There can be different perspectives of the sociopath (and other seriously exploitive personalities). These perspectives can offer different experiences of these disturbed individuals. At the same time each perspective offers, I suggest by definition, both a somewhat advantageous and yet limited view of the sociopath.
Living with a sociopath, or finding oneself involved deeply in a “committed” relationship with a sociopath, will offer an incomparably intimate experience of the horrors that sociopaths can inflict on their partners.
Clearly no one, and that includes the so-called “experts” on sociopathy (clinicians and researchers, for instance) will be able to appreciate the impact of the sociopath, on this level, like the partner who has lived with, or been closely involved with, one.
This close, personal relationship confers upon the partner of the sociopath a certain knowledge of sociopathy and, I stress, a certain intimate experience of the sociopath that no clinician or “expert” can possibly approximate; thus, the sociopath’s partner’s experience is surely a unique one, qualifying him or her, from this particular intimate vantage point, as really the ultimate “expert” on sociopathy.
Now thankfully I’ve never lived with a sociopath, a fact which also happens to limit my experience with sociopathic personalities—specifically, in this case, the experience of having lived with one, and had my life razed by one.
In this sense my, or anyone’s, clinical experience of sociopathic individuals—just like one’s clinical experience of any individual—is limited by the structure of the clinical relationship. It is a relationship with boundaries provided inherently, so that the clinician or researcher (unlike the sociopath’s partner) is for the most part protected emotionally and physically from the sociopath’s most damaging, hurtful, violating behaviors.
On one hand, the protection to which I refer—again, a protection that’s inherent in the clinical setting—clearly limits the clinician’s capacity to fully experience the sociopath; on the other hand, the very structure of the clinical setting may enhance the clinician’s ability to apprehend aspects of sociopaths that may elude the sociopath’s partner, because he or she—the clinician— again unlike the sociopath’s partner, in operating within a structure of safety and protection, can observe and study the sociopath more freely and through a much wider lens.
The clinican is afforded the chance to observe and study sociopaths’ attitudes, their interactions, their styles, their variations, their differences. And, of course, not just one of these individuals, but many.
And so the clinician’s experience with sociopaths, while less rich and informative in some important ways than the partner’s experience of the sociopath, in other ways yields him or her different, additional opportunities to grasp how sociopathically-oriented individuals think and act.
And yet over and over again, I note it when a Lovefraud member points out, “But what do YOU know? Or what does HE know? You (or HE) never lived with a sociopath!”
And my response, whenever I read these comments, is to agree with them wholeheartedly. They are entirely valid comments and speak a truth that all so-called “experts” on sociopathy should heed well: those who have lived with the sociopath possess a certain knowledge and experience of the sociopath that is not only unique (as I’ve suggested), but non-attainable to a clinician in any sort of safe, protective clinical setting.
In this sense, or certainly in many respects, the clinician has much more to learn from the sociopath’s partner than the other way around.
(This article is copyrighted (c) 2010 by Steve Becker, LCSW. My use of the male gender pronouns is strictly for convenience’s sake and not to suggest that females aren’t capable of the attitudes and behaviors discussed.)
10 Year Survivor,
Me too!
I still find myself dumbfounded as to the damage that is done by these monsters. And, that they, for the most part, get away with it!
I just woke up, and saw the e-mail from LoveFraud about this post, and came to read it. And it really triggered some thoughts for me.
First, Steve is his usual compassionate and respectful self about saying that he hasn’t had the experience of a close relationship with a sociopath. And so in dealing with his patients, he brings the more clinical perspective. But, as usual, I’d like to quibble a bit.
Because unless we’re locked into Rapunzel’s tower, I don’t think any of us can get through life without being at the mercy of sociopaths occasionally. Or being caught in a sociopathic rinteraction. It just that sometimes they are fleeting, and we are just wounded or a little ripped off or piercingly disappointed, but it doesn’t go on and on, because the predator moves on or we haven’t been hooked into believing that the relationship offers some long-term good for us.
Even these briefer ones leave us with difficult feelings, and often we think that we learned a lesson from them — what not to do in the future. Or we learn something about how to protect ourselves. Or, occasionally, when we “win,” (because “winning” is a kind of relative terms when a sociopathic transaction causes us to interrupt our lives and spend time and energy to fight off the predation), we feel like we’ve discovered that we’re a little tougher and smarter than we thought we were.
