A reader says: “I kept wondering what was going on in his head. I could never follow his thinking. I think he might have been into alcohol and drugs and that in itself messes the brain, and along with his other personality disorders, sure makes for a confusing relationship.”
The thinking patterns of the psychopath are indeed weird. It seems there are biological and intentional reasons for this. In others words, he is unable to think very logically PLUS he intends to mislead. No wonder he is hard to follow!
Below I list several factors which together make the psychopath a most bamboozling character.
The odd speech of psychopaths
The psychopath makes “frequent use of contradictory and logically inconsistent statements”, says Robert Hare in ‘Without conscience.’ E.g. “A man serving time for armed robbery replied to the testimony of an eyewitness, “He’s lying. I wasn’t there. I should have blown his fucking head off.” It is as if, says Hare, they have “difficulty monitoring their own speech”.
Psychopaths may also construct strange words: ‘unconscientious’ for unconscious’, ‘antidotes’ for ‘anecdotes’. Perhaps there is something about the brain of the psychopath that contributes to his odd speech.
Drug and alcohol abuse
With their poor ability to tolerate frustration and their high need for stimulation (same thing?), the psychopath is likely to abuse drugs and alcohol which obviously affects the ability to think. Chronic abuse damages the brain.
But, as M.L. Gallagher recently writes, he speaks in riddles purposely too.
The intention to deceive
This doesn’t need much elaboration here. The psychopath wants to get something. He may simply take it by force. Otherwise he will use his cunning to fool the other person. (Interestingly, the illogicality of his arguments doesn’t stop him successfully conning one person after another.)
Logical fallacies
Most of us use logical fallacies when we argue or try to persuade. Some of these are errors in our own thinking, some are conscious manipulations. Just accentuating a different word can make all the difference: “Mom said that we musn’t throw stones at the windows” (i.e. she didn’t say anything about hitting them with a tennis racket).
We can fully expect that the psychopath, with his flawed thinking plus his intention to deceive, will use every logical fallacy in the book. Bear with me for a couple of paragraphs.
Take the example the logical fallacy, the ‘ad hominem argument’. It has two types, circumstantial and abusive. In the circumstantial ad hominem argument the circumstances of the other are confronted instead of the evidence: “Of course you don’t accept that it’s OK to be a loan-shark. You’re a Christian and Christ drove the money lenders out of the temple.” (But that’s irrelevant; if I was Jewish what would your defense be then?)
In the abusive ad hominem argument the opponent is attacked instead of their argument: “You criticise me for loan-sharking, but three years ago you were arrested for drunk driving.” (What does that have to do with loan-sharking?)
Paramoralism
But the psychopath uses fallacies with an evil twist. Whenever possible he’ll use a logical fallacy as a paramoralism. In other words, he won’t use a fallacy only to win a point but also use it moralistically in order to corrode the other’s moral thinking.
How would a psychopath argue ad hominem? Several readers have mentioned precisely this example: “What kind of Christian are you to accuse me of this?” (Again, the other’s Christianity is irrelevant to the topic at hand.) Can you see the difference? Unlike the examples above where the opponent’s Christianity is used to score a point or bring the argument to an end, here the other is being denounced as a bad Christian. An open-minded person is likely to say to themselves, “Maybe he’s right. Perhaps I’m the bad one here.”
Perhaps you have an example to share of the bewildering speech of a psychopath?
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For glimpse into the wacky thought-processes of the narcissist see this article.
