Unfortunately clinicians and researchers often tend to interact with a specific segment of our society and to develop their own ways of describing the problems of the people they work with. For example, there are professionals who work with clients who have “personality disorders”, there are professionals who work with criminals in the justice system and there are professionals who work with perpetrators of domestic abuse/violence.
Each of these three groups of professionals has their own lingo for describing very similar people with very similar patterns of behavior. Each group also has a different “theoretical orientation” or view of the problems of humanity.
Because those who work with family abusers often lack experience with sociopaths in other settings they do not know that family abusers are sociopaths.
Where does that leave you, a victim or family member of a disordered, abusive individual?
To spare you the task of sorting through these three distinct ways of looking at the person who created havoc in your life, with the help of The Abusive Personality, I will present here more on the work of Dr. Dutton a psychologist who understand the personality profile of abusers.
First of all, I can say with confidence that individuals who abuse and victimize lovers, friends and family members are personality disordered. As Dr. Dutton points out on page 8 of The Abusive Personality, “Because IPV (intimate partner violence) occurs in a minority of relationships it cannot be explained by social norms. In fact, normative acceptance of IPV is low in North American populations. .. When people act in a chronically dysfunctional manner that violates the norms of their culture, their behavior is attributable to a personality disorder.”
Dr. Dutton makes a compelling argument that the “abusive personality” stems from what is known as borderline personality organization. According to psychoanalyst Otto Kernberg, adult and adolescent patients with antisocial personality possess an underlying borderline personality organization. Attachment theorists also suggests an association between borderline personality disorder and antisocial behavior or even antisocial personality disorder. Dr. Dutton acknowledges that many perpetrators are violent and antisocial outside the family and many appear to completely lack empathy and remorse. All chronic perpetrators have an extreme inability to empathize with their victims and seem to only express remorse as a means of maintaining the relationship. These emotional deficits are considered to be diagnostic of sociopathy.
According to Dr. Dutton, both male and female abusers experience cyclical changes in personality that relate to abuse perpetration. These cycles, have interfered with understanding the personality of abusers. The cycles happen because abusers experience a great deal of negative emotion and they blame this negative emotion on those closest to them. After they “blow off steam” by abusing loved ones, they experience a temporary relief from these negative emotions. During the time they “feel better” they may seem like model spouses and parents.
In my opinion, there are four other characteristics of men and women who perpetrate partner/family abuse that have interfered with our understanding that these abusers are psychopathic and are truly sociopaths. These are:
1. The degree to which they cling to those whom they abuse.
2. Their high level of anxiety and other negative emotions.
3. Lack of abuse of strangers and non-family members.
4. Lack of criminal arrest for other offenses.
I want to address each of these characteristics by asking then answering the related questions people have asked me over the years.
Question #1 Does the fact that my ______________ keeps calling and doesn’t want to lose me mean that deep down he/she really loves me?
Answer#1 NO! Although sociopaths are not capable of love they are very social and most often want to count themselves in as part of a family, extended family and friendship network. If they are alone how will they be able to do what they do best which is abuse and control people? Also if they are alone, how can they use people to get the other things they want. Especially as sociopaths get older and their ability to charm others declines they tend to want to stick with those they have taken advantage of in the past.
Question #2 My poor _________ is just depressed/anxious/angry about being mistreated and abused as a child. Won’t my love and reassurance help him/her get over it?
Answer #2 NO! If your______ has a long standing pattern of abusing you and/or other family members it means something very important so listen. It means he or she equates abuse with being in a relationship, just like you equate love and caring with being in a relationship. Since that is true, your love will only make the person more abusive.
Question#3 My ___________ only abuses me and no one else so it must be my fault. Right?
Answer #3 NO! Your __________ would abuse others if he/she thought he/she could get away with it and will abuse anyone else he/she feels close ties with. An intimate relationship brings out abusive behavior in people who have a borderline personality organization.
Question#4 My _____________ has never been arrested can he/she still be a sociopath?
Answer #4 YES! Antisocial behavior is behavior that hurts other people. When this hurtful behavior is perpetrated by someone who lacks empathy or remorse it reflects psychopathy/sociopathy.
In summary, I recommend that all mental health professionals who work with the victims and family members of sociopaths read Dr. Dutton’s book The Abusive Personality. I also recommend another of Dr. Dutton’s books, The Batterer a Psychological Profile for victims of domestic violence. Order it through Amazon today with these links:
The Abusive Personality
The Batterer a Psychological Profile
Does anyone want me to try to explain what “borderline personality organization” is?
