The Psychopath Inside (18 page)

These letters bothered me, but not enough to change my behavior. It took me a decade to put the messages of the two letters together and take them seriously. When I pulled the letters out of my archives and read them again, however, they depressed me for several days. I was able to shake off the brunt of guilt, but not completely. When I told Carol and Shannon that I had reread them and had finally seen what the letters meant, and that I understood how I must have hurt them, they both told me not to worry about it. In a way, I still have not had what could be described as full closure about this correspondence, or the underlying issues that motivated Shannon and Carol to write the letters, but they insisted they had come to an understanding that I just am who I am and that, for them, the case was closed. I don't believe that for a second. I think they were just being nice.

After a year of hearing what my family and colleagues thought of me, I said to myself for the first time in my life, “What the hell
have I done?” I wasn't despairing, just coming to terms with my cluelessness. All these pieces of the puzzle over the decades were snapping into place. About three minutes later another, different feeling took over. And with all the honesty I am capable of, I admitted to myself, “I don't care.” That's right, “I DON'T CARE.” At that moment, I realized for the first time in my life that what they had all been intimating, then whispering, then yelling to me all along, for all those years, was true.

•   •   •

After my “condition” became public in 2011 through TV and radio appearances, there was not a noticeable difference in the way most people treated me. Most people, including Diane and some of my other family members and friends, just told me, “I'm not surprised to hear you have some sociopathy in you, not surprised at all.”

But once this all came out, Susannah, one of my first postdoc researchers, who used to go on trips with me all the time for work, said she didn't want to be alone with me anymore. She and her husband, Mark, will still ask me over to their house all the time, but they want to be with the animal only when he's in a social cage. They don't think I'm violent, but they worry I'll manipulate them into situations they'll regret if left to their own defenses.

One other close friend, Mary Beth, a younger woman I've written a couple of papers with, told me straight up, “You're a psychopath and I don't want to be around you anymore.” She has left my life, apparently for good, even though we had always had a good relationship. We'd never fought and I can't think of any
incident that would have driven her away. She's a trained Wiccan, and I guess she saw too much darkness in me, like that priest who said I was evil. It's too bad, because she was fun and interesting to be around. Diane liked her, too. I miss her honesty the most. When she said something it was absolutely truthful, which meant she often said some unpleasant things. That's such a hard quality to find in people. So I miss her, but that's the way it goes.

In contrast to Susannah and Mary Beth, other people didn't change their behavior around me at all. Surprisingly about forty friends and acquaintances wanted to spend much more time with me than ever before. I suppose some of them may have just been curious about their “special” friend. Even I can enjoy some of that gallows humor over my own condition.

So the net effect is that more people want to be around me, but I lost a few close friends. Which would you rather have? It's an acid test. Honestly, in a way I'd rather have the superficial relationships—the more the merrier. I know that's not right. I can monitor what's right and wrong, but I don't feel it and I don't care about it, and it doesn't change my behavior.

One area of concern was how this whole “outing” would affect my relationships with professional colleagues. It turns out that since many of them had already seen through me over the years and had accepted my behavior, they treated me as they had before, occasionally pausing to give me a good ribbing over it. I'm still being asked to review journal articles for publication, to be a co-investigator on grants, and to give scientific talks, so perhaps my professional standing will survive all of this. But I'm sure an
important aspect of this acceptance is that I've never been accused of professional misconduct, or inappropriate behavior with students or staff or other personnel with whom I've worked. Above and beyond this, my colleagues have been wonderfully supportive and good-natured about my coming out.

Fabio, one of my closest colleagues—and friends—knows all my warts and still enjoys working with me. He sees me as a functionally flawed person and finds that interesting. He's an extremely empathetic person—my opposite—and knows my lack of feeling, but I've always helped him, and he knows I'd never intentionally betray him. And we have fun together and share a lot of interests—food, wine, travel—as well as a sense of scientific adventure. He trusts me with personal information, but he doesn't trust me to always do what I'm expected to do workwise (I blow things off sometimes), and when it's playtime he knows when not to get involved.

I sat down recently with my close friend Leonard, a psychiatrist who knows just about everything about me, to ask him what my most chronic psychopathic behaviors are. He agreed that my willingness to skip an uncle's funeral, a friend's wedding, a graduation, a bar mitzvah, First Communion, or wake certainly qualifies me as a Psychopath Lite. I don't murder people at these events; I simply don't go if I find out about another party or activity that stokes my interest more.

He also agreed that my willingness, eagerness really, to put friends and family in serious danger, just so I might “share” an exciting time, would qualify as a psychopathic trait. I asked him
if all of my physical and social risk-taking is just an expression of my sense of adventure. He said that might be true, but my wanton lack of concern for the safety of others while partaking in these adventures puts my endangerment of them far outside the realm of normal behavior.

I then asked him if my drinking binges might be a cause of my abnormal behaviors. He reminded me that I'm universally known as a fun and benevolent drunk, and that is true. If I've been drinking, my empathy for everyone, even and perhaps especially strangers, goes up a notch. And to this day, alcohol is my only drug of abuse, even though a day doesn't go by that I don't pine for a cigarette.

He and I went forward to test other waters. He knows of some things that I have done that I will not discuss here, and some things I am taking to my grave. But there was one type of behavior that really bothered him that I can relate here.

I asked him if revenge counts as a psychopathic trait. He said everyone is driven to seek revenge of some sort. It is normal to get angry when someone wrongs you, and to confront the other person and even to demand retribution. He asked me to describe how I get angry with someone, and how I might seek revenge.

