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.
GoingThroughTheMotions;
“…what a crock about the reserved Britishness ”“ that is a widely held false perception he used to make you feel ashamed of your desires ”“ to make you feel dirty, to make you think he was morally superior to you, to make you grateful that such a morally superior being saw something salvageable in you.”
My x-spath was very “covert” and quite hard to understand. In a sense, this is what I bring to the table here.
He gets angry, but does not raise his voice. He is controlling, but subtly and now that I think about it, with “moral superiority” be it a lecture about Americans and guns, my leather jacket, or correcting me for getting angry at a taxi driver who attempted to run up the fare…
He is highly sexual with a very easy to follow online trail and HIV+ but plays “innocent boy.” And I fell for it.
Ox Drover;
“I think that is the key to being able to DETECT them before we get hooked.”
I mean this sincerely now. There is no why that if I had been in a normal mental state I would have pursued him. Even more so for what I know now.
Blue_Eyes:
We all fell for it – all of us here. And the covert abuse is so hard to put your finger on. I felt so stupid for so long for so many reasons – and still, every time I remember one of the times where the red flags were waving. But as his own sister said to me “Of course you ignored them – of course you didn’t realize what they were – none of them on their own is somthing that would cause you to end a relationship – you simply believed what he told you, and you had two children together, and so you had two enomrous reasons to keep on believing, and before that he primed you”. I think she is too kind, not wanting to kick me when I am down, but she is right in a sense – after all, after the whole cat incident, I thought it was bizarre, but certainly wasn’t going to spoil the day we got our new kitten by nit-picking, or breaking up with him over it…it is only now, as I can sift through the memories as a whole, that I can see what he was. Each realization is STILL shocking. And it shouldn’t be shocking anymore.
The only reason I think what I do about your ex-spath’s initial claim that he was “offended”, is because this was an ongoing theme in my marriage – withholding for his own pleasure, and then acting like my “whorish” behaviour was what was turning him off, because I wanted it “all the time”. We went months and months without sex, and can probably count on my fingers the amount of times we had sex from the birth of my youngest to when my ex-spath left almost four years later (except for one summer when it was constant for a period of two months – a period during which he had lost an incredible amount of weight (gastric bypass) and felt awesome about himself – raring to try out his “new” body). He just couldn’t be bothered because he got nothing out of it that he couldn’t get on his own. As the thrill of his “new ody” wore off, his sexual behaviour became increasingly violent, and he only seemed to get pleasure from degrading me – depersonalzing the entire act. And I let him, out of depseration for his affecton, always thinking THIS will be the time that he makes love to me like he did when we were first together – it was better than nothing and he made me think it was our special closeness that allowed him to “be himself” in bed. There were other ways he chipped away at my psyche, my self-esteem, and other ways he promoted confusion, disorientation and so on…
By the time he left, I couldn’t even recognize the overt abuse for what it was – apologizing for whatever I must have done to incurr what I KNEW to be unacceptable behaviour, but had somehow come to think I deserved. I remember thinking once that I was “proud” of him because when he was angry he punched the wall and left a dent in the shape of his fist, and how lucky I was to have a husband with such self-control as to punch the wall instead of me. Oh My Gawd!
I could go on and on and on, but I’m sure you get the picture. It was the realization that regardless of whether he loved me or not (which clearly, he didn’t), it did not justify his treatment of me (or the children), and certainly wasn’t normal (especially in relation to the children).
And you are so right about not being in a normal mental state – the person I was before, and the person I am now, is SO different from the person I became when I was with him like being under a spell – and I can see it so clearly in his new fiancee. She is already accepting so many unacceptable things – already sacrifcing parts of her dreams in his defense.
How on earth do they posess such charisma?
GoingThroughTheMotions;
In the grand scheme of things, I am glad that a) I am gay and no children where involved; b) circumstances were such that I instituted NC long before I might otherwise have, thus keeping the relationship short.
“…none of them on their own is somthing that would cause you to end a relationship…’
Exactly.
BBE,
I can relate to what you said about the taxi driver incident.
It’s like they decide that everyone has the right to be angry except you. They don’t like to see you set boundaries because if you can do it to a taxi driver, you might do it to them. THIS IS A BIG RED FLAG.
