“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.
Merr5923 wrote,
“He once made the brag to me that everyone hated him because he was soooooo much smarter then them. How do you treat someone with that attitude?”
My ex also seemed to “brag”..basically was expressing (it seemed to me, anyway) how much “better” he was than one of the guys (who he introduced me to, and who at that time owned a recording studio in MD, and later still, would be busted for drugs) he’d done juvie time with, because he (the alleged braggart and Spath), at least, had stopped doing drugs. But he didn’t stop his pathological lying.
Taking a late lunch now, bloggers, which is when I typically comment or blog, when I blog.
About the DSM category talk..personally, I think Cultural Relational Therapy is superior to CBT, or at least better for Battered Women’s Syndrome. It doesn’t “assume” something “wrong” in the Battered Woman’s “behavior” that “brought on” the domestic abusing from the woman’s ex. It explores deeper than CBT. I know someone who saw a (CBT-based) counselor only three times, and that counselor was ready to label her records with “borderline?” after only three days, even though the counselor well-knew that other psychologists before her had diagnosed the patient/client (my friend) with PTSD. We have to be careful to SCREEN our counselors very thoroughly, to ask them what major theories they apply, b/c some of them may be sadists. My friend thought that CBT-based counselor was a sadist. It so happens that one social worker, a male, who’d worked under her, also thought she was sadistic, and left that counselor’s practice. My friend confided these things to me. I believe her, and have never known her to be malicious, nor to ever conflate or distort information (I’ve known her for more than 40 years.) That CBT-based counselor asked my friend if she wasn’t “villainizing” the Spath employer she’d had. My friend said she couldn’t get out of that office fast enough, after that question from the CBT-based counselor, and made it clear that the counselor’s techniques and methods were not to her liking, that she intended to find another counselor with whom she could feel comfortable if she was going to divulge about her past history of abuse, childhood, etc. Thank god she did.
Spath counselors can cause iatrogenesis (harm!) Look up the term.
I believe there needs to be an agency (for both private and public sector) that an employee can make complaints to regarding anti-social personalities they have to endure while in the workplace. I know, I know, people will say that the whistle blowers unit was designed just for this aspect, but, my personal experience with the whistle blowers sections are they are a bunch of sell outs too, giving heads up to management that a renegade or disgruntle employee complained to their agency.
Been there, done that … and the woman who spoke with me regarding my 1st official complaint that my big boss was a psychopath who was getting her kicks out of destroying my career … said to me “you do realize Wini that we have a Republican governor in office now”.
Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh. Oh, just to update everyone … that psycho Governor was forced out of office, spent a small (pitifully small amount of time for stealing all the money in our state) in prison for being the criminal narcissist that he is. He now has the title of felon attached to his name. I wonder what that woman at the whistle blowers commission thinks now? But, same ole, same ole … his political buddies ensured he had a high paying job back in SIN CITY where he comes from. Good grief and all the whistle blowers that got their lives destroyed still can’t get hired anywhere.
I can certainly empathize, Wini..agree with your statement, “Good grief and all the whistle blowers that got their lives destroyed can’t get hired anywhere.” So true. I have seen my more-than-fair-share of Spath employers. One of them, when he hired me (it was a state job) asked me in the pre-employment interview, “Do you believe in God? Just asking, because if I didn’t, I wouldn’t have shuffled your resume to the top of the pile.” I’d explained to him I had a disabling joint condition during the pre-employment interview, but didn’t tell him about the Battered Women’s Syndrome symptoms, and I REALLY needed that job. After hired, and he tried to add on a non-essential task of (occasional cashiering, which wasn’t on my predecessor’s job description, and which I cannot do after being robbed at gunpoint by a felon, and held hostage, left bound and bleeding–happened to me while in that task, at a job that wasn’t my main occupation, but in one of two “tide-me-over”, P/T jobs), and I asked him for what I thought was a SMALL accommodation to my 2nd disabling condition (all I asked him for was a cubicle wall installed, around my desk, to allow privacy, so I could concentrate when I had to do “accounting” type tasks, he refused, asked me if my attacker was black or white, to which I answered, “That really shouldn’t make any difference, but if you really want to know, he was black.” Well, being the African American he is, he asked, “Is my face going to morph into his?” He had a chip on his shoulder, I think. He said he’d experienced racism when he lived down south. The guy was an absolute despot, was my opinion, but if I’d ever been racially prejudiced (never have been!), I would never have consented to take the job. When he refused to let me use the EAP state plan for assisting my disability, I complained to HR, and he fired me three days later. The jerk. When I first brought up the accommodation request, he also asked/taunted, “Shall I call your references. I haven’t done that yet. Why don’t you show me a copy of your college degree?” I said, “Sure. I’ll bring it in tomorrow.” Don’t know if what he did was legal, but he’d also asked, before hiring me, to send HR a copy of my last earning statement from my former employer (I don’t think that was legal, either. But