By Mary Ann Glynn, LCSW, located in Bernardsville, New Jersey
Partners in our support group are often confused by the fact that after a verbal outburst, physical abuse, or once the ruse is up, sociopaths may seem remorseful. They might see the consequence of their actions, may even cry and be emotional, or apologetic. There might be efforts to change by more responsive or caring behaviors. If the relationship gets pushed to the breaking point, they may engage in therapy. Most partners’ experience the sociopath in therapy as completely blaming everything on them and/or trying to control the therapy sessions. But, some had a different, more perplexing experience.
Their experience was that the sociopaths appeared to be quite motivated to improve the relationship and to made headway expressing remorse, feelings, even empathy for their partner. Their behavior seemed to make a turnaround so that their partner believed that they had seen the light, and that the loving caring person they used to be returned. Their faith was restored in the potential for a loving relationship and intact family. It’s not impossible after all, right?
In the end, even when everything looked promising, partners reported one of these things happened: 1) As soon as therapy ended, the sociopath’s behavior reverted back. 2) When therapy started getting into deeper underlying issues for behavior, the sociopath disengaged. 3) In trying to empathize with the pain or hurt they caused their partners, sociopaths were able to speak words of empathy, but their partner didn’t feel they got or felt it. This is very tricky. Empathy by definition means that you can feel another’s pain as if it were your own. What the brain feels when you perceive someone else’s pain, or any other emotion for that matter, is the identical experience as if you yourself were going through it.
If, in a couples session, partner1 is openly sharing hurt, etc., and partner2 attempts to empathize, partner1 can always “feel” if partner2 gets, or feels, it too. If that happens, partner1 feels connected to partner2, and vice versa. What happened with sociopaths is, even if they express words of empathy for their partner’s feelings, their partner does not feel they are getting (feeling) it. The sociopath may even seem to be showing emotion, but it’s not their partner’s emotion — they’re more likely stuck in their own feelings of shame or victimhood. Pay attention to this if you go to therapy with a sociopath! When you don’t feel “heard”, like your partner can’t get to feeling your emotion, they are not empathizing with you.
Temporary remorse
So let’s get back to remorse. Remorse should affect behavior — not temporarily, but permanently. It’s about conscience, which is completely dependent on the ability to empathize. There are times we are all capable of turning down our consciences when it serves us, like telling a lie, taking supplies home from work, being defensive about our behavior, being insensitive, losing our tempers, being petty. But, once someone tells us openly how our behavior affects them, our conscience should make us have a different response.
For example, if you blow off plans with a friend several times without thinking anything of it, and then the friend comes to you and expresses hurt, rejection, not feeling important to you, or whatever, you are likely to feel their pain (empathy) and feel bad/guilty. If that friend identifies a childhood trigger in there, e.g. being blown off made them feel like in middle school when the group made rejected them, then your empathy quotient jumps much higher! Are you likely to blow off this friend anymore? No! If you had no ability to feel your friend’s hurt, your response would likely be defensive and cold, because it would just be about your indignation for them perceiving you that way.
No empathy — no remorse
If someone is not capable of empathy, they are not capable of remorse, and therefore change. Period. The brief feelings of remorse or regret you witness in a sociopath is likely to be about screwing something up they wanted (shame) or losing someone or something they wanted (victimhood) – in other words, it’s for themselves. They may believe themselves that they are making great strides in honesty and change — but it never really gets past their narcissism to feeling your pain. It’s more like a brief soiree into the anxiety of having lost control or lost something, in which they scramble to regain control and/or it. Once they regain control or what they lost, they’re done changing. Being disconnected from your feelings, they have no reason to keep up the change, and default back to being the way they were.
Katherine Underwood, in disguise, pursues her ex, Budimir Drakulic, who owes her $1.6 million
I still hold on to the stack full of I’m so sorry cards my ex wrote me after he had fouled up….. BUT I also have a memory of each time you pay dearly for making THEM feel bad about having to apologise…..AS usual, you are always in a lose lose situation!!!!
Thanks Mary Ann! This is SO spot on. I have told this little ‘story’ here, more than once. But it is such a good example, I’ll tell it again.
Me: (crying). It really hurts me when you look at other women when we are together. It’s like I don’t exist, and it feels so disrespectful.
Spath: I don’t want you to feel bad. How you feel is important to me. (puts his arm around me and gives me a hug)
Me: Thanks.
Later…..
Spath: I was thinking about what you said, and since every relationship is a fifty fifty thing, I think you should also have to do something to affect this sitution. So, in the future, when we are out walking, I would like you to QUIT NOTICING WHAT I AM DOING SO MUCH. Focus on yourself, and not me. Then you won’t feel so bad.
So much for conscience, empathy, and changing behavior.
Slimone…OMG…that is all I have to say. What a crap of a person.
Seriously, if we hadn’t all lived this kind of garbage, we wouldn’t believe just how outrageous and flat-out nuts they can be.
Thanks SER. Yep he is an all-around crappy guy.
When this was happening, 6 years ago, it was so painful and confusing. I thought I was too unevolved, emotionally and spritually, to be with someone who lived ‘so honestly’, and so outside the bounds of conventional ( read: limiting) social niceties. I thought if I could learn to focus on myself more, and quit being jealous, posessive, and insecure it would all work out beautifully. He totally agreed!
This was the groovy, yoga, spiritual, dancing guru type. So the awakening was pretty difficult, as I had to let go of some beliefs (rather counter-culture one’s) that were not in the least benfitting me, when taken to the extreme he was taking them.
So I practiced gratitude and generosity and turning the other cheek; and ‘openess’, kindness, self-reliance. What I let go were boundaries, my intuition, my needs, my personal goals. Of course he encouraged this, as it worked only to his advantage, while appearing to make me a better, more loving person. On the outside all his ‘groupies’ were thinking I was the strongest most amazing ‘goddess’ they had ever met. They longed to be me.
