This week two people contacted me, both adult daughters of sociopaths. In one case her father and in the other case her mother has psychopathic personality traits. Interestingly, both disordered parents claim to be “Christian” and the theme of our discussions was the disparity between what the parent says and what they do. Both women shared the belief that this disconnect between words and action is particularly damaging to children. I agree with this assertion because I have also seen it in other cases.
Why would the disconnect between words and actions be so damaging to children?
Consciousness develops gradually during childhood. Consciousness means connecting words, thoughts and feelings to what is happening in reality. Many children naturally idealize their parents and so are inclined to believe the version of reality their parents present in words. But what if the words and reality don’t in fact match? Consider the following example a father wrote to his daughter from prison. Keep in mind this father is a repeat offender who has defrauded and ruined many including family members:
I have a lot of time to sit here and ponder the course of my life. I know I have wronged the family, and for that I am truly sorry. I have been so selfish and stubborn… I haven’t seen or talked to you in well over a year and I can’t help but wonder the rippling effect that sends into the demonic realm. I hope all is well. I love you with the perfect love of the Father.
This is a perfect example of the way a sociopath communicates. His agenda isn’t apparent until the third to the last sentence. His agenda is to manipulate her into having contact with him. But unless you are aware of how a person with psychopathic personality traits operates, you wouldn’t necessarily get that. He starts out stating a fact, he has unlimited time in prison to think. Then it’s progressively out of reality from there. He also connects her failure to contact him with something demonic, suggesting that things might not “be well.” He concludes by proclaiming he has “perfect love.”
I have been chatting with the recipient of this letter for some time and can tell you the father, in addition to ruining her mother’s life was extremely verbally abusive. A parent who abuses while saying, “I love you with the perfect love of the Father,” inflicts wounds that are hard to heal. How can a child make any sense of this experience?
Dissociation- dealing with the disconnect
The different parts of our brains that perform different functions are functionally connected. Experiences we have during childhood but also throughout our lives, determine the functional connectivity of our brains. When reality doesn’t make sense our brains automatically compensate to create a coherent whole. So for example, a child whose parent abuses and says “I love you” may deny the abuse or blame it on themselves. Children whose parents, and adults whose partners continually do one thing while speaking the opposite experience a form of hypnosis. In this hypnotic state they only focus attention on the parts of reality that support the version of reality given to them by the sociopath. (If you have a lot of time read my story and see how this happened to me with disastrous consequences.) But what are the consequences of a childhood or adulthood habit of self-hypnosis? We don’t really know the full answer to that question.
How to heal
The first step in healing is realizing what happened to you and understanding that self-hypnosis or dissociation doesn’t mean you are crazy. It is a functional response to differing inputs. The next step is to fight the hypnosis. Stop having contact with the sociopath. If you do have to have communication, do not listen to the words, try to keep present in your mind the real actions of the sociopath. Tell yourself, “actions speak louder than words.”
Lingering questions
If you have experienced the disconnect between words and actions, I discuss here, you are undoubtedly asking yourself, “Do they do this on purpose?” or “Do they know what they are doing?” The answer is some do and some don’t. The ones that know what they are doing are perhaps more evil and the ones who don’t know what they are doing are perhaps more affected with psychopathy. No matter what, the sociopath makes a choice about what he/she does.
Thank you Dr. Leedom. It’s really important to understand the degree of psychological damage that these sociopaths inflict. No wonder it’s so hard to recover.
Liane, you just published my life story–except neither of my parents went to prison! The letter from prison to the daughter is so typical of the way the “religious” person who is also high in psychopathic traits uses “god” and “the Bible” (out of context) to shame, guilt and manipulate the others into going along with their cons.
In reading recently about how Jeffs, the “mormon” who had 70+ “wives” and would instruct these girls/women that their ticket into heaven was to please him sexually. I guess that is the reverse of the Muslims telling a suicide bomber that he gets 70 virgins in Heaven if he dies fighting for Allah.
