“How did he really feel?” and “What did he want from me?” are two questions that often haunt victims of sociopaths. The reason we are haunted by these questions varies but often stems from the habit of over-focusing on the sociopath instead of ourselves. That being said, victims also have a healthy ”˜need to know’ that can help with recovery and healing.
I struggled with these questions in my own healing. I remain baffled by my observations of enjoyment of affection on the part of sociopaths. Early on, I told my own therapist that I had come to the conclusion that sociopaths exploit those close to them to the point of death, then, cry at the funeral. At the moment the tears are shed, I believe they do represent a grief of sorts. The feelings of loss experienced by sociopaths are however, short lived. Victims also have to beware because, although sociopaths are said to be incapable of feelings for those in their lives, they do become obsessed with them. Psychologists have not yet explained this obsession. If they don’t attach, why are they obsessed? Those who have read my other entries know that I believe that sociopaths do attach. It is what they do with attachments that is disordered.
How did he really feel?
In response to the picture of a sociopath crying at his victim’s funeral, my therapist said, “He feels what he tells himself he feels.” To help you understand what my therapist meant, I will explain what is known about how people usually experience feelings.
There are two components to feelings. The first is a physical sensation. When we experience a feeling we feel something in our bodies in relationship to that feeling. Think about loving someone close to you and sense how your body feels. Is it warmth in your heart? That is usually what people report.
There is much evidence that these physical sensations are disordered in sociopaths. Sociopaths do not generally experience the physical and hormonal changes that go along with feeling emotion. If they do experience them, it is to a lesser degree. Physical responses are blunted.
The second component of feelings is called attribution. Attribution is a cognitive process. When I feel that warmth in my heart as I see my children, I attribute the sensation to my love for them. Thus the physical sensation alone does not make emotion. Emotion is physical sensations and our interpretations of these sensations. There is also evidence that the parts of the brain responsible for attribution do not function properly in sociopaths.
There is one emotion that many sociopaths experience in a not so disordered way. This emotion is anger. Sociopaths do have blunted physical responses to anger. Despite this blunted responsiveness, they seem aware of angry feelings and make correct attributions about what makes them angry. Again, science has not even addressed, much less explained this observation.
Since the physical sensations and attributions that allow for the experience of emotion are disordered in sociopaths, their inner world is very different. They are left to make sense of themselves and others without the tools most of us use. Other parts of the brain fill in the missing processes. The person who is credited with first describing sociopathy in depth is Hervey Cleckley. He proposed that sociopaths are at least of average if not above average verbal intelligence. This makes sense because they have to use their verbal intelligence to make up for their lack of emotions. They do indeed feel what they tell themselves they feel. Scientists say they mimic other people’s emotions, yet again there is no real proof of this.
What did he want from me?
This question is easy to answer intellectually, but very hard for victims to accept emotionally. There are three pleasures we get from our love relationships. The first is pleasure in affection. The second is sexual pleasure. The third is pleasure associated with dominance and control. Sociopaths experience sex and dominance as enormously more pleasurable than affection. Therefore, they are in relationships to get sex and power, pure and simple.
If you love deeply and feel affection for others, you cannot fathom the inner world of an emotionally disordered person whose primary pleasures are sex and power. To understand another’s world you have to imagine yourself experiencing what the other experiences. You can’t do this with a sociopath.
Louise Gallagher said in her post The six steps of healing from a psychopath that the first step is acceptance. We have to accept that we can only know in part how sociopaths really feel and what they want from us. We can understand intellectually, but never emotionally.
Again, a helpful read! I wish I could see what medical/psychological journals 100 years from now will say about this disorder.
My recovery is going well, and 95% of the time I am strong, but I have moments of weakness. I googled last night just to see if any new pictures are posted by my psycho (he’s a photographer) and sometimes he posts pics of himself in galleries. I found two new ones and although I am not wishing for the relationship to return (god no!) –I marvel at how he is smiling and looking perfectly happy and unaffected — as if we had never been together.
I know he has this disorder, but he functions outwardly like a “great guy.” It is so confounding.
What you say in this post makes sense and fits my psycho’s profile. Funny, we all “obsess” to some degree with new love, I believe. For psychos, it must be different.
I have to re-resolve to stop thinking about him in any way. The analysis of what happened is good for me as it is leading to a better life for myself and helping to fix what led me to the psycho in the first place. And the disorder is a fascinating condition, we all must admit, on a certain level.
But…too much time spent in the analysis is still a power victory for them. A “reverse obsession” on our part. Fascinating but necessary to control!
Still strong.
Hey Southernman!
I recognized so much of what I went through in your post. I was abandoned as well. I stopped the emailing and called only once because it was degrading to hear that there was no interest on the other end AT ALL any more. Therapy has helped me and it sounds like it has helped you. I keep going to my therapist for reinforcement. You are right. It WAS NOT you. It was her and her disorder. I believe once we understand that, we are more than half way there. I was deeply broken when I believed it was me who was responsible. It is a relief to understand that it was the psycho and their illness, and we just didn’t know their story.
