After much confusion, perhaps years of confusion, you finally realize why your relationship is so difficult. You’re dealing with a sociopath. This person has hurt, manipulated and exploited you — on purpose. So why won’t you believe it? Here are four psychological and biological reasons why you can’t accept that your partner is a sociopath.
He or she is abusive to you. It might be physical, sexual or financial abuse, but certainly emotional or psychological abuse. You know this. You’ve been disappointed time and time again. So why do you still cling on, hoping the person will change?
Your inability to end the involvement isn’t necessarily a failure of willpower. I’m going to explain four psychological and biological phenomena that may keep you tied to the sociopath.
Cognitive dissonance
Here’s the definition of cognitive dissonance on Verywell Mind.com: “The mental discomfort that results from holding two conflicting beliefs, values or attitudes.” The website says it’s the inconsistency between what people believe and how they behave.
That’s a good general description, but Dr. Liane Leedom explained it with a bit more detail in a recent True Lovefraud Stories podcast on extreme relationship stress.
She said that once you make a choice, you tend to focus on all the positive aspects of the choice, and disregard the negative aspects. So if in the beginning the person you’re involved with seemed great, and then later, he or she began mistreating you, you may find yourself remembering the good times and forgetting the bad times. Because you’ve chosen this relationship, you can’t wrap your brain around the reality that it’s not as wonderful as you initially thought it was.
You’re invested in maintaining a positive view of your partner, so you may not be able to see the truth of how he or she is actually treating you.
This can also apply to other types of relationships as well. Suppose you start to suspect that your mother or father is disordered. Well, everyone wants their parents to love them. So it may be very difficult to accept that your mother or father never loved you, and, in fact, was incapable of loving you. It’s just too painful, so you don’t want to accept it. Consequently, you experience cognitive dissonance.
Oxytocin
Here’s the second reason why you can’t accept the reality that the person is a sociopath — you’re flooded with neurotransmitters such as oxytocin and dopamine.
Oxytocin is a hormone and neurotransmitter that is released naturally in our brains and bodies when we experience intimacy. Any kind of intimacy will do — physical touch, conversation and certainly sex. Oxytocin causes us to feel calm and content, and it makes us trust the person with whom we experienced intimacy. That’s why it’s called the cuddle chemical.
Dopamine
Dopamine has multiple functions, but for our discussion the most important one is that it is related to pleasurable reward and motivation. According to the Cleveland Clinic, “Dopamine is known as the ‘feel-good’ hormone. It gives you a sense of pleasure. It also gives you the motivation to do something when you’re feeling pleasure.”
Dopamine is associated with addiction. It doesn’t actually cause addiction, but you can become addicted to an activity that spurs the release of dopamine in the brain. Therefore, when the sociopath is showering you with attention and affection, it causes your dopamine to spike. That’s how you get addicted to the relationship.
Trauma bond
Here’s the third reason why you can’t accept the reality of your involvement with the sociopath — you’re trauma bonded.
The concept of trauma bonding was introduced by two psychology researchers, Donald G. Dutton and Susan Painter, in 1981. They elaborated on their theory in another paper in 1993.
Dutton and Painter identified two features that enable trauma bonds to form: a power imbalance and intermittent good and bad treatment.
A power imbalance in a relationship means that one person in the relationship has far more social power than the other. Who has the power? The person who views it as not important and is willing to walk away. This typically describes a sociopath.
Dutton and Painter noted that unequal power relationships can become increasingly unbalanced over time, to the point where the power dynamic itself produces pathology in individuals.
As the power imbalance magnifies, the subjugated people view themselves more negatively, and come to believe they are incapable of fending for themselves and need the dominator.
This cycle of relationship-produced dependency and lowered self-esteem is repeated, eventually creating a strong emotional bond from the low power person to high power person.
The dominant person, in the meantime, develops an inflated sense of their own power. This masks the extent to which they are dependent on the low power person to maintain their feeling of omnipotence. The sociopath maintains the power differential through physical, emotional or psychological abuse.
Intermittent reinforcement
The other factor contributing to the establishment of a trauma bond is intermittent good and bad treatment. Dutton and Painter researched this in the context of battered women. The husband would physically assault the wife, and then, afterwards, be contrite and loving.
Dutton and Painter noted that this pattern of aversive and then pleasant conditions matches the learning theory of intermittent reinforcement. This means that sometimes a behavior is rewarded, and sometimes it isn’t. Because you never know when you’ll get your reward — your loving and caring partner — you keep trying to win approval.
Dutton and Painter said Intermittent reinforcement is highly effective in producing persistent patterns of behavior that are difficult to extinguish or terminate. It is the most powerful type of conditioning.
In other words, every time you go through this cycle of good and bad treatment, the emotional bond you feel with your partner gets stronger. This makes it difficult for you to leave.
I discuss trauma bonds in depth in my webinar, Maybe you’re not co-dependent, you’re traumatized.
What should you do?
These are four explanations for why you may have difficulty accepting the reality that you’re dealing with a sociopath and you should end the involvement — cognitive dissonance, oxytocin, dopamine, and trauma bonds. What should you do with this information?
First of all, please cut yourself some slack. Because of strong psychological and biological pressures, it may indeed be difficult to allow yourself to see the truth and disengage from the person. It’s just human nature, and you need to plan for this.
So how do you escape? I suggest asking yourself a question, and answering it honestly. Here’s the question: Are you happy now? This is not were you happy before, or do you hope you’ll be happy in the future. Are you happy now?
When you can admit to yourself that you are not happy, the next question is, what are you going to do about it?
If you’re dealing with a sociopath, the correct answer is to end the involvement and go No Contact.
This may be difficult, for all the reasons we talked about. So when you decide to go No Contact, plan ways to distract yourself for when you feel yourself faltering. And then, take it one day at a time. Get through today. Then the next day. Then the next day. The longer you can stay away, the more the sociopath’s grip on you dissipates, and the stronger you’ll become.
If you also work on your emotional healing — I spoke about this in recent Lovefraud Live podcasts — eventually, you will be free.
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For me the biggest hurdle was understanding that I was being abused. I was in constant confusion about his behavior because I always assumed he meant well. I did not have the cognitive framework to understand that some people do not mean well and actually intend malice. It was so confusing because I thought abuse is when your husband hits you or yells at you. Mine never did that. He was psychologically and financially abusive but I did not recognize that as abuse until years later. Sometimes I wish he would have just hit me so I would have recognized and understood it was abuse and I could have called police. Psychological abuse is very hard to understand and pinpoint and you can’t get recourse from police or in court unlike physical abuse.
Sept4 – your experience is very common for someone who has been married to a sociopath. You are absolutely right – psychological abuse is hard to recognize and prove.