The EMOTIONAL damage done to a child, from my own personal perspective, by the parent (who is god-on-earth to the young child) is deeply embedded in the child. Even today, my enabling is so deeply embedded that yesterday when I refused to “help out” a neighbor who is now slightly off center mentally and is himself being manipulated into giving all of his very limited funds to a “meth ho” he met in a wal Mart parking lot who shows up the first of the month every month now and stays with him for a week or two until he is TOTALLY broke, without food, fuel or cell phone minutes, then she hitch hikes on to the next victim’s house.
Even very guilty of self neglect (not taking his medication, not going to the doctor) and is a “bubble off of plumb” in his mental state, he knows who the president is, what year it is, etc. so he is LEGALLY SANE and adult protective services can’t do a thing.
He came to my house yesterday (again) after walking up a steep hill a half mile to get here (he is 83) with a gas can wanting Gas to get to his daughter’s house to get her to fuel up his truck. Since talking to his daughter I know this is probably a lie, so I offered to DRIVE him there or go get her. NO DICE, he did not want that. Actually, After telling him NO gas and driving him back home I called his daughter and she said he had been coming to her house and STEALING the gas out of her car! So he did intend to go to her house and get gas, just not with her help or permission.
I told my neighbor that I’d feed him if he was hungry or drive him to the doctor but NO MORE MONEY AND NO MORE GAS.
I STILL FEEL GUILTY for saying no. Logically I KNOW I have no reason to feel “guilty” because I did the RIGHT THING and set a reasonable boundary for my neighbor. When I know the woman that milks him is not there, I go down about every other day and check on him—and it’s a good thing I do because once in the days of 110+ degree temps I found him wihtout electricity, food, or WATER (without electric he had no well) and no AC or even a fan, his truck had 2 flat tires and was out of gas and he had no phone minutes. I took him food and water…but no gas, and no tires.
I’m not alone in my “feeling guilty” for saying NO to my neighbor, there’s a bunch of us around here that he mooches off of, “borrows” off of, and because he was a good man, and a good neighbor we all feel guilty when we tell him “NO!”
The difference between myself “before” and the “new and improved Joyce” now is that while I may still have that “knee jerk” response of feeling “guilt” about setting boundaries, I am NOT LETTING THAT FEELING OVER RIDE MY LOGICAL BRAIN….I am doing what is “right” regardless of what the “feeling” that results from it. I am hitting the “MUTE” button on those old lessons I received as a child that if I didn’t “fix” whatever was wrong with someone else, that I would go to hell because God would be mad at me for being “mean” to someone, or that I am being mean if I have enough or more than enough and don’t share it with someone else, especially if they ask me for “help.”
Recognizing and “hearing” these feelings, these INAPPROPRIATE feelings in myself, and being able to DO what is right in spite of them, has been a LONG DIFFICULT ROAD for me because I was programmed by a “Christian” family that were at the same time abusive and enabling, secret keeping and set on controlling this system of dysfunctional dynamics.
Thanks Liane for a great article that reinforces these discoveries in my journey! It is difficult to maintain the boundaries, don’t know if I will ever “be a natural” at it, but am using my logical brain to overcome the early programming. Setting boundaries is a learning process to overcome what “feels natural.”
Liane
Great post. No wonder we struggle! I am now quite removed from my SPATH experience (still in recovery), but when I was in the middle of it, all the incongruencies in his words and actions threw me into a DEEP depression. I couldn’t make sense of it, and thanks to the way my mother programmed me (she’s a N) I thought it was ALL MY FAULT. Ding ding ding ding, that was WRONG.
I now occasionally read thru my spath’s communication to me and I’m just so flabbergasted. It the same hour he would say he loved me, hated me, wanted to marry me, never wanted to see me again. In saner moments I would ask my spath why he would do that, and he’d say he had NO IDEA why. He said, “I’m a mystery unto myself!”. This is the heart of being DISORDERED, isn’t it?
Anyway I also want to tell you that I think your work on the INNER TRIANGLE is absolutely groundbreaking. I hope you submit it to the DSMV people, and other academic journals. It is sense-making at it’s finest). I have shared your work (credited to you) with SO MANY PEOPLE.