The real diffeence with extended relationships is that they go on long enough that we get sapped. Our resources and resilience get used up. And then we become sick. We lose the ability to fight for ourselves, to protect important things like our self-esteem and our boundaries and our material possessions and our other family members. We don’t feel strong or empowered or creative anymore. We sink into a sense of ourselves as victims, and our entire relationship with the world changes.
How this happens, the story of that disintegration, is truly something that we can talk about better than most people. (Because unlike most people who struggle with feelings of victimization, we are clear about the identity of the enemy.) Likewise, many of us can speak knowledgably about what it takes to make the long climb back up to recovering self-esteem, power and ability to trust and love. But in a larger sense, one that Steve sees as a clinician and one that many of us see when we have progressed in recovery, it pretty much fits into the category of recovering from trauma. Big trauma, extended trauma, really damaging and debilitating trauma. But ultimately healable, if we understand that it is just a big wound. And in the end, healing comes from getting that wound into perspective. We are not the wound (or victims by nature or destiny). We didn’t do it to ourselves or ask for it, and there is something to learn from it about the nature of the world. Something we can use to live better and smarter and actually have more strength and freedom to choose better lives for ourselves.
But there is a whole other side to this, which is about the nature of the sociopath. Those of us who have loved them and been exposed to them over an extended period have had the opportunity to see and try to make sense of things that are … well, counter-intuitive to us as social, feeling people. And I think that one of the most problematic of those things is the coexistence of intelligence, charm, emotional openness (about their own needs) and apparent ability to create a good relationship with the other side of them — the cold selfishness, the cruelty toward the people who care about them, the self-indulgent and often disgusting impulsiveness, and the seeming inability to recognize that their exploitative behavior may give them short-term “wins” but long-term isolation.
All of us have encountered people who are seriously emotionally ill in our lives. Whether they are chronically suffering from something like schizophrenia or some massive personality disorder, or whether they are, as we have seen in ourselves and our friends, going through some temporary thing like recovering from a bad break-up or the death of a loved one. We know what it looks like or how it feels, when we come in contact with it. And we know, at least, that these people are suffering and know they are suffering.
But with sociopaths, we are dealing with something different. They deny there’s anything wrong with them. They glorify their difference and view other people as suckers (or “food people” as my ex used to say). And consciously or unconsciously, they work at dismantling the psyches of the people they use or depend on, in order to maintain the upper hand and confirm their twisted power-based view of the world. And they do this all with a subtlety and secretiveness (that may become more open if they feel that the people around them are powerless to do anything about it) that is a kind of evidence of how perfectly alienated and separate they are. How incapable they are are of trusting, belonging or feeling part of anything but the nation of one they feel themselves to be.
In thinking about my ex, and my father who was another one, as well as similar people I’ve met and worked for in business, I’ve come to the same conclusion as a lot of us here. There is simply no way to deal with them. And any dealings with them — if we are forced by circumstances to do that — are going to be expensive. Even just getting rid of them or trying to hold onto what they’re trying to take. There is no reasoning with them, because they are so geared to winning at any cost. There is no appealing to their “social” instincts of compassion or shame, because they don’t have them. Even pointing out that they could get more if they didn’t behave like such jerks doesn’t work, because their pleasure centers are located in strange places in their psyches. “Getting more” for them isn’t about the same thing for them as it is for us. It’s not what they can get that turns them on, it’s the proving to themselves that they can.
And because of all this, I believe that their disorder is based on an anxiety about their own identity and ability to survive that is so deep-seated (and so well buried behind these adaptive shells of charismatic, clever and manipulative “fronts”) and so unfixable, even to them, that they are virtual robots. Something like people with life-dominating addictions to heroin or crack, the entire psyches become wrapped around this need to prove to themselves that they do exist in the world and they can survive.
But like us when we’ve been around them for a while and “catch” their disease by proximity, they view the world as a lawless place where there is no one to trust. Except that they have had a whole lifetime to get used to the idea and to build survival strategies that depend on no one but themselves.
This is almost a textbook definition of the affective disorder that has been well-documented by people working with adopted children that do not bond with their new families and have no emotional anchors to a belief in safety through mutual caring. It is also pretty good description of the internal world of an addict whose only commited relationship is with the non-negotiable demands of the addiction.
