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.)
Dear dear Janie! Glad to see you posting with your infinite wisdom and compassion gained from your search for knowledge. “The unexamined life is not worth living.”
I think as a result of our experiences with the “dark side” of the world, of evil incarnate, we tend to grow more because we examine not only the psychopaths but ourselves as well.
People who “blame” the psychopath entirely, without looking at what made them (the victim) STAY in the abusive relationship never learn, and many times will go right into another abusive relationship. It is only by examining our part in ALLOWING the abuse that we can learn and grow from the experience instead of just suffer. This is not blaming the victim for the abuse, because the Ps do not have the right to treat us that way, BUT, by the same token, there was something amiss in most of us that we ALLOWED the abuse to continue when it became painful and we had seen the lies and forgave and forgave betrayal after betrayal.
Even those people (a few) who HAD NO CLUE before it all turned to ashes were gullible to some extent. Being gullible doesn’t ‘make it okay for anyone to abuse you, but the FACTS OF LIFE are that if you allow it there are plenty of people who will line up to take advantage of you.
As P. T. Barnham said “there’s a sucker born every minute” and as Abraham Lincoln said “you can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all the people all the time.”
If we don’t learn to protect ourselves, we WILL be abused.
Janie, Jesus told us that we are not to “judge” but at the same time, He also told us that we can OBSERVE who is evil and who is not by their BEHAVIOR just as you can observe if a tree is good or not by the fruit it bears. Judging, I think is making a decision about someone without appropriate information, without known enough to make an informed decision. However, you can look at the FRUIT the “tree” bears and determine if the tree is good or evil.
It doesn’t matter in the end, if the tree was “neglected” as a sapling, or if it’s mother was a slut…if the tree bears bad fruit, then the tree is bad. Having been abused as a youngester does not give the psychopaths a “pity pass” as far as I am concerned. To me, “inspecting fruit” is not an arrogant attitude, but it is more a survival technique and “good sense.”
Kimberley,
Namaste, the seeker in me salutes the seeker in you.
You don’t sound like a plodder, more like a dancer.
As far as blaming and judging goes, I’m not impervious to that temptation. Especially when I’m overtired or stressed about some work challenge.
But I also know it’s a double-edged sword. All that blaming goes both ways, and I’m tired of listening to all the self-blaming noise in my head. All the have-to this and supposed-to that. I don’t have to be anything but what I am right now. That tolerance with myself tends to be extended to the rest of the world.
One way of looking at sociopaths is that they trigger a lot of strong feelings in us. For the most part, we know how we feel. If we stop worrying about whether anything is right or wrong, and start thinking about what we want to do with these feelings, I think we’re more likely to become active change agents in our lives and in the world. And have much more interesting lives.
I love what you said about seeing through other people’s eyes and feeling yourself inside living things. Me too. I even try to imagine I’m the artist when I listen to music or look at art. I know it’s partly projection to imagine I can understand their experience, but I also know that if I pay that kind of attention, I learn all kinds of surprising and useful things.
One of the hardest things about this recovery was that I had to consciously turn that learning eye into myself. It was a scary thing to do, especially when I was so bitter. But I really didn’t understand why this all had occurred. Why I didn’t just run away like any sensible person would have done, or beena more effective at controlling him or myself. My relationship with myself was probably the worst it had ever been in my life. I even considered suicide because I’d lost all faith in my ability to run my life, and I imagined that in my broken-down state I was going to become a magnet for even worse people than him.
But somehow I found the will to live, and the courage to be whiney and bitter and blaming and judgmental, because that was what I felt right then. I had to push through all the voices in my head that told me my face was going to get stuck in a grouchy frown and I was going to become an ugly, embittered old harpy. And I found that looking at what I was afraid to look at can be the most rewarding thing. I didn’t even know I was in denial until I let myself be all the things I wasn’t allowed to be. And discovered that I was hurt, and I didn’t feel like I deserved the way he treated me, and I had a very good reason to be angry.
It was great, but I’d never have gotten there if I didn’t give myself permission to stop being Miss Perfect. And I’m a total supporter of everyone on this blog who is outraged about what happened to them. It’s the major step toward learning how to be better at loving and caring for ourselves.
