t need destructive behavior to neutralize my anxiety any more than I needed floaties to keep from drowning in a pool. I just need to learn how to fucking swim, I thought. Learning to swim in apathetic waters turned out to be a critical aspect of my sociopathic treatment.
I turned to the CBT technique of cognitive restructuring, in which patients are asked to record unwanted negative thoughts and then refute them. I started logging every time I noticed one of these automatic negative thoughts and then forced myself to write down a fact-based counter-thought.
I get off on doing mischievous things, and I have to actively choose not to. Every day. Like an alcoholic.
empirical data about sociopathy became David’s gateway to understanding. The more he read and learned, the more supportive he became. Instead of seeing me as damaged, he came to see me as different. More importantly, he stopped taking our differences personally. His understanding of my personality type allowed him to navigate things from an impartial perspective. He became less reactive and therefore more empathic.
These days, I’m happy to report, I don’t have to work so hard. I’ve come to accept that my version of love is a mosaic: tiny pieces of broken glass held together by fate so the light can shine through in different colors. It is not perfect. Perfect, I’m afraid, is far too tame
“People hate sociopaths for not having empathy and compassion… But who has empathy and compassion for them?” Sociopaths were villainized for failing to exhibit the very emotion they were denied. “How can anyone be expected to master a learned emotion they never get to experience for themselves?” The hypocrisy was maddening. These were human beings deserving of serious clinical attention. Instead, they were treated with malevolence and exiled.