Many who have been hurt by sociopaths develop a general distrust of others. This distrust is understandable given how difficult it often is to tell if another person is a sociopath. However, going through life with distrust is not a pleasant way to live. Victims naturally then want to know in detail what sociopaths are about so they can identify the untrustables, and go back to trusting everyone else.
One of the purposes of this website is to describe sociopaths and teach people to identify them. Sociopaths are pathological liars who like to talk as experts on many topics. They manipulate others and generally have a high opinion of themselves. They also lack remorse for their actions and don’t seem to care about the pain they cause others. In fact they seem to enjoy inflicting all types pain (harm) on others.
The enjoyment of hurting another person is called sadism. Sadism usually refers to enjoying another’s physical pain. However, sociopaths enjoy inflicting all manner of pain on others including financial, emotional, psychological and social.
To sum it up sociopaths are in the business of reducing people to nothing and then taking glory in their accomplishment.
I have just described the most important “traits” of sociopaths. Many of you are saying, “Yes right on, that described mine exactly.” But are you satisfied?
You probably do not feel satisfied because you are left with wondering why. Why would someone do that? If you discover the answer to the “why question” you can go back to trusting everyone else again because you would understand the sick motives of sociopaths.
Normal people don’t enjoy watching other people suffer do they?
Here is where some get stuck, because many people secretly and not so secretly hope they live long enough to see the sociopath finally suffer. Well, if you can enjoy another’s suffering what makes you different from the sociopath?
If we examine the reasons why we would take pleasure in a sociopath’s suffering, we see there are two basic reasons. One is revenge and the other is our ability to consider the sociopath as “inhuman.” If a sociopath is not really human, then it is OK to enjoy that private moment of our imagined revenge.
There are therefore two basic routes to sadism. The first is through the power motive. Revenge is about reasserting power over someone who has robbed us of power. The power motive is also called the social dominance drive.
I am grateful to Caesar Milan the dog whisperer, for educating the public about dominance. We all know that a dominant dog has no problem inflicting pain on underlings to assert his dominance.
The second route to sadism is called “compartmentalization” by psychologists. A person who compartmentalizes has a motive (drive) to inflict pain on someone and so rationalizes it by saying that the other person is inhuman or “deserves it.”
Interestingly, both routes to sadism operate in sociopaths. Jack Levin and others have written a great deal about compartmentalization in sociopaths. Sociopaths are also ruled by the power motive and so enjoy hurting because it is confirmation they are achieving power.
That gets me to warped empathy. Many, including Jack Levin, have pointed to the faulty logic behind the idea that sociopaths lack empathy. If sociopaths lack empathy then how can they enjoy another’s suffering? If they can’t identify other’s emotions how can they know they are inflicting pain and so get enjoyment? Is there any question that the sociopath that hurt you knew you were suffering?
Most of us have seen clearly the sadism of sociopaths, so we know they must have some kind of warped empathy. Empathy should lead to sympathy with another’s suffering not pleasure in another’s suffering.
In 1982, while reporting the results of a very well done study in which he found that violent sociopaths of normal to high intelligence actually have increased empathy, Heilburn* made the following statement:
“One way to interpret these results would be in terms of a sadistic, effective-processing psychopathic model of violence in which inflicting pain or distress upon another is arousing and reinforcing (pleasurable). Such a model would assume that acts inflicting pain are more intentional than impulsive and that empathic skills promote arousal and sadistic reinforcement (pleasure) by enhancing the psychopath’s awareness of the pain and distress being experienced by the victim.”
Now in 2008 researchers have obtained results that confirm Heilburn’s theory.
Researcher Jean Decety from the University of Chicago found that young sociopath’s brains light up with pleasure when they experience another’s suffering. In this study, the pleasure was especially present when the suffering was being inflicted by another person. How did the researchers demonstrate this? They showed violent movie clips to sociopaths and non-sociopaths then used fMRI to scan their brains.
Most importantly, the study showed no abnormality of the brain pathways involved in empathy. Sociopath’s empathy centers appeared to function just fine.
