A 24-year-old guy described himself in an Internet forum: He doesn’t feel emotion, is an excellent liar, becomes bored quickly, and experiences an adrenalin rush when deceiving or angering someone else. He asks, is he a sociopath?
I’d answer yes. The post is an interesting insight into how a disordered young man perceives himself and others.
Read Self-diagnosing sociopathy on the Dr. Robert forum.
I’m sure it has to be very hard for many people to understand them. There are several reasons for that.
For one thing, if we’re trying to “understand” another person, what we need to find is some consistent pattern underlying their thinking and behavior. That’s particularly true if the person we’re trying to understand is very different from ourselves in certain ways. If we can discern some consistent set of rules that govern much of their behavior, we still have some hope of “understanding” them.
Unfortunately with chronically abusive people of any kind that can be very hard to do, because inconsistency is virtually the hallmark of an abusive personality. They’re often unpredictable in many ways. That’s true even of the majority of abusive people who are not psychopaths. Some have mood swings for instance, and seem like a “different person” from one time to the next. But with the psychopath it’s often the impulsiveness of their behavior that makes them inconsistent and unpredictable. There’s a “disconnectedness” in general about psychopaths. What they say for instance may not reflect the truth of the past, or any real intentions for the future. What they do may fail to take into account any lessons from the past, or potential consequences in the future. Some of their behavior belongs only to a kind of floating, detached present. This is one facet of what we call “lack of integrity” in the personality—a fragmentedness in place of a connected, consistent whole.
A lot of psychopathic “impulsiveness” and other behavior is simply due to the “lack of inhibition” in psychopaths. This of course includes the lack of what we call a “conscience” to inhibit behavior that’s hurtful to others. Yet that’s not the only inhibition that’s missing. Many psychopaths engage in behavior that’s ultimately harmful to themselves as well: behavior that “makes no sense” to other people. The point here is that when somebody lacks inhibition, their behavior can be prompted by all kinds of mere whims, which may vary not only from one time to another, but certainly from one psychopath to another. So in many ways psychopaths can be as different from one another as any normal human beings. That makes it harder to discern a pattern in all “psychopathic” behavior. Some may have a special taste for cruelty of a particular kind; others may be quite different.
Then I think people who have been in abusive relationships can sometimes add to the confusion by assigning motives to abusive behavior that are not necessarily accurate. Subjectivity can at times get in the way of understanding an abusive person, psychopathic or otherwise.
That brings me to another point: that when I hear people using the word “sociopath” it’s not always clear to me whether the person they’re talking about is in fact psychopathic. This is particularly true if it’s just a news report about somebody’s bad behavior of one kind or another. Often we have no idea of the real reason why a person did a particular bad thing. It may be due to circumstances, or they may have some other mental condition or personality disorder. It’s doesn’t have to be due to psychopathy. Yet I have more than a suspicion that some people use that word “sociopath,” not to mean a precise condition, but as a kind of sloppy all-embracing way of describing anyone who’s guilty of any “abusive” or “antisocial” behavior, regardless of the reason for it. That’s why I avoid using the word “sociopath” myself, to steer clear of any misunderstanding. The point is that if people muddle the symptoms of other personality disorders together with those of psychopathy, that’s bound to make it harder to understand any disorder.
Finally, I sometimes suspect that when people say they can’t “understand” an abusive person—of any kind—the real trouble is that they’re not just trying to “comprehend” what makes an alien mind tick, visualizing it as a mechanism whose workings can be grasped once they’re pointed out. Instead, they’re trying to do something more than that: trying to imagine themselves “being like” that person (or something of the kind), and they find they just can’t. If they can’t, that’s perfectly understandable.
Redwald,
it really isn’t hard to understand a psychopath at all.
They are emotionally retarded. They are infantile in their emotions. They FEEL the way infants and primitive tribes feel.
that’s it. Now all you have to do is study child psychology and anthropology. Throw in some mythology and Girardian theory and you’ve got it down.
