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.)
I think I want to add two more thoughts to that long post.
One is that, as trades go, I came out ahead on this relationship. What he got were cheap thrills, transient things. The sex wasn’t ultimately that important. The money I would have spent anyway sooner or later. He got the things he wanted right now, and he used them up as he got them. When we split up, he had a lot of memories he’d never have been able to afford otherwise, a little more money in the bank than when I met him, and some pricey things he could use for a while before they’d wear out, and he’d never be able to replace (unless he found another me).
What I got was a powerful learning experience that changed my life. Yes it was painful and expensive, but when the learning experience is that transformational, it’s going to be painful and expensive. Because you have to give up a lot to change that much. Which was another thing I learned. You have to let go of who you used to be to become what you want to be. It’s tough, but it’s worth it.
The other thing is that I look back at what I thought about him and what I was going to do for him, and I just cringe at my own ridiculous grandiosity. I don’t know if sociopath’s grandiosity is contagious or if they just trigger what’s latent in ourselves.
I was going to teach him how to feel. And I was going to make him a better writer. And I was going heal him with love. And I was going to make him better dressed and have better manners and speak more effectively and understand the business world and improve his ethics and discover how lovely life really is. Aarrrgh.
When I realize how truly disrespectful I was, how judgmental and superior, I can’t help but wonder if that mindset was what made me so vulnerable to his judgments and belittlement. And I wonder if I had not been so attached to my little rules about how things must be, including my demands that he conform to my idea of the social contract, I might not have understood what was going on a lot sooner.
I was always complaining or asking for consideration or suggesting that he do things another way, but always assuming that we were both in the same game because in my mind there was no other game. It was what “everyone” did. And I, of course, was the arbiter of those rules.
Everyone except him, of course. He played by his own rules. And it took me forever to catch up. Long after he was gone.
And from both the compassionate and the selfish perspective, if I have lasting regrets, it’s that I didn’t make him deal with the true repercussions of his actions. I didn’t do him any favors as a person to coddle him and shield him from how I really felt, while I imagined I was teaching him how a feeling person behaves. The truth is that feeling people behave with outrage, as well as kindness. And feeling people say “No, that doesn’t work for me. Either clean up your act or get out of my life.” In my most regretful moments, I feel like I spent five years training him how to be a professional user, and perhaps altered the course of his path so there were no other options for him.
But that’s more of the same grandiosity, because his path is his own. Cripples learn to live with their defects, as we all do. None of us is perfect. All of us are responsible for doing the best we can with our allotment.
For myself, I can’t imagine anything worse than having to live with no capacity to trust and no connection with other people’s feelings. It would kill off my spirituality, that amazing layer of the psyche where I feel connected to my source and to the great mystery of existence. And what would be left would be pretty puny and scary and grim. To survive, I’d have to become both hopeless and tough and learn to live on transient thrills as my reduced version of “good.” And pretend that it made me smarter, even while I was surrounded by people who enjoyed and even lived for things that I couldn’t begin to understand.
Instead, lucky me, I learned that I have a choice to be either self-centered or compassionate, and I can make that choice freely every moment of every day. I wish I could have given him as much as he gave me. But then, he got what he wanted — sex, money and experiences he couldn’t have afforded otherwise. And maybe he needed that as much as I needed what I got.
Does this make sense? In the last post, I wrote that I felt like I was becoming sociopath-proof. That didn’t mean only that I recognize them, but that I also recognize how it feels to be with one of them. That clarity of mind, that certainty about what’s worthwhile and what’s not worth bothering with. I didn’t and don’t necessarily agree with their judgments and values, but I appreciate the process of making those distinctions. And one of them is who I chose to spend time with. That’s where the sociopath loses with me, because I’m not giving up my plans, perspectives or desires for his. Unless I get immediate and greater return.
Do I sound like a sociopath? I think I just sound healthy. Finally. And if that sounds a little grandiose, well, yeah, let’s just say I’m getting there. And I owe it all to you know who, and my dogged determination to profit from it all.
kahatalyst: Go look up the word and meaning to reprobate and then give us your thoughts.
