Like many of you, I am very grateful for a few friends who acted as sounding boards as I processed my experience with a sociopath. The best talks have been with my exercise partner who is also a former Federal agent. About 2 years ago on one of our walks we discussed what it must be like to be inside the skin of a sociopath. Both of us tried to imagine what their inner world is like.
On that walk we both connected with ourselves and each other in a way we hadn’t before. The connection happened as we reflected on what it must be like to live a life without love. I realized that my sense of myself as a continuous person over time is based on the people I love and the values I have a passion for. Everywhere I go I carry with me a sense of duty, love and connection to my children and other loved ones. My dearest ones are always inside me. The fulfilling of duty to them gives life purpose and direction.
According to Dr. Cleckley, the first psychiatrist to really study sociopaths, the disorder produces an incapacity for love that is “complete”. Furthermore Dr. Cleckley states in his book, The Mask of Sanity that even those who have an “incomplete manifestation” of the disorder completely lack the capacity for love.
Without love to give themselves a sense of feeling and purpose, sociopaths are prone to boredom. They have to keep filling their lives with excitement and also abuse substances to fill the gap.
Sociopaths live in the moment because they lack the loving human connections that give everyone else a sense of continuity of person and purpose.
Sociopaths also have no true self because instead of being based on loving connections, their sense of themselves is based on who they can dominate in the moment. If yesterday they had to assume a certain identity to get over on person A, today they may have to assume another identity to get over on person B. This assumption of identities is not a problem for them because the goal is not loving or meaningful connectedness. The goal is the pleasure of the get over. They will become what they must to accomplish that goal.
I’ve been struggling over whether or not to include a section on “identity” in my next book. I am trying not to get too psychologically technical. But it might be helpful for victims and family members to reflect on identity and understand why sociopaths lack a stable sense of self. I am interested in your thoughts about that.
Since some of you indicated you wanted me to tackle an explanation of “borderline personality”. I’ve been reading on the issue of identity. On page 213 of “Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism” psychoanalyst Dr. Otto Kernberg says the following:
The normal integrated self and its related integrated conceptions of others guarantee a sense of continuity throughout time and under varying circumstances. They also guarantee a sense of belonging to a network of human relations that makes life meaningful, and they guarantee the ordinary “self feeling” we take for granted”¦
He also says that absent loving connections:
”¦ pathological subjective experiences of a painful and disturbing nature develop. Among these experiences predominates a sense of emptiness and futility of life, chronic restlessness and boredom..In typical cases, it is as if this emptiness were their basic modality of subjective experience from which they attempt to escape by engagement in many activities or in frantic social interactions, by the ingestion of drugs or alcohol or by attempts to obtain instinctual gratifications through sex, aggression, food or compulsive activities”¦
I hope you will spend what is left of summer reflecting on your own loving connections. As you contemplate the meaning of these connections and their importance to your sense of who you are, consider your own “self-feeling”. Realize that you have yourself to give yourself in intimacy to another either friend, family or lover, while the sociopath you know has nothing to give anyone.
Star, I read the first two books but never got to the third. Why did she single out David Peltzer? was he a child from another relationship or a product of rape? did he ever explain his thoughts on it? I kept wondering why she’d single out one of her own kids in this horrific way
Hi all,
Just a quick post…will finish reading the comments tomorrow – I missed my Tues all-day session – up to SeaWA for an R&R wkend with good friends and dinner with my 28 y.0. dau.
Oxy, as ever your posts are insightful and CHOCKful (lol) of interesting information.
As I was reading your post of Sat Aug8 12:05 am – I noticed one thing and wanted to let you know that I’d reada NYTimes article last week about lying – it was a recorded interview and the interviewee is a “prestidigitationist” – sleight of hand magician: he used the story of Joseph and the coat of many colors and had this take about it:
When the brothers in Genesis 37:20 said they’d say “some evil beast hath devoured him (Joseph) – they were talking amongst themselves, plotting.
Reading further, however, in Gen 37:31-33, they “implied” by showing the bloddy coat of many colors to Jacob, their father. They didn’t SAY some wild beat had devoured Joseph (because none HAD), they merely held the coat up and Jacob recognized it as Joseph’s and INFERRED that Joseph was dead by dismemberment…they did’nt LIE to their father, they merely let him come to his own, albeit erroneous, conclusion.
Narcissopaths do this constantly: they won’t say a THING is such and such, directly; they WILL however IMPLY the thing and let their “victim” draw their own conclusion – it’s like scripting without directness, programming their victim to feel sympathy, or hand over cash. etc.
They IMPLY and the other generally INFERS the thing is true.
It’s misdirection (the magician’s stock in trade) – for example my guy’s EX – (YAY! we picked up the littlun today to have and to hold forever) – was bilking a few of her guy friends for money because “my asshole husband is behind on his child support and I need some help til it comes…I’ll pay ya back when he does.”
