By Joyce Alexander, RNP (Retired)
I was reading an article about Steve Jobs’ new biography that came out this past week, and some of the stories about his life. There is no doubt in my mind that Steve Jobs was one of the smartest and most savvy guys in the Twentieth Century. The inventions that he fostered or personally thought of have changed our society and our culture, and remarkably changed the communication field. An amazing man!
You may have read the title of this article and are already wondering how Steve Jobs was killed by a “psychopath.” Jobs died of the terminal stages of pancreatic cancer. He was diagnosed with this very serious form of cancer. Apparently, according to what I read, it was a slower growing kind of this cancer, and if he had had surgery right then, there is a good chance that he might have actually effected a cure and be alive even today.
That wasn’t what Steve chose to do, though ”¦ he chose to deny the seriousness and the urgency to take drastic action immediately to exorcise the tumor out of his system. He did not essentially “go NO CONTACT” with the toxic, malignant entity that had silently invaded his body. As smart as Jobs was, and even though he had access to the best and most knowledgeable physicians in the world, he did not take the “appropriate action” to have the surgery. Jobs told his biographer that he did “not want to be cut open like that.” He later regretted that decision and even realized that it may have cost him his life.
His biographer says that he ultimately saw that the colon cleansing and other “new age” treatments did nothing for him, and nine months after he turned down after recommended surgery, Jobs finally decided to have it—what is called a “Whipple procedure” to remove the tumor. It was too late; he had missed that narrow “window of opportunity” in which he could have saved his life. He “got a divorce” from the tumor too late, the damage had been done. Though Steve Jobs fought valiantly for the next decade, the ultimate “win” by the psychopathic cancer was a foregone conclusion. He had failed to excise the cancer from his life while it was small.
Psychopaths as cancers
Too many times, I see psychopathic relationships with “malignant” individuals, and like cancers, they may grow inside us without being detectable as toxic until one day, even before we know they are toxic, the fatal damage has been done. Or, we may get a chance recognize them and to excise them when they are “small” in relationship to the rest of our lives. We can remove them without leaving large scars or holes in our lives. If we get this chance to remove the “malignant” people from our lives and we, like Steve Jobs, decide on a “want and see” plan, we allow them to grow and infiltrate our lives more fully, so that if and when we do decide to “surgically” remove them from our lives, the hole and the scars that they leave is much larger and more debilitating than if we had “done the surgery” when the situation wasn’t quite so ingrown.
Jesus talked about “if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, if thy hand offend thee, cut it off,” and went on to analogize that it is better to live a life with one eye or one hand than to live in “hell” with two eyes or two hands. Sometimes I think the “surgery” necessary to remove the psychopathic personality from our lives is very much like “plucking out your own eye” or “cutting off your own hand” with a rusty butcher knife. But the point of the situation is that in order to live a good life, or in some cases to live at all, we must make the hard decision to excise the toxic person, or the malignant tumor, from our lives as soon as we know what they are. Waiting around, treating this toxic, malignant issue with “kindness and love,” isn’t going to remove it from our lives or our bodies, or change it into something benign. We must take drastic and surgical action to remove this malignant person from our lives completely.
Removing those around the psychopath
That may also mean taking out the “lymph nodes” of the people around the cancerous person, just like the doctor will remove lymph nodes from around a breast containing cancer where that malignancy has spread into those nodes so that they, in turn, don’t spread the toxin to the rest of the body. It is unfortunate but true that a toxic psychopath will frequently have spread their lies and toxins to other people around us that we may also love ”¦ their families, our mutual friends, etc. A “cure” from the toxic psychopath may require us to be NC with those people too, and excise them from our lives as well. The longer the psychopath has been in our lives and the more deeply involved, the more likely this will be necessary. Failing to “bite the bullet” and do this as well may result in a recurrence of the malignancy this person leaves in our lives.
Steve Jobs was a significant personality in our culture. Of course there is no guarantee that if he had elected to have the surgery sooner rather than later, that he would have lived longer or better, but I can guarantee that living with a psychopathic person longer, or trying every “alternative” cure, except total surgical removal, isn’t going to improve your life in any way.
