Although it has been many years and there is a new relationship, a friend of mine still wishes every day that the sociopath that preyed on her will “drop dead.” Wishing and hoping that some horrible end will come for the sociopath takes up time and energy in my friend’s life; as she searches for evidence that something bad has indeed happened to the sociopath and then is disappointed.
Recently, I discussed the topic of forgiving psychopaths with a psychopathy researcher who is not a clinician. He said he received a letter from someone complaining that friends were pressuring the victim to forgive. It was the psychopathy researcher’s opinion that people should NOT be told they have to forgive a psychopath.
Upon reflecting on this opinion, I believe that this psychopathy researcher may have a special insight that informs his view —that psychopaths should not necessarily be forgiven. Perhaps this insight is: in spite of their brain disorder, psychopaths still have a choice about what they do.
My son is now 7, he and I rough and tumble play every day. It is impossible to wrestle and not have some kind of slight hurt come to one or the both of us. From the time he was very young, perhaps as young as 3, my son has appreciated the idea that mommy didn’t “do it on purpose”. If he pokes me in the eye or lands rough on my stomach he’ll say “Sorry, I didn’t do it on purpose.”
This example illustrates our inborn social contract that says we do not hurt each other on purpose. If hurts happen in the course of life, they are usually unintended side effects of other behaviors and so should be forgiven. Cheating on a spouse could even be forgiven as an unintentional hurt if the person succumbed to temptation in a moment of weakness, realized the wrong committed, then repented. Even murder is not punished as much if it is an accident.
The problem with sociopaths is that their behavior is no accident. They hurt people on purpose, carefully planning, then executing their plans. After 7 years of reading research articles and talking to victims, I believe choice is part of a complete explanation of sociopathy and victimization. If you watch any of the TV shows about sociopaths you too will see that the theme of their choices permeates the media.
Friday night, Gangland on the History Channel told the story of Billy Wadd, a member of the Devil’s Disciples motorcycle gang who gained notoriety when he broke the biker’s code of silence and testified against his nephew who murdered a family during a home invasion. Wadd said he decided to aid the prosecution of his nephew, John Wolfenbarger, instead of “taking care of things the usual way” because “You just don’t kill kids.” It is clear he believed these murders were performed with an intention that not even another sociopath could accept, so even sociopaths believe in their own capacities for choice.
Now let’s reconsider whether victims should be told they have to forgive. It seems there is a natural human instinct that says forgiveness is reserved for accidents, unintended consequences, and perhaps intentional slights that are out of character. How then can you ever forgive a psychopath?
Psychopaths have been compared to predators. I think this analogy is seriously flawed. A predator such as a lion or wolf has to kill in order to survive. Psychopaths don’t hurt for survival. They hurt because they want to, because they like hurting. Their enjoyment of hurting increases the likelihood they will choose to hurt if given the opportunity. They also seek out opportunities to hurt -not for survival but for pleasure.
Since sociopaths, with intention, repeatedly violate our inborn social contract, perhaps they should never be forgiven.
Instead of forgiving, I hope, my friend, you will think about all this and thoroughly digest the reality of the sociopath you shared life with. The reality is terrible— you shared life with a truly evil person, someone who regularly, with malice and forethought, chooses to harm others. Don’t stop hoping to see the day the scourge of this evil person’s existence will be wiped from the Earth, but do not waste any more of your time on him.
I came across the journal I was keeping for my ex SN when I was with him during his cancer surgery and post recovery. So many acts of kindness and love for him……I did this unselfishly because i believd that the cancer would be a wake up call for him and he would change. He promised …..but his “new and improved” change only lasted 3 months!
He told me I was a blessing in his life….. I was his prop for the holliday family dinners, which I cooked and hosted at his houe, I was his private designer for all the home improvements he was doing ……just for me “your Taj-Mahal” he would say….to prepare his house for me to move in (with out any commitments of course). He told me he needed me ….I was his cook, his soul mate and his “ED nurse”….I subjected myself to being used and sexually degraded under the FOG of being an act of love for him.
All the goodness lasted only 3 months… now I feel more used than ever!!!!!! All the bad behaviour and the signs strarted re-appearing, the phone calls and text messages on his phone at all hours of day and night, the misterious disapearing of the phone, the un-accountability for his time, the sudden change of plans, the lying, cheating, and finally the devaluation when he broke up with me at 4:00am in a cheezy hotel off the siede of the road on New Years eve because I was angry at him for manipulating me and pushing all my buttons the day before. We made up again, only to have him continue devaluating me….on another day he told me I was making a “big deal out of nothing” when I blew up because on the day of my birthday in January he admitted to visiting an old lover for tea and oranges while I was home alone.
