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?
Many times growing up in that kind of environment makes us later think that is “normal” behavior and that we can expect that from others, I think it is part of what “sets us up” to be victims of later psychopaths. – said OxDrover.
Yes yes yes! This is how I lived all my life. Totally petrified to get anybody at all angry with me. Always either doing whatever possible to try and avoid it, or doing damage control, and always expecting the worst. Problem is tho, that sometimes it is true. My childhood best friend was extremely controlling. Would give me silent treatment if something didn’t go her way, and would be fine again as long as I was the one to apologize. I used to have to create reasons to apologize.
Then I had a boss very much like my father. Did not give me appropriate training then yelled at me when I made a mistake. Made me cry when I was pregnant.
I spent a lot of time as a young child, trying to analyze my parents and figure out what or who was wrong and why, and what could or should be done about it. Spent a lot of time alone outside as that was the only really safe alternative.
Yes, I was afraid to be at home with my parents, but still, emotionally/socially unprepared to be out in the world. Terrified of going away to college.
Into adulthood I’ve had many nightmares of my dad screaming at me and I will scream back – “just hit me and get it over with!!”
I told my husband last night that if he gets worse as he gets older, I’d rather just step out in front of a bus. I am not convinced he does not feel love, but I am positive he doesn’t know how to feel it appropriately, as his inflated sense of self gets in the way of it, and justifies the rage. He himself and his family have a difficult time being affectionate and demonstrative. But he’s never used it as a ploy to get what he wants, or to apologize after an attack – never apologizes. Though I have seen him do it in public to non-family members.
Bunny – I identify totally!
I’d like to know more about borderline PD. It does sound dramatic to say my mother is a sociopath. Especially to those who know her. They think she’s just so charming. All her craziness is due to the loss of my father.
I also wish someone would write a post about coping skills for people like me. My mother is a SP. But she’s going blind and we just learned that she may have dementia. How do we protect ourselves while making sure she doesn’t wind up on the street?
It’s been such a crazy year. My dad died. My mother was DXd with macular degeneration, had a bleed so she can’t drive (but did until we took the car). A couple of weeks ago she rubbed her eye so hard she dislodged the lens in her bad eye and tore her retina. That eye is now all blind.
My sister and I went to help my brother with all this. She seems so sweet and nice when she really needs help. As soon as the major crisis was over she was back to lying, back stabbing, blah, blah, blah.
The Dr thinks the only way she could have done that to her eye is if she wasn’t in her right mind. I think it’s possible that she could have done it knowingly due to extreme anger.
Anyway, guess I just wanted to vent a bit. But some coping help would be useful. It’s so stressful it’s so hard to describe. I feel so angry, but there’s no changing her, so pointless to talk to her. And I fear this is just the beginning now that she’s sinking into old age. I wish it were over.
I totally relate, Bunny. It is well over twenty years ago for me now, but I’m still dealing with the aftermath of that “special” kind of terror that no child should have to deal with.
Like most children of N/S parents, that terror has formed my life in such negative ways. It has impacted my choices, big and small, and rendered me helpless to form my own opinions, self-worth and boundaries. The terrorizing, even as an adult, continued until the day, eight months ago, I finally HAD ENOUGH and fought back with (gasp!) “I don’t care what your opinion is of me, Mom.” It was an epic moment: I was suicidal and she picked that particular moment to viciously attack me personally – not a normal reaction for any truly “loving” parent. Thanks to LF, I RECOGNIZED the dissonance, understood the motive and realized at that moment I had to be my best friend, and stand up for, protect, nurture myself the way I would do for anybody else I loved. Otherwise she’d have destroyed me WILLINGLY and would have gotten a lot of enjoyment from the sympathy and attention by her friends while she “grieved.”
You’d think I’d told her she was the spawn of Satan but, I guess to a control freak N/P, there is NOTHING worse than being told he/she is irrelevant by a former source of Supply.
In any case, that has led to unequivocable nastiness from her in an effort to force my will to bend and beg her forgiveness (no doubt with the requisite prostrations and IOU’s forever and ever for my wrongdoing in ever thinking her opinion didn’t matter). After all, why shouldn’t it? That tactic has worked for over forty years! However, I am now morphing it into No Contact on MY terms. That’s it, I’m done!