Peace.
Khatalist,
I enjoyed your last post and especially your introspection leading to change. I am nodding in agreement that we have to let go of a lot to change and grow. Ultimately, we have to let go of being a victim and all the anger we have about it. This is not easy. There is a Buddhist parable about the monkey with his hand in the cookie jar. When he was grasping the cookie, he couldn’t get his hand out of the jar. Only if he let go of the cookie could he get his hand out of the jar. But he just couldn’t let go of it! Our minds are like that too. It seems to take a lot of mental discipline to work with anger in this way.
I also think what you stated about getting the better deal is very profound. When you value growth and self-knowledge, you will always come out ahead of a sociopath. If you place your greatest value in number of games played, money acquired, etc., the sociopath will seem to come out ahead, at least in the short term. So where do you want to place your value and meaning? What do you really consider as “winning”?
I feel that as painful as it is to get played by a sociopath, it is a great opportunity to decide who and what we are and what we stand for, what is important in our lives.
StarG: We won because we still have our souls, we didn’t sell out for frivolous, superficial earthly things or situations … to do what our Lord wants us to do. Never to waiver or to think that earth is our home … we are just visitors here … to return to our home with our Lord.
When anyone attacks us, we remember always, we are children of our Lord … attacks against us … we should rejoice for being attacked … a battle they lost to get us away from our Lord … we intuitively love and respect our Lord … no matter what happens to us on earth.
Peace.
From the Free Dictionary (the first thing that came up on Google)
1. A morally unprincipled person.
2. One who is predestined to damnation.
adj.
1. Morally unprincipled; shameless.
2. Rejected by God and without hope of salvation.
tr.v. rep·ro·bat·ed, rep·ro·bat·ing, rep·ro·bates
1. To disapprove of; condemn.
2. To abandon to eternal damnation. Used of God.
[From Middle English, condemned, from Late Latin reprobtus, past participle of reprobre, to reprove : Latin re-, opposite; see re- + Latin probre, to approve; see prove.]
Wini,
I’m not sure why you’re asking, but here goes…
This is a noun describing a person viewed through the lens of set of principles. It’s not an “inside” word but an “outside” word. An expression of external approval (or not). And one that sound a lot to me like shaming or controlling.
It reminds me of the concept of dignity. Which is something that theoretically is awarded from the outside view, but can become a delusion someone has about his own character. Or alternatively, depending how you look at it, a kind of worthiness (rather than entitlement) that we cultivate in ourselves by our ethical standards and corresponding behavior.
The problem with applying this concept as an “inside” description, rather than our view of the person, is that it’s likely to be psychologically inaccurate. We don’t walk in that person’s shoes and we don’t know what principles are in effect.
To move over to the theological side, I don’t believe that God abandons anyone, though I believe that some people give up on God. And giving up on God, they live in a much scarier world which demands a lot more from them in some ways. When you’re that alone, the principles of those people who believe that someone is watching out for them become pretty irrelevant, if not totally stupid.
There is some good writing on the levels of spiritual maturity, from the Hindu chakras to the wonderful work of a psychologist, Clare Graves, who laid out a similar ladder of seven levels of evolution. This one I described in the last paragraph is the first, the survivor level, where the rules don’t count because it’s just you in a world that doesn’t welcome you and there is nothing but you and your wits against the prospect of destruction.
I’m not suggesting that this would be the category of all reprobates. The Medieval Catholic background of this word suggests that that anyone whose thoughts or actions veered from church teaching would have been branded a reprobate. And that is what this word is — a branding of sorts.
Now, I know this is a blog about sociopaths, and maybe you brought this up because you found my posts a little too empathic. (Correct me if I’m wrong.) So, I’ll say here that my feeling is that the bad “wiring” in sociopaths is a result of serious emotional damage, not some intrinsic or genetic thing. I think that damage can be passed down generationally, but more in terms of family behavior modeling and circumstances. It’s also possible that there may be genetic character traits that may make a person respond to damage by becoming a sociopath rather than a borderline. (But I don’t really believe that because, although they’re both affective disorders, I think they emerge from different points of early childhood development.) And those character traits also may turn out to be spectacularly good under the right circumstances. And that sociopathic tendencies may be damaged versions of those useful character traits.