I continue to be un-employeed and he would buy me groceries and help me financially occasionally but he allways reminded me that I had to “earn my keep”, that if I didn’t do this or that for him, there was allways someone else available. (he has money and is very frugal and very cheap…I had to pay for gas and the only good meal we had on a road trip) .
He used his money to manipulate me into doing things for him that I would not have if I still had my job. He sabotaged every effort I made to look for work and get my self on my feet again. He would say “why dont you just move in and wear the apron, you’ll have shelter over your head, food in your belly and clothes on your back, all you have to do is take care of me and put with me”….”oh and since you cant afford your house anymore, why dont you sign it over to me and I’ll pay off the mortgage for you, I’ll make sure you make a little too” …he wanted me to be totally dependant on him. Emotionally, financially, phisically etc. with out making any compromises or commitments to me. I saw right through the smoke and mirrors.
The final straw came when after cooking, sexing him and doing things for him, he told me he had a date for the comming Friday night with an ex-lover to “wright a wrong” and for me not to make a big deal out of it
!
Only this time I didn’t wait for him to discard me, I discarded him! told him we were finished once and for all. (after 3 1/2 years)
It’s been 2.5 weeks with NC and comming across that journal which I wrote for him to keep, makes me sad and I want to mail it to him. …..I oscilate between feeling strong and good to feeling weak and lonely. He has not tryed to contact me, yet I look for it everyday and crave it at times…wonder if he misses me……I’m crazy to think this.
Sorry about the long post, just need to vent. I can forgive myself in time but never foregive him.
Aeylah says:
I came across the journal I was keeping for my ex SN when I was with him during his cancer surgery and post recovery. So many acts of kindness and love for him—I did this unselfishly because i believd that the cancer would be a wake up call for him and he would change. He promised ”..but his “new and improved” change only lasted 3 months!
——————————
Ha! You know what mine told me? That everything I had done, all my sacrificies and selfless deeds didn’t count because “he hadn’t asked me to do it” – I suppose if he had asked, then, they would have meant something… not!
When I told him that I gave him the best years of my life, he replied that “they weren’t even that good.”
Oh, man! You just can’t make this stuff up.
Quantum,
“Oh, man! You just can’t make this stuff up.”
Aint that the truth!!!!
worst of all is that we did give them undesrvingly probably the best years of our time.
Absolutely! If ever I wanted to become a fiction writer, all I’d have to do is retell my experiences with that monster and I’d probably have a best seller in my hands. With them, it truly is life imitating art.
I recently hired a lawyer to handle my latest ongoing quandary with the monster and, after reading the papers, he called me and said “that incident…it was so strange” – Now, keep in mind this lawyer handles criminal as well as divorce cases and he thought it was strange. I said to him, that is nothing, wait till you see the rest. Well, I haven’t talked to him since that day but he must be pulling his hair by now with all the stuff I turned over to him.