I know this a long post, and I apologize for it, but there is one more point I’d like to make. The human emotional system provides us with a common spectrum of emotional reactions that most of us feel and recognize in each other. And these reactions are associated with behavioral strategies. For example, when something pleases us, we tend to go toward it and seek more of it. When something angers us, we tend to treat it as “enemy” and either build defense or fight it under it is no longer a threat.
There is a theory about personality disorders that, for one reason or another, they are an over-dependence on one or a cluster of behavioral strategies, and an under-usage of others. For example, dependent personality disorder might be an over-reliance on seeking emotional security through association with someone of perceived greater competence, wisdom or authority. Or sociopathy might be an over-reliance on the kind of thinking that most of us would only feel in emergencies, when we throw all the social agreements and rules out the window and just do whatever it takes to survive.
I’m bringing this up, because Steve wrote about not having the experience of living with a sociopath, and I would argue that we have all lived with sociopaths. But inside ourselves. These sociopathic strategies are a normal part of the human psyche. We may not exercise them very often, because it’s not that often that we get the feeling that our lives are in danger, or the lives of our children, or our livelihoods, or our futures. But I would bet that in all our lives, there have been times when we made a conscious decision to stop being compassionate, to stop caring about how other people felt, to even stop playing by the rules, and just take care of business in addressing some threat to our wellbeing or survival.
To get back to an analogy I’ve used before, if you’re being stalked by a hungry lion, you’re not going to let your empathy for its hunger weaken your resolve to do whatever it takes to survive. You’re certainly not going to worry about what kind of person it makes you, if the lion is an endangered species and you have to kill it anyway. Or if you slather yourself with lion poop to make yourself less attractive. Or find something else to kill and throw it to the lion as an alternative lunch. None of things things would be our usual behavior in a social environment, and we might be grateful that no one else saw us doing them. But at the end of the day, surviving is triumph you walk away with. Second-guessing yourself about how you did it is sort of beside the point.
So to conclude this long meditation, my point is that we actually know and understand sociopaths a lot better than we might imagine. And that as we getter better, we may come to recognize that what they do is so outrageous, because they are acting on a level that we ordinarily keep reserved for life-or-death emergencies (or protection of our addictions, whatever they are). No rules, no compassion, totally centered on themselves and whatever they think is important for their impulse-satisfaction or survival.
There’s no question it’s a crazy and self-destructive way to act in a social world where we depend on one another and our success is largely based on our good will and trustworthiness. To us, they are like flaming rockets tearing through our lives, leaving smoking ash in their wake. If we mistook them for someone to love, we also have to deal with the damage to our own ability to trust ourseles.
But to say any of us hasn’t had relationships with these poeple is to deny our relationship with our own selfish, cold-hearted and profoundly logical instinct to survive. Even in these relationships, I would argue that everyone of us had the capacity to stop being cowed, stop being cooperative, and find the sociopath in ourselves to deal with this monster ruthlessly and finally. But we didn’t because it was against our own rules. These are the common rules of socialization that we are all taught as children, and that are reinforced throughout our lives. We believe that is is not good to be like that, and worse we believe we will be punished socially if we become selfish, uncompassionate and ruthless. And in fact, some of us are so well-socialized that we don’t even admit we have these capabilities.
One of the miraculous things about recovering from a relationship with a sociopath is that we discover and make friends with these capabilities in ourselves. Because involvement with a sociopath is certainly the type of situation when we should exercise them. Being selfish, being untrusting and untrustworthy, being willing to throw the rules out the window if necessary to get rid of this threat. We may not have had the years of practice they do, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have the force of will to survive inside ourselves, and the ability to bring it to the surface when appropriate.
And that knowledge changes us. What people talk about here — the fact that recovery from these relationships makes us stronger and smarter than ever before — comes from all the emerging aspects of our ability and willingness take care of ourselves. Not just in emergency self-protection, but also in the day to day pursuit of our happiness. Integrating our inner sociopath into our everyday social selves does not equate to becoming a sociopath, but rather developing healthy selfishness and the perspectives and skills that go with it. As well as learning to deal with the normal human challenges that a healthy person faces in balancing self-interest with compassionate social instincts.
