M.E. ThomasRecensioni

An interestingly enough read...I was going to give it 3 stars because too much of it felt more boastful than insightful and at times I was even questioning the truthfulness of the author, but at the very end there was an added essay that was printed after the initial publication which seemed more real than anything else she wrote, and, not being a sociopath (lol) I emphasized

DNF @ 78% - The first 60% or so was interesting, but I lost interest after that. Might revisit it later.

Zero stars.

while apparently the author, a diagnosed sociopath, is eminently self-aware, she seems oblivious in her writing to obvious further delusions, most notably delusions of grandeur. interesting read if you're interested in the way the mind works, and the epilogue is pleasantly optimistic as far as the possibility of applying nominally sociopathic traits for the benefit of society. wouldn't necessarily recommend, but not a waste of time to read.

Very, very strange. I found the book absorbing. An anonymously written memoir of a sociopath? So what part of it all is true? But of course that's the same question one should have about any memoir.

3.5 stars

The author is a sociopath and wants to describe it to others. She is not violent, but she doesn’t feel things the way other people do. She talks about her life and what makes her different from “normal” people.

I thought she did a good job explaining. I have read other books that tell me that not all sociopaths are serial killers, etc. They aren’t all violent, as this author isn’t. I did find some of her comparisons to “empaths” a bit odd, and they often didn’t seem to ring true for me. It was only in the epilogue that she defined how she was using the word to mean non-sociopaths (if she also defined it earlier, I missed it). I listened to the audio and it was done well. I rarely lost interest.½

This is a strange one. I couldn't help, through the course of this book, thinking that this sounds like a made-up story that a pathological liar might tell you should you be stuck in a circumstance where you're forced to listen to them for a few hours.

It sounds like a sociopath, but it also sounds incredibly calculated, as though this is what a sociopath should sound like. So, based on that alone, I'll bump the rating to three stars from the two I'd originally settled on.

There are several times when the author completely contradicts herself, then goes back and contradicts the contradiction.

But overall, there was one thing that I felt through most of this book that I never anticipated when the subject matter is a sociopath. For much of it, I was actually reasonably bored.

possible review to come...

This was more a 3.5 for me than a 3, but I tend to round down. I can't say the book wasn't interesting, but it was cyclical and dragged more than I would have liked. It was also worth reading given my interest in psychology. I'm glad I read it, but I don't know if I can recommend it either. This is contradictory, but also true.

Fittingly for someone who openly doesn't care about other people, this is a remarkably self-centered book, that I often found difficult to get through even though it's a pretty quick read. Billed as a memoir of sorts, there are occasionally some interesting tips on dealing with other people, interspersed with her memories of what her life as a sociopath has been like, including her childhood, her career, and so on, as well as some thoughts on sociopathy more generally, but perhaps inevitably, her own emotional detachment makes it hard to connect with the book the way you would with a normal memoir. I picked this up because I've heard/read vague conjectures that sociopaths make up a large percentage of certain careers like law, finance, politics, etc., and after finishing this book I can believe it.

There's a stronger meta aspect to reading this book than there are with most others. Not only do her frequent references to her strong ability to lie automatically invite skepticism of this or that detail, such as her claim that since 2004 her stock market investments have averaged a 9.5% return each year, but her discussions of normal people, colored by a mixture of boredom, contempt, and incomprehensibility, also put the reader on the defensive to the extent that they have strong feelings about people bragging about their emotional manipulation skills. For example, she often boasts about her manipulative and analytical abilities:

"I can seem amazingly prescient and insightful, to the point that people proclaim that no one else has ever understood them as well as I do. But the truth is far more complex and hinges on the meaning of understanding. In a way, I don't understand them at all. I can only make predictions based on the past behavior that they've exhibited to me, the same way computers determine whether you're a bad credit risk based on millions of data points. I am the ultimate empiricist, and not by choice."

I doubt that much of the book is fabricated, or at least I don't care enough to assume that she's making all of this stuff up, but I did have an issue with the "entertainment value" of her anecdotal style that seems calculated to lend her story more credibility. Sometimes the stories of her life are used in service to a broader point, such as talking about whether sociopathy is a nature or nurture phenomenon (somewhat surprisingly, she thinks nurture), or when she writes about her study abroad trip to Brazil, the one part of her life where she seems to have had a good time. However, sometimes they seem to be just there in the narrative, like a journal entry that escaped the editor. Perhaps someone gave her the advice to write about her childhood as a hook for the reader; it's possible that the childhood anecdotes will seem interesting to some people, but given that she herself doesn't seem to feel much about her abusive father or distant mother, it was hard for me to stay interested. Most interesting is the chapter where she talks about her relationships; right after that she references the character Cathy in Steinbeck's East of Eden a few times, and this does come off as a sort of Cathy's Tale overall.

