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.)
Would that Firm be Blogin + Blogin :)~
Elizabeth Conley: No I didn’t work for a law firm (LOL).
I worked next to 2 court houses … in the city.
Oh, and an answer to your thoughts about insulting an anti-social at the beginning might have you off their hit list. Not true in my case. My boss that went after me, waited almost 20 years to get me for what transpired between us in 1981.
1981 I was a union steward for an employee that worked for her (my boss). She wasn’t my boss at the time … I worked in another location in our place of business.
Long story short … I represented a black woman who was forced by this boss to sign in and out when she left the floor to get a drink of water or go to the bathroom … but, she never forced her white subordinates to do the same.
This woman filed a grievance and I was the union steward that represented her at the step one hearing.
Well, not only did I have to tell this boss that congress signed the bill freeing slavery under President Lincoln … dot, dot, dot … and you can guess her reaction at this meeting.
From that meeting on every time that boss saw me or any of her underhanded supervisors saw me in the hall way, they would actually face the walls of the hallways … like they were invisible. It was the strangest behavior I had ever seen, grown adults acting like immature children.
Anyway, years later, these lower level bosses took over our building … forced the “real” bosses out into retirement or transferring … and who do you think insisted that I now come work for her? You got it. Yours truly …
You know some of the trumped up charges against me was that I was prejudice about minorities, gays, men, female co-workers etc. Anything they thought could stick, she tried to stick it on me.
Funny … the woman I represented in that 1981 grievance became one of my best friends in there and was still working for this boss for all those years … as soon as that boss started on destroying me, this co-worker jumped ship and left our place of employment all together. To this day, she is still one of my best friends and told me that if she ever had to come back to the state we were in to testify on my behalf she would.
Why did she leave our place of employment? She knew when our boss finally went after me, there was no hope what-so-ever that our boss would ever find her heart.
Peace.
Sociopaths are not only lacking the part of normal personality – concience, their personality have an extra component that normal personalities do not develop and do not need – ability to wage mental wars against other people.
When was the last time you planned a psychological attack on somebody close to you in order to get something?
When was the last time you consciously planned on how to weaken such person thought process so that you can to get some profit from it ? Never, right… ?
If you were given a task to seriously destabilize another person intelectual abilities so that this person starts doubting his/her sanity than you probably would not know where to start. Why doing such a stupid thing anyway, right ? Only sociopaths learn know how to do it – normal people do not develop such abilities because they are thankfully not needed in a normal human interaction.
I used to be a math tutor for many years and I developed a great deal of insight into the thought process of my students. I could synchronize my own intelect with the thought process of the student solving a math problem – and by simulating his way of thinking I could quickly pinpoint and repair weak points of the
students problem solving abilities. I was a really good teacher and my results confirmed that.
Upon having contact with sociopaths I realized that If I ever wanted to act like one a few things were required. First I would have to synchronize my way of thinking to observe thought process of another person – just as I did with my students – this is not easy and it takes patience to learn. I think average people have no need to learn this skill, only teachers (and possibly sociopaths learn it by experience)
Second – I would have to wait until the other person came to a confusion – a crossroads in his/her thinking and right than I would have to conciously mislead them pretending to believe what I knew to be nonsense. It would be like teaching somebody in reverse – actually diassembling their healthy thougth process instead of improving it – brainwashing.
If sociopaths would do that all conciously – it would take enormous amount of work, and they really would be sort of evil geniuses. The understanding of other person thought process while the person is solving a problem is something I was able to do only after countless hours of interaction in a period of a few years. In reality sociopaths are not “geniuses”, they rely on life experience and they observe what we tend to neglect – automatic reactions in people. There is no “magic” involved – all causes and effects of their behaviour can be deduced by logical thinking. I am all for demystyfying sociopathic behavior – from the point of view of a math teacher there are some basic calculations involved – but nothing we could not understant.
P.
Speaking of deficits, I really need to discuss the SPEECH PATTERNS of sociopaths. My sociopaths speech and writings are really hard to understand. When I first met him, I thought the way he spoke was mystical and intriguing. I had to read what he wrote up to 5 times to “get it.” It was so out there and cool. When the mask started slipping, the speech patterns became dichotomies that I found hard follow. Now when I see his speech pattern, I see it is an incomprehensible mumble jumble. It is scattered and left for interpretation. I think this is part of the brain deficit. Did anyone else experience strange speech patterns?
Bird,
They contradict themselves, as if they can’t remember the meanings to words connected to “emotions”—they can also say “nothing in 10,000 words or more.”
Their “logic tree” doesn’t have the same “roots” that the logic tree for the rest of us does and they can twist reality. That’s about all I can say on the subject.
I’m not sure if this is the appropriate thread to post this on, but I thought it might sort of fit.
I saw 20/20 tonight and it was discussing the “Safe Harbor” law in Nebraska that was for mothers/fathers to take their children to a hospital and leave them there without “abandoning” the child or being prosecuted. It was intended for babies, but no age was put on it and people from Nebraska and other states began to bring their children, mostly older children there and turning them over to the state.
The head of the human services division in Nebraska was denouncing these parents as “taking the easy way out” and “abandoning” these children.
