Do sociopaths know what they are? Many, many Lovefraud readers ask me this question. The short answer is that some of them do and some of them don’t.
The man who sent me the following email certainly has insight into his own personality:
I would like to thank you for making your videos they have given me an insight into how you people recognize us. WE are not to blame for your short comings because you are weak minded and foolish enough to be taken advantage of. We are evolutions next step we don’t allow silly emotions to cloud our judgments. In fact we use our advantage for survival because we are natures next course. I know I sound very narcissistic and apologize for that but if you are so proud and concerned and attached to your emotions why not allow someone to make you feel like a queen for something as worldly as money? We give you what you are missing just as all of the world ecosystem has since the beginning of time. It’s funny how we have been so easily classified and even now as I attempt to alter myself in order to become unparallel to descriptions of us, I find it very difficult to even perceive. I would like to boast of my strategic victories over hearts but I would fear you making another video and making this game more difficult, of course it would make it much more challenging and pleasurable when enjoying the hunt.
This email is a great example of the sociopathic perspective, whether or not individual sociopaths are aware of it. Lest we forget, here is how sociopaths view themselves, the rest of us, and the world:
1. Sociopaths are superior beings, and everyone else is a mark.
2. If marks are dumb enough to be conned, they get what they deserve.
3. Marks deserve to be targeted because of their stupid emotions and consciences.
4. Emotions and consciences are useful in marks, because they can be exploited.
5. Exploitation is a perfectly reasonable way for sociopaths to get what they want.
This is why there is no rehabilitation for sociopaths. They do not feel that they have a disorder; rather, sociopaths believe they have an evolutionary competitive advantage.
Or, for those sociopaths who don’t have the intelligence or education to analyze their place in the world, they’re simply content the way they are and see no need for change.
I just got uninvolved with one of these guys. I ignored all the red flags (the 3 previous failed marriages he had) because he was so very attentive, taking me to movies, bowling, shooting pool, all the things I listed I liked to do on the dating site. I left after 8 months of lies (he was in constant contact with his 3rd ex wife who had committed credit card fraud on his first wife) with the excuse he had loaned her a car and he was talking to her about payments. He never told me I was attractive although other people do, because that would have built up my self esteem instead of tearing it down, which he did often (I don’t like your hair that way, I don’t like that dress on you as much as the first time I saw you in it, etc.) and the making fun of me and calling it a joke. Then there was the sex, him using me for sex and 2 days later saying we should just be friends, then pursuing me when I tried to move on. The final straw was on Saturday, after we talked Friday and said we were going to be friends, only talk occasionally (and it was a relief), he started calling my house, when he found out I was out, called my cell, insisted he had to bring me something, asked me to go for a ride, then to the movies and then out to eat (thereby monopolizing my entire afternoon) and while we were at Wendy’s, he asked me how I was going to get home if he left. I stayed calm, told him I had several friends that would pick me up and joked that I would be egging his house if he did that. When I got home, I sent an e-mail telling him exactly what I thought of him, and telling him if he contacted me again I would get a restraining order. I am so tired from the last 8 months of craziness and the past 2 days without him bothering me have been so peaceful.
NEVER EVER EVER tell someone ahead of time that you have intentions to get a restraining order. Not yelling at you but just emphasizing. Tell them once, maybe twice to stop contact in ANY form and then just do the RO. This was advised by my atourney and it makes sense to me, esp with a Spath.
KathyAnn: Congratulations to you! Stay as peaceful as you can and share here if you start to forget how bad that was.
Dorothy: Thank you for that SAFE and excellent advice. I agree that it is always a good thing to keep secrets from a spath.
I love how these people can barely put a sentence together and they think they’re the intellectually and genetically superior dominant race of beings that’s going to show us all how it’s really done. Their language is so awkward, like a 14-year-old trying to use big words for the first time. It just shows how connected language and emotions are. The spath I dated used the most awkward sentence constructions. One more red flag in dating and another sign that you’ve got a 10-year-old in an adult’s body. “I can’t put a sentence together but I’m evolution’s next step.” Right. Lord, if the world was run by sociopaths, how would it function? We’re talking the total break down of society as we know it. This letter sounds like the speech of a villain in a bad sci-fi novel.
