Confessions of a Sociopath: A Life Spent Hiding in Plain Sight

Chapter 9 RAISING CAIN

Though my dream of birthing a large brood of supergeniuses is no longer feasible, I still take seriously the Mormon doctrine to multiply and replenish the earth. I like children. They’re still figuring out the world, so they don’t have many expectations of me, and I’m able to behave more authentically around them; I don’t have to work on keeping my mask up the way I do with adults. As much as anyone else, I like the idea of raising little people whom I could influence and shape, though I rarely think of it in terms of producing “good” men and women. There will always be another generation of sociopaths. Children are being born every day with a genetic predisposition to feel no guilt, no remorse, no empathy. And is that really so bad?

There is nothing keeping a young sociopath from being a great, high-achieving, functional member of society. I excel at many things, I have meaningful relationships with people, and I have a very full life. I also suffered a lot to get where I am, and most sociopaths have similar stories; as I was learning to manage my impulses and redirect my desires, I fought with family, alienated friends, and lost out on opportunities I should have pursued. Luckily for me, my parents managed to do a lot of things right in raising me, and I love them for that. It could have gone very badly, I think, and I appreciate the fact that it didn’t.

To early sociopath researcher James Prichard, originator of the term “moral insanity,” no one was born evil; bad people were born good but cultivated in error in an unending cycle of well-intentioned human folly. And for decades, researchers thought that children were blank slates to be written on, for good or ill. But we’re now aware that these traits are likely encoded into people like me from birth. Knowing that I carry my sociopathy in my genes, I often think about the kind of child that I would have. Like pregnant women who have nightmares of birthing half-goat babies, I dream of nucleotide chains replicating into the future with indifference. My genetic code will ensure that it lives on, sociopathy and all.

I once visited Tulane medical school and their collection of fetuses and embryos, fifty specimens in jars preserved in a milky yellow liquid, both the bodies and the means of their preservation relics from the nineteenth century. Approximately half of the specimens demonstrated normal gestational progression, but the other half represented abnormalities, the diagnoses for which were scrawled on yellowed, crinkly note cards—for example, encephalitis for one large-headed baby or ectrodactyly for one with lobster-claw hands. Babies with no specific diagnosis were labeled, simply, “monster.” Some were double-headed monsters or four-legged monsters, but miscellaneous monsters they were.

John Steinbeck wrote of monsters in his novel East of Eden:

Steinbeck identifies the sociopath Cathy as such a monster. Of her, he writes:

I remember such inspections as a child—the reluctant attraction, the fascinated repulsion. It’s easy to question some of the parenting choices my own mother and father made, but I believe they took their newborn monster and did the best they could with her. They must have felt this simultaneous love and horror, even while I lay bundled in their arms.

From the cradle to the grave, Cathy’s project was to exploit people, manipulate them and insinuate herself into their lives with the sole purpose of spreading poison, madness, and despair around her. I understand her impulse, and I’ve traveled on her road from time to time. But something in me has made other choices—love most paramount among them—that I imagine must be owed to my parents.

My genetic heritage has made me question whether or not I should ever have children. I worry that they too will be monsters, regardless of how many legs or heads they will have when they are born. I worry that they will be like me, and I worry even more that they will not be like me. I don’t know how I could be an appropriate parent to an empathetic child, how I would be able to love and respect it. I have one sister, a tearful, hugging woman, whom I regard with a great deal of disdain. What would I do with a child that needed constant emotional suckling? Maybe I would just be distant—almost certainly, I would be bored.

If I had a sociopathic child, though, I think I could do a good job rearing him or her. I believe my parents did a remarkably good job with me, whether they meant to or not. They set up an ongoing competition for love and scarce resources like time and money among their five children, an active game with relatively straightforward, consistent rules and obvious consequences. They had clear favorites. In fact, on many a weekend afternoon, my siblings would stave off boredom by discussing the relative strengths and weaknesses of each sibling and how they corresponded with the affections of our parents, e.g., Dad likes Scott because Scott will surf with him, but ultimately likes Jim better because Jim indulges his flights of fantasy. It was clear to all how Scott could move up in the rankings by, for instance, supporting my dad’s magical thinking—he just didn’t care to do so for whatever reason.