20/20 spoke with some of the mothers and the grandmothers who were trying to raise these children and who made the painful decision to “abandon” these children to the state of Nebraska. Many of them were dangerous children with Bi-polar and “conduct disorder” (budding psychopaths) who were violent, and so violent that the parents, grandparents, and sibs were not safe.
They showed weapons made by an 11 year old, a stick with sharp nails and screws in it like a pin cushion. They interviewed the sibs of these children, who lived in fear of the “abandoned” child before the child was turned over to the state.
Some of these children had been hospitalized up to 26 times in their 10-12 yr life for violence. One mother said that when her son realized where she was taking him, he started begging her not to leave him, promising that he would not hit her or his sibs any more, that he would go to school, etc. Earlier she had described how he would curse her and strike her and his sibs, refuse to go to school, had been suspended, etc. and even had a video of a rage in which the child broke his own hand.
While my heart goes out to these children, my heart also goes out to these parents who made such a terrible decision to give up their children for the sakes of themselves and the sakes of the other children they are trying to raise—most of the time single handedly.
Other parents who made their children “wards of the state” because they made too much money to qualify for medicaide but didn’t have health insurance for treatment for the child’s mental illnesses.
The 20/20 interviewers were not very sympathetic to the head of the DHS for Nebraska who was totally 100% “blaming” the parents for not being able to handle these children and “taking the easy way out.” I could see the anguish in the faces of these women who had taken the last step possible in an impossible situation. My heart bleeds for both the children and the parents.
peterd: My bosses insisted that I go to the employees assistance program and explain all to the analyst there what was going on with me in the workplace. Of course, I refused after finding out how my co-workers who also were suing this team of managers were sold out by the employees assistance program. Who on that staff, I could not say because I refused to go. They analyze you, figure out your Achilles’ heel and serve it to the bosses in order for them to easily destroy ever fiber of you. Using you, against yourself. NOTHING DOING. I stayed as quiet and humble as possible and conditioned myself to take their insults, each and every day. I was fighting fire with kindness and compassion … though it exhausted me every day because of the amounts of players working on me every day. I figured they had at least 70 master minds pulling all the strings. They even brought in this retired personnel officer to go after my blood. That was the most unbelievable. Here this man retired years ago from the blood bath … and he’s resurrected to personally do me under… it was amazing to watch his oozing sleaze come alive. The guy actually smiled and smirked at me every chance he could and made no bones to tell me he was hired specifically to get me.
Of course, my kindness to him unglued him to no ends. They would always tell me from day one meeting “Wini, look how long we are giving you, no one has ever gotten so much time”. I had no clue what they were referring to until late that evening, before I went to bed, the words hit me like a thunder bolt … “look how much time we are giving you” … meant, most people loose their cool, tell us off by now and then we nail them for insubordination.
I always treated them with respect and they hated me for being a lady throughout all the hell they put me through.
Peace.
Oxy: I saw the tail end of that 20/20 show discussing the “Safe Harbor” law in Nebraska. That head of the human service division should take all those children in his home for a few months before he opens his mouth to make any comments about those children or their family members.
What a disgrace he is to the entire human race. How does anyone think this man can do his job if he doesn’t have an ounce of compassion? Absolutely NO compassion for either the children or the adult family members who made this gut wrenching decision? Typical bureaucrat … at it’s shining best for all to see, just collecting his paycheck every two weeks waiting for retirement.
Peace.
Bird: My EX had dyslexia and my sister had a hearing problem that was operated on when she was in 4th or 5th grade.
I’m wondering if they all have some form of physical ailments that they view as some sort of deficiency and hence, want others to pay for them being born with such? Again, it’s a negative mindset conditioned in themselves as children.
I’m wondering if therapist should work back from said ailments to find out what they thought of their ailment at a young age and how it affected their self esteem versus if they have this same thought process about the ailment as they aged?
You could just be on to something.
Peace.
Elizabeth Conley says: I noticed that the careless, lazy, rude and unreliable individuals (aka jerks) where I worked were the first ones to attached themselves to the psychos bandwagons. They just loved the energy of the chaos they could cause.
I also saw how the anti-social personality bosses would kick those that attached their wagons to them. They used everyone, the sniffling idiots and the decent (goody two shoes), mature folks. It was an equal opportunity destruction of careers and psyches on their part.
If the idiots (or jerks) got slapped down, they kept coming back for more. Brood for a few days and right back into the mix, relishing in it .. the insults, the chaos, and being allowed to keep the chaos flourishing… they were drunk with power of the chaos. Clueless to the fact that a new regime would come in and responsible people had a memory of all their antics for the years chaos reigned.
It always amazed me how these jerks thought that tomorrow would never arrive… as they basked in the breadcrumbs an anti-social personality threw their way for the short period they would reign.
I never saw jerks ever try to attach their wagons to decent bosses … always keeping their distance, somehow knowing that decent folks were surrounding a decent boss and they had no chance, no chance what so ever to get their way with a real boss.
Funny, the jerks always said nice things about an anti-social personality, but would never say anything nice about a decent personality … always looking for the negative side to a decent person. I found that an interesting concept too.
Peace.