“What a sociopath…” “Our president is just a narcissist…”
We bandy these terms around casually, as if they aren’t damning diagnoses of the DSM manual for mental illness. It’s become so common that I regularly encounter or overhear these colloquial uses of originally medical terms. But what are we really saying when we call someone a sociopath?
In my experience, usually it is a joke. We have come up with stereotypes about things that sociopaths do: they manipulate people, they don’t care about others, they don’t take joy in simple things like an iPhone home screen (***Did you know*** — a key sign that someone is a sociopath is that they still have the original stock image on the home screen on their iPhone).
But do we really know what we are saying? Or what we mean? What does it mean to call someone a sociopath?
As a mental health counselor enculturated in the school of Existential-Phenomological psychotherapy, I’m highly skeptical of diagnoses. Often these terms serve to “other” the person we are talking about. To call someone a sociopath is to make them different from us. To say that our president is a narcissist is to draw a line between him and me, and claim that something is “wrong” with him. But is it so clear-cut? Is he really a categorically different type of human than me?
As someone who has often worried that I am “narcissistic” or have “sociopathic tendencies”, I have found these terms incredibly damaging. They have served as incisive scalpels, separating me from humanity because of my self-perceived problematic behaviors: focusing on self and gratifying my needs, not feeling much when a family member passes away, fearing for and working towards my own advancement.
In common parlance, these actions might be labeled as “sociopathic”. Maybe I’m not a full blown narcissist, but certainly I’d be exposed to jokes and possible judgment were I to admit these feelings.
Is something actually wrong with me? Am I really different from other people? I used to think so. I used to believe that I was “broken”, that I was lacking what I perceived as the natural impulse to do good. I could “will” myself to it, using moral and ethical reasoning to identify the appropriate course of action. Fortunately I was raised by parents with a strong ethical backbone; I grew up in the Catholic Church amidst the strident messages of self-sacrifice and service to others; I was exposed to travel and global inequity at a young age, allowing me to see my privilege in obvious and objective terms. But always, it was work.
Growing up, I remember reading Steinbeck’s novel “East of Eden” in which the protagonist recognizes that in the face of good and evil, generosity and self-preservation, there is choice. Timshel. The Judaic word representing “thou mayest”, the ability to choose to act ethically in the face of so many decisions that life presents. Timshel — this word is the closest I’ve come to putting a tattoo on my skin. This is how I conceptualized my life — it wasn’t easy for me to do good, it wasn’t “natural”, but I had freedom to choose.
What a fucking burden. It is exhausting to try to muscle your way to goodness in every situation. I did it. In college, I devoted myself to service — I ran clothing drives for victims of the Iraq war, I sold late night grill cheese to help fund other service organizations on campus, I worked as a mentor and chair of a local mentor organization — but I found myself drained by much of this work. I was doing the “right” thing, so why was it so draining? Did it have to be so hard?
Shouldn’t doing the “right” thing feel good? Intellectually it did, but then, every time a new choice was presented, every time I was faced with choosing between an act of service or taking a moment to enjoy myself, I was confronted with this hard choice again. Hard, not in the sense that it was difficult to know the “right” thing, but hard in the sense that I often didn’t want to do the right thing. Going out with friends for a night of drinking, or playing games often proved far more enticing. Yet, when I did opt for the choice that promised more pleasure, the next day, at the end of a week or a month lived whimsically, I would criticize myself for living hedonistically. This wasn’t what life should be. I could rationalize my way to the ethical path — why was I choosing cheap pleasure?
What I didn’t know then, what I wouldn’t learn for fifteen years, is that I was dissociated.
Huh? In college, I wouldn’t have even known what I mean by that. You mean, like DID – dissociative identity disorder – those people with multiple personalities? No. I don’t think I have different personalities — at least not personalities that I’m unaware of.
What I mean is that I lived most of my life without a capacity to remain in my body. When something became difficult, when a moment triggered powerful emotions, I bounced into my head, just a brain in a vat.
I understand why now — and the reasons are multiplicitous – but suffice it to say, that I felt too much, not too little. Growing up, I didn’t learn how to navigate the painful emotions that ripped through me and so, for self-protection, I started to dissociate, to live life from my mind without a connection to my body. It is a remarkable ability that the human brain can essentially “mute” the communication from the body to the brain. The feelings are still there — and I see the evidence in chronic pain, GI issues and headaches that I’ve battled — but to my brain, nothing was wrong. I had turned off the signaling from my body to avoid feeling the overwhelm of fear, the crush of sadness, the fire of rage. I didn’t know what to do with them, so unconsciously, I turned them off.
All I was left with was my head. Perhaps that is extreme. I wasn’t unable to feel pleasure, it wasn’t that I never experienced emotions, but the majority of the time, information went through my brain and I was unaware of my body.
