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.
Eden,
Hi,
Hens said it best, the pain goes away but not the lesson.
Here’s a funny story. Before I knew what the spath was, I was living in a wooded area with 5 cats and the spath. Coyotes were everywhere and they eat cats, so I ordered Cougar Urine from an online store. It’s supposed to deter the coyotes. I took a sniff… OMG, the smell is a mind altering experience. It adds a whole new dimension to the olfactory senses! It goes right into your brain and makes you question whether life is worth living with a smell like that existing on the planet! I”m not kidding.
Well the spath is exactly the same. These things/spaths/smells exist. We just have to accept it.
LOL! I wish I could post the smell online so you could all know what I mean.
Well!? Did it smell good or bad? Are you saying Cougar pee smell’s like a sociopath? Wouldnt that attract more cougars? When my sociopath pee’d on the grass the grass died.
Maybe your on to something Sky, just dab a liitle cougar pee behind each ear and we will be predator proof.
Hens, You’re a hoot.
But then we walk around stinking to high heaven, and the spath emerges smelling like a rose. Not fair. It’s just not fair!
LOL ROTFLMAO—seeeeeee what happens when I go to bed and leave you guys unsupervised!?!!!!!
Sky, you don’t need to post any of it on line for us to sample smell, your description was good enough—want me to tell you how dead snakes in a sack locked up inside a building for a month smell? Thought not! So…just say “it stunk” is enough! LOL
Eden, a lesson we learn without any accompanying “pain” is usually not learned really well. The intensity of the pain helps the lesson PENETRATE SO WE REMEMBER IT WELL AND FOR A LONG TIME. (Hopefully! But sometimes we get the pain, the pain goes away but we DON’T GET THE LESSON—) that is the truly sad part is I got the pain over and over and over but didn’t get the LESSON that went with it. God, however, was very patient with me and I got to REPEAT THE PAIN/LESSON until I got the LESSON….so learning WHAT caused the pain and what WE ALLOWED to continue to happen that caused the pain to continue is part of the LESSON.
Now we can’t control who is a psychopath or who is honest or dishonest lbut we CAN control who we allow inside our inner circle of TRUST, and we do know that psychopaths are DIS-honest. So if we stay away from ALL DIS-HONEST people and RUN from someone at the very FIRST sign that they are dishonest we will AVOID having psychopaths AND dishonest people in our inner circle of trust and love and those who are psychopaths and/or dishonest won’t be able to hurt us as badly because we won’t trust them so much.
Since most psychopaths and dishonest people don’t always SHOW their dishonesty and P-ness at the FIRST meeting, we need to also watch for OTHER SIGNS OF PSYCHOPATHY (look for the 10 signs you are dating a sociopath article here) and if we see those signs, ANY of them, we RUNNNNNNN BAMBI RUNNNNNN, we do NOT make excuses for them.
So the thing is that once we are EDUCATED about WHAT the signs of a psychopath are and that DIS-honesty is one of them we learn to stay AWAY from DIS-honest people the way we learn to distinguish which SNAKES ARE POISON from those that are harmless.
Where I live children are taught pretty early which snakes are poison and which are not. We don’t want children SCARED of snakes, but we wasnt them to RESPECT and STAY AWAY FROM those that are poison and not fear the rest. So we too need to be able to DISTINGUISH the poison people from the harmless ones. With the poison snakes in my territory, I kill them….unfortunately, I can’t do that with a psychopath unless they are physically attacking first, but I am learning to AVOID and STAY AWAY from those people who are POISON IN MY LIFE.
I do still have the scars and the memory of what happens if I don’t stay far enough away that they are not able to bite me though….and I’ve learned to spot them pretty well. But even recently I Got BITTEN emotionally by a sssssssneaky ssssssnake ssssssslitering and I took the bait and felt the emotional bite of haivng been CONNED just a little for information. Just a llittle reminder lesson never hurts though. Keeps us sharp and at the top of our game.
Hens.
With the cougar pee behind each ear and a clove of garlic on every belt buckle, we ought to be safe….
Tell you what, you go first!
Let us know how it works for you…..
Yea, Hens, let us know how that works for you….I’ve actually been kind of wondering if I have bad breath or something anyway…not a lot of traffic out this way either! LOL I’d hug you but don’t want to take a chance of cyber-smelling the cyber-cougar pee! LOL
I am not kidding when I tell you that smelling the cougar pee is like the moment you realize the love of your life is a sociopath. It does something to your brain. Maybe it’s a natural reaction to knowing that you are on a predator’s territory? Maybe disgust is a protective mechanism to save our lives and we should cultivate it rather than try to always over-ride it.
Good point.
Thank’s, all of you! Wow. Amazing advise, and Oxy, thanks for your insightful and educational words, above! Sky, thank you for making me laugh like I never have (except at some of hen’s DRY stuff). Hens thanks for that additional sensible explanation. Nice way to start the day, really!! I don’t think I will ever forget this story (about the Cougar Pee), Skylar. Just like I will never forget you telling me about the dream you had where you were in a restaurant and all of the tables and chairs were connected to the ceiling hanging upside down, and what that had signified for you.
Woke up feeling much at peace today. Peace is beginning to out-weigh the heaviness. But so grateful to have this place to come to, to read and to participate whenever I feel the need or desire, and to get things off my mind, and receive such loving and helpful words. Hopefully I am contributing enough so as to be of help to others, as well!
LL, if you’re on here right now… I’m off to Tuesday Broker’s Open (Caravan)… Praying for no sightings of the P. I have decided that if we do cross paths at some point, I will just walk by him as if I do not see him. Thing is, if he is with other colleagues, I will need to at least crack a smile. If I don’t, I think he will get gratification from that, and my associates will think it is odd, as I am a very friendly, outgoing person (and agent that has done and will continue to do business with them in the future). Kind of sticky. Need to format a good balance and plan, I am realizing.
Thank you so much, all of you!
Have a beautiful day!!
Much love,
E
PS: Sky, I would say “YES” absolutely, to your statement that I have pasted here:
“Maybe disgust is a protective mechanism to save our lives and we should cultivate it rather than try to always over-ride it”. ~ Skylar