So, Steve, I think I’m saying that I appreciate what you say about not having the experience of loving and living with an active sociopath. But knowing what an insightful man you are, I’m hard-pressed to believe that you really don’t understand. Because these battles with sociopaths are also about battles with ourselves and the search for wholeness.
Affectionately —
Kathy
Trla:
I can relate to so much of what you wrote about in your post above.
I have an at risk child in my family (my niece), who is being raised by her psychopath mother (my sister in law).
The child is exhibiting warning signs that will become VERY PROBLEMATIC later if they are not addressed now.
And nobody is even paying attention, much less addressing the potential dangers/red flags that are waving around this child.
My brother has been manipulated to the point that he has lost all control of his own mind, unbeknownst to him, of course.
In addition to that, he’s in denial so far that I don’t know if he will ever find his way out.
In the meantime, his child is being abused to the point that damage is starting to show.
And this child is only 6 years old.
My mother is the only other person besides myself who sees the problem, but she refuses to GO THERE.
What I mean is that everytime I try to tell her that these behavioral problems in my niece are really the early signs of something much more serious that will show up when she reaches her teen years, and the abuse that’s going on is also worse than she thinks….my mother just says, “Oh, Rosa…you are REALLY dreaming things up now.”
I just want to scream.
Nobody listens or pays attention when they SHOULD.
By the time everyone wakes up to the damage these disordered personalities inflict on others, it’s too late….WAY TOO LATE.
Hi Kathleen. It’s good to see you online. Really GREAT STUFF in your post above.
((((Kathleen)))) Where have you been? I can’t tell you how often I’ve thought about you, and missed your insight. I’ve really missed you! It’s nice to hear from you again.
I recently went back and read your series on how we heal. Really, really good stuff. Thanks.
Rosa, I feel for you. And I remember posts of people in similar circumstances. Children are survivors, but they are not invulnerable.
Recently I was reading something about a simlar dilemma — not a about a child in danger, but a situation where the person was inclined to act on principle but was afraid of the consequences. The answer was “do whatever makes you feel positive and empowered.”
I hear your frustration with your mother and you brother. But my experience has been that being an unwelcome truth-bringer in situations may have short-term consequences for me. But it also often acted like a wrench tossed into the heavy machinery of dysfunction.
It worked particularly well when I talked about it in terms of myself — my perspectives, my feelings, my reactions. Saying something like this “Watching this disgusts me, and makes me afraid of what we’re all going to have to deal with from this child, when she gets old enough to act out what she really thinks about being left to this woman’s abuse.” “I think we’re all acting like a lot of cowards, and I personally am ashamed of myself and this family.” “Being forced to watch this makes me just want to cut off all ties with my own family and move away to somewhere where people are sane and actually care about each other in ways that count.”
I call this “delivering feedback from the universe.” Because you are giving people an opportunity to see the repercussions of their behavior. The repercussions are characterized as repercussions on you, as you report them. But the implications are repercussions on them. Even if they don’t respect you enough to take you seriously, you are also delivering information about how their behavior could be judged by the outside world. And how other people might feel about what kind of human beings they are, and whether they deserve being cared about.
This is cold stuff, I admit. And you have to somehow wrangle yourself out of stifling your real thoughts and feelings, because you feel responsible for other people’s feelings. Or because you fear they won’t accept you and love you anymore.
We actually have the right to judge the behavior of people around us, especially in terms of how it affects us. And to talk about the impact of their behavior on us. In fact, if we talk in terms of ourselves and what we are going through, there’s nothing to argue about. No one can tell you how you feel, and if they try to tell you there is something wrong with your feelings or perceptions, they are acting sociopathically. Trying to “gaslight” you for their own purposes without concern for you.
And if you buy into it at any level, including allowing them to do this without recognizing that they are taking care of themselves, not you or anyone else, then you are inevitably going to feel disempowered or helpless. Because you are denying your own wisdom and your own power see and talk about problems, and to use the simple force of your honest reactions as an agent of change.
If I could give you advice, it would be to keep reacting honestly and keep talking about it. Let them live with your observations and feelings. You’ll get a lot of resistance. Like your mother trying to tell you that there is something wrong with you. But you know already that’s her denial and her fear of the cost of being honest about her own feelings. Be a model for her, and she may ultimately surprise you.
