Contrary to a prevailing myth, sociopaths are really no smarter than the average individual”¦probably dumber. Sure, a good one can dupe you, but as I’ve written elswhere, this is no great shakes, as most of us can dupe each other if that’s our goal.
That’s because we enter relationships risking trust and faith in each other, which makes the exploitation of our trust and faith really easy. It takes no genius or particularly smart, crafty person to exploit this trust and faith. It’s as easy to do as it’s wrong.
And so, most sociopaths aren’t really that clever, or ingeniously bright. Most make messes not only of others’ lives, but their own too. Many end up in jail, and those who don’t are often finding trouble in other areas, exercising poor judgement all over the map, squandering friendships, family, and all sorts of meaningful opportunities.
By most standards of a successful life, sociopaths live lives of abject failure, accomplishing little more, at the end of the day, than having produced plenty of havoc and pain. None of this indicates that, as a group, sociopaths are smart.
Sometimes the media sensationalizes the sociopath as the dark, brilliantly predatory monster, especially in classic cases of psychopaths like Ted Bundy. But Ted Bundy wasn’t so smart. In the end, he was nothing but a vicious, sadistic murderer who managed to lure young, naïve girls sufficiently into his proximity to then viciously murder them.
How much of an accomplishment was this? To be able to lure naïve girls near enough to his car to then kidnap and kill them? Otherwise, OJ Simpson style, Bundy was ambushing dormitories at night and butchering innocent, sleeping college kids. Not exactly a genius, or courageous guy, at work here. Just a perverse, murderously violent, cowardly man.
Sure, Bundy was reputedly charming and articulate (video of him bears this out). But this didn’t make him “smart.” He was, clearly, adept at “masking” himself. But again, effective maskers aren’t smart; they’re just good maskers. And nonsociopaths routinely are good maskers.
Good masking, good self-disguising is a type of social skill, and not the purview of sociopaths exclusively. Also, many sociopaths are terrible maskers, just as many nonsociopaths are.
My point is that the “mask” is not an indication of “smartness.” It’s merely the case that some sociopaths, and some nonsociopaths, can mask aspects of themselves and their agendas effectively; but bear in mind, just as many do this very poorly.
In the end, sociopaths, as a group, have a poor track record of living effective lives. Rather, they live disruptive, unsatisfying lives”¦fraught with pathological attitudes and empathic deficits that bring misery to others and, correspondingly, much trouble and, at best, empty satisfaction, to themselves.
Sociopaths simply are not successful people. They may (or may not) skate along under the radar for some stretch of time, but this is not a “game” that smart people play, and that smart people get off on.
Only dumb people play this game. Only really dumb people live this way. Only really really dumb people derive satisfaction, for however long they can swing it, from pulling the wool over others’ eyes.
It’s just no great shakes to do this, and it doesn’t make you smart.
Zim,
You speak often about the bi-sexual nature of your spath. You are over focusing on that, I think. My own spath prefered 12 year old native american girls but he also fuked young skinny blond men and some old women that he could use to seed envy against me so that he could destroy me.
I really think that you are wrong to focus on his bisexuality.
I’ll explain better: HE ISN’T BI-SEXUAL, HE IS A SPATH. THEY FUK ANYTHING.
My spath actually MADE SURE that certain people knew he had young women on the side. he bragged about it to a certian best friend. Truth is, I doubt that ugly mofo had too many young women in his later years, but he wanted people to think he did. They always plan ahead in their convoluted spathological way. Think about it, if others think that he was a player, then, when Skylar accused him of trying to poison her, or of killing his best friend so he would get the helicopter for free, WELL THEN SHE IS JUST A SCORNED WOMAN MAKING UP STORIES FOR REVENGE RIGHT!?
Zim, I do agree that there is childhood abuse involved. The description of which, is too complicated to get into here. But the SPATH IS NOT BISEXUAL. HE IS A SPATH. He will fuk anything. Sex is a distraction from his EVIL. It’s a power play and a distraction from reality. My own spath was soooo good at sex. It’s all about power. People are vulnerable to sex, so if you are good at it, you have power over people. So why not expand to both sexes? It’s psycho-marketing.
