A sociopath is someone who has a pervasive and persistent disregard for the rights and feelings of others. This disregard is manifested in the antisocial behavior sociopaths show. While we usually think of antisocial behavior as criminal, not all antisocial acts are illegal. A person who slips up once is not a sociopath. Sociopathy is a lifestyle.
Since humans are designed to live in society, a healthy personality has prosocial inclinations. Therefore, people who are pervasively antisocial are disordered in the sense that they are not the norm (thank God). Although antisocial behaviors are observable actions like lying, stealing and assault, there are personality traits that cause antisocial behavior. It should come as no surprise that people who have a sense of entitlement, over-rate their own greatness and have poor self-control are more likely to hurt others and show pervasive antisocial behavior.
The American Psychiatric Association has defined a group of personality disorders it calls “cluster B”. According to a recent paper* by German psychiatrist, Christian Huchzermeier, M.D., “ The cluster includes disturbances of personality that go hand in hand with emotional dysregulation phenomena, a tendency towards aggressive—impulsive loss of control, egoistic exploitation of interpersonal relationships, and a tendency to overestimate one’s own importance.”
The disorders of “cluster B” go together because what underlies them is a disturbance in three developmentally acquired abilities I have called The Inner Triangle. These abilities are:
Ability to Love
Impulse Control
Moral Reasoning
These abilities that a child gains during development are a triangle because the development of each depends on the other two. A child begins to acquire ability to love in the first year of life, impulse control begins in the second year of life. At two years of age there is already a link between ability to love and impulse control. Children with the best impulse control also are the most loving/empathetic. Moral reasoning begins in the third year of life and its development depends on a loving nature and impulse control. Similarly the most moral kids are also the most loving and self-controlled.
I think of the cluster B disorders as different manifestations of damage to the inner triangle. I think of sociopaths as individuals who completely lack ability to love and have impaired impulse control and moral reasoning.
Given the Inner Triangle, it should come as no surprise that it can be difficult to find people who have only one cluster B personality disorder. For that reason individuals with antisocial personality, narcissistic personality, borderline personality and histrionic personality often have symptoms of the other disorders. If someone gets a diagnosis of only one of these, it doesn’t mean that the person doesn’t also have one or all of the others. The person making the diagnosis simply thought that the one chosen best described the person. You should know there is a gender bias in diagnosis such that women are often labeled “borderline.” These women can also be sociopaths who leave a trail of victimized friends, lovers and children in their wakes.
A recent study reported in Behavioral Science and the Law, “The Relationship Between DSM-IV Cluster B Personality Disorders and Psychopathy According to Hare’s Criteria: Clarification and Resolution of Previous Contradictions” examines the relationship between psychopathic personality traits as defined by the screening version of the PCL and Cluster B personality disorders. The authors of this study were careful to examine people who had only one cluster B disorder. They found psychopathy to be associated with all cluster B disorders.
The authors conclude:
“One clinical implication of our results, nevertheless, is that in cases where a cluster B personality disorder is diagnosed a high psychopathy value is to be expected, especially where antisocial, borderline or narcissistic personality disorder is involved. The PCL score is a better predictor of subsequent events, such as problems during (criminal) custody or a relapse into delinquency, than a diagnosis of a DSM-IV personality disorder, especially in forensic populations; therefore, an additional investigation with the PCL should be carried out, if a cluster B personality disorder has been diagnosed.”
