From a reader:
I have just finished reading your book, Confessions of a Sociopath, and appreciate so much the wider view I have gained as a result. Having read every published work on sociopathy previous to yours, I had become disheartened by the firmly held clinical theory that all sociopaths are “unredeemable” and therefore not worth the effort to help them to manage to live among “the rest of us” (whoever “we” are). This is a position without hope for the sociopath or those who happen to love them.
I spent all of my adult life trying to understand my childhood and how I was different (and therefore somehow less than) the other members of my family. It was in my graduate education to become a Licensed Mental Health Counselor that I came to understand something that years of therapy had not shown me: that both of my parents and two of my siblings are sociopaths. A genogram study of my family-of-origin, going back four generations from mine, looks much like that of an alcoholic family: mostly sociopaths with an “empath” or two thrown in for fun. My antecessors and contemporaries were not the productive-but-easily-bored variety, however.
Fortunately, naming a thing can grant one dominion over it, and this was the effect of that understanding for me. All the literature pointed to the fact that it was “them” and not “me”’ thus providing me with the permission to “feel” and also the label of “normalcy.” I determined not to repeat the past.
Unfortunately, though, one of my own children, my only daughter, is also a sociopath. Her birth 27 years ago provided the impetus for a different view of the “problem.” How can one not be part of the “problem” while also producing a child, which by all accounts, is “damaged goods?” Her lack of empathy, fear, and conscience, as well as her intelligence, manifested themselves at the age of 14 months in a single event that I captured in pictures because I was so baffled by it: When I left the kitchen for a brief minute, this child climbed from the floor to the top of a wire-shelved pantry, removed an unopened 5 lb. bag of flour from the top shelf, climbed back down, opened the bag with a sharp knife retrieved from a drawer with a toddler lock on it, and began loading the flour into the cat food dish on the floor to “make them stop crying, and you took too long.” She was angry and NOT worried about the cats. She was angry with me for leaving the room. She also moved to “fix” the problem of the crying cats by feeding them in a way she had identified as a means to her own sustenance. I did not at that time know the significance of that cluster of behaviors.
This child’s lack of fear and empathy caused me so much distress in her early years that her brothers are significantly younger than she is. I knew I did not have the capacity, and I certainly lacked any sort of empathic filial support, to bring another child into the world until this one was pretty much self-sufficient. She marched off to kindergarten about the time her first brother was born. Her entry to school seemed like a much-needed break from the “watchful” parenting and constant lessons in application of the Golden Rule. However, this was when the real problems began, as public schooling only served to exacerbate the difficulties she encountered in trying to “fit in” with their fungible “rules” and lack of training in any sort of excellence. We tried private schooling, Christian education, and finally ended up homeschooling her (and her brothers) so that she might adopt a set of values not unlike the ones you described having in your book. It also became necessary to terminate contact with unproductive and sadistic sociopathic relatives.
All of this served to produce a woman who is beautiful, somewhat ruthless, intelligent, talented, and never governed by her emotions. I think she cares for her brothers, and she is always checking in with me to make sure she handles relationship and communication issues with coworkers appropriately. She never emotionally eats or drinks. She moved to NYC about 3 years ago right under our noses with a man more than twice her age so that she could live the big city life. She dumped him like a hot potato (on Valentine’s Day, no less!) when he decided that at 60, he might like her to join him in living a slower, more rural life in Iowa. She went back to NYC and slept on the couches of “people in her network” (“friends” to us empaths), tolerating circumstances for months that more feelings-oriented folks would find intolerable for the sake of her own goals. She is currently seducing her next “provider” because “it is simply unacceptable for me to live for long in a three-bedroom apartment in this city with two other people without demoralizing them or wanting to ruin them, Mom.” I do not subsidize her lifestyle because that would be to invite the ruin of us both, and I often feel like the ethereal father of the sociopathic killer on the series “Dexter” working to help her to identify “the code” by which to live the most fulfilling life possible. I don’t know whether she actually loves me, or not. I love her deeply, and have thanked God every day that he should give me the daughter I had wanted as a young woman nurturing her precious life in my womb. I focus on being the kind of mother I need to be, doing what is best for my adult child as I did when she was an infant. I think she has taken the tools I have given her and put them to mostly good use. She has taught me not to ask God for what I want, but to be thankful for what I get.
I appreciated your view that sociopaths are just different. This is what makes the world go round, and my belief in an all-knowing and perfect Creator informs me that just as Judas was part of God’s plan for the redemption of mankind through Christ, my daughter has a purpose known to him, too. I had questions of faith with respect to the definition of words like redemption, sin, forgiveness, remorse, and evil. I have come to believe that sociopathy cannot be a mistake, but is, rather, an act of creation and for the benefit of mankind. Sociopaths are fearless, and in difficult times, this is defined as “courage”. Your book was very helpful to me in the challenge it provided intellectually, maternally, spiritually, morally, professionally, and personally. I wanted you to know this. Thank you for taking the time to read this letter.