I’ll also say that I think all this naming is a good way to keep from focusing on ourselves and learning what our experiences with these people can teach us. Not just about them, but about us. And fit keeps us rom thinking about the root causes of this epidemic of sociopathy, and whether something in our culture or society isn’t affecting us and our children. Rather than say, “Oh, those are such bad people, let’s throw them in jail so all us good people are safe again.”
I understand that all of us have to go through our blaming phase. It’s a critical step in the grief process, which helps us to clarify our losses and their value. We need to get mad, shake our fingers at the bad guys, and say this has nothing to do with us. But ultimately, we wake up and see that we’re still here, whatever we lost, and we discover that we can and are living without it. We may miss it, we may have liked it better when we had what we lost, but this is now. And after a period of sulking and resisting, we figure we figure out how to bloom where we’re planted.
And in the meantime, if we don’t want to spend our lives pointing fingers at other people and calling them reprobates, we may come to figure out that we had something to do with what happened. And how we’re more alike than different. And what we gained from an encounter with someone whose worldview is so different. And what we learned that we can take forward. (Which may well be that one encounter with that kind of person is quite enough, thank you, because I have a need that person can’t meet.)
I don’t like a lot of what happened to me in my relationship with my sociopath. But I volunteered for it every step of the way. I didn’t tell him to act that way, but I didn’t leave. And while I was in such pain and not leaving, I was having a lot of talk with myself, most of it angry and hating myself and feeling stupid and just as worthless as he told me I was. Those conversations and feelings were the foundation of me figuring out that I didn’t need to depend on other people for what I thought of myself, and in fact needed to be my own source of wisdom and power in my life. (Which I believe is the other side of this whatever-it-is that generating all these sociopaths, and that’s the huge numbers of us who seem to need to go through this before we can figure out that we’re responsible for taking care of ourselves and can actually do it better than anyone else.)
Now as far as he goes, well as my mother said about my father (another sociopath) just before she died, he’s an idiot. And that’s the truth of it. He’s just like the village idiot, staggering around and pretending he knows how to live a real life, when half his lights are turned off. And yes, he’s a vampire or reprobate or whatever you want to call him, and dangerous because of it, but the fact that some of us don’t have enough sense to leave when it gets painful says at least as much about us as it does about them. And yes, we can try to throw them all in jail or, more expditiously, just shoot them, but the fact is they keep on coming.
Call me a wild-eyed liberal, but I think it’s more useful to try to figure out why. And maybe to quit trying to socialize them to be like us goody-goodies, and try to figure out what it’s going to take to unlock their trust again so they can learn to participate. I don’t know if pre-verbal damage can be addressed without the entire personality collapsing. The older I get, the more I realize how terribly vulnerable people, and especially children, are to traumatic emotional damage, and how hard it is to resolve. But getting these people up the evolutionary ladder seems like a good idea to me, if there is any way to do it, because they are valuable in so many ways.
And yes, I know that everyone says it can’t be done. I disagree. I’m not sure the therapy would conform to the Geneva convention, but I believe it can be done. But considering the numbers, we’d probably have to round them up, drug them up, and do it in huge institutions. Sounds like science fiction? Not any more than stuffing them into jails and letting them learn to be better sociopaths does.
There was mention in a news article today about some commissioner of transportation noting that we were encouraging people to conserve gas and secretly hoping that they’d drive more so that gas taxes would pay for the roads and bridges. And he dryly noted noted that we were going to have to get our agendas straight. That’s how I feel about the sociopath problem and the cultural problem that is producing them and the need to figure out what we’re going to do with them. We need to take this seriously, if we truly want the cultural and spiritual evolution that we seem to be heading for. (And maybe reprobate the idea that the best and brightest of our college graduates have been going to Wall Street for the last decade, because success in this culture is gauged by how competitively you can spend money.)