Take a bow.
Superkid
Haha, I wrote here about the major disconnect between my father’ss words and reality. Remember, this is the guy who lives in his own bubble. He has become his facade, in his mind. Here are a few trinkets from his oh so loveable self, false and real self, or maybe some other self. Bah! Who knows anymore!? ^_^
He say he loves everybody and we should all live and let live. His true self is a racist who make black jokes daily. He thinks that Mexicans took his job! Reminds me of the South Park hillbillies screaming about it. ^_^
He says women and men should be equal and is appalled by rape and other acts of violence against them. His real self is the first to make comments about a women deserving what she got when she is assaulted and thinks they should work in the home and dinner should be ready when he gets home. He loves all the colorful words to describe women, the C word is his favorite.
He talks about how hardworking he is and loves to work. He describes himself as a workaholic. His true self is a parasite who will never work if you allow him to sit around. He fakes sickness to get out of working.
He loves talking about being a fine Christian man and preaches basic Christian values. His true self does not value any of this. He just uses it to build relations for work and social gatherings.
The Christian thing seems to be a theme in all of this. He had a girlfriend who was the same as him, but much more unstable, and she always talked about Jesus! She told us all about it. “I’m saved! That means I can do anything I want and still go to Heaven.” What the hell? Even I know that’s not how it works! Very basic unstanding of religion. They only use the parts that interest them, while discarding all of the rest. She told me that Jesus would not be happy with me because I did NOT accept her gifts. Yeah, she gave me gifts within a few days of meeting her.
Finally, I stopped letting my dad over. He is crushed and doesn’t know what he did wrong. He has made a huge sob story out of it. He hasn’t been here in weeks. We even stopped getting his medicine in the mail and told him to find another way. In the street it goes! ^_^
Dear Near,
Good for you for setting boundaries for this man who is obviously saying one thing and doing another.
No contact is the only way to deal with someone who is like this, and I am no contact with my egg donor and was with my P-sperm donor for the last 40+ years of his life. We do not owe them anything, and we “honor our fathers and mothers’ by being the kind of people that WOULD bring honor on them….but it does not mean we have to be DOOR MATS to their feet.
In ACOA or ACA (adult children of alcoholics anon. and adult children anon.) they used to use these emotion/ facial expression charts. I know these are used fairly widely and i believe they were first created to teach children emotional literacy. We used to look at them to identify what we we feeling.
This was a base for repairing the damage done by the intimate imprinting of lies by our families. Like learning the alphabet, so that we could form words, phrases, then complete sentences.
The relationships you have described (partially because of the specific context of the con) Leanne, remind me very much of the abuse within churches worldwide – it is spiritual abuse to teach people that what you are doing is loving when it is not. it is offensive to the nature of divinity, sanctity, soul, buddha nature, the universe, et al. teaching people to hate themselves, to misunderstand themselves, their surroundings and the world is offensive to the very essence of life.
Near, wow, that must have been MIND BLOWING when you were a kid! HUGS!
Oxy,
You boinked me to do NO CONTACT again, and I am. I just wanted to report back.
While not talking to him is relatively easy, going No Contact in my head is hardest and yet most rewarding. I’m not checking in on him, not checking up on him, distancing myself emotionally.
It’s all good. Hugs to you!
Hello Near!
We were just asking about you the other day! Glad to see you and happy that things are improving with you removing your father from you life 🙂
Dear Sk,
Good for you, Darling, you can go get an ice pack for your sore head now! LOL It really DOES get better the longer you do it. The mental “NC” IS the most difficult, but work on being AWARE of when you are thinking about him, and then consciously changing your thoughts to something else. It is a fact that the brain can only think one thing at a time, so put those thoughts of him into a folder (visualize this) put it into a file drawer and close and lock it, and open another drawer and take out a GOOD MEMORY FILE and it takes about 90 seconds for your moods to change. REALLY!!!!! You do have control! Practice helps too! Love Oxy