Downton Abbey was on TV last night, and Terry and I are among the millions of fans. Last night’s episode (Season 3, Episode 4) ended in tragedy because of behavior that looked so familiar to me.
(Spoiler Alert: The following description gives away the story.)
Lord Grantham’s daughter, Lady Sybil, is about to give birth. Rather than depend on the local country doctor, Dr. Clarkson, Lord Grantham has imported a more socially acceptable obstetrician, Sir Philip Tapsell, to deliver the baby. As the birth approaches, both doctors are in attendance at the estate.
Lady Sybil starts acting incoherently. Dr Clarkson fears that she may be toxemic. He recommends that they rush to the hospital so the baby can be delivered immediately by C-section. Sir Philip insists that nothing is wrong—Lady Sybil is experiencing a normal childbirth. The two doctors argue in front of the entire family and the nature of the argument is why I’m describing the show.
Dr. Clarkson worries that Lady Sybil may be in grave danger, but admits that he doesn’t know for sure. Sir Philip, on the other hand, is totally confident that nothing is wrong. He never wavers. He is pompous in his confidence. He practically sneers at the country bumpkin doctor for being an alarmist, and actually tells him to shut up.
Lord Grantham notes that Dr. Clarkson isn’t sure about the possible danger, whereas Sir Philip is 100% confident that everything is fine. He sides with Sir Philip, and they do not go to the hospital.
Lady Sybil goes into labor and the baby is born. But a short time later, she goes into convulsions and dies.
Argued like a sociopath
Dr. Clarkson was right all along. But Sir Philip spoke with unshakeable self-confidence, unwaveringly certain that he knew best. He argued like a sociopath.
I am not saying that the Sir Philip character is a sociopath. But I am saying that his extreme confidence, his self-righteousness and his hubris are all traits that sociopaths display when they are pushing to get their way.
I write about this in my book, Red Flags of Love Fraud:
How do they do it? How do sociopaths convince you to go along with their agendas, even to your own detriment?
They command it. This is a function of their charisma because they command unflinchingly, with complete self-confidence, they get results. Now, this doesn’t mean sociopaths are always barking orders. Often the commands are delivered on cushions of sweetness, or camouflaged as appeals for sympathy. But in their minds, whatever sociopaths want, they are totally entitled to have. Therefore, when they make their desires known, they show no doubt, only certainty. Compliance is demanded, and targets respond.
Those of us who are not disordered usually aren’t as adamant in expressing our views, opinions or desires. We may think we’re right, but recognize that we could be wrong. We may know what we want, but we’re willing to compromise. So when we come across people who communicate vociferously and forcefully well, we tend to be bowled over. Because of the sheer force of their words, we tell ourselves that they must know what they’re talking about, they’re telling the truth, and they’re right.
My ex-husband’s convincing lies
I’m soon going to be on another TV show I’ll tell you all more when I have details. The producer asked me if I had any more video or audio of my ex, James Montgomery. Well, I found some tapes that I had forgotten about recordings of voice mails, and a recording of our first telephone conversation when I arrived home after leaving him. The tapes illustrate the steamroller tactics with which he argued even when he was lying.
Let me set the scene. James Montgomery swept into my life, portraying himself as a successful entrepreneur. He invited me to be part of his business plans, which, if I could help him get started, were sure to make us fabulously wealthy. He pressured me to lease a car for him it was in my name, and I made all the payments. To feed his unending need for money, I drained my savings and loaded about $60,000 in debt to my previously zero-balance credit cards.
Montgomery also told me he was a member of the Australian military who had heroically served in Vietnam, and still acted as a consultant, particularly on terrorism. He often flew to Florida, telling me he was stopping by MacDill Air Force base in Tampa, home of the Special Operations Command. While there, he was able to get around by borrowing the cars of other military members that were parked at the base.
In December 1998, Montgomery dragged me to Florida, saying he had a contract to open a Titanic show in Orlando. We spent money we didn’t have to move down there. A few weeks later Montgomery admitted he never had a contract. Then, while he was flying to yet another business meeting, I discovered that he had fathered a child with another woman during our marriage. I left Florida, and took the car that he had been driving.
So, here’s part of my conversation with James Montgomery when I was back at my home in New Jersey. (Warning: Contains some profanity.)
Here’s what I know now that I didn’t know during the conversation. My entire marriage was a financial scam. James Montgomery was never in the military. When he travelled to Florida, he was visiting other women including, but not limited to, the mother of the child., who probably owned the car he drove.
Yet listen to how he argued about the car. I was wrong for taking the car back to New Jersey, which inconvenienced him. I was wrong about him using cars from the base. And I was stupidly ignorant about the policy for using military cars. Montgomery was adamant and self-righteous in his argument even though everything he said was a lie.
At the time, the conversation was terribly upsetting. He threw many more accusations and threats at me, which, because of the conviction of his words, made me wonder if he was right.
Later, I discovered that everything he said that day, and practically everything he said during our marriage, was a lie no matter how convincingly the words were stated.
I didn’t know someone could lie with such confidence and conviction. And that’s how I got into the entire mess.
