Sociopaths as much as anything exploit your faith in them”¦over and over again.
In many ways this captures the essence of sociopathy in particular, and exploitation in general: The sociopath, or exploiter, seduces your faith, only then to intentionally violate it.
The more seriously you take him, the more you are vulnerable; the more vulnerable you are, the more the exploiter is licking his chops.
And so the sociopath, or any exploiter, wants you to take him seriously! Indeed it’s his modus operandi to accumulate currency and credibility with you—the more the better, as this better ripens you, better fattens you, for the payoff he’s chasing.
Not all exploiters “get off’ on the suffering you’ll incur arising from their exploitation. Sadistic ones will; they’ll derive a portion of their satisfaction, if not their motivation to exploit, from your pain.
But more often the sociopath is flatly uninterested in your “expense.” He neither relishes, nor regrets, it deeply. What interests him, again, is his payoff; his prospective gain, not your loss, concerns him principally.
And so a core aspect of exploitation lies in the exploiter’s purposeful grooming of the faith of his victims, only then to purposely betray that faith.
And in cases of sociopathy there is the additional heartless indifference to the victim’s experience of that betrayal. Indeed, one measure of the depth of his heartlessness and audacity is the sociopath’s tendency to repeat this cycle regularly, abusing old and perhaps fresh victims.
When you think about it, what sociopaths and other exploiters prey upon—our faith—is what most of us are naturally inclined to give. We want to have faith in others. We want to believe that others will have our backs, not stab our backs in order to take something from us and then leave us, heartlessly, to grapple alone in confusion and despair.
We want to believe that, God forbid, were we lying on a deserted roadside, grievously wounded, that that stranger approaching us will have the intention to help us, and not, while issuing kind, reassuring words, to lift our wallets.
And so it’s no big accomplishment to exploit others. Sociopaths and all exploiters are going after something that’s as easily coaxed as it ought to be honored and safeguarded—our faith.
(My use of “he” in this article was strictly for convenience’s sake, not to suggest that females aren’t capable of the attitudes and behaviors described. This article is copyrighted (c) 2009 by Steve Becker, LCSW.)
one step, mine was supposedly “debilitated” by and injury and also has severe diabetes. well, i’ve watched him lift 20 lb boxes and he eats sugar like it’s going out of style. the “i’m gonna die” thing doesn’t fly with me at all.
Cat,
MINE had diabetes too!
now, if they only WOULD die.
🙂
it’s ‘only a fantasy’ came up near the end. his bf sock puppet used to say, ‘oh i don’t think you can have a meaningful relationship with someone who you have never met, or have only known 6 months’…and then ‘he’ and I would protest. ‘He’ was always ‘open as a book’ (one i forgot to add to the list that came roaming u[ to the surface last night when I was walking) and making excuses for the sock puppet bf and saying he just doesn’t understand…blah blah blah.
then after ‘he’ died I had a lot of contact with the sockpuppet bf – who went back to the website where we had all hung out. ‘He would say that EVERYTHING ON THE INTERNET IS A FANTASY. and there i was, still protesting.
When ‘he’ resurrected and called me about 6 weeks after dying, I asked, ‘what about all those people you lied to’? (btw ‘he’ wasn’t copping to it – he had been ‘comatose’ had no idea what had been going on, his now dangerous bf was keeping him from people, blah blah)
And his response was, ‘who’? NONE of us mattered.
and ‘he’ loved eat ice cream and donuts. the spath probably IS diabetic; she is very overweight, so for there to be blood sugar problems wouldn’t be surprising.
one step
i have been thinking about how much control my spath must have felt – me trying SO hard to help out and relay information to the bf that would help dying and psychologically falling apart boy.
all those phone calls and emails flying back and forth. trauma. again and again.
and all there REALLY was, was a ONE person sitting at a computer orchestrating it and responding to it. god, I wish the rest of my life was okay enough that i could focus on this healing.
thinking about the time the bf railed up against me – started out small. inconsequential. fist he was nice. then there were bits and then there was, his becoming fatigued as a caregiver, etc. i rearely pushed against ‘my boy’ – I know this was the case with one of her other dupees. But i did push agaisnt the bf at times, and he would flare and flame when i didn’t accept some aspect of the story being woven.