It is important for Lovefraud readers to be aware of this study especially if there is a divorce/custody proceeding or a cluster B personality disorder has been diagnosed. Many people might think that if the partner has been “diagnosed borderline” or “diagnosed narcissistic” that means the partner is not a psychopath/sociopath. This study suggests otherwise. IF YOU ARE INVOLVED WITH SOMEONE WHO HAS THESE YOU HAVE TO CONSIDER THEIR HARMFUL BEHAVIOR AS AN INDICATION OF PSYCHOPATHY/SOCIOPATHY. There are some people with cluster B, histrionic, borderline and narcissistic disorders who are not highly antisocial. But if the person is lying, cheating and manipulating, that is antisocial behavior. This behavior in the context of any cluster B means the person is potentially very dangerous. As the authors state:
“Screening for PCL-based psychopathy can also be important for general psychiatric patients with a DSM-IV personality disorder, so that potential difficulties in the course of their treatment can be anticipated and this comorbidity can be targeted in the planning of therapy. Patients with both a DSM-IV personality disorder and PCL-based psychopathy can exhibit behavior that is particularly dangerous to therapy (Stafford & Cornell, 2003).”
If you have been diagnosed with borderline personality and reading this frightens you, I am sorry. You can improve by working on your inner triangle. Talk to your therapist about DBT a treatment that is very effective in improving the state of the Inner Triangle in people who are motivated to do it.
*The reference for the paper discussed is Behav. Sci. Law 25: 901—911 (2007).
Hi Skylar,
Perhaps you are right. I didn’t know EB’s mom was in the N P or S category (?)–I simply thought it was a matter of an “unhealthy relationship.” So without knowing the details, it’s hard to say one way or the other…
But it is sad that no one came to see EB on the day she was diagnosed herself (something that stood out to me in your earlier post, EB)–that doesn’t speak well of anyone involved!
Even in toxic families (and I’m just speaking generally here, not making any assumptions), I think there should be a “no hitting below the belt rule.” Nice thought, but then that “human nature” thing always gets in the way!
Sky – this thing you did, this ‘knowing’ about the problem with the pedo father, THIS is the kind of thing my brain does now. it truly feels like a super power. but you know, all super heroes are perceived as freaks. sigh.
i have in so many ways in my life been the canary. i see it smell it feel it before it happens. i warn people, i confront people. they deny, they lie, then the damn thing happens. i am seeing a train wreck coming at work and i am too sick to stop it. so i am taking more anti anx meds and stepping back and am watching it. it will be a huge effort for me not to save the day – but i am angry at people for ignoring my voice. i am also so angered by saving the day that i have to do everything i can not to go there. i am trying to bring down my stress level – growing pains right now.
i use my senses and as out of whack as they may be right now (and thanks for the compliment Ana, I have a hard time seeing myself clearly, as many of us do.) i see the train coming – the first convo with db upstairs and i knew it would be absolute shit, so the next time i saw dbs with an application in their hands i actually went out to their car and warned them off with the truth. NEXT time i may use lies. i must protect myself.
the email from my father sits unopened on my server. I am an emo mess from the antibiotics. can handle almost no stress at all. And i have 10 more days of them!!! oy!
i need to get out of the house – too many days in here. and it’s muggy and the floors off-gas more in the dampness.
am making some bit of progress with getting the place together – since i can’t do much, i have been thinking it through. and i made a decision to get a cleaner in for half a day and to rent a little storage room (very inexpensive ) for three months, so that i can lighten this place up AND get my few things at the parents’ house, out of there. cut all ties. so that the @.......#$%^& doesn’t have ANYTHING over my head. I know he figures he still has the will – but truly i will fight anything he does in court. I haven’t said one word to him or sent any email – all i have sent is a father’s day card – so he doesn’t have much proof of what a wayward daughter I am, now does he?
i have never doubted for one minute that what you have said about your spath isn’t the truth. we all have our stories, and most of them are equally bizarre. that he was poisoning you physically might put him in a particular class of spath, but mine almost convinced a really unstable young man to kill himself. poison in ones food, or words over a computer, makes no diff – it’s just a difference in m.o. and how physically close one wishes to be to their dupes suffering. mind you, she did move in with the dupe who is suing her. (thank god that woman had good friends who kicked the spath’s ass out of their friend’s house or i would still not know what the fuck happened to me. mind you – it was the spath’s mistake, her blunder, that led me to her.)
