A big problem we face in sizing up a partner is getting stuck on, or being seduced by, his “light side—”that is, his apparently (or genuinely) wonderful, engaging, admirable, gratifying qualities.
However, when we’re dealing with a sociopath, there is also the other side—the “dark side.”
By “dark side” I mean, essentially, the sociopath’s exploitive side. And by exploitive I mean, very specifically, his calculated use of leverage to betray you somehow; moreover, to betray you with gross insensitivity to your experience of the injury or insult he’s inflicted.
The “light side” of the man must never compensate for his “dark side,” regardless of how well-concealed, and rarely, the latter may surface.
Most of us would take six sunny days in exchange for one cold, dreary, rainy one. That’s a trade-off we’d probably gladly accept. It’s not perfect, but it’s good, and it does nothing to compromise our integrity.
Yet six days, six months, six years of the man’s light side must not mitigate a single instance, a single flash (let alone pattern) of his dark side. One act of exploitation, the very first, necessitates, however sadly, that we cut our losses with minimal delay and filibustering.
Yet, in case after case I see clients who, understandably, prefer not to see their partners’ dark side. They prefer, naturally, to see his light side—his strengths, what he can be, what he usually is, what he “really” is!
They seize on his capacity for sensitivity, thoughtfulness, tenderness, warmth, good humor, patience, soliticousness, you name it. They desperately want to convince themselves, if not others, that his capacities define his essence!
Because he can be thoughtful, his essence must be thoughtful! Because he can be sensitive, his essence must be sensitive! Because he can be unselfish and candid, his essence must be unselfish and honest! Because he can go periods when he’s not (apparently) screwing around, his essence must be faithful!
I’m not speaking here about flawed partners who screw up, who make mistakes, who lose their course, their priorities, and in so doing sometimes wound others badly. In our fallibility we can make a mess of things, and hurt the people we care and love. Whether our transgressions are forgivable is for those whom we’ve disappointed to decide.
But the man with the dark side is a different case. When he reveals the capacity to exploit, he’s not revealing his human face, but his inhuman face.
He’s revealing the face of his dark side.
And while it’s a sight you might like to avoid, you musn’t. While you’d rather turn away until the view of his “light side” resurfaces, you must not. You must, instead, see him, unmasked, and recognize him, unmasked.
You must recognize him for who he is, in his essence.
(My use of “he” in this article is for convenience’s sake and not meant to suggest that females aren’t capable of the behaviors discussed. This article is copyrighted (c) 2010 by Steve Becker, LCSW)
hens,
Being a deep thinker is both a blessing and a curse. Like so many things. Sigh….
Hens…
You can’t woulda/shoulda/coulda…..because your a beautiful person, you are YOU, YOU have value. YOU ARE YOU….and your perfect as YOU…..
Hey….I’m an ’embarrasment’ to my family…..but do I care…NO….do I wish things woulda been different…yeah…..but did I do anything out of spite or ill intent….NEVER. So…If I don’t live up to others script of me….wellll……..FUCKEM! I can’t own that!
So get your Fuckem attitude out and remind yourself your a beautiful person with a beautiful heart that has so much to offer the world!
Big XX and lots of OO
Wit You said – That big empty space that we feel Does feel so empty when they are gone. Tell me how too define that feeling, I as of yet cant explain it or define it, not to me or anyone – the closest I can come to defining what happened and the feelings I am left with is the twilight zone – and that is not meant to be funny…..
Erin – I am so much a better person than they will ever know. Thanks twisted sister for you cheers and hugz and thanks and goodnite to you all – a better day tomorrow – hugz to all
I prefer chickie…..
Get a good night….it’ll all be brighter in the morning.
Goodnight darling!
hens,
It would take someone alot better with words than I am to define it.
As USUAL I don’t know how to define anything with just a few sentences.
Many of us go through life with unresolved issues from our childhood. Occasionally something triggers some or one of these issues. And we are not ready or equiped emotionally to really deal with them so we put a “band aide” on them and go on with our lives. Doing the best we can.
But after a relationship with an S/P/N, for most of us this is a life altering experience. And we are so broken and so depleted and so fragmented after this experience that when we attempt to JUST recapture our “old selves” before this relationship, it becomes apparant that we can not just bounce back and be our old selves again.
And as most of us also experience when the realtionship ends our questions when we come here or to any other source of someone willing to “listen” to us…..Everything we ask is usually about THEM. We are seeking to understand what the HELL happened. And then we find that the hard questions start coming up. And they are questions more about US.