Now, why is this a problem? Many intelligent people have used their minds to solve complex problems. I, myself, was an academic machine before these walls began to tumble down and I was forced to feel my body. There are “benefits”: an access to objectivity and rationality, unclouded by the messiness of emotions; an ability to ignore or sublimate bodily needs like food or pleasure to “higher” ends; an unrelenting commitment to the realm of ideas and theory.
Yet, what is lost? Most basically, the body is a primary vehicle of pleasure. A life lived in one’s head is largely a life lived devoid of pleasure. Without access to my body, I had trouble accessing the feelings of pride from being of service. But even more damaging, I was blunted from noticing and feeling the emotions of others — I couldn’t absorb the gratitude of a person for whom I’d made one of these “ethical” decisions.
Even more broadly, I wasn’t able to feel truly connected with others. This might take a little explanation — and I might lose some readers here, but bear with me please. It is largely in our bodies where we come to know our emotions. What is a feeling – like sadness, or fear or anger – other than a constellation of physical sensations? Certainly I come to label it with my mind and can state an emotion without awareness of these physical sensations, but if I don’t actually attend to the sensations in the body, I am only experiencing the idea of the emotion rather than the emotion itself. If I do this with other people, then I experience them as ideas, as the platonic form of a person, rather than the felt, lived experience of a person.
I would take this even further to the molecular level, arguing that because our borders are illusory — the boundary of my body is full of empty space between my atoms — it is actually in our bodies that we experience our exchange with the world around us. If I have developed habits of disregarding my body, then I am unable to truly “meet” the world. My encounters remain theoretical. How can I be truly impacted, how can I be driven in a self-sustaining way if it is all theoretical?
I can do it. I did do it: I chose the ethical choice over and over again. But it is always going to be hard, to be labor, because I’m not allowing the felt encounter with the world to motivate my action.
Yet, when I started to become embodied, this all shifted. I didn’t choose the “ethical” choice because objectively, in my head, it was the “right” decision. I started allowing inspiration and energy to come from the world, to come from the encounter with other people. I didn’t make the selfish choice, because I could feel the pain that caused another person. I chose to ask how another person was feeling because it felt good in my body to make space for their experience.
I would like to posit that this is really what is going on with “sociopaths”: extreme states of dissociation. When you don’t feel your body, then you are unable to feel the ways that your actions impact others. Certainly you can intellectually tabulate the impacts based on knowledge, but you don’t feel it. And if you don’t have a good mental model, then there is nothing keeping you from acting in a self-serving way. If I don’t feel what others are feeling – and I don’t believe in equity – then what would keep me from focusing solely on myself?
I don’t believe that sociopaths are categorically different from me – or from anyone else — I just believe that life has not facilitated an embodied way of life. Perhaps there are genetic precursors that make this difficult – or impossible – though I have yet to see any clear and definitive evidence (and if there is a genetic condition, I think it is FAR less common than our current societal dialogue suggests).
Personally, I believe that humans possess the capacity to learn to feel. After all, this is what I have been learning over the past several years. I was never a “sociopath”, I never had “sociopathic tendencies” — at least, no more than another person has the capacity for such tendencies – but I did have a long road to walk in becoming embodied, aware of my emotions and the emotions of others.
The upside of this road: I can now love, I can now find ease in acting from embodied inspiration, I can now encounter the world with my whole being.
So now, opportunities to play with embodiment:
- Start tuning into the sensations inside your body using a body scan. YouTube is full of them — just search Body Scan and then # of minutes you want!
- Try out Generative Somatics “centering” practice — posted on Healing Justice: https://healingjustice.podbean.com/e/12-practice-somatic-centering-with-sumitra-rajkumar/
- Self-guided inquiry. At a time when you think you are feeling a lot (or really whenever you want to), close your eyes and imagine following a spiral staircase down from your head into your chest, and notice what you notice.
- Sit with someone and ask them to tell you about an emotional experience (light or heavy) and listen as if you have ears all over your body. See what happens as you shift attention to different parts of your body: try listening with focus on your heart, try listening with focus on your gut, the choice is yours!
- Find and participate in activities that encourage you to be fully in your body — for me, my primary embodied activity is ecstatic dance, but there are lots of possibilities. Most movement practices can help shift focus to our bodies (yoga, barre, pilates); there are many meditative and relational practices (circling – social meditation, authentic relating). Just start asking, what activities in my life leave me most aware of what is happening in my body?
- Consider working with a Somatic Experiencing (or other somatically-oriented) therapist. (For me, this has been the most healing component of my own personal journey. As much as I learned to understand my problems through more insight oriented therapies, I never learned how to “feel” differently).