i think that knowing them and reading them as ‘garden variety’ is important. it gives us power. when we demonize them, we lose our power. however, they ARE evil, but like any dangerous instinctual creature, when we KNOW about them and how to spot them in the wild, how to take them down or avoid them – then they are just another creature on the planet. As a kid i knew about cows and horses, and the kids that lived in the subdivision (in the middle of nowhere! it was put there to house the workers at a plant in the middle of nowhere) who met my horses, and the city couple who moved in down the road – who would find the heifers on the road had NO idea about how to handle these creatures – they would get all freaked and spazzy and do dangerous things (for themselves mostly). Same thing – no familiarity and no knowledge = danger. and that’s what happened to us. Mind you at least those people could say ‘cow’ and ‘horse’, all we can say is ‘WTF?’ when we start to see the disordered.
i said WTF about my n ex for a long time. (long in ‘one joy years’, but not in anyone elses! I had waited 18 years for that relationship so everything about it was BIG). And then the spath – but you know sky, after the fake boy fake died i started to sleuth, i became fairly certain that he wasn’t dead, and only a couple of things came to mind about WHO would do such a thing, and spath was on the list. so, pretty quickly i could say ‘spath’ , but learning about them and how to deal with their specific way of being (like, don’t stand out to the side near a cow’s rear leg, because you will get kicked) is harder.
i don’t know where i stand on the whole, we’re ‘collateral damage’ or we are ‘intended victims’ who they are trying to hurt. Personal or impersonal? anybodies’ blood or someone’s blood?
with my dad – i think most of what he does as an n is just collateral, EXCEPT i think the money thing is personal. he’s paying me back for outing his father as a letch. with my sib, he cut her out of the will ’cause she accused him of being a letch – even went to file charges against him. he had a very high placed lawyer and sib was characterized as mentally unstable and the charges were dismissed. sib is mentally unstable and an n herself me thinks, BUT that doesn’t mean she wasn’t legit in her charges (how does one GET mentally unstable… hmmmm?!). it got kicked because it was in a decade when a lot of women were just starting to bring forward historical charges and because he is better connected than she is (which means it was a pissing contest and he, as we all know, is the biggest dick!) so, he likes to fight (you might have missed my story about him wanting to hit a 20 something buff guy in the last 5 years), rape and pillage (steal) Guess that makes him a soldier, and i know i have been there (literally) in another life (oops, one joys very limited belief in reincarnation leaks out here) – so perhaps he and i have unsettled business from another time. He is a formidable foe. I don’t think age and isolation from people has made hm less so – it has made ME more so, but i don’t know if i will be able to take him down (re the money) you know this anger and frustration *I* feel dealing with the challenges of uncaring people in general is quite fueled by what he has done to me and my mom.
In general this sort of treatment brings up two things – rage at impotence/ losing and hurt at feeling so uncared for and devalued. With him i built skirting around the hurt to keep it separate – but in fact it fuels the rage. I try not to let it though – because rage is hot and i have to be cool to deal with him. It is no coincidence that the first words out of my mouth to the cognitive dude (who i was seeing to deal with the spath) were:’ my father stole my money’.
Your whole paragraph about the pedo and his family. sigh. cog dis…denial denial denail. My mom went to therapy (unheard of!) to find excuses to allow her to keep my dad’s letchy father in her life after i disclosed. she is a sucker for these men who supposedly treat her well (eg. her own father) and treat others like shit. mind you, by all accounts her father was a much worse guy than my dads’, EXCEPT HE FUCKING TOUCHED ME! Did i feel abandoned? Yes, as I always have (and have been) when it comes to her and the men in the family. i thank god i didn’t have a brother. She has always sacrificed me at the altar of her delusional role of supply. I lived thousands of miles from them, so it wasn’t in my face all the time and i was quite clear on boundaries – do not discuss him with me or me with him. period.) I have said it before and i will say it again, my grandmother is the only good one in the lot. my mother is estranged from her – jealousy, blames her for her father’s death? no idea.