I agree, we are lucky we did not move in with or marry these people — and we are lucky they do not try to re-contact us. Still, we were emotionally abused, no question and our precious time was wasted in a very big way.
On a positive note, five months out of the experience, I can say that I feel a definite sense of strength which I have gained. You are right. Our happiness comes from within first, and then we can attach to others. Not the other way around. It’s one thing to understand that intellectually, but quite another to truly FEEL it inside. Well, now, after the psycho, I get it. The horrible experience has (after much pain and introspection) BUILT my self-esteem. Ironic, but true.
I find myself standing up for the things I want out of a relationship much much more quickly now. It’s a 50/50 thing, and if I’m not getting my 50, well, then it’s not right, period.
I also see that I am the winner here. Strange to say, but true! The fact that I care about others and about myself and spend time making sense of what happened makes me a winner. Also, all the things the psycho accused me of turned out to be TRUE OF THEM. I am the one to be coveted, not them.
I visit this site almost daily. I am obsessed (not ridiculously – you all know what I mean) now with my own recovery and mental/emotional health. That comes first.
I am sorry to hear when people’s children have to go through this. Again, I guess therapy is the way to go for the parent and possibly the child. Hard enough for us adults to recover…
Knowing other people have gone through similar experiences reinforces my recovery. This site helps keep me from getting “soft” about the very disturbed freakazoid I got tangled up with!
To Southernman
Thank you for posting your story! I have three reactions to it.
First, Your story is important for us because women can also be sociopaths. I am working on a piece about this and you have given me an introduction.
Second, you have done a very great thing for the women who visit this site. Because sociopathy is so common in men, women who have been involved with sociopaths come to believe that good men like you only exist on TV and in the movies. HEAR THIS LADIES EXPECT A MAN TO BE LOVING AND EMPATHETIC THIS IS NORMAL MALE BEHAVIOR!
Third, balance in pleasure is important for balance in life. That is what you maintain when you keep your spiritual focus. None of us know why these relationships happen to us, but it is up to us to learn and grow from the experience.
Dr. Leedom and LAMan………
Thank you both for your kind words. I really only scratched the surface in my story about her behavior. There were many things that she shared with me, during our time together that now, I see as big time red flags… but of course, she wouldn’t do those things to me… I was “special.” I have wondered why after all these months, why I could not move on, why I was consumed by her and the relationship, why the pain was so intense. I must share that I can honestly say that having this happen to me was more painful then losing my wife to death. I think on some levels, it’s because she did these things to me emotionally with a smile on her face, with concern, and love in her eyes. Using projection, manipulation, and just plain cruelty. She was able to make me think and feel like I was the person who needed help with my “emotions” When I think of all the hoops I felt I had to jump through to keep the relationship. when I think of the sabotage she did to it. It would seem like when ever things were going well, or a important date would be approaching, like Christmas, Valentines Day, my birthday, a romantic weekend planned for us… she would suddenly create drama, to make me feel like everything was in jeopardy…. Of course, I didn’t see those things at the time, and also, since my only marriage had also been unhealthy, I came to think that being in a relationship was 50 % good and 50% bad…. It was just the way it would be. My goal in this lifetime is to have a healthy, fulfilling relationship with a woman. I know what that looks like on paper, but have never experienced that in my life. All these months, I have wanted her back. My self esteem was shattered. Before I met her, I was a confidant man, who had no problem meeting women, but after her departure, getting close to someone and trusting them was unthinkable. I have come a long ways in this 10 months, and finding this site, and now knowing that there isn’t something wrong with me, and that it wasn’t my fault…. has made such a big difference. I still am saddened when I think about the woman that I thought I loved… she was perfect, and for some reason, it was almost like I was under some kind of spell…. because, I now just cannot believe that I would have put up with the craziness. I could never understand her ability to totally delete my son and me from her life as if we never existed. I now understand. It was provedto be the closure that I have been searching for. There is one thing I will always miss… and that was the sex… for me, it was spiritual because of my love for her… for her, it was all a game, and in some ways she raped me with my consent.
Wow, there are so many commonalities here! The sex was amazing in my situation, also. I used to miss it. Not any more. You won’t always miss it — you know why?? Because I realized that I was 50% responsible for the hot sex, and I don’t believe I’m a psycho 🙂 so that means hot sex is possible with non-psychos because it was possible with me (and with you from what you say). So, therefore, you’ll find it with someone else – who is NOT a disordered personality.
My psycho also would make everything out to be my fault, too, and I bought it for awhile. The arguments were pretty convincing because he took everything I confided to him and used that to nail me!
No more, brother! And you shouldn’t buy it for yourself, either! We WERE abused, you are right – but we got out!
Go back to being the confident guy you remember you were before – only now, you are even stronger because you have seen the nasty side of life – and you know it doesn’t have to be that way!