so i continue to weave all this together – or as i am getting really fond of saying, ‘stuff all the sox in the same big shoe’ (‘my boy’ used to say that he felt like he had a big shoe hanging over his head); understanding at deeper and broader levels the nature of the deception and what it means to me and has left me with.
i think when people say ‘let them rot in hell’ that it may mean that we hope they are left alone and forsaken, cut off from love and companionship. I have mixed feelings about my spath – and it is VERY clear that she was in a big game – what i keep running into is feeling ‘he’ is part of her. ‘He’ is not, ‘he’ is a composite of me and the other’s she has fucked over, and enough glue of her to hold it together. ‘He’ WAS real to me. OH, and THAT was another contention, that just because you coulnd’ google him doesn’t mean he didn’t exist (bless all those who challenged ‘him’)
okay, enough. 😉
one step
Oh, that open book! Mine was all fiction, changing day by day to whatever fit his purposes the best. That’s a good one to add.
Coma? Resurrected? Uh huh. But at least you saw through it all. Some would fall for it and at one time, I most likely would have.
No, NO ONE matters to them. When I got that part, I got the full picture.
My ex is an insulin dependent diabetic who is slowly, but surely, killing himself. Between the sugar and the drugs, his body is slowly dying. I know it sounds cold, but I honestly don’t care anymore. He used this so much as a reason for his behavior, he wore it out.
one step, yeah, we could go on forever 🙂 too much energy to spend on them.
Henry,
didn’t know that your spath was in your neighbourhood. 🙁 harder in the small circles we tend to move in.
I went out last night also, and others found me to be quite witty. Had no idea. I am so messed over I never know how i will be. But i was with a couple of close friends and a few acquaintances.
in the last month one friend and i meet at a coffee shop once a week and play scrabble. I quite like it. I also always win 🙂 which is good for my competitive streak – hey i can’t compete in the job or housing market here, but i damn well win at scrabble. so we met last night to play scrabble then we met up with some friends to listen to some okay jazz- I LOVE music and esp. jazz. one friend got me in for free and bought me a drink, so i didn’t have any anxiety about the money.
I was there about 2 hours and the air intake system started pumping cig smoke in. sigh. I had to flee when it didn’t abate.
not perfect, but good.
all best,
one step
Cat,
I need to keep orienting myself to ‘not real, didn’t exist’ again and again. it IS so sad.
when she called (the resurrection) for the first time I got to watch her work with the info I was feeding back to her (i challenged him about everything, got some of it right, some of it wrong, an dnow i realize some of it more right than i knew at the time) and shape a new story she thought i (and possibly others) might accept.
when she was caught out by another in the past she disputed the length of time of the fraud, NOT the fraud. And when i went on the website and said that the bf never died cause he never existed she never once said, ‘of course he died’. only how mean i was (freaking anonymously tyvm) to ‘piss on his memory’.
after RD (resurrection day) one of the sock puppets wrote me an email and threatened me, and another railed for about a week about sock puppets and people not desrerving the ‘light ‘ (me 🙂 of ‘him’, and threanted to cut me, blah blah blah. this would be sock puppet # 5, the bitchy queen. sigh. said almost all the things i said to him, EXCEPT that I thought ‘he’ was a spath. THAT never made it to print.
going out for a walk now.
one step, two
oops, realize that the last post made it look like i threatened him with physical harm; i didn’t. I just talked aobut ‘death bloggers’ and sock puppets and that I was looking for ‘him’. sleuthing.
onestep – I live about 35 miles from where he is. I have not seen or spoke to him in over a year. Last I heard anything about him was from someone else that I really dont know well. I drove to his place of work one nite too see if his vehicle was in the parking lot about a year ago. It was. And that upset me. I have been thinking about doing that again. When I hear something on the local news like ” Body found behind Bar” I wonder if it was him. He is gone..history…wont ever see him again.. so many of you talk about your x still coming around, doing spiteful things etc. I almost wish he would. I cant answer why I want that, as I would ignore him. Too give him one second of recognition would make his day. Too give him one second of time too talk to me would be dangerous. So it is best I never see him again.
Henry – nostalgia is what is coming up for me re contact with the spath.
There is sadness. There is loss. I hope sometime that I have the calm in my life that i can really dig deep and heal what it is that caught me this time (and with my N gf.)
