A relationship with a sociopath is a traumatic experience. The definition of physical trauma is a serious injury or shock to the body, as with a car accident or major surgery. It requires healing.
On an emotional level, a trauma is wound or shock that causes lasting damage to the psychological development of a person. It also requires healing.
To some degree, we can depend on our natural ability to heal. But just as an untreated broken bone can mend crooked, our emotional systems may become “stuck” in an intermediate stage of healing. For example we may get stuck in anger, bitterness, or even earlier stages of healing, such as fear and confusion.
This article is about my personal ideas about the healing path for full recovery from the emotional trauma caused by a relationship with a sociopath. I am not a therapist, although I have training in some processes and theories of personal and organizational development. My ideas are also the result of years of research into personality disorders, creative and learning processes, family dynamics, childhood development, recovery from addictions and trauma, and neurological research.
After my five-year relationship with a man I now believe to be a sociopath, I was physically and emotionally broken down. I was also terrified about my condition for several reasons. In my mid-fifties, I was already seeing evidence of several age-related diseases. But more worrisome than the premature aging was my social incapacitation. I was unable to talk about myself without crying, unable to do the consultative work I lived on, desperately in need of comfort and reassurance, unable to trust my own instincts.
I had been in long-term relationships almost my entire life. My instinct was to find another one to help me rebuild myself. But I knew that there was no safe “relationship of equals” for me now. I was too messed up. No one would take on someone as physically debilitated and emotionally damaged as I was, without expecting to be paid for it. Likewise, I was afraid of my inclination to bond sexually. The only type of person I could imagine attracting was another predator who would “help” me while draining whatever was left of my material and financial resources.
My challenge
So, for the first time in my life, I made a decision to be alone. Knowing that the relationship with the sociopath had involved forces in my personality that were out of my control, I also decided that my best approach to this recovery was to figure out what was wrong with me and fix it. At the time, I did not understand my role in fostering this relationship, except that I couldn’t get out of it. But I knew that what happened to me with the sociopath wasn’t just about him. It was also about me.
I also made a decision to manage my own recovery. I made this decision for several reasons. One was that no one else really understood the mechanics of this relationship. My friends offered emotional support, but they were as confused as I was about his hold on me and why I could not extricate myself. Second, I found no meaningful assistance from therapists who seemed unable to grasp that this was a traumatic relationship. Third, everyone I knew wanted me to get over it and get on with my life, which was simply impossible to do.
So I was not only alone, but proceeding on a path that no one else supported. I’m not sure where I found the certainty that it was the right thing to do. But I was certain, and I held onto that certainty through the years it took. Today, when I’m essentially at the end of the process, except for the ongoing work on myself that has little to do with the sociopath anymore, I look back at it as the greatest gift I ever gave myself. It was the hardest thing I ever did. And in its own weird way, the most fun.
Here is where I started. I knew that I wanted to discover and neutralize the causes of my vulnerability. I knew that my vulnerabilities pre-dated the sociopath, although he had exploited them and made them worse. I felt like my battered state and particularly the sharp emotional pain gave me something to work with that was clear and concrete, and possibly the emergence from my subconscious of a lot buried garbage that had been affecting my entire life. Ultimately, I did engage a therapist to assist me in uncovering some childhood memories, and then went back to my own work alone.
My personal goal may have been more ambitious than others who come to this site. I not only wanted to heal myself from the damage of this relationship. I intended to accomplish a deep character transformation that would change the way I lived. Before I met him I was superficially successful, but I was also an over-committed workaholic with a history of relationship disasters. Except for a lot of unpublished poetry and half-written books, I had made no progress on lifelong desire to live as a creative writer. I wanted to come out of this as a strong, independent person who could visualize major goals and manage my resources to achieve them.
Because I had no model for what I was trying to do, I did things that felt very risky at the time. For example, I consciously allowed myself to become bitter, an emotion I never allowed myself to feel before, because I was afraid of getting stuck there. I’ll talk about some of these risks in future pieces — what I did and how it came out. I learned techniques that I hear other people talking about here on Lovefraud, things that really helped to process the pain and loss. Some of them I adapted from reading about other subjects. Some of them I just stumbled upon, and later learned about them from books, after I’d begun practicing them.
Though not all of us may think about our recovery as deep transformation work, I think all of us recognize that our beliefs, our life strategies and our emotional capacities have been profoundly challenged. We are people who are characteristically strong and caring. Personal characteristics that seemed “good” to us brought us loss and pain. After the relationship, our challenge is to make sense of ourselves and our world again, when what we learned goes against everything we believed in.