I understood my parents’ favoritism as a clearly defined meritocracy—a consistent system under which I could learn to operate. I bought into the game and actively participated because I felt like I could play well against my competitor siblings. I did not know all the rules or triggers, but I could learn them, and it was an ongoing challenge because I was not otherwise naturally inclined to care what my parents thought of me. My mother cleaved to the children who showed emotional and musical sensitivities that would encourage and affirm her own, while my father preferred the ones who exhibited innate intelligence sufficient to recognize his intellect but not so great that they questioned his authority. I would always go surfing and skiing with my dad because he would buy me the proper accoutrements—wetsuits, surfboards, surf racks, skis, boots, gloves, poles, and gas for my car—while my sister Kathleen was having to borrow dance shoes and scrounge rides from her friends. My mother always had dreams of our singing together like the Partridge Family, then later upgraded her dreams to a family jazz combo like the Marsalis family. My father always dreamed that we would be like the guitar-playing cool kids he used to envy in high school. I chose to play drums because it fit both of their dreams perfectly, enough that they found the money to buy me a drum set while my sister had to stay home from camp for lack of funds. My parents weren’t consistent in terms of providing emotional or financial support for me and my siblings, but their unremitting self-interest made them very predictable; this single vector dominated their every behavior toward us. Getting what we wanted was only a matter of how to appeal to their particular brands of self-interest.

The worst thing that my parents could have done (for me) was to behave in inconsistent ways, or to show us too much mercy. As a child, all I understood was cause and effect. If I felt like I or my siblings could break the rules and still get away with it by crying on cue, then I would have done that instead of following them. I was as amenable to conditioning as laboratory rats, learning to push the levers that gave me treats and to stop pushing levers that yielded nothing.

I think that sociopaths (particularly young ones) actually feel happier and thrive better in a world of clearly defined boundaries; when rules are consistently enforced, the child will just start to take them as a given. I certainly did. I think simple cause-and-effect rules with clear, predictable outcomes for compliance or violation encourage the young sociopath to think of life as an interesting puzzle that can be gamed. As long as the young sociopath believes that she can acquire some advantage through skillful planning and execution (and finds some level of success, which I feel is almost a given), she will stay committed to the structure of the game you have set up. It’s why sociopaths can be ruthless businessmen fiercely defending the principles of capitalism.

My favorite teacher had an entirely meritocratic system in which we could opt out of class time. She had replaced a very popular teacher in our sixth-grade pre-algebra class midyear. I didn’t like the popular teacher; he had pandered too much to students and often played favorites. My new teacher initially struggled to gain the trust of the class. Pre-algebra was the most advanced math class for our grade and our school was in a particularly nice part of town, so everyone was very smart and entitled. The smartest and most demanding of the children (including me) complained that she was going too slow. In a creative solution, she started giving short quizzes in the first five minutes of class. If you received a perfect score on the quiz, you got to go outside on the grass patch just outside the classroom door and work on your homework instead of staying inside for the lecture. Every day I would arrive a few minutes before class, glancing through the material for the day so I could get a perfect score. Out of the eighty school days left in the year, I only had to stay in for a few lectures, typically due to some small arithmetic error. Those were always very difficult days for me, but I also understood that those were the rules and my teacher applied them exactly and without exception. It felt like a game, and it was a game I liked to play because I outplayed my classmates. The fact that sometimes I lost just meant that it was not an easy game. It was challenging enough to keep my attention and consistent enough to keep my trust.

But if I were confronted with a system in which one lever might sometimes get a shock and sometimes get a treat, I would probably choose not to engage with the system at all, stealing my treats from the other rats instead. The worst thing that parents can do is to be inconsistent. It makes the child sociopath think that the game is rigged; in that case, it doesn’t matter what he does, except to the extent that he can out-cheat the cheater (typically the parent). Providing me a system defined by clear incentives, my parents laid out a way for me to gain positive benefits while exercising my sociopathic traits. I didn’t have to rely on the soft intangibles of empathy or emotion to get what I needed.