Is there anyone who still has trouble accepting that partner abusers are sociopaths?
But their Fear is a weekness that they do not want to show or Deal with! That is why they are so roten!
Is it commonplace among forum users to be labelled mentally unstable by abusers? My 2 abusers have used the mental health trap on me accusing me of having ‘antisocial personality disorder’. This was their only weapon when I called police and authorities about the neighbour’s antisocial behaviour (she harrassed my elderly parents for years, it only stopped after she got out the mental health card).
This is how I came to know the term ‘PD’, ‘borderline’, ‘ASPD’ etc. Ironically I have to thank my abusers for sneaking in these terms. They were the catalyst for researching abuse/serial bullies etc.
Dear Witsend,
As I think you know, many psychopaths ARE bi-polar, and many ARE ADHD, as well. Just because you have one doesn’t mean you can’t have all 3. The Trojan Horse Psychopath had all THREE, he was Bi-polar, ADHD AND psychopathic (official diagnosis ASPD).
He WAS treated for the bi-polar and the ADHD but it didn’t stop his PPD from being full blown! It didn’t stop him trying to kill me, having teh affair with my DIL and trying to kill my son C.
As far as I know, my P-son has no other diagnosis for mental illness, depression, bi-polar or anything else. But he is a full blown P.
What difference if he has 1, 2 or even 3 or 4 other diagnoses? The bottom line is the ONE that makes him dangerous to others as an abuser? Even if you medicated the others successfully (many, if not most, times they will refuse medication as they actually like the feel of the bi-polar mania) but you still would not be able to infuse a conscience or the ability to give or receive love. You would not be able to get them to focus on something besides themselves.
At what “age” you recognize that your son has a SERIOUS unfixable problem, (a personality disorder) whether he is treated or not for the other problems that are treatable, doesn’t make a difference in the TOTAL OUTCOME.
I realize how difficult it is to ACCEPT that someone so “young” is beyond help, beyond hope, and believe me, it took me 20+ years to realize that, but ALL the signs were there by puberty, the time the REAL “manhood” gets there, not just the artificial “age” that our society puts on “adulthood.” In most more primitive societies, adulthood went along with puberty, adult responsibilities and accountabilities came with physical maturation at whatever age it happened. Our artifical designation of “adulthood” at 18 or 21 is just that, an ARTIFICIAL designation.
A young man here can go to war at 17 with his parents premission to join the service, but he can’t buy a beer or cigarettes legally. He can vote at 18 (it used to be 21) and youths much younger than 18 who committ heinous crimes are being tried and punished as “adults.”
Yet, we also know that the frontal lobe of a young person’s brain doesn’t fully mature until after 21, maybe up to age 25.
Each society uses a different criteria to determine who is responsible (legally) and held to the standards of “adult” behavior. I don’t think there is any artifical standard of age that fits every situation. I know kids who are “little kids” at age 15 and others that are ADULTS by 13. There is a huge variation in emotional and physical maturation in kids.
I had a new insight:
The institution of slavery was P-behavior sanctioned by society. I see it most clearly in the need to CONTROL others.
In both narcissism and slavery, the need to suppress the other person’s will and deny their personhood is obvious. As we have all experienced, the only thing the P’s like better than servitude is complete submission of your soul to them.
Slavery has existed since the earliest days of humanity and only been eradicated in most countries very recently.
How much easier it would have been to keep living with eyes closed and allow people in the south to continue keeping slaves. After all, the slaves were not even from this country, they were not even considered real “people”, they were “others”, different from us – scapegoats. In fact, the bible was often used to justify slavery because slaves are mentioned in the bible.
Instead of living with eyes closed, this country bravely went into a bloody civil war against the narcissistic beliefs of the slave owners. So, that gives me hope. By opening a dialog, creating analogies and exposing narcissism for what it really is – slavery – we can create public awareness and outrage.
The sad part is that it took thousands of years for humanity to open its eyes to the evil of slavery. How long before they see that the root of slavery was narcissism? How long before they see that eradicating one manifestation of this evil did not make the evil go away? Only when we recognize this evil IN ALL OF ITS MANIFESTATIONS can we begin to put an end to it.
No, Kim, I’m not picking on Pinky-Doodle again. I only mean to say in all of its HUMAN manifestations.
