Sitting with an antisocial or sociopathic client is an interesting experience—for a while, anyway, until it grows tedious”¦almost boring. There is the initial curiosity about, and fascination with, the client’s antisocial behaviors”¦their nature”¦breadth.
Perhaps there’s even a certain rubbernecking interest in the train-wreck of moral turpitude these clients present—with their staggering patterns of ethical and moral debaseness. Admittedly, it can be breathtaking, on certain levels, to behold the magnitude of their abuse of others’ boundaries and dignity, accompanied by missing feelings of accountability and remorse.
And the interest in the experience with such clients persists a bit longer when you are dealing with someone who is “intelligent.” There’s something just inherently more compelling, at least initially, about an “intelligent” sociopath who guiltlessly transgresses others in the gross, chronic way that sociopaths do, versus the less intelligent sociopath, whose intellectual limitations seem to dim, however unfairly, the spectacular nature of his violations.
But after a while, as I say, sitting with the sociopathic client, however intelligent he may even be, grows tedious. It’s not unlike the experience of discovering that someone you expected to find extremely interesting (and perhaps did, initially) is, at bottom, really a boring individual with little to say or offer. There’s something anti-climactically disappointing in the discovery of the individual’s gross limitations.
With most sociopathic personalities, in my experience, this sense of disillusionment—of of having to face the reality, ultimately, of their emotional vacuity—occurs in the work with them. As different in temperament and intelligence as they may be, ultimately sociopaths prove to be highly ungratifying clients to work with. This is because, regardless of their ability to talk the talk, they are, ultimately, unable to make themselves genuinely accountable for their actions, the fact of which, after a while, simply grows tiresome.
The sociopathic client just doesn’t feel, in a heart-felt way, so many of the things he “allegedly” is ready to own, or the reforms he is “allegedly” ready to make; and when this becomes clear—as it always does—a certain tedium, boredom enters the sessions.
This boredom, I think, arises in the recognition of the futility of making a real connection with the sociopath; also in the futility of his making any sort of real connection to the pain he’s caused others, and will continue to cause others, despite his superficial assertions of regret and remorse.
And so this is where the big yawns threaten to emerge with regularity. It’s the feeling of having your time wasted, which is exactly what the sociopath is doing. He is wasting your time, as he wastes everything from which he doesn’t derive a personally, selfishly compelling benefit.
It is that moment of untruth—that moment when it becomes clear that, no matter how verbally interesting and, perhaps, even engaging he may be, the sociopathic individual finally lacks anything substantive to say, feel, or aspire to. Lacking this substance, the possibly initially engaging experience with him yields, ultimately, to the sense of being futilely engaged with an emotional cipher.
That is, for a while his charisma, charm and engaging qualities, if they are present, may compensate for the missing underlying emotional substance. But there is a shelf-life for this compensatory entertainment before the tedium of his barren inner emotional life begins to weigh down the experience of him. There is a limit to hearing the same repetitive pronouncements of intended change, pseudo remorse and responsibility.
There is also a limit, beyond which it becomes increasingly oppressive to sit with the sociopath, who in one breath may claim responsibility for his violations of others, while in the very next withdraw his pseudo-assumption of responsibility and abruptly rationalize the very behavior that, only moments before, he seemingly repudiated?
This is the sociopath at work. Sitting with him can be an interesting experience. But as his particular, underlying emotional disability surfaces, the interest leads, surpisingly quickly, to a feeling of ennui”¦almost oppression.
(This article is copyrighted © 2011 by Steve Becker, LCSW. My use of male gender pronouns is for convenience’s sake only and not to suggest that females aren’t capable of the behaviors and attitudes discussed.)
lesson learned
One
Si, and gracias Chica! 🙂
Came from my heart too 🙂
LL
one/joy_step_at_a_time
well, the best wishes do!
I can think of no other more painful death for my spath than to experience the pain of those she has tortured.
lesson learned
One
AGREED!!!
super chic
.
Ox Drover
Thanks Henry, here are my valentines thank you notes.
Dear Jerkface, (per Jimmy Kimmel’s thank you notes!)
THANK YOU X-Boy friend for burning T’s house, it let me know what you would do to me when I dumped you for being a cheat, so that I could let you know I KNEW and that if anything happened to my house, even a lightening strike that I witnessed myself, that YOU would PAY. So thank you again. I feel safe from you now.
Dear P-son,
THANK YOU for sending someone so stupid and greedy to try to kill me that he got found out in time for me to flee to safety.
Dear Texas Parole board,
THANK YOU for hearing my plea and keeping my P son in there for at least another 3 years. I can sleep well at night now.
Dear Parole Attorney,
Thank you for believing me, and thank you for knowing what a psychopath is. It was very validating.
Dear Minister that I contacted to try to convince my egg donor not to financially support P-son,
THANK you for convincing me that I was right all those years ago when I thought you were a pious hypocrit, it validated my earlier opinion, and reassured me that I could NOT trust you.