My guy was NEVER behind – he always paid in full and on time – but SHE would let her guy friends INFER that my guy is THE jerk, not supporting his kid. So she got bunches of free money from them, with the full knowledge that my guy wasn’t “behind” – she merely implied, with a lie, and let them draw their own conclusions.
Anyway – I appreciate this group of fine folks and their comments. Paper doll, chameleon, hollow, and “Masked” all describe aspects of the narcissopath – but it’s like looking at the facets of a diamond, one at a time – you never see the whole thing, just as she never DID tell the whole story -I just thought I’d share this “implied/inferred” pattern that I had just last week read about – it seemed to fit, and Oxy’s story about Joseph and the brothers is very “aptly illustrated” in it’s use here.
~jewels~
GemGirl:
Great to hear a happy ending! I love your story..its beautiful and gives me hope…THANKYOU!! xoxoxxo
amay61
wow yes it is very cool that so many of us have experienced the same things! I think I see that there are many general patterns that people assume, either as abuser or victim, that the behaviors are the same. I mean, I am amazed that S#2 said things verbatim off of the checklist. You are perfect, I’m not sorry, oh there are more just not able to think this morning.
Wanting contact from him still is very frustrating for me. I think it has to do with closure, in part – there were some very good discussions on that on another thread here. We basically don’t get it, cause they won’t give it to us. WE are the closure, the buck stops with us as long as we are NC.
Another reason, I think, that I want contact, is validation. This stems from childhood abuse. He told me I was perfect, beautiful, funny, sexy, smart, down to earth, caring, compassionate, giving, loving (yes and all in one email too, besides many other times). Nobody has ever told me all that before (not even husband). If he was lying, it must mean all those things are untrue. So I want him back to keep telling me all that stuff. It felt so good, and I believed him. Now, when my HUSBAND does tell me those things, I have a hard time believing him. So IRONIC! But I think, you are just telling me those things because you know you have to now to make me feel better. AGGHH, round and round we go.
And then, I think, the third reason I want contact – to me he is the escape route. Very often, my REAL life, is frightening. Not horror show scary like many of the stories I’ve been reading on here, I’ve never been beaten or raped – just emotionally abused as a child by my dad & mom, and sometimes as an adult (we live next door to them). But the tyranny of the every day. My parents are still my parents, my husband is still my husband, my job is still my job – going back to “normal” sometimes scares me silly. Long way round to answer your question – my marriage is now AWESOME, the debris from the bomb is just about cleaned up, my husband is a CHANGED man who now completely understands what his role is supposed to be. BUT – I have a hard time believing 100% that it won’t go back to what it was before. Trusting him – hard, fully understanding that he has really changed, difficult. I want someplace or someone I can run to. My sense of self is so vague I have always needed someONE to support me emotionally, I have a lot of growing to do if I should ever have to get out and live under my own power. So in the back of my mind I want S#2 to still be there “in case” I need to escape. Right, like that’s gonna work.
Posts from you and others here recently have helped greatly. I feel much stronger now than I did even over the weekend.
And I’ll say more about our marriage because it seems you are interested in that, maybe it will help. I tend to analyze everything down to the last molecule. Comes from trying to analyze my parents as a child. I want to figure things out. So I was, in time, able to explain most of why this happened to my husband. We spent a LOT of time talking, long walks talking. We stuck together like glue – he needing to know where I was and what I was doing, me not wanting to be alone and sad and scared – every time the kids needed to be taxi-ed around, we went together. Need to pick up milk at the store, we went together. Yeah, the kids thought it was weird. And it could have been, but we took every chance we could have to talk and sort. I told him stuff I remember about growing up and the abuse me & my brother dealt with – stuff I had stuffed, didn’t think worth remembering so I had never told him before. It was eye opening for both of us. He had a couple really big “lightbulb” moments – one where before going to sleep I told him he needed to grow a backbone (we had just witnessed some arguing/bantering going on between my brother and his wife – I felt it was fun/normal and they got it done and were fine afterward – hubby was shocked and thought it was “bad”) told him I needed him to stand up to me and give me some feedback in life (he was dead-passive prior to this – I could have painted the kitchen purple w/ pink dots and he wouldn’t have noticed for 3 days and then just said, oh that’s nice) well, he didn’t sleep at all that night for thinking about that. But he tore down that wall of fear he had created which kept me driving the bus the whole time. Now he sees how unfair it was to let me do EVERYTHING, except bring home his paycheck and take out the trash. This is a guy who thought landscaping was mowing the lawn – and only that. He would have rather just have gravel. But we can’t because we are up against a hill, and have to keep the house from sliding down it. We just had major construction to replace rotten timber retaining walls. We spent a week’s vacation building our own stone wall, and planning other things. We did it together and he enjoyed it! Now when we go out, he looks at other people’s yards, asks me what kind of plant this or that is, thinks about potentials for our yard – it’s amazing. It’s like a zombie brought to life. I’m so thankful to God for this. And it’s such a RELIEF knowing he is now on MY team. I have been feeling all these years like it was me against the world. He admitted that he had put everything and everyone else before me. His work, his family, his hobbies, I took a back seat to all of that. And I thought I was supposed to be content with that. After all, he is working hard, he “loves” me, he doesn’t beat me or drink or gamble, we have a nice home, “nice” family, etc….what do I have to complain about. I told myself this – and I know if I complained to either set of parents or friends, they would have cut me down. So S#2 shows up and puts me on a pedestal, wow look what I had been missing!