From time to time she drops useful life strategies, such as one from her time as a law professor where she would email a student ahead of time to tell them she would be calling on them in class. That would not only save the classtime wasted by a student who wasn't prepared, it would incentivize the student to do their work. Furthermore, the answers they would give in class would motivate the other students to work harder also, and since the students would want to keep the fact that they'd been tipped off secret since to reveal it would deflate the aura of their unusually articulate answers, she wouldn't have to police them about the tactic. Nice lifehack. She also spends a good deal of time breaking down how she's learned to fake being interested in other people and developing artificial social skills. It was interesting how autistic she sounded in the sections where she recounted the trial-and-error process of constructing her social persona, as well as her discomfort with people who show too much authentic emotion, such as grief over a dead relative. She even mentions how exhausting it is to bridge the disconnect between the internal emptiness of her emotional life and the external vivacity she projects to others, which is something I've read about autistics. I wonder what lessons on the differences between the two syndromes you could draw from her attempt at a relationship with an autistic guy that didn't work out.

Fascinatingly, she mentions that she runs a blog about being a sociopath, which seems a little out of character. After all, would Patrick Bateman run a forum? But her descriptions of the sense of connection she gets from hearing from people similar to her help to humanize her, and by the end of the book her sociopath demystification project looks reasonable and normal. "Human, all too human", if you will. A lot of people seem to have found her writing style difficult to take, and her in particular insufferable, disturbing, or unrelatable - I can certainly understand their frustration with the sense of emotional falsity that came from many of the book's weaker moments. Ultimately however, I found her sympathetic, if not always the most riveting of prose stylists, and by the end I thought she made some solid points about the relationship between sociopaths and society at large, even if I rolled my eyes a few times at her claims of ruining people for fun. Still, what else can you expect from a sociopath?

After chatting with a customer about this book I was quite intrigued to read it. Having known and being effected by people with sociopathic tendencies I really wanted to understand more. I thought this book would be the answer to my problems...it wasn't.

I read it through to the end (as I give every book a chance) but there were many times I just wanted to throw this book across the room. Due to my empathetic nature I was very effected by this book. I felt as if this entire book was an elaborate lie.

The amount of times she referred to her 'perfect' breasts and her athletic build and how oh so clever she was..."even more clever than you dear reader."

I'm not spending any more time reviewing this. I really hated this book.

Where do I even begin.

Well, how about with this:

"This sort of behavior may seem uncouth, but is it really immoral? Prichard's disgust with sociopaths for being immoral seems largely unwarranted unless you ascribe to his particular brand of morality. Was I really in the wrong by temporarily taking my neighbor's bike? Only if you think that violation of the personal property of others is immoral. Even the law recognizes that this is not always the case: If you're stranded in a snowstorm, it would be permissible to break into someone's ski cabin and spend the night, as long as you pay for any damage .... you can still use this defense if if you knew for a fact that the owner would not grant you permission, for instance because you two are mortal enemies and the cabin owner has made it clear that he would not piss on you if you were on fire. The cabin owner can take this position, but the law will not support it.... When seen through this lens of reasoning ... perhaps my neighbor was acting improperly by being unreasonable in not allowing me to borrow her unused bike."

Keep in mind that she didn't ask, she just took it without telling the woman, and when the neighbour found out she got ("unreasonably") angry.

If you want to spend 300 pages with such a person, you'll love this book.

Seriously. She compares her "borrowing" a neighbour's bike without asking to breaking into a cabin during a blizzard to save your life.

And get this: she goes on and on (and on and on and on) about how brilliant and rational she is.

Does that sound brilliant or rational to you? Does it even bear a passing resemblance to even average intelligence?

Like many people I've met in my life who pride themselves on their super-rationality, she is nothing of the kind: she simply doesn't base her decisions on the same emotions other people do. Instead of guilt, remorse, empathy, consideration, or compassion, she bases her decisions on greed, egotism, anger, desire, and boredom. They're still emotions, and she's still rationalizing her actions after the fact. Repugnant emotions, but emotions just the same.

For instance, she blathers on for far too long about how fantastic sociopaths actually are because they do so well in business careers, and thus must be good for business. But this is rank nonsense. It does not follow that just because corporate America creates a culture where sociopaths can make a lot of money, that the sociopaths must therefore be productive employees who contribute to their organizations. Plenty of empiric evidence demonstrates otherwise--that teams composed of respectful and compassionate people outperform the snakes. She simply ignores this and instead posts a lot of crap from her blog readers.