Thank you, P-X-DIL, for trying to kill my son and failing. It was the ONLY way I could have gotten you completely out of my life. I really shouldn’t have gloated about you “looking so fetching” in your orange jail jump suit and your jelly flip flops, but at the time it was just overwhelmingly tempting after how you had treated me.
Thank you, Trojan Horse-Psychopath for being so greedy that you gave yourself away before you could off me. Seeing your mug shot with the two black eyes after the local bank robber beat you up in jail really did make me feel somewhat vindicated, that even a POS like him would look down on and despise someone like you.
Thank you abusive X-boss, if you hadn’t been such an abusive person to me, I’d probably still be at that job, and I wouldn’t have gotten a weekend option job where I could have been with my beloved daddy during his illness and death. THANK YOU, you really did me a favor.
Thank you to ALL of the disordered and dysfunctional people in my previous life for NOT being in my life today. The lessons you have taught me might have been painful, but I’m a better, stronger and happier person because of those lessons.
hens
Dear Jerk Face………………………………………………………………………….It is better to have loved and lost – open card – then to live with a physco the rest of your life. signed – You don’t say…~!
lesson learned
I need some talkin too, or a fryin pan or somethin…
I’ve been absolutely struggling today, emotionally.
It’s like a constant war waging/raging in my head and it’s frustrating.
I’ve been ruminating about spath and his new gf all day again today.
I can’t help but get past the notion that she’s getting something I did not. I was never love bombed when he was single, blah blah blah….I was also the ONLY woman HE DUMPED.
When thinking about it a little more deeply, I thought much about what I was when I started out with spath in the beginning. I was very sick, I was just walking out of a twenty year horrifying abusive marriage. Things were all over the place, myself and my kids were an absolute mess. I had to quit school due to illness. I was so frightened. I had no means of taking care of myself. I didn’t have SHIAT. No housing, no money,…it was just awful…but spathy? Yea, my Knight in Shining Armor! Somehow, I when thinking about it, he was what got me THROUGH all of that crap…he didn’t really do a lot except see me, screw me, play mind games with me, etc, but …..he DID listen to me for hours on the phone and through emails (Yes he responded) as to what I was going through. He was my “friend”. Then he was my lover. I”m still trying to understand the dynamics back then, compared to his endless pursuits of women now, of when he was chasing wife two as well, endless stories about that as well…….LOTS of inconsistencies….wife two chased HIM, not the other way around. Given his desperate chasing right now, I don’t see that it’s true. I chased him, or at least he wanted me to believe I did. I was the OW, NOT the girl he fell for as a single man. His dynamics with me were markedly different. Which also causes me so much pain. How could I think someone else wouldn’t have it better because she’s getting what I never did, which is TRUE!!! HIs MO is still the same. Drink wine with me and “teach” me how to have sex because I never could do that kind of stuff in my marriages. Actually, he never mentioned marriage one to love bomb when he was pursuing HER only marriage two (victim of her of course) nor did he mention me, well, cuz, ya know 🙂
But the place I was stuck in, is almost the EXACT same place I find myself now. I ALMOST called him twice today. I didn’t. Each time I go to dial the number or to check on his facebook, something stops me in thinking…….the point of that would be???? What, you want this psycho king from hell in your life or??? He’ll just be mean. He’ll take it as POWER OVER……and he’s had enough of that, yet the pain of what SHE/THEY got, and what I didn’t in living with him and being actively pursued in an appropriate dating environment are things that never happened for me. Even sexually, things are different. He would not have intercourse with me for a year. Perhaps because he didn’t have to really seal the deal to prevent himself from being alone, I don’t know…I would have had him a year ago, after his divorce had he wanted me……..
I find myself in the same place. But this time there are no distractions. There is no man waiting in the wings to save my ass. And this time, even though it hurts like nothing I’ve ever felt in my life, it has to be this way. I know that. But I haven’t a clue as to what to do to with myself. I don’t know what I want, where to go or what to do, also seemingly faced with the same financial situation. No money. School is gone for the moment….
I’m just totally lost. I have no motivation for anything. I just feel a barren, empty void and sadness I can’t describe.
I miss him.
And it’s all I can do right now, not to contact him.
LL
lesson learned
Ox,
I love that.
LL
Ana
Hello,
My valentine is
*How can I miss you if you WON’T go away?*
(thanks to dan hicks & the hot licks)
hens
Well LL You and I are in the same boat. So here we are. This is it. We can shake it up and change it or stay right here, I think it is up to us. What if we called them and they told us to fuck off? Is that what keeps us from calling them, fear of being rejected again? Or if we give them just a liitle bit of our heart they will use that to devour us again as they set back with a smirk as we sink back into hell. What are our choices here? Change the past is not an option. Waters under the bridge were to tormented to forget. So I choose to except that nothing could of been any different than the way it was. I learn from this – it was meant to be….