Sociopaths, mimicry, and blank slates

"I pick up on accents." That's what I always tell people when they ask where I get my accent from. When I hear someone speaking with a distinctive accent, I adopt it for my own, at least for that moment while I'm with them. It can get particularly offensive or dicey when I adopt the accent of someone of a different race or class from me and they think I'm making fun of them. I do it very naturally and the result, like that of many aspects of having a personality disorder, is that I don't really have the accent of my nationality or place of birth -- the default. What I have instead is a hodgepodge where people assume that I'm foreign, but no one can quite put a finger on where I might be from.

For sociopaths, mimicry is their metier, their bread and butter.

Hare once illustrated this for Nicole Kidman, who had invited him to Hollywood to help her prepare for a role as a psychopath in Malice. How, she wondered, could she show the audience there was something fundamentally wrong with her character?

"I said, 'Here's a scene that you can use,' " Hare says. " 'You're walking down a street and there's an accident. A car has hit a child in the crosswalk. A crowd of people gather round. You walk up, the child's lying on the ground and there's blood running all over the place. You get a little blood on your shoes and you look down and say, "Oh shit." You look over at the child, kind of interested, but you're not repelled or horrified. You're just interested. Then you look at the mother, and you're really fascinated by the mother, who's emoting, crying out, doing all these different things. After a few minutes you turn away and go back to your house. You go into the bathroom and practice mimicking the facial expressions of the mother.' " He then pauses and says, "That's the psychopath: somebody who doesn't understand what's going on emotionally, but understands that something important has happened."

I think mimicry is interesting, and I think a lot of empaths think it's freaky. What I find more freaky is what constant mimicry suggests -- that you have no baseline "you," that you are always just reactions to outside stimuli.

I have a good friend who was initially very frustrated that I didn't seem to have defaults: no default understanding of right and wrong, no default beliefs, no default personality even. Everything had to be reasoned, everything had to be constructed anew. It can be frustrating for me too. It's time consuming. And sometimes it disturbs me how impressionable I am. Being a blank slate, sometimes I can surprise even myself with non sequiturs or unpredictable behavior. It's sort of scary.