I told him that when someone gets me mad, I can immediately suppress the anger. Unless someone knows me intimately, they will not realize I'm mad, perhaps even furious with them. I am a master of suppressing the expression of anger or a look of revenge. And I can delay revenge for years. But at some point, when that person least expects it, I get even. People have wronged
me in business or professionally or personally, and I've gotten them in the end. For me, it's fun because they don't realize what's happened. (I can't give details because I got some people really good.) I'm careful to measure the revenge proportional to the original offense to me, and not one iota more or less. And I have no interest in physically harming anyone.

My explanation clearly shocked my psychiatrist friend. And he said I related this trait to him in such a cold-blooded way that it made him shake. This ability to strategically delay revenge, he told me, was my most psychopathic trait. I told him I do other things, and these were worse behaviors, but he just waved his hand to my face and said, “That's okay, Jim, you needn't tell me any more.”

I started to ask myself if other aspects of my behavior mitigate my psychopathic traits. When I asked myself the question in this way, I was quick to justify my actions. It reminded me of when I used to go to confession to reveal my sins. I realized at this point in my life that such attempts at making peace with a deity, or my own soul, on a weekly or monthly or yearly basis was a rather pathetic attempt to deny my psychopathy, as if each time I could wash my sins away just by admitting to them and asking myself or a cleric or God for forgiveness. I knew these acts of confession and contrition and seeking of grace would not change my behaviors, but were only performed to make excuses for them. If a sinner, like any psychopath, is anything, he or she is a repeat offender. We are machines and cannot fundamentally change ourselves through sheer force of will.

I considered that I could change myself superficially by simply changing the narrative story line of my behaviors. Maybe, by altering the words and definitions, the psychopathy could be made more tolerable, even lovable, if the story were crafted well enough. I could be like someone who describes himself as having a refreshing, flexible, open, and healthy attitude to sex, rather than just admitting to himelf that what he really is is promiscuous. But that wouldn't alter any of the underlying behavior. So to see myself for who I am, and then maybe even try to change for the better, I would need a plan of behavioral redemption. But the inherent problem I could not shake is that, try as I may, I really just don't care. There it is again. I do have some desire to keep the people around me happy, but that's mostly because it makes my own life easier and more pleasant.

Where does this leave the people close to me? In 2011, I was invited to give a Moth talk as part of the World Science Festival. The Moth is a storytelling and radio series in which people from all walks of life tell a story about their lives. The stories are usually personal, and often funny, so I took it as an opportunity. I can't stand giving the same talk over and over again and wanted to say something different from what I'd said in previous talks. I got my genetics work done for the
Wall Street Journal
article because I wanted to say something new, and this Moth story needed a good ending. So I decided to try to change my behavior, to actually go to the funerals and the weddings and the visits to the hospitals and sickbeds and devastatingly tedious lunches with a friend in need, offering some emotional support, an ear of empathy, if you will.

I also saw the attempt to change my behavior as an experiment or a challenge. I am a scientist, after all. Can I try to be better behaved and act more empathetic even though I don't care? It was a competition with myself, and every time I succeeded at doing the “right” thing, my hypothesis was proven correct. That's a mechanistic, frivolous sort of thing, but I still cared about it. Plus, I figured I probably owed it to the people around me. So there were three reasons to change.

And I actually started to do these things as opposed to going to the parties, the racetrack, the casino, the funky dives with inappropriate companions, playing out outrageous acts of senseless bravado and danger, and I have continued to do them to this day. But honestly . . . my heart really isn't in it. It was more of a game of whether I could do it, and it continues to be that. I figured, however, that just doing these simple humane and human things instead of feeding my amygdala and hedonism circuits might even temporarily strengthen some weak synaptic circuitry so that I could re-habit my habits into behaviors more suitable to a mensch than a psychopath. And it seems to be working a little.

The people around me, especially those close to me, notice these little differences. And they don't mind too much that my heart isn't really in it the way a normal person's would be. True, there may be some phoniness to all of this, but people seem to appreciate that I'm trying, that for some reason I'm exerting that effort and eschewing the wild times in order to be with them, and treat them with more respect, like a good companion should.

But I can see some troubles brewing with all this Boy Scout
stuff. There is a whole repertoire of things I do that are not immoral, or unethical, yet are most assuredly inappropriate, like getting another professor to dance on a table, drunk at a bar. At least that is what I'm told by the people I'm being inappropriate with. But I don't get it. If what I'm doing is not wrong in any fundamental way, who cares? Well, here is the rub. People could, again as I am told, take things the wrong way, and that will hurt them. At the same time, I really don't know if I'll be able to give up those morally neutral but apparently inappropriate behaviors. Like many people, I was able to stop smoking, cold turkey, after decades of heavy smoking, and have not smoked a whiff since 1998. I've been able to lose from sixty to a hundred pounds eight times (only to gain it back, of course). But changing the really big, interpersonal stuff? No.

As I write, I've been able to go into long-term social isolation from all the hedonism I love so dearly, the heavy drinking and eating and partying and gambling and Internet surfing and TV watching and going absolutely wild on a regular basis. But I'm learning something: the substances and the activities are not what I'm craving at all. It is the buzz from the social interactions that go with these activities that I'm “addicted” to. Frankly, I find most people uninteresting and boring, but under those circumstances of wildness, they all seem wonderful. These excessive and dangerous activities must be about getting a replacement for those human connections, the simple and pure and natural buzz of empathy and togetherness others must experience. So far I'm close to tolerating the shift and to sometimes even enjoying the
company of others in a safe and sane and sober and clothed environment. But there are only a handful of times when the simple pleasure of having a glass of water and hanging out with someone has been enjoyable. There are a few people, mostly family members, with whom that has always been true. But beyond that, no.