Already I feel so much better spiritually even though my life, financially and personally, is in absolute shambles as a result. I think I’ll really start being able to make some smart, healthy decisions for myself now that I’m not being influenced/pressured by the egg donor (thanks Oxy, for that great descriptor!) based on what will or won’t “embarrass” her or reflect on her.
there is not a label on this planet that could sum up the way these people actually successfully blend into society and maybe I’m a bit paranoid but when you start putting everything into “nutshells” I get nervous, the human species is a creative organism that constantly evolves, yet here we have the human equivalent of cancer cells as human, they destroy the good cells eventually ending in their own demise anyway…borderline personality is a clinical word that says nothing to me of the allure of these people, the charm factor the persuasiveness all the better to destroy you with…it really is red riding hood and the wolf “what big teeth you have” “all the better to eat you with” and the wolf was a borderline personality? I’m sorry but it just sounds so “We have it all under control because we can name things and label things and document it…its just a joke, these people are still destroying life…and getting away with it in a genius kind of way and we would need to start labelling, documenting and naming how we respond to them and what that says about us..
I guess the whole point of us “normals” putting labels on these folks is to really get to understand what has happened and, more importantly, prevent it from happening ever again.
Yes, it seems ridiculous on the surface that the people who have been damaged by the disordered pow-wow, trying to understand and heal through labels and naming, while the disordered themselves merrily go on their way, cutting a swath of destruction through other people’s lives. However, the only hope we, as a species, have of controlling this group is through knowledge.
It seems more and more people ARE picking up on it lately, though. Corporations, some financial leaders, even entire governments are referred to a sociopathic entities by the media because the label fits the behaviours. There is increasing pressure on courthouses, counsellors, social workers, etc., to learn the true meaning behind accusations of abuse and multiple convictions. It’s happening very slowly but it IS happening.
The more people that recognize the labels, the better. Maybe then people who have never personally experienced the gifts bestowed by the disordered can help put a stop to it before it really gets out of control.
Maybe I’m just being an optimist, though. It kind of stinks to think these people ARE the cancer of the world that we have no hope of getting rid of.
For those who care,
I think I got it. The Eggshells book on one of the preview pages, states that Borderlines feel feelings, like everyone, but they are very intense feelings, rapidly cycling and quickly changing. Because they are so incredibly intense, it’s hard to contain them. Psychopaths (APDs), like ThornBud noted, feel Hate, as the only viable emotion they are capable of genuinely experiencing.
it’s been few days without you all. I have done it on purpose, but felt lonely and came back. Thank you for sharing in this awful experience. I can’t imagine what it would be like had I not found this site.
Welcome back, PInow (Katya)
You were missed but it is true that sometimes we need a respite from even the wise advice and encouraging words. At least I do.
I’m glad to hear you “got it.” I’m rather positive my EX was not borderline but I have a friend who was married to one. Not fun! Are you perhaps thinking this “label” identifies your disordered person? If so, I hope knowing this new information will help you figure out the rest.
I agree with Jofary’s statement, “I guess the whole point of us “normals” putting labels on these folks is to really get to understand what has happened and, more importantly, prevent it from happening ever again.”
We, for sure, never want to go through this again!!
jofary
Yes its the steady march of my ex P and kind of unstoppable machine like way he sticks to his agenda regardless or in spite of the mayhem around him. He could fool anyone, his body language is a lie, he switches around like a chamelion. labelling him might help in describing him, spotting him, detecting him, avoiding him of course…i’m just despairing the fact he is still out there spreading poison…we all know him, there is a growing group of us…his sister, his mother, his father, his friends, his neighbours, his former girlfriend (still trying to get over him 3 years later, me (trying to forget him) 1 year after, As i said to his sister we can sit around describing him till the cows come home…and there is this almost resigned look in all our faces…we cant reach him!
PInow
Hate…the only viable emotion they are capable of feeling…thats the cancer cell element of them and the very very bad news about them…My ex P seemed to have put on a brilliant act…his sister agreed he is a master at lying without flinching. He stares with this completely trustworthy look, not a trace of sneering, very vulnerable open looking…and thats him performing the act and I defy anyone not to fall for it….its seamlessly convincing
ANewLily
I know that I could go through this again! in fact thats the only way I can go forward is to really know…yes this can happen again. I suppose like a fighter cell I have got to experience the cancer cell…let him destroy alot of me and then trying to group to gether with other fighter cells…his family and we are kind of circling him now…but how to deal with him? we attack cancer cells with radium!!! and they come back!!!! so we are all just talking about it…discussing various ways of approaching him..I would honestly say if he feels us closing in he will skip the country and go somewhere no one knows him..and start again…thats why maybe getting a criminal record from me might stop his ability to move around at least a criminal record is a signal to people….but every person i talk to i am scanning for psychopathic traits and even us “normals” have them as does society, we would not enable them otherwise…or treat animals and children the way we do…so I am going to turn it around in myself so that I am at least aware its in me too and thats where I can fight it best.