Lovefraud recently received the following e-mail from a reader who we’ll call Martha.
I have a 33-year old adult stepson who I believe is sociopathic — he fits all the criteria. He has been a problem to the family ever since his mother threw him out to our house at the age of 13. By that time he was so oppositional there was no dealing with him in any reasonable way. We went through all the “standard” teenage issues with him — petty crime, running away, repeating years in school, counseling, adolescent psych facility, military school till we ran out of money, etc.
What is different about our situation from everything I read is that my husband has stood by him for so many years, giving him money, cosigning on loans, all to no avail of course. My husband thinks he is being a good Christian parent and that he is the only one who is forgiving enough — the rest of us are at fault for not being forgiving enough. We can have no reasonable discussion about his son, as he does not like to hear anything negative about him. We can have no reasonable discussion with his son, as he never takes responsibility for any of his actions — everything is our fault for not doing enough for him — all the standard excuses that sociopaths give.
My unique issue is that I feel a lot of guilt about it. I know he was 11 when we married, so I could not have had any part of early childhood upbringing. He showed some of the signs you talk about when he was 11, but he did not appear to me to be a red flag issue at that time. I was never able to bond with him, but his being sociopathic explains that to me in retrospect.
What I would like to hear about is how other parental figures deal with these feelings. My own husband acts like he feels guilty, but will not admit it. His ex-wife is emotionally fragile and has to stay on meds to keep from having a breakdown and being hospitalized again. My stepson is probably ADD also, but neither of them wanted him “labeled” as a child, so they rejected any sort of meds or treatment for him back then. I guess my moral compass says that parents should not inflict this type of child on society and must do everything possible to assure they raise their children right. I know it bugs me that neither my husband nor his ex ever seemed to do a whole lot to correct their son or guide him even today. I also know that a stepparent really has no ability to alter the situation either. I just feel that it is so wrong to have this situation and have all the family members taking this approach that it is not their issue or problem, and the guilt sponge in me feels that I cannot be allowed to sink to their level with them.
I feel guilty for being part of the whole situation and not being able to make it any better. I feel guilty for being part of unleashing my stepson on society where he preys on people and does not carry his weight. Every time I read one of those articles where people want to start prosecuting the parents when someone like my stepson commits a crime, I just cringe in fear. I feel like as long as my stepson is acting the way he does, someone must be doing penance for the sins. And it scares me that I feel that he will never change but we are responsible to get him to change since we somehow failed to properly mold him in the first place.
So why am I the guilt sponge? Why do I want everyone else to wallow in guilt like me? Are there other family figures in similar situations who feel all the guilt that no one else in the situation seems to feel? I know this is unrealistic guilt, too. I know I was raised to be a guilt sponge, so part of it is just me. Sometimes I think I have all the guilt genes these sociopaths never got!
Martha is not to blame
The reality of the situation is that Martha is not to blame for her stepson being a sociopath. This personality disorder is highly genetic. Martha is not the biological parent, so she had nothing to do with his genetics.
As Dr. Liane Leedom explains, children born with the genetic traits that may lead to sociopathy exhibit signs such as aloofness and fearlessness. This is because they have a diminished capacity to form bonds with people, including their parents. Parents need to work extra hard in order to teach these children how to love. For the best chance of success, parents must do this from the time the children are very young.
But this is new information—Dr. Leedom’s book, Just Like His Father? was published in 2006, and it is the only book that addresses how to parent children with genetic links to antisocial behavior. The information was simply not available when Martha’s stepson was growing up.
Plus, these children are, in fact, difficult. It takes a lot of emotional strength to teach them to be loving, day in and day out. Martha says that her stepson’s mother is emotionally fragile, so she did not have that strength.
The stepson came to Martha’s home when he was 13—probably in the midst of puberty. In many cases, the hormonal changes of puberty cause sociopathic traits to really become prominent. Martha and her husband did everything they could, such as counseling and military school. It didn’t work.
The sad truth is that sometimes the genetics of sociopathy are so strong that all the best efforts of parents to guide their children fail. Martha’s stepson may be one of those cases.