certainly the “god-smacking” question, in the pre-employment interview, when it was a state job, I think others besides myself, could’ve been interpreted as potential religious discrimination (as in “failing to separate church and state”) The main HR guy was also in his 50s, another African American, who arrogantly told me, when I filed my EEO complaint, requesting accommodation, “You won’t win. We always win.” He had, just as my boss had, these blood-shot eyes, like road maps running through them, as if he was on some medication or another (or drugs). It’s just sickening these days, as if age discrimination isn’t bad enough, they’ve got to disability discriminate, on top of it, and/or pile on reverse racial discrimination and/or gender discrimination, on top of the other offenses, just because we will not put up with hostile work environments. Yes. I totally empathize. I never experienced job discrimination until after turning age 40; then the sh*t hit the fan. Of course, I was living with that (alleged) Spath while it went down. I was put, illegally, on admin. leave, AFTER I’d passed my probation period with flying colors and high recommendations from my first supervisor; it was the next supervisor who put me on the illegal leave, after I’d complained about (PROVEN!) harassment from two co-workers, one of which had tampered with my time sheet. Though I did get a settlement, I had no option but to resign. Well, the offending supervisor (IMO “despot”), who, when he did his dirty deeds, was also voted out of office “no confidence” by 17 of his peers, because he’d offended them, too, and he was voted out of his position less than 8 months after he’d taken the directorship. I heard it through the grapevine that at least one of the hostile co-workers was also let go, for doing what she did to me. Of course, the (alleged) Spath in my life, gave me little-to-no support, in my opinion, after this happened. To the contrary, he told me that I should’ve just “put up and shut up”..as if I should’ve tolerated hostility in the workplace, when, after filing my legit grievance, I went to work daily, for weeks, with knots in my stomach; he also, in my opinion, tried to control how I spent my settlement money. Nice, huh?
zimzoomit, “they” are all over the workforce in the good ole USA aren’t they? “They” do have their own language you know. I’ve learned from my former place of employment that female Spaths will laugh with the interviewer when asked questions as you were asked. Female Spaths make their moves on the interviewer, get asked out immediately for lunch, hired, promoted to at least a supervisor’s position … and the sky is the limit for the female Spaths. Whereas, suckers like us who are in touch with our emotions, get bullied from the very start of the interview. My interview March 30, 1980 went as follows:
I met with the female boss (that I decided to work with) … all went well.
2nd interview was with a male supervisor who bribed me with spending time at the beach on the company boat … and this guy had a crush on me for the 24 years that I worked there.
3rd interview was the final interview of the day with the director who wanted to find out if I made a decision who I would work for. Long story short, all the women in the office pulled up their chairs outside his glass partitioned office where the walls did not go up to the ceiling. We (the director and I) could hear every derogatory word those women (aka cats) said about me. It was so overwhelming that the director stopped the interview and said to me “don’t pay any attention to them, they are just jealous”.
I was floored, to say the least. When I got home that evening, my husband asked me how the interview went? I told him what happened and said “I just walked into the twilight zone”. I worked there for 24 years (could NEVER transfer out, they needed a work horse) but, I never changed my original opinion of “them”.
Peace.
Wini, well..about that state job under that (alleged) despot who put me on admin. leave illegally, I went through all the legal internal procedures of grievance. The state employment policy, even though I had them hands-down on discrimination, would not allow me to transfer within, to an unhostile area (unlike some fed jobs allow). I got two internal interviews (had to apply as if I were an outsider who’d never worked there) elsewhere in that institution, and things looked real good (I had always landed EVERY JOB to which I’d applied, for almost thirty years, before this snafu) with those interviews (potential supes seemed to like me), but somehow, even though I got two great letters of recommendation from my former supe (before the despot supe who took over his job, but my former supe still stayed in tenure, at the institution), my former supe, for some odd reason, told me not to use those references internally. What a creep. And I got neither job to which I’d applied, before I signed off on the settlement. The state had a policy that if anyone resigned or was let go due to any employment grievance (even if it was the hostile worker’s fault and not mine), no one could get hired at that institution for another two years, after the griever had filed his/her grievance. It sucked. After the two years had gone by, I applied again and again to that same institution, for different positions, but never again got an interview. The whole course of my life changed just because of that situation. Oh, and to make matters worse, it was my ALMA MATER, so instead of having great memories of the college where I was on the Dean’s list my last semester, I had horrible memories of the trauma of being wrongfully “terminated”, would never feel like gracing that place with my presence again, and will NEVER give $ to my alma mater, when they solicit me annually for contributions to the institute (thumb to nose here.) At least you had a husband who was supportive of your situation. I, instead, had that (alleged) Spath..a sex addict and perpetual commitment phobe, living in my home.
