I received this question from a woman who is divorcing a man she believes has the traits of a psychopath (according to the psychopathy checklist):
“What psychological tactics can you suggest in dealing with a psychopath? There must be some tools and strategies to stay a step ahead. I’ve read books on identifying liars and tried to educate myself on strengthening my position in recognizing The Predator. There has to be some guidelines somewhere on How to Ride That Horse. I have had hundreds of horses throughout my life and pride myself on being able to ride anyone that crosses my path. Although this horse has been the most difficult and I continue to be dragged, trampled and kicked, I continue to get back up, dust myself off and try again. I have learned much and he has been a great teacher…..but in the final stages of our divorce, he is throwing some wild curve balls and I’m desperately trying to stay in the saddle. I ride all my horses softly, gently…..Can you offer tools for the arsenal?”
Before answering this question I want to make some important comments. Many people have reasons for needing and desiring relationships with people who are very sociopathic/psychopathic (sociopaths). In my view, there are only two legitimate reasons for having interactions with someone you believe may be “a sociopath.” The first is that the person is your boss and you haven’t yet found another job, and the second is that there is a court order commanding you to. That the sociopath is charming, attractive, wealthy, your son, daughter, friend, lover, mother, father or some other relation, is not a good enough reason to risk yourself and others.
Whenever you interact with a sociopath, you not only risk yourself, you risk others. Sociopaths weave a web of deception that is supported by the many relationships they have. If people refuse to participate in the sociopath’s life he/she will be very limited in his/her ability to harm anyone. Sociopaths/psychopaths know how to surround themselves with people who give them legitimacy in the minds of others and who serve as “cover.” They will use anyone for this purpose, especially ministers, priests and rabbis, and of course, children.
If you desire to have a relationship with a known sociopath there is something wrong with you. That something can be ignorance of the disorder and its dangerousness. A sense of grandiose invincibility and a love of risk taking can also feed into this desire. If you are an adventurous risk-taker, take up blizzard mountain exploration or sky diving, but keep away from sociopaths. Many people write me with a tone of wonder, awe and admiration for sociopaths. Save your wonder, awe and admiration for the Grand Canyon, the pyramids of Egypt, or the true miracles of life, please. (Here I am referring also to the women who send love letters to known killers and serial killers.)
Those comments out of the way, how can you cope successfully with a sociopath/psychopath? First, remember that these people are Driven to Do Evil. Just like you wake up every day and feel your drives and desires, sociopaths/psychopaths wake up every morning and “It’s show time!” Whereas your goals are intimately related to the love and compassion you feel for others, a sociopath’s goals are intimately related to his/her desire to gain power over others. If you don’t understand this at the core of your being, you will not be able to deal with sociopaths. Second, imagine a moment what your life would be like if guilt, empathy and compassion did not enter into your decision making processes. Imagine that your decisions were based solely on your judgments regarding what would benefit you.
Now imagine both together, a Drive to Do Evil and no guilt, empathy or compassion. A sociopath is a sports car with an accelerator and no braking system. Now you can see why I say only an ignorant, crazy or suicidal person would voluntarily choose to ride this horse, or drive this car!
I have just armed you with the mental picture of the sociopath who you are compelled to deal with. To successfully cope, keep this picture in your mind at all times. Ignore any of the sociopath’s actual appearance or behavior. Keep all conversations brief and to the point. Set firm boundaries and never give an inch. Insist that you get everything due you, and that the sociopath abide by his/her end of any court orders, or job descriptions. Most importantly, STOP expecting that the sociopath will behave like anyone other than who he/she is. A sociopath is a person who is Driven to Do Evil and who lacks, guilt, empathy and compassion.
To make this point further, let us consider our friend’s analogy of the psychopath and our relations with him/her to the horse and horseback riding. Horses are domesticated animals. Domestication means they have been bred to have the capacity for submissive behavior and impulse control. These two (submissive behavior and impulse control) are supported by a very complicated biology that includes hormones and brain structure. The psychopath lacks both the brain structure and hormonal profile to behave submissively or even consistently cooperatively. The best horse analogy to the sociopath is the horse who dies in the process of being ridden because s/he lacks the substrate for domestication. This horse is not a challenge, s/he is a waste of time and energy.
So stick with the horses that have been beautifully trained to compete in the show ring, and who lovingly wait by the fence for you to appear. These horses enjoy cooperation and don’t mind having to submit occasionally. The untrainable horses are a complete waste of time. Surround yourself with people you know to be primarily motivated by love and compassion. To do otherwise, is a complete waste of time and energy.
hi firsthingsfirst – i have heard this many times – inside and outside of my own head. ‘he’ll do something to hurt me, but I can survive it.’
WE NEED AND DESERVE TO DO MORE THAN SURVIVE.
we need to transmute that energy – it is creative and conjoining. what can you create/ conjoin with? art?
i get spring fever intensely. and i have an ex n who came into my life in spring and it took years to not want to go *there* in the spring time.
okay, this is serious, but i may be seen a crakpot for it (and that’s just fine): i hold trees, and i find it to be an incredibly sensual and sexual experience this time of year.
too bad the park next to my place is so public. 😉
but i will go out to the country one day soon, by myself, and be with the rushing spring creek, and the flowing sap and i will feel, for all intents and purposes, that i am with a lover.
