When reflecting on the sociopath’s style, I often find myself thinking metaphorically. For instance, in an early LoveFraud article (Sociopaths’ Cat and Mouse Game) I explored the mind of the sociopath via the metaphor of the cat toying with the mouse.
In this article, I probe a different metaphor: the small child abusing the captured insect.
But a caveat’s in order: Just as I wasn’t impugning cats as literally sociopathic in my earlier piece, I’m not suggesting here that all children, including bug torturers, are developing sociopaths (anymore than in my last LoveFraud article I was suggesting that all practical jokers are sociopaths).
On the other hand, I am suggesting that there are states of mind—normal states of mind—that approximate (more closely than we might think, or want to think) how sociopaths perceive and relate.
And so I invite you to join me as, together, we watch a small child, who sits on a curb in front of his house, a daddy-long-legged spider in his clutches.
Let us not mince words: the child has intentionally trapped the spider; and he fully intends, and fully expects, to have his way with it. Moreover, he confidently feels that he has power over the spider to do with it, to toy with it, to experiment on it, as he wishes.
Does any of this, already, sound familiar?
But let us proceed: The child may (or may not yet) have formed an agenda for the spider—that is, he may already know what he plans to do with it, and how he plans to entertain himself with it; or, he may not yet know these things, but rather may be operating more impulsively, or perhaps taking things a step at a time.
In either case, as he stares down at the bug, the child does so with a feeling of omnipotence—that is, he has, and relishes, a sense of omnipotent control over the spider’s near and long-term destiny: he will be deciding its short and long-term fate. He knows that he can dominate the spider any way he likes, and, as we’ve established, he intends to exploit his dominance: the spider, he is well aware, will be helpless to defend itself against his designs.
And so, one by one, the child begins pulling the legs off the spider. He finds this interesting, amusing, and even thinks it’s a little funny. He wonders, fleetingly, in pulling the spider’s legs off, if this hurts the spider?
His curiosity, however, is detached and superficial, lacking compassion and empathy. For, although it strikes him that if someone were to pull his legs off it would surely cause unspeakable pain, yet his intellectual awareness does not translate into empathy for the predicament to which he’s subjected the spider.
(The child, in a word, fails to apply the principle do unto others as you would have others do unto you. Sociopaths, of course, notoriously forsake this principle.)
And so the spider might look a little funny with no legs. And it could be amusing to see the spider, as its legs are systematically ripped off, reduced to the size of a small nipple. And it could also be amusing to watch the spider try to walk with its legs missing.
All of these (and other) prospects for entertainment intrigue the child, and support his abuse of the insect. We can say this with certainty: in his relationship to the spider, the child is solely interested in how the spider can entertain him—that is, he is curious about, and interested in, only the gratification he can derive from the spider (and from, in this case, the spider’s predicament).
The child regards and values the spider purely as an “object” which, if properly manipulated, can yield him some worthwhile satisfaction.
And so the spider, now legless, doesn’t move. The child notices that its legs, however, which lie beside it on the concrete curb, twitch all by themselves, as if they’re separately alive and as though being animated by a mysterious force. This intrigues and amuses the child who, incidentally, has momentarily lost all interest in the spider.
That is, the child presently is no longer interested in the spider, but only with the spider’s legs (which of course he tore off), finding their twitchy, independent movements curiously entertaining.
I think we can safely add that the child doesn’t hate, or feel malice towards, the spider. That’s to say, none of this is “personal.” When he sat down on the curb, the idea of targeting a spider to exploit may, or may not, have been on his mind.
The child may have been actively targeting a vulnerable insect, or maybe not; maybe the spider just happened to enter his attentional orbit at the wrong time (for the spider), and in so doing primed the child’s exploitive inclinations.
In either case, it’s easy to describe what the child feels for the spider; he feels towards the spider precisely what he feels towards any object—appreciative of it only for the satisfaction it supplies him.
Short of this, the spider rapidly loses its value for him.
This is occurring presently: As the spider’s novelty is fading, the child’s investment in it wanes. He valued the spider purely, remember, for its gratifying properties; now, as the spider grows less novel by the second, the child grows increasingly bored with it. The spider’s value, its use to the child, is steadily, rapidly depreciating.
