What Sociopaths Really Feel | Dr. Patric Gagne

Lewis Howes (0:01)

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In this conversation, you're going to learn why people-pleasing is really a form of dysfunctional love. You'll learn how to fill your own inner container, so you stop needing others to fill it. You'll get the simple questions that teaches your kids, their feelings matter, and you'll see why failing or admitting that you're wrong doesn't make you a bad person. Dr. Patric Gagne was diagnosed as a sociopath. She went on to earn her doctorate, writing her dissertation on sociopathy, and worked as a therapist and a volunteer emergency trauma counselor. She is the author of Sociopath, A Memoir, the story of growing up without the emotions everyone expected her to feel, and learning to live with radical honesty. This is Dr. Patric Gagne. Episode 1995 on The School of Greatness.

I'm fascinated by human dynamics and human behavior. You're an expert in this topic. I like understanding the human mind, human emotions, why people do the things they do.

Patric Gagne (4:28)

I'm just as fascinated. I just come at it from an antisocial perspective, whereas you come at it from a pro-social perspective. Isn't that interesting?

And that is something about psychopathy, is that it's automatically assumed, oh, psychopaths can't feel. Psychopaths can feel. We feel all of the inherent emotions. Everyone's born with those inherent emotions. You have young kids. You didn't have to teach them to smile. You didn't have to teach them to cry, happiness, sadness, surprise, disgust. Your children are born with these emotions. But it's the social emotions that psychopaths struggle to understand, empathy, compassion, envy, remorse, guilt. Again, these emotions are taught mostly through modeling. So if your daughter hits her sister, you're going to say, hey, we don't want to hit because your sister, it'll make her sad and you don't want your sister to be sad, do you? And your daughter will probably say, no, I don't. And that's how we learn empathy. Well, psychopaths don't learn emotions that way.

Lewis Howes (5:28)

Is that because they're not modeled by parents or by society?