What I write here is not a model for going through this recovery alone. I say I did this alone, but I recruited a therapist when I needed help. I encourage anyone who is recovering from one of these relationships to find a therapist who understands the trauma of abusive relationships, and that recommendation is doubled if, like me, you have other PSTD issues.
The healing path
Given all that, this article is the first of a series about the process of healing fully. I believe that Lovefraud readers who are far down their own recovery paths will recognize the stages. Those who are just recently out of their relationships may not be able to relate to the later stages. But from my experience, my observations of other people’s recovery, and from reading the personal writings on Lovefraud, I think that all of our recovery experiences have similarities.
Since my own intention in healing was to figure out what was wrong with me and fix it, this recovery path is about self-healing, rather than doing anything to or about the sociopath. However there is a stage when we do want that. We want to understand who we were dealing with. We may want recognition of our victimization, revenge or just fair resolution. There is nothing wrong with feeling that way. It is a stage of recovery, and an important one.
My ideas owe a lot to the Kubler-Ross grief model, as well as to recovery processes related to childhood trauma, codependency and addiction. I also owe a great deal to the writing of Stephen M. Johnson, whose Humanizing the Narcissistic Affect and Characterological Transformation: the Hard Work Miracle provided invaluable insights and encouragement.
Here is the path as I see it.
1. Painful shock
2. Negotiation with pain
3. Recognition with the sociopath
4. Anger
5. Measurement of damage
6. Surrender to reality of damage
7. Review of identity after damage
8. Rebuilding life strategies
9. Practice
The words here are very dry, and I apologize for that. The experience, as we all know, is more emotional than intellectual, though it taxes our thinking heavily.
From what I’ve experienced and seen, some of these stages may occur simultaneously. We may feel like we’re in all of them, but working particularly in one stage more than the others. In my case, I often found that I was “going around and around the same mountain,” returning to a previous stage but at a higher level than before.
There is no specific mention of depression in this list. This is because I regard it as a kind of brown-out of our emotional system, when we are simply too overwhelmed by facts and feelings that conflict with our beliefs and identities. Depression can happen at any time in this path, but feelings of depression are most likely to occur in Stage 6. Terrible as depression may feel, I believe it is evidence of a deep learning process, where our conscious minds are resisting new awareness that is developing at a deeper level.
This path is a model of adult learning. It would be equally valid in facing and surmounting any major life change. If you are familiar with the Kubler-Ross grief model which was developed to describe the challenges involved with bereavement, this model will look familiar. It is essentially an extension of Kubler-Ross into a post-traumatic learning model. The trauma may be the loss of a loved one, a divorce, a job loss or change, or any of the major stressors of life.
This is all about learning and evolving. If the path is traveled to its end, we emerge changed but improved and empowered. We have given up something to gain something more. The fact that this change is triggered by trauma may cause us to think that it’s a bad thing for a while, but ultimately we come to realize that we have not only recovered from a painful blow, we have truly become more than we were before.
What drives us to heal
The future articles in this series will explore the stages, their value to us and how we “graduate” from one to the next.
Our struggle to get over this experience involves facing our pain, which is the flip side of our intuitive knowledge of we need and want in our lives. Those needs draw us through the recovery process, like beacons on a far shore guide a ship on a stormy sea. To the extent that we can bring these needs up into conscious awareness, we can move through the path more directly, because it programs our thinking to recognize what helps and what does not.
Here are a few ideas about where we think we’re going. I hope they will stimulate some discussion here, and that you will add your own objectives to the list.
1. To relieve the pain
2. To release our unhealthy attachment to the sociopath
3. To recover our ability to love and trust
4. To recover confidence that we can take care of ourselves
5. To recover joy and creativity in our lives
6. To gain perspective about what happened
7. To recover the capacity to imagine our own futures
Finally, I want to say again how grateful I am to be writing here on Lovefraud. As you all know, it is not easy to find anyone who understands our experience or what it takes to get over it.
I have been working on a book about this recovery path for several years. The ideas I’m presenting here have been developed in solitude, and “tested” to a certain extent in coaching other victims of sociopathic relationships who entered my life while I was working on my own recovery. But I’ve never had the opportunity before to share them with a group of people who really know and understand what I am talking about.
