I just joined because I so desperately need other survivors right now. No one else sees what’s in—or not in—their eyes. I might delve into my violent encounter with a sociopath in a future post, but right now something more pressing has come to light, so I’ll just provide a basic rundown (it is inherently violent and may be triggering).

On Thanksgiving Day 2017, I broke up with my sociopathic boyfriend. There were a million little reasons that were actually big reasons I ignored or explained away or didn’t see, but the important thing was: I knew I had to get out.

I told him he could stay in my apartment for the weekend to give him time to find a place to live. We actually hung out and it seemed like he could be my friend.

For a couple hours. Then he tried to murder me.

The ordeal lasted about an hour and left me in a shock I’ve never known, knees numb and red before bruising set in, hair disheveled, side of my head pounding as I lay awake trying not to sleep for fear of a concussion, falling asleep with a steak knife in my hand, waking up barely able to open my jaw.

Almost a year later, I have healed greatly, learned to defend myself (and found a hobby in Krav Maga and MMA I truly love and didn’t know I’d actually be great at!), gotten closer with my family, and I’m finally starting to feel like my life is getting back on track, even though he’s still a free man and the court case is still ongoing and thinking about testifying in December makes my stomach turn.

So here comes the reason I’ve been in absolute distress the past few days. I recently moved into a rented house with my current (wonderful and beyond supportive) boyfriend, our mutual best friend, and two other classmates that have become our friends as well. Last month, our best friend, we’ll call him Erik, mentioned in passing that he has sociopathic tendencies. This made immediate sense and explained a lot of what I saw in his behaviour. After that, I’ve kept a pretty close guard. There was a moment last month where I walked past him and he just happened to look me dead in the eye and it still shakes me to the core, because in his eyes I saw everything I had seen when I’d looked into my ex’s eyes while he was strangling me. I knew it then. I told my boyfriend, “I think Erik might be...” He said immediately, “no he’s not, you know he loves us, you know he’s your friend.” And while I wanted so badly to trust everything in my gut that was saying “SOCIO SOCIO SOCIO GET HIM OUTTA YOUR LIFE RIGHT NOW,” I had to acknowledge that my PTSD has been bad lately and I didn’t want to conflate things.

A few days ago, Erik told me he was diagnosed with sociopathy by his therapist over the summer. As soon as he said that, it was like a light switch was turned off in my brain, and he wasn’t a person anymore. For an entire year, I’ve convinced myself that psychos/socios ARE NOT PEOPLE. I don’t like to say they’re inhuman or not human, because they are genetically of the human species, but I truly believe their pathology separates their personhood from their humanity.

I left the room calmly and broke down in a panic. My boyfriend sought me out and consoled me. He had known this information for weeks, but didn’t think it was his place to have that conversation with me. I don’t blame him. He truly thinks Erik is harmless. He truly thinks this is the same friend we’ve known and loved for 3 years. The same “person” who let me into their home after being beaten by a sociopath a year prior. Is he? Has it only been a superficial friendship? What *is* a purely superficial friendship? Who am I to say that what other people interpret as empathy from him is fake?

Thinking back, he reacted differently than I expected him to and differently than everyone else in the house when I, his supposed best friend, came in bruised and beaten. While everyone was giving my their affection and attention and care the entire time, his was fleeting. The “caring” was their for a second, then it was back to normal like this wasn’t as shocking to him as it was to our other friends in the house.

When Erik told me he was a sociopath, he was arguing that my definition of sociopath was actually a description of psychopathy. Now. I have DONE my homework. I KNOW I know what I’m talking about. But somehow my hours and hours and hours of research—pouring over books, dissertations, lectures on evolution of human behaviour from Stanford professors of psychology, abstracts from medical journals, and studies on antisocial personality disorder and the difference between psychopathy and sociopathy—all served as fuel for his gaslighting, saying that I’m “confused” and “don’t understand what a sociopath is.” “Sociopaths DO have empathy,” he said. “It’s PSYCHOPATHS that don’t have empathy. Your ex is a PSYCHOPATH not a sociopath like me.”