And the guy I just dumped, he couldn’t write or spell any better than a 2nd grader, but they are so good at being cunning and playing head games.
Absolutely……I have walked away from Spathx’s emails either scratching my head, huh?? Or feeling like it was so CAREFULLY worded that it sounded shallow and fake. Lack of affect, just like his words of eternal love and devotion. ALL BS!!
My nick name for him is TML, by the way! The Missing Link. Monkeys that don’t fit into the group get squeezed to the periphery. Ostracized I believe. On the outside looking in. Very sad.
I agree with you Moonwave. That’s exactly what I was thinking as I was reading the ‘spath’s letter; it sounds like a high-school kid’s version of a comic book super-villain.
Dr. Robert Hare nailed it; he said that psychopaths basically regard other human beings in the same way that a cat regards a mouse. Psychopaths are “intra-species” predators who will just as soon shoot you between the eyes as shake your hand, and with as little concern. (A psychopath’s behaviors are based solely on what is more personally advantageous to the spath; nothing more.)
An all-psychopath society might resemble a world populated by nothing but vampires. The original version of Dracula is the very embodiment of a charming, charismatic intra-species predator completely devoid of a conscience or feelings of empathy for the victim.
And yes, from personal experience, I believe that at least some with narcissistic pd and psychopathy do have personal insight and KNOW that they’re doing horrible things to other people, but are consciously choosing to go ahead and do these things anyway.
How sad for Mr. Sociopath! Not having empathy, any emotions, or feelings! To go through life always having to have the advantage and to win at all costs. I feel very sorry for these people because when it is all said and done they will die alone. To bad they cannot see that life is much more greater than their little games. To feel love, to feel how someone else feels is far more successful then a Sociopaths way of life!
I’m not sure I believe that the person that wrote that staement is really a sociopath. If they truly are, I wonder why they are wasting their time here on this sight where everyone knows what they are and knows to stay away. I see in the various comments from some here the shadows of myself years ago. I was raised by a spath, then married one. I remember the way that they controlled my every move and thought. I didn’t know there were people out there that could look you in the eye and lie to you day after day. My spath husband was so charming and could get anything or anyone he wanted for a while, when he was still handsome and things hadn’t caught up with him yet. I put up with his emotional abuse (you gain 1 more pound and I’m divorcing you!) for 5 years. I had tried to leave him so many times, but I would get this panicked, sick feeling in my stomach and just run back to him. He finally left me for greener pastures, he left his 2 daughters, ages 3 and 1. Then, 15 years later, he wanted to get to know them when they were grown up, they saw him for what he was pretty quickly. He died 2 years ago, 3 weeks after his his 3rd daughter (from 2nd ex wife)was married. He reunited with his 2nd ex again for about the 10th time at their daughters wedding. How ramantic!! He started experiencing symptoms like tripping over his own feet while walking, incontinence. He went to the hospital, was diagnosed with multiple brain tumors. His ex wife wanted to take him home to her state to get him to a Dr. that would cure him. She picked him up herself and drove him a few hundred miles to her house. Because of not being given proper care during the drive, he developed blood clots and died soon after she got her prize home. She has a lovely FB page in his memory where she states that she is in a relationship with him and he is the love of her life. She has wasted the last 25 years of her life trying to get him to behave and be the husband and father she thought he could be. I feel like I have dodged a big bullet. He left me, I got out alive and raised my daughters and am very happily married to a true partner. My heart aches for all of the people, men and women that get duped by sociopaths every day. But the good news is, those people can get away, get well, get on with their life and live very happily!! Keep up the good work Donna, and all of the regulars on this sight.