But then I realized that while I was giving and wanted to give ALL of myself to him, he was just giving me back scraps, or only the little bits of himself that he was willing to reveal, which turned out to be completely false, and in the end, nothing at all. And I was just filling in his “gaps”. His own words.
HEY
Has anybody found this interesting? In “The Sociopath Next Door”, the author states how we as a country seem to foster or encourage sociopathic behavior as a culture. The “ME” generation, look out for your own needs and all that. Now I am finding sociopathetic stuff everywhere, particularly in music and advertising. I will hear songs and the lyrics and go – WOW that is really sociopathic. It is really driving me crazy and it is kinda scary. We are feeding these people – either that or a lot of S/P’s are musically gifted.
For those in a marriage you feel you can’t leave….a very close girlfriend can give you a ton of emotional support.
My brain is foggy from antibiotics, forgive me not listing everyone’s name, I’m going back to bed!
This blog has been a great help to me since my involvement with a soicopath ended this past June. It was very shocking how he suddendly left and married another woman with 4 children (from another man who just left her) went to Las Vegas to marry her & now she is having his baby. I was with him for one year. I recall how he was robotic in many ways, and my friends all thought he was ill. But by that point, he had isolated me from them. And he wasvery emotionaly abusive. To me and to his elderly & ill father. It was terrible.
The good thing that I can say, is that I am the lucky one. Even though he is showering his new wife with everything she could possibly want, I know that it is an act that will most likely fall apart once his baby comes (his hier) and I will not be surprised when he leaves her, but before that, he will most certainly abuse her and her children. At least I know that he isnt able to love, and I keep re-reading the profile of a sociopath in order to remind myself and to refrain from magical thinking. My fantasies stay in my head, and are getting less and less as more time passes.
It has been very difficult, but coming here to read has significantly helped me. I have not seen him since June, and when I do I will simply be polite. I expect nothing from him ( as he devalued & discarded me) and I finally can make sense out of his behaviours and craziness! Again, I know that I am the lucky one to BE FREE.
Thank you all for being so incredbly honest and open about your experiences. It is a healing balm 🙂
Dear a_real_wife,
I ge tyour point about the psychopaths not always SAYING out loud a lie, but putting things where someone will infer the untruth.
The Trojan Horse P, when I asked him if my egg donor had loaned him the money said “I have friends in texas”–inferring that those friends had loaned or given him the money. He did not say NO. When I confronted him about it later, he kept saying “I didn’t lie I just deceived you.”
I looked up deceive in the dictionary and it says A LIE. So whether they SAY it or let you INFER it from an EVASIVE “answer” it is still Deception and deception=a lie.
That story of Joseph has many meanings to me, and the best one being that FORGIVENESS does NOT equal “restoration of trust” without some SIGNS OF REAL REPENTENCE on the part of the person who has “sinned against you”—-and believe me, I have never seen any REAL repentence in my P son or my egg donor, only the VERY THIN OUTWARD “I’M SORRY” AND then, a QUALIFIER like “I’m sorry that you perceived I did something mean.” LOL ROTFLMAO yes, my PERCEPTION when you lie to me directly or indirectly is that you don’t want me to know the TRUTH because it will make you look bad.
When my “perception” is that I have caught you lying is that you are NOT TRUSTWORTHY, well, that is the way it IS. If you are not trustworthy, show no signs of repentence by changing your behavior, actually trying to make amends, etc. I will forgive you but I will NOT RESTORE TRUST TO YOU. So sorry, that’s just the way it is. I think Joseph had the RIGHT idea. LOOK at actions, not words.
Even Jesus said that you can know a good treee from a bad tree by looking at the FRUITS (behaviors) and people who do bad things as a way of life, who lie as a way of communication, are not “good trees.” Don’t need any more rotten fruit in my life!
Dear Missdiaz,
Glad you are here and that LF has been a healing balm fo ryour soul. Knowledge is power, and gives us back the power to take control of our lives. I think your assessment of how he will treat this woman and her children is correct. You are the lucky one!!!! God bless.
Missdiaz,
You are 100% right on!
Glad you are healing. thank goodness it didn’t last longer, though that was bad enough.