In an odd way it IS a gift to me. I have to uproot this hook that she latched on to.
My situation – in case it is still terribly confusing – is one of being duped on the net and on phone by a woman posing as a young guy and an array of sock puppets – his friends and family. So ‘he’ doesn’t even EXIST. Perhaps ‘his’ not being who he pretended to be is more literal than a ‘real life’ experience, and in some way easier – and in other’s not.
I just found out that the bf of one of my neighbors’ works with sex offenders, etc. at a prison. I have asked her to ask him (I have met him many times and liked him) if he will take some time to talk to me. Love fraud is good, but I don’t feel wholly comfortable here – I keep fearing she’ll find me here, and anytime I see something that is like something she would write then I get nervous – just words even. I am being triggered.
And then there is a desire for a bit of control…to have the op. to see them and reject them.
I know people here advise NC and it makes sense. (Of course here’s my caveat :)) i have a lot of revenge fantasies. Sometimes I don’t even see them coming and I am caught up I them.
Her dupe who has gone public and is suing her for fraud has asked me to direct her to the website where I met her. And I freaked right the F**k out. Nuh uh. I don’t know this woman personally and i have no idea what she plans to do – thing is, one should ask, right? And old one step would. New one step just didn’t respond. The other woman needs to build trust and cred. with me first. I almost regret responding to her blog – but when I found it I just flipped out and said, ‘omg I have just found the person who duped me!’
And then I took some time verifying things – like a newspaper article and the lawsuit. It doesn’t change things though; so she was duped, too. But it doesn’t mean I can trust her. Arggh.
I have some conflict. Some parts of me want one thing, and others want something else. And as much as I just want it all over now, I need to go very slowly. And THAT is not my usual way, especially if something is causing me anxiety.
Some of the reading I have done here today spoke to the role of anxiety in attachment, and in the spath con. Mine is through the roof. I fee really lost inside myself – like there is a big barrier between me and others, feel unloved, or maybe more to the point, unlovable. But I guess there is a reason for that; someone pretended to care for and about me for months and it was just a game of cat and mouse. How callous. How demeaning to an ordinary person.
Pretty much I don’t get caught up in ascribing ordinary human emotions, etc. to the spath. I get that they are NOT normal. I get that. Something that I am sure would cause me no end of internal grief would not even cross her mind as being wrong.
I am coming to understand ‘how’ and ‘why me’ by reading. Now I need to break the strangle hold of the anxiety and the shame left from being demeaned. I still have a lot to ‘put my finger on’…so much I don’t yet understand.
I am not sure what to do with some of how I feel and what I want at times. I get glee from knowing she is being prosecuted. Funny ‘he’ brought out the best in me, and she has brought out the worst.
I feel both ashamed of my desire to hurt her, and understand it as both protective and vengeful. And want to know, really know how to proceed – and not do something because I have been a freaking nice girl and should do this or that. I have been through 12 step, a decade of Buddhism, etc. But I want to know, beyond pedagogy, what I REALLY NEED to do. And I have to give myself permission to be erratic, and change my mind and try on the coat and take it off.
I don’t know, I just don’t – there are lots of systems that could guide me – and not one of them makes space for seeking justice for the violation I feel. (I may have to take to reading the old testament).
I am struggling just to survive re housing and work and I HAVE to focus there, but this other stuff will not go away – I have to deal with it. But there are choices. And some eat more energy than others. I need to come to what my guiding principles are with this one. I don’t want to be harmed by my choices. I need to look myself in the mirror, over the short and long term. AND not just hold o to old ideas of relating ”“ no one has ever done anything quite so despicable to me and perhaps it warrants special responses? Dunno yet. Part of me wants it to. There is something about the rage I feel that I don’t like ”“ there is anxiety in it. I don’t want to live there. If I could be vengeful and not feel anxiety —.I truly don’t know yet.
I think that I am in such a hellish situation that fixating on this helps to distract me. ‘He’ always did. And I know that I recoil, literally from things I would have been doing even 2 weeks ago. I don’t want to ‘live’ in that place. I think I have been running on high adrenaline for so long that it is hard to get off the wheel.
I feel I can trust no one right now. No one. Oy.
Thanks for listening.
One step