How to deal with the stepson
So now what? Martha’s stepson is 33 years old. He is an adult. The issue becomes, how does Martha and the rest of the family deal with him?
The first thing, I believe, is to be clear on what this disorder is about. If the stepson is a sociopath, he will probably be manipulative until the day he dies. He will lie, cheat, sponge off of others, perhaps commit crimes. This is what he is; this is what he does. No one in the family should have any illusions that he will change.
So then, what do they do? I’d say it depends on what the stepson does—Martha provided no information on that point.
If the stepson is a criminal, I think they should let him face the consequences of his actions by, for example, not bailing him out of jail.
If the stepson tries to defraud women, I think they should warn any woman that he snags. I’ve heard of many cases in which the families of sociopathic men were happy to let some poor, unsuspecting woman take the parasite off their hands. This, to me, is unconscionable.
If the stepson is abusive to Martha, she should implement a policy of no contact, even if her husband will not go along with it.
Martha mentioned feeling guilty about unleashing the sociopath on society. The family may or may not be able to do something about this. I know of one case in which a family made sure the sociopath was taken care of—set him up with a place to live, food, etc.—just so he wouldn’t have to steal and manipulate for a living. This might work for a parasitic type of sociopath. But, as Steve Becker writes, many sociopaths act out to relieve their boredom, so it might make it easier for him to cause other kinds of trouble.
Finding peace for herself
There is only one person we can ever truly change or influence, and that’s ourselves. Martha is in an impossible situation, and to me the only thing she can do is try to find peace for herself.
Martha needs to let go of the guilt. She did not cause her stepson to be a sociopath. She did her best to guide him in the right direction. It didn’t work.
Having a sociopathic stepson probably feels like a loss or a failure, and Martha may need to grieve this. Although there may be little Martha can do about the sociopath, she can do something about her emotions. She needs to let go of blaming herself, let go of wishing things were different, and accept what is.
Remember the Serenity Prayer: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.
Regrettably, there have been no responses to this post. I don’t have much to offer Martha, except sympathy.
Martha, guard your finances as much as possible. Your husband’s concern for his son may cause him to give the S assets the two of you need. The two of you may need legal help with this, and it’s a ticklish thing to do, given your husband’s prickly emotions with regard to his son.
I suspect that Martha’s husband feels far more guilt with regard to his son than Martha does. Martha, you know your husband best. Do and say whatever you can to mitigate that guilt.
It has been my observation that sociopathic children bring a great deal of grief, and even financial ruin, upon their elderly parents. One of my dear friends has a daughter who is probably borderline. This daughter is incarcerated for minor, stupid, piddling crimes this summer. Many, many people are sighing with relief. My girlfriend doesn’t see it this way, of course. Even though the daughter is 50+, the mother is grief stricken because her “baby” is troubled.
I’m afraid this is what you have to look forward to as you, your husband and the sociopath all age together. Guard your finances to the best of your ability, and be prepared to offer your husband a great deal of emotional support over the years.
When S children move home in adulthood, they bring awful baggage with them. I suggest that during a lull in the action, you convince your husband to move into an intimate little retirement home with NO SPARE BEDROOM! (Chuckle) It’s A OK to be a bit stealthy in your efforts to insulate your lives from the S.
Oh, one more thing: Don’t run around warning people of how awful your stepson is. This will backfire. It’s a rare person who will heed your warnings. You’ll only brand yourself as the “evil stepmother” if you do. Warning people about Sociopathy is an absolutely thankless task.
Martha,
You are living with the feelings of a victim. For all practical purposes, you are a victim, though you are not identifying yourself that way. You are writing about your concerns about everyone else, and your internal confusion about what you should being doing about them — now or in the past. But the primary topic of this letter is your feelings, and that’s a really good thing to be focusing on.
Whatever your stepson is in diagnostic terms, he is affecting your life in serious ways, and has been for a long time. And whatever the causes of his behavior, he is an adult now and accountable for his behavior. This is important, because you are also accountable for yours and whether you are actually taking care of yourself.
