The third leg
Then I am starting to think that some of my friends or the other psychiatrist back in California are pulling my leg. And no, they didn’t know me. At that point it was the first time when, after five years, I started to take it seriously. During that flight home I said to me that something was very disconcerting. It was weird because this was very different than what I thought I was. I did go as the sweet guy, the Catholic boy of the year, for God’s sake! I went back and started asking. I asked my wife, my brothers, my mother, people close to me, my best friends, and then the psychiatrists who know my behaviors. I just said: “Tell me what you really think of me, I just had an experience. Don’t worry, I am not gonna get mad at you.” And they all let me have it. They all said the same thing, except my mother, who at the end just said: “you are nice a boy though, you are nice boy”. She was the only one who has said that. Then after that, on the side, she told me all the terrible things I did. Anyway, they all told me about these very specific events and how I am not there. My sister said: “Do you remember that letter I sent to you fifteen years ago? Look at that letter again.” It is like: “Jim, I got all the love for you, you are a good brother, but you are never there, you are not there emotionally at all”. My daughter had told, as I found out from my wife, that back in 2000s, I was really bugging her because I was acting in ways that were really annoying to her, really bothered her, sort of very cold things. My daughter, who is a clinical psychologist with a lot of patients, understands that dad is a narcissist. She did not say psychopath, but she said: “he is really a narcissist, he doesn’t even know he is doing this and it’s all about him”. I am telling you. Right now, I get to give a talk and I talk about myself, though I have an excuse. Again, it is really wonderful, except you do not want to do it in this way. They all said the same thing to me and it was sort of odd.
Then I was tested by psychiatrists and they did both structured and unstructured sort of testing. And here (note: in the video) is one of the summaries, which basically says: “JF satisfies most, if not all, the psychiatric symptoms and psychoanalytical characteristics of a psychopath, along with associated affective symptoms, but he notably lacks most of the behavioral consequences of such psychiatric pattern“. In other words, he is able to inhibit these traits that would have made him a full-blown psychopath. He basically said that all my thoughts and urges are like a full-blown psychopath; I just never act them out. This was like: “Why? Why I am not in jail? Why growing up all those adults told me: ‘it is a good thing you are from a good family’?” I was told this growing up because otherwise I would have turned out to be in a gang, maybe a gang leader, a little bit of bad guy. I heard this from different priests, rabbis, and doctors, all through my teen years and afterwards. It was always an adult who would say: “there is something really wrong with you, it is something dark about you”. Even though I wasn’t doing anything, it was something about me.
As I was trying to put all of this together, to try to make sense out of this, I was in my Jacuzzi in the backyard. My mother was over. She was weeding and doing things with plants, pruning the plants, what she likes to do. She was sitting on this three-legged stool, this wooden stool, and I am saying to myself: “I got all this biological stuff, I have got the genetics, and I have got the brain pattern connections of a psychopath. And yet I am not. What is the deal? I have tendencies, but I do not act on them.” And I looked at the stool and I looked at my mother and I said: “It is her, she was the third leg!”
Now, this may be obvious to you, but it is not obvious to me that the environment, the early environment, would have played a role, because I was like the poster boy for genetics determines everything. When I had to finally admit that I was wrong, all my colleagues loved it. I had to eat crawl on this, which I hated to do, but I really got that part wrong. It opened up another door and the more interesting part is about what epigenetics is really about. It is not that the genes do not matter, it is that they matter only in certain circumstances. That is how it turns out. Here are (note: in the video) the three legs and a model that I put together about psychopathy and related personality disorders: the biological markers, the early environment – upbringing from birth up to 3-4 years old, the effect really goes down after that – the abandonment and what stress would do.
In fact, we know that you and I have the same genes, but they are turned on and off. If you are making a hair cell, it is different than if you are making a liver cell. These things are turned on and off.
Some of this turning on and off is done by methylation. The small methyl group – a carbon with three hydrogen added on – can turn things temporarily on like when you get the flu – for immunity, or permanently on like what early abuse or abandon in the first few years of life look like. If you look at psychopaths and other personality disorders that are associated with violence, it is not inhuman to kill. If somebody is attacking your family, you can kill them, that is not wrong. But if you kill at the wrong time, then it is considered a psychopathic trait. The same thing with sex; nothing wrong with sex, but there is a time and a place for it. It is this inappropriate behavior having to do with mostly aggression, manipulation, and violence. The genes that control this behavior in a kid who has been affected early on by trauma get methylated and stay permanently on. It is like the kid is always being attacked, there is always an attack. This makes a lot of sense because you have a case where a child is born and the social brain opens up, which is the frontal lobe, especially the orbital cortex, the anterior temporal lobe, and the amygdala. That social brain opens up to the world and if it sees violence, the best way to survive is to be violent yourself, so it probably sets the trigger points. I am saying this like we really know; there is data, but the whole story is not known yet. That brain is set up to be hair-trigger for violence and aggression. But if you are born into and see a wonderful world, the best way to act is with love; so those genes are turned off and you have somebody who is really mellow and quite nonviolent, unless they have to be, because at the right time they still can become aggressive – they are protecting their family, for example. Now, I couldn’t figure out why I didn’t really show more traits of it.
While I was writing this book – The Psychopath inside – I was over in Italy, in this little town in the Alps, where nobody spoke English. When I was over there, I happen to get two papers that were about one of the warrior genes – the serotonin transporter also called SERT. There are a couple of these genes. One paper was done on rhesus monkeys and the other one on humans, showing that if you had this gene and you were abused, this was bad news. It was like MAOA, the first warrior gene, because it really affected serotonin metabolism and in quite a permanent way. But it also said that if you were treated well, it kind of negated the negative effects of it. Now, this allele, which was a warrior gene allele, was very dangerous. If you are treated well, not only it turned off that effect, but inhibited other genes too. So I said: “this must been what happened with me, this was the third leg of the stool”.