In raising my child, it would be natural for me to follow in my parents’ incredibly self-interested footsteps by only fostering those interests in my children that appealed to my own vanity. But there is predictability and honesty to this approach that I believe actually sets up children to thrive in the real world.

And I think that children often prefer emotional detachment from adults in response to their tantrums as opposed to emotional coddling. There’s something reasonable and stable seeming about my emotionlessness to children. Especially when children are self-aware enough to acknowledge that there are emotions they can’t control (and I think most children are aware of this as soon as they begin acknowledging the emotional worlds of others). It’s very calming to have someone not reacting emotionally at all.

My three-year-old niece had a meltdown in church the other day so I took her outside. I knew it was just because she was tired (all of her cousins had slept in the same room as part of a holiday weekend’s festivities), maybe a little overexcited with all of the activity and relatives, and maybe a little annoyed about the arrival of her new baby sister. So I just walked with her until she stopped crying, then sat on a curb playing with ants. I didn’t talk to her about her feelings or even mention the meltdown. When she got tired of the ants, she insisted we go back into church. I let her boss me around. It was a subtle sign to her that I still took her seriously, even after the tantrum. And then finally after we had settled ourselves into the pew again she asked me to scratch her back, after having acted aloof to me all weekend, and wanted me to go to her Sunday school class with her (I told her I was too tall to fit in the small chairs).

I’ve discovered that children are aware that they are slaves to their emotions and are a little embarrassed about it the same way twelve-year-old boys are a little embarrassed about their erections. They can’t really control them and the last thing they want is more attention being drawn to it. Asking about erections is not good. Tears should have the same rule. Or maybe it’s just that the children in my family prefer emotional detachment because that’s more what they’re used to. Either way, the esteem and affection that my nieces and nephews show me is perhaps proof that I wouldn’t be a horrible parent to an empath child after all.

Or maybe I would have little sociopath children. Because of my own success as a sociopath, I know that if I had equally remorseless, unfeeling children they would have just as much a chance to thrive in life as other children, if provided with the right kind of structure and opportunities to learn how to succeed. They’d be fine. In Steinbeck’s description of the sociopath Cathy he explains that “just as a cripple may learn to utilize his lack so that he becomes more effective in a limited field than the uncrippled, so did Cathy, using her difference, make a painful and bewildering stir in her world.” I know that any sociopath children of mine would be able to turn their weaknesses into strengths. I would hope that with the proper guidance they could use those strengths not to make a painful and bewildering stir, but for the benefit of their family and the greater world.

My most salient worry would not be how they would treat the world, but how the world would treat them. Would they be outsiders or outcasts? I would hate for them to feel compelled to go underground, never to find acceptance for who they are, to be regarded as hollow, unfinished people—or even the embodiment of evil.

It’s hard to parse out the root causes of this disorder. What it would be to know what genes flip which chemical levers that set these subtlest of mental tendencies in early childhood into motion. How do these incipient chemical yearnings mature into full-fledged sociopathy? Geneticists, neurologists, psychiatrists, psychologists, and criminologists are beginning to knit together, from bits and pieces of studies and observation, a complex portrait of a complex human experience.

Budding sociopaths are often categorized as “callous-unemotional” by psychologists who are reluctant to diagnose children as sociopaths or psychopaths too early, feeling that applying that diagnostic label can unfairly affect how the kids and their families are treated. The traits in children are very similar to those in adults: a distinct lack of affect, empathy, and remorse. Callous-unemotional children don’t respond to the usual negative cues that teach most people how to behave well. Paul Frick, a psychologist at the University of New Orleans, says, “They don’t care if someone is mad at them. They don’t care if they hurt someone’s feelings. If they can get what they want without being cruel, that’s often easier, but at the end of the day, they’ll do whatever works best.”

That was certainly my experience growing up. I had revelation after revelation that I could get more of what I wanted more easily if I learned how to accommodate the desires of other people. On the playground, you can keep a toy longer if another kid willingly gives it to you than if you take if from him; in high school, you win more popularity by fitting in than by lording your superior intelligence over everyone; in the workplace, you advance more by making your supervisor look good to the boss than you do by undermining your supervisor. As one blog commenter put it:

Despite sociopaths’ being largely ruled by impulses (or perhaps because they are), they are incredibly sensitive to incentive structures and actively consider both actual costs and opportunity costs in their decision-making. But there are certain consequences that I do not care as much about, particularly the moral judgment of others.