And damit, when we start asking ourselves the REALLY hard questions, it often leads to unresolved childhood issues. They were always there, but now they feel more like HUGE empty spaces. Because usually we do leave these relationships with the S/P/N completely depleted. It is almost as if they draw the “life” right out of us.
I think the twilight zone you refer to, is having been through the UNBELIEVABLE and not being able to define it where someone else CAN understand it that has never experienced an S/P/N on a personal level. It really is a “zone” that we find ourselves in.
That’s why people will say to you…Get over it. move on with your life..Blah, blah. Because most everyone has had the past experience of a break up. And moved on. So they don’t understand. And they haven’t necessarily had to face their unresolved childhood issues or their past tramas in order to move on. BUT it is because they didn’t have a encounter with an S/P/N. Their break up didn’t “shake up” their entire world as they knew it.
We almost have to face our demons if we are to ever heal from these toxic people that entered our lives. The “band aids” just don’t seem to work as they might have in the past.
Does any of this make any sense to you? It is late and I am thinking out loud.
Wit – Every word you wrote makes sense. And nobody could of been more clear with explaining the events and outcome of relationship with a s-p-n. And yes at first it was all about him, why, how and what? Like alot of people here , we are changed and forced to look under that band aid and ask ourselves the hard questions. Intellectually I understand about him, and about what was under my band aid. I have sorted alot of that away. What I can’t seem to get past is that big empty space you were talking about. In my heart I know it was a lie. But for a short while he lived my dream with me. My dreams were real, and he played the part so well at times. And somehow I think to myself, maybe only a sociopath could do this, because they have no real self and they become our dreams. And that is an unreal and unhealthy way to love and be loved. It makes me question who I am. Am I really that selfish that only a dream or a mirror reflection of myself will make me happy.?
Witsend – that is exactly it – we come asking questions about them ‘Why did he …?’ and then when we try to get over it using our regular old coping mechanisms they don’t work. We can’t get our old selves back. I can’t even get a semblance of my old self back. I am changed beyond recognition after this and I am not sure I like the new me. What I have managed to assemble though is clean of the childhood wounds – it’s fragile .. tentative and wouldn’t take much to blow over.
I can relate to this idea of the Twilight Zone – I feel like I am in the Matrix and am the only one who can see the world as it really is. I want to yell out to everyone passing who is living their life in oblivion as I used to “Hey guess what? There are monsters here and they look the same as us!” I feel that the world I inhabit is a much different one to the people who are going about their business every day – going in the car to the shops or out to a movie. Everything now has such significance and it is overwhelming – going to the shops I will be reminded
‘Hey you’re going by yourself – do you remember why you are going by yourself? That’s right – because you married a psycho and he turned everything upside down and now he’s gone and it’s as if he was never here but everything is somehow different now. You’re aware of everything now. You look at the products on the shelf and their use by date and wonder when your own use by date is.”
I feel so damned angry to be burdened by this awareness of the passing of time – the psychopath has made every day full of decay while everyone around me celebrates and lives in life. I feel time slipping through my fingers now and have come to doubt all those dreams I used to have. Anything I think that might be something to look forward to is tainted with a sigh and the question ‘So what?’ It feels like nothing matters now. I don’t want him back but this is an awful way to live and it doesn’t seem to end. Does it end?
I can’t even articulate it either – the grey cloud. That’s all I know of it. I want it to go away so I just notice the flowers and the sun again. Instead I am hyper aware of the shadows on the horizon and the drops of rain in the air. Other people are oblivious – they don’t understand what it is to be like this. It’s almost like depression but there is too much apathy and pain.
Like you Hens I intellectually understand – my cognition ‘gets it’ but the rest of me doesn’t – my heart, my soul, my guts. They’re all crying out ‘why?’ And Hens – you are not selfish at all – if you were you never would have stayed with this person – so please don’t put that label on yourself – you are self sacrificing – well you were anyway – we all were in some ways.
I have heard of shamans who practice something called Soul Retrieval and I am wondering if this is what is needed – it feels as though my soul is trapped in a mirror maze somewhere very far from me. And I am dying without it. I can’r even articulate this feeling – it is so frustrating – it evades description.
It is sombre – I closed my eyes and got the term Sombre occasion – like I am living the funeral for my soul. sorry to both of you = I feel drained of life juice tonight. A bit defeated. A bit beat up and cast aside like refuse. It hurts.
hens, I read your post from last night, and I’m sorry you’re going through this. I know the feeling. And even thought it’s been a long time now, almost seven years for me, sometimes it just comes up and blindsides me. He was the last person I had that big in-love feeling for.
You asked for a definition of that feeling. But you described it really well. That feeling of something missing, the hole that makes your heart like a doughnut.
