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
OXDROVER and OxDrover,
OMG!!! Please forgive me. It was awful of my to call OxDrover Wini. I am very sorry. You’re both awsome people with two distinct stories and great personalities. I’m very sorry!
Elizabeth
OK, this is getting really silly:
Dear OxDrover and Wini…
excuse me while I go hide my red face in a bucket of ice water!
whoever is blogging about codependency.. it’s real.. most definitely real.. but it’s a heck of a lot more complicated than being a pushover or giving too much, though that’s part of it. It is something that happens to an entire family when they are forced to deal for years and years with a drug or alcohol addicted person who may be their breadwinner as well.
The years of get daddy up, get him to work, lie for him so he won’t get fired, go drag him out of the bar before he spends all his pay, etc, etc, becomes a part of a child’s personality.. when they grow up, they are literally trained and groomed to fit into another disfunctional family, or even create one. It is hard to retrain your thinking after this happens to you.. but it’s not impossible.
If you just call it bullshit, though and never look into it, well, as they say in the Overcomers recovery group, “If nothing changes, nothing changes”
Dear Elizabeth,
Get your head out of the bucket of water before you drown! LOL No offense intended I am sure, and NONE TAKEN. Just a good laugh, and I needed that today! LOL
Yes, I can imagine that my mother grew up not feeling safe or feeling that her mother would protect her.
Mom had a completely “different” personality until my GM died, then she seemed to assume the family role my grandmother’s death had left open of enabler, however, my mother does her enabling with a different twist than my GM. My grandmother did her enabling passively but my mom is an aggressive enabler, who will PUNISH YOU if you don’t go along. GM on the other hand would not PUNISH anyone for anything.
Looking back over “family role” theory, I can see a text book case of assignment of roles.
After my GM died, my mom dropped her antagonistic relationship with her brother, Uncle Monster, and assumed this totally protective mantle where he was concerned.
When he contracted fatal brain cancer, my mom was his power of attorney and she made arrangements for his care, etc. During that time, her anxiety arose to a very high level and she was my grandmother personafied. She was very “anxious” about spending his money (he had plenty) on canned dog food for his old and suffering dog who could not eat dry food because she had no teeth. My uncle would not put this poor dog out of her misery when his mind was “functioning” (which was a big problem for me) and after his mind was gone and he would not know anything about it, I offered to do it for my mother (who does have some compassion for suffering animals) she would not let me take the dog away from the house and shoot it, but insisted I get the medications from the vet ($50) and I did. It didn’t make logical sense though, and mom was VERY anxious about doing anything that my uncle would have disapproved of even though he didn’t know. Strange, but gave me a clue about how her anxiety worked where the family enabling was going on.
Even though he would not know the poor suffering dog was being put out of her misery (a great boon to the dog) she knew he would not do it, so she was very anxious about doing ANYTHING he wouldn’t want, even if it caused suffering in a poor innocent dog.
He got to the point toward the end of his life that even 2-3 caregivers 24/7 could not have taken care of him at home, so he was put in a hospice bed about 3 weeks before he died. Again, mom’s anxiety rose about placing him in a hospice bed rather than keeping him at home, but he was out of his head and would try to walk, and fall, and we had to call the fire department several times to help get him off the floor.
After he died, her anxiety decreased. I think (just my guess) is that she must have some “internal tape” running that no matter what the “golden child,” (always male) of the family must be humored no matter what they want and that anyone who tries to give them consequences is the “enemy” and must be “shot down.”
In this maternal line, I can trace it directly back to an alocholic ancestor who died in 1860 in Tennesse, in a direct line of alcoholics and abusers. I was fortunate that I found a chikld custody law suit in 1840 over his step son (the fight was really about the kids estate) with a lot of dirty linen aired in the 287 hand written pages of testimony about his drunken rages, his fights with his second wife, his abuse of his slaves, and his drunken brawls, passing out in a neighb or’s house, vomiting on the floor, losing his way home at night, etc.
The lateral lines of this same man’s descendants also have a high rate of alcoholism, suicide, murder, dysfunctional relationships etc. so I can see a pattern there for sure.
Uncle Monster’s three children are all damaged goods, but they have managed to none be alcoholics, though one married one, but they are not “evil” like him. His son has never married and has social anxiety disorder, one daughter has married 4 times, but the last one for 15 yrs and is apparently very happy. The Alcoholic man the middle daughter married has sobered up, but I think is somewhat of a “dry drunk.”
They are all three fairly close to my mother, but my male cousin is starting to see the “truth” about the enabling pattern in the family. He was sort of in the middle during the time I was gone from my home, not wanting to believe the things I told him about what was going on. He loved both me and my mother. When, however, my son’s wife tried to kill him, and my mother was “proven wrong” about who to discard, he realizes now that the dysfunction in this situation was not mine and that all the “predictions” I made about what would happen came true. It hurts him that my mom is the way she is and he keeps limited contact with her (he is her power of attorney now) but on a superfiscial level.
Like many kids of a dysfunctional family who band together because they have to in order to survive, he and his 2 sisters are extremely close though they don’t live close physically to each other.