If they only knew.
Now, when I type it out in it’s most simple form it is ridiculous. It made me laugh to type it. Not because he didn’t treat me horribly, but because I know, and can map out, how he ‘spathed’ me. For me knowledge was immensly healing.
And he is, in addition to being crappy, quite ridiculous. A paperboard cut-out of a real live human being.
The goal really is to stop listening to these types, and start watching. It is what they DO that gives us the best outside information. That, combined with our ‘senses’ (ie, intuitive feelings) are the best guides. As soon as we listen, we are targets.
Great article, Mary Ann.
It is so helpful to have these facts reinforced in our minds as we battle to survive. Thank you for the reminder. Sociopaths are excellent actors and can cry faster than Erica on ALL MY CHILDREN. 🙂
Somebody once commented on Lovefraud that her ex used to pull a “Golly Gee Willikers! Have I been thoughtless?” act every time he got caught doing something outrageously hurtful or unfair. My ex would also do that — claiming that he didn’t appreciate ahead of time how I would be negatively affected by the behavior, etc., EVEN IF I begged him not to do what he was about to do.
His apologies were always a bad joke. He would say he was “sorry” and the next day he might bring me three dead roses that he bought at an intersection, but his behavior NEVER changed. But once he made his apology, he was entitled to a Fresh Start, and I was never allowed to bring up his repeating pattern of financial dishonesty, etc. “How can you call yourself a Christian when you never actually forgive anything?”
I tried so hard to make our marriage work for religious reasons, but he really did become more dishonest and immoral as time went on.
Donna: if this is too much I apologize, and will leave it to you as to whether you leave this up.
Here is an excerpt of his fundraiser…for himself. They will use anything to get what they want. Religion, education, law, finance. Any ‘front’ will do.
Try reading this to mean it’s exact opposite, and then you can see what he is up to…..the Blank (dumbing sounding) are my words, so as not to disclose his ‘identity’.
“Hello My Friends!
After this last year of working and teaching abroad it has become all the more clear how much impact my work has on people’s lives. While I hear this regularly from students in the states, teaching around the world opened my eyes to how fortunate we are in the US in so many ways. I am inspired now to bring this work to a broader audience and launch my work at a new level.
I am launching The Blank (dumb sounding) Tour to bring my practice to people worldwide and help build their Communities through Dance, Vocal and Rhythmic expression. These classes/workshops are designed to help men and women break out of their limitations and step into their whole being, embodying their own unique expression and creativity. This work offers foundational transformation for people. I already have the framework set for the tour in 5 countries and I would like to reach as many people as possible on this journey.
I will begin this tour at the beginning of April in Australia.
In order to really do this work, I am asking for your support to get things in order for this tour, to take care of lingering health & dental issues. My goal is to bring these gifts to people while having the resources to keep myself whole and healthy.”
OMG! This sounds so much like my husband with his lack of remorse. I sometimes think I am going crazy! After we were married (a second marriage for us both) he mentioned that the first time he saw me (we worked together in different states) he told himself he was going to marry me! We were both married at the time. Now I wonder if I was just another conquest.
Great article on lack or remorse. I always had a niggling feeling that his “remorse” was all show. Maybe my intuition was right?
My Spath has moved past even faking remorse. Now it’s all my fault for driving him away. Not only is it my fault, but now he says that God told him our marriage was never going to work, and that’s why he started an affair last year. I asked him why God didn’t tell him to tell me and divorce me first. So his God is obviously in the business of hurting people? I told him to take that stupid justification and present it to our pastor and see what a real man of God thinks.
That’s not the God I know. When a Spath starts using your faith against you it’s called “Spiritual Abuse”. Just another form of manipulation and degradation.
If I had all the money back that was wasted on fake therapy (a front for him to regain control), I could take a nice European vacation. The very last time, after I had told him I was ending the marriage, we ended up in therapy again only for me to find out later he was secretly pursuing a job in another state to try to force me into isolation again. Lucky me, though, I found my strength to refuse and he went anyway…which meant, after 25 years of hell, I was able to get out with my two young children.
slimone: the fundraiser is a CLASSIC! He wants strangers to subsidize his hobby, which undoubtedly supplies him with an unending stream of female victims.
My sister used to complain that in her community, the teenagers were always hitting people up for money for various trips to Europe as “Teen Ambassadors” or some sort of “Junior Missionaries.” The first time I went to Europe, I was 18, and I had saved money from a part-time job for many months to make it possible. It would never have occurred to me that my parents (who had never been to Europe at that point) should help pay for my trip, and I would have burned with shame at the idea of asking complete strangers to pay for my trip.
Exactly, DFGaslighter. He gets to travel around the world, bang on his drum, dance around and be the center of attention, make other people do strange things (humiliate them), and get the girls. Most expenses paid.
He is not living a life of luxury here, though. He lives like a toddler-on-the-road.
At first I didn’t want to see how silly he actually was, because it felt SO embarrassing. HOW could I have fallen for THAT?! Now it feels so utterly impersonal and ‘clinical’ I can laugh out loud.
Just in case anyone is wondering: Isn’t this breaking NO contact? YES, it is. Looking at what he is up to would not be good for anyone who is adversely affected by seeing this kind of information, and I do not recommend it.
I have kept track (about every 6 months), to make sure I don’t just bump into him in my city, as this is where he keeps popping up. All I have to do is google, and about 40 pages of junk comes up.
If I could I would post the ‘gifts’ he gives people for different levels of donation. THAT is truly hilarious!
No remorse, no change. It is just taking of advantage of others, as usual.