It is likely you are reading this because a sociopath said “I love you” and you believed him/her. You also probably thought that when the sociopath said “I love you” he/she used these words as you do, to express a sense of intimacy, passion and commitment. However, what a sociopath says and what a sociopath does are so different it can be crazy making.
In the aftermath of a relationship with a sociopath, former romantic partners are left to wonder, “Just what was going on in that person’s mind?” “What was he/she thinking?” Many people have written in asking, “Did he/she really love me?” and “Do you think he/she loves that other person now?” It is the second question many find most disturbing.
In 1943, Dr. Abraham Maslow in his classic paper, A theory of human motivation, declared that psychopaths lack the capacity and motivation for love. “The so-called ‘psychopathic personality’ is another example of permanent loss of the love needs. These are people who, according to the best data available (9), have been starved for love in the earliest months of their lives and have simply lost forever the desire and the ability to give and to receive affection (as animals lose sucking or pecking reflexes that are not exercised soon enough after birth). ”
Contemporaneously with Maslow, Dr. Hervey Cleckley described psychopaths in The Mask of Sanity and developed a set of criteria for their identification. According to Cleckley (criteria #9), psychopathy is associated with “pathological egocentricity and incapacity for love.” He declared “The psychopath seldom shows anything that, if the chief facts were known, would pass even in the eyes of lay observers as object love.”
Cleckley also maintained that an “absolute” incapacity for love is even found in those with an “incomplete manifestation” of psychopathy, who lack the full disorder. Writing in 1956, Drs.McCord and McCord disagreed with Cleckley and Maslow. They described psychopaths as having “a warped capacity for love” stating, “there are indications that the capacity, however under developed, still exists .”
My guess is that the McCords got fooled just like you and I and a recent paper shows us why.
Dr. Barbara Gawda at Maria Curie-Skldowska University Poland studied the “Love Scripts” of sociopaths. Love scripts are simply ideas about love that a person has. These ideas include how people fall in love, and what people in love are supposed to do.
Dr. Gawda showed a picture of a man and a woman hugging to 60 sociopaths in prison, 40 prisoners without disorder and 100 university students. She asked all participants to write a story about the picture and to imagine themselves as one of the characters.
The sociopaths stories were significantly longer, more detailed, and more self-centered than the other two groups. Contrary to expectations then sociopaths do not lack love schemas. They are perfectly adept and perhaps more adept than most in talking about love. The findings of this study jive completely with my own clinical experience. That is, over the years many people I knew to be sociopaths told me about their love experiences. Their stories were impressive and had me believing that they were capable of love.
If clinicians, scientists, lovers and family members rely on verbal reports, they will never come to understand the lack of capacity to love that characterizes sociopaths. Cleckley reached his conclusions about psychopathy and love only after observing their actions over a number of years. He also said this,
“In a sense, it is absurd to maintain that the psychopath’s incapacity for object love is absolute, that is, to say he is (in)capable of affection for another ”¦ He is plainly capable of casual fondness, of likes and dislikes, and of reactions that, one might say, cause others to matter to him. These affective reactions are, however, always strictly limited in degree. In durability they also vary greatly from what is normal in mankind. The term absolute is, I believe, appropriate if we apply it to any affective attitude strong and meaningful enough to be called love, that is, anything that prevails in sufficient degree and over sufficient periods to exert a major influence on behavior.”
References
A theory of human motivation. Maslow, A. H.; Psychological Review, Vol 50(4), Jul, 1943. pp. 370-396
McCord, W and McCord, J (1956) Psychopathy and Delenquency New York: Grune and Stratton, Inc. page 13
Love scripts of persons with antisocial personality.Gawda B.
Psychological Reports 2008, 103, 371-380.