One of the hardest things in dealing with people like your stepson is to separate yourself, to realize that he is not only a supportive and loving influence on your life, but that he will actually suck you dry or harm you, if you don’t consciously get some distance. Emotionally, if not physically.
No question you’re dealing with a complicated situation. A husband who is in denial, and probably (as Elizabeth noted) struggling with his own guilt, disappointment, and a lot of other emotions that threaten his sense of himself as a good person. The fact that the mother is emotionally unstable doesn’t help either. It sounds like you are the only one in this emotionally enmeshed group who is dealing with anything like a rational and realistic view of what’s going on.
In other words, you’re the grown-up. And because everyone else is acting as though they are inadequate or unwilling to face reality, you are left feeling like you are responsible in ways that you just aren’t. All of this is out of your control, and that’s the hard fact.
What is in your control is how you look at it, and how that affects how you feel about it and what you do about it. One of the ways you can look at it is that your husband is behaving irresponsibly, if you two have any hope of holding onto your remaining assets, not to mention your mental health. And you may have to find enough backbone to confront him, without apologies or caring whether he understands or not, and tell him that he is not taking care of you two and you expect him to do better.
This is going to be a tough conversation, and you may need to find a marriage counselor to help you go through it with him. But he is collaborating with your son in destroying your lives. It has to stop. And if he continues, there will be repercussions on your side. I don’t know what you can threaten him with — stop cooking for him, stop sleeping with him, leave him — but you have to communicate that you’re serious about this. So that he can see what he’s doing to you two, and make some decisions about what’s important to him and what he wants the rest of his life to look like.
This is not about not loving him. Quite the opposite, though he might not grasp it at first. But you also need to be prepared to back up your threats, even if it comes to leaving. And that’s going to be hard on you, but otherwise this isn’t going to stop. The stepson is manipulative and is playing off his father’s feelings of responsibility for him. And you need to clarify for him that he is prioritizing the wrong responsibilities. Not just in terms of how he should be caring for you, but how he should be caring for himself.
As far as what you’re experiencing as guilt, maybe it’s not guilt. Maybe you’re articulating it that way, because it’s a familiar concept in your current family or family of origin. Lots of times, when we dig down under these things, we find that we’re really angry with ourselves for allowing ourselves to be abused. For allowing the people we have supported and loved to return our investments with selfishness and thoughtlessness. I wouldn’t be surprised if this were so in your case.
At some layer of consciousness, you surely must be resentful and frightened about what your husband and this grown-up stepson are doing to your life and how they are threatening your future. A lot of your letter is about why you feel you can’t take action, the various obstacles related to other people’s emotional states or chronic behaviors.
But you know, Martha, this is your life. If you don’t stand up for what you think is prudent, fair and loving toward you, no one else is going to do it. Especially not in this group. Unless your husband wakes up. I assume he loves you and depends up the good, well-established partnership of your marriage. But it also sounds like he might be suffering something like the same kind of guilt, a kind of mask of depression over not being able to get his own life under control because he feels responsible for other people’s behaviors.
The real challenge is for both of you to toughen up. And start thinking about and taking care of yourselves. If you’re stepson is ever going to grow up or behave more responsibility, he’s going to do it on his own dime, not yours. What he owes you now is a truckload of apologies and efforts to make amends. Short of that, he’s not worth dealing with or worrying about. He’s on his own destructive path, and your only real relationship to it is as a witness. Available to help by sharing your own experiences, if someone asks. But otherwise, what he does has nothing to do with you.
If these other people insist on thinking that they need to be involved, you absolutely have to think about what you’re going to do to protect yourself. There’s a concept that some people here talk about as “sociopath by proxy.” If your husband is giving away your money and darkening your life by continuing to support this dangerous man, then you have to recognize that you might as well have the sociopath in your home. This is a tough thing to face, but it’s what you’re dealing with.
I’m sorry to be so blunt. And sorry this is so hard for you. But the truth is that you’re a victim as much as the rest of us here. And like us, you face the challenge of taking your life back. The fact that you’re here at all is a great step. Welcome to LoveFraud. It’s a wonderful place for healing.