i think that there was once a family – tied together by blood and sex and hopes and lies. and over the years it has all unraveled and i am left with the memory of a textile – vastly imperfect and worn, but it did have a warp and a weft, and i could hold it in my hands with tenderness. thankfully woven into that textile is the feel of the wind, branches swaying, the sun glistening on the waves, flocks of birds twittering at the end of the rain, the first bud of the lilac, the feather of a peony, the caws of crows, geese flying south in the fall, the slant of the sun in September…..
and these things have gained in importance for me, and this is why i have to move to the country. the memory of my blood family is there and my real family of wind and sky and earth and animal is there, caressing my cheek, soothing my mind, and telling me it is all okay.
I feel so down today-like an empty shell of a person. I am going to my dad’s house for dinner tonight and I don’t wanna go. I’m only going so I won’t have to put up with his N attitude if I don’t go-plus the washing machine is broken at this motel so I am going to do laundry over there.
I have no desire to be around people and I don’t want to do anything. I’m scared about what is going to happen in my life after this job assignment is over. I miss my beautiful apartment in NOLA so much but I don’t want to be around the neighbor until I heal myself and get back on my feet. I need to be stronger before I go back there permanently. I know that it’s probably good for me to go far away but I’m scared of that too. This whole feeling of being afraid of stuff is new to me and I don’t know how to be this way. I really feel like giving up right now.
lizzy – to feel instead of running, is to make progress. it sucks, but if you are moving forward then be in service to the woman you can become.
if you let go of all the drama you will feel empty. of course, this is natural. and then we need to learn to sit with ‘scared’ and ’empty’, and teach ourselves not to run. i am not as good at this as i used to be, but i learned a lot of this through buddhist mediation. it was my anchor, and it was trustworthy (not like poeple) and i trusted it because i saw the results it brought me. i learned that i am bigger than my problems – my problems are small things in the big sea of me. of course, i have forgotten this in the spathisode. so now i have to relearn, but i am hoping as i knew it once, it will be easier to connect with it again.
why go to your dad’s lizzy? why? just for today, can you say no? just for today? you can go to a laundrymat and maybe meet someone to have a nice anonymous chat with, with no strings attached.
try to be in today, okay. I understand the looking forward stuff – but someone once said: ‘the worse things that happened to me, never happened.’ I struggle with staying in the day, because the day is SHITTY, and that’s one of the big reasons we worry forward – it’s a form of escape.
work on being i the day, and don’t put caveats and time lines on yourself (not wanting to go back until you are healed…) because you are setting yourself up to stay outside of your own life, not meet your own goals, and need rescuing. which takes you right back to your dad’s table for dinner.
i have to tell you – i am a bit impressed that you seem to have listened to some of us here who have been relentless with you. try not to flop back – stay in the moment of your feelings, and work with taking responsibility for yourself. I know it’s hard; i work with it and whinge about it all the time. And there are truly times for all of us when we are beaten and can do no more….until we can.
((((Don’t lay down lizzy, get up and do something for yourself.))))
onestep-it feels so bad that despite being here all this time I managed to pick another narcissist and now I am mourning over that. And the crazy thing is that I discarded HER. She devalued me so I discarded her. I just can’t understand why I am upset that she is gone from me. I should be happy that I don’t have to deal with the drama anymore and feeling controlled.
There’s something wrong with the fact that I’m so freaked out about drama leaving my life, when I should feel great that it’s going away. I was counting down the weeks til I could go back home and now I am counting the weeks til I am geographically away from my family and her. I love my home NOLA, and I want to go home so bad but I don’t want to be near her until I don’t feel messed up and til I feel strong. She can’t run me out of my place and there are plenty of totally normal nice people in my neighborhood that I enjoy being around.