I respect every stage of the recovery path — the attitudes and voices of those stages, their perspectives and the value they provide to us. So if you find me more philosophic, idealistic or intellectual than you feel right now, believe me that I have been through every bit of it. If you had met at different places on the path, you would have found a stunned, weepy, embittered, distraught, outraged or depressed person. I was in the angry phase for a very long time. I had reason to feel that way, and it was the right way for me to be at the time.
I believe the stages are a developmental process that builds, one stage to the next, to make us whole. I also believe that this healing process is natural to us, and what I’m doing here is describing something that has been described by many people before me, but not necessarily in this context.
Your thoughts and feedback are very important to me.
Namaste. The healing wisdom in me salutes the healing wisdom in you.
Kathy
STockholm Syndrome by another name, me thinks.
Similar in terms of brain chemistry, I think. I’d researched Stockholm Syndrome before this.
The problem with Stockholm Syndrome as a model for what happens to us with sociopaths is that the victim in SS truly doesn’t have power. It’s the powerlessness in a high-risk situation combined with the positive attention from the source of the threat that triggers the passionate romantic attachment the victim feels.
In most of our cases, we had the power to control or end it, but felt and acted like we didn’t. This may be a form of indoctrination or hynosis or mind control, as suggested in the book, “Women Who Love Sociopaths.” And we could argue that we invited it or allowed it, just because we had dreams or circumstantial problems that a sociopath could exploit. But, in my case at least, I believe that I had pre-existing tendencies to allow it, as a result of my incest background. And I think that may be true for a lot of us.
I think that Pesso’s ideas may offer a higher-level explanation that covers more territory. I think he’s talking about the rewiring that happens in seminal traumas. And that rewiring gives us the tendency to replay those traumas (and feelings). It’s embedded in the subconscious, along with lost or repressed memories of seminal traumas.
I think this relates to the profound learning we do in healing from these sociopathic relationships. Those patterns are what we’re unlearning. And the difficulty that presents — or why it takes so much time — is that so much of our personalities and our life circumstances have made use of these reactions as point of self-identification.
We are literally remaking ourselves. Not completely at a conscious level. But we make a conscious decision to change. And that, combined with the “reality lessons” of dealing with the sociopath and our strong desire not to go through that again, starts effecting change at a deeper level.
When I read Pesso’s article, I was so struck by the combination of 1, 5, 7 and 8. All of these didn’t match who I thought I was, but all of them represented the cause of a lot of my life strategies. Including trusting indiscriminately, being unaware of risk, flinging myself into ill-considered romantic entanglements, feeling that I had some cosmic guidance in it all, and — this is the hardest to describe — my life was naturally like some huge Russian novel full of larger-than-life characters.
When I read this article, I got a very clear picture for the first time of how a psyche might accommodate completely blown-out boundaries over a lifetime. Having no clear sense of where it ended and the world began. This wouldn’t apply in every activity of life. But in my case, it applied in personal relationships. I did relatively well in business, or taught myself to do so. But when it came to romantic and sexual relationships, I was empathetic and helpful to a self-destructive degree.
Obviously, this is just another model for things that can be discussed in other ways. What I just described about myself could probably be described in terms of a personality disorder or codependency. And Stockholm Syndrome or trauma bonding could fit in there too.
But if we’re going to name this, I think Pesso’s list of reactions keeps us closer to home in some ways. It’s about us, what happens to us, when faced with traumatic circumstances. How we cope. And every one of those responses seems pretty normal to me.
I’ve been meaning to do one of their three or four-day sessions (can’t remember which it is), and learn more. I believe they’re in New Hampshire or Vermont.
I’m still not satisfied with my understanding of how we’re hooked and why we can’t get out. Why we act like we have no power, when we do. I think these reactions may help us understand more.
Kathy,
There are so many theoretical models, and I think most of them have some validity. Since no two situations are identical, and since none of US are identical either, you have such a multitude of variables in a situation that it is only by looking at several theoretical models, that we can find the things that fit our particular individual needs.
Of course we can’t “test” our brains for chemical changes, we can only see the differences different things make in how we FEEL and in how we perform.
You are so right in that we ACT like we have no power, we become, as the psychopathic blog spot says, “sheeple” and go along with it.
I really do think too, that there is a HERD MENTALITY in humans very much like sheep, which will go over a cliff without any hesitation, following the herd. The Indians (before horses) used that herd mentality and fear to spook an entire herd of buffalo to fling themselves off a cliff.
The herd mentality is a protective mechanism for prey animals who are individually safer in a herd than by themselves, but it can, like any good thing, be turned to a weakness if it becomes too strong.
