In my last LoveFraud article I discussed strategies for vetting your new partner for “personality skeletons” lurking in the “apparent” history.
I’d like to focus, here, more specifically (and in more depth) on individuals with a pattern of discarding the people in their lives.
Sociopaths and other seriously disturbed narcissistic personality types will have this history—that is, a history (past and recent) that’s almost certainly littered with friends, family, and anyone who was once useful, whom they’ve cast off ostensibly for one or another reason.
As best as possible we want to glean this history, if it’s applicable and somehow accessible. In such cases, we want to ensure that blinding defenses such as denial, avoidance, idealization and incuriosity (among others) don’t compromise our observational powers.
More than that, we want to be sharply astute to evidence suggestive of such a history.
And why? If for no other reason than that adults with a track record of cutting loose the people in their lives simply do not outgrow this pattern.
In other words, this is a deeply inscribed aspect of their character, from which none of us carries special privileges to immunity or protection.
Yes, we’ve discussed this and other aspects of pathological narcissism before, but it’s always useful, I feel, to take a fresh view of it.
As we know, sociopaths and similarly character-disordered personalities engage in relationships, and in a great many interactions, almost strictly to the extent that they perceive you to be useful to their interests.
I think we can agree that, just as soon as the exploitive personality perceives that your usefulness to him has run its course, it will follow like clockwork that his use for you will correspondingly expend itself.
These personalities measure you against the criterion of your useful shelf-life which, in a sense, puts you in a not so different category from, say, an appliance, or, for that matter, any possession or object whose utility depreciates over time.
From the height of his satisfaction with your optimal utility to him, the sociopath begins a slow, inexorable and, in some cases, disorientingly precipitous, phase of depreciating you. He may, or may not, begin this process by idealizing you. But even if he does, he won’t be idealing you; rather, he’ll be idealizing your utility to him.
I’d like to stress this point again: Sociopaths, and I include all pathological narcissists, never really idealize you; they idealize your present utility to them.
And, of course, from there, it’s all downhill.
When exploiter’s depreciation of you is complete, then it’s time to discard, and replace, you. This constitutes his “moving on.”
If he could list you as a deduction on his tax return, based on your depreciated value to him, he would.
And so his discarding may take a more literal form, like leaving or ending the relationship; or it may take the less literal, but worse, form of his staying (or hanging around) while abdicating, increasingly, any and all sense of accountability in the relationship.
Now that you give him so little of compelling worth, so little to value and use (except, among other conveniences, perhaps a roof over his head), the exploitive “partner” no longer feels he owes you much of anything.
This perspective conveniently enables his conviction of his right to pursue his gratifications elsewhere. Again, this constitutes a form of his “moving on.”
But let’s not mistake what “moving on” means to the sociopath and like-minded personalities: it means finding new victims to exploit.
He may not consciously process his agenda as such (although he might), but we know that this is his agenda.
Many sociopaths, in their warped self-centeredness, subscribe to the philosophy: I want, therefore I deserve. And so the next step follows with dangerous self-justification—taking what they want.
Again, the sociopath may not consciously think, “I deserve to have fun with the credit cards in that guy’s wallet.” But he will want the credit cards with which to have some fun, and whether consciously or not, because he wants them, he’ll feel entitled to seize and use them.
This also explains the prototypical sociopathic telemarketer: he wants the old peoples’ assets, and because he wants them, he feels entitled to take them. Deploying any and every tool in his exploitive toolbox, he then takes all the assets he can from the naive couple.
Once having taken what he can from them, they cease to have use for him, and so he cuts them loose; he discards them. That is, having fleeced them for what he could, he “moves on” in search of more gratification through prospective new victims, who may have what he wants, that he can take.
Very likely he won’t look back, and if he does, it won’t be with empathy, guilt, shame or regret.
(This article is copyrighted © 2010 by Steve Becker, LCSW. My use of the male gender pronoun is for convenience’s sake, not to suggest that males have a patent on the behaviors discussed.)
Dear MILO,
Some courts are getting it about kids not being just objects that you can farm out for a few years and then decide you want to come back and pick it up and everything is hunky dorry, kids have to have consistently loving parents and abandoning one for 4 years doesn’t seem to me to be CONSISTENT with anything but not caring about the kid.