Constantine,
I know that my ex (spath, I say) was, indeed, seeing that particular “Imago” therapist, because he had two of those appointments, at the beginning of our relationship, & I recall rendezvousing with him in front of those offices. I merely am curious as to what all “Imago” therapy is for. That said, I don’t think that therapist was a very good one, as he didn’t seem to help my ex with whatever his “pathology/pathologies” were, but then again, I’ve heard that spaths can’t be cured, that treatments are not very effective. I don’t obsess over wondering what his pathology is, so much any more. It gets less & less, thank God. And neither do I feel any more grief over what his daughter’s behavior was. Her loss. I know that I am a kind, nurturing human being, and he or she can no longer hurt me that way. I do think my warning those biz contacts he had was worth it, though. I’m still protective where children are concerned, that’s just me. That part of me is a GOOD thing. I just wish he had not wasted so many years of my life with his shady ways. It is only a matter of time that Ms. Next will see him for what he truly is..a monster. He can’t keep it hidden forever.
skylar,
about that bisexuality issue..you are probably dead on right about that. My father once told me that the only true bisexuals are those born with both sets of genitals, female & male, and that the others who claim to be “bisexual” are just gluttons..greedy. I am inclined to believe him, but that is just my opinion.
Imago therapy sounds Jungian. An imago is, I think an image held in the psyche, that represents a person, (probably a primary caregiver in childhood.) If you are that curious, why not google it? I think I will. Sounds interesting. I love Jung, and he helped me a lot, in early recovery. Especially his concept of the shadow. Ever heard of it? Good stuff.
Another PROJECTION he made at me, in the end was “your lovemaking was too powerful” .. Sounds like something he probably should have said to his gay male cousin, only he should’ve used the words “your sexing me had too much power over me, as a kid..was beyond the boundaries any kid should have endured”
Even that projection contradicted his previous descriptions of my sexuality with him: “you make my blood boil” … “I was taken with you” ..which all got “canceled” with his sick statement, years later, “becoming One with you did not give me that wave of relief rushing over me”.. or some such words.
Yep. Just a sick spath. He could barely get it up at the end. What am I saying.. “at the end” for..?? heck, it was more like a limp noodle most of the time (even when I counted 15 M-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P-Is very slowly, he couldn’t last much longer than that, and I even have proof (from another woman who was a friend of a friend of mine, that she though he had “performance” problems), in an e-mail, that another woman more or less described his “lack of prowess” similarly. I think it was “porn creep” from all those gay male porn videos he watched.
Zim,
Well, but didn’t you say somewhere that he was married at the time? (i.e., during the Imago therapy sessions? ) Because spaths do sometimes get “forced” into marriage counseling by their bewildered spouses. I’m not sure of your story, but that WOULD be textbook spath: meeting the mistress outside of the marriage therapist’s office!
Anyway, other than that or something court ordered, nothing else comes to mind. But after looking up “Imago therapy”, I have to say that on a cursory glance it sounds rather airy-fairy and insubstantial. The thought of your ex spath with some gentle, “let’s not blame anyone, it’s about underlying causes” new age psychologist, is just too delicious for words! (It makes me think of Hitler smiling down at starry-eyed Neville Chamberlain as he signed the “Peace in our time” agreement”!)
But if that’s not it then I’m at a loss as to how he ended up in a therapist’s office at all.
kim frederick,
Never heard of the Jungian concept of the shadow. But I often felt if my ex could’ve stolen mine, he would have..actually he almost did, by stealing the sun from shining on me..keeping me in darkness.
Constantine,
“didn’t you say somewhere that he was married at the time?”
He was separated for 1.5 years, living with his mother at age 40-something (RED FLAG right there!) I was not the “other woman” though, that caused his 2nd marriage to fail. He admitted to having an affair (or tried to..she smartly told him, “I don’t want your problems to become mine”..or so he told me) with a married woman, then he “dated” (or had a fling with) another woman (the one who I, years later, found out had confided to her friend that he had “performance problems”), who I met at a mutual friend’s party. So, technically, he was in the divorce process, dragging his heels when I began my relationship with him. But it IS possible that the Imago therapy could have been a result of some kind of “edict” or ultimatum from his second wife (like “if you don’t go, we won’t ….”) He did tell me that when he & his 2nd wife tried marriage counseling, he didn’t get much out of it. He also told me she refused to go to Alanon to help him through his AA stuff..but that could have been a lie, too.
