Donna Anderson’s important latest post reminds me that one topic which will never be worn out is that of the psychopath’s lies and their impact on others.
This week I want to very briefly introduce yet another take on this inexhaustible topic. Everyone lies, but there’s something else at stake in the case of the psychopath’s lies.
To illustrate: you might say about any regular (non-psychopathic) person, “Things would be better if s/he was to lie less often. Her/his soul or psyche would be healthier as would her relationships.” That’s true. Now try this on for size and notice how wrong it seems: “Things would be better if the psychopath was to lie less often. His soul or psyche would be healthier as would his relationships.”
Weirdly, this is patently not the case. The psychopath will be just as sick/evil no matter how many or how few lies he tells. It’s not a quantitative but a qualitative matter.
It is commonly said that a defining characteristic of psychopaths is that they are pathological liars. This is right if you mean that they are profoundly dishonest and not to be trusted. It does not mean, though, that psychopaths lie a lot. They do lie a lot and those lies cause havoc. But as I hope my illustration above shows, lying less will not make them better people.
So, how does this work? The thing about psychopaths is that even their truths are lies! Or rather, whether or not they happen to be telling the truth or a lie at any particular moment is not what makes them psychopathic. What makes them psychopathic is that they use and destroy people; truth or lies are for them just so many weapons for pursuing their prey.
M.L. Gallagher said a lot when she wrote this:
He is the lie….
From hello to good-bye. I love you to I hate you. You’re beautiful to you’re ugly.
It was all a lie….When friends or my family ask, but what about this, or what about that, I tell them. It was all a lie. There was no truth in him.
If I spend my time trying to figure out fact from fiction, all I am doing is trying to prove I wasn’t so stupid. See, this was true. That’s why I fell in love with him.
Truth is. I fell in love with him because I believed his lie.
When I discovered the truth, I was so enmeshed in his lie, I couldn’t find the truth in me. And so I sank.
it’s really hard to live with-accept without automatically starting to dissociate the memories still. what made it most horrific for me was that i had two of them (his mother-enabler or just like him? and him) gaslighting me and telling me i was insane. eight months before i left, he had sexually abused me and the next week, shoved me into a wall and then picked up the phone to call the cops to try and have me arrested for assault (my jaw dropped, but i had alreay started reading about these tactics, so i was in shock but registered that it was typical abuser BS). i called his mother after the incident and she told me to come stay with her for a month, during which time she kept telling me there was something wrong with me, that i was disordered and she felt sorry for her son for having to put up with my crazymaking. she would berate me, criticize me, twist my words, verbally degrade me from morning until evening..it went on day after day and then 2x pr week, she sent me to her ‘therapist’, from some strange middle eastern religeous/psychology cult twice a week, hired a ‘healer’ to lay hands on me, while speaking in tongues and suggested false memories of child sex abuse (i was never sexually abused as a child). i responded, to my complete surprize and horror, by ‘confessing’ to being sexually abused as a child…she had my mind so twisted, that i admitted to whatever she wanted me to say, that i was MPD, BPD, faking anorexia in order to control her son. it was the sickest experience of my life-sicker than the abuse of her son. for 4 weeks it was drummed into my head that i was crazy. i started to feel sorry for both of them for having had to put up with my insanity. some small part of my mind remained untainted enough to remember that i knew the truth and no matter what she was able to make me say it didn’t make it not lies. i think the only reason i didn’t have a psychotic break as a result was i kept being able to remind myself that my mind was being manipulated and it was going to feel like crap but that it wouldn’t kill me and it would be over eventually.
i still live with the guilt and humiliation…the shock at how easy it was to further mangle my mind on top of coerce me into saying things at least part of me remembered were complete lies. but i don’t think i’ve ever regained trust in my own sanity, as a result. i had no idea why she did this to me, although a year ago i was talking with a psychologist about it for the first time-she told me it was her guess that his mother did this to me possible to have a means of discrediting me if i ever tried to take legal action. i was afraid to go to the police or ever take legal action in the first place, because i had already been brainwashed into knowing they’d put me away instead.
Stunned: You are amazingly, beautifully, profoundly sane. My god, to have escaped and gotten here? You are totally awesome!
I had a reputable clinical psychologist refuse to talk to me because one of the accomplice S/Ps had gotten to him with false stories.
We must validate each other. We are the children looking at the nakedness of the S/P/Ns and their systems saying, “But he’s not wearing any clothes!” and they are afraid of us and they want to keep us down.
