Can Sociopath/Psychopath feel sorry for what they do

[Roxana D]

Hello All,

I have a quick question here, since I am planning to leave my husband who I found out has all/and more characteristics and features of a psychopath/sociopath.

Is there a point where sociopaths/psychopaths have enough and they decide to change? Be a better man/woman, stop lying and deceiving? Since I have had a hard time to cope with this revelation, I would like to at least be able to explain my decision of leaving (after I leave) only to get my husband understand how hurt and damaged I am from all the deception and lies (not that my decision is subject to change, but I am just trying to avoid further abuse after I leave, meaning I wouldn’t like him to blame me for being unappreciative, ask me back and so on). Whenever he sees an overweight person when we are out, he asks this rhetoric question “At what point do you look yourself in the mirror and realize enough is enough”. Don’t they feel sad and devastated that all their relationships, marriages, friends and family disappear into thin air because of their deception and manipulation or don’t they care? After I leave, my husband would have nothing, no family, no friends, no relationships. At what point would they figure “Enough is enough” and possibly Want to change? I wish I didn’t care, but at least I would like to make him realize it’s not worth to continue living life like he does because it would hurt him in the first place.

I appreciate your responses.
Rosy.

[jenni marie]

Hi Rosy, I have been a LF member since 2012. A series of internet clicks brought me here, beginning with a click on some survey asking “How healthy is your relationship?” where my answers scored high on “Not Healthy”. No surprise I suppose, but I was still in the mode of trying to figure out how to Improve my relationship with “NOMO” my ex psycho bf. Click after click kept bringing up search results about abusive people & liars & manipulators in romantic relationships until I finally got to a link that had to do with jerks and disordered people who may be more than just your average mean jerk which had links to Lovefraud. The minute I started reading Donna’s site I knew that I may be dealing with a Sociopath. I also know that we can’t actually diagnose them as such, so I decided to pay better attention to what he was doing and saying that matched the Sociopath check list so I could hopefully eliminate “Sociopath” as a reason for his behavior. That was in March of 2012. During one of many break-ups I told him that he has ALL the traits of a Sociopath and that he ought to “google it!”. I fought hard to get him to understand that the way he treated me SUCKED the majority of the time and that I knew he could be nice because he WOULD BE nice to me at times, and he was nice to his “Friends”. Friends who “understood what he was trying to say versus me who was supposed to be intelligent, yet for some reason, I just couldn’t ‘get it'”. It took me three years and nine months to finally peel him off of me, and Keep NO CONTACT. Dozens of break-ups and get back togethers happened between my finding LF, until the night in Dec 2015 that I finally said “Enough”. We were apart from June to early Dec 2015 when he texted me a pic of a sunset and like an idiot, I responded and spent the next 2 weeks in hell after he said that during this last 5 month breakup, he couldn’t ignore his animal needs and so he had been having sex with his friends drunken 21 yr old daughter and also had some other girl sending him texts about how sweet it is that they have such deep life conversations and how great of a man he is. I told him that he better not see the 21 yr old again and that he better text the other one and tell her he was with me and she should move on. Hours and hours of me prodding him to text her, he finally sent this text “ya know how your husband is in heaven? Well it’s kinda got to be like that between us because “as for now, I am romantically bound to Jenni Marie”. WHAT? “AS FOR NOW?!?!?!!!” Instead of “Move on” or please stop “coming on to me now”. I laughed and asked him if he thinks he just sent a message that said that he wanted to be with me, or if he thinks that he just sent a message that said “see you in a while?” He said he didn’t want to hurt her feelings because her husband had only been dead for about a year. Yes. Her feelings are what we want to be concerned about, so “GET OUT!!!!!”. I tried to get him to think like a normal bf and spent hours explaining how it’s his mean lying sneaky actions that caused me to be a “jealous angry bitch” and that no one in my life has EVER acted like he does. So, anyway, You have asked a question that I believe you already know the answer to. He is a Sociopath and you have already spent an inordinate amount of time ALREADY trying to get him to understand that it’s HIS behavior that keeps causing him to lose everyone and everything, the whole time you’ve been with him, since the first time his mask of sanity slipped. Yes? So please don’t waste your time thinking about his impending consequences. Focus on Your Future, and always always always REMEMBER, that the ONLY thing that he would be willing to try and change is: Your Mind.
Best Regards.
Peace out, Jenni

[Roxana D]

Thanks for taking the time to share your experience Jenni, I will taken your advice into consideration. This forum has helped me a lot to cope with this devastating revelation. I wish you all the best in your future endeavours and thanks for sharing again.

[junebug]

Well, not feeling remorse is one of the central, if not THE central, part of the condition. So “feeling sorry”…no.

If they’re intelligent/high-functioning, like my father is, they can understand on an intellectual level that a certain behavior of theirs is not working for them or unnecessary and change it. But many are not that high-functioning. And feeling guilt or remorse is impossible for them. The feeling simply is not in their emotional repertoire.

As for whether change is possible…that depends on what you mean by change. If you mean “learn” how to stop being sociopaths and/or learn how to empathize, that’s impossible. That’s not something that can be learned. You either have the ability to feel others’ pain or you don’t. Heck, I can say that from personal experience, having Asperger’s Syndrome and/or Schizotypal Personality Disorder and actually lacking that ability myself. (Calm down, those aren’t exploitative disorders. 🙂 Google it if you don’t want to take my word.)

My father did reign himself in and begin to practice restraint after almost getting literally killed in college for this incident involving a girl who claimed she was date raped and the entire football team. He learns to hide his deceptions and controlling behaviors better every year. He learned a ton from the time he was in prison (for a different thing than what happened in college). Did he learn compassion? Haha, no. He did learn how to fake it better. Did he totally stop lying or manipulating? No. Actually I’m pretty sure he lies and manipulates more than he ever did. He’s probably more honest with me than with anyone else he knows (except possibly my brother, who’s narcissistic), but that halfway trust was created through 21 years of loyalty and keeping his secrets. And even so it’s honesty and trust by his standards.

For example, he constantly has a form of GPS tracking on my phone to find out my location. He won’t take it off, but he did tell me about it…finally, after it being on since I got my first smartphone years ago.

So…I guess my answer on whether they can change is…sort of? If they’re intelligent, that is. There are many, many that are not and will never have the foresight to change even behavior patterns that are actually harmful to THEM. I’ve never even met your husband, so I cannot say whether he can do this much or not. But maybe you can?

And good luck with that divorce. You’re going to need it…as high-functioning as my father is, the divorce from my mother was still UGLY. (Would have been uglier if it wasn’t for me. She left him for another man…he would NEVER let THAT go unpunished.)

• This reply was modified 7 years, 9 months ago by junebug.
• This reply was modified 7 years, 9 months ago by junebug.

[Roxana D]

Thank you for the last comment, I hope “sort of” is right because I would feel sorry for him if he doesn’t at least try to change. I will not communicate or respond to his emails, calls or texts from this point onwards but I am sure I can be loud and clear with him in my farewell letter that enough is enough. I would never want anyone else to go through this sort of a deception with him after me. Nevertheless, one of the therapists told me I should always ask myself this question “How much can I control?” and the answer is None. I can’t control any of his actions once you leave.
I appreciate your feedback again and wishing you all the best. Thanks for sharing.

[Stargazer]

No, they cannot feel remorse and they do not change, I’m sorry to say. This is one of the things that makes it so difficult to recover from a break up with a sociopath. You will not get the kind of closure you need from the sociopath. You will just have to walk away, cut your losses, and realize that they will never understand how they hurt you, and you will never understand how they can’t understand.

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