That therapist MIGHT have been their marriage counseling therapist, though he did not say so. If so, though..yeah, that certainly would “feed into” the textbook “spath character”
Per your “airy-fairy” thought. It did cross my mind that the therapist might have held men-group sessions for “gender confusion” issues or a sex addiction group of men, and the it crossed my mind that that therapist might have been a little “light in the loafers” too, possibly shady himself (like those “happy ending” massage therapists.)
I sense that my ex probably gleaned his co-dependency jargon from those sessions, though, to use as word weaponry on others later, to flip the script, gaslight, etc.
One of his excuses he made to his friends for his 2nd marriage ending was to blame her cats & the vet bills. If he didn’t want an animal lover for a wife, why marry her? Probably because her daddy owned a rock/gem shop & he saw an “easy way” to a potential “cash cow” & an instant job for him, but it seems now to me like he bucked under her daddy’s yoke, then convinced her to open another rock shop, with just he/her running it, in a distant town. It went under–was going under before I arrived on the scene. He foreclosed on his marital home with her. He admitted to me that she was worried he’d ruined her line of credit, or that she’d accused him of it. He told me that his would-be-ex-father-in-law wanted to put him permanently out of business (he said these things after he & I’d rented a house together, & about a year later.) Just a mess that I wish I had not been the sounding board all those years, for the “pity me” stories of his.
One of the last things I found out about my ex was that he had joined a men’s pipe-smoking club. Ha. I wouldn’t put it past him to use that as a means to escape his “happy” 3rd marriage (if it happened), as an excuse to ACTUALLY go out & have sex with men “behind the scenes” .. on the DL.
It also dawned on me that perhaps those (Imago?) therapy sessions he supposedly had, may have been about “working on the hurt child within” .. as in, maybe there was an adult survivors of incest group he belonged to. No matter what he was “counseled” for, he generously used co-dependency terms to fit his own agenda, to flip the script on others in his past, and said nasty things about even his good friends, behind their backs. He said of this one guitarist with whom he’d been in two bands with (the guitarist thought highly of my ex, even liked his second wife), “he plays guitar [stiffly] like he’s carrying two buckets of water” About same guitarist, my ex said that that guitarist’s wife was clinically depressed, & implied that it was due to how the guitarist treated his wife, or due to his personality. He said about another guitarist we worked with, “his eyes glaze over whenever I’m trying to get him to learn something new.” He could be cattier than the cattiest female you’ve ever met. He even used the word “enmeshed” to describe his own mother, once or twice.
He said about one guy who spent juvie time in the same facility he did (because the guy later got busted for drugs) about how much “better” he thought he was than that guy, because he’d stopped using (his 1st wife told me that my ex still sold drugs when she knew him, so, apparently, that juvie time he spent, did not stop him from that activity!) when that guy didn’t.
If you’ve ever heard the Conway Twitty song, “Image of Me” .. with the lyrics, “she laughs and she drinks, just a little too loud, and with her pride gone, she hangs around, just any ol’ crowd..well I know I’m to blame & I feel so ashamed that I made her the Image of Me”
… I think he tried to “foist” (PROJECT) that “label” on me, too. True, he did not drink (to my knowledge) the entire time I lived with him. True, he bought groceries for us, most of the time. For the first 8.2 years, he never bought any wine for me. In the weeks, right before he decided to abandon me, he bought, each time he went to the grocery store, one of those large bottles of Merlot, for me, which I would nurse for about a week (my father believed, like the French do, that drinking one glass of red wine each night, is good for the heart.) I wondered, why, all of a sudden, he was buying wine for me? Was it so he could PROJECT later, to others, about me, that I was an alchie? (if so, he failed. I can only recall ONE time when I’d had too much to drink, at one gig of his, years & years before he decided to buy that large bottle of Merlot, for a couple of months. It was because I’d had rum & coke, which made me sick that night..something about the mixture, and I never had any since that night.) I have never been an alcoholic. I KNOW the dangers. My mother’s 2nd hubby was an alchie. Brilliant man, but he left her for a Bar Room Betty in their 10th year of marriage. My father was not an alcoholic, either. Neither was my mother. Alcoholism runs in genes.