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A Pressure Building Since Childhood
As a child, Patric felt a physical pressure building behind her eyes whenever she was bored or expected to care. Only rule-breaking relieved it—stealing trinkets, sneaking into strangers' houses, and eventually stabbing a neighborhood bully with a pencil, which brought instant, euphoric release. When she tried honesty with her mother about feeling nothing, the reaction taught her a harsher lesson: truth was dangerous, and selective honesty became her only path to survival.
Borrowing Emotion from Strangers' Grief
To manage her emotional void, Patric built unusual routines. She took a nanny job, discovering that constant structure kept apathy from pooling. She also sat in the back rows of strangers' funerals, absorbing raw grief through a kind of osmosis. These borrowed feelings worked as a strange prescription, and she later explained to her horrified father that these small, harmless outlets kept her more dangerous impulses safely in check.
Turning to Science After Failed Surrogates
After years relying on people—David's calm, Max's darkness—to regulate her mind, Patric enrolled in a UCLA PhD program to study sociopathy scientifically. She applied Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy and the ABC Model, treating her destructive urges as anxious reactions rather than moral failures. Research from Dr. Karpman and Dr. Lykken on primary versus secondary psychopathy finally gave her a way of understanding herself built on evidence instead of surrogates.