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.
ALL PSYCHOPATHS cause horrible pain to anyone they interact with, or are related to.
They give us a “fantasy” of them being what we want and need, but it is all a FAKE, a LIE, “smoke and mirrors” and UNREAL. My son used my love for him, and used me like toilet paper–somehow he got joy out of “putting one over” on me, more than doing it to others—he had a special hatred of me, I think because of the few times I SERIOUSLY stood up to him…I think he actually wanted to prove himself smarter, more cunning, and more sly than me…
But he didn’t hurt me emotionally any more than anyone else here has been hurt emotionally—the pain from them fills our entire being—regardless of who they are to us. It is just that I let it go on for longer than most people have, though I know women who have been married ot them for 40+ years and finally broke free—
Anytime we continually interact with anyone who is “not behaving morally” (whether they steal, cheat on their wife, sponge off others, or what their immoral behavior is) we are letting ourselves interact with a potential, if not actual, Psychopath.
I’ve “enjoyed” all the pain I care to from psychopaths in my life, from my son, to my biological father, to bosses, to boyfriend, to business partners–I’ve ignored the red flags, and ignored warnings from others early on in the relationships, but I think I finally got the message.
Blackrose, your P can’t love you, only use you…just like a cat plays with a mouse (read that thread it is a good one) and sometimes it is difficult to get our heads around that concept. I know it sure was for me and most people on this blog seem to echo my feelings on that (not trying to speak for everyone though) Because we don’t have the same mental constructs that they do we can’t understand them much better than they can us–it would be like us trying to understand the thinking of our 15th century ancestors as they lit the fire under a heretic to burn them at the stake for thinking the world was not flat.
I have no doubt that somewhere one of my ancestors was burned at the stake and that one of my other ancestors lit the fire…but I can’t really imagine how they felt, thought, etc. as it is just too foreign to me to think about such a thing as “logical” or “rational” or “right”—
I can’t really fathom how someone can strap a bomb to their body and think they are doing right by blowing themselves up and taking innocent children with them. I can’t imagine how Timothy McVey bombed the buildings in Oklahoma…anymore than he can imagine what I thought about HIM. It is like two different species, except THEY LOOK HUMAN.
I can observe their behavior in some circumstances, but I can’t fathom how they really “think.” I know when I go to drive up my herd of cattle, how they will behave if I do X, and How they will behave if I do Y, but I can’t get into their heads, I can only observe cause and effect.
Ps in some ways are just as predictable as the cattle at herding time…if you look directly at the cattle they sense this as aggression and move away from you, so if you are trying to walk by one without disturbing it, you look away and it will stand in place, but if you look directly at it, it will run away from you.
All the “behavioral clues” that he gave you, and that you chose to ignore, are pretty common with other people too. I had RED FLAGS waving not in a “breeze” but in a hurricane and I ignored them totally because to notice them would have been to give up the “fantasy” I was invested in, and I wasn’t ready to do so until the pain got so intense I had no choice if I was to live (literally).
The one thing I would contradict you on is that I don’t believe he did love his son—they are not capable of love as we know it, but only of “ownership” of others, especially children. Notice what you said about “did not remember how old the child was, and said it casually as talking about a puppy he gave away.”
You sound like a pretty “sharp cookie” and I know that there will be pain for a while and the “crazy making” confusion etc. but the pain is transitory and there is light at the end of the tunnel if we look for it!
What bothers me the most, and I don’t know why, is to think of what he’s telling those people who knew about me. The things he would say about his niece to me to try to discredit her, and then he’d say that he loved her. I just feel such shame, his niece told me that I had given him an easy way out when we had that argument, but thinking about it, I had given him the chance to break it off a couple of moths. before, and what did he do? He asked me to wait and be patient, now I see that he could not be the one to be “left.” Like I said before, it feels as if I have been emotionally raped, and when I asked people if they thought this was a good man, who maybe decided to work on his marriage, the response was always the same, no.
Maybe they’re right, maybe he’s moved on to someone else, maybe his wife is now providing him with the ns he needs, I don’t know, what I do know is that he never loved me and that’s going to be a hard pill to swallow for sometime.
The one thing I remember about him is he always said that if we were going to be together, it was going to be his way of noway.
But, then he’d say how his wife called the shots at home, I don’t know if that is true or not. I know that he has some deep emotional issues with women, he confessed to me that he had been sexually abused by his mom, that she would lock him in a closet for hours when he was little, and that is why he punishes the women in his life. I wished I had never met him, that is one of the things I would change about my life if I could, just erase him out of my memory.
Blackrose,
It really doesn’t matter if his mother tortured him with lit cigarettes, that does NOT excuse his behavior to women.
NOT every person who was abused as a child becomes an abuser. It is a CHOICE.
He will talk about you badly, that is what a Psychopath does. They place blame for what they do on others–the poor abused dear…that is part of the LIE.
Keep in mind, HE IS THE LIE. EVERYTHING HE DOES IS A LIE.