Aeylah, i’ve been doing alot of thinking about how these types can be so hard to resist, I’ve been going through tthis nightmare for 7 years now, 6 of them sober by the grace of God and only because i didn’t live or financially depend on the s. I’ve tried meetings to stay away, hynotherapy, shrinks, therapists, Trauma program for 2 months you name it, book Betrayal Bond was probably the most helpful along with this site and still im drawn to the loser. Over the last six months i lost my father whom i really never had a relationship with not that he wasn’t ther he just didn’t acknowledge me or couldn’t , he wasn’t abusive and was so well loved but couldn’t show me so i’ve been watching the dvd of his wake, he had so many people who really idolized and adored him and they all gave him a beatiful service and i was really proud of him because he had so many people who loved him, but im finding i watch the service becasue im mourning the relationship i nver got with him , and i know this has been an issue that made me a prime target for the s. The s knows this as well, i found myself trying to get my dad’s approval for years and doing the exact same things buying the same things for the s. After my dad passed i was a complete wreck, as i had just come out of trauma program and of course had contact with the s and i was literally dwindling away to nothing, my dad’s share being left to distribute by a toxic bully who i just can’t be near. Sometimes i think why am i such a dam weaking to these sorts of people i try so hard to stand my ground but they always get the best of me and this guy has taken over my role as the Exector (farm is my grandmas long story) anyway he has bullied me, blackmailed me etc. Then aft losing my dad i got involved with listening an d helping this detective whom is by all accounts (therapist confirmed) with a n/s or at least a raging n. and he was very kind much like my ex husband whom i blame myself for losing due to my drinking and generally unhappiness, he tried very hard. Then after watching the cop and his pain i could really see myself in him and he was told he had to tell her to leave after xmas (she used the i’ll stay for xmas ) as the therapist said he couldn’t handle much more. Well next thing is she decides to sing at xmas and now he’s back in the web. Now im left thinking heres this guy just like me with all this goodness and he’s wasting away with her. So i end up back in same position the s being my fall back. I sat thinking yest as we are snowed in here, about all the conversations the detective and i had and how similar it all is, they are really boring cookie cutter people, he looking perplexed at me saying ” why would we go back” and wondering why it is that their approval should mean so much to us, this energy that they have the ability to suck from us and how unfair it is that we got snagged by them in the first place, and i did come to one conclusion that i’ve readon here for years but it hadn’t sunk in, it’s really about us as people, and not them. they will continue doing and being who they are with or without us. I guess as usual i was looking for a complicated asnwer as to why we want their approval in the first place. My s recently (after seeing a biker chick for oh over a year) sat and gave me this look like i could tell you something but i shouldn’t and i didn’t reallly prod, but he came out with the “she really isn’t my gf” and you know i know full well it’s all bullcrap, she thinks she is. I feel as though there is this little teeney part of me that wants to beleive him when he says this crap but that tiny part of me is giving up, i know he is full of crapola and i’m on to all the lies . I had an older gentleman fr the program say to me concerning the detective ” what is it with you women who want to fix men” and i’ve been thinkingon that one too. I wish i could take that detectives wife and th e sociopath and put them on an island , LOST but unfortunately they are like poison to us and not easy to dispose of. I rem the cop saying you weren’t married and didn’t have children with your s. as hs wife uses the fact that his family and children are his life. Just sucks that the good people get used like this. I’ve looked back at my journalling over the years and the anger is what stands out the most, just terrible hatred and now im at a point where i know i have to take my part of the responsibility and the anger won’t get me anywhere. I often wonder why i had to come so close to such evil that i had no idea existed and im so grateful for this site but i know i have to let go and move on which is the hardest part for me , the letting go. Im seeing my shrink tom for last time, not because i have anything pertinent , she’s going on a mat leave, just going to talk about how i need to motivate myself to look for a job and take care of me, she is well aware of how i take on others problems instead of looking after myself. Reading the above posts and the 3 months of niceness, yea they are all the same, jsut thinking though, they must get exasperated pretending to be nice, and that’s a consolation in itself. We don’t have to try to be something we are not. Fake fake fake all of them. In my fantasy i would love to send them on a boat to an island and let them eat each other up. love kindheart.
oh guys for got tomention with the kind things i did i got the ” You try too hard” line and this is another one you have to love he’s say many times “You’re almost perfect” buuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuut then left it up tom y imagination. don’t you just love the lines.kh
Aeylah, not the best years of your life. The worst years of your life. The best is yet to come.
The journal you found … it’s a chronicle of you opening your heart and turning your life into a wide-open faucet for him. You did it because you believed in him. Believed in his promise that everything was going to be different.
And then, after you did this, after you made the commitment to invest everything in this pretty dream, you started to get the payback for your wide-open emotional and physical investments. The lies. The lack of commitment. The attempts to financially exploit you. The glorification and demands for repayment for every little thing he did for you, while whatever you did for him was somehow forgotten because it happened yesterday.
He made a deal with you. He didn’t keep his side. He’s a liar and a thief.
I know how it feels to wait for him to come back, even though I was the one that ended it. As screwy and sick as the whole relationship was, it was so stressful and used so much of my energy that, when I finally got the strength and certainty to end it, it took a while to decompress. My life felt empty. Even if it was bad, I missed the excitement, the challenge of surviving it, and the occasional times that it was good.
This was because I was sick, really sick from the aftereffects of years of dealing with this crap. We don’t always think about what this does to our nervous systems, trying to keep our lives making some kind of sense when we are attached to these masters of chaos. Imagine coming back from a war zone where you’ve been dodging bullets for three and half years. How long do you think it would take to get used to, much less learn to live productively in a peaceful environment?