I used to write him, letter after letter. Things I didn’t send, but kind of an extension of the occasional e-mail I sent him when we were still involved. I wrote them to the man I was in love with, trying to get him to understand how I felt. The man I was actually involved with never understood them. I talked about things he couldn’t grasp. He thought I was asking for him to behave in some way. He’d said, tell me what you want. And I’d say, “I want you to say that you love me once in a while.” And he’d sigh, and say like a wooden doll, “I love you.” Sometimes he’d get sarcastic and say that he supposed I was better than him, because I could write about my feelings.
When we were involved, it was so confusing. I thought that he was just unable to use words about his feelings, but that this was some kind of test. That I was supposed to get over my dependence on words, and just understood that we were in a relationship by his actions. He was there. We slept together. We did things together. Yes, I paid for everything, but I had more money. Yes, he slept with other women, but he always came back. Yes, he criticized me all the time, especially when I asked for more consideration from him, but he kept coming back and we slept together and we did things together.
I really didn’t understand what a brute he was until after I finally got him out of my life, because I knew I was close to suicide. Before that, I just knew I was in pain. But even after he was gone, I kept writing these letters to this man I loved. Even after I realized that I was writing to someone who didn’t exist, unless there was some other person underneath the person I knew.
Those letters, and the missing him that was like a piercing ache, not really too different from the knife-in-my-heart feeling I had when I was with him, were evidence of something that continued to puzzle me as I went thought my recovery. It took me a long to to even consider the fact that the man I was in love with didn’t exist, as least not in my ex.
(And it really helped that he was publishing short stories in these years, and I could read them, to to learn how he thought and felt from a safe distance, but a number of these stories drew from of our relationship. And it was pretty horrifying to see how exploitative and, worse, totally clueless about love he was. I don’t really like to say this about anyone, but he was really sub-human in emotional matters, and certainly no one to love.)
So, if it wasn’t him, who was I writing to? Who was I missing?
hens, maybe these big feelings are coming up for you, because you’re ready to think about these things. We get so mad at them, and blame them and build better boundaries for the future and think we’ve taken care of it. But there was something you wanted in him. Some characteristic that he had to make you want him so much that you overrode your natural self-protective abilities. Even if you made mistakes in the past, you never made a mistake like this one. (Or that’s how it was for me.) And that’s what I finally had to look at. What was so damned important about him?
I’ve written a lot about my background and about this thinking process, and I don’t want to bore you with going over it again. But the net of it all was that I realized that he, like pretty much everyone else I’d ever been that I’d fallen deeply in love with, offered me a set of characteristics. I saw them as stronger and more capable than me in dealing with the world. I saw them as having a quality of healthy self-interest that I admired (but had not the slightest idea of how it worked). And because of these things, I saw them as able to run things better than me, because I was always making decisions based on pressure, and not what I wanted or cared about long term.
This is just me. I don’t know if it would be the same thing with you or anyone else. But I do suspect that these people represent for us our lost selves, the parts of us that are buried or undeveloped because of background trauma, and that we try to complete ourselves with these relationships. I know that a certain amount of this is normal. We are attracted to people we admire for traits that seem to be better in some way than ours. I know this doesn’t account for the power of sexual attraction, but I think that even the sexual attraction is partly mental/emotional. But the different thing about these relationships is that they — because of a combination of the S’s desire to appear to be exactly what we want and our own desire to find these missing parts in another person — just become a kind of high-voltage connection that overrides everything else.
And when I started to play with the idea, I also started thinking that maybe what I was missing with such huge yearning was myself. He represented these lost parts of me, and this pain was more familiar than I was originally recognizing. It was the pain I lived with since I’d “agreed” (not really, since I was a child making decisions about how to survive in my family) to give up certain things in order to get along. And that there were human rights and entitlements that I’d buried away, capacities that I didn’t even recognize anymore as mine, that his presence and then his betrayal and the loss of that promise of completion, had given voice to. And that voice was loud and it wasn’t going away.
I write this in a few paragraphs (though another one of my annoying long posts), but trying to figure this out took time. I had to look at the idea that there was something about him that I wanted to be. Not the bad parts. But the good I imagined in him, what I admired and wanted in my life. And I thought that if I could imagine and admire these traits, that maybe it meant that they were actually in me. How else could I see them, if they weren’t part of me too?
So, I’ll leave you with that. I don’t know if this helps or gives you any ideas about why you are suffering again. I know a lot of people just wait for pain to go away, for time to dull it down. But I think our feelings are speaking to us, trying to get us to pay attention to something important. About us. And if we feel something that strongly, it must be really important.
Fondly,
Kathy
kathleen – thank you for another wonderful annoyingly long post.