This could be good news, or more bad news, for the spider. As his interest in the spider expends itself, the child may decide to move on. He may be finished with the spider, and so he may, finally, leave it alone. The spider may have a chance to escape with its life. That could be the good news.
But it’s also possible that the child, seeking a last satisfaction of his thirst for stimulation, may decide, perhaps impulsively, to squash the spider, to crush it, like the bud of a leaf. And if he does this, it still won’t be personal. The child doesn’t have it in for this particular spider.
This particular spider merely happened to conveniently enough meet the child’s criteria as an exploitable object.
And so it’s 50-50 whether, in his boredom, the child will move on, leaving the legless spider to regroup after its traumatization; or whether, also in his boredom, he’ll decide to mash the spider between his fingers so he can feel what it’s like to mash an insect into a paste. That could be a curious sensation, which he’s never had (or hasn’t had it in a while).
He might find that sensation interesting, or maybe not.
And so comes the abrupt, anticlimactic end of our story, which was simply about the intersection of our neighborhood child with the unsuspecting spider.
Postscript: The child spared the spider, not from compassion, but because a cramp in his leg prompted him to rise, and stretch. But in walking away, the child inadvertently stepped on the spider, flattening and killing it. But even had he known this (and he didn’t), it’s not likely that the irony would have impressed him.
(This article is copyrighted © 2010 by Steve Becker, LCSW. My use of male gender pronouns is for convenience’s sake and not to suggest that females aren’t capable of the behaviors discussed.)
Kathleen, I thought empathy began at 18 months of age…Did I misunderstand? My little grandson was about 20 mos. old when his 4 mo. old baby sister was crying non-consolably, and he brought her his beloved blue blanket, with his name on it that he had fallen asleep with since the day he was born. I know he offered it to her to comfort her because it was what comforted him. It was what he understood and what he could do…Very touching.
Kim: that is soooo sweet! 🙂
TB, none of my business, but if you want to talk…how old was your daughter when this affair happened? How do YOU interpret it? Do you feel your daughter was a victim of your x spath, or do you feel that she was a willing partner? Do you think she’s a spath, too? I seem to remember that she was not a child, that it was all pretty cold-hearted, but I’m not sure.
I have to say that you are pretty forgiving to reach out to her…that you have proven yourself to be the bigger person. One day she will regret her choices and long for her mother…
I can’t imagine how painful this must be.
kim frederick, the whole concept of empathy gets a little confusing.
I think that, like all of us, kids interpret the world in terms of their own experience and needs. And we can also do that in interpreting them.
I suspect that what your grandson was doing was doing for his sister was being like mommy. Offering comfort and taking care of her. It’s what he would have wanted if he had been in that situation. It was very emotionally smart behavior, in the sense of putting two and two together. And very sweet, as you say. It also suggests that he feels very secure in the family, and feels like there are enough emotional resources that he can afford to share his own.
But at that age, if he’s not fully separated from his mother (which he wouldn’t be), the way he’s “feeling her feelings” is, at most, more like sympathy or caretaking feelings than empathy. Empathy requires understanding of another person’s separateness. And the true test of it is in disagreement. Or competition for resources.
I have a clear memory of the first time I saw my son exhibit the beginning of empathy. It was early in his fourth year. He was a very confident kid and pretty forceful in his opinions and desires to do what he wanted to do. He wanted something, and I was telling him that I didn’t want him to have it at that moment. Maybe a cookie or a TV program or a trip to the pool. And he was explaining to me that I didn’t understand, that I wasn’t getting how important this was, and the light went on in his mind. He suddenly realized that I felt differently. That I had a completely separate mind, and I didn’t think or feel the same way he did.
I’m sure he’d been approaching this for a while. And it may not have been the first time he grasped this. But it was the first time I saw it happen between us. And it was the beginning of his really trying to understand how it was for me.
Partially for his own purposes, because he would need to persuade me of things in the future. But there was also a lot of love between us. The separation process is a letting go of the perception of absolute merger between mother and child, as the child pursues more and more independence. This is genetically programmed development, but the success of the process also depends on the emotional environment of the home. And if it does happen successfully, another kind of relationship has to replace that absolute dependence on “the source.”
