Spencer Greenberg: …You mentioned in your book an example, I believe you were in the subway where someone tried to shame you. Could you tell that story?

M. E. Thomas: So it was in the Washington, DC metro station. I was just trying to get to wherever I was trying to get to. I saw an escalator, and it was broken down, but I just walked down it because it’s stairs. At the bottom of the escalator, a worker stopped me. At first, I was like, “Is he asking for directions or making pleasant conversation?” But it became clear he was trying to tell me that I was wrong for having walked down the broken escalator, which is really just stairs. I’ve done that all my life, especially in New York or other places where escalators often aren’t working. It seems like in the subway, you just walk down the stairs. But he was, I think, more upset that I didn’t seem to acknowledge the wrongness of my actions. Then he tried to shame me about it and said, “You know, didn’t you see the sign? You weren’t supposed to do that, and that’s trespassing.” He was trying to make it seem like I had committed this crime. Then he started walking away. I still did not feel the shame, but I responded to what I perceived to be his aggression, trying to shame me in a way that I call gray rage. Gray rage I experience when somebody who’s not in a position of authority over me seeks to assert authority over me. It must be something about childhood trauma or something, but I immediately kind of lose it, and I call it gray rage. Actually, somebody else coined the term, but I like it because it’s gray, it’s not like red hot, it’s just a full burn. After he left, I started kind of following him, thinking, I just have to destroy him. Those were sort of my ideas. When it’s gray rage, you just are subsumed by the emotion. It’s acting on pure impulse, and the impulse is just to destroy the threat, the thing that caused you to be triggered in this particular way. I was following him, thinking all these thoughts of the things that I would do to him, and then I just lost him in the crowd. I basically had to just go home, wherever I was staying at a hotel, and just rest because it’s so exhausting, physically exhausting afterwards. The gray rage is just such an intense experience.

S. Greenberg: Do you think what would have happened if, instead of losing the crowd, let’s say you cornered him in some secret place where nobody else could see?

Thomas: I had the things that I had imagined doing were mostly choking. I don’t know why in my mind I had the vision of just choking him. It doesn’t make any sense. My more conscientious mind, the non-lizard brain mind, thinks that’s stupid and ridiculous because I’m a 5-foot-four-inch girl, and he was a 6-foot-something guy, and there’s really nothing I could do physically to him with just bare hands that he couldn’t just push me off. But sometimes I wonder about other psychopaths, how crazy that must be to experience things like gray rage or these other impulses when you are a 6-foot man and you experience testosterone. On top of all of this, I wonder if that must be very difficult for them.

G: I had an interesting experience related to gray rage, which is that I was talking to someone that I thought might be a sociopath, and I was asking them about their emotions. I asked them if they feel angry, and they said, “Oh, no, I never feel angry.” Then I said, “Okay, let me show you a video.” I showed them a video of a sociopath describing gray rage. They said, “Oh, that emotion, I feel that like 30× every day.”

T: Wow, that’s a lot, 30× a day. Maybe this person was just exaggerating for humor.

G: They might have been exaggerating, but then they also told me that they keep a list of everyone who’s wronged them, and every month they check it to see if they can hurt those people in any way without putting much effort into it, sort of low-effort ways of harming the people that wronged them. I’m wondering, does that resonate with you at all? This idea of wanting to take revenge on people that have done bad things to you?

T: I don’t experience that as much as other psychopaths that I’ve met seem to experience. I’ve heard of some really long cons that people have done for people that have wronged them. I think that my guess, from my own experience, where my gray rage seems to come from, is that I was imposed upon, my personhood, my autonomy, severely when I was a child, and as a result, it’s almost like a PTSD trigger when I experience the gray rage. It’s obviously not the Metro worker; the Metro worker has really done nothing. But it’s all these memories of feeling like my personhood was disregarded, and how badly that hurt my psyche, and how much that disrupted the development of my sense of self, that I think is being triggered. I think the gray rage is this desire to reassert control and really just personal boundaries. You can’t talk to me that way, type stuff. In the story you mentioned of somebody who has the list of people they check in on every month, I think that’s what it’s trying to do; there’s a desire to be invulnerable to other people. Because we felt so vulnerable as children and felt so put upon and powerless as children, I think.

G: Do you think that other sociopaths tend to have something similar to gray rage? Do the triggers kind of differ a lot in your experience?

T: I think the triggers are pretty much the same. I have another friend who says somebody has a false sense of their own authority, and by consequence, they have a false sense of their own safety. That’s how they think of gray rage.

G: They feel nothing bad could happen to them, and they’re kind of exerting authority on you.

T: They feel they can do that, and this phrase, “I’m not the one you should be messing with”, or “you messed with the wrong person”, is how I hear psychopaths describe it. They want to surprise the person with how forceful and extreme the reaction is to the victim trying to assert authority over the psychopath.