No Oxy, I’m not calling you a P for eating steak either, we all have to eat. Just as long as we don’t eat people’s souls for lunch!
Skylar,
You are right, and to take it a step further, look at WWII, where hitler “dehumanized” some segments of society (not just the Jewish people) as less than human, as vermin.
Look at 9/11 where the terrorists dehumanized Americans because we do not share their religion, we are “evil”—we dehumanize them, and go to war with them.
Almost ALL I think of man’s “inhumanity to man” is based on “us vs. them” thinking. The Native Americans preyed on each other, tribes went to war against each other for resources and “fun”—-it was us vs. them thinking.
I think a certain amount of “us vs. them” thinking is almost genetic in mankind. When we humans lived in small bands it was probably necessary for survival of the band, especially when resources were very limited. It was kill or die. I think that tendency lives on in narcissisticly inclined people even today.
The history of humanity has been written in BLOOD since we crawled out of the muck or left the garden of Eden (whatever your beliefs are) and I don’t see it changing much in the future. Some of us will see things in a more “civilized” manner but yet even we tend to “profile” others by age, race, sex, dress, etc. we “form opinions” on first meeting someone by those external things, which many times are not correct, but it is a fact that we DO this.
Here on LF we are learning to “profile” psychopaths by how they behave in order to keep ourselves safe from their attacks. We are learning to look for the “red flags” that indicate (or might indicate) that they are dangerous people and we need to avoid them.
Psychopaths have learned to “profile” US so that they know who it is SAFE TO ATTACK and who will ‘fall for” their abuse and who will not. Just like a school yard bully doesn’t pick on the strongest kid in the group, he picks on the weakest who is less likely to fight back.
Good analogy with slavery.
ps. Keep in mind the American Civil War was NOT faught to free the slaves, but over “state’s rights” vs. the Federal Government’s powers. Lincoln “freed” the slaves well after the war started as an economic blow to the South. Many early “fathers” of our country, including Jefferson and Washington owned many slaves and saw nothing at all wrong with fighting for THEIR OWN LIBERTY while holding others in bondage.
At the time blacks were “slaves” in the south, the north was treating the working poor worse than slaves because they had no value once they were starved or worked out. Factory Child labor was very common once the spinning equipement was developed, and children as young as 6-7 were worked 12-18 hours 6 days a week for not even enough to feed them enough to keep body and soul together.
As each new immigrant group (Irish, Italians etc) came here, they were the newest “bottom rung” on the social ladder and were treated as disposable labor.
In “Fatal Shore,” the history of Austrailia’s “criminal” immigrants, these people, many of whom were NOT criminals by any standard used today, were treated horribly by the political faction in power in England. The psychopaths who were the “prison wardens” were socially acceptable and what they did to these people is as bad as what happened in Germany during WWII. It is remarkable that any survived.
The psychopaths among us (humanity) are in my opinion, responslibe for 99.9% of all the problems of the world and our or any society. If all we humans had to deal with was cancer and AIDS and such as that, it would be a paradise on earth compared to now. Consider: no hunger, no crime, no child abuse, no rape, no robbery, no crooked politicians, no jails, and everyone working for the good of society.
Oxy, Yes, and even many diseases would be less frequent because stress is a component of cancer and autoimmune diseases. The stress of living with a P is life-threatening and financially devastating.
But I don’t want to bring killing into the analogy because many wars are fought over land or ideology. My point in bringing up slavery is that it is EXACTLY like kidnapping. What happens in a relationship with a P is exactly like that too, only more sinister because you aren’t even aware of what is happening. The lies are your shackles. Both killing and slavery use dehumanizing for justification, but many narcissists are very carefully avoiding outright killing so that they can say they are innocent. I want to focus squarely on denial of personhood, what that is and how it happens so that it is recognized in every manifestation: racism, misogyny, child abuse, kidnapping, slavery, scapegoating, etc…
I do know that the argument over state’s rights came up later, but I think that was a (typically narcissist) diversionary tactic on the part of the south. The Abolitionists were called that because they wanted to abolish slavery. They got attention from the North because money was at stake. Slavery was cheap labor and gave the South an unfair advantage. I get that. That’s why the financial COST to society has to be part of the argument for change. $$$ is the only thing people get.
Fascinating thread of comments, gang… thanks to all who shared.