You can't trust a word she says--obviously. Oh sure, yeah, she averaged a 9.5% annual return on her stock investments and fully funded her retirement by 30 ... ok. And of course she is a brilliant law professor whose students all love her. And she is adored by everyone and has close relationships ... because she says so.

You can find some speculation as to her real identity at the link below:

http://abovethelaw.com/2013/05/sources-and-dr-phil-offer-insights-author-of-conf...

Doesn't seem like this super-brilliant insightful genius who can see through the heart of all humans to the real motivations beneath was real careful protecting her identity while promoting the book. Way to go, Jamie.

God only knows what it's worth. The only thing I'm sure of is that sociopaths, if they're anything like what this woman is claiming, are even worse than I thought. Sure, yes, some proportion of humanity will probably always be exploitative and lack empathy, and it is even possible that they do contribute somehow to the greater social ecosystem--though I can't imagine how. But so do venomous snakes, and I don't invite them into my living room.

I wondered early on, while reading Confessions of a Sociopath, suppose I were a sociopath? Would I like this book? And if I didn’t, would I confront the author to express my displeasure with actions free from restraint or moral boundary? You know, give her a “sociopathic” review.

As it turns out, I liked a fair amount of it. One thing that tickled me: Among author M.E. Thomas’s confessions and opinions is her thought that lots of CEOs and lawyers are sociopaths (she is a lawyer). I like to think of this when the news reports a CEO or lawyer doing something lousy. Instead of bemoaning a failure to behave in accord with my moral compass (M.E. says, “we don’t have a moral compass”), I now just mutter, “That damn sociopath.” It’s therapeutic. I guess that means I owe to one of the sociopaths out there a word of thanks.

She presents some interesting information and claims. Examples:
• She’s Mormon and it seems to suit her. She calls the LDS church “a sociopath’s dream.”
• Justice as a moral judgment doesn’t makes sense to her; justice as a way to control people’s actions does.
• Zealous empaths manipulated by appeals to their emotions can commit horrors far worse than sociopaths ever would bother to undertake, in her humble opinion.
• It’s not insanity. “Sociopaths actually know what society considers right and wrong most of the time, they just don’t feel an emotional compulsion to conform their behavior to society’s standards.”
• Corporations display the classic signs: inherent amorality, elevation of their own interests above all others’, and disregard for moral and sometimes legal limits in pursuit of their own advancement.
• Psychotherapy has helped her commit sociopathic acts more effectively. Good news, don’t you think?

Since “sociopathy,” as she conceives it, differs somewhat from what recent psychiatric practice calls “anti-social personality disorder,” Ms. Thomas admits that “I could not be legitimately diagnosed with ASPD.” She was diagnosed as sociopathic after voluntarily being tested, but she’d also researched the subject thoroughly and probably could mimic well the typical behaviors and thoughts. Since the diagnosis could help validate her already existing blog for sociopaths, she acknowledges readers might be skeptical. Still, whether she really is a sociopath ended up not mattering to me all that much. I found Confessions educational while minding that this author might not be a reliable guide.

Most readers, I’d guess, will have a limit for how much of M.E. Thomas’s specialized self-congratulation will be tolerable. Sooner or later you just may conclude that Hell is a place where one is forced to chit-chat with a sociopath day after day after day after . . .

Very interesting, enough so that I spent over two hours interviewing her. My first talk with a self identified psychopath.

I picked this up thinking it would be an interesting read. It really, really was not. In fact, this book is intensely boring. As a sociopath (if she is indeed a sociopath which is pretty doubtful), it seems the author is incapable of introspection, and it shows. The meat of the book amounts to a few hundred pages of dry, insufferable ramblings about how naturally superior she is to not just normal people, but other sociopaths. It's like being locked in a room with a pathological liar for several hours. I barely got halfway through, and I am one of those madwomen who ALWAYS finishes a book, no matter how rotten. Unless you're a masochist, give this one a wiiiiide berth.