Kathy
Dear Martha,
I am a 62 year old woman with a VERY SIMILAR SITUATION, only it isn’t my husband that is ENABLING the psychopath but my mother and the “child” (now 38) is in prison for murder which he is guilty of, AND has recently tried to kill me by seinding another psychopath he met in prison to do the actual murder of me—because I cut him out of my will.
I am also othe one who coined the term “psychopath-by-proxy” for my mother’s toxic enabling, giving my son money, providing for him to have a LOT of money after her death, which he will use to try to get out of prison AND to use to try another attempt on killing me and his two brothers.
Though your husband, like my “egg donor” (mother), couches their enabling (muting the consequences for the psychopath of their behavior) pouring mooney and other assets to these people and saying it is “forgiving” IT IS NOT ABOUT FORGIVENESS AS THE BIBLE DESCRIBES IT—I too am a Christian but my egg donor’s “definition” of “FORGIVENESS” is to “PRETEND IT NEVER HAPPENED” THOUGH YOU KNOW IT WILL HAPPEN AGAIN EVEN THOUGH THERE IS NO GENUINE SIGN OF REPENTENCE.
It appears that your husband is using the same “twisted” lotgic cloked in “christian forgiveness” that my egg donor uses to excuse my P son, NO MATTER WHAT HE DOES, it is “not his fault” and so on.
In this situation, Martha, there IS ONE INNOCENT person, and that is YOU. There is NO WAY you caused or failed to prevent this young man’s behavior.
Your husband is a TOXIC ENABLER who is in my opinion a “psychopath-by-Proxy” with his enabling of his son to continue this reign of terror without consequences.
My other sons and I have completely cut off all contact with my egg donor after she promised to stop sending money to my P son, and then lied about it and we caught her lying to us. She knew that if she sent money, she would lose contact with us and we have continued to stand by that. She still sends the money. I amher only child and my other sons her only other grandchildren, so she has in effect, TRADED the P-grandson of hers for the rest of her family. She stands by that choice and we stand by ours. so she is alone, her only family contact the letters she gets from her incarcertated grandson.
I have a feeling your husband would do the same.
So, after a marriage of 20 something years, your only options are to 1) accept the situation as it is and not participate in it and continue to live with your husband while he sends your joint assets to this man or 2) cut your loses and get a divorce and half the assets if you can.
Neither of these “option” is an easy one for you. It was not easy for me to “divorce” my egg donor, as I am her only child. It was also not easy to “divorce” my P-son, even if he had become a murderer, but after much pain, 20+ years of headaches and sorrow and tears, I did both of these things.
I am very sorry that you have had so omany years of your life lived in chaos and trauma, but the one fact we have to accept as grown ups and the hardest to accept I think, is that we cannot control what others do or thinnk, even when it is so obviously “bad.”
I wish you well and I ihope that you will come here to LoveFraud and learn more about psychopaths and about their enablers and how we CAN BREAK FREE and BE FREE and experience joy in life again! My prayers are for you and your healing and escape from all this continual pain. God bless you. (((hugs))))
I so agree with Ox Drover, (as usual). The only way I am able to survive the abuse, and self guilt, I suffered for years dealing with my “troubled” daughter, is absolute NO CONTACT. Yes, break free of this sociopathic “kid”, and his enabling father both.
Oxydrover, I love you and I miss you all. I had to comment on this topic. I had to stop posting for a while, due to the divorce and custody battle.
As you all know, I am the daughter, sister, ex-wife and mother of a sociopath. My daughter is now 11. In the past, she has made 3 attempts on my baby’s life from my second marriage, drowned my poodle, snapped my birds’ necks and has stolen from me and my friends, including food, money, makeup, clothing and whatever she can get her hands on. Her new thing is to disappear in the middle of the night and come back with large amounts of cash. Every lock in my home is disabled as well, so that she can gain access to whatever she wants. They are repaired every week and she simply disables them again.
We are down to finalizing her being placed in a permanent facility and it has been a lengthy process and a desperate cry for help.
