I am fairly ginger and the colour of milk, and so it is fair to say that I have struggled with the recent heatwave England has been experiencing these last few weeks.
When I’ve not been rubbing aloe-gel into my lobster-pink sunburn, I've been skulking off to patches of shade in which to read, and a recent favourite has been some non-fiction; Patric Gagne’s memoir Sociopath.
I read this book greedily, smashing through it in a few days, but Gagne’s story has long since stayed with me. Patric Gagne is an American therapist and diagnosed sociopath, and her memoir details the ways in which her sociopathy presented in childhood, her journey to diagnosis and how she’s since navigated her studies, marriage and motherhood.
While sociopathy is an outdated term and, within the UK, falls under the umbrella of antisocial personality disorders, Gagne was diagnosed not long after she graduated from university by a psychologist who had her complete a psychopathy checklist and came to the conclusion that Gagne was instead a sociopath.
Many of the symptoms of Gagne’s sociopathy feel like the antithesis of the symptoms of my C-PTSD. Where she is unable to access empathy or guilt, I struggle to control the intensity with which I feel them. Where she lacks motivation to adhere to social norms, I’ve often felt an overwhelming need to appear ‘normal’ and hide the ways in which I experience life differently.
Still, what I found so interesting about Gagne’s story was that, despite the enormous differences in the way our brains work, our needs are not dissimilar.
By the end of her memoir, Gagne realises that she needs to accept her sociopathy but, perhaps equally as important, she also needs her loved ones to accept it - no matter what her sociopathy looks like.
Isn’t that what we’re all looking for? To be accepted and loved for exactly who we are. While not everyone is in Patric’s position, wherein which she is a diagnosed sociopath, I’d argue that you would struggle to find any individual that doesn’t carry some kind of baggage that makes them feel unworthy of love.
I’d also argue that a great many of us have felt as if we’ve needed to compromise parts of ourselves in order to be loved and accepted, and in an increasingly harsh throw-away culture of instant gratification and emotional disconnect, it’s getting harder to find the kind of embrace and approval we need to feel safe in loving relationships.
What stood out to me throughout the memoir was how honest Gagne often was about her sociopathy, despite how easy she found it to lie about a plethora of aspects about her life, and I could recognise the need to have people know the truth about your differences in the hopes that you might finally be able to live openly and honestly.
Weaving throughout the memoir is the story of Gagne’s relationship with David, the man who eventually becomes her husband after meeting him as a teenager.
It was refreshing and hopeful to read that David knew about Gagne’s sociopathic tendencies from day one, but it wasn’t until he truly accepted the challenging symptoms of Gagne’s sociopathy, and the fact that she could be a good person *while* being a sociopath, that they could live a positive life together, including marriage and children.
It's clear through Gagne’s writing that it took a lot of mutual vulnerability, emotional willingness and compromise for her and David's relationship to work, and I can’t help but question how many of us are truly able to make those kinds of commitments when someone’s adversity is established early on in the relationship.
Have we leaned so far into a red-flag culture of dating that we are no longer willing to give people a reasonable chance before we deem them undesirable or too much work, and does this stretch to illness or disability, aspects of one’s life that are beyond their control?
Gagne’s memoir is an eye-opening education into preconceived perceptions of ‘the other’ and what the journey to true self acceptance looks like, and how those that deserve us are the ones that are willing to work around the barriers put upon us by societies judgements.