Skylar, OK, I spoke of harm doers in that quote. Plenty of the ninety something percent of clinical nonspaths do harm. Especially if there exists a spectrum that approaches spathiness and there are some tincture-spaths, let’s call them. I see all kinds of harm in life as coming from people not thinking. Moral blankness that is not a constant state. many of us become less spathy or narcissitic as we mature. Many of us look back on past behaviors and feel shame. Many of us aren’t very well tuned in to one kind of person who merits sensitivity, and oblivious to other people or issues that might also. We have causes marketed to us, and some of us are malleable. We might romanticize that cause and have no feeling for another worthy and urgent one. We might be all taken in my the illusion of a smile on a dolphin or beauty of a horse and be indifferent to the pig or cow. We might muscle in on wealth that could be shared with a husbands first set of kids because we are an a$$hole, even if we don’t clinically qualify as a sociopath. We might blindly favor one child, we might gang up on somebody and mock them. We might lie about something we did or said because the consequences for ourselves are too great. None of this stuff is rare or unheard of among non-spaths. Some people who have the capacity for great empathy for some people fail with other people. I have born the brunt of this in real life, and I also appear to others here to be an example of *doing* this.
But spaths themselves: The exploitation, the deceit, the murder, may truly be about money. It may truly be about sex with a live person instead of their hand yet again. Or some specific thing the perp is obsessed with getting for himself or paying for or a debt that has to be repayed or repair costs for the truck. The ability to sleep like a baby when another person’s pain is the BYPRODUCT of going for something you want or think you deserve is as spathy imo as cynical cruelty or sadism, but not the same thing. Some people are just grifters. Some people really do not think again of people they used after they discard them. They don’t care.
A serial insurance/inheritance motivated murderer, like a black widow, is a different animal from a repeat torturing or strangling murderer — which is different from a burglar who more than once shot someone who saw their face in the course of their burglary — which is different from the rapist who killed for the same reason [victim saw his face] more than once, or I guess even once. Lets not forget the gangbanger who killed someone else for insulting him, or for matters of business, or a mafia hit man. Or the husband who killed the wife for wanting to leave him for someone else, or for being with someone else oafter a separation. Some of these things are similar to each other. Some very different from others. Many or most indicate some kind of sociopathy. Some I think are very different from being invested in a game.
Supposedly even among violent rapists there are several categories. Likewise among pedophiles, I have trouble seeing that guy in the article coaching the gymnasts as wanting to destroy innocence. Certainly an active molestor is either willing to destroy it, or has rationalized and discounted society’s message that he or she is destroying it, or might be driven by a motive to destroy it — that would be the domain of the psychopath for sure — but the information in that article makes it sound like there are some who are not driven by sadism in and of itself, and whose fascination or belief that they are in love with that inappropriate object of their interest is not driven by a hatred or resentment of innocence or a desire to change it. If someone has data along the lines of everyone in that German program revealing that their sexual fantasy/compulsion or their inability to stop staring at kids is all about their drive to change or punish or destroy innocence, then I am dead wrong. That article seemed to be propagating thinking like mine. But that was one of the generalizations that I seriously have questioned here.
I still have to look at the book Ox Drover recommended, though.
So that’s where I am coming from. Hopefully I have not triggered anyone anew with my answer to you.
fixerupper,
a warm and sunny place far away from home can help in some ways… it can remind you of beauty of nature that no spath can destroy for you, and at least give you a first step to peace of your life being in ruins back home. But no, it cannot magically heal everything.
I know it’s rough and hard. I didn’t start to feel the first sensation of healing more positively until about 6 months after. But then a lot of pieces and puzzles started to fall for me, not just about the spath, but about myself and those 6 months of aftermath. Which did include a trip of 6 weeks in Peru that I undertook 2.5 months after the discarding. It did not go professionally for the first half as I wanted (I was a tourleader half of the trip… my boundaries were bad, and I had a tourist along who constantly switched between claiming to be supportive and yet undermine me, even aggressively), but eventually landed me in the Amazon by myself… And while I cried there for the shere contrast of finally doing what I dreamed of doing since I was a kid and being amazed by the beauty of it and yet my life back home was like Tolkien’s death marches full of ghosts, just that contrast made it even more beautiful and memorable. Only there I was finally inspired to grieve and mourn over all that I had lost because of the spath.
“I have a theory. Since sociopaths objectify their victims ”“ it is relatively easy for them to stay in the so-called relationship ”“ because they are simply objects. They do not feel or perceive what they are doing to the hearts and minds of a human being ”“ that may be so ’in love’ and hoping and working HARD for a favorable outcome or happily -ever-after ending.”
I think your theory is a good one, fixerupper.
katydid, I’m sorry, I completely misunderstood. The context of your posts, praising DM’s post to me and stating that it articulated what you wanted to, made it sound to me like what followed was also connected to me. I also hope the apology in my superlong post to DM offered a modicum of comfort to you.