Just move towards that. Good women will find you. They exist. Evidence: Seems to be plenty of them on this site 🙂
Wow Southernman, Our stories are similar. I too am a widow, my late husband died suddenly at 33 years old, leaving me with 2 kids to raise. I had been alone for 5 years, dated a few but nothing very serious until this seemingly perfect man came into my life. I agree with you, dealing with this is SO much harder than dealing with my husbands death. My daughter was only 3 when her dad died, sociopath knew he was the 1st man I was sure of enough to bring into her life, she adored him and we played family with his little boy, for a year and a half (my other child is much older). It ended very abrubtly when I caught him cheating, he never once mentioned concern for me, or the kids. La Man is right… Knowing what you were dealing with is half of it, now you can begin to heal. For me it has only been 5 months, but I’m doing much better, because of lovefraud and MSN PSYCHOPATH which is a wonderful support group. Good Luck to you.
Hey will be ok…….
I think that being a widow/er made us more vulnerable. The loneliness can be overbearing. I tried very hard to fill that void in my life for both me and my son. By the time I met my P, I had actually stopped trying so hard, so when she came into our life, I really thought that she was there for a reason, a answered prayer. Little did I know that the reason she was there was not what I had hoped for. Like you, we played “family” with her, and like I had stated above, that was the thing I wanted most desperately. that sense of family. My P knew of my pain from my loss, she also knew just how badly I wanted that family unit, and she knew I’d almost stop at nothing to regain that. For the first 6 months of my relationship with my P, there wasn’t a single misstep. Everything seemed perfect. We loved her, she loved us. And because I had wanted this one piece of my life to be complete, I overlooked things that I shouldn’t have. I agree with you and LAMan that now that I know just what I was dealing with in her, the truth has really set me free, and I can feel my true healing begin. For months, I have tried to connect the dots, to try to understand, and I just couldn’t. It was beyond my comprehension, as to how a woman could do this to me knowing of the pain I had gone through with my wife’s death, and further, how could she have done this to my son.. a little boy, who loved her and opened up to her like she was his mother. I still can see my P holding his hand, sitting on the couch reading to each other, her tucking him in at night. It makes me want to cry, because I now know that it was all not real. With knowledge come healing and peace, and I am on the road to that, but also with knowledge comes power. This will never happen to me and my son again. Thank you will be ok…. My heart goes out to you and your children. But we both “will be ok”… ;^)
Even years later we see victims still struggling with this. It may have been someone they just met or had known for years. Trying to make sense of these predators is futile yet, as normal caring people we need to make sense in order to heal.
Great post!!
After four years with a sociopath that ended with him assaulting me and BITING me until I bled ala Mike Tyson and Hannibal Lector, I am still trying to figure out what happened to me, how did I allow years of mind manipulation to the point that I was so confused that I had no idea what was real or not real. Every red flag was resolved with a convincing response with what I now realize were pure lies, extreme lies. It baffles me that I actually lived through this. I wonder though if it is just me, am I a target for sociopaths. Is he dating women now who can identify it early on, or are they falling for the same incredible charm and affection he gave to me. I once told him that I just didn’t understand him….and he told me that he is not easily understood. It was perhaps a rare moment of clarity for him, but not for me. So, in the end I found out he spent four years of ongoing non stop dating on his tennis nights, on his nights at work, when he had to get his car fixed etc, and the unimaginable…as a man who pretended to have multiple identities on websites for large women luring them to meet with him, promising them a loving relationship, and many other incomprehensible behaviors. It still doesn’t seem real. I am getting better, but I am not sure I will ever recover.
It’s been three weeks now since I made the connection that my ex girlfriend was a p/n. After 11 months of crying, confusion, obsessing, depression, self blaming, weight loss, trying to get on with my life, not being able to focus, worrying about if I was losing my mind, and just plain being miserable and sad, I’m happy to say these past three weeks have been the best in nearly a year. My entire perspective about that crazy relationship, and mainly about her has changed so dramatically. I am starting to feel my worth again, and after reading so much here, and at the MSN sites, things are so much clearer, and all the questions, the doubts, the why’s and the how’s have been answered. For all this time, I just simply could not understand why I could not get over her, especially when she was so cruel and cold hearted. Every night for these past three weeks, I have read for hours the posts, the info, at the MSN Narcissistic Personality Disorder Group, here at Love fraud, MSN Friends and Family Affected by AsPD Group , Dr. Sam Vaknin’s site for the study of Narcissism. It has been truly enlightening, and I know for sure that I will not be a target for another one of these cold hearted women in the future. I have grown so much over these past 11 months. I became a Christian, have not dated, and have tried to heal from this emotional trauma. My friends and family have been very concerned about me these past months. they kept telling me to get over it, or move on, and wondered why I keep it so close to the surface of my existence. I know that unless you have encountered one of these crazy people, you have no idea. I look forward to the nest relationship I enter with a woman, but I do know two things. I can love again, and I’ll never love again with the innocence of a child like I did nearly two years ago when she came into my life. It will be spring soon here in the South, and like the flowers that bloom, and the leaves on the trees, I feel a rebirth, and a resurrection of not just the old me, but the new and improved, and the WISER me. Thanks to all here. This site has done what it was intended to do… inform, and warn.