So, Wini, forgive the rant. I’m not sure what you were looking for, but you got what’s on my mind.
Wini,
I just read your last post and understand better where you are coming from. And probably what you were looking for.
As far as souls go, I don’t think we can lose them, because they’re sort of attached. But we can lose our way to connecting with them, and we can lose it big time. I think this is one of the definitions of addiction. Per Dante’s Inferno where the levels of hell are where you get exactly what you want, whatever is more important to you than God. And you live with that misery.
I used to call myself an ex-Catholic, now I think I’m more a post-Catholic, taking that good core of spiritual teaching and adding the spiritual education I’ve picked up through my life to create my own sense of the universe.
One of the worst things about my recovery phase was that I had to consciously let go of all that in order to indulge my need to get angry and blame and judge. I knew I had to do it. I knew what it would cost me (not to mention all the dear friends and family who had to listen to me). But it was a dark place I had to go through, because in all honesty I was already there by the time I got rid of him. And if I didn’t give it its time and attention, I knew I would be stuck there in bitterness and fear and despair.
It took a long time, mostly because I really resisted it. I didn’t want to be bitter (or to let myself or anyone else know that I was). It was like a rule with me, ever since I came out of the hellhole that was my family home. I wasn’t going to be bitter. I was going to act like someone who was “normal” and not damaged.
One of the watersheds in my recovery was waking up one morning in London, on a business trip when I got poisoned by dinner the night before, sick as a dog. I had been dreaming before I woke, and it was the dream that woke me. In the dream I was deep underground, standing beside a long black river. I knew it was bitterness, and I was considering whether to just dip a toe into it, or run away and pretend it wasn’t there. Before I could make a decision, that long black stream stood up like a dark monk rising from a bed, and came around to stand behind my left shoulder. In that moment, I realized that bitterness was also memory, and the guidance and wisdom of memory. I named it my Dark Guardian and then woke up.
It was the beginning of my really angry phase, and I was totally obnoxious for a while. But it was good. I had to do it, because I needed to understand what I had lost, not just to my sociopath but in other times of my life, and honor these losses and mourn them. Because in doing this I learned that it was me mourning them, but that they were not me. I was separate and still here, no matter what I’d lost. I survived it all and was still intact.
It was quite a bit later, after I’d been through forgiveness training (highly recommended) and was seriously working on trying to free myself of all these judgments and bitterness that the next big watershed came. One day, I was wishing I could be clear of it all, and listening to all the knackering in my mind about how I wasn’t this and I wasn’t that, and I decided to tell it all to shut up. And to my surprise, it didn’t shut up but it moved off to the side so I could get past it and discover what was more deeply inside of me. And I found myself as I had been as a child, before all the terrible things happened. (I was lucky enough to have a great childhood for my first three years.) And I found such a great clarity of spirit and understanding that there is nothing more valuable in human relations than compassion, which is what I’ve always believed. And I knew, finally, that all that noise was not me, but stuff I’d picked up from outside sources. I was that clear-headed, happy, generous person I found beyond the noise.
Which was a big step to getting my spirituality back, but the next watershed did the trick. I was at a concert of gospel singing by a black choir, and I was having a great time listening and clapping and swaying with the audience. When I had a vision. And it so blew my mind that I almost sank to my knees.
I saw my life, or any life, as a blink of God’s attention traveling through time. Like a bullet or an arrow on a trajectory that rises and ultimately falls back into the great matrix. But the really interesting part is that what we experience as life is just the skin between that spark of God’s attention and material reality. My life is God’s way of experiencing this reality through me. And the more old emotional junk and judgmental noise I have in my head, the more static I create between God and reality. It makes it difficult for me to perceive the God in me, and difficult for me to see the world through God’s eyes and act as an agent of good.
And I drove home the concert grinning, thinking I can live with that. And I’ve been running on it ever since.
