Patric Gagne shares her experience of fighting and overcoming her urges, while also being a loving sister, daughter, mother, and wife.
Patric Gagne has spent most of her life fighting terrible urges. She is also a loving sister, daughter, mother and wife. She talks about her remarkable journeyThere is a slight flash in her eyes as Patric Gagne describes what she calls the “tug” – the moment she imagines something she really shouldn’t do and thinks: “Wouldn’t that be fun?”
We speak over video call, Gagne at home in Florida. She is compelling, like a movie character – a sociopath who’s beautiful, warm and funny, articulate and charming. She’s a self-confessed liar, but her book details a woman struggling against her urges, and her deceit is largely about masking to fit in – not deployed, as far as I can tell, for power and control.
Where, she says with a smile, is empathy for sociopaths? “When you are a sociopathic kid, nobody’s empathising. Sociopaths are villainised for failing to demonstrate the exact same emotion they have never received themselves.” That feeling of hopelessness, she thinks, can be “a driving force in the escalation of destructive behaviour”. But the sociopaths we hear about “are the extreme examples, and by only focusing on the extreme, we continue to exacerbate the problem.
She observed and imitated her younger sister’s behaviour, and that of other children at school, especially in relation to emotions. “It was almost like learning a language,” says Gagne. “I would try to figure out the socially appropriate way to respond.” Did she worry about becoming a mother? “I remember holding out hope that when my first child was born, I would have that instant connection I had read about in books and seen in movies. When that didn’t happen, I felt very disappointed: ‘Is this going to be a situation where I can’t connect?’ But ultimately, I love my kids. I didn’t experience that instant connection, but I learned other women who do not have a sociopathic personality also experience that.
But there were slips. Once she picked up a cat in the street and squeezed it harder and harder, feeling, she writes, “euphoric” before she let it go. It frightened her – she didn’t want to hurt animals. There are other things she left out of the book; I’d love to know what they are, given that she does include disturbing things such as breaking into the property of a woman who is trying to extort money from her and attending strangers’ funerals, drawn in by the mourners’ heightened emotions.
Patric Gagne Urges Journey Overcoming Family
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