I presumably feel this way because of the wiring of my brain. Magnetic resonance imaging on the brains of psychopathic adults has shown significant differences in the size and density of regions of the brain associated with empathy and social values and active in moral decision-making. These areas are also critical for reinforcing positive outcomes and discouraging negative ones. In callous-unemotional children, negative feedback like a parent’s frown, a teacher’s chiding, or a friend’s yelp of pain may not register the way it would in a normal brain.

The lack of interest in other people’s negative emotions could, interestingly, be a matter of attention. Researchers gave a group of callous-unemotional boys a visual test that measures unconscious emotional processing. They flashed a rapid sequence of pictures of faces—fearful, happy, disgusted, and neutral—and measured the boys’ preattentive, or unconscious, recognition of the meaning of the emotion behind the faces. When compared with normal kids, the boys were less able to quickly detect fear or disgust, indicating that these callous-unemotional kids are not automatically assimilating threatening or negative cues in their world. They are lacking a fundamental social skill that most other people are born with, and it affects the way their whole emotional palette develops.

A recent study came to the surprising conclusion that children with a certain variation of a gene that affects brain serotonin are more likely to have these callous-unemotional traits if they are also raised poor. In contrast, kids with the same gene who had high socioeconomic status scored very low on sociopathic traits. The lead researcher on the study pointed out that although sociopathy is considered abnormal, these traits may be useful in certain circumstances. “For example, these folks tend to have less anxiety and are less prone to depression,” she said, qualities that might be useful in dangerous or unstable environments. It seems possible that kids in bad neighborhoods develop their inborn sociopathic traits as a defense mechanism against a chaotic and unpredictable world.

But these kids aren’t doomed to a life of prison or misanthropy. Psychiatrist Lee Robins investigated the roots of sociopathy by conducting a series of cohort studies tracking children with behavioral problems into adulthood. She discovered two important facts. First, nearly every adult who fit the criteria for sociopathy had been deeply antisocial as a child. And second, about 50 percent of the antisocial children who started in her study grew to be fairly normal adults. In other words, all sociopaths were antisocial children, but not all antisocial children become sociopaths. One has to wonder: Did some of those antisocial children simply grow up to be high-functioning, successful sociopaths who were then counted among the “fairly normal adults”? And if so, what in their childhoods made some children take one path, and the others another?

The general consensus has held that sociopathy is an untreatable disorder, but as evidence mounts that the brain is more plastic, or changeable, than we thought, researchers are beginning to propose that young sociopaths might be susceptible to early intervention. Perhaps children can be trained to develop their vestigial sense of empathy or learn to react appropriately to the emotions of people around them.

As any sociopath knows, people are hardwired to be aggressive and selfish, but it turns out that most of us are also biologically programmed for basic human compassion. Even children from abusive, chaotic homes, the kind who are the most troublesome in school, can learn to listen to that whisper of empathy that seems to be hidden somewhere in them. A Canadian organization is sending mothers and young babies into classrooms to help schoolkids learn the basics of parenting skills. The students try to imagine what the baby is experiencing, so they practice “perspective-taking.” The children observe the baby on his stomach barely able to lift his own head and then attempt to understand the baby’s perspective by themselves lying on the floor on their stomachs trying to look up. Perspective-taking is the cognitive dimension of empathy, and one that is not familiar or automatic to many of these schoolchildren. A developmental psychologist who has studied the program attests to the larger successes of the program: “Do kids become more empathic and understanding? Do they become less aggressive and kinder to each other? The answer is yes and yes.” Or, as Paul Frick says regarding child sociopaths, “you can teach a child to recognize the effects of their behavior.” Despite the genetic code written indelibly in our cells, the human mind is amazingly malleable and easily influenced by our experiences.

