Featured Image Credit: Instagram/@patricgagne
Topics: Mental Health, Real Life, True Life, Life
Rhiannon Ingle
Topics: Mental Health, Real Life, True Life, Life
A diagnosed sociopath has recalled the exact moment as a child when she realised something was different about her.
Author and therapist, Patric Gagne, has built up a pretty sizeable following online sharing her experiences as one of the estimated 13.7 million Americans who are diagnosed with sociopathy.
But things didn't always seem so clear for the 48-year-old, who is now spreading awareness and educating her followers about the disorder, as she revealed that from as early as the age of seven, she felt something was 'off'.
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Patric explains that being a sociopath means she lacks the learned social emotions including empathy, shame, guilt, remorse and love, but that doesn't mean she doesn't feel any emotion at all.
In short, the Sociopath memoir writer believes the condition exists on a spectrum, with the most extreme examples being what spring to mind when you hear the word.
"I’m not trying to minimise sociopathy. I’m saying there’s nothing immoral or inherently wrong about not feeling empathy," she said.
"People like me are just different – it’s our behaviour that’s wrong at times. Just because I don’t care about you doesn’t mean I want to cause you pain."
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Ever since she was a little girl, Patric knew she was different from the other kids.
"I started stealing before I could talk. At least, I think I did. I don't remember the first time I took something, just that by the time I was six or seven I had an entire box if things I'd stolen in my closet," she wrote in her memoir.
As a young child, Patric realised she didn't feel things the same way her peers did, and spent much of her childhood trying to keep what she calls 'the pressure' in her head at bay.
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"I didn't feel guilt when I lied. I didn't feel compassion when classmates got hurt on the playground. For the most part I felt nothing," she recalled.
"And I didn't like the way 'nothing' felt. So I did things to replace the nothingness with... something."
She continued: "Empathy, like remorse, never came naturally to me.
"[...] My teachers talked about 'honour systems' and something called 'shame', but I didn't understand why these things mattered. I got the concepts intellectually, but they weren't things I felt."
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Speaking on Fearne Cotton's Happy Place podcast, Patric explained that as early as the age of seven, she felt something was 'off'.
"I didn't feel bad when I was 'supposed to'," she revealed. "Telling people about that was the quickest way to get into trouble."
Because of this, Patric learned how to 'lie and manipulate and mask' at a very young age.
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She also explained this process was a 'coping mechanism', adding: "It was born out of necessity."
Patric shared that she used to break into houses, explaining: "The stillness of those homes matched the stillness in my head, and that equilibrium was like floating on water."
It wasn't until her 20s when Patric was told she was a sociopath by a psychologist after taking the psychopathy checklist assessment, most commonly used among offenders.
"There are eight fundamental inherent emotions that everyone is born with. It's anger, anticipation, joy, trust, fear, surprise, sadness and disgust. I have access to those, everyone does, including psychopaths. It's the learned emotions that people who are psychopathic and sociopathic struggle with," she told Mammamia.