Like the husband of the woman in this posting, I denied, denied and denied her condition. I even went after the school board when they “segregated” her from the school bus for torturing other children. But when she drowned my poodle, it got “real” for me. Then I knew, she was one of those.
I no longer deny the truth about my daughter, as I want to go to the hilltops and shout it out and warn THE WORLD. She has no soul, she has no conscience and she is a “flatliner”. Yes, a “flatliner”. When I look into those eyes of hers, there is NOTHING there, as if she is simply staring off into space. The expression changes, but never those eyes.
It’s funny how my mother’s own parents hid what she was and we hid what my brother was and my first ex-husband’s family hid what he was. I suspect the reason is that NO ONE wants to admit to having a monstor. Yes, A MONSTOR from the scary movie that in their sick, twisted game to win, they keep coming back. You think that at the hospital after giving birth to her, I would think, OMG, she is going to be Rosemary’s baby? It is not what I signed up for.
She is in the therapeutic school now every day and will be transitioning to live there full time. During the struggle, guess what? Her father called me! He now wants to be in her life. I quickly told him to go back to hell and keep running it OR, go find some chains and haunt a house. He says there is NOTHING wrong with her. HA HA HA.
At her therapeutic school, she has already conned her shrink. The shrink actually thinks she can save her and pointed out the fact that she didn’t want to give the poor worms to the bird on their field trip to a nature outing. I told her that it is all an illusion…..Whatever! Whenever I piss her off, she makes false reports against me and CPS shows up equipped with her shrink. This shrink thought that she could “save” her. Thank GOD that the shrink my little P had been seeing prior to this school and since she was 5 (the same shrink I wanted to fight in the parking lot when she told me that she saw something DARK in my child that I humbly went back to and have counseled with over a year), has been there to back me and swatting down child protective services like flies. Her con game; however, has been helpful to my benefit. I told her “Please, I can save her” shrink that if they didn’t do something soon, I will send her to her father and within a week, she will be a street prostitute, but because both she and her father are so cunning, they will NEVER prove it.
I’m DONE. And I too do not want to unleash a beast on society, which is why I will ALWAYS rat her out……..ALWAYS. She knows this and perhaps this will keep her away from me once she graduates “Vampire High.” It’s funny, one of her classmates (another P) told her that everybody at that school is going to hell and she asked if it was true. My answer, “It won’t be so bad, at least there will be somebody there that you know.”
If I offend anyone, I really don’t care, come live my life with her for one week, just one, I will pay all the expenses and afterwards, you will RUN for the hills.
tdpprocessing,
I’m so sorry. Has the “I can save her!” shrink gotten a clue yet?
We had two kids in our family who started running wild at about age 11. Ironically, the rest of the family didn’t know. The parents knew their daughters sneaked out every night, of course. The rest of us were clueless. We just saw “sweet little twin girls”.
I don’t think my nieces are as bad as your daughter, but it just goes to show how much can be hidden and/or denied. You describe a lot of hiding and denial WRT previous problem members of your family. I can relate to this, because it’s taken me decades to learn just how crazy-mean my two nieces, now in their early 20s, can be.
They’re as sweet as pie to me, but absolutely evil to their mother and each other.
God Bless You, Dear Lady. You’re in my prayers.
As I read what Martha has written, plus the responses, I’m struck anew by the damage that results from relationships with Sociopaths.
Martha, cling to sanity! Don’t let the step-son ruin your life. Stop thinking about him as much as you can. Limit the damage he can do to your finances and your emotions. Try to protect your husband as well.
Sociopaths, Psychopaths, Histrionics, Borderlines and Narcissists really change us. The greater our exposure, the worse we’re harmed. Oh sure, we can and do recover. That being said, the memories can be awful, and the recovery process is rough. Finances don’t always bounce back so easily. Even when we feel stronger and wiser than ever before, we still bear the scars.
Don’t waste any more emotion on your Sociopathic Stepson. Disconnect, distance and insulate – that’s your best bet.