I think even in his death, Steve Jobs left us one more important thing ”¦ a lesson for anyone involved with a toxic relationship of any kind.
Eurohorse,
you missed the point I think.
The connection is that Steve didn’t want to be cut open. He thought perhaps his malignancy could be handled less radically than through a surgical removal. He chose to try various techniques to “deal with” the cancer and the end result was that his cancer became more invasive. It spread. With time, cancer always spreads. Some quicker than others.
In that way, spaths are like cancer. You can’t negotiate with them, you can’t deal with them. They eat up your resources and give nothing back except toxicity. The only solution is to cut them out of your life forever.
You are right though. Sometimes it’s too late and the surgery doesn’t work because they have left too much damage in their wake. That’s why early intervention is so important.
My own spath made sure to leave several trojan horses in my family and my neighborhood. His intent was to have them there as minions for his use. He never thought he would be surgically removed. In the end those minions serve the function of spreading evil in his place. They are not as potent a cancer as he was but they are certainly capable of toxicity. Removing them will take some doing.
Skylar..you wrote: “The alphabet soup behind the name means nothing if the empathy is not there or if it’s shallow. I think if I was looking for a therapist, I would look for signs of maturity (or immaturity) foremost. Because with maturity comes wisdom. There are so many traditions of therapy that arose from freud and jung that in the end there is a connection anyway”
I totally agree that without empathy the therapy is shallow. I probably said this before, but I found that therapists schooled in [or who use/emphasize] the CULTURAL RELATIONAL THERAPY methods, as opposed to the COGNITIVE BEHAVIORAL THERAPY methods, worked best to heal me.
I disdain therapy that relies too much on CO-Dependency therapy, either. One book that helped me understand how some scholars think that co-dependency theory/jargon has been used to actually harm others more than help them (yes..even at AA meetings and 12-step meetings!) is Mary Ballou and Laura S. Brown, Rethinking Mental Health & Disorder. I highly recommend reading it.
Zim
I once saw a PSYCHOLOGIST who used PROJECTIONARY measures on me, to say that I had “villainized” a former [SPATH, in my opinion] supervisor who was BLATANTLY racist, disability-prejudiced. I stopped seeing him IMMEDIATELY!..found a subsequent therapist who VALIDATED me and confirmed my experience..my TRUE experience..confirmed that what I felt about the SPATH was NORMAL to feel!
Zim
Google the word “iatrogenesis” .. it is (or is similar to) what happens when a therapist HARMS a patient. I think that is what that PSYCHOLOGIST did to me. It was as if I was being RE-SPATHED by ANOTHER SPATH. I even think he misdiagnosed/mislabeled me..wrote me up for “adjustment disorder” when I had been VIOLATED by a supervisor spath who ignored EEO laws (I proved this, case settle in MY favor, though not nearly enough $ to repair the psychological damage the ER/supe spath had done.) That psychologist probably should have labeled me with PTSD, if anything, but didn’t. He MINIMIZED/INVALIDATED what happened to me.
Zim
Neuroman, You can contact me at oxdrover1946@gmail.com, that e mail address is found under my listing on LOVEFRAUD AUTHORS.
Sky, you summed up my point very precisely and concisely to Eurohorse, thank you.
You’re welcome Oxy,
I left out one thing: I agree with Eurohorse that the issue goes deeper than slicing and dicing. There is the issue of what caused us to be susceptible to the cancer in the first place. Was it a virus we picked up early in life? or was it exposure to a carcinogen? Perhaps it was a genetic predisposition in conjunction with a certain environment?
Yep, the analogy is a very good one, Oxy. Spaths are very much like a cancer. It’s not surprising that they cause cancer too.
Sky,
Also, like psychopaths and cancer, by the time you realize what you have, it may already be too late….or there may be “no cure” for it. The girl my son Patrick murdered, Jessica Witt, didn’t know she had “cancer” when she was dealing with my son Patrick and she found out when he called her name and she turned around just in time to see the gun before he pulled the trigger and ended her life. She didn’t know she was dealing with a FATAL case of psychopathic “cancer.”