One_Step,
Thank you for responding to my post. You seem to really get it, and that heartens me. I don’t think your hugging trees is crackpot. If it works for you . . . if it is creative and conjoining, as you say, for you . . . that’s all that matters.
I do deserve more than to survive. . . . I just wish I had more of the kind of connection that I desire.
firstthingsfirst –
me too.
i can’t guarantee i will have that deep wild running sap connection with anyone else ever – so i am banking on the kind of connection i desire being in rejoining with myself (and that coming about through creative acts, grounding acts, kindness to my own pissy mind, and a whack of permission to explore who i really am).
Dear FirstThingsFirst,
I think every human in the world (possible exception: psychopaths) desire a CONNECTION on a physical and sexual level. This has been proven with observations that children without physical connections with other people literally DIE or fail to thrive and grow.
That being the case, I think we have to figure out a way to have connections with other humans that are not likely to expose us to abuse from a psychopath.
Many people here have talked about what “great sex” they had with the psychopath, yet, they later found out that there was no emotional connection from the psychopath at all. It was all fake on the part of the psychopath.
After my husband’s death, I too craved that physical and romantic connection with a man, and because I was “needy” I hooked up with a psychopath and fell for his “charm”—only to be very badly hurt. I’m still by myself, but I meet my needs for human connections in other ways without resorting to any contact with a psychopath. It just isn’t “worth it” to be in the same room with a psychopath, ultimately the “connections” are so onesided and painful.
BTW congratulations on one year of NC!!! That’s great!
In March of 2005, during the myriad of little earthquakes that signaled the end to our relationship of six years, I went through a bad breakup with the SP telling me that he didn’t feel anything for me any more and that there was a girl at his office that he would be with if she would have him. He didn’t expect me to stand up, grab everything that I could that was in his place where I had been staying, loaded my car to the brim, bargained to keep the cat we shared by giving him my gaming account, and left sobbing, but determined.
For the first time in our almost 6 year relationship, I didn’t call, didn’t email, and considered our relationship over.
I wasn’t at the end. I went back into the lion’s den where he told me he was a changed man. He was going to throw away the porn, spend time with me and my interests, stop being so aggressive in the way that he treated me(not physical), and control his angry outbursts, always the product of things not swinging his way.
I wouldn’t have sex with him, wouldn’t even kiss him until he proved himself. He tried for about a week. After that,he started showing anger that I wasn’t immediately giving in and coming back to stay with him. My behavior was “misguided” according to him. Now I recognize he was just trying to get me away from my family and my own better judgment back into his den. I had sex with him once. It was okay, but I now recognized the lack of emotion there. It didn’t feel right. It felt empty and cold, just like him.
When my uncle died a few weeks later, I had a realization of how short life is, and how I didn’t want to spend it being manipulated every day, feeling empty. I drove home from Nashville where my uncle was, dropped my sister off at her home 20 miles outside Chicago, went to my grad class in the city, and then drove another 20 miles out to the suburbs and broke it off with him. He had felt me pulling away. He cried. Bawled his eyes out. This is what took away my ability to recognize what he was. Sociopaths don’t have any emotions, right? Wrong. Their emotions are all for THEMSELVES. If they are about to lose their prize, they will NOT be happy. That day took me from 6 in the morning until 11 at night to be finished, but it is one of the most memorable and satisfying days of my life. I will never forget it.
The SP came after me with phone calls, texts, cards, and gifts. He gave me all the things I had always begged for during the relationship, and he had withheld. He wrote me long letters reminding me of how good we were together. Oddly enough, now that I think back, all the good things were good things I MADE. He just went along for the ride.
I was an avid online gamer at that point, one of the things that had brought us together. I had bought a new game to replace the one I traded him for my wonderful, but feisty cat. I felt really, really guilty for making him feel bad, so I would occasionally entertain conversations with him on the game. (Back into the lion’s den, the lion was really restless and unhappy, so why not give his ears a little scratch, right?)
I had a phone relationship with a really nice guy who distracted me from the SP. The SP hacked my email and found out. He confronted me. He blamed the breakup on this guy. When things didn’t work out with my distraction, my addicted self gave the SP a call. I met with him for coffee and saw him face to face for the first time in months. He simpered, eager, charming, false humility oozing out of every pore. I felt like throwing up the whole time we met.
Once again, it wasn’t right. This encounter made me feel really guilty for hurting him. His ego was what was really hurting. He tried to kiss me, and I just felt revolted. I told him it wasn’t going to work out.
I felt so bad that a couple of weeks later, I posted on my blog. I knew that he read it. I said that I cared about him, but that the real reason I could never be with him was that he wasn’t a Christian. Which was true … just not the whole truth. I had started my journey back to my faith which he had always made fun of.
He called me and told me that he was ready to pursue learning about Christianity. Now I felt like I owed him something. He met with one of my best friend’s husband all through Dec. I would talk to him on the phone occasionally when he called. Ask him about what he was learning. I felt obligated and wondered what I was going to do if he did accept the Lord into his life.