Being involved with them isn’t the only trauma. The shock of transitioning out of the craziness can also be hard. But the good news is that this time, you did something really, really good for yourself. And as you get through recovering from those years, you’re going to discover that you’re a smarter, stronger, more creative, more successful person in every way, than you ever knew.
When I was involved with my ex, I used to be be astonished at the way my heart was just blown open. I’ve been married three times and I’ve had a lot of love affairs in my life, but I’d never experienced anything like that. It just took me over. No matter what he did to me, no matter how logically I knew that this was a bad thing that was destroying me and my life, I couldn’t get control of it. I’d do anything for him.
At that time, I wondered if maybe it was a good thing, to discover this capacity for love in me. That maybe, after this hell was finally over (because even though he kept abandoning me and coming back, I knew he would leave me eventually), that it would mean that I would be able to love in a new way. Better, more openly, with more freedom of some kind.
Now, a few years later, I think differently. I don’t believe that it’s good for us to love someone else against our own self-interest. I believe that one of the skills of sociopaths is to seduce us and pressure us into letting down our boundaries beyond what is healthy or safe, so that they can induce us to act against our own survival. Love, real love is based on respect for each other as individuals, and the joyful recognition that our separate identities bring value to each other’s lives. We care about each other’s wellbeing, but we cannot really care about anyone else unless we are able to care about ourselves first.
That stunning open-heartedness — all that compassion, generosity, understanding, willingness to invest endlessly in his wellbeing and happiness — that so surprised me, well that wasn’t completely a mistake. It was just turned in the wrong direction. I did need to learn what that felt like. I thought I was such a great lover, but I wasn’t, because I really wasn’t very good at loving myself.
Recovering from these relationships is a great adventure. You’re going to be amazed at what you learn. It’s only been a few weeks, and you’re still decompressing from running a treadmill in the crazyhouse. That’s your problem right now. Think about what you can do for that. Give yourself some safe adventures, like a hike or learning a new recipe or changing the oil on your car. Something with boundaries and a sense of accomplishment that doesn’t leave any hooks in you. You wouldn’t stop dead from a marathon run when you crossed the finish line. You’d cool down. That’s what you need to do.
Finally, I know that you’re probably wondering what’s going on in his head. And I that I probably can’t talk you out of that right now. But the more important thing is what’s going on with with you. That’s always been the more important thing, and he just managed to convince you otherwise for a few years. Whatever you’re feeling, it’s about you, not him. He’s just a bit player in the story of your life, a character in a strange, stressful, wounding chapter.
You just started a new chapter, and this one is more about you than any chapter in your life. It will be a bit of a rollercoaster, but you’re going to love it. Getting better is the best and only revenge that matters. And you’ve already started.
Kathy
kindheart, you are doing so well. Everytime I read one of your posts I’m blown away by how far you’ve come.
Here’s a thought. You need a few things. Just because you’re human. You need to be recognized as a valuable person. You need to have your love acknowledged. You need to feel like you belong, like you have a place in the world. You need to get back something for what you give to other people, not just give, give, give while they take, take, take. You need to be able to trust the people you deal with, and if you can’t trust them, you need to be able fix the situation or get out of it. You need to be able to tell the truth about how you feel without being afraid of being punished for it.
These are just basic needs. And when we don’t get our needs met, we become “needy.” That just means we have a backlog of unmet needs that are driving us. The bigger the backlog, the more they stress us internally and drive us toward extreme solutions (that may not actually be good for us, or may have a bad impact on other situations where we were getting other needs met).
You’re saying that your background of not being acknowledged by your father, not getting any return for your love for him, not getting any response to your efforts to be close to him, all this made you vulnerable to the sociopath. Bingo. That’s exactly right.
And you’re right, they do exactly what you said about taking advantage of those unmet needs. Looking like they’re a solution, that they’re going to make us feel better, because it’s the fastest, quickest way to make themselves our drug of choice, so they can use us.
KH, I don’t know why your father behaved like that toward you, but you deserved better. Particularly from a father, who had responsibility to support you not only financially, but emotionally too. These unmet needs are the result of neglect of the child that you were. I don’t know what was wrong with hm, but it doesn’t really matter. What does matter is the fact that so much of your life has been shaped by this emotional starvation, and what you’re going to do about it.
Yes, as your therapist said, you need to take care of yourself. But I think that maybe you also need to rebuild your relationship with yourself. Because this kind of parental neglect will leave a child (and the adult she grows into) uncertain if it was her fault or uncertain if maybe she just wasn’t worth any better treatment.