Ideally, what is established is respect for each other as separate human beings with our own thoughts and feelings and needs. To a large degree, we as parents have to teach and model ahead of our children’s developmental ability to understand. So when they do evolve into real separateness, the principles and elemental behaviors of courtesy are familiar.
A lot of parenting is showing kids how to do something and identifying certain behaviors as acceptable or preferred or really good, at a time when the child is just learning by rote, not really understanding. And in fact, the year or so after the separation is complete tends to be a huge social learning time for kids. They want information about how things work socially, and we see their interest in “good guys and bad guys” (cowboys and Indians in my time), naming things good and bad in social terms, and trying to master “the rules.” This is very serious business for them, and I remember having to hide my smile, when my son would come home in a huff, because one of the boys he played with was being “bad.”
This is also a period (4-6) when our encouragement can really make a difference in what they consider themselves good at. Which may have a lot of influence on the rest of their lives.
So all that is what I’ve learned from my studies of child development and my own experiences with my son and other children. Again, I really recommend Bradshaw’s videos. He’s an expert on codependence and the videos were actually made as a series on the development of codependence (which he believed originates as a problem in the separation process). But the way he lays out these early years is fascinating and changed the way I looked at the small years every after.
Kathy
Dear TB,
I went back and read your post about you trying to make peace with your daughter that had the affair with your husband (her step father) Darling I have never hit you with the skillet but I am gonna do so now! BOINK!!!!
I have spent nearly a month reading through the lettters that my X-son-P sent me for the past nearly 20 years and after I got my head out of my U-NO-WHERE (recto-cranial inversion) I read them with DIFFERENT EYES—I could SEE there was NO hope for anyone without a conscience.
Sure, people do stupid and mean things, once or twice, but COME ON, NOW—continual abuse after SHE is the one who did the NASTY WITH YOUR HUSBAND?
I almost laughed til I croaked at reading my X-son-P’s letter to his brother C after C found out that the Trojan Horse had been bumping his wife, and X-son-P told C that he should just “get over it” and STILL BE FRIENDS WITH THE TROJAN HORSE PYCHOPATH! Ah COOOOOOOME ON! “Be FRIENDS?”
TB, I know it hurts, sweetie, I KNOW you want to have some kind of satisfying relationship with your KID, but there are times we just have to SEE THE LIGHT and get our heads out of DENIAL. I lived in it for DECADES and I did everything I could except let the chit kill me—spent the day talking to lawyers about future plans and how I ought to do things, and just want to BE PREPARED before I have to do something in a hurry, and then 3 hours at the copy shop making copies of the letters so I can send them to the parole attorney, then another 4 hours this evening sorting through them (I made two copies each) and will send one clean copy and one highlighted and I iam not even half through, and found I missed a few back sides of pages so will have to go back to town and do more copies, but reading those LETTERS with NEW eyes and not being in denial, makes me see them in a whole other light. I found references in there where he threatened my son D, and another guy he talked about “shovingn 18 inches of steel in his chest” and so on, some how when I was in denial I missed those references.
But seeing the YEARS LONG, 100s of letters lies and plotting and so on, and the stupid things he said to his brother C after the TH-P got caught with his wife, HE DOES NOT GET IT AND HE DOESN’T CARE THAT HE DOESN’T GET IT, HE THINKS HE IS SMARTER AND BETTER THAN ANYONE IN THE WORLD, and if you cross him or accuse him of being or doing what he is, then you are the ENEMY. You can’t make your daughter see the truth any more than I can make my X-son.
I know it hurts, but hang around here, you know you are NOT ALONE and that helps! ((((Hugs))) and God bless you TB. Love, Oxy (ps. here’s an ice pack for your head and a cup of tea)
Kathleen, thank-you for your response. I would really like to hear more about your ideas about empathy and seperateness and disagreement, and competition over resources.
I have just deleated what I’ve written twice. I would really appreciate it if you just opened te dialouge on this subject.