yes to all of the above mine once said to me when he had scratches nad love bites all ove him from another woman. when i asked him aobut it he said his mates had been wrestling him and hats they were bruises. i did nt believe him. then he sadi to me: you should know me better than that i dont do on night stands. and he got angry and said: if i tell you something you should believe me. he said that one a lotlike i should feel bad for even asking him ab out such a thing.i realised anger was a big indicater of his lies when confronted if he was caught he would get very angry. he even coppied things i had said to him once i said i thought you are an amazing person and when we split up he said the same thing to me word 4 word and i told him he ws using what i had said to him he replied i know but i mean it. im like he cant even say his own words when hes trying to be nice. then i htought i bet he uses other things i have said to him and he probably says them to other woman. that really hurts and made me feel terrible. also i noticed they seem to recover so quickly if they are upset. even now if he gets dumped by a girl hes straight into recovery mode calling up other woman to help him get over it. like any one else would feel sad for a little while even but not him no self searching just straight into the next adventure. he even lied aobut smoking too and when i found out he then said well youve lied to me about bla bal and no i hadnt he was just trying to swtch it onto me again. then once he even lied about having a shower when i could see the bathroom totally dry not a drop of water was there, it like a five year old would lie aobut that. big ones and little ones if they can lie big they can small too it s unbelievable. he would take risks too once he got into a car at our apartment with a woman and her babyright outside our place any neighbours could have seen him and he was hiding the whole thing from me but how easy for them to see him and tell me. hi mother was weird too i think his upbringin was part of the breeding ground for s pathy. she was like this person hwo you had to admire and agree how attractive and young looking she was, very insecure really. she didnt pay much attention to him either or then shed be all over him if i was there. bizzare behavour.he said so many wierd things cant remember all of them once when i confronted him aobu tfliring with a girl he said, i adore you im like yes but were talking about you. then he said hes had this all his life everyone always gets the wrong idea about me. now i know why.
Straight to the next adventure. How true. He would say to me-why can’t you just forget about things and move on. One of the times he said this we were right in the middle of losing our house that we built on land that had been in my family for 30 years.
Before our second anniversary he was diagnosed with testicular cancer. (It was caught in its earliest stage and he’s been clean for 16 yrs.) A few years later he asked me why I stayed after he got sick because other woman would have left. I didn’t understand where it was coming from. The thought of leaving never even occurred to me. I told him most would not leave and asked if I got sick would he leave. He said no and nothing else. That’s not the whole conversation and I can’t remember exactly how everything was said, but it left me with that feeling of “strangeness” for lack of a better word. I know part of what he was trying to tell me was he wouldn’t stick around if I was sick, but what else I’m not sure.
As for the lying about big stuff and small stuff, he just lied to my son again. When he showed up for visitation in an expensive car(he was not paying child support at the time) he said it was a rental car. With the exception of when he has flown up it’s been the the same “type” of car. Yesterday my son got in the car and asked where all the dog hair was from. His dad told him the car wasn’t a rental this time, it belongs to a guy at work and he brings the guy’s dog with him. He doesn’t even try to make the lies believable anymore.
Does anyone have any experiences to share of them lying to their kids? My counselor says my son needs to find out for himself and I should not tell him when his dad is lying. He’s 14. I haven’t said anything about the car, but I feel like I’m sitting back and letting him hurt him even more. Oh yeah, my ex says he can’t see him for the last two days he’s supposed to while he’s in town because he chipped a tooth and is going to the dentist and then he’s leaving a day early.
Get this…Jules. You said sometimes yours repeated the same things back to you that you yourself had said to him? I’m in communication with his girlfriend who he says he loves enough to “change” for. The things that she tells me that he says to her are things that I actually said to HIM during our marriage. He was very immature and irresponsible. I tried to help him learn to be more responsible and would often comment that I was too old for this or for that. Now, it’s like he’s taken on my “mature and responsible” personality to pull his stint off with her! That just amazes me! I honestly think I helped him become a better and much more respected sociopath!!!!
tami newman: I’ve been thinking the same thing for months about mine, but when I tell anybody they look at me like I’m crazy. He has taken things I’ve said to him and used them as his own to manipulate his gf. It’s like he’s pretending to be parts of me with her. How sick and sad.
Jules, mine often told me that if I was a good person, I would take him at his word, putting the onus on me once again to prove that I was nice and good and kind. It didn’t matter that he was lying, it was my job to believe him.