The “larger than life characters” of the Russian novel, or a Greek tragedy is also true for me. My biological father was definitely “larger than life” and the lure of the adventure of the trips to Africa, television shows, wild animals, safaris etc was a definite hook and I loved those things. Even after he started to verbally abuse me I stayed because the “adventure” was so alluring to me. Plus, I was already habituated to being treated poorly, having my feelings discounted, having my few boundaries stomped on, etc. to being made to feel unimportant and worthless.
I look back now and see that he abused everyone that worked for him, and they too stayed for the adventure. There was only one employee of his that wasn’t afraid of him, and he hated that guy with a passion, but needed him so didn’t fire him until we got back from Africa.
I can “analyze” many of the “hooks” that I swallowed with each of the psychopaths and abusers in my life. I always managed to escape before they killed me, or if the abuse turned physical, but the verbal and other abuse, I tolerated because that was what I was “programmed” to accept. The physical abuse from a male was not in my ‘program” like the emotional and verbal abuse was.
I also wonder how much (and I think it is a GREAT DEAL) of our acceptance of abuse (and the kinds of abuse we will accept) is a combination of childhood or infant hood programming AND genetic.
I keep returning to the research done at Ft. Roots at Little Rock, AR with the dogs. A guy started with one litter of dogs, and bred the most aggressive to the most aggressive and the most timid to the most timid and in 20 years (20 generations) he had two completely different sets of dogs. ONe set were killers and the others were so timid they would belly crawl.
We know that there is a great genetic component (as well as some environmental programming) to the psychopaths, how can there NOT be some genetic predisposition for us to be the subservient victims?
Genetic + environment= Psychopathic abuser
Genetic + environment=subservient victim
Now, the question is—why did WE (specific people here) decide to break out of that equation? While others who are SVs stay in the victim position for life?
WHAT made us “see the light”? What made us crawl, bleeding and wounded up onto the Healing road and stay there in spite of the pot holes, the rocks, the alluring Siren sounds of the Ps calling to us to return to them? Why did WE escape our genetics and our programming and get out of the relationships?
I think as hard as we have worked and as much as we have learned there is still the POTENTIAL for us to “fall off the wagon” (like a “reformed alcoholic”) and go back to the subservient victim hood unless we continually WORK at staying on the Healing road. I feel somewhat “safe” that I will never again allow abuse in my life, and yet, I fear on some level that I might, so I will maintain a bit of a hypervigilance against returning to my addiction and allowing abuse again.
That is why I continue to stay here at LF–I am like an alky who goes to daily “meetings” for affirmation and validation. Maybe this is my “new addiction” but it is so much better than the “Old addiction” to abuse that I am still a “winner” even if I am STILL blogging here when I am 80. I have thought seriously several times about not blogging here any more and just “getting on with life” and not thinking about all this any more…but I really am afraid to leave here.
In a way I tell myself that I NEED to leave here, to not feel “too dependent” on LF, to just get on with life, take the training wheels off, put down the security blanket and move on. But I do know that coming here keeps me thinking about how I am feeling, how I am doing, keeps me gaining new insights, and keeps me feeling that I may be helping others too (paying my debt for the support I have received) and keeps my compass pointed in the right direction.
I think I still have a great deal of processing to do, but at the same time, while some people may not need to do that processing, I have been burned so many times by so many psychopaths that I am scared chitless of taking a wrong turn back into the abyss of hell with another one, as I have done before.
BTW Kathy, thanks for so many insightful posts and articles!
Oxy, a lot of things in that post.
First, as far as the models go, I keep researching and synthesizing. Sooner or later, they all look pretty similar with most of the differences coming from discipline they came from. In fact, it’s really amazing how different disciplines all seem to coalesce eventually on certain models — like how healing sequences are very similar to models of spiritual development.
But what got me about Pesso’s list was his inclusion of expansive responses. Other than in some symptomatic descriptions — like Stockholm Syndrome and trauma bonding — no one talks about this. But it makes a tremendous amount of sense in describing the underpinning of certain coping responses, which also relate to the dependent side of the disorder spectrum.
As far as the genetic issues go, I am also interested in your breeding-for-character information. But the place where I stumble with it is my own family history. Every child in my family has this temperament that has come down from my father’s side. In talking to my sister and son about it, we’ve finally come down to “high-voltage wiring.” We are genetically inclined to be intellectually, emotionally and even physically intense. It’s very difficult for any of us to find the off switch or to turn ourselves down.
