Sociopathy, many experts agree, is a deficits disorder.
The sociopath, in this view, is missing something—things like empathy, remorse, and basic respect for the boundaries of others.
When you think of a deficit—something missing—you don’t necessarily think dire consequences.
You may think, instead, things like less”¦incomplete”¦limited.
For instance, the idea of intellectual deficit might spark the association, mental retardation.
Instead of invoking fear, this tends to elicit our understanding, even empathy. The mentally retarded individual is missing something that most of us have—a normal intellectual capacity. You think, this is unfortunate, for that person.
When you think of kids with attentional deficits, you’re likely to bring some extra patience toward the challenges their condition presents. Your accomodation is based on recognizing their behaviors as originating in a deficit.
When dealing with the Asperger’s Syndrome population, you understand their social inaptitude as arising from a neurologic difference. And so in responding to the Asperger individual’s peculiarities, you allow that he or she, on a social level, is operating with less than a full deck.
In general, when speaking of disorders of deficits, we tend, or at least try, not to take the consequences arising from the disorder personally. We recognize the deficit as something the person doesn’t ask for and, at best, struggles to control.
This isn’t to deny, or minimize, the impact of the individual’s difficult behaviors. But in locating that impact in a deficit, we can potentially experience it as less personally injurious.
Sociopathy, however, presents an interesting challenge in this regard. Research increasingly implicates brain differences in sociopaths. Sociopaths, we are learning, fail to experience and process certain emotions like nonsociopaths. Their capacity to learn from aversive consequences appears to be compromised. And they show evidence of certain enduring forms of attentional pathology, involving defective inhibitory and impulse control.
The sociopath, in a word, appears to be a psychologically handicapped individual.
Yet it’s hard to empathize with the sociopath, who himself lacks empathy. And how not to personalize his actions—actions that can cause so much personal pain? And how not to personalize that pain, even if it results from the sociopath’s deficits?
It brings to mind the concept of processing a vicious dog attack. The dog is vicious. It attacks you. It knows it is attacking you. We can even imagine that it knows, on a primitive level, that it is wounding you. The dog needs to be leashed, kept away from others. Improperly secured, it sees you walking down the street, primitively registering your vulnerability. And then it attacks, remorselessly.
While it’s true that we can ascribe to sociopaths (and not dogs) a capacity to evaluate their prey and plot their means of attack, we run the risk, I think, of giving the sociopath too much credit.
After all, if the sociopath’s deficits destine him to interpersonal exploitation, does his exploitation become personal simply by virtue of his capacity to plot it?
Sure, the vicious dog, unlike the sociopath, may lack calculation and plotting skills. But for all intents and purposes, unless locked-up, both will inevitably attack and/or violate. The vicious dog, if it doesn’t attack you, will attack someone else. And if you are lucky enough to escape the sociopath’s transgressions, someone else won’t be.
From this perspective, the sociopath’s deficits will take forms of interpersonal exploitation just as surely as the child with ADHD can be expected to obnoxiously disrupt others, heedless of their boundaries.
From this angle, it’s possible to construe the sociopath’s aggression as tantamount to a hurricane’s damaging your house. The wreckage may be great, and traumatic; but it is the wreckage, ultimately, of an irrepressibly violent, impersonal force.
Arguably, this defines the sociopath: an irrepressibly [interpersonally] violent, impersonal force.
We hope, through our awareness, prudence, and luck, never to suffer its destructiveness. But if less lucky, we can remind ourselves that the sociopath, in the final analysis, is about as pointless, worthless, and arbitrary as a natural disaster.
(My use of “he” in this article was for consistency’s sake, not to suggest that men have a patent on sociopathy. This article is copyrighted (c) 2008 by Steve Becker, LCSW.)
StarG: Snakes are pretty … just have to warm up to having one as a pet. I remember in grade school my friends did their science project on snakes. One of their snakes died before their presentation so we were trying to catch this snake that we happened upon walking near a stream. We chased that pour snake all the way back to the lake and lost it. We did capture it a few times, but it squirmed out of our bare hands and just kept swimming and swimming away from us. The poor snakes thought we were nuts. Anyway, the next day, one of my friends who had snakes as her science project looked up what kind of snake we were chasing.
It was a water moccasin and we were so lucky it was a baby, cause if it were the adult version, we would have definitely been bitten by the sucker.
Peace. After that … I never got into liking snakes and having one as a pet … but my friends who had this science project always had pets in their lives.
To each our own.
Well, I know I’m wierd, but I think snakes are more than pretty. I think they are adorable. One of my boas has this little doll face that is to die for. The other one likes to cuddle in my lap and watch movies with me. You just can’t get anything cuter than that. When I first met Veronica, she was only 21″ long. She slithered up my arm and stuck her little snout in my ear. The little tongue was going a mile a minute (it’s how they smell). I thought I was gonna die of cuteness!
StarG: That’s because you were willing to love snakes. My Chuckie smells like baby powder. He always did. He loves to sit on my left shoulder and give me kisses and snuggles my cheek. Then he blabs in my ear and has these long winded coversations with me … I just say, uhhaaah, uhaaaaaaa, oh is that so?