Erin B referenced the craig’s list ads and it reminded me of a disturbing website that I searched once looking for the S (this was long after we broke up and the angry side of me wanted to “catch him” & “expose” him… gave him way too much of my brain rent free!) Anyway, it was called ashleymadison.com and the slogan there was “life is short;have an affair.” It was an entire site dedicated to helping MARRIED/committed people find someone to have an affair with. The”traffic” that came to my false member account within minutes and days was beyond disturbing…
Like Erin ( i think) said I don’t give a hoot about someone’s sexual orientation… but boy do I have my opinions on people who cheat, gay or straight, as a lifestyle choice… and by that I am not talking about people who unexpectedly find themselves in an affair, due to unhappiness, or being mislead in the partner’s intentions, etc., I mean those who chronically cheat as a lifestyle choice, either with repeated affairs, one night stands, or stranger sex encounters… and in every case putting their unsuspecting partner at risk. that website made me sick.
well, gee that was a useless soapbox kinda rant, wasn’t it?!
With regard to Oxy’s comment about how they “profile” us, in hindsight I am “amused” at the fact that the S targeted me at a time when by by all appearances I was pretty vulnerable… 3-4 months post divorce, single, professional mom with three kids (2year old twins!) and an alcoholic ex in rehab,selling a house by the skin of my teeth to avoid foreclosure cuz the ex wasn’t paying at the time… only to be quite surprised when my confident, outgoing, got it all together real self “re-surfaced”. Actually I wasn’t ever truly submerged, it likely just looked that way to the S given the circumstances… Joke was on him, huh?! 😛
BTW, I can’t go in to details here in public forum but I am on alert these days cuz he’s unfortunately in a position to instigate something with me if he so chooses….and interetstingly while I maintain NC and potted plant stance with him, he seems to have changed tactics to make it appear as if he’s givng me no contact – turning his head when HE sees me, etc…. BUT AT THE SAME TIME maintaing his and his family’s presence in my “turf,” and making a choice that from my vantage point arouses my suspicions of his motivations/intentions. I know this likely doesn’t make sense, but really the point is that, while I do nothing to provoke him, he is going to be one sorry SOB if he chooses to screw with me in this context.
My best friend says he won’t do anything, he just likes to have the appearance of being the one in control or may truly not care, etc. given he just tied the knot with his new victim and is preoccupied with being prince charming. I, on the other hand, know S’s don’t like to lose, like to win publicly, and may reappear in our world without warning as the need suits them… for sheer narcissitic how dare YOU leave ME purposes, or to cause chaos/ have a cause or a battle to win/detract from the dysfunction that resonates in his world… and he ALWAYS needs a cause to fight for. Or, even just because he KNOWS there’s one person out there (lucky me) that knows too much/knows the truth about who he REALLY is… yep I believe that fact alone could instigate him now, in the days to come, or in years to come… and thus my continued vigilance and belief that you NEVER underestimate an S/P!!! But, as I said I am watching, waiting, and taking precautions/making strategic choices so that should the need arise… I am prepared
OMG, I sound like him fighting a war, LOL! Am gonna have to give my tactics a fancy sounding name like “Operation: You’ve met Your match” Or better yet. how ’bout “Operation Don’t You Even Dare F*** with Me, You @.......#$%& Borderline Narcissiopath!”
Well on that note, LOL, thanks for reading & apologies for monopolizing the thread with such a long post. Had to get in my lovefraud fix and therapy now that I am back to work, I guess. Thanks for letting me spew forth a bit here, friends!
Hugs,
Hecate’s path
Oh yeah… I forgot to add a book recommendation – which was actually why I referenced Oxy’s comment originally and in respons eto the Q’s about how do you “know” who someone is when you first date them etc.
Hihly recommend “Profiling Your Date – a smart woman’s guide to evaluating a man” by Caroline Presno.
Even has a nice little section on narcissism and a blurb on how medications and birth control pills could affect how women “choose” men/mate selection based on some newer…
research…
Just for the record this book hasn’t helped me find a good man… but it, and my experience with S, of course, have sure helped me to “spot” the multiplicity of Mr. Wrongs!!!
uh yeah… that should say:
HIGHLY and BASED ON SOME NEW RESEARCH.
I think my inability to type coherently today is a sign I need to take a break from posting today, LOL! best be taking my hands off the keyboard for a spell now, and go have a spot of tea… not! It’s off to do laundry… ugh.