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.
Dr. Leedom,
I have read through this about 5 times, and find myself particularly inspired by this topic of healthy attachment and identity.
As a survivor of childhood abuse the development of a personal identity separate from ‘victim’, with healthy attachment to others, has been hard won (and has made me a sitting duck, off and on, to predatory types). Much as I hate that it is true the injuries to my early needs for affirmation and cherishment made it difficult for me to trust, and form loving connections. Therefore having a sense of self/identity was intermittent, and I suffered terrible alienation and loneliness for many years. Actually very much as you describe the personality disorderd.
I believe having had this kind of childhood made me feel compassion for the n/p types, as I believed I understood what it felt like to be them. And I think, in some ways, I do. But for me, for whatever reasons, true personhood was possible. For them, not.
This understanding about what makes each one of us have a sense of ourselves as we exist over time provides me a real explanation for the groundedness I have been slowly finding, but which was significantly derailed by this last experience with an N/P. The new abusive injury ended up taking me back to earlier times, as if my hard earned connections and sense of self had never happened at all. I have found myself, through my N experience, feeling that same disconnection/boredom/futility. Funny that being involved with one of these folks enamored the same temporary pathology in me, in the retriggering of my childhood loss and emptiness.
Part of my recovery has been the fear that I will not feel more fully connected to others again, and may never reconnect fully with MY OWN self. But I realized, reading this article, that it has been happening.
That even though my feelings of connection may be a bit ‘numbed’ by my experience, they are slowly reappearing. My batteries are slowly recharging, and I have more energy to resume the loving ‘duty’ to my friends/family, and again join in the ‘Conga line’ of life.
Thank-you for this thoughtful article.
Slim
I agree with the inner emptiness, Dr. Leedom. THe narcissiopath I was involved with had a high IQ and SOME insights to his behavior, but actually rather limited. But he did complain of feeling empty inside.
When I said “ok, you win (we reconnected after dating in high school, 40 years later, after intermittent low level stalking), you are a mega millionaire, a doctor, you have kids, etc” (a statement that reflected that I was already giving up my values and buying into his) and he said “yeah, but you have passion”. I do have passion for my work, which is what I think he was referring to.
He also said he needed my laughter. He managed to squeeze all the laughter out of me.
He referred to returning to one of his multimillion dollar homes after an trip away as “returning to the nothingness I call home”.
He called me once as a teen, saying he was about to kill himself. That was part of the emptiness inside too.
He can’t stand to be alone, drinks then. Keeps up an incredible pace with vacation trips. No down time.
Also looking for the next “bragging rights” accomplishment too, like a marathon or whatever.
You are so right that they live in the moment and just want to control or dominate openly or subversively the person they are with, even if it means cutting off their nose to spite their face. All that matters is that they win.
slimone
What you wrote really resonated with with me.
“The new abusive injury ended up taking me back to earlier times, as if my hard earned connections and sense of self had never happened at all. I have found myself, through my N experience, feeling that same disconnection/boredom/futility. Funny that being involved with one of these folks enamored the same temporary pathology in me, in the retriggering of my childhood loss and emptiness.”
Man, can I relate. Perfect, succinct description of what happened to me. I am back to my hard earned connections now. What helped tremendously was surrounding myself with people who share the values and connectiveness I had established. They reminded me of who I am.
It is almost scary how much the naricissiopath hooked me into his world view, I sort of alluded to that in my previous post. I said to my therapist once, I didn’t know life was a monopoly game…I didn’t know that was the game we were playing! THat was part of me being hooked into his world view. And in that game I felt horribly empty. I was so glad to climb back out of that world view. SO THANKFUL.
Now life again has meaning. And it is feeling like I make a difference in alleviating the needless suffering of others that makes me feel alive, and feeling connected to those I love, and to nature.
Slimone:
Your writing is so insightful…maybe you should do a book!
I am brand new to all of this, but I want to thank LF and especially OxDrover for saving my life. I got blindsided in June by the most charming and sexually attractive (aggressive – he really got my attention) man I had ever met. After only 2 days of a very intense relationship, he began to demand money. I thank God for His mercy that this man’s character was revealed so early on. I ran to the internet to try to figure out what in the world had just happened to me. ‘That’s when I ran into LF and got the education of my life. Thank you, Thank you, thank you. You have saved me. I need to get over my hormonal chemical response to this man but with this website’s help, I WILL do it.
JAH,
Jeepers! That is a really nice complement. Thank-you so much!
I am so happy that your loving connections are helping bring you back to yourself. And that you have the internal resources to once again reach out and give to others. Coming out of the emptiness, from being caught up in the false logic of the pathoworldview, is amazing! I too am thankful to be back in my own mind and body. It was like I was taken over by an alien, and woke to find myself starved and near dead from it’s misuse of me.
I have chronically doubted my connectedness to others, nature, and my importance in others lives. Thankfully my circle of friends and family are generous with their expressions of love and gratitude for me. And this site, with loving people, such as yourself, have helped me ‘refuel’, and once again have the resources so that I can more fully participate in the give and take of healthy relating.
Love to you…and all
amay61,
SO good to hear you interrupted the ‘seduction’ of this creature early on!!!!! Welcome to LF. This place is the real deal.
Amay61. Your eyes were opened after just 2-3 months??? That’s phenomenal. You must be a very strong and wise woman.
Glad to have you here!! But, sorry you had to encounter even such a brief experience to give you qualitifcations for membership!
The getting over the intense emotions you felt for him may be the hardest to overcome. But as other posters attest, it can be done!
Amay61:
Stay here on LF, “sexually because “sexuallyattractive, aggressive, unavailable abusive men “will eventually elicit a red flag sign from you instead of the hormonal chemical response you have now. You got it from your childhood. Like me.
E>G> Abuse = attention, must be love.