The willingness to be empathetic you see in me today comes from the other side of that effort. Now I can extend that empathy without feeling like I’m required to fix anybody or bail them out. Very different from the days when I was all about fixing up other people in exchange for them thinking I’m totally fabulous and non-expendable in their lives. When I couldn’t say no, for fear someone wouldn’t like me. I like me. Other people’s opinions may be interesting, but are ultimately not important.
And no, it’s not that easy. None of this is easy. St. Teresa wrote something to her nuns about the need to get over the idea that communion with God was going to be a joyous experience. She said it was going to be the hardest work you’ll ever do. Cleaning up your head is like that. Hard work, but the alternative is not attractive.
So you’re out there dancing in the cosmos, and I’m here with the broom and mop. Hmm, maybe it’s time to quit for for the day and go outside and see what the stars have to say. Thanks for the reminder, Kimberley.
In retrospect, I was abused but I did allow it to happen. I wish I had gotten out sooner. I blame myself because I kept making excuses like things will change and get better…they would go back to the way they were when we first met. They didn’t of course. In fact, they got worse. I always knew in my gut something was terribly off…that my partner’s version of “love” wasn’t right. After he hooked me and I started giving, there was nothing I was getting back from him. ..until I had nothing left. I was spent up and then discarded.
Trust me. I will never allow this to happen to me again. When I think of some of the things I accepted, and things I discovered that were going on behind my back, I feel nauseas.
I have to acknowledge that God was with me and I discovered the con before he split without a trace with my car and ownership of my condo. After this experience, if I allowed this to happen to me again, it would be like me not thanking God for his help when I asked for it. It’s just so hard to trust again. That is something I will have to work on very hard.
Here is a “daily reflection” that came today that might be helpful:
Regarding your past experiences and pain–it is darkness only if you see it as darkness. Everything that has happened in your past is a part of who you are and has been an important part of the beautiful person you are today. You are beautifully and wonderfully made and God has a plan for you.
Our individual journeys are like the making of a quilt. Each piece in the quilt is an important part of the overall design. As we go through life crafting our quilt, we see the painful parts of our lives as ugly scraps sitting on the floor and we often don’t want to weave these scraps into our beautiful design, fearing we would ruin the quilt. The truth is that these scraps are required pieces in the quilt in order to make the quilt complete. The quilt would be incomplete without these pieces and the overall design will only be beautiful with the inclusion of these pieces.
Pearl: That is a beautiful quote. I received that about a year ago … and it made me feel great. Same with seeing it again.
Thanks for sharing.
By the way, everyone should log onto an inspirational quotes site and sign in for them to send you e-mails … that come to you weekly or daily. They really do boost your moral.
Peace.
Dear Khatalyst,
You are so right, it is that we have to work on ourselves. I think that “forgiving myself” for being so “stupid” was the most difficult thing for me. Also forgiving myself for being “provoked” into doing things because I didn’t have control of my emotions the way I would have had if I had not been in such pain.
None of us are perfect, but I would accept much less than perfection in OTHERS, even abuse, but I could NOT accept less than perfection in myself. So because I wasn’t perfect, I wasn’t OK. It was a lose-lose situation for me. Now, I can accept my own imperfections, allow myself to be “human” and not perfect and still be OK. I no longer allow abusive behavior or those that cross over reasonable boundaries, and feel no need to fix them, or to have them in my life. I feel no guilty about standing up for myself. I feel no guilt because I can’t fix others.
So the self examination and resulting changes have been a big benefit to me in the long run. I’m still not perfect, and once in a while I fall from the “wagon” and have to get back up and dust my self off and get back on…one day at a time, but the good days now outnumber the “bad” days 100 to 1, and those are good enough ratios for me.
Like Janie, I appreciate your thoughtful posts and great wisdom.
Oxybodacious & Khatalyst,
Thank you both very, very much for responding to my comment above. I know some of it seems rather ambiguous, or rather vague, but it’s where I’m at in my spiritual walkabout and it’s a little difficult for me to verbally express what my heart, my spirit is whispering to me. Ya know?
Oxy–You know that I know, without the guidance, mercy, love of the Lord I wouldn’t be sitting here today, typing on my puter sending you this “love letter” (heehee). So, yes, you sharing scripture with me, knowledge from the Holy Bible, is super important. I am first and foremost a devoted Christian, meaning not only do I love the Lord but I worship him through and through.
