What Shapes a Sociopath's Flavor of Violence?

Once upon a time, I spent years in therapy trying to "fix myself:" to become lovable, so I'd no longer experience severe traumas and violence, to learn how to "pick better partners" and become healed enough for "good people" to love.

Much to my surprise, a trauma that took me to the underworld and back--being stalked, drugged, and repeatedly sexually assaulted by my neighbor who broke into my home (my apartment maintenance director)--caused me to AWAKEN to the truth.

It wasn't (SHOCK OF ALL SHOCKS) my fault that I'd been abused.

I wasn't exceptionally bad or ugly or born unlovable: I'd been the daughter of two sociopaths--one who assigned me the role of scapegoat and one who assigned me the role of invisible.

I'd internalized blame to protect my love for them, and because I had unresolved and unprocessed childhood grief, I kept finding myself attracted to people who fit the shape of my extreme wounds.

I subconsciously kept repeating the patterns of my childhood in the hopes that I'd finally be able to earn the love I'd failed to earn in childhood. I was TRAUMA BONDING.

Awakening to reality and breaking my denials was so extraordinarily painful that it's no wonder my child self had to cope by burying it all.

As I healed, I set out to understand my overly sensitive empathy (Borderline Personality Disorder) and the affliction that plagued those I loved who had no empathy: Antisocial Personality Disorder, or sociopathy.

A good predator knows its prey, so prey must know their predators to survive. I set out to do just that. I wanted no mask to deceive me ever again.

As I studied, one thing that puzzled me is the diversity of sociopaths, both who I've known personally and who I've read case studies or books about.

What makes one sociopath a wealthy CEO while another sociopath is dirt poor and spending most their life in prison?

What makes one sociopath extremely covert and another sociopath extremely overt?

And most curious to me: what shapes their flavors of abuse?

On one hand, it's easy to see what makes a sociopath behave the way they do. It's one part luck (being born wealthy, being a favored race or gender in their culture, being exceptionally good looking) and one part an echo of their own pain.

Whatever abuses they experienced in childhood will be the exact abuses they dole out on partners, friends, and their own kids. A sociopath who witnessed domestic violence in the home will physically abuse their partners. A sociopath who experienced incest will engage in sexual abuse of their kids.

However, the catalyst for most sociopaths to even become case studies is GETTING CAUGHT for a crime, and most of the case studies reveal that whatever crime they were caught for was either a major element of their obsession fantasies (for example, a terrorist is likely to have written a long and involved political manifesto) and/or it's a repeated pattern of behavior in their lives: it operates like a compulsion, an itch they can never scratch no matter how much blood is shed.

What makes one sociopath turn into a serial killer, one sociopath turn into a mass shooter, one sociopath turn into a pedophile priest, and one sociopath turn a weapon on their family and then themselves?