As far as losing my soul to the sociopath, I have to say that my awareness of the God in me is a lot stronger than it was before I met him. I got involved with him because of the old emotional junk and judgmental noise I was carrying around with me. My sister, who’s spent time at AA, hit the nail on the head when she said he and I were both acting like addicts. In retrospect, I don’t think he could have exploited me if I didn’t have an equal stake in using him.
Those days are over. Or at least that lesson is. There are always new ones to help us sort out the junk and noise. I like what St. Augustine said about the universe hurtling toward perfection. That is also the path of a life, I think. A return to the original connection. Hopefully, we get a grip on it in time to do some good in the world, instead of just feeding our various hungers.
As far as reprobates go, I’m no one to be calling anyone else names. But I do know that he is a man of amazing potential which is only half-realized, and may never be more than that. He doesn’t live a happy life, and a sense of desperation is his constant companion. He has no one to turn to, and there is no way out for him because he can’t trust. To me, that is a tragedy, and one that I grew up with, with my father who was similarly damaged. And who broke all of our hearts over and over because his internal noise made him a monster. We grew up with that and we knew what makes monsters, and in our own way, we became monsters. Some of us more socially acceptable monsters than others, but all of us far from what we could have been.
These are the losses I had to mourn and let go. As all of us here do. What we might have been is a dream. What we are is real. We never cease having the opportunity to create our lives and to chose what we give our attention to. That includes allowing ourselves to grieve our losses and to respond appropriately to anything that would compromise our body or spirit. Learning how to do this is the hardest discipline of life. But to me, it’s part and parcel of the awareness of the God spark in me.
It’s late and I should be in bed. Do you know the term “Namaste.” It means, more or less, the God spark in me salutes the God spark in you. (As does the reprobate in me salute yours, if you’ve got one too. If it weren’t for that part of us leading us astray, why would we ever volunteer for these great lessons?)
Baptism Of FIRE!
khatalyst: Everything I read in the Bible tells me … God wants us to be humble. Stay humble, live humbly … stay humble as you work, stay humble as you love, stay humble through life and the words of his wisdom will guide you. Be humble tell the truth … because truth opens the way to understanding and appreciating life.
To me that says … free your mind of your ego and the flow of life will come into your spirit. You will be alive and live to the best that God has to offer.
Opposite of everyone we are blogging about … their ego … them living in their ego … their ego consumed of selfish greed, for them, them, them … if their so focused on their own greed and what’s in it for them … how can any of us expect they comprehend or experience the rest of what life has to offer? Their ego allows them to lie. If they lie, they don’t learn anything about life … how could they figure it out life through lies. Their lies is the evil of the world … aka opposite of life … LIVE backwards in EVIL.
Peace.
Wini,
There’s a lot we agree on. But not the “humility” of pointing fingers at other people and calling them evil. And I realize that’s practically heresy on this blog, but part of my belief system is that we’re all doing the best we can and working our way back to the equilibrium God offers in our own way. However misguided, however destructive to ourselves and other people.
Even sociopaths, who do it with half of their brain tied behind their backs. Their affliction makes them dangerous, but evil is in the eye of the beholder (or really, the recipient). I have a friend who has histrionic personality disorder. She constantly pushes into my life with her dramas and demands for attention, and dealing with her has caused me to neglect my family and risk my livelihood. I love her but I hate what she does to my life. It’s painful and frustrating and emotionally destabilizing to me. Does this make her evil?
My preference is to see the evil in the causes of her affliction. I know what happened to her as a child. The cause and effect is so clear that my annoyance with her behavior is also my horror and grief at what happened to the confident, brave, open-hearted child she once was, and still is at some level. And that creates a challenge for me, because I want to help but I also have to maintain some boundaries around my own life. It would be very convenient to label her, and dispose of her as a problem person I don’t want in my life because she’s more work than she’s worth. But the larger truth is that she’s a loyal, funny and generous friend. So I walk that line of taking responsibility for how much I let her into my life.