Firstly, they are parasites because infants are parasites. In other words, they FEEL COMPELLED to get attention and sustenance from those humans that they perceive to be in authority, just like their parents were. So they search. They know what to search for too. They search for those people who will take RESPONSIBILITY. Any kind of responsibility. It could be a cop, a teacher, a preacher, a kind hearted teenager who accepts blame, any type of ENABLER will serve the function.
Red, I’m talking about the roots of the psychopath. You will see how it can diverge into many different forms but at the root, it’s the same. It’s a parasite. Some parasites are on public assistance, some will do a billion dollar ponzi scheme. It’s the same thing. No difference at all, it’s someone who wants, “money for nothing and the chicks for free.” If it’s a woman then it’s just money for nothing and the guys for whatever is in their pockets.
They despise authority. They want to usurp authority because all infants imitate their parents in the hope of one day having the magical power that parents seem to have, in an infants mind. This is natural and good. It’s how humans pass on the memes and genes. But spaths never grow up. They look for people who seem to be authoritive, knowledgable and respected. They will try to brown nose the authorities, but if they fail in that then they will try to destroy the authorities.
I could go on and on, but you get the picture. they are emotionally retarded and not very difficult to understand if you study the infantile mentality.
I just ran into another one. It used the pity ploy, love bomb and rage, on me, but I knew what it was. And it knew that I knew. Infants can’t change, they have a limited set of tricks. You just have to be able to recognize these tricks by reducing them down to their lowest common denominator.
As for the rest of us, Sky, we gotta install microwave ovens for a living… 😀
skylar:
What Redwald said made sense, but you make a lot of sense also! I see both scenarios in my X spath. He was extremely unpredictable. That came from his lack of inhibitions and doing whatever on a whim. His middle name should be “whim.” No concern for others, just whatever will satisfy him at the moment; just like a child. I also see very clearly that one of the main reasons he stays married is because his wife is “responsible.” She takes care of the kids and everything else while he goes and does whatever. He does have a high paying executive job and works long hours there, but that’s all he does. Another thing that I see now very clearly in hindsight is the OW in triangulation with me told him that I was “sweet.” GREAT!! She made me a huge target by telling him that!! I can seen now that he thought I was easy prey by knowing I was sweet.
Redwald: Not sure if you were talking about my use of the word, but I use sociopath because psychopath seems to make people think of some killer they would see in movies. Even now, people seem to do that. They just don’t think of the predators among them. I try not to slap the title on everybody that is abusive. I mean the precise condition. I’m not schooled in the reasons for the words or their differences, though. I just use sociopath to convey my thoughts and meanings, without making people think of some killer-type.
Anyway, I do try to understand them by placing myself in their spot or trying to think what it would be like to be them. I still can’t. I should look at it more from a distant place. More like fixing a clock and looking at it for problems, instead of becoming it or relating to it. ^_^
Finally, your thoughts on inconsistency and lack of inhibitions made some sense to me.
skylar: Yeah, that infantile mentality was brought to my attention before, and I thought it was selling the infants short. 😛 That definitely describes some of them. I always thought they were stuck in a rowdy teenage boy phase, but infant is a much more real example, since not all teenage boys are the same, but infants are.
What do you mean you just ran into another one? How long does it usually take them to start pulling out their tricks and raging? I guess how ever long it takes for you to notice them and identify them. ^_^
Dear Redwald,
Your post above, and the one above that (on the previous page) about trust are BOTH very interesting to me.
The trust thing….my P son SAYS he adheres to this “honesty among thieves” concept that a prisoner doesn’t rat out another one, or snitch because to do so would be to set one self up for REVENGE. Research has shown that chimps have a sort of reciprocity–sharing food etc. because they know if they don’t “act nice” that the others will eventually seek REVENGE on them. It isn’t truly an altruistic activity.
My P son Patrick also THINKS (arrogance) that he can anticipate what each family member will do or think….though he has not lived in the house with any of us or been around us more than a FEW hours in literally decades…and therefore he can “trust” (anticipate what we will do) in any situation.