So how can I help you feel comfortable trusting the 90% of the rest of humanity who are not significantly sociopathic when I have already said that that most people can be sadistic under certain circumstances?
The answer is found again with motives, specifically the power motive. Learn to recognize the signs of excessive power orientation. It is OK to want a certain amount of power, but the pursuit of interpersonal power should not occupy a person’s every waking moment.
Well balanced people enjoy love and affection more than they enjoy power and control. I encourage you to learn to tune into love motives in others. I have found that consciously choosing to notice loving behavior in others has also helped me better recognize the power motive.
Avoid people who dehumanize others because whether or not one who dehumanizes is a sociopath, this compartmentalization is an important contributor to man’s inhumanity to man.
Lastly, I encourage you to stop supporting violent entertainment with your consumer dollar. Such “entertainment” fosters the development of sociopathy in at-risk youth. It also brings out the worst in everyone else.
*Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 1982, Vol. 50, No. 4, 546-557
About the compulsions becoming addictions as above… they sure as heck can become addictions..
As far as being “addicted” to tying your shoes a certain way.. you aren’t “compelled” to tie your shoes for emotional release, but you surely can become compelled to cut yourself, have sex with strangers, read porn, overeat, binge and purge, etc for emotional release..
The need for emotional release is very, very strong.
Plus there is the habitual aspect.. because even tying your shoes makes pathways in your brain.. need proof?
Try tying your shoes a different way and see how awkward it is.
Ns and Ps should never have an official role in minsitry- of any sort.
They presence is never benign, they use appearnaces to abuse.
Others are lead to believe tehy can’t be that bad, they are an altar server, or an usher even.
Though they are there, and they are allowed to fool people.
They should be punished and counseled. I can tolerate them in Church, but they, by their behaviors, opted out of any “role” in Church save as a parishoner. And that shoudl be enough, I mean we are all called to venerate God, that is our primary role not self-promotion.
Of course, the psychos I know want the public roles not the ones involving self-sacrifice with no recognition.
We do them no favors when we do not treat them as the sinners they are.
Bird,
I feel your pain. My baby was 11 months when my husband left. NO ONE can understand unless they have been affected by a sociopath. He left and I did not know where he was, etc. It was the worse time of my life. About 2 weeks before he got mad at me because I suspected him of cheating and he gave me a whole story about how much he loves me and he is working hard to take care of our family.
When I found a number he had been calling excessively I called the number and it was a girl’s voice on the voice mail. He had the nerve to tell me that if I called that number again he would leave my a**. Here he was getting mad at me for calling a number. So months later after he left I found out he was cheating (the woman on the voice mail) and they had a baby together. Their baby is about 11 months younger than ours.
I wish everyone would realize my husband is a sociopath. They see a fun, witty, charming, intelligent man. He is working on his doctorate, bought himself a new lexus after he left us, has taken numerous vacations. It is like we never existed in his life. This site has really helped me get through it all. I know that he is ill and it was not personal at all.
Funny, I wrote about revemge in my log only last night. I will share what i have, hope it helps. Writing my blog has saved my sanity, thats for sure.
F*****g nightmares. Same one. Vivid. I am not going back to sleep for while. No valiums and whiskey now, just me. The shaking and crying has stopped, but they come too often now. Nothing to be done about them but work through them. Well, “It” really, just the same one over and over.
So, I am now awake for a while. No booze, no drugs, just me now. I would play guitar but it is late and I already know that that isn’t going to help. Cant concentrate enough to read, and I don’t feel like listening to music, triggers too many emotions right now that I am not strong enough to handle.
They never understand this, they never understand how profoundly our lives are affected, how deeply they wound us. Even music, which I love, holds hidden traps in it. So I sit here, in the dark of the night and I am left with one choice. To think. And it hurts. I mean it really truly physically hurts still, even as advanced as I am in my hypnosis program. Last night I thought for a while that I was having an angina attack, I thought “This is impossible now, I cant have any more with the new meds”. It wasn’t angina. It was the physical pain of a heart that has been destroyed. Simple as that. This is why I am doing the hypnosis program, to escape the pain. I tried suicide, and even failed at that. Ironic in a way, She failed at life and I failed at death.