On New Year’s Eve, I received a call from him telling me that morning he had received Christ as his Savior during a church service he had attended with many of my friends. My sister and her husband were both in church that day and she tells me that she thought it was genuine at the time.
I talked with my wonderful father about this and he told me that he was praying for me, looked me straight in the eyes, and told me that I knew what I needed to do.
I broke up with the SP a week before my birthday. Met my wonderful, flawed, and loving husband six months later. I am still scarred from all my experiences (for another time) in that six year relationship.
Things had been congenial for a few years now with the SP. We could go to shared parties, even with some additional weird stories to go along with his current GF.
A few months ago, his current GF messaged me telling me that she would never have been with him if she knew what he was like. Apparently, he had kept a video that I made with him when I was young and naive at the beginning of our relationship. He had lied to me at the time and told me that he destroyed it. She found it, and in addition to all the unscrupulous, illegal, and financially irresponsible things he had done, this item was the topper, and on a zip drive (bought after we broke up so he had to actually transfer it knowingly) next to their desk. She had the same problems with him of porn, selfish and dangerous activities, etc. She is a piece of work herself, but I wanted to help her if something was really going on.
In his email to her (and me) he said, “I hope you don’t think that I was watching this all the time.” Eeeeewwwwwwww! At first he tried to convince me that something was wrong with her. Then apparently, as she and I emailed back about what we had both experienced, she sent him my correspondence. He had never expected that polite and private little me would share those things. An SP can get very, very angry when fully revealed. He sent me a nasty email that fully revealed his true colors, and she sent me one as well that showed me she had no compassion for people who made mistakes in being with an SP other than herself.
I sent him a message back telling him that he could lie to her because I was done being manipulated. May as well have given a hungry lion a peppermint stick.
I blocked the two of them on facebook, myspace, my emails. Apparently he hacked into my emails because I received an email two weeks later from him. He was telling me about how his life had changed. He is seeing a counselor (we all know how well SPs do with that). He is back with his GF, he sees how his gaming addiction was the problem (hmmmmmmmm, not sure how that figured into all the other much more detrimental problems). There was no apology. He was trying to convince me that his life was good. My opinion matters because he sees me as someone who his family and friends value. If I see him as a monster, he is a monster. He can’t manipulate me any more into seeing him as what he wants me to see. I’m sure that bothers him to no end.
I changed the password on my email account, changed my phone number, and prayed that I will eventually get a job, and a home somewhere far away from his prying eyes.
Whew! I know that was long, but this is the only place where I feel that I might be truly understood.
ChristyK:
Welcome to LF…..glad you found us!
I just had a thought……ANY CHANCE the S could have installed a keystroke logger on your computer?
Yes, darlen….you unfortunately ARE understood here…..
Keep reading and learning and moving on down the healing path…..
It’s a long one, and unfortunatley they just don’t all drive off cliffs and leave us alone!
🙁
But…..I do believe….everything happens for a reason….and it’s up to US to find that reason……
Education is key……
Dear ChristyK,
I second ErinB’s welcome to LF…and congratuations on figuring out what this creeep is. Education and Knowledge=Power and we can take back our power from these creeps to hurt us!
Keep on reading here and there are always people here to support you and belive you! God bless.
Dear Erin and Ox:
Thanks for your replies. I’ve been reading Lovefraud since November when the latest incident happened. One thing that I’ve found no one but my counselor (who is too expensive for me to see right now) and my husband understand is how long this takes to get over. I had pushed my memories of what took place during the relationship away when I broke things off so that I could “forgive” him. I felt very free at the time, but never addressed what had happened. Three years later, it all came back with a rush. I’ll be in the shower – have a flash. I’ll be having a disagreement with my husband – have a flash.
At least now I can forgive, remembering. I still struggle with my conflicting beliefs that God can save anyone, and the fact that I don’t believe a true Spath will ever be saved other than by some chemical miracle. My mom and I talk about this all the time.
The reason I believe this happened? I think maybe I am meant to be a quiet (or not so quiet) activist. As an elementary school teacher, I have already seen one intermediate level student with anti-social qualities that are driving straight in the direction of spath. I am researching, trying to determine if there is anything I can do for these children, but also wondering if I can have an effect on educating little girls and boys that aren’t to be aware and watchful for this.
Dear ChristyK,
NO Contact is the best with these creatures as helping you heal. Even just seeing them can trigger a “flash back” or bad emotions.
I think your goal of educating young kids about psychopaths is a good one and it is one that needs doing for sure. It can be worked into just about any kind of “class” or “education” by a creative teacher (which I am sure you are) as a lesson in morals and ethics…or teaching children how that sometimes people who are out to “con” you are VERY nice to you at the beginning and once they Get you to trust them, BINGO they con you….
YOu never know, a lesson learned at gradeschool level may save someone decades later.
But the question doesn’t pertain to a desire to be with a sociopath but rather how to deal with them in divorce. I am assuming her divorcing him means that she doesn’t want to be with him.