And like Tami, I’ve had the same experience. Things I said to him have been used on subsequent girls. We get involved with these poor, dear, hurt guys thinking we can fix it all and convince them that the world is a good place when they are not actually hurt at all. They’re feeding off the hurt of the last girlfriend and using us to enhance their ability to con the next one. And to think I wound up teaching that man to quote Shakespeare’s XXIII sonnet to the next girl, making her think he was both romantic and well educated! This is the same man who admitted to me that he had DELIBERATELY left a lover’s underwear on the bedroom floor where his wife would find it, before the divorce.
Yes, and the thing that really bothers me is that I have tried everything I know to try and convince this girl that she doesn’t know him. He told me before he left that I was his “record” in that he stayed with me 8 years! I saw it that I was the biggest fool he’d had to date! I told her that I lived with him 8 years and didn’t know him and how could she possibly know him in the short time they’ve been together. She confronted him with everything I told and he admitted to doing the things that he did. He told her that he had never loved me, slept with all the other women because he was justing wanting to get laid, actually stayed with me for security and admitted to using me for money! He told her that I was a good person and that I didn’t deserve any of what he did; however, he told HER that he was sorry for what he did to ME–not me! She says that she believes he is truely sorry and tells her that she gives him more love and attention than he’s ever had before and that he’ll change for her. I told her he told me these very same things. She knows much more of his past than I was every privy to. Had I have known what she knows, I would have ran as fast as possible in the opposite direction from him. I don’t think she understands fully what I’m trying to tell her. She still wants to believe that she’s the “one”. I’ve read conflicting reports on sociopaths. I’ve read mostly that there is 0% recovery rate; however, I’ve also read that their sociopath behavior starts to subside in the their 30s and 40s. Is this true?
And, another thing I’m wondering about. My ex’s most famous saying about himself was that he was REAL and that he like REAL people. He also referred to himself as an empath–claimed he could feel sick people’s pain and suffering. He would tell me that I wasn’t REAL and too materialistic and that material items meant NOTHING to him. However, the first thing he did when he got with me was find a way to get me to buy him things and he’s done the same exact thing with her! Do they actually KNOW these things about themselves well enough to go out of their way to proclaim the opposite. I honestly didn’t even know what an empath was at the time and he explained it to me. His claims of being one, is one of the things that knocked me overboard when he suddenly transformed into a monster before my eyes saying every hurtful thing he could possible say to me through clenched teeth, a darkened face and piercing eyes of steel. I couldn’t believe this was the same sweet totally sensitive man that I had lived with for nearly 8 years! I did not provoke this anger in him with my own anger, either. All I could do was cry and beg him not to leave me and all I got from him was pure hatred!
Just a quickie as it is nearly my bedtime lol.
I had to pick up on a few things here…
Yes, plagiarism seems a familiary thread here. There were so many layers to this man I knew that it’s hard to know which one to concentrate on. But on one occasion, when he was overseas and I was in the UK, heard a piece of music that was special to us, being used in an ad.
I was riveted and felt him round me as soon as I heard it. I wanted him to know, so I sent him a text that said ” I just heard the ****** we love so much, and it brought you straight to me, it’s as though you are here in the room”.
Many many months later, when I discovered his massive deceptions on so many levels in his email, I saw an email he sent to the woman he had devastated shortly before me and he used those words, exactly as they were written by me. I was staggered.
Another thing, I found pieces of paper where he listed meticulously all sorts of little quotations. row after row of love quotes he picked up from cards/books or wherever he found them. Written in meticulous handwriting. I found about 5 or 6 sheets of these. Why? I wondered. What for? I wondered.
Yes he lied to his children. He used his children to lie also. When he was due to go to his new job in the Middle East, he wrote and asked them if he could delay for a week, as his youngest daughter was in the hospital for a minor op and he didn’t want to travel until he was assured she was ok. They were terribly sympathetic and said of course.
His daughter was not in the hospital, and he was with me the whole time.
??