To start here, I believe the issue most people have when reading this book is a dislike of the author and her voice as she goes through her narrative, and I think it really highlights the differences between sociopaths and what M.E. Thomas refers to as "empaths." There is nothing in this book that will make you like M.E., and I don't think that's purposeful, simply a result of her laying out how she views herself and the world in the plainest terms possible. She is very cutthroat about a lot of social situations, and at times I was disturbed by the flippancy in which she cared for the others around her. There is no "soft blow" language here, and what I mean by that is when most people talk about something bad they've done, they will justify it, soften the blow, lower the risk or lessen the severity of their own actions to seem more "human" or sympathetic to those listening to their story, but M.E. doesn't bother with such fluff. She doesn't try to endear her to you, doesn't justify her actions beyond the straight "I did it because I enjoyed it" or "I did it to get X result." Because of this, I can see many readers being put-off by her and shutting down anything she has to say on the subject, which is a big mistake, in my opinion.

If you intend to read Confessions of a Sociopath, you must do so with an open mind and the understanding that everything M.E. writes is through a warped view. She has some great arguments, but everything must be taken with a grain of salt. However, if you go in with the right mindset, this book is absolutely eye-opening.

Confessions of a Sociopath is part memoir, part psychological research. M.E. looks at the history of study done on sociopaths way back into the 1800s and presents it in a very wonderful and informative way. She illustrates the faults in our tools for finding sociopaths, showing that most research and testing is done on the prison population. While many sociopaths do end up in prison, this only highlights one thread of sociopathy, and neglects to look at successful sociopaths who manage to immerse themselves in an empathetic culture and stay above the law. Looking at sociopaths as all murderers or serial killers is no different than looking at all Mexicans as lazy or all black people as criminals-- it is just not reality. She goes on to show the study of the brain and that sociopaths have been proven to have a different brain make-up, and explains the theories and research behind why sociopaths are so unempathetic, looking at something such as inattention to be the cause of this lack of empathy.

M.E. builds a wonderful case for how a sociopath may be a "successful" member of society. She insists that sociopathy is not as much of a "mental illness" as a different brain structure or personality type. Her description of sociopathic thought processes certainly brought the 4% statistic into reality for me, took away the stereotype of the "serial killer" and illustrated a very real person, whose personality traits I could see in people around me. But the thing that made this book so wonderful was the argument she raised on what should be done with sociopaths. All books and journals and readings about sociopaths indicate a need to find them, expose them, and avoid them. But if we come to a place where we can identify sociopaths, what would we do with them? Would we ship them off to camps to be put to death, because they are "beyond saving" or "monsters"? How is this any different from the way Jews were treated in WW2?

Confessions of a Sociopath is a fascinating read, and really opens up this topic to another perspective. Are sociopaths really monsters, or are we the monsters for thinking of them in such a way? Are they not just another structure of the human form, like autistics or geniuses? Sociopaths, much of the time, thrive in our world. They are our CEOs, our lawyers, friends and coworkers. They are people who are doomed to repeat the same destructive cycles time and time again because they lack the ability for self-reflection and introspection, and would have to work to obtain any level of self-improvement. But when autistics need this outside help, does anyone say they should be "avoided" because of their differences? Do we toss them to the curb because of the way they were born?

If you are at all interested in sociopathy, mental illness and psychology, I highly suggest the read. However, I'd advise readers to calm that emotional knee-jerk response when reading, and reserve judgement. The experience will be so worth it.

This started as a horror book. But at the end I realized M.E Thomas is just a nice little woman who is too hard on herself and introspective. Fine, she might not feel bad when bad things happen sometimes, and she may think about killing someone. Anyway she talks a lot about her childhood. That strange father of hers. The pedophile she had for a teacher. Her vindictive nature. You get to see her as a vulnerable girl who many might identify with. She lets you in on how she got to the place she is now in her adult life, with many accomplishments. I credit her for taking such sincere efforts in writing this book. It is not relishing or trying to glamorize the subject matter. It is quite simple to be honest. Some parts were boring, stiff and rushed, but the reading was mostly easy on the brain. In the end it could have been more interesting. But what can you do? This isn't Sherlock Holmes. This is about as academic and factual a book could get without becoming a university textbook.

I get it, she's a sociopath. She's also a major A-hole, but I guess that's redundant. She really enjoys her contempt for the rest of us.

The problem with the book is that she's so much in her head, she can't make her problem relatable. She's a sociopath who's been hoisted on her own petard.

Ick.

I hated this book and I especially hate her stupid nonchalant way of discussing how much of a jackass she is.

Fair warning: I dated a sociopath that ruined my life, so I'm probably biased against her.

M.E. doesn't have to convince me that she is a very different type of person than most. For me, difference is fascinating but even for those who are comfortable belonging to 'normality' the divergent paths of human nature are extremely revealing. If you are a non conforming individual of any breed, but particularly if you place a high value on logic, many of the tenets M.E.'s morality and life philosophy will resonate with you. If you aren't, they might explain why certain people around you panic when you break down and start crying.