T: I totally agree. So again, using the example of my dad, he’s almost maudlin with his display of empathy, sometimes. He’ll show his arm and be like, “Look, I have goosebumps” because he’s listening to some sad story about somebody. And then to me, though, there’s actually a story, it happened when I was 9, I have this memory where we’re watching TV together, and there’s some kid, I think it was during the Ethiopian famine at the time. So there’s some African kid with a fly flying into his eye. I’m just kind of making fun of this kid, “You can’t even get the fly out of your eye.” And then my dad said to me, “Have you no empathy?” I was like, “I guess I don’t.” Well, first I asked, “What is empathy?” He describes it to me. And then I thought, “I don’t think I have empathy.” So I think that’s a really good example. He probably was crying at the advertisement of the African kid, and I just had this callous reaction of, “What’s the deal with the fly in your eye?”

G: So if you were to watch someone being tortured, really gruesomely, parts of their body flayed off and so on, do you think you would have any emotional reaction to it?

T: I’m sure I would have some, at least esthetic reaction to it. I definitely experience things like disgust; if something smells terrible.

G: Oh, you do have disgust, yeah.

T: I think it kind of makes sense. Disgust is probably a lizard brain emotion; you know, it’s just meant to get us to not eat infection.

…G: You mentioned fear. Fearing rats and opossums. One thing I know about a handful of sociopaths, and one thing I’ve asked them about is fear. Some of them say they don’t think they have fear, or at least not in the normal way that other people do. What’s your relationship with fear?

T: Yeah, I totally agree with that. The rat thing, you can kind of tell it’s a phobia. My girlfriend, who’s also a psychopath, has a phobia of spiders but is totally fine with them. If she catches a spider in her peripheral vision, she’ll have that initial kind of freak out because of the phobia. I’ll do the same thing with rats. If I see one, I’ll have that initial kind of jump scare, and then it’s fine. I can even hold them. I can even play with them or whatever. It’s not that I’m actually afraid of them, and I’m not really afraid of anything else either. Sometimes that’s gotten me in trouble because I will not take adequate precautions. Sometimes I do things that can maybe seem like I’m a little accident-prone. For instance, when I go mountain biking, I probably crash about 20% of the time, which I’ve heard is high.

G: You mentioned in your book how you cut yourself in the kitchen a lot with knives by accident. Can you talk about that?

T: Yes, I still have a plastic safety knife. It’s kind of like the type that you carve pumpkins with, or little children can carve pumpkins with. I almost always use that knife here and there. I think it actually is safer for me to just use a bigger metal knife, but then I have to be very conscientious. I’m the same way with train tracks. There are some train tracks close to where I live, and I cross them basically every day, but I know that I’m bad at paying attention and being careful for my own self. I really talk to myself when I’m doing it, I’m like, “Here we come. 15 feet from the train tracks. 10 feet from the train tracks. Look right, left, right, left, right.” It’s this very belt and suspenders approach to kind of rein in my brain, which naturally doesn’t care, doesn’t even pay attention to things like that.

G: Right. Because it’s not that you don’t know intellectually that you could cut yourself with the knife. It’s that somehow you don’t have the fear of cutting yourself with a knife that causes everyone else to be cautious. Is that accurate?

T: Yeah, I would say that that’s what’s happening.

G: Okay, imagine you’re walking down a dark alley, a big man jumps out with a gun, holds it to your head, and says they’re going to kill you. Would you not feel afraid, in that case?

T: In those types of situations, I do experience hormonal changes, so cortisol, adrenaline.

G: You feel your body being amped up.

T: I can feel the physical change in my body.

G: Do you think you’re afraid?

T: No, in the same way you would feel the physical change in your body of being sleepy. You have melatonin or tryptophan or whatever kind of running through your body, but you don’t think of it. It’s almost kind of like, and this is how I feel too. I’m not a big drinker or drug user, but when I think the most I’ve had is 3 drinks, and at that point I was like, “Oh, my body is just lethargic.” That’s the only way that I experience it. I’m a little stupider, and my body’s moving slower. It’s the same thing with fear or adrenaline. I know that I have adrenaline because my hand is shaking, but I don’t identify with that state of being afraid.

G: Another person I think is a sociopath that I was talking to, I asked them if they’re ever afraid and asked, “What about dangerous animals?” They told me stories about being around dangerous animals, and they just have no emotional response to them. They know intellectually that they can be dangerous, but they just don’t care. This makes me think about, I’ve wondered, from an evolutionary perspective, why are there sociopaths? How is it that they exist in the population? One possibility is that mutations happen sometimes, but I think more likely it’s kind of an evolutionary stable strategy where there are a lot of ways to survive. One way to survive is to have tight-knit groups that work together, collaborate, and have altruism, and that’s what a lot of people do. But there may be another evolutionary stable strategy, which is to be fearless, to focus on your own self-interest, and to be willing to exploit altruistic people when they’ll give you resources. What do you think about that theory?