This somewhat commonly held notion that lack of conscience and lack of the ability to love/feel compassion is advanced in human evolution seems backwards to me. If the frontal lobes of the human brain, (where research indicates compassion originates from), are the more RECENT in human evolution, then these abilities seem later, not earlier, in human beings’ evolution. Add this to humans having been hunters and gatherers at one time, where humans WERE predators (and it was functional), then spath traits would be valuable. Later humans came to live in agrarian and then industrialized societies (and now information age societies) and the ability to care for each other and support each other — and feel compassion for others, seems more functional than being a predator. Spath traits, to me, seem earlier in human evolution – and hopefully will be extinct one day!
I believe the lack of empathy and conscience we are seeing now in psychopathy is a de-evolutionary misfit characteristic that may have a short term survival advantage in our totally messed up world but is doomed to extinction. They may thrive in the short run but all successful mamalian evolutioary species have love and compasion as traits required for survival. H
umans, even more so.
I agree that the traits of psychopathy/sociopathy (which includes the traits of narcissistic pd) are at a more primitive evolutionary level, and yet these abhorrent traits MUST have some survival value or they *would* have already died out long before now. In fact, if one of the traits of psychopathy is to have many short-term relationships and produce lots of offspring (which they abandon/fail to parent as they move on to the next “relationship”) we could eventually find that the spaths make up the majority of the population. Scary thought.
I love when these types write in to Donna, to ‘once again’ establish their superiority, dish out some insults, and let us know they will continue to win. Any audience will do…
FFWR: Love your perspective. I couldn’t agree more. Every one of these types I have known, regardless of innate intelligence, basically act like infants (or monkeys!). Every response is ‘simple’. Which sounds counter to what we may think of these sorts, and their ‘complicated’ game-playing. But, really, they only have a few set responses to the world: envy and contempt. Maybe I am missing something, but it seems to me they always seem to respond in one or both of these ways. They are either on the ‘bottom’ or on the ‘top’. If they are envious, then contempt kicks in to get them back on top (winning).
They may look smiley, happy, shiny people. But inside they are either envious or they are contemptuous. And all their cons seem to come out of these two basic responses.
4light: Your PTSD will not resolve itself until you are completely out of the influence of the spath. Our bodies react to the machinations and abuse of these types, even if our minds know what is going on. It’s just the way our bodies are designed. They react to protect us. But after the stress becomes chronic and unrelenting our bodies are in a constant state of hyper sensitivity. This means being awake at odd hours, crying unexpectedly, over reacting to other minor stressors, an inability to focus or achieve small goals, etc….. I hope that you can get away from your entanglement ASAP. I had to stay in, for safety reasons, after I knew what he was. Not for too long, but for a time. I didn’t start to truly feel ‘better’ until there was no contact. I don’t think, in these cases, that ‘mind over matter’ works….hang in there.
Take care all,
Slim
Thanks Slim for your response. Makes perfect sense. Having multiple toxic sources converge on me simultaneously would obviously make me sick. Take’s the ” You make me sick ” thing to another level. No, you literally make me sick ! lol – Where’s the quarantine tent ?
Mary,
I agree. I do think they are definitely NOT representatives of human evolution. There is absolutely no evidence that lack of emotion and empathy is an advancement. More that it is a throw back.
I am just reading the Moral Molecule. It talks quite a bit about this subject. From the perspective that being moral, cooperative, and with good boundaries and a good connection to our intuition is the main thrust of human evolution.
Grandiosity. I am inclined to mention once again Schaef’s When Society Becomes An Addict, Harper and Row, 1986.
These folks behave like animals. Perhaps they are operating more out of their lizard brains.
They behave much worse than animals. I can agree with snakes or reptiles but not mammals.
amanwhocares
That’s what I think of when I picture the spath now. A lizard/man with his lizard like head and face. He really does seem reptilian.LOL
Slim,
You are entirely correct. The basic difference between mankind and other animals is our ability to feel for each other. While some animals seem to have a sense of caring like porposes and ducks, science is still unclear whether their connections exist out of anything other than basic survival and protection of the species.