But I have to now, I have to live and go on. I think that no matter what I do part of me will always grieve for the “wife” that I lost. The years we were together were happy, the happiest I ever had. But that’s what they do to us. In the end they show us that it wasn’t real, that everything we did meant nothing. They think differently than we do. They really must regard us as inferior. And we are always at their mercy. Why is this so? What is it that they do to us that leaves us so vulnerable? And, when they devalue and discard they just leave, never looking at what they have done. We sit there in shock, our health, both physical and emotional, in tatters, our life around us in pieces, and they just move on.
We can never get them to accept responsibility, to do anything that normal humans do. We cant make them, you cant make anybody do anything, they have to choose to do it. We cant punish them, it would just make them worse. Plus, we don’t have the right to punish them. Revenge? When thought about in a cold and clinical manner it is not possible. It is something we cannot do. Even now, each time she hurts me I forgive her. I don’t forget, but I do forgive. Revenge is out of the question, for a couple of reasons. If I were to give myself over to that side of me, the one I keep locked away except in my nightmares, would be wrong. Purely and simply wrong. I never want to go there when awake. The other reason? I have to do the right thing here from now on. I have done the wrong thing enough times in my life to know the difference. It isn’t easy, it really isn’t, but I will not let myself do it. I like who I see in the mirror a little bit, and I want to grow to like him more. Maybe that’s the real difference between us and them. We make ourselves do the right thing even when we desperately don’t want to. We have a conscience, we have empathy. We don’t want to hurt them. I may have said some things in my emails to my ex-soc that may have hurt her, but I cant help that, I try to be polite but I am not going to lie to her. I say what I mean and I mean what I say. I don’t have to handle her with kid gloves the way I did before. I spent too many years worrying about bolstering her self image, I no longer have to do that. I lack the motivation and the energy now. I barely have the energy to heal.
But I will heal after a fashion. As best I can. But I am always going to be vulnerable to her until I am rebuilt. That’s a scary thought. Now THATS enough to give me nightmares.
My husband always said he was at work. Well, the woman he cheated with worked for him. I still can’t believe sometimes that he had another whole family somewhere. He is now living with her and her 4 kids. He rarely talks to his step-daughter whom he called his daughter. Now I don’t think he ever cared about my daughter from a previous relationship. He skipped out on us a month before her 8th grade grad. He did not call or anything. He did not see her for a year. He saw our daughter maybe 5 times during the year. He told me that after he left he was mad at me and he felt indifferent about our child. He did this same thing to his first child’s mother. He cheated on her with me and now he cheated on me with his 3rd child’s mom. He also keeps coming back to me to be intimate even though he left me for someone else…yikes that sounds so confusing.
There is so much dysfunction with this man that I could write a book about it. I am sure we could all write about our experiences. I don’t know if anyone would believe it. Sometimes I don’t even believe it.
Holywatersalt: I agree with you that they are the worst of the sinners. Not only are they sinners, but they are CRIMINALS that need to be in prison. Period.
I wish people would open their eyes and see that these criminals take the easy way out in crime … crime against us … pretending to be involved in relationships to steal and get whatever they can get. Hey, it beats robbing a bank or stealing from a company … police are hot on their tales … but relationship theft … they still can buffalo the courts, attorneys, law enforcement … they have that 50/50 shot that they can pull the wool over the eyes of the court … and besides, most “normal” folks wouldn’t think of taking them to court to throw their theiving butts in prison. Not only that, but they cleaned us out before they go, so even if we wanted to take them to court … we have no money left.
BELIEVE ME WHEN I TELL YOU … ALL OF THEM ARE CRIMINALS … OPEN YOUR EYES TO THIS FACT.
There is no mistake in what they say or do … and they have many going at the same time, it’s called reaping as much as you can in the smallest amount of time, then taking off to another city/state to con the newest victims.
They are criminals and what they have done to all of us is a crime.
Peace.
Bigdude,
That was so well written. I am always amazed at how mostly everyone who has been affected by a Soc. has experienced the same things and have felt the same way one time or another. Don’t worry about the emails that you sent to your ex- that you thought may have hurt because they didn’t.