In fact, to me “trust” is the ability to anticipate what someone will do in a situation (either positive or negative.) I can TRUST my P son Patrick to try to kill me if he gets a chance. I can TRUST that my son D will NOT lie to me NO MATTER WHAT. I can TRUST that my son C WILL lie to me if he thinks it will benefit him for him to lie to me or he decides to hide something from me.
So, “trust” runs both ways, both positive and negative, and to me is defined as CONFIDENCE in a person to behave in a certain way CONSISTENTLY.
My P son “trusts” his convict buddies to adhere to the “convict code” which in actual fact I think is more MYTH than reality….
Funny thing is too that while my son Patrick expects others NOT TO LIE TO HIM, he lies to them, while he expects people not to steal from him, he steals from others….sort of a double standard there, don’t ya think? LOL
The second post ofyours, Red, that I’d like to address is the
Redwald says:
I could spend my whole life studying sociopaths and still not understand them by the time I die.
I totally agree with them, and while some of them do indeed as Skylar points out have “infantile behavior and thinking” there are many of them that are far above that level. Which is why the most LEARNED MINDS ABOUT PSYCHOPATHY are doing research to learn more about them rather than taking just the observations of former victims such as we are for what psychopaths are and how they think.
While psychopaths do have ***some*** things in common, they ARE as different from each other as “regular people” are different from each other.
When I was doing wild life photography there was a BIG argument about whether the elephants of South Africa and the elephants of Mozambique –which was the biggest. While I was there they finished the results of a study done and found that they were the SAME ELEPHANTS….while I was there there was also research going on about the “rogue males” and the life cycle of the elephants. Of course people had observed elephants for thousands of years but it was all just OBSERVATION…so I was part of the research that was tranquilizing “single males” and painting numbers on their ears and rumps, and then observing them….they were looking at trying to “crop” numbers and wanted to know if these single males could be cropped to decrease the number of animals in a give area without harming the breeding population, and they found out that they could not, as these males came back into he female and juvenile only herds to breed. Now, 40 years later, when a particular area has been over populated with elephants and they must “crop” them, they take out an ENTIRE herd rather than only a few members. It seems in a way cruel to do it that way, but in the end, they decided it was more humane because of the tight-knit social structure of the animals.
So RESEARCH has a place to get OBJECTIVE DATA from a COMPLEX social structure as well as just the things that are observed (SUBJECTIVE data) to get more of a realistic picture of what is really going on.
One study on something simple I thought was pretty interesting.
Which is cleaner a wooden cutting board or a plastic one? Well, I would have thought the plastic one because it would be more easily cleaned of germs right? Sounds logical to me. BUT RESEARCH showed that a WOODEN cutting board is actually cleaner because the wood has some property that KILLS GERMS and a wooden board actually kills germs, but the plastic one just has places for the germs to hide and is much more difficult to clean.
So sometimes OBJECTIVE RESEARCH shows things we are not expecting about even a simple subject, so when you get into the COMPLEX subject of HUMAN BEHAVIOR and what makes it tick, the RESEARCH being done is only a beginning…there is still a lot more to learn about them.
Fortunately for US, we have learned a BIT about how to spot the RED FLAGS that some of them wave, but I doubt that any of us would have been able to “spot” Bernie Madoff, the successful money manager who lived the high life….and the ONE man who DID, who for years tried to OUT BERNIE, was not listened to by anyone who counted. LOL
While I think that we “can spot SOME OF THE PSYCHOPATHS some of the time, I do not think any of us can SPOT ALL of the psychopaths ALL of the time.” (I ask forgiveness of Abraham Lincoln for the misuse of this famous quote).
Louise;
I was not with him that long; it was all quite tumultuous. Funny thing is that I was never head over heels for him. I just thought he was a decent, quite, “next door” type guy who had some hurt from the past, quirky but with good qualities. He slowly won me over. In fact, on several occasions I remember thinking to myself that I was the problem. This guy is interested in me and I have my doubts?
Over a long weekend of talking with him I felt that perhaps I found a soul-mate and I hate that term. No rockets and fireworks, just somebody I felt more and more comfortable with as time progressed. One week later, it was over.
