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)
And hens, please don’t think I’m implying there’s a thing wrong with you. I read your posts. I know what a kind-hearted, wise and humane person you are, and how your lifestyle reflects what you truly love. I’m a city girl living in a country house, and reading about your life often makes me think about what country life could be.
I also see how much it pains you to accept that these people exist at all, and maybe it angers you or grieves you that you have to live with and bear the burden of watchfulness and distrust this knowledge brings. A lot of us feel that way. But because kindness is such a large part of who you are, this may seem like a particularly cruel blow.
I grew up with an angry, violent father who kept the family in fear, when he wasn’t literally dealing pain either emotionally or physically. Even as a small child, I looked at the damage he did and the huge distance between our family and anything I saw on television or read about, and I said I would never be like that. Not cruel. Not violent. Not insensitive to the feelings of people who depended on me. Not out of control in pursuit of my own satisfactions or pleasures. I would not, not, not be selfish and mean and totally uncaring of the damage I did.
And of course, beyond my own decision to be different, there was no chance at all to be like him. Because my survival depended on not making him mad, on anticipating his needs, on acting like I had no greater wish than to make sure that he was happy. We all lived with that — my mother and siblings. And when the occasional rebellion broke out, it was squelched as though he had no doubt in his mind that he needed to keep us all terrified. My sister, who was probably the strongest of us, remembers one of her last conversations with him, when she was a teenager. He put his face a few inches from hers and said, “One of us is going to break, and it isn’t going to be me.”
So I was not going to be that. I ran from that, and created a life based on the idea that I could trust and be trusted. But I had not one iota of knowledge about what that really meant, on the side of trusting other people. I thought it was just a decision I made, something that was up to me. Not that it was about them, or their behavior, and whether they had to earn it or keep earning it. And I had a lot of disappointments in my life, because expecting the best from people, even after they’d shown that their “best” had nothing to do with what I really wanted or needed, turned out to be not exactly the best strategy. Not only that it didn’t work very well, but also because it didn’t really lead me to learn much. I kept thinking “Oh, I must have made a mistake about what they really wanted.” or “Oh, they must have some stresses or problems that get in the way of what I thought we’d agreed to.” or “Oh, maybe I’m just being unreasonable and want too much.”
My way of thinking didn’t allow me to consider the fact that they just might not be worth trusting, that they might be bad people for me. Because I’d blown up “bad” to be the big, black-hearted monster that my father had been. And there were no subtleties, no middle ground in my thinking, and certainly no way that I had learned as a child to think about protecting myself or viewing things in terms of what I wanted or even observing people in terms of what their behavior said about them. Trust was just one of those big concepts, like understanding and kindness and safety, that I pulled out of books and television and movies when I was a child, something I really wanted when I got out of there, and my life was different.
And so from that perspective, thinking about you and how you must feel about what you learned from your ex, if it’s anything like what I learned, it’s a terrible truth. Because I learned that the big ideas I was running my life on, and the rules those ideas created, weren’t exactly wrong. But they were not enough.
Clearly not enough. And the part that I was missing were the parts I didn’t want to think about. Like learning how to really protect myself and take that seriously every minute of my life. Like figuring out what I really wanted, which I didn’t have any idea at all of how to do, and then taking responsibility for getting it, even if made people mad or not like me. Like becoming capable of getting mad and not caring about what other people wanted, if that’s what it took to protect myself and create the life I wanted. And somehow doing all of that in a way that still allowed me to be open-hearted and generous and loving.
I can’t tell you how hard this was for me. Just getting mad took forever, because I wasn’t allowed to do that. I didn’t allow me to do that. I didn’t want to be that kind of person. It took forever to finally identify my ex as a “bad person” so I could justify getting mad, and then I was terrified that I would become a bitter, mean-mouthed, brutal, unfeeling person forever. That I’d never come out of it. And it was so big when I got there, and I was mad at so many people about so much stuff, that I felt like I’d been grabbed by a whirlwind. Even when that calmed down, and I started to do all the things we do, assigning blame in the right places, building better boundaries, learning how to recognize and deal with threats, it took a lot longer than I would have liked to see a light at the end of the tunnel. And I saw that light a long time before I got there.
I’ve written this so many times, and yesterday some people got angry with me for calling this a stage. But I say it, knowing that it will irritate people who are doing this stage, because the people who aren’t there yet need to know that it’s safe to do it. That it is a part of healing, not the whole of it, and that if we find the courage, faith in ourselves and belief that this is really important, we come out the other side of it. And we come out with something really valuable.
hens, you write that you know you have family issues. And that you know these are probably related to what happened. Just like a lot of us do. And if you’re like a lot of people I talk to, they feel like they just don’t want to open this Pandora’s box. It’s not worth the pain it’s going to cause, not just to them, but the disruption it may create in their relationships, maybe with their families, maybe with everyone. Or maybe they feel like they’ve already dealt with it all, and they’ve gotten to a place of acceptance and reality-based thinking that they can live with.