And that little girl may also get the benefit of knowing that someone in the world will speak up for her.
Good luck, my friend —
Kathy
Hi Kim, nice to hear from you. And thanks for the kind words.
I’ve been really busy, and deeply challenged by some things going on in my life that have nothing to do with our conversations here. So I haven’t been back to write, though I stop in and read occasionally. It’s so good to see that people are healing and getting really better.
I’m out of here now to go back to work. Much love to everyone —
Kathy
Dear Tria,
I also have a son who is ADHD, he isn’t a psychopath like his P-brother, but he has some problems that he is unwilling to face and though on the whole he is doing well, works, doesn’t drink or smoke, etc or rob or murder like his brother. He lies to me and I am not willing to deal with perpetual liars. Period.
I also know that while he isn’t a P he has some of the traits of impulsivity, willingness to lie, etc. and I can’t deal with that.
The through with your daughter and her ADHD is that many Psychopaths are also ADHD and/or bi-polar (manic-depressive) so she may have some other diagnoses as well. It is possible she may have some psychopathic traits as well, like taking the person’s car and disappearing, or that may just be only impulsivity/.
The point is that she is 19 years old. She is legally an adult. Pretty much” what you see is what you got” at this point, unless SHE DECIDES to seek help on her own and to CHOOSE to make some changes in her life.
My ADHD son SAID he wanted to make some changes and ,I let him come live with me–he paid a reasonable amount of room and board $600 and paid his own expenses for vehicle, gas, insurance, etc. and bought the vehicle from me (I didn’t give it to him) did his share of the house and yard work as well, and for almost 18 months everything went well I thought. He was saving his extra money —but then, low and behold, the old “I want what I want when I want it even if I can’t afford it” came out and he bought a computer he couldn’t afford and then LIED TO ME ABOUT IT.
It wasn’t the impulsive act of buying the computer that he couldn’t affrord, it was the LYING TO ME ABOUT IT…and I knew the minute he opened his mouth with a complex story that it was a LIE. (He never was a good liar!)
I confronted him. He blamed me. I told him to leave my house and I’ve essentially been NC with him for 9 months except a couple of e mails for business reasons. That’s the way it will be.
It broke my heart at the time I told him to leave, but it wasn’t just about the ONE lie he told. It was about the many many other lies he had told me in the past, and I had not only forgiven him for those but RESTORED MY TRUST TO HIM so his “lie” about the computer wasn’t just a “small white lie” it was a BETRAYAL OF TRUST that hurt me as much as if I had caught my husband in bed with another woman because it DESTROYED our trusting relationship.
A philosopher once said “It isn’t the lie you told me that upsets me it is the fact that I can’t ever trust you again.”
I can’t ever trust my son again because all the past betrayals got dug up when he betrayed this one last one! I kind of felt like Charlie Brown when Lucy pulls the foot ball out every year after she swears she won’t do it again and then of course she does!
But I’m done trusting my son C again. I love him, and he’s not “all bad” he has many good qualities, he’s usually loyal to his friends, would die to protect them, give them his last dollar….but at the same time I am not one of those people he is loyal too except when he needs me, so, that being the case, he’s on his own and I say “God Speed, have a nice life.”
Triua: just to respond to the post about the 6 year old. Go to the girl’s school counselor and talk to them. Depending on the situation you might also need to go to child protective services quietly. If you do, do not TELL ANYONE. God b less you for caring about this child. Hopefully something can be done for her before it is too late.
Kathy, GREAT TO SEE YO!!!! I loved your analogy about the lion stalking you, “you’re not going to worry if it is an endangered species if you have to kill it”—and unfortunately too many of “us” (prey) worry about HURTING THE LION’S FEELINGS! (I’ve been there and done that!!!!)
Hi Oxy, it’s always nice to be in touch with you and see how you’re dispensing wisdom and support around here. You’re a treasure.
I have a lot of sympathy for lions, tigers and wolves, as you know. I just don’t want one mistaking me for lunch.
Hugs —
Kathy
Hi Kathleen!!!
It’s so good to see your posts this am.
Your articles have helped so many.
Stay out of the mouths of predators.
Peace to you my dear!
XXOO
EB