This study compared the scripts of love among 60 prison inmates diagnosed with Antisocial Personality Disorder and those of 40 inmates without an Antisocial Personality Disorder diagnosis but low antisocial tendencies, and a control group of 100 adult students in extramural or evening secondary schools without Antisocial Personality Disorder traits. The study focused on emotional knowledge about love of the group with Antisocial Personality Disorder, as they present lack of capacity for love. The study was done to examine how they perceive love and how much knowledge they have about love. All described their reactions to a photograph of a couple hugging each other. The content of these scripts, analyzed in terms of description of actors, their actions and emotions, and length of description, was compared among the groups. The scripts of love by antisocial inmates contained more actors’ feelings and strong emotions, as well as more descriptions of actors’ traits, their actions, and presumptions. The inmates with Antisocial Personality Disorder showed more focus on themselves when they described love than the other inmates and the controls.
MariaLisa, I WILL get explicit.
did you ever see the episode of Star Trek the next generation where Data has sex with Tasha Yar?
He was programmed to be fully functional. “programmed in multiple techniques, a broad variety of pleasuring”.
Well that was my P, but never any sounds of pleasure for himself or feelings, nothing on his face. No expressions either visual or audible.
I think Tasha got more emotion out of Data than I got out of the P. LOL.
here’s a link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aM8JfKSZ6NM
yours no sound too??? I like to talk a bit, sometimes exciting things, nothing crazy though! But he just COULD NOT talk while at it. he seemed in shock most of the time. or like he was surprised I was there with him or something…I mean after a while. The first period I guess he was trying harder to appear normal…
It was more than just no sound, he was sooooo focused on getting me to go absolutely crazy with desire. He wanted my emotions. He would take me to the edge. But he might as well have run on batteries….LOL! because he never broke a sweat. He is a true vampire. Although we no longer were physically intimate or barely touched for 15 years, whenever we went to a thriller movie, he would drape my arms and legs around him, “to keep you warm” he said. Now, I know that it was to feel the jumps and spikes that my body produced during the exciting or scary parts of the movie.
We stopped having sex 15 years ago because he only wanted orgies. Me and several other men. I just didn’t feel that was going any place good. I didn’t argue with him, I just said no and he never suggested the alternative of just 2 of us. Now I’m pretty sure that he liked looking at the guys too. I’m pretty sure he is either gay or bi.
About the bad teeth, it’s possible that they were using meth and crack and hiding it. Sociopaths need lots of stimulation, and crack/meth users eat a lot of sugar to keep the energy level up.
well i didnt wanna say ( even on this board im embarrassed) but he was an ex heroin addict and exalcoholic.i dont know anything about drugs but he smoked crack too…all before i met him… BUT ofcourse TOTALLY on a new spiritual path!!! Oh yes he was very much into God. He looked down upon people as he said who were ‘ living a lie’.
SERIOUSLY!!!Skylar: Who are these people?!?!?!?
yours sounds more like a narcissist. mine a sociopath. the first time we did it i remember him doing things a girl thinks are romantic and it all seemed heartfelt…i guess he just couldnt keep that mask up to long…i mean why bother when he ‘had’ me..i think, right?
mine wasnt into anything crazy sexually AT ALL. i wrote it earlier in another post, our sexlife or mostly his sexuality still puzzles me the most. i thought he was very detached sexually. i actually wanted to help him with it, but I guess he couldnt care less. he would make promises in that area like every area, that he never kept….
did yours then go off and do al these things without you?
Maria Lisa, no way that mine is not a sociopath. He was intent on driving me to suicide, just like his ex-girlfriend. But that didn’t begin until my money was gone. i’m convinced he killed others, through mechanical sabotage. But with women, I’m sure he just outright strangled them.
All of these details ARE embarrassing, but the most embarrassing of all is just that we were taken in by liars.
Mine was totally against drug use or even alcohol use. But that didn’t stop him from being a drug DEALER! He told me that he had sold acid and I knew he sold pot. he also told me he cooked meth once but when he watched the junkies shooting up, he decided not to do it anymore. Riiiiight.
Why did I put up with that? because I felt sorry for him, I just knew he only did those things because he was very broke and desperate. Riiiight.