He’s cute too. He knows when I’m patronizing him. They are extremely intelligent. Actually, he thinks all the pets are his … and maybe that I’m his pet too.
Peace.
tks again steve……..i would feel much better, in a weird way, if what you say is so….almost as though i shouldnt take it personally….i know, i know, its not us to blame, but again its hard to wrap your head around how someone could live with you, in your family and just not feel some sense of loss to leave all the goodness behind…………wow, im used to dealing with the known facts of clinical medicine…..this brain and personality stuff can really knock you for a loop……..
i do wish shows like 48 hrs, if intent on showcasing these personalities would go a step further and do a public service……those who have yet been affected just view them as criminals without realizing that there are many who walk among us confounding to me for sure, terri
I’ve got an obnoxious Golden Retriever named Punkin. She ate both my black dress shoes and my cream ones, which was really inconsiderate. She shoulda ate either the black shoes and the matching black clutch or the cream shoes and coordinated purse, but nooo!!! She ate both pairs of shoes. I’ve discussed it with her, and her the look in her melting brown eyes and tender kisses suggest that she’ll be more considerate next time.
She’s obsessed with the neighborhood raccoon, and pees next to our trash cans morning noon and night, growling her contempt and fury every time she sees signs of his depredations. She lays in that corner of the house each night, waiting to poke her head over the edge of the windowsill and bark her outrage as soon as he shows up. No amount of discussion about the efficacy of the elastic bands I’ve strapped to the lids of the pails will convince her to drop the feud.
We’ve got a black snake too, a big fat one who keeps the yard clear of slow, stupid squirrels and greedy little bunnies. I appreciate the snake, but we’re not cuddling, and he’s not coming inside. He doesn’t have the capacity to love, any more than our two adorable goldfish do.
I hear you, Terri…shows like 48 hrs don’t make their money running stories on your garden-variety sociopath who merely wrecks his or her family-life. They are looking for more sensational, graphic stories of coldblooded murder, etc. Just as you say, this encourages the public’s narrow view of the sociopath as violent, coldblooded killer.
Elizabeth…LMAO about your golden retriever. I think in obedience school they can be trained to be more fashion savvy? That if they MUST eat an outfit, they at least eat the coordinating accessories? ha ha ha ha ha ha
I had a favorite dress made out of a delicate material. It was very expensive, and I loved to wear it. One day I pulled it out of the closet and it had been shredded, presumably from a cat trying to climb it to get to the top of the closet. This really bothered me. The cat (whose name is Destructo) couldn’t go after the old Walmart shirts. She had to use my best dress! She also goes for the cashmere sweaters. They all have puncture marks in them too.
Being a Libra, I am a total clothes horse. You know it is true love that I put up with a cat shredding my favorite clothes!!
I just read an interesting article on psychopathst that addressed their “deficits” – I will post to my blog-
Two point struck me:
Blair (personal communication, May, 2000) also observed that if psychopathy is a disorder,it is oddly unique inasmuch as it is associated with some enhanced
abilities (albeit such undesirable ones as glibness, conning and exploiting).
Blair, Jones,
Clark, and Smith (1997), however, reported that although psychopaths (the most identifiable life course persistent offenders) exhibit deficits in
responding to emotional cues concerning others; negative emotions concerning the self (i.e., threats) led to normal responding.
(My point: they aren’t innately disordered, they actively choose evil. Threatened enough they backoff– they understand cues concerning them.)
http://holywatersalt.blogspot.com/
Dr. Steve-
Do you believe people are born good and do good automatically without thought? And if so, wouldn’t that negate what goodness is- making it rote.
I amsorry if these sounds cynical- it’s an honest question.
DrSteve, thanks for your post. This is exactly the way I think about sociopaths. The lights are out in a certain part of their psyche. And a great deal of the grief we feel in dealing with them is that we expect them to be like “normal” people, and of course, they’re not. And can’t be, because they’re crippled.
For people who imagine that an encounter with a cripple demands a kneejerk reaction of willingness to help, sociopaths are a great learning opportunity. Because the “help” they want is a reflection of their internal deficits. They want to win or to make themselves feel bigger or more important, because it’s the only pleasurable thing they can imagine in interpersonal relations. The closest they get to love is cultivation of a “source” to keep him or her giving. And in return for giving, you can be dazzled for a while by clever cultivation, and then you can be destroyed, if you’re vulnerable, because the sociopath is envious and resentful that your feelings give you perceptions and therefore power that he or she will never have.
And not one bit of this is personal, because the sociopath doesn’t perceive other people as real. They are always means to some end that is personal to the sociopath. But the sociopath is blind to any reality that is not his own, or not part of his or her construct of survival.
And so, no compassion. No regrets. But these words are the words of us, the people with compassion or regrets for the failures in our interactions with other people. They are not the sociopath’s words. The sociopath would argue that he or she does have compassion. He or she feels sorry for people who are not as smart, or not as determined, or not as aware of the predatory nature of the world. And the sociopath has lots of regrets about roads not taken, because the sociopath never has enough and is never in the circumstances reflect his or her grandiose imaginings.