I definitely don’t need rescuing because I know that I need to allow the emptiness to be there-that means the drama isn’t there and I am ok without it. I want to be at that place where I am ok without it. It feels so pathetic that I don’t know how to exist without the drama. My dad is getting ready to go on a long vacation so I will probably go tonite because I won’t be there long and by the time he gets home, I can have all kinds of reasons to not want to do things with him. It’s so crazy that he knows how much my mom suffocated me and he can’t see that he is attempting to do the same thing.
lizzy – with n’s it’s all about them – what you want or need isn’t in the game. get it? i relate to your dad sending you money when you didn’t ask for it – it’s control. my dad used to send me all kinds of grand shit I didn’t need or want – because it NEVER WAS ABOUT ME OR MY NEEDS. discarding me when i most needed help in my life took that crap from weird and creepy to ‘fuck him.’
You cannot expect your father to help or care for you in a reasonable way. he doesn’t ‘see what he is doing’ because he is not normal. it will never happen.
in your above post you said both:’There’s something wrong with the fact that I’m so freaked out about drama leaving my life, when I should feel great that it’s going away.’ and ‘I definitely don’t need rescuing because I know that I need to allow the emptiness to be there-that means the drama isn’t there and I am ok without it. ‘ hmmm.
you should be freaked out. and you need to learn to work with it. please TRY. tell yourself it’s like physical helaing – when the numbness goes away it hurts like hell until we start to heal. you may just be moving out of numbness. Please try to accept that this will hurt and be hard. that is where you are RIGHT NOW. if you focus on how it shouldn’t be as it is you are still trying to escape. and your job is to learn to be in the present and stop running away, and stop projecting into the future. that’s all. that’s ALL you have to do. it’s a big job, but forget about adding a million other things for distraction. every day be in the day.
i keep thinking a framework would be of help. for me it was meditation. now, it’s a little journal i have that i write answers to very specific questions (the same questions over and over) every week. it is also working a bit with meditation again and the dharma. it steadies me.
Liz,
isn’t your job filled with drama? are you working ER? It seems like helping save the sick and injured all day, should provide you with lots of drama. Maybe what you are experiencing is actually severe lonliness?
One,
being able to see people for what they are, even across space and time, is liberating. It’s similar to the way that astro physicists can know that a star or planet exist even if they can’t see it, because they can see the effects of it’s gravitational field. We can look at a person’s life, personality or choice of partners, and we can “know” other things about them because certain behaviors go hand in hand with certain modes of thinking. This is what spaths do when they pick out there victims, they test and figure out who will make a good victim, by the test responses. The test responses also tell the spath where the hooks are and they tailor their lures to match.
It’s so obvious yet, I went for 43 years completely clueless to these indicators. How did that happen? Well, I would attribute it to my own narcissism: I believed everyone was basically just like me. LOL! How’s that for being self-centered?
The problem we have with our N-parents is also part of our narcissism, I think. The fact that our parents devalue us is taken personally and it becomes a narcissistic injury. How DARE they not love us as much as we demand and deserve to be loved? We think: they are our parents and they SHOULD love us and treat us with respect. But in reality, they are not capable of the type of love we wanted from them. (We are lucky that they didn’t smother us in our cribs as some parents do.) Their need to control us is the best we can hope for from them. They might even consider that “love” in their twisted minds.
So this is about us, not about them. Once we know and can see clearly what they are, how do we deal with it? Do we allow it to become a narcissistic wound in our souls, making us feel that since our parents didn’t love us, we must not be loveable? Or do we just see it from the perspective that we are loveable, but our parents just didn’t have it in them to love. That was not our fault or our responsibility.
I’m getting past my narcissistic injury, where I cried and cried and asked myself what am I doing wrong? It hurt to realize that they don’t love me, but it doesn’t hurt as much to realize that they can’t love me. It isn’t a choice for them, it’s beyond their capacity.