I use to send my ex emails and I stopped because no matter how much I thought I was hurting him it was just hurting myself. He never agreed with any of it. He once told me that he is a good person even after he ditched his family.
I just believe now that he will reap what he sows. It feels good to know how far I have come. When he first left I was in shock like you. I cried everyday for 4 months. I lost 15 pounds and I couldn’t sleep. I felt like a zombie. It amazes me that I made it through that and you will make it through also.
nic:
Just reading your posts. My ex told me to leave with my 3 daughters when the youngest was 10 days old. You used the word “indifferent” to describe how your ex felt toward your shared child. I think that sums it up- I still have a hard time (it hasn’t been that long- 3 1/2 months ago)…I still can’t comprehend how indifferent my ex is, as if we don’t exist. It is ironic, in the same conversation he was telling me that his family (who owned the house we were living in and he originally told me was his) was evicting us, he also said that if his 2 stepdaughters ever asked about him that “he loved them”. It is so amazing how easily these people toss that word around when there actions in no way correspond…
I feel the same about it being unbelievable. Sometimes people ask me what happened and I don’t even know where to begin; it would almost seem like I am making it up as if it were something out of a movie or a novel…
nic,
I’ve wanted to write a book about my whole experience, but it truly is too confusing and complicated for me to write about! And, you’re right, no one would believe it. All the bizarre behavior, all the cruelty – my ex is a “successful” CFO, extremely charming… I liken him to Ted Bundy. It just doesn’t make sense.
It’s been a year, and I still cry on and off about the whole mess. How can these people just walk away from their children? How can they even say they “love” their children… because words are easy for them. There’s no meaning behind the words as we all know.
“Reducing people to nothing”… that is exactly what he does.
“Hermann Hesse – Steps (Stufen)
February 17, 2007 in Life, Thoughts
Steps
As every blossom fades
and all youth sinks into old age,
so every life’s design, each flower of wisdom,
attains its prime and cannot last forever.
The heart must submit itself courageously
to life’s call without a hint of grief,
A magic dwells in each beginning,
protecting us, telling us how to live.
High purposed we shall traverse realm on realm,
cleaving to none as to a home,
the world of spirit wishes not to fetter us
but raise us higher, step by step.
Scarce in some safe accustomed sphere of life
have we establish a house, then we grow lax;
only he who is ready to journey forth
can throw old habits off.
Maybe death’s hour too will send us out new-born
towards undreamed-lands,
maybe life’s call to us will never find an end
Courage my heart, take leave and fare thee well.”
This was my grandfathers favourite poem, and I would like to share it with you all. It is comforting me in difficult times. He was a really great man and I loved him very much, and he was one of the few people in the family I felt that he loved me when I was a child. He passed in the eighties and he is now my lighthouse in stormy seas.
The other one was a proverb he kept in his drawer, and my mother always has it on her lips: “Learn to become a nothing again”. He surely ment to be humble and decent, but I always get furious when my mother recites it as she is the greatest narcisst one can possibly imagine. Become nothing after ALL THE OTHERS are annihilated. (“reducing people to nothing”). Another of her sayings is “be nice to me as I won’t live much longer”, and my reply uniformly is: “always these empty promisese”. I think I am THE perfect enabler? I definitely have to work on it.
My P-father used to say, and always said it with a special smile: “Beat up your wife every day even when you don’t know why. SHE will know”. It is Russian he told us. Or “To know one woman is to know them all”, or “tell a woman how unique she is and then you can get them as all the others”. He told us such things prior to Kindergarden. Maybe he wanted to protect us from HIS breed, at least that is what he told us to be his motivation? I rather tend now to think he wanted to have fun and see my stunned face.
I try to get NC with my family, first with my father, but now also with my mother and my sister who develops more and more strange habits with me, for instance critisizing, judging my hair, figure, I won’t do amything right in her home and she quarrels with me in front of my 6 year old godchild; this quarrels I HATE, and I wont let her act out her tantrums on me.
Today was a very difficult day, and I was looking forward the whole afternoon to getting relief on this very blogside. Thank you all so much!