I am much embarrassed that all the drama played out in less than two months and it also was a long-distance. However, I believe its the nature of a relationship with a sociopath that makes them difficult to forget, even if it is a short-term relationship. Several others here have been in similar situations.
My case is complicated by that bizarreness over HIV which I described, his somewhat sorted trail that I discovered online and the fact that I actually knew of him from about 9 months before we met, but did not make the connection until I discovered his online profiles.
My own situation since then did not make moving on any easier. In Russia, I actually met a genuine, open, caring, clean-living and hard-working guy who was no mirror of me. My second day with Nicky was the most emotional day in my life. While walking thru the halls of Mikhaylovsky Palace, I was never so happy and so sad. Of course I did something stupid, thinking to myself I could actually make this work, the end result being me hurting Nicky very much. One day he is walking thru Mikhaylovsky Palace thinking he owns it, next he is a waiter in its restaurant, serving vile Russian nouveau riche.
After Nicky I met a very nice, very calm, very quite guy who happened to be HIV+ and was honest from the start. Ironic. Of the three, I dated him the longest but my time in Canada was up and I returned to the USA I learned I needed open-heart surgery within six months.
Once I became sick all I had was time to think, more than a year of that if you count the post-surgery depression that often accompanies cardiac surgery.
Thank God I found Lovefraud to help process it all. It helped me understand how mirroring, pity plays, manipulations and other sociopathic tactics hook people. I also have the experiences with two normal people to underscore how different was the relationship with the x-spath.
I also need to be patient an understand that my life did not begin again until May of this year, when my lawsuit against my former employer settled. Still, I am surprised that on occasions, I still have strong feelings for somebody who is toxic and abused me.
Oxy,
The infantile theory is not my own. It comes from research on narcissism. In my experience, with sociopaths, this seems to be the best description of their emotional behavior. It doesn’t describe them intellectually AT ALL, because spaths can differ by a wide range, intellectually and physically.
It’s their impoverished emotional landscape that colors their perspective of the world and they see everything and everyone as being there to provide them with whatever they want. They feel entitled and they put whatever intellectual and physical attributes they are endowed with, toward that end and no other.
The shallowness of their emotions is hidden by their false masks, which they use to imitate us and pretend to have real love, empathy or compassion. But in the end they are a 3 trick pony and will always reveal themselves to be so. When they are trying to control us, they will use charm, pity and rage, just like infants do.
Sky, I agree that some of them ARE “infantile” in the way that a 2 year old is all about ME ME ME emotionally….but I think (personal opinion) that that is not the TOTALITY of their emotional “stunting” or “development’ (use whichever word you choose)…I’d like to read the STUDIES you are referring to though, do you have a link to them?
I have been reading the studies that are on going, Kent Kiel (with various fMRIs of convicts going on) and Dr. Barbara Oakley reports on the results of some of the studies going on as well. Interesting stuff, so I’d like to add the studies you are talking about to my reading.
I agree is the shallowness of their emotions, but the thing is an infant can’t hide their real emotions, and the psychopaths can and do hide their emotions. I don’t doubt that those P-emotions are shallow in terms of their ability to love, but I can tell you their emotions like RAGE are FULLY DEVELOPED!
Some psychopaths though, I think are VERY good at concealing their real intentions from most people—maybe not from those that live the closest with but from the majority of people they can and do. I think whether they do that or not depends on their impulse control or lack of it.
There are SO MANY VARIABLES in human behavior and thinking, and even in psychopathic behavior and thinking that I wish I could say it was SIMPLE to always spot them as a “3-trick pony” but some of them are VERY good at what they do, and that “trick” is covering up their psychopathy from the MAJORITY of people in their environment.
Skylar;
My experience certainly supports the infantile theory. That was my response to the first profile of my x-spath that I found online. Actually juvenile was my thought.
Later on, I stumbled across another profile of his. Again, very juvenile.
His Facebook profile picture is one of him sticking his tongue out. Of course it was taken the afternoon before we met.