Ironically, when folks try to convey their sense of a predator after a relationship with them, they generally look to the animal phylum and ascribe the lowest form of existence to them such as “slugs”, “slime”, etc. I often recall trying to find a single term to convey the personality of my ex. The best I could come up with is that he was like the slime at the bottom of a very filthy barrel. Anything higher than that on the spectrum would actually have character.
A person without character can’t possibly understand what having character means, and can only see character as a flaw. That they are simply like the lesser animals on the phylum, without the basic elements that elevate mankind from beasts,is beyond their grasp.
Just as one shouldn’t sleep with a tiger who could rip your heart out if their need warranted it, one should never sleep (either metophorically or factually,) with a person who has anti-social personality disorder (ASPD). They are both as ruthless, but with a different set of tools.
Unless stymied by genetics, human beings have the ability to develop advanced levels of moral reasoning. Babies begin with only the ability to think of themselves. As they evolve, they begin to relate to the world around them, but in a very me-centered way. It is evident in the “no” phase of a two year old. As parents we try to instill a more advanced sense of moral reasoning in our children.
The next step is doing what is right and decent because there could be consequences for doing otherwise. Children at the transition of accepting consequences as a normal part of life are often heard to express “it’s not fair.”
Our moral development goes through additional stages until we acquire the ability to do what is right and decent out of love. This advanced stage of moral reasoning comes with the ability to let things pass for “the greater good.” It is this advanced stage of moral reasoning that predators prey on.
Neither psychopaths nor sociopaths evolve into this final stage of advanced moral reasoning. If you were preyed on by a psychopath, the good news is that you probably are a moral human being.
In response to a person who takes pride in their immorality: a tiger could kill me in a heartbeat. I don’t consider them a more advanced state of being because they can, any more than I could possibly think of a human predator as anything other than a person with a retarded level of moral development.
Joyce
JM, You understand this, I’m sure, but the spath has no feelings for you, us, or anyone other than themselves. They draw us in with whatever way they have to attract us, make us feel they love, or like us, and then proceed to separate as much money, material possessions, or whatever from us as possible and to have it for their own. Many, such as the one I was involved with, don’t even keep the money, or possessions for any length of time, but use it to further their con of another person, or simply give it away to family, or friends as a way to show how they are a responsible member of society to those that receive it. Some fool a multitude of people where they live for years into thinking they are really “nice” people while making the life, or lives of other(s)as miserable as they can.
Once they are done with us, they have no remorse as the writer of the email said; they are far superior to us in their view, and simply move on to con, swindle, and generally ruin the life of another in their chain of wrecked lives they leave in their path. Why? Simply because they can, and normally they get away with it because they have carefully selected their victims and only work their craft on people who are considered to be well respected in their communities and will be too embarrassed to have them prosecuted plus, in many instances, they never give out enough factual personal information to be apprehended by officials once they cut ties and run. In my case, I was able to obtain a good bit of factual personal information on my spath and have them arrested and charged for at least part of what of they did to me. Turned out they were on probation and parole from two other states and had violated their parole by even being in my state. Therefore, she had to serve out sentences in Illinois and Missouri before Tennessee gets her to serve the sentence she received from here. She still has another 8 years, or so, left before she will be out to start her conning and scamming and ruining lives again. I have no doubt whatsoever that once she is released, she will once again continue to do what she has always done only with a little more knowledge of how to avoid being put back in jail again.
It is sad that so many in this world are born to basically live off the suffering of others, but it happens every day and is going right at this moment in numerous homes, and vicinities. They are among us, but hopefully, thanks to this site and our experience with those that we were involved with, we won’t be enticed ever again to become another one’s victim.
Best wishes to all; inform your loved ones of what not to allow anyone to do to them, and always stay wary of another one attempting to fool you again. God bless.
Jerry