I also know what happened to my sociopath. In the five years, I learned a lot. I learned a more from his published writing (yes, he finally got published) after we split. He is a product of some very bad things that happened to him when he was very small. Again, it doesn’t make him any less dangerous. He simply can’t help himself when it comes to exploiting people; his thinking doesn’t include the possibility of peer relationships that just exist for their own sakes. In his world, people have less power or more power. They’re people he needs to suck up to, or people who are weak and usable.
If today the opportunity arose to spend time with him again, I wouldn’t. Not because I’m afraid of him, but because his worldview is boring and restrictive. And it’s annoying to constantly fend off his opportunism or deal with his sycophancy. But you have to understand this is his loss. He can’t negotiate the world of feeling people. He is the loneliest person I know, because he is so charismatic that he attracts people who want to know him, and then pretty quickly they don’t because he is so incessantly manipulative. His girlfriends are universally highly damaged women, usually incest survivors, who enter the exploiter-victim drama imagining it to be a great romance. None of these relationships end well. His writing is sad, so full of despair and loss, that it’s hard for me to read it.
Now, anyone who’s had dealing with sociopaths would say that’s just the pity play, but to my mind, this pity play is real. Their affliction is an affective disorder, an inability to bond that keeps them searching for their place in the world. Because they can’t establish one in the usual way of creating relationships and community, they project who they want to be and try to make everyone conform to their fantasy. It’s bravado fronting confusion and loss. Unfortunately, they are split people. The loss is real, but so is the bravado which is how they survive. And this bravado isn’t pretty. It’s the tough bravado of the survivor who will do whatever it takes, and cares about no one because it is protecting that child that no one else cares about.
Does all that matter if you are on the receiving end of that bad behavior? Well, I think this is we’re we are split too. On the one hand, we have to protect ourselves and take our pain very seriously. In that framework, they are “bad” people, certainly bad for us. On the other hand, I prefer to also understand, as well as I can, the dynamics and history of the sociopath’s disorder. It helps me stay human, instead of succumbing to a black-and-white, good-guys-and-bad-guys mentality, which is the kind of thinking that solves nothing and often starts wars. It also helps me stay hopeful about what looks like a lost cause. If we can find the causes and continue to care, then over time, we can do something to help. If not the sociopaths that exist today, then the ones who will be formed in the future by emotional damage.
As I’ve said before, none of this is relevant to someone who is in the blaming phase of grief. And it shouldn’t be. Every major loss drops us back into something like the developmental phases of childhood. And we have to run through them again in order to avoid becoming emotionally constipated by that painful loss, and having it drain our energy for the rest of our lives. But ultimately, if we finish the process, it becomes clear that loss creates growth, and I believe that principle is all through the Bible as well.
There’s a wonderful Bible-based book called “Get Over It and Get on With It” by Michelle McKinney Hammond. You can find reader reviews on it on Amazon. Like most Catholics, I’m not a Bible reader, but this book has tempted me to go back and read some of the stories the author references. I highly recommend it.
So in my long-winded way (and I much admire your brevity), I’m taking a position here that is not yours. But as the lawyers say, reasonable people disagree.
khatalyst: If you read all the bloggs on this site … they are written by the unselfish (those that stayed humble in their lives against all the odds to become selfish) explaining the selfish greedy personalities that came and did damage in their lives.
The only thing titles to their afflictions tells me … is where do they lay on the greed and selfish scale 1-10 and of course psychos tipping the scale and flying off the scale altogether.
Why anyone can’t get through to them … and why the lie through their teeth about everything and anything to everyone and anyone. It’s all about them, them, them and their selfish greed is clouding their judgments. Why would a selfish greedy person admit that they are selfish and greedy? That’s why they keep putting the spins and having you go down dead end streets all the time.
Think about it … I know my EX always said “you can get more bees with honey than vinegar” … which should have been my first RED flag that he was talking about himself … instead of telling me to kill my bosses with kindness, don’t react to anything they do to me … cause they want me to react so they can fire me for insubordination… which would resolve my having filed a lawsuit against them.
Break down their selfishness and greed … and you’ll find the person sitting behind their selfish, self centered ways.
Greed and selfishness … hand in hand is the major aphrodisiac in society today.
Peace.