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.)
hens, he sounds like a real charmer. I’m so glad he’s out of your life, and you’re only dealing with memories now. They may be annoying and distracting, but still only like watching a movie, not living through the real things anymore.
You just reminded me of something I was thinking about yesterday. Writing here always surfaces memories I haven’t thought about for a while, and then some of them stay on the surface, generating emotional reactions that demand attention. I try to ignore them, because I’ve got other things to do. And the more I try to ignore them, the louder they yammer.
And finally, yesterday, when I found myself playing solitaire instead of working, to distract myself from the noise in my head, I stopped the whole silly thing, and turned within. Okay, I said to myself, what’s so important?
I can’t even remember what it was now. I think it was something about continuing to allow other poeple’s demands on my life to chip away at time I needed to preserve for wellness activities like exercise and meditation. (This is not about writing on LoveFraud, except as it becomes one more thing crowding my day.) I’m doing my busy-busy bee thing, rushing around which also keeps me from thinking about what I’m doing. But there is a place inside of me, which found an opening when I was writing here yesterday, that observes and has some strong opinions about what I’m doing to myself.
And that was why I couldn’t get those memories to submerge again into the mental storage room.
My point being that there’s a reason these things come up. It always drives me crazy when people say, “I don’t want these angry feelings.” I want to tell them, “Well then, figure out what’s causing thema and do something about it.”
Which, of course, is not always the first thing we want to blame them on. “Someone” is abusing or exploiting us, or our family, or our social group, or the human race or the planet. So our first reaction it to be angry with “someone.” That’s the child-level of anger, the response of someone who has no power. But if we explore that anger, it eventually gets more personal. We’re angry at ourselves because we let them do it. And then we’re angry at the rules that cause us to do that, and the people or institutions that taught us to be such doormats. And then we’re angry about the fact that we’re probably going to have to do some work to change ourselves before we can become effective at changing anything else. And at that point, the anger has really matured, like a bottle of good wine, and we are back to being angry about the outside “bad thing” but we’re owning our own feelings and the responsibility that goes with them to something about it, if we don’t like what’s going on.
(Whether that something is saying “You don’t belong in my life; get out” or talking openly about our experiences of abuse or boycotting a product or joining a movement or creating one that doesn’t exist yet.)
And this is part of the reason I encourage people to consciously go through their angry phase. Because so many of us don’t know how to experience anger. We’ve been taught it’s a bad thing, and we stifle it. We live with all the internal toxic waste of that furnace burning with no outlet. And we live with the pointless embarrassmentts and losses we suffer when we blast our deferred anger on things that are not really the cause. We suffer the heightened reactivity caused by unacknowledged feelings just waiting for an opening to explode out.
The first response of anger — to blame something outside of ourselves and feel like a victim — isn’t the most evolved form of anger. But, like grief and other negative feelings, we have to enter the feeling however it is presenting itself, and then give it conscious attention to it so it evolves. People talk about waiting for anger or grief to dissipate over time, and it will seem to fade, at least in terms of creating feelings that distract us constantly. But if we don’t come to terms with the source and cause of the feeling, then those feelings are just waiting for an opportunity to remind us of that.
I think about all the years I lived with a sense of having a bottomless well of unmanageable grief in the center of my personality. It put me at constant risk of clinical depression. I had to mentally tiptoe around it, and never, ever go to certain types of movies. Likewise I lived with hyper-alertness, that cause me to jump a foot off the ground if someone didn’t make enough noise approaching me. (And couldn’t go to other kinds of movies.) Not to mention the wretched S&M fantasies that felt like a tractor beam dragging my sex-life into weird power games that made me feel not just dysfunctional, but self-destructive. All of it related to my unresolved incest background.
And all of it gone today, or so diminished that it’s hard for me to remember how it all felt. Because finally, as a result of realizing I’d collaborated with that horrible man, I realized that something was wrong with me. And if I want to stop living with these painful feelings and confusing thoughts and self-destructive behaviors, I was going to have to start paying attention and working on fixing what was causing it.