However, I see the impact of environmental factors on the different ways we dealt with the radical dysfunction that also came down from that side of the family. If you talked with any one of us, you could hear a strong thread of feelings of victimization. But if you talked with people around us, you’d hear a completely different story. How we “express” or how we coped with our early traumas is very much shaped by things like birth order, relative wealth or poverty, the state of my mother’s mental health, etc.
So I find genetics to be a slippery slope. And it gets more slilppery the older and wiser I get. Because I realize how much of my life was live in reaction to my childhood traumas, and how much of that internalized information I projected to shape the circumstances of my life and relationships.
You’ve got a particularly difficult situation to parse. Two children who apparently absorbed your values, and your approaches to life challenges. And one who seems like a genetic product, since his upbringing was apparently the same. But the environment of a child, especially one who is in the stage of massive hormonal shift, is not just the home he sleeps in. For someone to go as dysfunctional as your son has become, it would seem like there must have been some kind of massive emotional trauma (at least in my model) that shut down several crucial processing paths.
But then, violent psychopaths are not an area that I’ve really looked at for differences from what I call garden-variety sociopaths. I’ve assumed that the origins of their disorders are similar, but more possibly more extreme, than those that affect sociopaths and narcissists and maybe histionics as well. But the thing about extreme psychopaths is that, I believe, they have completely lost touch with their level of emotional vulnerability. I don’t think that’s the case with the other disorders.
(Their emotional vulnerability is felt and expressed differently from people who can process trust and dependency as meaningful life resources, so we don’t get the opportunity to share their vulnerability as we do with more communal people. It may seem like they have no vulnerability. But I believe their behaviors are attempts to deal with it in a no-trust and no-dependency mode.)
Regarding what you said about your connection with LF, I know how you feel. I find it to be a bit like my own AA meeting too. It help me stay straight, and it also helps me remember and refine what I know. But I sometimes think I spend way too much time here.
But it’s also a wonderful venue for helping people. And I suspect that’s an attraction for both of us. If someone gave me an opportunity today to teach and facilitate these healing principles to people who really wanted to learn and get well, and to do it for money, I would think I’d died and gone to heaven. I’m not ready yet to create the opportunity for myself, but in the meantime, it’s really rewarding to support other people as they move through their healing.
We’ve done so much work on ourselves (and it keeps going on). It seems like a waste to not share it, and here we can share it with people who are truly interested. How many venues do either of us have where we can talk about healing from a sociopathic relationship or family structure? This place is an amazing gift for which I’m so grateful.
I don’t know if you ever wrote me. I get so much mail everyday that I could have missed it. But here’s my e-mail address — khatalyst @....... gmail.com. (Just close up the spaces.) I have an idea that might be fun to kick around.
OxDrover : I have seen other bloggers come and go, some probably well on their way to being healed, some probably back to the X or on to another new bad relationship, and everything in between I guess. It makes one wonder when people just “go away” without saying “bye.” Some have come back and said “I screwed up” and stayed around for another while.
Dear OxDrover, i did come, posted few posts, and i am still here, amazed by the grace of many ppl here. I am reading, and reading, and learning…shocked by similarity of our stories and similarity by our X …sometimes , reading some of the posts, i wonder: WHEN THE HELL DID I WROTE THIS ??? and after a while, i realise its just the same story.
Yeah, i agree this is the blessed place, the Window God opened for all of us. Place to learn, even in advance, even if someone (lucky one) never interfered with S/P/N to prevent catastrophe IF /when it is about to happen.
Yeah, i feel safe here, protected and understood. I just dont feel strong enough to post
God bless u all
Dear Kathy,
First off, I think you will agree that humans are mammals.
We share a HUGE proportion of our genes with animals.
Animals can be and have been bred for centuries for various MENTAL qualities. My border colliles are a prime example. These dogs are well recognized as THE smartest dog on the planet because the dumb ones have been systematically weeded out for hundreds of years before they became “pets” (and they do NOT make good pets) They have been bred to enhance their native instincts to hunt the way a wolf does, by circling the prey animals and bringing them to the alpha wolf for the kill. We use this enhanced instinct and brains to put words to the actions they do instinctively and they bring the “prey” to us, thus herding our sheep, goats, cattle, ducks or pigs. Working IS the “reward” for their minds. You don’t have to give them a treat to get them to do it, they ENJOY it.