You can’t “normalize” his behavior, or make sense of it in a way that a normal person can understand, all we can do is to observe his behavior and say “He is acting like a psychopath” because he can’t understand empathy and we can’t truly understand how a person with NO CONSCIENCE TRULY FEELS.
He is POISON. He is EVIL. Just like a rattlesnake is poison, and will bite, Ps do what they do. They just ARE.
Trying to “understand” him, or “pity” him is crazymaking.
All the “love” and “kindness” in the world won’t make a rattlesnake not poison, and it won’t make it grow fur and love you like a puppy—it just IS a snake. It does what snakes do. It thinks like snakes think. (if they do)
The time will come when you will remember the experience without pain, with acceptance, but in the meantime, focus on healing YOU. God bless.
I know, but even now, and it’s only been three months, I keep blaming myself, and then I have to keep remembering that this man NEVER LOVED ME. When he would talk about the love of his life, his drug addicted ex-wife, he’d tell me, “as much as I loved her, I used her.” I never asked him to go into detail, I think I was just afraid of what the answer would be. Sometimes I just pray that I am wrong about this guy, but it always goes back to the same thought, no, he is what he is. They can’t even be called animals, that would be too good of a name for them.
Blackrose, the “blaming yourself” is part of the healing process. I think 99.9999% of us all do that…but that too will pass as you heal, you will forgive yourself as part of the healing process.
I don’t think anyone felt as STUPID as I did, I think us all thinking that WE are the QUEENS of STUPID is part of it too. LOL Now I just realize that I am HUMAN and that I made poor decisions, ignored red flags, and that even though I have made poor decisions in the past, today is a new day with new decision choices and I want to make better decisions today than I made in the past.
By looking at the past poor decisions I made, seeing why they were poor, and in some cases deciding why I made them, I am able to see where I went wrong and correct that today and in the future. Beating myself up for being “so stupid” isn’t productive at all.
I got some therapy and that has helped give me more insight into the “whys” of why I allowed someone(s) to abuse me for extended periods of time, or why I got involved with them in the first place. It has also made disconnecting from them easier, though it was still difficult as many of them were family members. But today I feel more centered and rational and emotionally happy and healthy than I have ever felt I think. So over all this may have been a very painful but very good lesson for me.
Did anyone read any Steven Carter, like “He’s Scared; She’s Scared” or “Help! I’m in Love With a Narcissist” when they were in the relationship? Somehow found those books last spring, in the middle of it all, and recognized so much of the patterns, both those of the P’s and those of us who were with them.
That was the beginning of the end for me and the first step to stop self-blame. It’s ok to realize something is wrong with how we reacted and what we accepted, but that didn’t make the P do the things he/she chose to do to us.
I’d highly recommend them to you and others, blackrose :
Steven Carter’s Relationship Q&A:
http://www.power-surge.com/php/asktheexperts/archive.php?in_expert=relationships
Steven Carter’s books:
http://www.power-surge.com/asktheexperts/relations.shtml
Thanks for all the tips, I am now beginning to see, slowly, what a loser he really was, and he even told me that one time. Do these guys have some moments when they actually say the truth? All of his bragging about what he had accomplished, the years he served in the Navy, I always felt like saying, dude, you would have to be a hundred years old to do all of that. But I never made fun of him, if he sensed I was laughing at him in any way, he would become angry, but he always made fun of other people.
“Blackrose” keywords “He is the lie”. Your p was burned by cigarettes and locked in a closet. Mine was punished with her hands being put on stove burners and locked in the basement while her mother had her affairs.”She is the lie”. I really believe we somehow need to start our own sort of PCL-R-R using the power of the internet. The constant comments of “were we dating the same person?” or the similarity of so many of the stories to our own is a very powerful statement to exactly how they work.
Hi LilOrphan. I have that book (He’s scared, She’s scared) and its the best book ever. I have the other one on order but it is out of print and its called something like ‘Help Im in Love with a Narcissist’.
When I knew my ex was messing with my head, I went on the web to find out signs of cheating, then I was thinking he was committment phobic, so I bought the book and there are lots of references to narcissistic behaviour, but the penny still didnt drop for me until I went on a site about sociopaths and then the pennies starting falling like bricks. Then I found my way here six months ago.
I also read the ‘Art of Seduction’, a training manual for users and abusers.
So true, all the good things I remember about him are really the things I imagined in my mind. My dad was able to see through this guy from the beginning, even though he never talked to him or met him, he always said this guy was a compulsive liar. When my dad passed away unexpectedly, my P was very supportive, but he had no choice, he had to play the role. He did say a strange thing, that he had expected his dad to die before mine, his niece stated he was probably envious that he didn’t and that he was deprived of the attention he feels entitle to. I think that makes sense, when we did see each other, he always accused me of wanting other men to look at me, and that I wanted to take them home to have sex with them.
I know am better off without him, but the humiliation of having been used bothers me. How can these people say they love someone if they don’t really mean it? I would never think of doing that to anyone, but he knew how vulnerable I was at that time in my life, and took advantage of that.