TB,
You are a bigger person than I could ever be, trying to mend fences with your daughter. I don’t have an opinion on that because I can see the value in forgiveness, though it doesn’t sound like she is a safe person for you to be around. Your relationship with her reminds me of my relationship with my mother, where every so often I reach out to her. Then I remember why I went NC in the first place. Seems that in the realm of relationships these days, my quest is to find a safe person and to allow myself to trust that person. I know this first begins with trusting myself, which is difficult (I can almost hear Kathleen Hawk’s voice saying this to me :)). I am struggling with this, and so I’ve been in fear quite a bit lately, which isn’t fun. On the other hand, I’ve taken many risks and expanded my social circles to the point where I’m endlessly busy and almost over-extended. Wow, I’m rambling….
Anyway, I guess my point is that I have no advice for your situation, but I’m glad to see that you’re moving forward and working toward acceptance and forgiveness, whether you allow her back into your life or not. I am beginning to see forgiveness as a huge leap of faith because it has the power to shift your entire identity. And that can be scary.
Dear Oxy, and TB, I so relate to you both! Oxy, I have learnt SO MUCh from you,as you said many times,”The truth will set you free but first it WILL piss you off! “You are exactly right, and this is what I did for YEARS and YEARS with both of my spath daughters,{and before that with my first spath husband, the alcoholic.} They almost had me convinced between the 3 of them that I was the problem, i was TOO crazy,a DRAMA QUEEN,[both my daughters favourite description of me.}, Ishould “get over yourself” as they told me,According to them, D. NEVER threw a red hot steam iron at my head, I MADE THAT UP! she did not beat my legs with a bamboo pole, {funny how I had purple welts on my leg!}
I was the liar, manipulater and all round bad Mother, according to them! It wasnt till I learnt about projection, mirroring, gaslighting,etc.,tc., that the light bulbs started to flash, one after the other.I still remember reading Oxys and other blogs, and thinking, YEs,Yes,YEs!!!this is them!Im not crazy after all! And Ive had my darling husband to confirm their spath treatment of me,[and of him,} for 25 plus years.
Giving up hope is the hardest thing, malignant hope the kind poor NewLily had still hoping right up to her death, that her spath kids and siblings would be nice to her. As you know it never happened.THAT was the cold bucket of icy wter poured ove rmy head that I NEEDED to wake myself up, and realise they are HORRIBLE people, and no, THEY WILL NOT CHANGE!! Ever! Sometimes we need that icy water , that reality check. With me, it has unleashed anger I had stored in my body and cells for years and years.Hard to get it out, but its the rocket fuel I need to break with these bitches once and for all!! THEY ARE NOT MY DEAR LITTLE GIRLS ANY MORE,GOT THAT,GEM?? This is the bitter pill I have to swallow down, I have to save my own life, I need to save my love, talents,warmth, affection and cash for people who love and appreciate me back!And Im well aware I have to do this totally NO STRINGS, no expectations of reward,but to be wary of future spaths, and keep my spath radar on!!
Incidentally, Oxy, like you I am now an Apple shape round my tummy, something I never was. I think its the unconscious minds way of protecting us. Fat equals protection,
it keeps us warm if we are hiding in a dank cave, its an emergency food supply, it may even prevent us being killed in a knife attack, by absorbing the blow before it reaches the vital organs.As part of the “fight or flight or freeze” mechanism. But, hey, we are all still alive, we are still here, God is on our side,and the outcome for the spaths, long term is NOT good.They have not won!TOWANDA and Hi5 peeps!!
Much Love, and {{HUGS}}< Mama Gem.XXX
Wits end. I apologise with my abruptness. I am triggering myself all over the place here lately.:( I react badly to the spanking issue. Its personal for me… I am sorry. I feel under huge stress at the moment. I am not being of use to myself or anyone by posting right now. Much love.x
kim, I’m glad that I made sense, but sorry you deleted your post. It was interesting. And my perspectives are only my perspectives. I wrote something about these ideas in my last article “The End of Recovery,” that that was more about compassion than empathy.