Other breeds have been bred for aggression and “hot tempers” like some of the war dog breeds or fighting dogs and these dogs have instinctive ON switches, but no OFF switches, once they start to fight, they will keep on til physically pulled off or they are dead.
Other breeds, like the guardian dog breeds, such as a Great White Pyrenees have been bred to GUARD but to use the MINIMUM amount of force to quell the threat, whether it is a bark or a fight to the death to guard their prey.
The Spanish have bred a “race” of aggressive cattle for their fighting bulls. most dairy breeds of cattle are pretty docile (at least the cows are) because if you are up close and handling them personally, you do not want some aggressive witch of a cow that will try to hook you with her horns, fight you, or kick. So those cows have been “selected out” of the breed because of their aggressive natures.
When we are looking at choosing some calves for draft animal training, we usually pick a diary breed, first because they are selected for gentleness naturally, secondly, we castrate them because a bull calf that is raised on a bottle and loses natural “respect” and fear of a human by thinking a human is “mama” WILL when he reaches maturity and the hormones kick in, become volitile and AGGRESSIVE and dangerous. Without the bull’s hormones, the steer is placid and cooperative, viewing the humans as the alpha of the herd. Even though they COULD easily kill you, they will not even try because they had (a) a naturally docile temperment to start with and (b) you have taken away the testosterone and (c) you have convinced them that you are “bigger” and more powerful than they are, and they will not buck that trend EVER. You may (if you so desire) ABUSE them no end, beat them, over work them, starve them, and they will NEVER REBEL. The old Jersey steers I worked for years (double the average life span of most cattle) and who weighed over 2,000 pounds a piece, would do my will like I was a god. I kept a small “switch” in my hand, but it would have hurt them less than their own tails swatting at a fly, but as far as they were concerned, that pencil thin piece of a tree limb was a sword that would end their lives or beat them to death.
So here we have genetics and environment working together to produce a totally docile VICTIM if you will. I am in complete control of their lives, I make ALL the decisions and they have NO say so in what happens to them from moment to moment.
Now, let’s say I started out with two calves from the Spanish fighting bull breed. Do you think I would have been as successful, even gelding them, and treating them exactly as I would have the jersey steers who were bottle raised almost from birth? Of c ourse not! In fact, I have a friend who bought a pair of young steers from a man who breeds “roping steers” which have a great deal of Spanish blood in them. He worked with t hese calves for months on end and they remained as wild as deer for nearly a year. He finally got them civilized enough to hook them up, but they were never trustworthy.
I have started pairs of calves in yoke several times and had to get rid of them because one other the other would not be docile enough and would kick or have other defects. I had a cow once who though she was “gentle” and halter trained from a young age was a kicker. she would nail your ass when you least expected it. And funny thing, every one of her calves but ONE (out of ten) would kick the crap out of you. One of her sons was trained as an oxen and I ended up slaughtering him because of his kicking. I could NOT stop him from doing this—just like mommie!
Most young calves will kick when you first start working with them and you must kick them back, but harder, so that they know you are in charge. I was never able to break this calf, kicking him back just made him kick more. When he got bigger he actually became dangerous. He didn’t kick often, but I wasn’t taking any chances. With most cattle, the domoinance factor within the herd is SET in a pecking order and steers and cows do not try to rise above this position, they accept that they DARE not offend a higher ordered individual or risk a thrashing that they do not want. He apparently didn’t get this instinct in his genes as his mother was abusive with her position, and eventually, 3 cows ganged up on her and beat her unmercifully and thrust her out of the herd group. After that (I thought they were going to kill her) she would never approach the main herd but stayed an outcast. Her son seemed to inherit her abusive nature and, it cost him his life at age 18 months old, rather than 16 or 18 years as a docile oxen.
Thopugh I had been somewhat “aware’ of how animal disposition varied by breed, I started studying in earnest the variations in different breeds,a nd since I had good records on my cattle and closely observed them, I started selectively culling ones with aggressive natures. I noticed how the more docile cows gave birth to more docile calves who became more docile adults.
My breed, Scottish Highland, is an old breed which was from the first used for multiple purposes and had apparently been selected for centuries for disposition as well as for meat and milk.
I also looked at research in the mainstream of animal husbandry about selecting for disposition which is starting to be researched and taught to ranchers and others who raise animals, as the more docile ones are less nervous and convert feed to meat or milk better, as well as not being as dangerous to handle.
When I down sized my herd from 50 mama cows to 4 of my “pet” cows that had been halter trained, I picked the four that were good mothers, docile, etc. except I made one exception. One of the heifrs had been halter trained and was pretty gentle, but her mother had been slaughtered for her attitude.