I have just finished reading your book, Confessions of a Sociopath, and appreciate so much the wider view I have gained as a result. Having read every published work on sociopathy previous to yours, I had become disheartened by the firmly held clinical theory that all sociopaths are “unredeemable” and therefore not worth the effort to help them to manage to live among “the rest of us” (whoever “we” are). This is a position without hope for the sociopath or those who happen to love them.
I spent all of my adult life trying to understand my childhood and how I was different (and therefore somehow less than) the other members of my family. It was in my graduate education to become a Licensed Mental Health Counselor that I came to understand something that years of therapy had not shown me: that both of my parents and two of my siblings are sociopaths. A genogram study of my family-of-origin, going back four generations from mine, looks much like that of an alcoholic family: mostly sociopaths with an “empath” or two thrown in for fun. My antecessors and contemporaries were not the productive-but-easily-bored variety, however.
Fortunately, naming a thing can grant one dominion over it, and this was the effect of that understanding for me. All the literature pointed to the fact that it was “them” and not “me”’ thus providing me with the permission to “feel” and also the label of “normalcy.” I determined not to repeat the past.
Unfortunately, though, one of my own children, my only daughter, is also a sociopath. Her birth 27 years ago provided the impetus for a different view of the “problem.” How can one not be part of the “problem” while also producing a child, which by all accounts, is “damaged goods?” Her lack of empathy, fear, and conscience, as well as her intelligence, manifested themselves at the age of 14 months in a single event that I captured in pictures because I was so baffled by it: When I left the kitchen for a brief minute, this child climbed from the floor to the top of a wire-shelved pantry, removed an unopened 5 lb. bag of flour from the top shelf, climbed back down, opened the bag with a sharp knife retrieved from a drawer with a toddler lock on it, and began loading the flour into the cat food dish on the floor to “make them stop crying, and you took too long.” She was angry and NOT worried about the cats. She was angry with me for leaving the room. She also moved to “fix” the problem of the crying cats by feeding them in a way she had identified as a means to her own sustenance. I did not at that time know the significance of that cluster of behaviors.
This child’s lack of fear and empathy caused me so much distress in her early years that her brothers are significantly younger than she is. I knew I did not have the capacity, and I certainly lacked any sort of empathic filial support, to bring another child into the world until this one was pretty much self-sufficient. She marched off to kindergarten about the time her first brother was born. Her entry to school seemed like a much-needed break from the “watchful” parenting and constant lessons in application of the Golden Rule. However, this was when the real problems began, as public schooling only served to exacerbate the difficulties she encountered in trying to “fit in” with their fungible “rules” and lack of training in any sort of excellence. We tried private schooling, Christian education, and finally ended up homeschooling her (and her brothers) so that she might adopt a set of values not unlike the ones you described having in your book. It also became necessary to terminate contact with unproductive and sadistic sociopathic relatives.
All of this served to produce a woman who is beautiful, somewhat ruthless, intelligent, talented, and never governed by her emotions. I think she cares for her brothers, and she is always checking in with me to make sure she handles relationship and communication issues with coworkers appropriately. She never emotionally eats or drinks. She moved to NYC about 3 years ago right under our noses with a man more than twice her age so that she could live the big city life. She dumped him like a hot potato (on Valentine’s Day, no less!) when he decided that at 60, he might like her to join him in living a slower, more rural life in Iowa. She went back to NYC and slept on the couches of “people in her network” (“friends” to us empaths), tolerating circumstances for months that more feelings-oriented folks would find intolerable for the sake of her own goals. She is currently seducing her next “provider” because “it is simply unacceptable for me to live for long in a three-bedroom apartment in this city with two other people without demoralizing them or wanting to ruin them, Mom.” I do not subsidize her lifestyle because that would be to invite the ruin of us both, and I often feel like the ethereal father of the sociopathic killer on the series “Dexter” working to help her to identify “the code” by which to live the most fulfilling life possible. I don’t know whether she actually loves me, or not. I love her deeply, and have thanked God every day that he should give me the daughter I had wanted as a young woman nurturing her precious life in my womb. I focus on being the kind of mother I need to be, doing what is best for my adult child as I did when she was an infant. I think she has taken the tools I have given her and put them to mostly good use. She has taught me not to ask God for what I want, but to be thankful for what I get.
I appreciated your view that sociopaths are just different. This is what makes the world go round, and my belief in an all-knowing and perfect Creator informs me that just as Judas was part of God’s plan for the redemption of mankind through Christ, my daughter has a purpose known to him, too. I had questions of faith with respect to the definition of words like redemption, sin, forgiveness, remorse, and evil. I have come to believe that sociopathy cannot be a mistake, but is, rather, an act of creation and for the benefit of mankind. Sociopaths are fearless, and in difficult times, this is defined as “courage”. Your book was very helpful to me in the challenge it provided intellectually, maternally, spiritually, morally, professionally, and personally. I wanted you to know this. Thank you for taking the time to read this letter.



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