That said, I will not nor cannot dismiss, turn away from any profound, sincere spiritual experience expressed by any person regardless of their religious beliefs (or lack thereof). I think about all I might be missing by not being receptive to others, not taking the time or interest to truly listen. That’s the linear thinking, the linear posture I discussed up there that I consider stagnating behavior, imo.
Now, I think I need to clarify that I have transcended all the years of involvement with PDIs, and all the stupid suffering I allowed them to dish out to me at this juncture in my life. I can candidly and frankly admit that I am healed. Truly. I wouldn’t lie on here as that would only be lying to myself.
I also no longer have the desire or energy to spare in cultivating any type of romantic (or even carnal) involvement with a man. Yes, I’m burned out but I also consider being with a man to be a distraction, an impediment to what’s going in right now in my life. Sound selfish? I hope not because it doesn’t feel like that at all. It seems like a good idea, a reasonable state of being.
I guess you can say…using the pop psych term..I am emotionally unavailable to men. I am so content, so serene, so marvelously happy being single, unfettered, that I plan on hanging out here for awhile. Am I weird? You betcha!…haha. I’m a nerdy, space cadet, introvert who just wants men to linger on the sidelines and keep their distance.
So, maybe I don’t really have anything much to offer regarding current experiences with PDIs, but I sincerely hope I will be allowed to offer encouragement and support whenever I feel the need. I am devoted to LF and have been for about a year. I simply can’t imagine not being able to read what all of you must say in order to find your own healing. I read the latest sad stories and my heart breaks again, for the gazillioneth time, then I read that healing has begun and I’m not surprised but elated. For all of you.
You really are some of the most wonderful people I’ve ever had the privilege of “meeting”…haha.
I love these posts, Oxy, Jane, Wini, Pearl, Iwonder.
A long time ago, it occurred to me that the quality of my life might be changed by the state of my consciousness. The idea caused me to try, just try, to work on keeping myself positive. To see the good around me, to be grateful, to imagine good outcomes.
I had a lot of emotional damage from my childhood, and a lot of it was not clear to me. I just felt it as a lot of anxiety, difficulty in focusing on things that should be important, and a kind of over-reactivity to life. So I often felt like my mind was my worst enemy. I would be try to be a light-filled person, and there was something inside me that wasn’t cooperating at all.
All of this peaked in my relationship with the sociopath. All my ancient bitterness and grief, insecurity, fears about the future, sense of ineptitude, concerns about whether I was worth loving. It was like every self-destructive thing in my psyche rose to have a big party on the surface of my consciousness. And where all this had probably been “driving my bus” from a subconscious level before, there wasn’t any doubt in this relationship that I was being driven by forces in my character that were, to put it mildly, not contributing to my mental health.
At the same time, there was a little voice saying to me through the whole thing, “This is really important.” I didn’t understand that until much later.
One of the amazing things about this blog is that all of us have been through serious traumatic abuse at the hands of someone who, as DrSteve put it, had a certain type of deficit disorder. We were all used by someone who put his or her own objectives so beyond any concern for us that we lost a great deal to people who relentlessly put themselves first.
And no matter how different our backgrounds, circumstances, beliefs, ways of living, we all have another thing in common. It’s that we were vulnerable to this. We were giving, not particularly self-protective people. If we’d all met before this ever happened, we probably would have come away thinking, “What a sweet bunch of people.”
That broad generalization may not totally be true of everyone who is damaged by an encounter with a sociopath. We can be blindsided by a sociopath in a business meeting, someone who decides to win at our expense. There can be similar chance encounters by people who are ruthless and just don’t play by the rules. But LoveFraud is about people who were in “love” relationships with partners incapable of love. Not hit-and-run encounters, but experiences over time.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but I know that, for me, it was the worst thing that could ever happen to me. It was what I feared all my life. I didn’t know I feared it until it happened. I didn’t know how much energy I’d been expending to avoid something like this. Making very sure in all my relationships that I was liked and loved. That people would tolerate my insecurities and appreciate how caring and generous I was to them. That there was always a warm cuddle if I needed it, or an ear to listen to me or help me with some advice, and encouragement if I was feeling down. As a result, there had never been anyone close to me who didn’t meet this criteria. Until this guy.