I remember that he would come home smelling like sex. I remember that he would often make “friends” with young blonde guys. Then later I read that the Ns are so obsessed with having sex with themselves that they look for people who remind them of themselves when they were young and in their prime.
I know he used sex to manipulate my P neighbor who likes to steal other women’s husbands. Funny thing, I told her years ago that she could have him. I’m sure she told him and probably amped up the rage.
Another funny thing: I had a closet-gay, male friend for years. This is the only friend that my P would allow me. He destroyed all my other friendships. He finally met my friend, after some years. My friend and my friend’s young blonde (obviously gay) friend needed a ride but my car was a two seater and so is my P’s. So we split them up. I gave the blonde guy a ride and P gave my buddy a ride. The next week, my friend made a comment using my P’s FULL NAME INCLUDING THE MIDDLE NAME, which I had never told him. I pretended not to notice. Weeks later my friend said, “do you ever wonder if (the P) is gay?” I said, “no, not ever.”
The gay friend moved to canada about 10 years ago but we sometimes emailed each other. Then this year I told him about the P’s strange behavior and that I was afraid. My gay friend reacted almost agressively and told me that it was too much meladrama for him to handle. Then he told me that my sister didn’t love me and that I should contact oprah. WTF?
I’m now NC with my ex-friend.
MariaLisa, it looks like we hi jacked this thread with discussion of our love lives. LOL.
But I just wanted to respond that your xp sounds really childish. Like wanting to talk about sex in a cheap thrills kind of way, but not about intimacy, just like a little boy looking at a playboy magazine. I can relate to that. Mine used all kinds of childish words to talk about our intimate relations.
Being so young when I met him, I just let him dictate how everything went. Until I finally just said no.
guys, there is a thread and article on here that Ps aren’t really straight OR gay, just many hypersexed–will have sex with a snake if it will stand still. No emotions, just like an animal.
A snake? My x had no labels – sexually – and I discovered he was -bi- after he left. He would do anyone. His penis was his ticket to ride. Or get a ride when he didnt have one. I didn’t need his penis – I needed his love – and he told me he loved me twenty times a day – it was a way of controling me and manipulating me – but I got tired of the unemotional I love You’s – most of the time I was looking at the back of his head when he said it – he had his face buried in the computer and would say I LOVE YOU if he heard me or felt the air move as I walked by. When a S say’s I love you – it is to make you crazy – not make you feel loved…But my X was terrified of snakes – I often think how cool it would be to put a 7 foot black rat snake in his truck…:)
everyone
this totally puzzles me when everybody says how their S or P or N was a total sex addict and mine so weird in this. I mean I found out he was cheating on me in a LARGE way, BUT I talked with other victims of him about sex with him and they shared the same experience as me. He never seemed into it ( in action), only in his talks.
i just woke up from another nightmare. cant believe this still happens. wake up feeling so humiliated how I remember him parading me around and now realizing what I must have looked liked when so many people ( male friends) around him knew of his ways. god knows what they thought of me….and i was living int his bubble of ‘love’. i thought he would tell them what he tells me, how he was SMITTEN with me and talked about marrying me and having my babies ALL the time. YUCK. feels so humiliating. how do we ever get rid of this feeling.
btw about homosexuality: i always thought he had something feminie about him. nobody else saw it but I thought it was all over him. I mean he was all man in how he projected himself ( sports, not into beauty products), but the angelic quality about him was…maybe not feminine but child like then. i dunnno he switched the way he acted too. one moment he would look so cold and masculine and the other like such a sweet little boy. which one was him? when was he not wearing a mask. i mean arent they without identities?
Henry,
My ex p was terrified of SPIDERS! So I have may fantasies of putting a funnel web (deadly and very easy to get) in his BED.
Nowadays, if anyone says ” I love you” to me (that is except for my son), I immediately don’t believe them and feel on guard. This is the intelligent thing to do if you have had my past.