Most people who call me for personal consultations want to talk about an abusive romantic partner. They want to know if their partner is a sociopath, and usually, based on their story of lies, manipulation, cheating, stonewalling, gaslighting and sometimes violence, the answer is yes. Then, as we talk about how they were vulnerable to this person, they say that the sociopath is just like their parent.
For example, here’s a letter that I received from a Lovefraud reader:
I was involved with a narcissist in 2013 and after a year of being with a complete nut case went no contact. (Can write a short story about it.) It’s taken a few years but free now in my mind. My father is a narcissist so attract that kind. I have been single for years because anyone I’m attracted to ends up being someone with a personality disorder. I’m wondering if you could do an article on this.
Why does this happen?
Disordered parents
Sociopaths make terrible parents. Remember, the bottom line with people who have these personality disorders — narcissistic, antisocial, borderline, histrionic and psychopathic — is that they are deficient in their ability to love. They do not care about anyone else’s health, wellbeing or success. This includes their own children.
I documented this in my recent Senior Sociopaths book — Chapter 4 is all about sociopaths as parents. More than 1,000 survey respondents described how the sociopath they knew, while over age 50, treated minor children. The most common descriptions were, “cold and indifferent” and “abusive or harsh.”
Here’s what one survey respondent reported:
“Adoptive mother played endless mind games. Pitted my brother and I against one another. She’s controlling, manipulative, and lies! Heavy handed punishment was the norm.”
Effects of sociopathic parenting
Unfortunately, sociopathic parenting is extremely damaging to children. In some cases, the problems are obvious, such as when parents physically abuse or neglect their children. But even when parents take care of the basics, such as providing food, housing, schooling and health care, there can still be tremendous emotional and psychological abuse.
This subtle abuse affects children’s behavior and personalities as they grow up and can carry over into adulthood. For example:
Hypervigilance
Sociopathic parents can be explosive, suddenly erupting in anger or criticism. Children learn to watch their parents carefully for any sign of trouble, so they can run and hide or defend themselves. As adults, they may continue to be hypervigilant, always tuned in to potential problems.
People pleaser
Sociopaths always blame others for their problems, and sociopathic parents often blame their children. Kids, not understanding that this is poor parenting, feel responsible for their parents’ mood and happiness. These kids turn into people-pleasers, always putting everyone else before themselves.
Abuse is normal
Sociopaths are self-centered and lack empathy. They engage in lying, cheating and aggression. Children who grow up around these behaviors come to perceive them as normal. When they are adults, therefore, and partners engage in these behaviors, they do not recognize that they are being mistreated.
Love is pain
Some sociopathic parents engage in subtle abuse while simultaneously claiming they love their children. Or other adults may try to reassure the children, saying, “That’s just how mom (or dad) expresses love.” As a result, these children come to associate love with pain. They truly do not understand what love is.
These are just some of the ways in which children of sociopathic parents end up with a warped view of how people should treat each other. They have absolutely no idea of what a healthy relationship is, so they tolerate bad behavior in others.
Emotional wounds
Every time children are subjected to callous, cruel, indifferent or aggressive behavior by their sociopathic parents, they suffer an emotional wound. But they don’t know how to handle the injury. They quickly learn that crying or talking back makes matters worse, because it causes their parents to lash out even more.
So what do the kids do? They internalize the pain. They lock their emotional wounds away in an internal closet. Most of us aren’t taught how to deal with emotional pain, and this is especially true for the children of sociopathic parents. So the emotional wounds stay inside and fester.
These children grow up and become involved with a sociopath just like their parent. How does this happen?
Sociopathic radar
Sociopaths are skilled at spotting our vulnerabilities and using them to hook us. In fact, they seem to have radar for our vulnerabilities.
Emotional wounds from childhood are exactly the kind of vulnerabilities that sociopaths like to target. Adults who never felt love as children are easy prey. All sociopaths need to do is mouth words of love and promise to take the pain away and they can get whatever they want.
The adult child of a sociopath falls for it, and inevitably ends up betrayed. So there’s a new emotional wound — romantic betrayal — piled onto the childhood emotional wounds. This increases vulnerability.
It happens again and again. Vulnerability draws another sociopath, which causes another romantic betrayal, which creates another emotional wound. The vicious circle keeps turning, and the adult child of a sociopath keeps suffering.
Emotional recovery
This is why it’s so important to focus on emotional recovery from the sociopath — all the sociopaths. Healing the emotional wounds interrupts the vicious circle and reduces the likelihood of encountering a sociopath just like your parent.
Usually the recovery process begins with the most recent betrayal. But this betrayal is linked to the previous one, which is connected to the one before that, going all the way back to the childhood wounds. As more wounds are released, there’s less energetic pain for the sociopaths to latch on to.
This is how to stop attracting a sociopath just like your parent. The recovery process is messy and takes time. But the effort is absolutely worth it.
Her husband was engaged in theft, embezzlement and laundering money
Donna, great topic, thanks for addressing this. I would like to add that anxiety disorders are high on the list for targets that are/were subject to narcissistic parents. The hard part is a child cannot leave a parent, and has no idea what they are dealing with….so the anxiety gets worse with time, which leaves the child with a lifetime of healing of psychological damage–that is, if the child ever becomes aware that their parents were disordered and could not change.
Joanie – the wounds from a disordered parent certainly go deep. I really hope that people who have experienced this recognize that it’s not their fault, it was never their fault, and that they commit to their own recovery