The URL for that, if you’re interested is:
http://www.lovefraud.com/blog/2010/01/08/after-the-sociopath-how-do-we-heal-part-16-the-end-of-recovery/
In my internal models, there’s a sequence of developing maturity in these feelings. Sympathy is highly related to caretaking, which is normal behavior in family situations, but can be diverted into victim-rescuer dramas in dysfunctional families or relationships. Sympathy, in my mind, has a number of touchy elements in it. One is that is tends to be a one-up/one-down feeling that puts the sympathizer in a superior position to the sufferer — feeling pity or feeling sorry for. And that has all kinds of hooks attached to it, like potential obligation to do something about the situation, even if it has nothing to do with us, which could equate to meddling. From my Buddhist perspective, it’s a dangerous emotion, even in clear-cut caretaking situations.
Empathy, again in my model, is more like relating. You’ve felt something like that yourself, and you can understand how it feels. Or you can feel it, or imagine you feel what someone else is feeling. In an empathic reaction, we’d be more inclined to say, “I know how you feel,” than “Oh, you poor thing.” And from the perspective of interaction, depending on what the relationship is, we might be less inclined to jump in with a helping hand, because we recognize that we really don’t know everything about it, just like they wouldn’t know everything about what’s going on with us. So we’re more likely to be companionable, good company as they go through it, than taking on a quasi-parental role.
Compassion is really the top of the heap in this model. It’s being fearlessly open to another person’s reality. Unlike sympathy which has dangers of making us feel responsible, or empathy which incorporates awareness of boundaries, compassion assumes that everything has its reasons and our awareness of as much as possible is better than ignorance. We can’t get to real compassion until we’re solid in ourselves, and unlikely to be hooked into another person’s drama. It doesn’t mean that we have no pity, but we are able to manage our personal resources well enough to recognize instinctively what we can and cannot handle. And we have to be okay with the whole spectrums of our emotions, because we’re going to feel things if we’re really open to other people, and we can’t be afraid to feel them.
Compassion also refines our sense of what we can do. Sympathy can be kind of overwhelming. If you’re in a caretaking mode with the whole world, you can’t afford to look at some things, because it will make you feel too bad to stand it. In compassion, you can look at the worst things, and think, “What can I do?” in a very pragmatic way. Sometimes, as with sociopaths, there’s nothing you can do. Sometimes, you can make a career out of fixing a systemic problem, as Mike is doing and other people here are doing. Sometimes, you find ways to help that you can afford, like I give money to Kiva, as I can afford it, to help entrepreneurs in poor places.
The other thing about compassion is that it helps you to recognize trouble earlier. If you’re open to people’s anger or desperation, you can understand when they can’t see you as another human being, but just as a target. Again, you have to be open to these feelings in yourself to be able to feel them in someone else. To be able to be aware and, strange as this might sound, non-judgmental. They have their reasons. It is not our job to judge, just to manage our own lives and environments as best we can.
You mentioned interest in the idea of competition for resources. You can probably imagine how that concept evolves along with these “feeling” reactions. In sympathy, we are likely to give too much, become depleted, and then enter a toxic space of needing other people to restore our resources and making deals with our own diminished resources to get that from them. This is where a lot of sociopathic relationships start.
In empathy, we are better able to manage and share resources, because we’re less likely to see ourselves as rescuers. But our interpretation of other people’s experiences still needs to be filtered through our defensive boundaries. This is a much better response than sympathy, and enables us to have good relationships that don’t eat us us alive. Mutual respect also enables us to negotiate reasonable deals and compromises when resources are scarce, or we’re competing for something we both want. (Like not to have the job of taking out the garbage.)
In compassion, the world is a great tapestry, and one of the ways to look at that tapestry is in terms of resources. But things get really subtle in this realm. One of the key resources, as I’ve mentioned in other posts, is attention. What we and other people pay attention to. The more healed and integrated we are, the more naturally we provide for our own needs (so we don’t have to be so focused on our unmet needs) and the more we see how much variety and opportunity there is in the world. And we realize that all of us have choices, including us. We become a lot more free in picking and choosing, and leaving behind what doesn’t work, and enjoying the moments of shared attention without putting too much weight on them. We enjoy watching things develop as much as the finished product, and life becomes a lot more about understanding that change is all around us in lovely patterns that we can affect by just reaching out our hands.
We’re all maturing, growing through these stages, as we move through other ones. We don’t have to rush or judge ourselves for where we are, because we’re designed to do this growing up.
I hope this makes sense. And I’d be really interested to know what you think of it.
Kathy