I’ve had patients who came into my office not knowing they had cancer, and when they gave me a list of their symptoms, I suspected cancer immediately and sent them for more tests to either prove or disprove my suspicions. My step father had symptoms for months before I knew it, and he “self diagnosed” that he had a sinus infection. Of course, my immediate thought was he either had one of the tick borne diseases or possibly cancer (which will frequently cause intermittent fevers) and I hoped that it was something that could be cured. Unfortunately, there was no “cure” for his cancer, it was just a matter of time and how it was treated, but there was nothing that could keep him from ultimately dying from his cancer.
Maybe Steve Jobs could have survived longer, or even excised the entire cancer if he had agreed to a PROMPT SURGERY….maybe not, but we do know that he decided NOT to have the surgery, and why he decided not to have the surgery, and what he decided to “try” instead of the prompt surgery.
If you accept the analogy that psychopaths in our lives are like SOME cancers at least, that if they are excised out of our lives EARLY before they spread to every aspect of our lives, sometimes our lives are “cured” by their removal promptly. But we also know that psychopaths, just like cancer, can “infiltrate” every corner, every nook, every aspect of our lives, souls, hearts and minds. Sometimes fatally.
We also know that sometimes removing the cancer also requires removing an organ or a limb that leaves us disabled, injured, or hurt. But I think it is better to live with one leg, or one kidney, or one eye, or part of your colon missing, than to die from cancer.
I wish very much that my son Patrick was a loving, caring, honest man, but he isn’t, and even though many many people have told me “oh, but you can’t ever give up on your son, he’s your SON!” I know that he is diseased, he is cancerous, he is malignant, he is DEADLY, and though it hurt to have my soul opened and my love for my son “surgically” removed with a “rusty butcher knife” it was the only thing that literally saved my life.
I don’t know how Jessica felt about Patrick, maybe she thought she loved him, but she didn’t KNOW HIM at all. So maybe she had thought about breaking up with him, but it was painful. I don’t know what she felt, but I know that she knew he was doing things that were illegal and dishonest, she knew he carried a gun, she knew he was an ex convict, and yet she continued a relationship with him, she CHOSE to interact with him. She made a mistake in that choice. It cost her her life because she chose to interact with my son. She did NOT deserve to die because she was 17 years old and didn’t realize what a psychopath was, but the truth is she had been “warned” by the red flags in his life that she KNEW ABOUT, but she didnt’ know what they signaled.
Those of us who DO know (at this point) now that the red flags signal something DANGEROUS should heed those warnings and excise the toxic, malignant psychopathic “cancers” from our lives to the extent that the law allows.
Hi. I know this doesn’t belong in this thread.
Can you please indulge me anyway for just a minute.
I am 7 weeks no contact now. This is the longest stretch ever. I’m suffering withdrawal symptoms.
I blocked him from calling any of my phones, I changed my email addresses, I removed him from my social networks, and I am in SO MUCH PAIN because he’s gone, and he hasn’t done anything about it. He could show up. He could promise to change. He could try to win me back. But he is nowhere in site. He is gone.
I know, I’m missing the guy I wanted him to be, the guy he pretended to be, not the guy he actually is.
Nonetheless, I’m crying in my pillow today.
This is hard.
Athena
Sisterhood,
I had periods like that with my therapist too, where she was giving me a hard time for fixating on my spath, and wanting to direct me to resolving things with my parents. We somehow settled in the middle between where I wanted to go and where she thought I needed to go. My luck is that my therapist did have a SPATH experience, but not to the depth that I did.
I fired six therapists before I found one that I felt was my partner. And it wasted a lot of time.
Anyway, I hope your therapist works out for you.
Athena!
You are doing fine! Congratulations on the 7 weeks NC. It will get better. I have this impression that you are now dealing with the last illusion you were still holding on to in secret for yourself… that your NC might make him change his mind, might affect him in a way so that he would finally do what needs to be done to be back with you. If you hang in there tonight you will feel better for accepting who he truly is: a spath who’ll never change and never cared.