Inside the Mind of a Sociopath
Discovering Tanner's voice
If you’re new here (💁🏻♀️), you might not know that my newest novel is a dual perspective between the main heroine, Lena, and her obsessive, stalker ex-boyfriend, Tanner. Lena’s chapters take place in her present where she has finally found a safe haven for her and her daughter. Tanner’s chapters are set in the past, where the growth and eventual decline of their relationship is explained through his eyes. Writing these chapters, while endlessly entertaining, proved more difficult than I had originally thought.
To fully describe the depth of Tanner’s insanity, I had to get inside the mind of a sociopath. (TW: all types of domestic abuse)
A sociopath is defined as a person with a personality disorder manifesting itself in extreme antisocial attitudes and behavior and a lack of conscience.
I had a lot of inspiration while writing Tanner’s character. Not from my own life, gratefully, but from TV shows, movies, and books. One such novel that inspired a lot of Tanner’s sociopathic mannerisms was Too Late by Colleen Hoover. A brief description: The main character is in an abusive relationship with a man who continuously emotionally and sexually abuses her. Her reason for staying with this man is because he has a financial hold over her that binds her to him. Her story has a happy ending (I won’t spoil it) but it got me thinking…
What if the heroine didn’t have a concrete reason to stay? What if she just was not strong enough to leave?
That thought took me on a journey of the different types of domestic abuse. In my novel, Lena goes through each and every type of abuse that I could find on the internet: emotional, financial, (lite) sexual, (lite) physical, verbal, psychological, and even cultural (my stomach couldn’t handle any real form of sexual or physical abuse). Within each chapter in Tanner’s perspective, he finds a way to control Lena in varying levels of extremity. Starting with something as simple as vetoing an outfit she wants to wear on a night out to such extremes as physically assaulting a man who talks to her at a party. But the question remains: Why does she stay?
In situations like this, the relationship is already too deep, too real before he/she starts to show their true colors and it is difficult to imagine that they can actually cause you harm; that their actions aren’t just accidental or a “one time thing”. In Lena’s case, Tanner’s seemingly earnest apologies led her to believe that he would change. That he would never hurt her again. That he was truly sorry. It wasn’t until something absolutely immense occurred for Lena to actually get the courage the save herself.
There’s a line that Tanner says a few times that caused me to pause while I was writing it. Caused me to ask myself, is this going too far? But I knew it was important and accurate and, for Tanner to truly be the monster that he is, he needed to say this to Lena. If only because his feelings for her would cause her endless feelings of guilt.
“You love me…right?”
In order to get Tanner’s voice accurate, I had to first convince myself that I was always right. That what I said was law and that I always knew what was best. Because, how could a defenseless, aimless girl like Lena possibly know how to take care of herself? Clearly Tanner had to take on that role, and he was happy to do it, as long as she understood that he had her best interests at heart. And of course, Tanner would get upset if Lena defied him. How dare she? After everything he’s done for her? All the money he’s provided her when she had no job or means to make her own. All the times he’s showered her with love and affection, even when she didn’t appreciate it. All the vacations he brought her on, the thought he put into making sure she didn’t have to care about a thing, like what to wear or how to spend her time. Lena would be nothing without Tanner. And he made sure she knew that.
But was it love? Did he truly love her? Or was he just sick enough to believe that his infatuation was love? Lena certainly believed it was love in the beginning. But when she finally broke free, she saw that “love” for what it really was: obsession, fixation, exploitation, and abuse. When Lena became free, she took her first real independent breath and realized she was safe at last. Knowing that I was saving Lena was the only thing that kept me from going completely insane while writing Tanner’s chapters.
I want to open the floor to my subscribers to join in the conversation. Is there a difference between infatuation and love? Is there such a thing as a healthy obsession? Is it safe to care about someone so deeply that it becomes your entire personality?
To find out how Lena’s story ends, make sure to check out He Found Her, available for Kindle and in paperback on May 2nd, 2022. Click below to pre-order the ebook!
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Your new book sounds fascinating - and a little terrifying. I can’t wait to read it!!