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Confessions of a Sociopath A Life Spent Hiding in Plain Sight ME Thomas 9780307956644 Books

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Confessions of a Sociopath A Life Spent Hiding in Plain Sight ME Thomas 9780307956644 Books

It would be very difficult for me to write a review which would add anything to this stream because several have already done an excellent job, e.g., D Shrink, D. B. Moran, Herblady, and others.

As an I O Psych major who added several abnormal psych classes to my curriculum I was interested to see how a self-proclaimed sociopath would write a memoir. Some of the reviews seem to feel she is not really a sociopath. How many of those reviews were founded on currently popular TV shows which tout sociopaths as both protagonists and antagonists? Not all sociopaths mame and murder. In some respects those similar to M. E. Thomas are more dangerous in that others aren't necessarily aware of the potentially destructive impact the Thomas's of the world can have on those around them. If each of us read the list of traits seen in sociopaths we would all find one or two of those traits in ourselves to some extent. And let's be honest - we've all worked in an office with a person we thought was "crazy." I currently work with someone who most likely is sociopathic and knowing this (suspecting it anyway) keeps me on my toes, being prepared to ward off some of the manipulations aimed at advancing her career at the expense of the rest of us.

I did finish the book, but it took a while since Ms. Thomas is not a person I care much about but what she has done is heighten our awareness of the invisible sociopaths around us and, more importantly, got the 69 of us (at the time of this review) thinking about something we may not have considered otherwise - and I imagine most of us learned a little something either about ourselves or those around us.


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Confessions of a Sociopath A Life Spent Hiding in Plain Sight ME Thomas 9780307956644 Books Reviews

Inconsistent, amateurish, contradictory stories, self serving. I guess the perfect product from a sociopath.
There is some good information and insight in this pseudonymous memoir. Author M.E. Thomas, a self-confessed sociopath, albeit a law-abiding one, nicely details the sociopath's risk-taking, fearless, calculating and transaction-oriented lifestyle. Appallingly, the sociopathic character appears breathtakingly close to the economist's model of the rational decision-maker, meticulously calibrating risk-return tradeoffs for all of life's decisions. Perhaps that's why sociopaths are said to flourish in the echelons of top business executives.

Thomas also draws a riveting portrait of her upbringing by horribly indifferent parents, who present themselves as good Mormons to the world, while badly neglecting their children in private. After enduring years of emotional, financial and recurring physical abandonment, Thomas appears to have shaped her personality to cope with an unstable world.

Despite an excellent beginning, Thomas's memoir soon descends into an airless and abstract discussion of the author's life that proves oddly revealing of a sociopath's flat affect. The author and her family and friends are never fully drawn as three-dimensional. Rather, they emerge as shadowy paper dolls, out-of-focus photos cut out from a dated magazine. As a result, Confessions of a Sociopath fails to impress and, worse, begins to bore the reader badly.

This book would have been better delivered as an in-depth feature article.
This is a very interesting read, though it requires the reader to see through the author's own self-manipulation.

This author epitomizes the child abuse victim’s narrative. Her father was violent and abusive to her and his other children, and her mother was a self-absorbed, dysfunctional enabler, and both of them sometimes provided adequately for their children and sometimes did not. She describes in the book a few violent episodes and painful dysfunction, such as her father beating her and how he left punching marks on the doors and walls of the house, and yet says point blank that she was never abused. This author swears to the tune of so much repitition it appears she is trying to convince herself more than others of the following two things 1) that her parents were amazing, did a wonderful job, and loved their children truly, and 2) that she herself was born defective, a sociopath, not normal. This is the stereotypical, worldwide and extremely common child abuse victim’s narrative idolize the abusers, blame yourself. The child abuse victim will blame herself and happily create a story that she was herself to blame for the mistreatment, claiming to herself and to others that she was “born bad” or “born wrong” – all to protect her image of her parents as wonderful and loving. All children in abusive homes do this, and many carry the story throughout their adulthoods too. They must do this to enable bonding with their abusers at their young age, and as a result of needing to bond with their abusers, they develop a certain set of skills – particularly, they develop a lack of empathy, an inability to connect with others, and manipulation, having to effectively shut down parts of their humanity to tolerate the abuse and to form trauma bonds to their attackers despite it.