Looking at the dysfunction from generation to generation it is quite possible to see how this is passed on genetically as well as environmentally. How the girls in the family are programmed to enable and the males are programmed to abuse. My grandmother was programmed to cover up bad deeds of the males, to be totally submissive and to beg them to stop abusing her, to never sanction them in any way for any past abuse and to “pretend none of it had happened” and somehow that was supposed to make everything okay.
I think my mom’s problems with anxiety if the family is not playing “let’s pretend” is a big problem with her, and she will do anything to stop this anxeity about the “golden child” being punished for their own bad deeds. I really think this is a learned behavior rather than a genetic one, but it isn’t going to change at age 79 for her.
I think the emotional need she has to hang on tightly to this assigned family role is so important to her that any affection she ever had for me (if any) is expendable. I also think that the only role a woman has in the family is to produce male children (she didn’t) and so she “adopted” my sons as her own. Though I am female I think she is my GM protecting her son from his “father” and I am playing the role of the punitive father in my mother’s mind and she has to do everything she can to keep her “son” from being punished and “running away from home.”
The plot to this play was written before she was born, before her mother was born, and she will not deviate from the role she is assigned until her dying breath.
Maybe I’m being over analytical in this, maybe she is a narcissist, or even a psychopath, but I don’t think so, though the role she is playing is a “psychopath by proxy” but it also gives her a PURPOSE IN LIFE and that is to defend her “son” at any cost to others. PEACE AT ANY PRICE, and others always pay the price. That’s pretty twisted. But I also know that this is not a unique situation, there are other families playing “assigned roles” in plays with plots written generations prior to the current one.
Dr. Eric Berne, in “Games People Play” summed up a great deal of these “games” which are definitely NOT “fun and games.”
Wow OxDrover,
It’s funny that you mention the “pretend nothing happened game”. That’s a real popular game in abusive environments. When I see it in abusive homes I understand, ’cause I figure there are lots of controls to keep people in line. The thing is, I’ve seen it in abusive churches too, where it makes little or no sense. There seems to be a strong compulsion in normal people to pretend away abuse. In organizations like churches, I think it’s really creepy – twilight zone stuff. In a dysfuntional family, it’s potentially deadly. I’ve seen awoman beaten to a bloody pulp, with not a square inch of flesh untouched. Still she claimed to have been pushed down the stairs. Wow!
There was a huge measure of sexism in my mother’s family too, but it stopped with my grandmother’s generation. My maternal grandmother decided she was very hurt by her mother always putting her brother first, so she put a stop to it in her family.
I hope you get a chance to be mother and daughter again before her days on this earth are through. It all seems horribly sad.
Elizabeth Conley: I think dysfunction started 1,000 of years ago … when women didn’t work. They worked in the home and did everything, but they didn’t make a paycheck to be self sufficient. In order to survive, the spinning of dysfunctional weaving and manipulation started. Out of survival.
This survival technique was passed down from generation to generation and no one questioned it. It just got incorporated into the offsprings psyches.
Then the 60’s came along and women could go out in society and take a job and make a living. Yes, true, not to make the paycheck of a man’s, but still allowed her, if need be, self sufficient. The issue of why men make more money than women today is still the unspoken discussion of control issues by men. Hey, why would women need us if they make the same money we do … theory!
It’s all a matter of working backwards to see how anything started.
Oh, and may I remind everyone that men back in those days, if they didn’t take care of their wives and children … they were thrown out of society!!! Yes, they were … you can thank the churches for insisting men handled their financial obligations. Not like it is today in the courts…. courts giving women lip service, oh these men are suppose to pay … you are awarded that payment … you won … now go and make him pay, we gave you a court order that he has to pay. Give me a break here … throw the idiot in jail, put him on a chain gang for X amount of years … doing community service every day, day in and day out … then back to his prison cell to sleep 6-7 hours, up again … go do your community service, pick up garbage off the streets, help the elderly, pain their houses, or build them furniture … until he pays his debt to society. Then and only when his debt for child support is paid in hours of manual labor … can he be let out.
Oh, violates their civil and constitutional rights … TOO BAD, they didn’t care about violating the mother of their children and their children’s rights to be feed, clothed, taken care of, now did they.
Peace.
Dear Elizabeth,
You know it is funny how “good” my mother is at “pretending everything is great.” I have a plaque that I keep up that says “Remeber, everyone thinks we’re a nice, normal family” as sort of a black humor joke.