I am very impressionable. I know that my genes might predispose me to the way I think and interact with the world, but I also take full responsibility for the amount of control I have over the rest. Every day I am in motion, sensitizing myself or desensitizing myself, constantly reshaping my brain, making and breaking habits, making myself more or less inclined to act or think a certain way.

Everything I have done has changed me, for better or for worse. I didn’t realize this when I was a child. I’m lucky that I was raised in a very sheltered, devout religious home. We were not allowed to swear, not even damn or hell. We could not watch PG-13 movies until we were actually thirteen and we could never watch movies that were rated R. My father had a temper, but my parents never drank, did recreational drugs, or were otherwise out of their heads. My community was so conservative and predominantly born-again Christian that I suspect few of my friends in high school were sexually active—or if they were, I certainly wasn’t aware of it.

It’s through experiences that normal-gened people can be desensitized to things like killing, and sociopathic-gened people can be sensitized to things like being aware of the needs of others. I was not desensitized to violence. If anything, I was sensitized to music. I learned to be quiet and to listen beyond the surface of things. I was sensitized to spirituality—I was taught to be self-reflective in prayer and other forms of worship. As a middle child and power broker, I cultivated an awareness of the needs of others. Like the children lying facedown on the floor attempting to see the world through a baby’s eyes, I was often forced to engage in perspective-taking focused on service and care for others. Even though my mind was not naturally directed to recognizing and responding to the needs of others, my parents, church leaders, and teachers actually did make a difference in making me acknowledge and address these issues.

Not long ago, I read about a Mormon teenage girl who murdered a small child, luring her outside to play, strangling her to unconsciousness, and then slitting her throat to watch the blood drain away. After giving her victim a shallow burial, the girl went home to write in her journal of her breathless excitement and noted that she had to hurry off to church. At her trial, defense counsel demanded that the jury consider the difficult circumstances of the teenager’s childhood, characterized by parental abandonment and abuse.

I am not violent. Despite having imagined it many times, I’ve never slit anyone’s throat. I wonder, though, if had I been raised in a less loving home, or a more abusive one, whether I would have also had blood on my hands. It often seems to me that these people who commit such heinous crimes—sociopath or empath—are not so much more damaged than everyone else, but that they seem to have less to lose. It’s easy to imagine an alternate universe in which a sixteen-year-old version of me would be handcuffed in an orange jumpsuit, on my way toward scheming for dominion over the juvenile prison population. If I had had no one to love or nothing to achieve, perhaps. It’s hard to say.

A well-known recent example of nurture trumping nature is neuroscientist and University of California–Irvine professor James Fallon. Fallon specializes in studying the biological roots of behavior, and he is famous for his work with the distinctive brain scans of killers. While discussing his work at a family function, his mother told him that Lizzie Borden was a cousin of his. Startled by the revelation, he investigated and discovered that on one line of his family there were at least sixteen murderers—“a whole lineage of very violent people,” as he described it.

He decided to check the brain scans and DNA of his family members for indications of sociopathy. He discovered that everyone was relatively normal, except for him—Fallon himself had the brain-scan signature of a killer as well as all of the genetic markers predisposing him to impulsivity, violence, and risky behavior. When he disclosed this information to his family, they were not surprised. “I knew there was always something off. It makes more sense now,” his son said. “Everything that you would want in a serial killer he has in a fundamental way.” His wife added, “It was surprising but it wasn’t surprising … he’s always had a standoffish part to him.” And Fallon, being honest with himself, admitted, “I have characteristics or traits, some of which are … psychopathic.” He gave the example of blowing off an aunt’s funeral. “I know something’s wrong, but I still don’t care.” Why didn’t he end up a killer? “It turns out that I had an unbelievably wonderful childhood”—he was doted on by his parents and surrounded by a loving family.

For all these children like me, born with the monster genes of sociopathy, there are many paths to travel. The brain grows and changes in response to many influences. “Brain research is showing us that neurogenesis can occur even into adulthood,” says psychologist Patricia Brennan of Emory University. “Biology isn’t destiny. There are many, many places you can intervene along that developmental pathway to change what’s happening in these children.” Rather than waiting for sociopaths to turn violent or criminal and become a burden on the justice system, it seems conceivable that if we notice unusually antisocial traits in a child at a young age, we could prevent them from turning into criminals by redirecting them to a more positive route, through warm and affectionate parenting, as one early study has hinted, or through targeted therapy.