Setting boundaries can cause controlling people (psychopaths or not) them to “lose it”—I remember the first time I EVER set a boundary for my egg donor. Dad had been deceased for a year or so, her health was reasonably good, she had a housekeeper to come in 3 days a week and do anything she needed or to drive her, and my own business interests had SUFFERED CONSIDERABLY to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars I had “lost” by not taking care of my own business because I was so busy taking care of my egg donor who at THAT TIME didn’t really NEED any help.
So I informed her I would be “available for emergencies” but that i NEEDED to get some of my own business done, so I wouldn’t be available i.e. to just take care of her “boredom” but if it was a serious emergency I’d of course drop everything and be there.
Her eyes SHOT FIRE and she said “Well, in that case, I just won’t ask you for anything!” (snorky tone of voice)
I said “That’s not what I’m saying, I said if you NEED anything I’ll be there but if you just want to go to town on Monday and it can wait til Tuesday and I have something I need to do on MOnday for myself, then we will just go on Tuesday.”
She looked at me, again, FIRE shoo9ting out of her eyes and said !WELL!!!!! WHAT IF I JUST *** WANT*** TO GO ON MONDAY!”
That was the time she first started trading me in for the P-WIFE of son C….AND THE TROJAN HORSE. Only a few weeks after I tried to set the boundary, she moved the Trojan Horse P into her house as a live-in slave. (she thought!)
NO, they do not like you setting a boundary for them…and if they see you too self assured or setting boundaries for others it sort of puts them on notice that you might stand up to them too.
Looking back though, I realize the “GAMES” that my egg donor manipulated me into for DECADES, the games of musical chairs of PERSECUTOR/RESCUER/VICTIM and ever changing roles she would assume and I would DANCE TO HER TUNE, all the while not realizing what I was participating in until after I had been “HAD.” (Sometimes not even then.)
Even now, she continues to play the “RESCUER” to my P-son’s VICTIM-role and to cast me as the “persecutor.” (What a horrible person I must be to want my darling boy to continue to spend the rest of his life in prison just because he is an unrepentant psychopath guilty of cold blooded murder.)
She also plays the “VICTIM-Role” with me as the “persecutor” in the community, because her only daughter has abandoned her and tried to steal her money, but it’s not entirely the daughter’s fault, though, as she is seriously MENTALLY ILL so egg donor (saintly person that she is) prays for the crazy and greedy daughter.
There isn’t any way to “handle” these people, to interact with them in a healthy manner. The ONLY way to opt out of the “games people play” is to HAVE NO CONTACT with them.
AGREED!!!!!
Skylar,
building on what you said about Behind-Blue-Eyes taxi driver incident:
“It’s like they decide that everyone has the right to be angry except you”
I think it can be taken a step further even, and once they are moving towards devlaue and discard, it’s like they decide that everyone has rights except you. As in, you have no rights at all, because you are worthless to them, therefore worthless in general. In fact, asserting your rights, however delicately, is cause for rage, anger, tantrums, sulking, manipulation, witholding, and whatever other punishment you might merit for having the audacity to waste their time and threaten the inflated sense of self they enjoy in their fantasy world.
As for your the next part:
“They don’t like to see you set boundaries because if you can do it to a taxi driver, you might do it to them. THIS IS A BIG RED FLAG.”
Wholeheartedly agree, but also think that refusing to back us when we are in need of support, even in instances where it is warranted, is not merely reactionary – as in they shut us down because they are fearful of us growing stronger, but also pro-active and deliberate and calculating – a subtle way they have of introducing self-doubt, and fostering the internal belief that there is something wrong with us. Because clearly there is nothing wrong with the crooked cab driver who is trying to rachet up the fair. It is we who are crazy.
: )
I read somewhere on here yesterday about sending ourselves a Valentines card. So here goes—.
If you were my Valentine
These words to you I’d say
You went and ruined everything
In your stupid selfish way.
We could have been together
We could have had a ball
Instead you chose to gamble
And now you’ve lost it all.
You told me that you loved me
Well that was just a lie
You said we’d be together
Until the day we die.
Your promises were empty
Your lies fell thick and fast
Guess what spath your hist’ry
I’m over you at last
Wishing you all a spath free Valentines day
Candy – You win the grand prize – look under your chair – see – he aint no where to be found…congrats and thanx for sharing your card. You need to go to work for HalMark….!
Cheers Hens. Goodnight.