Blessings,
Elizabeth
To answer your question Elizabeth, the answer is no. The shrink still thinks that there is something that I am doing that is causing her behavior saying that she wants to “attach” to me. It’s utter nonsense. She called me today and said that she had to file another report because she lied again and said that she was spanked, when I asked by who, she said, “you.” So, I was like do whatever you got to do.
The school made a bed ready for her as of tomorrow on emergency shelter plans because I reported that there are safety concerns. This will be emergency placement for 30 days and give the school board a chance to re-coop and call her IEP. At the last IEP, the school board got into a pissing match with the staff at the school because the school performed a “psychological evaluation” on her and began to read it about how low her cognitive skills are and how she can’t identify correctly with emotion. The board immediately adjourned the meeting to talk with their “uppers”. My best friend who is a juvenile correction’s officer was there and said, “It’s all because you guys don’t want to pay….Yes Ms. Shrink that think you can save her, she is in fact good here at school, it’s because you have controls.” He went on to explain that she can’t do bad things there because there is so much control and literally 2 staff members to each student. He made me laugh so hard when he said, “Meanwhile, that little souless girl wakes up at home before school and says, let me do 10 bad things today before I leave because I won’t have that chance at school.”
So, I am meeting with the school tomorrow and will be saying goodbyes to her. I am mandated to meet with the school and her once a week, as their goal is to eventually have her “reattach” to me and come home. It’s all to frustrating. **sigh**
Dear TDp. my God! I thought I had problems with my daughter, but compared to what you have had to live through, they seem like nothing. How terrible for you. I hope and pray that you will be able to extricate yourself from this agonising situation, and get some kind of a life for yourself.
My ex husband was an alcoholic, and he did bash me severely before I left him. However, I have long ago forgiven him, and still have good memories of some happy times with him. The problem is now with my daughters, now 43 and 45 years old. I havent seen the younger one, Claire, for 16 years, and have never once been allowed to see her 3 kids.
Until I found Lovefraud, quite recently, I had no idea that the hell Ive been experiencing for over 30 years had a name, that both my girls are NS. The older one was the worst, over the years she has,wrecked my art studio, and destroyed all my art books and paintings, painting over some of them. Invited strange guys into our home when my ex and I went on a brief holiday break, to try to save our marriage. When we returned w found our home had been vandalised and wrecked, -thousands of dollars damage. She has thrown a red hot steam iron at my head, and then hotly denied it,beat me with a bamboo pole, leaving red welts,hit me in the face with a belt buckle, threatened to break a stool over my head.
She has connedand fleeced me out of thousands of dollars, lied to me, wrecked my tiny flat, bad mouthed me to my new husband, told so many lies I even wonder if she knows she is doing it. Since she left her poor long suffering husband 3 years ago, I have given her thousands to try to bale her out of toxic credit card debt.She never, ever rings me unless she wants something, usually cash. I gave her an ultimatum several weeks ago,set a boundary,{that she get rid of her former alcoholic friends from her facebook, and re-instate me, and also apologise for all the terrible, cruel, heartless things she has done to me. Since the letter, I havent heard from her, and I havent rung her. I feel at peace about it, and dont miss her at all. I know I must NOT weaken, and now that I have the marvellous support and help from all you great people out there, I know I CAN DO IT!! Its not easy to cut off your own flesh and blood, but she is not, as dear Oxy said, my dear wee girl any more. She is a selfish, cruel, manipulative, conniving lying B—ch. She doesnt love me, I doubt if she is capable of love.My lovely new Iranian “children” make David and I so happy, they ar so appreciative of all we do for them. They hug and kiss us, and are doing much to heal my broken heart! I thank god for them! Maia {geminigirl}
tdpprocessing,
Reading your posts, I kept thinking of how grounded in reality you sound, and what a hard road you’ve traveled to get to where you are now. There are a number of people here dealing with problem children, but you are the first person I can remember who has gotten so far with diagnosis, going through the treatment options, getting professional support, and placing one into a residential facility.
I’m sorry you’ve had to go through this, but I’m grateful you’re here telling your story. It may help some of us. I hope the relative peace and safety makes a big difference for you and your family.
Kathy