I don’t know what’s going on with you. But you dropped that post into a thread where a lot of super-sensitive and irritable people were turning their irritation on other people here on LoveFraud. And I can’t help but wonder what you thought if you read them or any of the others like them that have been popping up lately. I suspect you felt bad about people on the site interacting in this way. It’s not your way. You’re a supporter and a peacemaker. Maybe a healer. But what were you going through while they were drawing boundaries and calling each other out and making demands? This big, inchoate yearning for something missing in your life.
People say you can’t get back. You can’t recover life “before the fall.” But I don’t know if I agree with that. You can’t go back without taking your history with you. It’s part of who we are, the “knowledge of good and evil” that comes from our history. But we can go back, I think, and recover what we once bargained away for our survival. The bits of our integrity, the entitlements to feel and to want and to act as people who deserve love and happiness, the things we got talked out of when we weren’t old enough or smart enough to understand that living without them was not safe or healthy or sane. Maybe to say to the people that once forced us into those bargains, because they could and we didn’t have the power or knowledge to hold onto ourselves, that we are withdrawing from these agreements. That this was always about them not us. And we’re taking ourselves back.
This post has gone on long enough. I hope that some it makes sense. Like so many people here, I am grateful for your presence. I hope you hear this in the spirit I wrote it.
Kathy
And I promise, that’s all I’m going to say. This may have nothing at all to do with you. But maybe it’s for someone else.
I don’t want you to suffer for someone else’s behavior. I know it’s out of my hands. But I still feel that way.
Kathy
Kathy, I actually liked your post. I say ‘actually’ because when I saw how long it was, I wasn’t going to read it. But I identified a lot with what you said, especially how hard it was to get angry.
So on a different note, in my little depression I was in this weekend, I blew off an agreement with a new friend, and now I feel really bad about it. It’s really out of character for me to do that, but she doesn’t know that, and it doesn’t really matter. Funny, even though on the inside there may be volcanos brewing, we still have responsibilities and commitments that people hold us accountable for. I’m pretty pissed off about this, too, BTW. Can’t I just be irresponsible once in a while?
Well, Star, who told you you have to be responsible all the time? Sounds like you might be zeroing in on one of those missing pieces of you. Are you by any chance secretly attracted to irresponsible poeple?
Or maybe jealous of them? Or mad at them, because you’re not allowed to ever be like that?
And it’s just not fair? Because you’re taking all the responsibilities and when is it your turn to have fun? And just think about Star for a change, and not worry about what your supposed to be doing and everyone else wants and expects?
How come your life is all “should” this and “should” that? And other people get to just do what they want, and not care about whether or not they’re taking care of business. And then, when they don’t have anything of their own, they expect other people to take care of them? And be responsible for them too? What’s fair about that?
How come I’m the one who has to be the thoughtful and responsible and caring person? And how come this is always a one-way deal? What’s going on here? Who’s taking care of me?
Is it something like that?
And forgive the series. I’m on a roll. And I have a feeling that I’m not talking to you right now, but myself.
Yeah, something like that. More like it pisses me off that I have to keep commitments when I’m not up to it. I get tired of putting on a face for all these social events. However, I’m finding that the real person and the face are starting to blend, so I question if it will really be as difficult as I imagine…
Overall, I mostly feel like I’ve let a friend down. I’m not mad at the friend, and I was actually looking forward to seeing her. It was just the social event (church service) that I wasn’t overly excited about so I didn’t go. She is a planner, and we’d planned this a week in advance to meet after the service. I’m a more spontaneous person. I’m used to having no one to answer to. So if I don’t want to go somewhere, I just don’t go. But I had her to answer to, and I let her down. I feel bad about it because we must have had some bonding in the short time we’ve spent together.
Wow, I just edited this post!! What a great feature.
Okay, so it’s about feeling bad about her.
I got confused when you asked, “Can’t I just be irresponsible once in a while?” And related it to having more important things going on inside of you that were “brewing.”
Except for a post I need to write another another thread, I’m out of here to work to day.
Have a wonderful and/or interesting day!
Kathy
Love the edit and delete features! Great improvement.
Okay, so this is a processing post….
Yes, I’m mostly feeling bad, but also scared. I’m scared that if I am really myself with these new people they will reject me. Or worse yet, they may accept me. If that happens, 49 years of isolation will flood to the surface, and maybe I’ll drown in it. I went through this dilemma yesterday. Better to be alone? Or better not to be alone? I went with the safe option yesterday. There’s some anger in there too but not sure what it’s about.
I had a dream the other night that I went to spend the weekend with some friends in the country. When I got there, there were all these kids around of all ages. It was loud and disruptive, and the kids were getting into my vehicle and taking it over. I was very upset and angry at the friends for not warning me about this before I drove all the way out there. I’d been hoping for a quiet weekend. But some of the kids were adorable, and they kept clamoring around for my attention. I think they may have been orphans. This little voice inside my head told me it is probably exactly what I need, to be around these kids and they probably could have used my attention. But I was so angry and stubborn. I just packed my stuff up and left.
I have felt angry at these friends since then, but I’m not sure why. Mostly, I take the dream on face value. A psychic recently recommended to me a few months ago that I should work with orphaned/abused kids. I was very resistant to the idea.