Fixer, hang in there kiddo. Just think, thank God you don’t have kids with her. I’m not being glib (eek!) I mean not trying to be, just saying that I find it helpful to be thankful I can walk away because the ties that bind are mental but not legal. That’s a huge advantage we should be glad of. Hopefully the dust will settle for you soon. If not, your LF friends got ya back x
Thanks, darwinsmom and Tea Light!
“Just think, thank God you don’t have kids with her.”
Funny that you bring that up.
She’s in her early 40’s and wants to have her first.
And I would have sacrificed anything to make this come true for us.
I have one child (A teenager, now.), but back then would have done whatever possible to have a child with her.
raggedy ann
apology unneccessary. your posts are overly long and sorry but i haven’t been reading them. i responded only b/c you posted a remark to me and clearly inferred something i did not think. if you take a step back, darwinsmom replied to you but her remarks took on a general tone that offered insight that benefits everyone, and i was grateful for it.
fixerupper,
I would have loved to have gotten pregnant at the time with the spath. And my therapist told me that I should not discount that my late 30-something and my growing hormonal nesting need may have been partly why I put up with him for so long. (I’ll be celebrating my 39th birthday next month, and the likelihood of being a mother ever dimming)
However, she told me the same thing that Tea Light told you: be very grateful that I escaped him without having a child by him. She even explicitly told me that she did not just meant this as in “being a single mother” or even “being bound to him”… but that she also meant not having a child that would have gotten genetic material from such a father and might end up growing up to be a sociopath as well. While she never used the word psychopath or sociopath (I did tell her on my first visit that I suspected it), she never disagreed with it, and because she inferred to the genetics by the end of the first visit it was clear to me that she actually agreed with my suspicion.
Raggedy Ann,
I see. You have different names for all the same behaviors because they appear different to you.
People who rob, rape, defraud etc… looks different to you because the crimes seem different. They look the same to me because I’m looking for the basic, most fundamental common denominator. I call it shame and envy.
Sandra Brown calls it “The Cluster B’s” and wrote a two part article on it. She explains:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/pathological-relationships/201109/who-does-part-1
IMO, by calling them “cluster b’s” Sandra gets closer to the fundamental problem, but not as close as Rene Girard, who writes about mimetic desire, which is at the root of shame and envy. And BTW, he doesn’t write about spaths, but about human nature.
I read somewhere that narcissism tends to ebb and flow with most of us, throughout our lives and even throughout the day. We tend to be more narcissistic at home, in the evening and when we are tired, than we are at work during the day. So when you say that people who are NOT spaths hurt others sometimes, yes, you’re right, but they were MORE spathy during that time and LESS spathy later, when they sincerely apologized. A true PCL-R scoring spath doesn’t ebb and flow much out of their spathiness, they just stay there all the time.
Spathiness is based in narcissism. Narcissism is about SELF-denial. The narcissist doesn’t ever admit to shame (not even to himself), instead they deny responsibility, they rage, they feel paranoid, they plot vengeance and they envy others.
So the spath/narc isn’t going to really KNOW why he/she wants to rape a child, since they are in denial of their true feelings, using all kinds of defense mechanisms, such as projection to lie to others and to themselves.
Believing that a spath is wanting sex because they want more variety than their hand can offer, is naive. Spaths’ motivation is to assuage their feeling of powerlessness, by overpowering another person. Sex can be used to dominate, particularly if the other person is weaker. And lets face it, they always pick on someone weaker – that’s a red flag. So when you see a person “attracted” to children, it’s safe to say that they are “attracted” to a weaker person. What makes that person weaker, really? It’s their innocence. And that is what spaths have in common with pedophiles. The spaths were attracted to people who couldn’t discern their hatred, their envy, their desire to overpower us. In other words, they were attracted to people too innocent to protect themselves.
There are common denominators and if you look past the “MacGuffins” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacGuffin
you will see what they are: power, envy, shame. These are all the requirements for any good drama. Which the spaths need desperately.
Donna, I’ve been away for a few days, and I read this article, just now, and you’re SPOT-ON about how fervent a spath is in their machinations!
And, oh I SO wish that I had the foresight to record the exspath. Omigosh, my skin seriously crawled when I was listening to your recording of Montgomery’s assertions.
The “holier-than-thou” tone of voice and the words that he used…….they are almost identical to the same tones and words that BOTH exspaths used!
Thank you so much for sharing the sound clip. It resonates with me on many levels with MANY different interactions that I’ve had with other spaths, as well.
Brightest blessings
Darwinsmom, what u wrote about regarding offspring with spathy genetics is one of my fears. Sometimes I look at her and ash myself if it is normal 2 year old behavior or signs of his spathy DNA. Ive read Dr. Leedoms book and am ever vigilant to develop the ability to love, moral reasoning, and impulse control. Shes keenly aware of emotions and can identify anger, saddness, and happiness in herself and others. And when others are upset around her, she tries to comfort them and I am encouraged that she is developing empathy. Its scary to think about, but despite his disorder, and the devestation to my life, I cannot imagine this little girl not being here. I tell myself to enjoy her now, never mind the scary possibility. She could just as likely end up an empath like me. I feel like I did her a huge favor psychologically by getting her away from his spathy influence. Maybe nurture can triumph. That is my hope!