This spring I was going to slaughter a bull calf for meat and as we were driving the cattle into the corral, this cow turned on me and was going to try to escape—right over my body. I saw the challenge in her eye. Fortunately my son was close enough to her to bean her on the head with his hat and she missed me, but I decided then and there that SHE WAS A GONNER as well as the young bull calf who was more aggressive than I would permit. Besides, I could use the meat.
I have traced the family P-geneology on both sides of my family, and also on my children’s father’s family as well. My P son is SO like my P-sperm donor in his facial expressions, in his hand writing even, and he has NEVER met my P-sperm donor.
I don’t doubt that a bad environment can have a bad effect on a child, or if a child is abused he might be more likely to become an abuser himself, BUT that said, not all abused children become abusers, and not all children who are well parented become good people. I wish it were so that the genetics were not so involved. The study of identical twins raised apart proved that up to 80% of the time if one was a P so was the other, though they had been raised apart.
I wonder too, if the ones that were “not Ps” had a “score” of 20 or more on the PCL-R or if they were “perfectly normal” my guess is that though they may not have qualified as “full fledged Ps” they had some real issues!
Having worked with children in psych institutions, and seen many adoptive children by age 10 so “out of control” that the parents are afraid to go to sleep at night because they are afraid the little darling will burn the house down on their heads, I have seen this up close and personal.
FINALLY medical science is catching up and realizing that the “adoptive syndrome” of adopted kids being many times “the bad seed” is that usually the only healthy babies in this country (at least healthy physically) are from women who are dysfunctional themselves and the babies are removed by the courts. There is a BIG trend now to seeing that this is NOT because they have been “traumatized” by BEING adopted but their genetic material is inherited and that it will lean toward personality disorders because the parent(s) were personality disordered.
For years people were told that if their child had schizrophrenia that they were bad parents and caused it. NOT so, as it is FINALLY recognized as a primarily GENETIC cause.
It’s kind of “funny” to me that my grandfather with an 8th grade education, advised my mother years ago not to date a very nice guy, because he came from a family with a fairly high rate of “insanity” in his family.
I’m glad that medical science is finally seeing what my grandfather saw (from his animal models) over 65 years ago.
But while I believe there is a great deal of genetic component in psychopathy, I also believe there are some genetic components in the “easy victim” as well.
I also think birth order, family role designations, and other environmental aspects influence this as well. but bottom line is, that if you take a wolf pup at birth, even before it ever smells its mother, and raise it on a Cocker Spaniel foster-mother, when it grows up it will STILL BE A WOLF, albeit, a confused one without fear of humans, but it will NOT be a domestic dog. ditto a lion cub, a tiger cub, etc.
Dear Thorn-Bud,
Thanks for hanging around here and reading and learning, because ultimately that will be your salvation. Post when you get the strength, but posting is not required. Laugh
Reading every article here in the archives is what I usually advise people to do, so that you get an overview. there are also some great books recommended here too. You can get them pretty cheap at amazon.com in the used books. I have paid as little as 4$ including shipping for many of them used.
Keep on keeping on, it DOES GET BETTER!
Oxy said: “But while I believe there is a great deal of genetic component in psychopathy, I also believe there are some genetic components in the “easy victim” as well.”
I definitely agree with the above statement. Just from reading this board for ages, it is apparent to me that not only do alot of victims have the “good traits” talked about in Women Who Love Psychopaths, but many also share the common denominator of dysfunctional backgrounds.
Your entire post was food for thought, Oxy, and I found it really a fascinating and informative read. Thanks.–Jenn
Oxy, you addressed that post to me.
As you know, I don’t agree with most of it. The genetic traits that provide inclinations toward sociopathy are also traits that can be very positive. I believe that difference is largely environmental. There are mountains of research on the impact of environment on affective disorders and development of anti-social tendencies to back up this opinion.
The cow you described didn’t fit into the submissive mold that was required in your cow culture. She might been more temperamentally suited to live in the wild, and bred a herd of smart survivors. She reminded me of some friends of mine who are not people who always do well in hierarchical situations, but who think fast, assume leadership easily, and are the people I like to have at my back when I’m in threatening circumstances.
As far as the brain damage of sociopathy goes, there is enough information about the physical neural networks carved by trauma and terror, as well as the related changes in brain chemicals and the extended nervous system, to know that environment affects fundamental brain function and development. The issue of adopted children is almost a textbook example of this. Children who are separated from their parents during early development are at high risk of affective disorders, and the mechanism of why that happens and their ongoing difficulty with trust and bonding is well known.
