Patric Gagne is your typical Los Angeles middle-class suburbanite- she is a wife and mother of two who, on the outside, appears to be a caring, kind person to all she meets.
There’s just one problem: she’s a sociopath.
At 48 years old, she still doesn’t experience the normal emotions people feel when they look at their newborn child or meet the love of their life.
When her baby was born, she wasn’t overcome with love for her child, she didn’t have ‘romantic, flowery emotions’ when she met her husband and still just thinks of her first-born as just ‘a great kid.’
Her lack of empathy in her youth led her down a path of crime, not because she wanted to steal, but because that act fulfilled the void left by her ‘absence of social emotions like shame and empathy,’ Gagne wrote.
Sociopaths act like they care for others but lack the common societal norms of apathy (stock image)
Gagne described her experiences in a personal article in The Wall Street Journal, saying her earliest memories of exhibiting sociopathic behavior was in kindergarten when she noticed that she didn’t show the same emotions as other children.
She didn’t experience guilt when she lied or compassion or empathy when a fellow classmate injured themselves on the playground, or fear – she felt ‘nothing.’
Memories of her childhood were vague – except for the times she punched one classmate and stabbed another with a pencil.
‘All I knew was I felt this pressure, and something in my brain was telling me, Punch that kid, and you’ll feel better,’ she told The New York Times.
Gagne then went down a road of theft and violence before finally coming to the realization that she was a sociopath.
She added that she worked to replace the ‘nothingness’ with something, anything that would make her feel better through theft – whether it was a locket, a barrette or a pair of glasses.
‘This impulse felt like an unrelenting pressure that expanded to permeate my entire self,’ Gagne wrote.
‘The longer I tried to ignore it, the worse it got. My muscles would tense, my stomach would knot. Tighter. Tighter.
‘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 party and when she mentioned that she is a sociopath, he told her: ‘You know, I have thoughts of killing my wife a lot.’
She asked him to tell her more, and he said: ‘I’ve really thought about it. I’ve reached out to people about hiring somebody to kill her.’
People assume that Gagne is sympathetic to their plights, she told the outlet, because they think she would related to them.
The term sociopath wasn’t formally recognized as a disorder until the 1930s when it was called psychopathy, but still wasn’t commonly discussed until 1952 when the term changed to sociopathy.
A person with sociopathy is not always easy to spot – they can come off as friendly and charming, but their lack of a conscience and empathy, their disregard for following rules and other societal norms, their reckless disregard for their own safety, and their impulsive and aggressive tendencies make them stand out.
READ MORE: These are the five personality traits that indicate someone you know is a psychopath
The first sign of a psychopath is someone who leads a ‘parasitic life’ in that they ‘leech off’ others rather than doing anything for themselves.
Gagne wasn’t sure at first that she was a sociopath until she reached college age but was told the disorder couldn’t be treated and there was ‘no hope for a normal life,’ according to her press release.
But after years of studying and examining the link between not feeling remorse, anxiety, apathy, and stress with the need to ‘behave destructively,’ she was finally able to control her impulses.
Gagne studied the disorder for years, did intensive therapy and earned a Ph.D. in psychology before she came to terms with her disorder and realized 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 deemed sociopathy untreatable and unredeemable,’ Gagne wrote.
‘The afflicted have been maligned and shunned by mental health professionals who either don’t understand or choose to ignore the fact that sociopathy—like many personality disorders—exists on a spectrum.’
Scientists still aren’t sure about what causes sociopathy, which is now more commonly called antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) by psychologists.
They believe people are more likely to develop the disorder if they have a family history of sociopathy or had a traumatic experience in their childhood.
Research suggests that roughly one percent of the global population has sociopathic tendencies like not showing remorse or turning the blame on another person for something hurtful they’ve done – also called gaslighting.
There is evidence that there sociopathy, or psychopathy, isn’t an either/or phenomenon, meaning people aren’t either full sociopaths or not sociopaths, Scott Lilienfeld, an Emory University psychology professor, told Austin American-Statesman in 2018.
It is more the case that there are varying degrees of sociopathy, with some people exhibiting only a few sociopathic tendencies.
‘It is a tragic misconception that all sociopaths are doomed to hopeless, loveless lives,’ Gagne wrote.
‘The truth is that I share a personality type with millions of others, many of whom have good jobs, close-knit families and real friends,’ she continued.
‘We represent a truth that’s hard to believe: There’s nothing inherently immoral about having limited access to emotion. I offer my story because I know I’m not alone.’