And this is the way the narcissists and spaths play us, too. They choose us BECAUSE of our great capacity to love. They ENVY that in us. They want to destroy it. So they begin a relationshit in which they pretend to love us. Then they let the mask slip and show that they really DON’T. But what they do not show us, is that they really CAN’T. So we are left with a narcissistic injury of rejection, thinking there is something wrong with us to make us not be worthy of love. That is the deception. That’s the big lie. Getting to that knowledge, I think is the first step in healing the wound.
Not everybody’s spath pulls that off. You and I were both left with our eyes wide open. In both of our cases, we immediately realized that we had been involved with a demonic presence, not a normal human being. I think we were lucky in that way. The fact that they can’t love us, was glaringly obvious in the end, because we both saw that the “real” person was nowhere near how they presented themselves.
Well, now I’m just rambling…
SARASMILE
Wow! That was an amazing comment. So I this HURT that I feel, this physical HURT is actually GRIEF. I didn’t realize it. I had no idea.
I was told to embrace the grief.
So, this is a good thing, huh, the hurting?
Thank you for your brilliant insight.
SK
ElizabethBennet
I totally get where you are coming from, that you’re just ill about having so much experience with N’s and that you don’t trust yourself and your judgment any more with people or relationships.
Now that I’ve been in therapy nearly 3 years, I have had my spath experience, I am wiser now than ever, I am not just part of the disfunction but I CAN SEE IT.
I thought my dad was a PERFECT MAN and now I see that he keeps chosing “N” women who walk all over him. He has no backbone. He was married to my mom for 20 years, she was totally mentally ill, a complete N, tried to kill me, and he stayed for 20 years! Then wife #2 killed herself. And now wife #3 is the most domineering woman on the planet. She is so self centered and a complete “N”. OK, I see a pattern here of making unhealthy choices!
I just am completely paralyzed. I see it in my dad, my sister and so the unhealthyness isn’t just my mom.
I just want to hole up somewhere and never come out.
SK
One-I don’t want my father to love or care for me in a normal way. I want him out of my life forever-just like my mother. They are incapable of being normal. I don’t want to run away from it. It is just hard for me to sit with the emptiness and know that it’s best for me. I don’t know how to sit with it and I don’t know how to stop worrying about the future. I have a REALLY hard time doing the day by day thing. I wish that I could be ok with doing nothing at all and being ok with it.
Sky-my job isn’t drama right now actually-it’s the least amount of drama in the workplace that I’ve had for a long time. I do work ICU and I go to work and do my work and go home and since I am a travel nurse, the staff nurses in the hospital don’t try to involve me in their drama and in their lives. They leave me alone.
My parents do consider what they do “love”, and that is so twisted. I don’t want to try to get them to love me or be shocked that they don’t cuz they can’t and they never will. They don’t deserve to be in my life. I’m not doing anything wrong, They can’t love me.
I think that the narcs are envious of us and want to destroy us. I think that my neighbor is jealous of me because she doesn’t have in her nature what I have in mine. I have finally realized how much she wants to do harm due to that jealousy and it makes me sick. It really is pathetic.
I have always had severely low self esteem but I am finally starting to realize that my view of myself isn’t at all true. I have a lot of great qualities and talents and there are so many things that I am good at. People like her can’t deal with that. She is good at two things-her job and being evil.
Right now what I need to focus on is staying out of drama and really doing the things for me that are going to make me feel better about myself and making me feel whole-losing weight and getting my bills paid off. Those are the two things in my life that I want really bad and I need them to feel good. I need to be ok with being by myself and feeling my feelings. It’s hard for me to even be around others right now. I guess I would much rather be freaked out about the emptiness than feeling like my neighbor is controlling my emotions. I am really angry with her right now and I guess that’s ok.
I am also angry with myself for allowing myself to get fooled again. I am beating myself up a little over it but I’m trying not to be too hard on myself.