Which may seem like a big digression, and maybe it is, but I think that anger itself may be a path to profound healing and the recovery of personal power that goes far beyond just getting over these relationships. And maybe it just requires paying attention to it — instead of saying “I don’t want to feel like this” — and respecting the wisom of our own emotional systems instead of assuming there is something wrong with us.
Another long post. Sigh. Okay, this is busy-busy bee flying back to work.
Kathy
Wow Kathleen – Can I make a personal appointment with you for some one on one therapy? You have always related with me and my past. Not knowing that much about me. Yes I am a incest victim, dont think there is such a thing as an incest survivor. And I do think that has made me sexually dysfunctional and the root cause of some of my issues. I dont get angry, just a few times in my life I was surprised at the anger unleashed in me by my mother and xbf. It’s just easier for me to avoid then confront, mostly because they are what they are and regardless of what they did or said they turn the blame around on me and justify and rationalize what happened to the point of making me give up. I will defend the one’s I love to the death but not myself.
I have a folder full of you comments and articles and post, your special to me.. And if coming to LF triggers bad memorys for you then dont come here, I only want the best for you, I think you and I have found some peace with ourselves, as much as possible anyway..have a great day and know that you give me calm….
Yes, Jeannie,
Please do tell! What did he say about your throwing the noodles & corn into his truck? And did the raccoons actually get into it? That sounds like something I would want to do! I don’t know about frying a cellphone, as Hens did, because I’ve always been too afraid of the retribution if I actually destroyed something of value.
My son was once involved with a truly skitzy woman who burned everything he was planning to move out of her house: his clothes, boots, CDs & CD player, all piled in the drive-way & set afire. I told him he should file charges on her, & he said, “Mom, she just did it becuz she didn’t want me to leave her!” I was stunned that anyone would think that burning clothes would give the person a reason to stay!
When J left me in May, he left a lot of his books, clothes, & other personal things here….along with everything he hadn’t gotten shipped out of his lab, like some very expensive equipment. I was tempted to destroy it all, but I was still hoping that he’d be coming back, so I didn’t want to do anything that’d make him mad! I did take several boxes of his papers out of the office & dump them in the lab, & I was even worried about that. Then, about 2 wks after he left, he emailed that he’d transferred $400 into my bank acct, & he sent me the confirmation of the transfer from the bank…….& he left his note to the bank requesting the transfer on the bottom of the email. It said, “I’ll send you my new mailing address shortly.”
THAT’S how he told me he wasn’t coming back, after he’d been telling me for 2 wks that he was just “trying to get centered & figure things out!” I was FURIOUS. I went to his lab & threw bottles of oils & other liquids thru 3 large (expensive) flasks. I broke maybe 6 bottles in the process, but restrained myself from further destruction, still hoping that he might change his mind & come back….when he said he was coming to pack up the rest of his lab, I confessed to him that I’d broken some of his things, & OfCourse begged for his forgiveness.
He said, “I could never come back to you because you have an extreme & terrible temper when hurt…..as evidenced by your destruction of my lab. You are dangerous, angry, & destructive.”
Once again, he’d managed to turn it all on its head & make me the guilty person. And, BTW, he never came back to pack up the lab….he said he’d be sending people to do it & that I was “nuts” if I thot he’d ever come back to my house for anything.
I think some sub-section of “people” seem to think that if they ignore sorrow, anger, or other unpleasant feelings by “staying busy” rather than confronting those feelings and dealing with them that all will be “well.” My egg donor subscribes to the “just don’t think about it, pretend it never happened and all will be well” philosophy of life—in fact she has actually said that to me.
I think that is along the same line of SUCCESSFUL coping strategies as PRETENDING THERE IS NO MORTGAGE PAYMENT DUE.
Lots of people have either gotten to the point of being unable to pay the rent/mortgage but literally pretend it isn’t due.
Pretending doesn’t make it go away. Eventually the sheriff comes to your door and sets you out on the street.
