Patric Gagne is your typical middle-class suburbanite in Los Angeles: she is a wife and mother of two, and on the outside she appears to be a loving, kind person to everyone she meets.
There’s only one problem: she’s a sociopath.
At 48 years old, she still doesn’t experience the normal emotions that people feel when they look at their newborn child or meet the love of their life.
When her baby was born, she was not overwhelmed with love for her son, had no “flowery, romantic emotions” when she met her husband, and still thinks of her firstborn as simply “a great boy.”
Her lack of empathy in her youth led her down the path of crime, not because she wanted to steal, but because that act filled the void left by her “absence of social emotions such as shame and empathy,” Gagne wrote.
Sociopaths act as if they care about others, but lack common social norms of apathy (file image)
Gagne described his experiences in a personal article in The Wall Street JournalHe said his first memories of exhibiting sociopathic behavior were in kindergarten when he noticed he didn’t show the same emotions as other children.
I felt no guilt when I lied, no compassion or empathy when a classmate got hurt on the playground, no fear—I felt “nothing.”
His childhood memories were vague, except for the times he hit one classmate and stabbed another with a pencil.
“All I knew was that I felt this pressure, and something in my brain was telling me: Hit that kid and you’ll feel better,” he said. The New York Times.
Gagne then went down a path of theft and violence before finally realizing she was a sociopath.
She added that she worked to replace the “nothing” with something, anything that would make her feel better in case of theft, whether it was a locket, a barrette or a pair of glasses.
“This impulse felt like an unrelenting pressure that expanded until it permeated my entire being,” Gagne wrote.
‘The more I tried to ignore it, the worse it got. My muscles would tense, my stomach would tie into knots. Tightest. Tightest.
‘It was claustrophobic, like being trapped inside my brain. Trapped inside a void.’
As an adult, when Gagne shares her diagnosis with others, they sometimes tell her their own, often disturbing, secrets.
Gagne told The New York Times that about two years ago she was sitting across from a man at a dinner and when she mentioned that she was a sociopath, he told her, ‘You know, I have frequent thoughts of killing my wife.’ ‘
She asked him to tell her more and he said, “I’ve really thought about it.” I have contacted people to hire someone to kill her.
People assume Gagne sympathizes with their plight, she told the outlet, because they believe she would relate to them.
The term sociopath was not formally recognized as a disorder until the 1930s, when it was called psychopathy, but was not yet commonly discussed until 1952, when the term changed to sociopathy.
A person with sociopathy is not always easy to spot: they may seem friendly and charming, but their lack of conscience and empathy, their disdain for following rules and other social norms, their reckless disregard for their own safety, and their impulsive and aggressive tendencies make them stand out.
Gagne was initially unsure if she was a sociopath until she reached college age, but she was told that the disorder could not be treated and that there was “no hope for a normal life,” according to her press release.
But after years of studying and examining the link between feeling no remorse, anxiety, apathy, and stress with the need to “behave destructively,” he was finally able to control his impulses.
Gagne studied the disorder for years, undergoing intensive therapy and earning a doctorate. in psychology before accepting his disorder and realizing that sociopaths aren’t “bad” or “evil” or “crazy,” they just don’t process feelings and emotions as well as others.
“For more than a century, society has considered sociopathy untreatable and irredeemable,” Gagne wrote.
“Those affected have been maligned and shunned by mental health professionals who do not understand or choose to ignore the fact that sociopathy, like many personality disorders, exists on a spectrum.”
Scientists are still unsure of the causes of sociopathy, which psychologists now more commonly call antisocial personality disorder (ASPD).
They believe that people are more likely to develop the disorder if they have a family history of sociopathy or if they had a traumatic experience in their childhood.
Research suggests that about one percent of the world’s population has sociopathic tendencies such as showing no remorse or blaming another person for something hurtful they have done, also called gaslighting.
There is evidence that sociopathy, or psychopathy, is not an either/or phenomenon, meaning that people are not full-on sociopaths or are not sociopaths, Scott Lilienfeld, a psychology professor at Emory University, told Austin American-Statesman in 2018.
It is rather that there are varying degrees of sociopathy, and some people exhibit only a few sociopathic tendencies.
“It is a tragic mistake to think that all sociopaths are condemned to a life without hope and love,” Gagne wrote.
“The truth is that I share a personality type with millions of people, many of whom have good jobs, close-knit families and true friends,” he continued.
‘We represent a truth that is hard to believe: there is nothing inherently immoral about having limited access to emotions. I offer my story because I know I am not alone.’