Dear Stunned,
I am so sorry you endured such a horrific experience at the hands of these two monsters. Rune is right, you are an amazingly strong and awesome person to have endured this. I too, questioned my own sanity with gaslighting and so have many of us here.
Your response to the brainwashing these people where doing to you and the abuse in an “abnormal” way because the situation was abnormal. To have behaved “normally” would have been abnormal. No one could be “normal” in those situations, but YOU ARE NOT INSANE, you are wounded by the abuse these people heaped on you.
But you survived, and I am glad you are here at lovefraud. Read and read and read, and share what of yourself you feel comfortable sharing. This is a safe and healing place with good support and good information. Knowledge=power and we can and are taking back our power, taking back from them what they have taken….and you can too. The road to healing is long, and at times bumpy, but in the end the road will become easier as you go, and learning about them, and learning about ourselves gives us the knowledge and the security of knowing we are NOT crazy! (((((hugs))))) and God bless you!
I’m watching a re-run of 48 Hours/Hard Evidence. It’s about all the different scams out there. Very interesting, to say the least. One of the highlights was about parking valets ripping off whatever the customers left in their cars. It was disgusting to see grown men stealing everything and anything a customer would leave behind in their cars. They had it all on tape and when the owners of the valet organizations were confronted, they chalked it up that they wrote (in the tinniest of print) on their parking stickers not to leave valuables in their cars. These grown men (well chronological old) were stealing chump change out of the center consoles.
Incredible. I’m shaking my head.
Peace.
Stunned: I suggest you buy the book Betrayal Bond….you were brainwashed, manipulated, severely abused and should be proud that you got out. I escaped from much, much, much less abuse, and still felt incredible shame at my response, until I realized the shame belongs to the abusers, not to us!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
You were doing what a survivor has to do….and you did more than survive, you escaped!!!!!!!!!!!
Are there things that you can do to better protect yourself in the future? Of course. Just like people buy home alarm systems AFTER they are robbed. But that doesn’t mean they should feel shame for not having a home alarm system before….the shame belongs to the thief!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Stay safe. Much love to you, you are amazing!!
Stunned,
I sickens and infuriates me when those who are supposed to help us damage us more. I seen some very dangerous and narcissistic therapists over the years who convinced me of having everything from BPD to no issues at all. Thank GOD you are out of that mess. There is nothing wrong with you. You were the victim of some really horrible abusers. Makes me want to go punch a random sociopath in the gut.
Justabout healed,
GREAT ANALOGY!
Star, punch one for me too, OK? LOL Better yet, I’ll let you borrow my skillet and you can BOINK’em on the head!
Oh, I think I’ll go out and buy me an AK47 skillet. If I ever have another sociopath in my house again, I will FLATTEN them with it!
Wini,
Regarding your last post about your sister keeping score and her thinking being clouded by some imaginary beliefs…..I think this can be true of all of us to some extent or another. But I think you are comparing sociopaths to garden variety humans with issues. I believe they are a totally different animal and do not think, feel, or react in the same way we do. You are trying to attribute human motives like fear and insecurity to sociopaths. I don’t believe those things as we know them exist for them. After all, if we could pinpoint a source of their earliest straying from humanity, then they could probably be helped by therapy. But they can’t, even the ones that know something is wrong with them. It’s both tragic and aggravating all at the same time.
StarG: I’m just throwing it out there so we can deduct what we know to hopefully get to a resolution of sorts. I know my sister has (cold distant, bullying) issues. She on the other hand, would disagree (LOL). She thinks it’s normal to tell a lie to get what she wants. I find it frustrating, to say the least when dealing with liars, for whatever their reason for lying. I’ve gotten in more trouble than I can think of for the simple fact of telling the truth (go figure). I am laughing as I write this … but, it is sad most of the time, and it is true. Again, chalking it up to immaturity that these people will eventually outgrow it.
I firmly believe in our creator. I think that is where the truth will be found. I also believe this is the difference between them and us. It says in the Bible, believe and trust in God and you shall live. Otherwise, you will die. I believe the live equation of this scripture is that we feel, we love, we create, we have hope, we develop all the virtues of God. I believe the die aspect of this scripture is there is no life. They are walking zombies, not loving, no believing, not trusting, not creating … just superficial substances walking around on this planet.
I believe all the people we blog about think of God as a fairy tale. Hence, believing only in themselves and not in the highest power of God.
Peace.