What the neighbors think is so important to her that it is “unreal” and I tried to go along with that for a long time, but I am at a point in my life now that I could give a rat’s behind what the neighbors think! I’m also beginning to realize that my step-father kept a better handle on her than I realized when I was growing up and even later. My son C had hoped that he would be able, as the oldest male left in the family, to persuade her to follow his directions about not sending money to my P-son. Apparently not though, as the letter from my P-son talked about how my son C had “abused” my mother, along with me of course. LOL It is all so transparent to me, but obviously what she wants to hear. I am sure the “abuse” he was talking about was my son C demanding that she not send money to P-son. LOL
I spoke to the Attorney General’s office in Texas today about the letter I had and they told me who to call and who to fax it to and I will do that this evening. Texas right now has the prisons shut down on “lock down” where all inmates are kept in their cells (for several weeks now) due to cell phones being found, including some on death row. My son’s letter to my mother talks about him “calling her” and a smuggled in cell phone would be the only way he could accomplish this. He has already been caught with one once. Cell phones in prison is a felony offense because of the possiblity for escapes etc. He was not prosecuted for the felony last time because they didn’t find the sim chip. He was kicked out of craft shop and put in solitary confinement for some time, then transferred to another prison on maximum security for a year. (inside his cell 23 hours a day) With money though (which she is sending him) he will be able to buy favors from other inmates and to “buy” time on the phone of another inmate. Apparently he had “sold” time on his phone when he had one for favors and goods. Apparently the guards smuggle them in or they are smuggled in in orders for craft shop materials. (He was in the craft shop).
Many of the letters between him and the Trojan Horse psychopath contained coded messages. I’m not sure waht the codes were about but I am assuming that they were for sending in contraband. They didn’t make any sense otherwise. He was talking about ordering “aircraft parts” and “aircraft radios” etc. Which wouldn’t make any sense to anyone reading them, and he certainly wasn’t ordering aircraft parts or radios. He kept saying to “look up the aircraft parts on the internet” to the TH-P and about “shipping” the “parts” etc.
The reference to “occasional calls” between him and mother though is pretty plain, and especially since he had a cell phone in the past. Inmates are NOT allowed to make unmonitored calls even if there is a death in the family, and documented proof of the death must be received before they are allowed to make that one 5-minute monitored call. The chaplain is on the line with the inmate and overhears every word.
It is amazing how much the inmates can get away with though, and how inventive they are at breaking the rules of the prisons and getting in contraband. Of course having guards that cooperate with the inmates helps them. I have no doubt that my son is an expert at it. He even had an affair with a female major. I saw the two of them together and I have no doubt from the eye contact they made in the visitors room that they were having an affair. She must have been pretty twisted to be having an affair with an inmate since she would have been prosecuted for rape, lost her job and gone to prison herself if they had been caught. Pretty risky behavior for some thrills I would think. He would only have done a few days in solitary. He had nothing to lose and she had everything to lose including her husband and children.
One secretary in the prison he was in was having an affair with an officer there AND with an inmate and she and the inmate were both found murdered with their throats cut in a janitor’s closet. No one was prosecuted for their murder.
As much as I know about what goes on in prisons, I know I don’t know 1/10th of 1 percent of what goes on, and couldn’t believe it if I did. I can only imagine that it must be a hell on earth for all there, both inmates and guards, a precursor to hell, but my P son seems to thrive there. I just hope h e can spend the rest of his miserable life there where he can’t do as much damage as he could on the outside.
Oxy: One of my former co-workers used to sneak out of work hours earlier than release time and bring drugs up to the prison for her EX boyfriend that is incarcerated for murdering a package store owner when we were in H.S.
Anyway, for a year she was doing this … and clocking her time in for 8 hours per day … receiving her full pay during those excursions out of the office (helped that she was sleeping with her married boss too).
Anyway, one day she’s driving and what does she do? She hits and kills a kid on a skate board … was in the local papers of the time and date of the accident.
She and her boss along with personnel, fudged all her records for the past year … sweeping all her lies and deceptions under the rug.
A day or 2 after the accident, the young teenager died of his injuries sustained in the car accident that she caused. What did she do upon hearing of his death? Nothing, she went out and partied and blew cocaine up her nose … a week or 2 later, the teenagers parents wrote her a note and told her to not blame herself, they had warned their son numerous times to stop skate boarding on that highway.
Good grief. I prayed for those parents that they never heard the truth about what a low life this woman is and could care less, to this day that she killed their son.
Justice? This woman belongs in prison.
Oh, she now is up in the ranks sleeping with her current boss (that makes about 8 bosses in 20 years she purposely bedded to get her way in that place) … bounced him out of his loving marriage with his wife … now they are buying a house together. The boss she dates wrote a letter against me during my law suit … I didn’t know he was dating her until after I retired… all in God’s time.
Funny, for a woman who filed bankrupcy at least twice in her adult life (that I know of) … where’d she get the money for a down payment to put down on her current house? Everyone looks the other way.
Don’t drink the water!
Peace.
The Ps have NO SHAME, and many times (too many times) they get rewarded in this world’s coin for their lack of morals and lack of shame, but I truly believe that they will have to answer to a higher court at some point in time. I would not want to be them at that time. I would rather be me and have a conscience that keeps me from doing that sort of thing than to be them and not be able to love. A crust of bread eaten in peace is better than a feast eaten with chaos and malice.
So true Oxy, so true.
I pray for that kids soul and his family. Every year I light a candle for him.
As for her new promotions in that place, her lover boss harassed his 2nd in command out of his position, they rewrote the specs for her (no degree) and gave her his job with another title. Yes, what a place. Promote the derelicts in life and everyone wonders what’s going on with our world?
Oh, her first promotion and my promotion started exactly at the same time … now you know the rest of the story … I was never to get mine, but the lying, conniving, home wrecking murderer got hers?
Don’t drink the water!
Peace.