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.
I had this young english teacher for two years in high school and she was real gorgeous-all the boys had huge hots for her. I was walking down the hall one day and didn’t know that she was behind me. A guy reached out and grabbed by ass. I turned around just in time to see him hit the floor flat on his face. She was there. I said what happened. She said-“I don’t know-my foot accidently got in his way when he was walking”!!!
awesome!!!
you makin’ me chuckle!
Oh yeah………
ya’ll I’ve got to hit the pillow to be up at 06:15-next job heinous job with crazy people for 8 incredibly long hours. I cross my fingers that the 8 doesn’t turn into 10. Au revoir ladies!
Okay, ladies, I’m signing off for thre night…thank all of you for being in my feild…see you tomorrow. Sleep tight!
night night everyone…..
“Good Night ladies,
Good Night ladies,
Good Night ladies,
Im going to leave you now!
Merrily we roll along, roll along ,roll along!
Merrily we roll along,
Over the deep blue sea!”‘{Sung in chorus, a capella}.
Night night!
Love, gem.XX
EB you are a blast from the past for me!!!!!
And don’t ever give that tenacity up!!!!!!!!!
Jusst keeeeep the RedFlags in the forefront
love ya gall
am reading without conscience. very illuminating as to the structure of ppaths minds. how units of info are quite small and they can move them about and arrange them in unusual ways – this, the researchers think, may account for ppaths odd speech patterns and how quickly they can fly form one lie to the next.
i recognize that i have the ability to do something similar – and that brain structure is related to my left handedness. and that the ppath and i could play with words and have GREAT fun doing it now has a plausible basis, AND i see, once again, that although we seemed to be connected, it was, once again, a case of ‘paralell play. ‘
word games me = connection and love
word games her= deceipt and manipulation
again.
yet flaming again.
Well,
Looking at this again. Trying to get to the place where I really accept and let go. Reading Abigail’s post on the other thread- “he was my everything”. Yeah. That was it.
Reading one’s entry here – what felt to me like connection. And in those moments where I am not otherwise fully occupied, still does.
Best that I have those hours where I don’t FEEL his loss because when I do, I forget that he is a bigamist and that I have uncovered literally 100 lies and omissions of what is true- not least of which the legal marriage.
I’ve done everything I can first to prove he is and then to prove he isn’t and the moment comes to judge which out weighs the other and to make that final decision.
Like being a diver on a high board I imagine. Walking all the way to the edge first and then back to approach the edge with a measured step and a bounce without hesitating.
I can’t prove he isn’t. Although I do learn over and over that he is not exactly what he presented to me. I don’t know who or what – really. Abigail’s post again. Same thing only different.
Enough of him. What about me? Having declared my independence, realized that bigamy isn’t a joke and learned so much about the breadth of my own boundaries and how they made it so that I would accept only what I saw face to face and could touch hand in hand which becomes negated by the rest of the story.
I don’t judge his history so much as it was kept a secret until it was uncovered by not having been resolved. He made two promises: to be faithful and to be there. Neither of which he kept and for 12 weeks, I have been in agony over the fact that he isn’t here? Time out? He is in prison. And for a reason. And he has a wife and 30 girl friends in various stages of development. And I’m sad about this? Concerned for his well being? I’m broke, I have to move and to this day he has contributed nothing materially to the whole program. And I am very afraid of being alone in the world.
If it looks like a duck, it quacks like a duck, betcha its withing range to call it a duck. A wise friend told me so.
This one’s right out of the book.
Well, the new chapter is drafted. Picking up pace, one, two, three
SPRING! He is served. There is a landing path. There is a plan.
There is another way to live. To give and to grow old in peace.
Diving into the new freedom is like falling. It is why divers make such an art of twisting themselves into beautiful forms to fill the space.
When you’re in the open air, its all about motion. It doesn’t matter what you think, it matters what you do between the boing and hitting the water.
Like Woody said to Buzz – “thats not flying, that’s falling with STYLE”. An authentic style which acknowledges me from inside out and back in again. Falling into the flow of the cosmos somehow.
Water always in the Tarot symbolic of life and souls. So the work done here is the twisting and bending of falling and the endpoint rejoining the river of souls as it flows, becoming part of that stream, not isolated.
The alternative- well, It would be a good story beautifully told and when it was done, that would be all. Words hanging in the ether without form or the ability to connect to the great river of life.
Yeah, right. Boing!