I would not, like James Fallon, describe my parents as doting. I firmly believe that they taught me the skills to manage my sociopathic traits in a productive way, but I also believe that the way I was raised brought those traits to the surface. My father’s facile sentimentality made me distrust excessive displays of emotion, and my mother’s inconsistent care led me to believe that love could not be depended on. Though I never suffered from trauma or abuse, my parents’ own quirks of personality shaped who I am.

Over the last couple of decades, psychiatric researchers have identified a dozen or so gene variants that can increase a person’s vulnerability to mood or personality disorders like depression, anxiety, risk taking, and sociopathy, but only if the person suffered a traumatic or highly stressful childhood or life experience. Through complex “gene-environment interactions,” it was believed that your “bad” genes could set you up for problems, and life events could then knock you down. Recently, however, a new hypothesis has emerged: These “bad” genes are not simple liabilities. In an unfavorable context, these genes can cause a person problems, but in a positive context, the same genes can enhance a person’s life. An article by David Dobbs in the Atlantic describes this theory as “a completely new way to think about genetics and human behavior. Risk becomes possibility; vulnerability becomes plasticity and responsiveness. It’s one of those simple ideas with big, spreading implications. Gene variants generally considered misfortunes … can instead now be understood as highly leveraged evolutionary bets, with both high risks and high potential rewards.… With a bad environment and poor parenting … children [with these genes] can end up depressed, drug-addicted, or in jail—but with the right environment and good parenting, they can grow up to be society’s most creative, successful, and happy people.”

This theory matches up with what I’ve observed in my own upbringing, and that of other successful sociopaths I know and hear from on my blog. Our genes and childhoods may have made us sociopaths, but we’re not destined for lives of unfettered evil. Instead, with the right kind of care, children like us can learn to do great things—even if they never learn to fully empathize with others:

It is becoming increasingly clear that it is possible to be a sociopath and still be successful in normal society. Dr. Stephanie Mullins-Sweatt’s research into successful sociopaths confirms this, suggesting that a trait as simple as “conscientiousness” can make all of the difference between a successful and a criminal sociopath.

I believe that sociopathic traits can be managed and even changed, particularly via early childhood intervention. This belief, although still not popular within the psychological community, is finally getting some traction. I believe that the existence of successful sociopaths suggests that this is true, that sociopaths are incredibly malleable and impressionable. Sociopaths are not influenced in the same ways as empaths, but sociopaths are just as susceptible to their own range of outside influence, perhaps even more susceptible. In research involving the propensity of toddlers to share, psychologist Ariel Knafo of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has researchers spend an hour of quality time with the toddlers. During a snack break, the researcher brings out two bags of a popular peanut-butter-flavored Israeli snack—Bambas. The youngster opens his pack to see the proper number of Bambas, twenty-four, but the researcher opens his to discover only three, to which he exclaims, “Mine has only three!” Some of the toddlers volunteer some of their own Bambas. Interestingly, the toddlers most likely to share are the toddlers who have a gene variant highly correlated with antisocial behavior in children. Leading researcher in child development Jay Belsky explains: “These genes aren’t about risk, it’s about a greater sensitivity to experience. If things go well for you when you’re young, the same genes that could have helped make a mess of you help to make you stronger and happier instead. It’s not vulnerability but responsiveness—for better or worse.” It’s this “for better or worse” aspect that is concerning when considering the possibility of raising a child genetically disposed to sociopathy.

When I consider the possibility of having sociopath children and how I would raise them, I think the ideal situation would be for child sociopaths to be exposed to both a sociopathic parent or adult figure and an empathic person. An empathy role model is important for a sociopath in order to learn to respect how most of the world thinks. Steinbeck describes the origins of the sociopath Cathy’s mind-blindness to others:

This description is particularly poignant for me because it provides a readily understood explanation for why Cathy cannot respect the inner worlds of others in a way that would allow her to check her antisocial behavior. All she sees are people’s frailties, which, when hidden from the outside world and only acknowledged and indulged in private, drive Cathy to conclude that people are gross hypocrites. She does not respect them, does not even consider their needs and wants worthy of her own consideration, largely because she cannot see the many ways in which empaths are worthy of her admiration and respect: “to a monster the norm is monstrous.”