Yet this author is clearly entirely unaware of how she has herself mentally bought the age-old and tired child abuse story. She is oblivious to how common and normal her self-story is; indeed, I fully believe that she fully believes her own story – a story built throughout her life and strengthened, first to protect her image of her parents in her child’s mind, and then to avoid dealing with her painful past in her adult mind.

Critical reviewers here have rightfully doubted that this adult victim of child mistreatment is truly a sociopath, hypothesizing instead that she is narcissistic. This is also what I perceived as well. Narcissistic Personality Disordered (NPD) people are hungry for attention, low in empathy, manipulative and malicious, and enjoy feelings of immense superiority to others. Naturally, with so many people being diagnosed with NPD (a disorder known to often result from child abuse/neglect as a coping mechanism) a diagnosis or a self-concept of NPD no longer offers one the special attention or feelings of superiority any longer. So it makes sense that this woman has labeled herself a sociopath – and then sought out a professional with the explicit goal to be diagnosed as a sociopath after having spent years studying up on the disorder herself first – to provide herself with a stronger self-story that would reinforce the child abuse victim’s narrative of “I was born defective, like this, and my parents are loving and wonderful to have so carefully raised little defective me.”

Indeed, this story insulates her from having to face the harsher reality that is much more likely and far less rare than being born a sociopath that her family’s abuse, violence, and dysfunction directly caused her to develop narcissistic traits in order to first cope with the abuse, and then to avoid dealing with the painful aftermath. Even brain scans have shown that child abuse produces many of the same neurological effects one sees in a psychopath’s brain, whether or not those abused do show psychopathic traits/acquire a diagnosis of the disorder. For this reason, brain scans do not at all answer the question of the chicken or the egg.

But this author does not – and will not – realize any of this. Because to realize this would defeat the purpose of her self-story in the first place.

Some people judged this book as boring. I think they took the words of a traumatized and admittedly mentally disordered person in obvious denial (“my father beat me" and "I was never abused") at face value, and failed to exercise any of their own analytical or critical thinking skills in the process of reading. I found this book fascinating. It is thought-provoking in many ways.

Many of the critical reviewers on this page intuitively saw that this woman was deceiving herself, but I think they misguessed at the motives and reasons for her own mental gymnastics and cognitive dissonance. The author prides herself on her self-proclaimed talents for manipulating others, but this author is most adept and skilled at self-manipulation.

Fascinating read. The only reason I gave it four stars instead of five, is because this woman intends to procreate child victims for herself. She idolizes her abusive and dysfunctional parents and the way they “raised” her. Conveniently, she has self-diagnosed and decieved a professional into diagnosing her with an untreatable problem; now she is off the hook for being accountable to deal with her symptoms, just as any Narcissistic Personality Disordered person would most prefer in her life. It is her future child victims for whom I have sympathy.
It would be very difficult for me to write a review which would add anything to this stream because several have already done an excellent job, e.g., D Shrink, D. B. Moran, Herblady, and others.

As an I O Psych major who added several abnormal psych classes to my curriculum I was interested to see how a self-proclaimed sociopath would write a memoir. Some of the reviews seem to feel she is not really a sociopath. How many of those reviews were founded on currently popular TV shows which tout sociopaths as both protagonists and antagonists? Not all sociopaths mame and murder. In some respects those similar to M. E. Thomas are more dangerous in that others aren't necessarily aware of the potentially destructive impact the Thomas's of the world can have on those around them. If each of us read the list of traits seen in sociopaths we would all find one or two of those traits in ourselves to some extent. And let's be honest - we've all worked in an office with a person we thought was "crazy." I currently work with someone who most likely is sociopathic and knowing this (suspecting it anyway) keeps me on my toes, being prepared to ward off some of the manipulations aimed at advancing her career at the expense of the rest of us.

I did finish the book, but it took a while since Ms. Thomas is not a person I care much about but what she has done is heighten our awareness of the invisible sociopaths around us and, more importantly, got the 69 of us (at the time of this review) thinking about something we may not have considered otherwise - and I imagine most of us learned a little something either about ourselves or those around us.