The style is engaging and readable, I can certainly believe sociopaths are charming! and although M.E. is not, and admits to this herself, a fully mature individual; she is self reflective and intelligent in a completely new way so that her observations are extremely valuable and different than those of neurotypicals.


"What makes you a sociopath is not that you choose to do certain things, but that you are presented with an entirely different set of choices than a neurotypical person."

This was a simply fascinating book, providing an insider's perspective on sociopathy. The good news? I am not, it appears, a sociopath - - not nearly charismatic enough as it happens. I could not put this book down - - well written and researched, this was a surprisingly compelling book.

M.E. Thomas, a diagnosed sociopath, talks in depth about the way she lives her life, the forces that shaped her, the nature of her thoughts and feelings, and the way she navigates through a world of people very different from herself. This is both a memoir and a work of advocacy, as she makes the case for sociopathy not being all that bad a thing, painting sociopaths as being perhaps just one more point on a natural human spectrum.

As far as her intellectual arguments go, she does this well. Attempting to dispel a common stereotype, she points out that while the number of sociopaths is higher among violent criminals than among the general population, it is very much not true that all sociopaths are violent criminals, or even that most violent criminals are sociopaths. She argues that, while sociopaths lack feelings of guilt and shame to guide them and do not respond emotionally to the idea of doing something hurtful or morally wrong, it is entirely possible for sociopaths to behave pro-socially because they recognize that it is in their rational self-interest to do so, or because they recognize that society will function better, for them as well as for everyone else, if they follow certain rules. She calls this having "a prosthetic moral compass," and even suggests that claiming it is impossible to be good without an emotion-based sense of morality is as offensive as suggesting that it is impossible without religious belief... an argument that I personally cannot help but respond to. She also points out that there are areas where the dispassionate ruthlessness of a sociopath can be a definite advantage, such as her own field of law. A trial lawyer, after all, is supposed to be able to put aside her own emotions and moral judgments and concentrate solely on making the bast case she can.

Heck, Thomas even makes sociopathy sound kind of appealing: a life lived with a confident sense of self-worth, free of any of those often downright neurotic worries about what people might think of you, or about all the potential bad consequences of your actions.

And yet. And yet, in the midst of all this, I was constantly brought up short by the way she would casually discuss truly appalling things as if they were no big deal. She cheerfully talks about her favorite hobby of "ruining people," including all the details of why it's so much fun. She trots out lines of reasoning that are clearly twisted and self-serving to explain why such things are perfectly acceptable, and makes it clear that, to her, what "I didn't do anything wrong" means is only "I didn't do anything illegal" or "I scrupulously followed the rules of some game that only exists in my head, and that I did not ask anyone else if they actually wanted to play." Some of the things she describes are enough to raise the hairs on the back of your neck, and on the whole I think it may have left me feeling significantly more frightened of sociopaths than I ever was before, however much appreciation I might also have for their humanity.

And, of course, there's also the question of just how much we can trust anything Thomas says here. This memoir certainly feels tremendously open and sincere, and her stated reasons for writing it that way, her desire to be understood, seem very real. But then, this is also a person who, by her own account, excels at faking sincerity and manipulating people by telling them what they want to hear, so it's impossible not to wonder to what extent she's also doing that to her audience of readers.

The cumulative effect of all of this is illuminating, unsettling, and deeply, deeply fascinating. Not only does it provide a window into the world of the sociopathic, but it also offers up a very different perspective on the rest of us, raising a lot of extremely intriguing questions about what "empaths" have that sociopaths don't, how it works, and what it means.½

I enjoyed this book and found a lot of interesting insights--especially for how sociopaths might perceive others around them. Some reviewers have pointed out that the book is repetitive at points, and I agree. However, it wasn't so bad as to keep the book from being readable.

Thomas comes across forthright about her thoughts and perceptions, and she is frank about her own perceived shortcomings as well.

I found some very interesting insights to glean from what she has to say. Yes, there are parts that are very self-centered (the work is an autobiography of a self-diagnosed sociopath, after all). I would recommend the book. Not only for those who wish to be able to avoid sociopaths (I don't believe this is the main point of the book, but I understand people don't generally like the idea of being hurt), but maybe just for the opportunity to see a maligned segment of the population as just another subset of human people trying to find a way to navigate the world.

I don't really know what I expected. Actually, I guess I do, I thought I'd be entertained, but for all of the author's professing how likable and intriguing she is, my goodness is she a braggart and a bore.

This is a dull book.