But my most important (to me) argument in the genetics vs. environment debate is the impact of emotional dysfunction is passed on through behaviors. My father’s sociopathic father brutalized my him. He went on to brutalize us. The kids in my generation, who all had temperamental similarities with my father and similar physical types, went on to make their own huge messes in clear reaction to their upbringing. The emotional vocabulary of my family was determined by my father’s dysfunction.
Anyone who deals with highly dysfunctional people takes this sort of thing for granted. They don’t pop up out of nowhere. It’s not that an occasional person isn’t born with just too many genetic strikes against them. But I believe that’s the exception, not the rule. I also believe that the real cause of the explosion of sociopathy in Western culture has nothing to do with our genetics suddenly going bad. It has to do with family dramas, the way the glorification of winning and consumerism affect our values, the way we view and treat the less fortunate, the way social and economic hierarchies are enforced by fear and shame, etc., etc.
I know that you have a son who is a sociopath or psychopath. And that there is a pattern of this type of behavior in your family history. Which you reasonably assume to indicate genetic inclination, and I don’t argue with that. But I do argue that the impact of this type of behavior pattern is not trivial.
I want to get away from your case, because I feel like I’m intruding. So I’ll get back to my own. My son grew up with a mother who grew up within this type of emotional vocabulary, as well as exposure to the characters and family dramas of my siblings. I would tell you that I was committed to not reproducing it with my own children. But that commitment, as well as any interaction with my family, was also continuing involvement with that vocabulary. I was a living reaction to my father’s behavior, and what I passed on in my behavior to my son was variations on a theme. The same is true for my siblings and their children.
The other thing that is true for my siblings and their children is that my father’s genetic inheritance seemed to be dominant. All of us were highly intelligent, physically strong, highly strung, dominant personalities. We didn’t see ourselves that way, and that dominance was twisted into all sorts of strange shapes from the way we grew up. Those same traits emerged in two of our three children. All of us could have been sociopaths. At various times in our lives, the distance from what we were to diagnosable sociopathy or some other Cluster B disorder was sometimes not too great.
These traits sabotaged us and also made us exceptional in many ways. The tragedy of our lives was not the genetic material, but what was done with it. The same is true of my father. My interest in human potential comes directly from observing my father. Even as a child, I could see how his life was all about inability to process the damage of his childhood and the ongoing life dysfunction that created. It made him a monster, but it also was heartbreaking. My story is about retrieving my own potential. It wasn’t just that I wasn’t going to let him destroy me. I wasn’t going to let this curse of generational transmission define me.
I think the work that you and I are doing on healing ourselves isn’t just about us. It’s about changing the world for our children. We become examples of something else than we were. Our requirements in relationships, our values, and our beliefs are communicated through everything we do, and I think this has a ripple effect, not just on us but on everyone we touch.
Though I suspect that my family has more of this particular set of characteristics than average, I also believe that dominance and Cluster B behaviors are part of the full deck of any healthy human being’s optional strategies to meet life’s challenges. It’s not the traits that are at fault and it’s not the behaviors. It’s the fact that certain optional strategies are overused and others blocked because of incomplete development of emotional capabilities. I think that’s about trauma, not inborn attenuation of some area of the brain.
I apologize for being so direct here in arguing this. I wanted to make sure that the opposing view was aired. Friends can disagree.
Kathy
I had three foster kids I intended to keep forever, but for one thing, they were attacking each other and it was an impossible situation. I believe there was both a strong genetic component and a strong trauma component. We can see the work of genetics in physical appearance, in disease, and it surely has just as much an impact on mental health.
But we also see that a bad fire, bad car accident can completely change a person’ s physical appearance, change their suspeptability to disease, and can render an intelligent person to the level of a five year old permanently. And we now know the impact of trauma can be seen on the brain, etc.
So nature vs. nurture ….either one can be powerful! But the basic building blocks (e.g., I’m a human, and can’t become a dog) are nature’s, so I guess I’d have to give nature the upper hand.
One relative of mine would go rigid as a baby, from the moment she was born, when someone would try to cuddle her. Today she is a fearless daredevil and man eater. Hmmmm.
Well, whether from genes or trauma or some combination, I do think Cluster B’s, at this point and time, can’t change their spots, don’t want to change their spots, and don’t even know they HAVE spots.