I think feelings are like that as well. Ignoring them and not dealing with them doesn’t keep the debt from being due.
We frequently talk here about peeling the “ONION” OF OUR LIVES, ONE LAYER AT A TIME and when we get through and resolve one layer there seems to be 100 more under that one, but dealing with them I think I the onlyh wayh out of the OVERALL mess.
Thank you so much, Hens. I don’t mind the bad memories, as much as the fact that they send me back into processing. The processing is good, and I profit from it. But, you know, it keeps me in the past, and my present is pretty interesting now.
My e-mail address is in the author section. You’re welcome to get in touch. I’ve always thought we understood each other pretty well.
Kathy
Oxy,
I know that I was pretending that things were all fine with us, but I really thot it was just a “bad patch” we were going thru. After all, he’d never ever said that anything was wrong between us….never indicated it in any way until the 10 days before he left…& even then, kept saying that he was depressed & frustrated over work. And that was totally understandable. He continued to say he’d thot he’d maybe “gone a little crazy” over the obstacles in his work, even after he left. (Of course those comments were interspersed with other hateful comments about me.)
Thru all of our years together, his nurturing, caring, attentive treatment of me never changed. The only thing that changed was that he was traveling more & more. And that sex had virtually stopped, but he blamed that on “low testosterone from being in prison” at his age. And his travels were easily explained away becuz they were actually business trips…..he just didn’t tell me what else they included, &, as I’ve said before, the only times I questioned them, he had a ready explanation for it.
I’m still struggling to understand it all now. It remains murky for me. I know now he lied to me for years & had been deeply involved with his other woman for 4 yrs–beginning shortly after he got home, when I “knew” things were perfect between us! But I still blame myself for some of our problems, &, whether they were actual “problems” in our rel or not, I know there are things about me that I don’t like & that I’m working on with my therapist now. I’m feeling far more *sane* now then I did May-August, but I’m still dealing with the demons of doubt & depression—tho I have overcome the despair.
As Kathleen said above, “I don’t mind the bad memories, as much as the fact that they send me back into processing. The processing is good, and I profit from it. But, you know, it keeps me in the past..” I am slowly processing it *all*, & posting here & working w/ my therapist is helping me to do that.
I want so badly to get on with my life, but I’m still allowing myself to be hampered by the freshness of this wound….I’ve never been cut so deeply by anything. I’m getting involved in doing work with my church again, having given up a lot of that over the past few yrs….I’m working at a church event tonite. And I’ve contacted the local women’s shelter & have made an apptmnt to talk to them about volunteering there. I know I have to Step Out if I’m actually going to get on with my life….to do things beyond the gym, & spending time with friends, & with my son, & with my therapist…..but I’m such a chickens**t at this point in my life!! I’ve Never been *afraid* of anything ever until now. This has been so crippling…..
I missed everyone here…password problems, but I’m back. So, my therapist lied to me, twice in the same conversation. First told me he doesn’t accept plastic for payment, but that is how I paid him the very first session. I recall clearly because it was such an awkward moment while the receipt tape chugged out of the machine as we sat without speaking in his office. Then, lied about suspending sessions for unpaid bill as indicated by “NO SESSIONS!” (I pay my bills, but was out of work, no income for2 months and went into survival mode all money went to lawyers, so most have been on hold until last Fri–halleluja!). I questioned his use of an exclamation point in that way on the bill. And was glad I did not ask or just believe his answer. That is new for me. The benefit of the doubt is OUT. Then he tried to make me feel “damaged” for a minor error in recalling the total I owed. WOW, did I spill my soul to another spath?? I guess if you have to ask…
Dear fearless peace,
Oh,, darling ! I am so sorry that you got hooked by such a faker! ((((Hugs)))) Well, at least you got away!
Dear Whyme,
Yes, it is time comsuming to process all this carp! But I liken it to this. If you had say been in a horrible car wreck and had every bone in your body broken, you would NOT expect yourself to 1) not have any pain, 2) go on as “if nothing happened” 3) get well over night 4) not need some help and support in your recovery.