There is some very good writing on the internet about the similarity of dealing with sociopaths and dealing with addicts. Addiction makes people sociopathic, in the sense that their relationships become secondary to their pursuit of their fix. Everything in their lives gradually becomes the means to that end. If you’ve lived with an addict or had one in the family, you’ve had the experience of being used, stolen from, lied to or even physically assaulted in their single-minded pursuit of the fix. They completely lose the ability to care about other people’s feelings or hold onto remorse for their terrible behavior. And we learn the hard way to ignore what they say and pay attention to what they do.
And that too, is what we learn from sociopaths. Like addicts they will seduce and tell sad stories and promise us anything until they get what they want. And then they’ll fade away and insult us if we dare to assume we’ve “bought” any love with our attention. And then they’ll come back and seduce us again when they want something else and face away, and then ultimately dump us when they’ve gotten everything they want, or we get too difficult, or another fatter and easier source shows up.
But none of it is personal. In fact, they would tell you how much they’ve invested in the relationship, which largely comes down to the tiring effort of “pleasing the fool,” as my sociopath used to describe it. It was boring, time consuming and always took more than he’d originally planned to invest. For which he was deeply aggrieved and resentful. Now, that was personal. Why did I have to be so annoying?
The thing about these people, which everyone whose been recovering for a while comes to understand, is that it was obvious that they were crippled from the beginning. Obvious that there was something wrong with them. And I think it’s one of the most difficult and painful things to get over — what was wrong with US that we didn’t interpret this correctly? Why did we see them as romantic or powerful or clever, when they were really so broken that they couldn’t even fake being normal for any length of time.
I look back at mine (I call him “mine” like a kind of travel sticker for my time in sociopath land). How could I have possibly believed that this penniless, badly dressed, socially stiff, cruelly sarcastic, secretive, morally challenged, unpublished writer was going to be my Prince Charming? I’d read his writing and I knew darned well why no one would publish it. It was the overwritten, self-aggrandizing drivel of an emotional seven-year-old. And I knew I couldn’t get a straight answer for any question that involved a commitment on his side for everything he wanted me to do for him. What was wrong with my brain?
When brings me back, the long way around, to DrSteve’s post. Because I was incapable of seeing him as something separate from myself, incapable of not personalizing him. He was a challenge to my ethics. He was an answer to my needs. He reminded me of myself, of the broken or hurt parts of myself, and I wanted to heal him. He made me feel generous and kind, and in a reverse way, he made me feel as though I was going to lie back and let someone be generous and kind with me. He was all that, and all of it was about the great tradeoff that I thought love was about.
If I’d been a little more like him, I would have been looking at him a lot more cautiously and objectively to see if I was really going to get what I wanted out of it. And what it would take, exactly, to please the fool. But I wasn’t. I was all involved in my own emotions and how good he made me feel, and I lost the thread of what was really going on.
Which was that a big, blind hurricane was headed in my direction, and I was standing out in the wind thinking how much fun it was and imagining that that wild wind was heading in my direction because I was special. In my case, he did think I was special, about as much as his choice from the fabulous menu in an expensive restaurant. I was perfect for what he needed. He liked me that much.
I’ve written here before that I believe that we attract what we need, and often what we ask for. There was something I wanted from him and from life, very badly. It was to figure out why I seemed to be losing my life to commitments, and never getting my own career as a writer going. I was a professional giver instead of a professional writer. And in the time I knew the sociopath, I studied him. For a long, long time, I couldn’t figure out why he was always winning and I was always losing, and it wasn’t until years of thinking about it after he was gone, that I finally figured out the simple truth that he was expert at taking care of himself and I was expert at taking care of everyone else. I wanted to be loved, but he, the cripple who couldn’t feel love or imagine what it was, wanted what he wanted for himself.
It was a lesson worth learning, whatever it cost. Not least because it taught me that love, as I once imagined it, was really a tradeoff of help and security. Not the true affection of people who are together because they choose to be, moment by moment. But also because it taught me that love begins at home, with believing that I’m worth loving and deserving of it, and that my relationships will be a reflection of how rationally and lovingly I take care of myself.
This is probably going to make some people very angry, but I also believe that my sociopath, like a blind person has compensating strength in other senses, was more grown-up than most “normal” people in a way. He understood the costs and losses involved in accomplishing something. He was realistic about the fact that he was ultimately alone in the world. And he knew that no one but him was going to create his life. His self-reliance was so highly developed, because he was incapable of trust and so couldn’t depend on anyone else. And though I’ll never probably never forgive him for some of the terrible things he did and said, and I also pity him because he really couldn’t feel so much of what I feel as a matter of everyday experience, I still admire and model my life in some ways on his powerful determination to achieve what was important to him.
But I also know that he and his kind are to be avoided in the future. I learned my lesson. I take the signs more seriously now. I don’t involve myself with people who try to manipulate my emotions. And I particularly avoid people who can’t give a straight answer to questions that start with “why?”
I may have written this here before, but it bears repeating. I once asked him, probably when he was sneering at my tears and telling me that “weakness is not attractive,” why he didn’t get involved with someone more like him. And he told me that people like him were not attracted to each other. And these days, that makes me feel relatively safe.