No. That’s not the fucking case. And don’t tell me what my abuser you’ve never met is and isn’t. Both lack empathy the way normal people feel it. Psychopaths are born with the biological incapability to feel empathy/remorse due to (extremely basically, not literally) a separation of the grey matter from the rest of the brain, a big “ingredient” for empathy. In a healthy brain, grey matter develops very much like the language center: it is moulded in early childhood, and if has not developed by a certain age (called the critical period), it will never fully develop and is pretty much shrivelled and damaged. If you try to learn a language after the critical period (about age 7-9 I think), you may learn all the words and grammar, and you may become a fluent non-native speaker, but your brain will never think of the language as fluently and easily as native speakers. Sociopaths’ grey matter, for a variety of reasons many of which are poorly understood or remain elusive but include trauma and abuse/neglect, has not properly developed by the critical period. This is why sociopaths are forever, always, for life stuck in a 5-year-old’s mindset. The “me me me!” The “no he did it! I hit him because it was his fault!” The “but I want it! I deserve the cookie because I want it!” The “you said I couldn’t poke you there, not here!” The “I want mommy! She knows it wasn’t my fault! She’ll tell you how good I am!”

That’s the reason you may have found yourself explaining empathy to a grown ass man the way you would to a child: they have a child’s empathy. Which is to say, the wires are technically there, not like a psychopath where they’re virtually absent. Sociopaths have the technical capability to grasp the concept of empathy and maybe even try to demonstrate it, making them different from psychopaths. But they have to try really really hard to wake up those little-used grey matter synapses, where as you and I don’t even have to think about it.

That is what makes them not people in my eyes. And I recognise that that view is partly a defence mechanism. It’s easy to vilify the perpetrator who isn’t a person. But I believe that I truly believe this now that I know they exist and what they are.

I’m so confused right now because I thought I knew what a sociopath was before last year, then I came head to head with a violent one and saw what they are. But now I’m told I still apparently don’t know what a sociopath is because apparently “they do feel empathy” even though the literal definition says otherwise.

He claims superiority in the subject on two grounds: a) he’s a music therapy major and has been taking classes on psychology, and b) his diagnosis as such.

It feels like a paradox. Like when a liar tells you he’s lying. Is he telling you he’s lying or is he lying about the lie? I can’t fucking trust him. I can and do only trust myself. I trust my boyfriend on an emotional level, and intellectually, and he has alright intuition, but he is still trying to “get me to see” that Erik is just a high functioning sociopath that does feel empathy, and sociopathy is a spectrum, and he’s nothing like my abuser. But I believe this to come from a place of both naivety and being deceived.

I have so much cognitive dissonance in my head; if he’s an actual sociopath, he’s not a person and he doesn’t feel empathy. But he calls himself a sociopath and claims to feel empathy AND claims that sociopaths feel empathy. Everything I’ve learned is not agreeing with what Erik is trying to tell me. I trust my gut, but my boyfriend doesn’t see him any differently as a sociopath than as a non sociopath because he believes that bullshit “socios are actually empathetic” explanation.

I’ve avoided Erik for the past few days, and it’s been extremely difficult on the entire house and my relationship with my boyfriend. I swore to myself that I would kick every single one of these vile alien creatures out of my life, clean cut, no contact. Now I might be living with one.

As of now, I think I’m going to just try to get the status quo back, and act normally while keeping a significant emotional distance and as much physical distance as I can. My eyes are open.

I want to believe that he feels empathy. Because if he doesn’t, I can’t see him as a person. And if he does, he’s not a socio. It’s worth noting that he’s also been diagnosed with bipolar among other mental disorders in the past, and many of them seem to be misdiagnosed in my humble opinion, and I’m wondering if the sociopathy is also a misdiagnosis. I’m not a psychiatrist, but I’ve been around the block when it comes to psychological research.

I don’t really know what I’m asking. But I also don’t know what to do.