QUESTION: Please don’t laugh, but I worry I may be a psychopath!
All my life I’ve found it very difficult to feel emotion. Although I often pretend to be upset about bad things, inside, I don’t feel anything. When my father died, I didn’t feel anything except rage – and I also got very ill, but I couldn’t cry. Sometimes, I’ll cry about something I read in the papers, but anything personal leaves me cold – except for physical symptoms.
What do you think? And if I am a psychopath, is there anything I can do about it?
Yours sincerely, Rebecca
ANSWER: The psychological explanation for what you describe would certainly not be that of a psychopath. A psychopath feels nothing - not even for sad stories in the papers. Psychopaths also would never declare, as you do, that they “worry” about being one. They may know that they have psychopathic tendencies, but they're strangers to worrying about it.
It sounds to me as if you're one of these people who may well have suffered some trauma in their lives, and, as a result, have cut themselves off from their feelings. It's a bore, but it's a coping mechanism. At some point in your childhood, you decided that you couldn't cope with any more and you shut down. That's why you can feel sympathy and joy and sadness about other people but not when it comes to anything personal.
Your shutting down mechanism became a defence - against thinking you'd go mad, perhaps, or a feeling that if you let anything in you might crack up completely. Rather than fret about this, and try to uncover what it was, remember you may have taken the right decision.
We are made up of three components - mind, heart and body - and sometimes the body can behave in ways that leave us baffled. Hence your getting very ill after your father died. Getting ill was your form of grieving. Your body has not shut down, and like a lot of people, often you find that your body does your feeling for you. Psychopaths do not get ill after difficult events. They sail through, unperturbed.
There is a common misconception that we all respond in the same way when it comes to major events. When disaster happens, we scream and cry. When something joyful happens, we dance and whoop with joy. But we're not all like that. Quite a few of us have other ways not only of expressing emotions but of feeling them. And that doesn't mean we're mentally ill.
The other thing to remember about your ability to stay cool is that it can be a tremendous bonus. You couldn't be a brain surgeon if you were too empathetic or, at least, didn't have the capacity to shut down your emotions during the operation. You couldn't be a bomb disposal expert because you'd be a gibbering, shaking and sweating wreck the moment you reached out to untangle the wires. Some judges have psychopathic tendencies, and a very good thing too, or they'd be leaves in the wind when it came to listening the sob stories of the accused. Not all psychopaths are grinning serial killers. Many are good and noble - and essential - members of society.
Don't worry about yourself and your reactions so much. Yes, you may be a bit unusual, but there are plenty of people like you. And try to dwell on the pluses - the ability to keep calm in a storm, the ability, perhaps, to reason your way out of difficult situations instead of succumbing to shrieking and lashing out - and consider yourself not, perhaps, cursed, but rather, in your own way, admirable.
* Jon Ronson wrote a fascinating book called The Psychopath Test. Do read it. You'll discover that you definitely do not fit the profile of a psychopath - and lots of other interesting stuff, too.
The Independent