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.
super chic
I can relate to that!!
hens
Slimone – your above post reached down into my soul and pulled out something that has always lingered there. You hit a nerve. [ But for me, for whatever reason true personhood was possible. But for them. Not.] I question myself all the time . what is my disorder? Why do I feel so different? But YES I have true personhood. I have always felt as I am a good person, not bad like the abusive people in my life. I am a true person, with a heart and a conscience and alway’s, all my life, keeping my self esteem and selfworth UP has been a day to day struggle. When I get to feeling like a true person, I volunteer to let another abuser knock me down. That will never happen again. I have true personhood~~!!! thank you for your awesome post..
Tilly
But we don’t do it anymore shabbychic! TOWANDA!
libelle
Dear Slimone, dear JAH, thank you so much for your posts.
I could so relate to it! It helped me tremendously sorting out the confusion after I read about “inverted narcissist” by Sam Vankning (very dangerous man I think, I will NOT READ ANYTHING ANYMORE BY HIM) some time ago, and I found myself there described to the T, but also I knew it was NOT TRUE that I was so deranged and that there was NO HOPE FOR ME as he stated. I did not find an answer to solve this problem. Thanks to you and Dr Leedom’s article I could relate and find a satisfying solution/explanation for this problem.
Dear Amay61, welcome! Sorry that you “qualify”, and the first time is the toughest. As others said: The truth will set you free, but first it pi***s you off”. Stay here, learn and read, and post if you have the urge to contact him, NC (No contact)is THE most important to healing/detoxifying the soul. (((Hugs)))
amay61
Thanks, again! Just reading your responses made me cry this morning. I haven’t really done that yet. The urges to contact him are overwhelming! I have deleted his number (finally) from my cell phone, so at least that oh-so -easy method is gone! Of course, I know where he works, his church (HA!) etc. Coming here to post is definitely the better choice.
Having been starved of intimacy, affection etc. in a “safe” but dead 29 year marriage, the hormones went bezerk! My husband was able to sexually ignore me 10 years at a time (while living in the same house).
Anyway, glad I’m here. Thanks for the acceptance.
neveragain
amay61…stay strong!
blindsided31
amay61
Wow, your story sounds somewhat like mine.
I ,too, am in a 20 + year “dead” marriage to a man I no longer love who has multiple physical and emotional issues.
I also was seduced by the most charming, attractive(married) man I ever met who, for 18 months, made me think he was my best friend, my forever friend— only to have him dump me by telling me he does not love me. Only after that day when I was “blindsided” did I discover he had scored with his next victim the very day he told me he didn’t love me. Like this post says, he, like all Ss, is pretty much always bored, and therefore must contantly be looking for a new thrill (or in my case victim).
At least my S never wanted money, all he got was my heart. I loved him so much, relied on him so much, and was so shocked when he dumped me that now, after a year of the dumping (8/31/08) I am still working on recovery
At this point, it is 8 weeks of renewed “no contact”. He has a knack of calling me on hurtful days (my birthday; anniversary of a trip we took) to make sure I know he “still” does not love me. The last call was 8 weeks ago. Like I told hecates path and justabouthealed, this time (for the first time) I told him I would not be contacting him and told him not to contact me.- and so far I am succeeding.
NC is still very hard. I still cry often ( twice today) and miss him so so much. But I do know that any renewed contact will just give him the opportunity to hurt me again (while he constantly says “I don’t want to hurt you any more”).
Keep up the good work of NC and continue to look here for support from people who know exactly what you are going through.
ANewLily
amay61 and blindsided,
My heart just bleeds for both of you — victims of narcissiopaths who were just using you for their own pleasure and egos. Yet, playing with your deep emotions and hopes and leaving you in despair.
I have no idea if you are like any of the “victims” that my EX captured, used, and trashed when the new one came along — all while telling ME how much I was loved (in words anyway) and telling me I was his best friend, complementing me on how well I understood him — all lies, come to find out. I was just his “public image wife” to cover his disorder and to allow him “permission” to victimize other women behind my back.
I’ll never know the answers to my unansered questions about his strange behavior — except that he is disordered — but I don’t even care any more. I only care DEEPLY for the hurt he caused other women who believed his lies.
My prayers are with you both!!!
blindsided31
ANewLily
I am so sorry too, because I knew I was doing something that could potentially be discovered by his wife and hurt her terribly- like you have been hurt.
Of course, he had a “pity” story during the seduction phase. His wife had various “health problems” with the implication that she was too absorbed in her illnesses to pay attention to him. He was so good, so charming, so convincing that he got me to do something I never dreamed I would do- I was the biggest goody two shoes in the world prior to his coming into my life.
I often wonder if his wife has any idea what is going on. I’m sure I wasn’t the first and the woman that came after me won’t be the last. To the best of my knowledge, up to the time he dumped me, his wife did not have any idea. I often wonder if I should tell her (if only to warn her about possible STDs)- I think that would be the best way to get back at him. But I have not, I do not want to be the one to give the news that would cause another person such agony. I believe he treats her just as your husband treated you- he is super nice to her- the “perfect husband” in a perfect house- good show for friends, family, and neighbors.
Of couse she must know something is not right even if she does not label it sociopathy-(they have been married about 19 years.) I met him on the job (where I have worked for 30 years)- he is 59 now and has told me of many jobs (and many odd endings of jobs- none of which were his fault at all, of course). Now he, after 3 years, has lost this job in a very weird way- a state job that is very hard to lose unless you do something very bad, unethical etc.(but just the kind of thing SPs can’t help but eventually do). I’ve been told he has had to take a job far away with a long, arduous commute- at probably a lower salary. But he is so good and so convincing he may have her convinced that he was a victim of a mean boss etc.
And if she knew all that he was doing behind her back, I’m not sure his wife would leave him. Even though I have read on this blog of women that had no idea of what the SP husband was doing, I still somehow wonder if she has some idea but just blocks it out?
Sadly, the SPs leave a trail of wives; friends; lovers etc. and feel no guilt at all about any of it.
Tilly
I too studies Sam Vankning for a couple of years before I ended up with my p dentist boyfriend! Huh! lotagood it did me (not!)