This is why I think it is so important for sociopathic children to be consistently exposed to a loving and admirable empathy figure, in order to realize that empaths are much more than the sum of their basest desires. A sociopathic child would need someone like my friend Ann, who, after I spent decades objectifying all other humans, finally got me to see that empaths were just like me, but different. And after I understood that basic fact, I was finally able to trust that things like “love” and “goodwill” were actual concepts that empaths felt and not just window dressing on lives lived in a collective delusion.

I think that sociopathic children, like the schoolchildren who are learning empathy from babies, should be sensitized to the fact that there are others out there who are different from them, and in fact that most people are different from each other. I think most child sociopaths grow up thinking, first, that everyone is like them, but just not as good or smart or skilled; later they think they’re entirely alone and no one else is like them. If children sociopaths grew up realizing that they were different, and more important, that other people are also different from each other, I think they could be taught to respect those differences in a way that would make them uniquely sensitive to the needs of normal people.

I also think a sociopath child should have a sociopath role model in his life. A fellow sociopath would help the child to know that he is not alone, that he is not a monster, “only a variation.” A sociopathic role model could help him guide some of his impulses into positive, pro-social activities. Children have legitimate needs and wants, and a sociopath role model might be able to address the special needs and wants of a sociopath child without alienating him with hints of moral repulsion. According to psychiatrist Liane Leedom, the author of Just Like His Father, the sociopath child’s needs must be acknowledged as legitimate but limited in socially acceptable ways through the use of redirecting the child’s attention to acceptable substitutes until the child can learn to meet his own needs “in a way that is productive rather than destructive.” It’s not a complete cure, but it is probably the best that can be hoped for.

Who knows how children should be raised, really? In a New York Times Magazine article titled “How Do You Raise a Prodigy?” Andrew Solomon speaks of a prodigy as “a monster that violates the natural order,” who presents his parents with unique difficulties as “bewildering and hazardous as a disability.” Parents fear that they might either fail to cultivate their child’s unique gifts or push too hard and break their child’s spirit. These parental anxieties are even greater when it comes to children who are labeled special or different.

With the benefit of adult hindsight, I believe that my parents remarkably managed to strike a proper balance for me. I’ve hated them sometimes, but for the most part, I’ve loved them the way one loves the sky or the ocean or home. I recently read an interview with the virtuoso and former prodigy Lang Lang in which he described what it was like to grow up with a tyrannical father: “If my father had pressured me like this and I had not done well, it would have been child abuse, and I would be traumatized, maybe destroyed. He could have been less extreme, and we probably would have made it to the same place; you don’t have to sacrifice everything to be a musician. But we had the same goal. So since all the pressure helped me become a world-famous star musician, which I love being, I would say that, for me, it was in the end a wonderful way to grow up.”

My hope for a sociopathic child would be that she might learn to leverage her gifts in order to achieve her own version of success—to find a sustainable and joyful way to appreciate a world of infinite possibilities and realities. Sociopathy does not necessarily equal misanthropy. It hasn’t been that way for me, and I think my parents have had much to do with that, even if their methods seem draconian or aspects of their personalities seem harmful. They made me feel like there was a place for me in the world, and to me that made all the difference.

Perhaps if we treat sociopathic children more like prodigies and less like monsters, they might direct their unique talents toward pro-social activities that reward and sustain society rather than to antisocial or parasitic behaviors. Perhaps if they feel like there is a place for them in the world, they would say, as one child prodigy did, “At first, it felt lonely. Then you accept that, yes, you’re different from everyone else, but people will be your friends anyway.” Perhaps we could make the measured judgment that, even if we could, we wouldn’t want to train or love the sociopath out of them, because sociopaths are interesting people who make our world a more diverse, colorful place in ways that we can’t predict.