If she had cancer and was in the hospital during that time I might see it, but NOT the way it happened. I would get my attorney to point that out to the judge and maybe he can see that contact with a person who would WILLINGLY do this to a child is not in the child’s best interest! AT worst, try to get SUPERVISED VISITATION maybe with a therapist or professional as the observer. Good luck! Ps. Milo, do you also post on aftermath?
MiLo,
My prayer is that she doesn’t get custody of your precious grandson. I don’t know what she’s up to, but she wants something. Personally, I don’t think that she truly wants to be a mother to her son (lacking the motherly instinct). If she has custody of the child, I’m assuming that she can profit money-wise since her son is a special-needs child, is that right? My heart goes out to you and your family, hoping that she would get it into her head to “discard” all of you, staying out of the picture.
Oxy, you, of course, are the exception.
Seriously, you make a good point, which I considered as I wrote this article. It’s really not per se the cutting loose of people in one’s life that’s the sole, or even necessarily essential, criteria, because goodness knows there can be so many good reasons to cut people loose–sometimes herds of them (eg, if they’re destructive); it’s as much, if not more, the mentality that’s associated with this.
So when I use the term “discard,” I would not apply that to your situation, which I assume was one in which you were protecting yourself from those who may been selfish if not abusive?
When I use the term “discarder,” I’m referring to the process of leeching and taking from others purely selfishly and greedily, where reciprocity is not part of the equation; then, having taken all he/she can from his/her victim, the exploiter regards the victim with contempt–and now as utterly discardable– because the victim(s) no longer offer anything more for the exploiter to take.
There was a great many years that my husband was in the discard stage, now, when I finally have some self-esteem, I can’t get him to leave. It’s like a big game, he seems so sincere, I think he just wants to reel me back in without really changing the broken parts in him. He still is a sex addict, still is narcisstic, but he saying all the right words to seem like he cares.
The point is, I wish he would have stayed in the discard stage, I would be happy to be discarded. He said once, I sometimes people (at work) will find out I’m really a fraud. I thought it was because he didn’t have a college degree, now I know he’s really a big, fat, lying, fraud.
Dear Steve,
I just lost a post, very profound as usual, (LOL) but will try to come up with the gist of it.
First off I was a bit tongue-in-cheek with that post, but also the thing is that if someone has had multiple BAD relationships, EITHER as a repeat victim or as the victimizer, the person may not be someone you would want to form a close bond with as a partner unless they have LEARNED FROM their role as repeat victim. Not that I am blaming someone for being a repeat victim, I was a repeat-repeat-repeat victim because I did not set gound boundaries, and I tried to fix my abusers, to placate them, to keep “peace” with them, etc.
I really don’t want a romantic relationship with someone who doesn’t set good boundaries and is continuing to be repeatedly victimized by psychopaths or other toxic people. I think I am NOW a better relationship risk than I was before when I had poor boundaries. But, if I were a potential partner looking at me, I would look very closely at me to see if I had learned anything from the repeated victimizations.
Either way, chronic abuser or chronic victim (without insight), is not someone I want to form a romantic attachment to.
Oxy, you make total sense. Insightful as ever. Thanks.
Oh, I forgot to mention that sometimes (frequently, in fact) chronic abusers MASK AS repeat victims. They throw the pity ploy on you, and so I think it is a really good idea to check back on someone who has had multiple “victimizations,” and that isn’t always easy to do since the people they victimized (then pretended to be the victim OF) are probably not in their life to be cross examined about the situation.
And BTW sometimes these “pseudo-victims” are very “insightful” about what they learned. I’ve been fooled by a few and caught on to a few more, but it is quite difficult to do in any short period of time, and just takes watching how they ACT vs how they talk.
Oxy –
Yes, same MiLo, same old farm girl. If only the court we are in could see ANYTHING. The GAL on our case is accusing us of “disparaging” our poor daughter in front of her son and putting negative thoughts in his mind. She is what we have looking out for “best interest of the child”.
MiLo
OxD, that makes sense to me. The latest spath encounter seemed to have SO many tribulations – NEVER a good day, NEVER grateful for good health, ALWAYS having something happen because of someone else. Lost a job? Someone else’s fault. Missed a car payment? Bank’s fault. Etc., etc., etc. There seemed to be so many “reasons” that she was miserable, and it took me nearly 4 years to figure out that they weren’t “reasons,” at all.
I should add that she never discussed anything “insightful” or lessons learned.