Second time, when we were in the Middle East and his daughters were waiting for him to contact them for their first trip out to see him and tell them when the flights were booked for (this was 17 months after he left his girls he loved soooo much) he dipped out of contact for 3 weeks. His ex-wife told me this. She said ” I don’t understand why whenever he goes on these business trips he loses his mobile signal.” –“What business trips?” I said — “Well he didn’t contact the girls for 3 weeks – we didn’t think this trip was going to happen – and he said it was because he was in Saudi on a business trip and couldn’t get a signal.”
He never set foot out of the country the whole time and had been with me the whole time, and according to him, phoned his girls every night on his way home in the car.
??
I confronted him on this one, and for once, he had nothing at all to say. Nothing. for about a week.
lol. Got to laugh really haven’t you? When you see it in black and white you do wonder how you ever fell for it???
LJ
how dare they use our words conversations and thoughts withother woman i find it a total rip off. its like they have a log book of what we said to make them feel good in their memory and pull things out of it to impress others . nothing is sacred with them even those intimate things we say between us. this is really sick i have no proof but im sure he repeats things i said to other girls. i just know. thanks for your coments everyone.
This thread is fascinating. I too had noticed a strange use of words and also the plagerising of my words and thoughts. It was like he took a little peice of each person and built himself into a character…. nothing was his own. Recently, I found a radio interview of someone I know he dated before me in Maui. She was a “Tantric” massage therapist. She was interviewd on some new age radio program… anyway, she used a phrase in the interview “darkest night of the soul.” The bad man used to say that. Something bad had happened at work and he was so dramatic about it but wouldn’t tell me what happened. He was so distaught that I thought someone had died. It’s a long story but in the end, I tried to support him but I ended up walking out because he was being abusive and inappropriate and strangely babyish. He told people that I had “left a good man in his darkest night of the soul” and then reported back to me how shocked his co-workers had been at my behavior.
He also posted on Match.com that he wanted to be someone’s “Sweetie Babe” which was what I called him early on. I thought that was really inappropriate. He also once described on his profile, under things he liked, a very intimate afternoon that we shared. It was strangely specific, nothing gross but it basically went like this: I like to make love during afternoon thunderstorms while eating frozen bluesberries and licking lollipops. You see what I mean by specific? I was stunned. I remember saying to my housemate, “WHO DOES THAT?!”
I noticed he tweaked his profile constantly and it seemed to reflect details of whomever was his latest conquest: “I like petite marine biology students.” I know this had to be someone he met because he did this over and over as well as putting specific jabs at people he felt burned him. For the longest time, about half of his profile referred to me in the positive and the other half in the negative… but if you weren’t me, you might not pick up on that. But I could pick up at least 20 references to me. It was bizarre. I even noticed LONG after I left the island that when I added to my profile that I liked to read about nutrition, he added that he wanted to meet someone that eats a nutritious diet.
Coincidence or have we entered the TWILIGHT ZONE…?
And using our words to seduce others??? I told him that holding a woman all night without trying to have sex with her would be a gift. Later he gave this “gift” to a woman for her birthday. This is the same woman that thought I was a psycho when I tried to warn her. All of this was while I was still on island and I hadn’t read anything about Sociopaths or personality disorders. But I definately started to realize that something was happening that was bigger than I could handle.
In our last arguing email about the fact I was done, done, done.. and he was stating his case over and over that I was making a mistake, and he was trying harder with me than ever, anyone else… blah blah blah. He actually thanked me for making him “a better man”. I thought to myself exactly what you all are discussing here. I taught him so well, how to act, how to play upon what is important to a woman. He “got it” finally after us having been together for 1 year. Our second year, he turned into mr. perfect. And I believe with all my heart that mr. perfect was an act… purely based on my discussions with him about what was important in a relationship and my forever efforts to getting him to communicate with me and on which topics. Now he can move forward to the next girl and be so incredibly great at all the right actions, words and so-called communication skills. She will really have a tough time seeing through it. I sure do, but my intuition tells me different, even when things arent blatently in front of me – his lies and cheating.