He fooled me. He read me and came on as exactly the kind of person I needed him to be. And more, because he understood the changes I wanted in my life, and he promised me all that. And he disparaged and convinced me to stop giving energy to everything else that had been important to me, because he was the big solution. And I flew into it and him like a moth into the flame.
Hooked. Thinking this was love.
I keep waiting for one of my fellow bloggers here to offer an opinion that I hear from my family and friends, when I suggest that a more empathetic approach might be in order. That I still love him. Even after all this time and suffering and energy exerted on recovery. And it’s true. I do. I’ll always love him. He was one of the smartest, most insightful and funniest people I’ve ever known. There’s a lot I hated about him, mostly the way he treated other people (especially me). But despite his own best efforts to prove that love was a fraud, he wasn’t all bad. He was just bad for anyone who depended on him and expected him to play by common social rules.
So how could I (or we) have known what we were getting into? Here we are, nice people, maybe too nice, all with our own ideas of what a great relationship would look like. There are the sociopaths, making their livings or getting their egos inflated by worming their way into our lives by looking like Mr. or Ms. Right.
In the five years of my relationship with my sociopath, there were periods of months when he wasn’t in my life. Even when he was in my life, he was always cruising for sex and often for a “better score.” Although I had tons of money at the time, I was way older than him and that embarrassed him. He didn’t like looking like a boy toy. So I got so observe some things. Like a lot of women got rid of him very fast. And at least one other woman gave him a few months before she got rid of him. None of his sexual hookups, except one sad and passive little girl, came back for seconds. What did they see that we didn’t? Or what did they want that he wasn’t giving?
Dear Khatalyst,
I too loved the psychopath X-BF, and felt like I could never stop loving him….but I did. A love relationship has to be “fed” or it dies, withers away. Maybe you want to continue to “love” him, I don’t know. But I do know that if you decide NOT TO CONTINUE TO LOVE HIM, quit feeding the emotional part of that relationshp inside yourself.
There is an old Cherokee story about good and evil. An old man was teaching a young man about life and he told him that inside each of us there are two wolves fighting, and one is evil and one is good. The boy asked the man which wolf would win, and the old man said, “The one you feed the most.”
I thought I could never stop loving the P, but after a time, slowly, almost imperceptibly the love drifted away until one day, it wasn’t there any more. I’m not sure when the last drop of it left, but it is gone.
Actually, the same with my P son and my mother, his toxic enabler. I can’t conjure up any feelings of love, need, wanting, missing, needing, just wanting to chat or to tell them something about my day, or to tell them a sorrow or a joy. They just aren’t in my radar any more as far as emotions are concerned.
Some days I think of something funny or nice and I want to tell my grandparents, and I almost pick up the phone, but I then realize I can’t “call them” any more to share with them, they havae been gone since 1975 and 1978, or I hear a joke my husband would have laughed about and I think “I can’t wait to tell M. about that”–then I realize he is gone. I don’t have those feelings about my mom or my P-son, there’s nothing I want to share with them. It’s like they just don’t exist. Is that “indifference”? The opposite of love? I’m not sure. They still have the power to piss me off once in a while, but not like they did. They don’t have the power to hurt me any more. I took that power back from them. I don’t trust them, so they cannot hurt me. I don’t expect anything from them so there is no way they can disappoint me. No disappointment, no pain.
You may be (possibly) not so much “in love” with HIM as with the FANTASY of what you thought he was. The mask, the FAKE “him” that you saw/
I’m like Janie now, I really don’t have room in my life for a relationship with a man. I think sometimes I might like one if it feell into my lap, but they take an awful lot of energy and my energy right now is focused on me. Healing me. Loving me. Enjoying me.
I’m pretty “choosy” now about the people I let into my life. It has to be a pretty special person for me to even bother with. People who are not kind, caring, honest, and good people, can just keep on moving. I don’t need them even near me!
Happy Thanksgiving DAy folks! xoxoxox Oxy
Oxy, Oxy, Oxy … I love your old Cherokee story about good and evil! The perfect story to tell us.
We need Donna to post this story on the HomePage.
I copied it below for anyone that missed Oxy’s post to Khatalyst …
An old man was teaching a young man about life and he told him that inside each of us there are two wolves fighting, and one is evil and one is good.
The boy asked the man which wolf would win, and the old man said, “The one you feed the most.”
Perfect, perfect, perfect.
Peace everyone.