BUT because we don’t have a full body cast, or even a cast on our pinky finger, we “look okay” we look “Whole” but we are any thing but whole or well. WE ARE RECOVERING from a TRAUMA a TRAIN WRECK TRAUMA.
So even if others can see that about us, and expect up to “get over it’ “move on” and all that carp, WE KNOW the extent of the damages and we will give ourselves time, comfort, caring, help and love—-even if no one else does!!!! We will VALIDATE OURSELVES!!!! ((((hugs)))))
fearless,
I just can’t imagine having a therapist treat me that way! The worst that I can remember was back in my late 20s, when I had a substitute therapist for several months, & my apptmnt with her was right after lunch, & she’d fall asleep sometimes during our sessions! I’m SO fortunate that I have a therapist now who takes both Medicare & Medicaid, so that I can see her 2x a week & not have to worry about the bill!
Oxy,
thank you for the big (((hugs)))! I’m so sick of listening to myself whine. And, after tonite, I have to realize—once again—that I’m just not good at “volunteering”. As always seems to happen for me, there are always far more volunteers than are needed for the job at hand, & I don’t like standing around with nothing to do. It makes me feel even more inadequate! Not the standing around with nothing to do, but the ducking out early, saying, “listen, since there’s nothing I’m needed to do, I think I’ll just go on home.” It’s hard for me to validate myself when I do things like that.
It was good to get home to have time to spend with my son who’d been away working for a couple of days….but I wish I were a better “volunteer.” What the heck is wrong with me…..
Dear Kathy, glad to see you! I just wanted to thank you and Oxy and Rosa for the wonderful coaching you gave me last spring. Just a little update what happened since then. You remember: I got busted by my “partner”, and I decided not to go as an employee with “prospective” future partnership he initially wanted and promised.
Well, I have moved since then in my wonderful new flat, had 4 months of just slobbing about and getting used to the new area, retightened the knots with old friends from high-school, kindergarden, university and relatives, whom I carefully chose, and could distance myself easier from my unhealthy family so that I was not anymore the easily disponible servant to them. Besides of that I did not much, no travelling, no extensive reading, none of all the things I wanted to do “when I have plenty of time”. Just lingering, slobbing, like the walrusses on the piers in San Francisco. (I even had a little guilt trip towards myself at the end)
From April till May I cleared my old flat, very cathartic indeed, threw out LOTS of things, old love letters and the like, and from may til now I was moving in my new flat, decorating it with stuff from fleamarkets, and now I feel really comfortable. In july a car hit me in my car, so I had to buy a new car as well; so everything changed!
I started working in August, and after an initial culture shock I start to like it very much. (it is a small hospital and everything has to be ordered well in advance to get it, the thinking is completely different; and I have always worked in big facilities where everything was staple and ready to use). My colleagues are very helpful and also grateful (!) that I am there, and for the first time I feel really appreciated for what I am and not just as a working bee.
In February when I discovered that my “friend” was about to con me I could not imagine that life can be so nice.
The pay is less than at my former place, but the appreciation is priceless, and the fun getting up in the morning and finding meaning in life is here again.
As you mentioned in your post above I also tried not to be too much the solution for their problems by getting too much involved but observed everything from a healthy distance being friendly but be strictly business with everybody, being attentive and reserved and not letting the guard down too early. I feel now much more “grown up” and standing on my own feet, and must not be afraid anymore. And with my colleague I get along very well. She talks to me, for a start! ;-), and she knows the words thank you and please and how to apologize.
And one of the best chocolate factories in our country has its outlet in walking distance from the hospital. I have arrived almost in heaven!
If it was not for the “busting partner” I would not have found the courage to leave everything behind to start with (the old working situation had become unbearable as my former boss wanted his mistress to have my position). You all helped me to find the courage to continue after everything imploded, to find the manure part in all that shit.
THANK YOU!!!
I wish you al a very nice weekend!