Catch and release

Recently Lovefraud heard from a woman whom we’ll call Trina. Trina was involved with a sociopath for five years, who abandoned her eight months ago, after wrecking her financially and emotionally. Still, she continued to be in shock, denial and disbelief—until the guy sent her the following poem:

Catch and Release

Before I pull your hair and leave you for dead
I will ravish you
not physically, but with words sensuous and firm
with sibilance rolling off my chameleon tongue
and metaphors byzantine and allusive pitched
to that intimate space between your ears.
I will watch you wriggle with denial,
claw with anger, bargain for release,
splash like a drowning animal in hopelessness.
And when I observe the contour of your acceptance,
the precise moment your will bends pliantly to mine
I will release you.
Game over.

Trina was horrified, and when she communicated this to the guy, he denied that the poem was at all autobiographical. He said she needed to “lighten up;” she was too “up tight;” he’d just taken a line from a TV show and embellished it. Here’s how he explained it to Trina:

“I thought that was a great opening line and I twisted it a bit, threw in Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s five stages of grief as I played on the word ‘dead’ and created a poem, role playing the braggart and using a line that fishermen do when they fish for fun and not food.”

“This man knows he drove me to the point of near suicide,” Trina says, “and rather than feeling badly for it, he actually taunts me, to this day.”

When there is no reason

Many sociopaths are parasites, manipulating people into giving them money, food, sex, a place to live—whatever. But some sociopaths, who may actually hold down a job and have their own resources, manipulate people, even torment them, just for the fun of it.

There are sociopaths who break women’s hearts just to watch them fall apart. There are sociopaths who commit crimes just to prove they can get away with it. There are sociopaths who disrupt workplaces for their own amusement. These people simply want to be puppet masters, pulling strings and watching everyone else jump.

This is probably the most difficult type of sociopathic behavior to comprehend. Many of us have spent hours, days, weeks, even years trying to figure out why a sociopath acted the way he or she did. Sometimes there is no reason other than the sociopath found the situation he or she created to be entertaining.

So how do we come to grips with this? How do normal people, who try to be considerate and cooperative, understand this behavior?

We can’t. These sociopaths are totally twisted. It’s just the way they are.