It’s important that you understand that this wasn’t ever about you. That his inadequacies as a parent wounded you, but he was the inadequate parent, not you. If you could go back and take over for him, and give you all the recognition and love and attention you needed, things would be a lot different for you. You needed a parent who was overjoyed at your existence and committed to bringing you up as a happy, confident and self-reliant child.
Believe it or not, you can actually do that for yourself now. If you can go back into that memory, and recognize that your father is not doing a great job of giving you what you need to grow up, and tell your child self that you think you can do a better job of it, that will begin to change your life.
You don’t have to know everything about being a parent to do this. You only need to have a sense of where you’ve been hurting, and what you really wished you’d gotten. And then let it go and let your own inner wisdom figure it out.
How could you know how to take care of your feelings as an adult, if no one modeled it for you as a child? At the time, you were dependent on them to tell you how things worked, what you could expect, what you were supposed to do. They taught you to accept too little, and to take too much responsibility for accommodating their inadequacies, rather than trying to get what you needed from them. Now, you have to undo that. And to believe, really believe, that as a human being you deserved more and still do.
Just believing that you deserve to get your needs met will gradually change your life. There’s a lot of internal processing that will happen in the background, as your deep layers of belief accept the new information (and it will accept it, because you really have those needs), and it gradually works its way through your emotional system and your thinking.
I had to do that, and it was a really interesting experience, almost like feeling a long-blocked part of my childhood self finally grow up. But it’s a good experience, all the way.
You deserve better. And you can learn to run your life that way. You can’t force other people to love you or treat you well. But you can sure make decisions about what you want and don’t want into your life, and thus create a life that’s better for you in every way.
You’ve already started doing this, making great progress. But I think if you go directly after this business with your father, and take over as the warm, loving parent in your own life, it will do wonders for you.
I hope this makes sense —
Kathy
Kindheart & Kathy,
Thank you so very much for your support and understanding. I’ve been feeling so blue and miserable and your kindness lifted my spirits.
Kathy, thanks you for validating my experience! …wow….something so menaingfull right now when everything seemed so confusing…for turning the whole “best and worst years of my life” concept around. You are right….those were the worst years of my life! and the best is yet to come.
You’re right too about the decompression part. You go from being suffocated, having all your energy derailed and drained to feeling the stillness and emptimess, but I know this too shall pass and I needed to be reminded again that all the love, care and doing I did for this sick man I must do for myself now.
Kindheart, I’m so sorry for the loss of your father. Your story resonates so much with my own… my father is a full blown N who has never approved of me and continues to try to control me with his own brand of manipulation. My relationship with him is always walking on egg shells, as I never know if he will berate me or be kind to me when I talk to him or see him. I recognize that my S was very much manipulative like my father (with the exception of the lying & cheating because my father is very loyal to my mother)…..and I’ve been trying to seek approval from him all my life.
Onwards….this is a new chapter in my life, and on a good note Kathy, I have done somthing good for myself. I started taking a real estate class and managed to pass the test this past monday!!!! …Something I could have never done with the S around, since he was trying to sabotage that as well when I started taking the class.
Thanks you so much to you all at LF
Aeylah
hey gals, im snowed in today so i’ve been on the net reading up on the Col.Williams sex crimes and im sickened , brillian,t , meticulous, cold and cunning and im wondering how he managed to stay above the radar so long, he’s apparantly confessed to over 4 dozen lingerie sex crimes. I as a proud Canadian with a son who has just been commissioned as an Officer and i know im his mother but he’s the most decent , honorable kid you could find and this is what i have to be proud of, hard to differentiate i know between the person and the military , but as a Canadian they had better do a dam thorough investigation into this whole affair or im sure there is going to be an uproar. It leaves me to wonder , who or how or when should we speak up with these types . The one poor woman was a third generation military airforce family and her father (retired) is sickened as well. I cry for the poor families and the Military im sure will be looking in their own back yard and they had better be, this guy had been stationed all over so who knows what devastation is ahead, and i wonder what does his wife know. Where and when are we responsible for forthcoming with these predators and are people educated enough to understand. Im hoping it’s just a case of he was so articulate that he fooled everyone but i doubt it, arrogant to the core . I feel sorry for my son today with all the negative press as i know what he is made of and this country is lucky as many friends have said to have him i just hope something valuable is learned from all of this. love kindheart