ZZ,
You are quite right in that people should select their counselors with care. They should select their doctors, dentists, lawyers, and any other professional with great care.
The problem is that even good hearted, kind, caring and decent counselors can cause harm. For example if they believe that someone just has to “get it out” and fully disclose things (i.e. sexual abuse) because they will “never heal” unless they do. That may be true for some but it is not true for all and persuading someone to do that can inflict more harm.
As for the whole CBT thing. It is not the CBT but rather the person using it. Taking one’s own personal experience and generalizing it out to the entire world is not such a good thing. I have known good therapists that use various different theories and I have known bad ones that use various different ones. One of the key pieces is to find one that you connect with.
And CBT doesnt “assume” something “wrong” in the Battered Woman’s “behavior” that “brought on” the domestic abusing from the woman’s ex. That assumption would be from the practioner not CBT.
I also wanted to talk about the whole sexual addiction thing you mentioned earlier. Personally I think (my opinion here) that the whole “addiction” label has gotten way out of hand and confused. If someone is a “porn addict” for years and all of a sudden they are cut off cold turkey, I have no fears that they are going to drop dead from it in my office. The same can not be said of things such as drugs and alcohol.
Sex, Pornography, Internet, etc are things that are “habits”. Maybe deeply ingrained habits but habits just the same. Technically if you can become “addicted” to these things you can become “addicted” to almost anything. Not to mention that it often comes across as trying to deny reponsibility. I am “addicted” to the way I tie my shoes and I bet there are others on here that are too.
Example – Get a large group (and try it yourself) and have them tie their shoes the Opposite of how they do it now. So if you start with left over right you would start with right over left etc. See how difficult, how long, and how many relapses and failures there are when it comes to doing a change this simple. You’ll find (if you get a good enough size group) that some can handle it fairly quickly and easily and others will have a horrible time of it and some won’t be able to do it. So are they “addicted” to the way they tie there shoes or is it a habit, a behavior they have done so many times that it becomes a part of them? And yes I know this cuts against the grain of some of the addiction crowd. The end result may be about the same as say an addiction to heroin but there is a difference. Of course as time goes by and the evidence (credible evidence not the junk studies) piles up it could show that I am very wrong and if so I will change my thoughts on it.
So what did that little rant have to do with psychopaths? I think that a good number of them use or try to use anything they can grasp as a “pity” play or excuse. “Really sweetheart, I don’t looove any of these other women. I can’t help myself because I am “addicted” to sex and just can’t stop.” or other similar lines. And for some there is the old (and not wrong) conventional wisdom that sticks with a lot of the addiction services of “once an addict always an addict” and you can see how easy that would be to twist and use.
Anyway just my 2 cents for what it is worth.
ZZ,
You are much more likely to encounter a predator in the “self-help” pop psych movement. James Ray is a good example as shown on ABC the other night – http://tinyurl.com/27rm9re (link to the entire episode)
If you watch the video the piece at the very end is what I found interesting. The reasons they gave (compared to the one victims mother) were all based on what they themselves got out of it. When they said they would do it again even though people were hurt and died. As the one person said “because of what I am getting out of it” or as another said “It is horrible what happened in the sweatlodge, 3 people died but my life is better and I am so grateful for that, I’d do it again in a heartbeat.”
Sounds a lot like they are not much different (thought wise) than the accused.
Dear Blogger,
I saw that show the other night and my mouth fell open when those people he had bilked out of $10,000 to go through the “experience” which killed three people and they were still hooked. I wonder if it is some form of Stockholm syndrome that bonds them to him since he puts them through such trauma.
I sent Donna an article about him, and I think the man is a very adept con man selling “snake oil” to people who want to get rich and happy.
ZZ, I agree with BloggerT on what he was saying to you too about therapists. There are therapists and there are therapists, just like there are bad teachers and good teachers and Excellent teachers, and there are excellent teachers that just cant reach a CERTAIN student for some reason.
For PTSD I used a therapist who used “rapid eye movement Therapy” and FOR ME it worked well and quickly where just straight talk therapy had done very little goodl for me.
Also, keep in mind PTSD or depression etc. is not the SAME in everyone. It can vary in intensity of one part, duration, etc. so it may not respond to the same therapy for A as for BG.
My suggestion is to read all the 700+ articles in the archives here (go by author so you don’t miss the early articvles) there is something in each of them that at one time or another will make you go AH HA!!!!!! Glad you are here, this is a great place.