By Joyce Alexander, RNP (retired)
Psychopaths do a great deal of damage to their victims. The fact that there are people who are aware of what they are doing and choose to “look the other way” or to “sit on the fence and do nothing” enables the psychopaths to continue to abuse their victims. If the bystanders would stand up and assist the victims, even acknowledge that they are being victimized, the psychopaths might not be quite so successful.
One of the most famous of these enablers who chose to look the other way was a man named Pontius Pilate, the Roman prefect in Jerusalem in AD 33. When Jesus was brought before him by the Jewish leaders, Pilate stated that he found “no fault” in Jesus, yet he gave Jesus over to the mob to be crucified.
To signify that he had no responsibility for the death of Jesus, Pilate had water and a basin brought and he literally “washed his hands” of what the mob intended to do. Yet, he did nothing to stop it.
The dictionary defines the word “minion” as “a servile follower or subordinate of a person in power.” These people also enable the psychopath to continue to victimize their prey by either helping the psychopath, or by simply “looking the other way” as Pilate did. Minions can also be very active participants with the psychopath in the victimization of the prey.
Examples of doing nothing
A famous case of people knowing a horrible crime was being committed and doing nothing was the murder of Kitty Genovese outside her Queens, NY, home in March, 1964. There were 38 witnesses who did nothing—not even call the cops when they heard her scream for nearly a half hour as she was repeatedly stabbed on that fateful night.
A more recent example of people doing nothing is the Penn State case of Jerry Sandusky’s pedophilia. The head coach and the president of the university knew what Sandusky was doing and chose to do nothing, which allowed Sandusky to continue to abuse young boys sexually for more several years.
Of course not all “enabling” of psychopaths are as “serious” as the crucifixion of Christ, the molestation of dozens of young boys, or the brutal murder of a young woman. But the help and support offered by others does enable psychopaths to “get away with” much more than they would otherwise.
Tattling and telling
We teach our kids not to be “tattle tales” and kids learn not to “snitch” on each other. When my kids were little, I tried to teach them the difference between “tattling” and “telling.” “Tattling” was saying “Johnny called me a doo doo,” but that “telling” was saying, “Johnny is playing with matches and setting fire to the curtains.”
I don’t support gossip or tattling in any way, but we must be aware that when we keep our mouths shut and allow evil to flourish, we are contributing to that evil.
My guess is that most of the people reading this on Lovefraud have experienced people being enablers (either actively or passively) to the psychopath that abused them. People either knew the truth and turned their backs, or actively participated in helping the psychopath accomplish their abuse.
Blame the victim
Psychopaths are also usually very good at the “smear campaign.” When the victim is finally trying to break free, they smear the name, sanity and reputation of the victim to everyone who will listen. Unfortunately, too many times the victim is blamed for their own victimization, or labeled crazy or vindictive for trying to protect themselves. “Yeah he hit her, but she was so mouthy, what can you expect?” Or “well if she’d been a better wife, he wouldn’t have needed to cheat.”
The hurt for the victim becomes double or treble when the enabler or fence sitter is someone the victim counted on for support, such as friend, neighbor, co-worker, relative or even the police and the courts. When someone you have counted on to believe you and validate you, instead turns their back on you, in addition to the trauma from the psychopath, the pain may be simply overwhelming, leaving the victim feeling totally abandoned.
No help
I can’t even imagine the horror that Kitty Genovese must have felt that night as she cried out in terror for someone to save her. Yet, I know that many victims of psychopaths have cried out to people that they expected would help them, would support them, only to find a total lack of concern.
The news reports today are filled with stories of people who “knew” and yet did nothing, or worse, helped the abusers. Whistle blowers are still persecuted relentlessly. Those are facts of life.
For what it is worth, though, even if no one else believes us, it doesn’t change the truth or the facts. While we would appreciate support and validation from others, we don’t always get it, even from those we hold most dear. Learning to validate our own knowledge of the truth may be the closest we come to receiving support.
In my own situation, essentially my entire family, immediate and extended, have either actively assisted my psychopathic son Patrick, stood by silently while he tried to harm me, or washed their hands and didn’t even bother to listen. It hurts when those we have depended on fail us, but it is not the end of the world. In most cases, and we can move on. We can learn to validate ourselves and what we know is the truth.
Fortunately, there is Lovefraud, and the many bloggers here who do support and validate us in our healing journey. I hope that each person here will feel free to reach out to others for support when you need it, and that you will reach out to extend validation and support to others who need your support. That’s what it is all about.
God bless.
Eralyn
Before my daughter met her father at age 10, she would ask me “do you think my daddy loves me?” In my mind I would think “he loves you every other Thursday for about 10 minutes!” Every single time I thought that. It’s so strange how much I believe it’s true. His definition of love to me is a fleeting thought he believes love to be from seeing someone else like a father playing with his child at the park or on TV.
Then again, maybe I am giving him too much credit for that 10 minutes twice a month……………
Truthspeak
Darwinsmom, spot-on. Boundaries and NC aren’t about making other people feel our pain or experience some sort of consequences for their actions.
Sunflower, that you are being accused of being a “bad person” doesn’t preclude that you need to suddenly squat into a defensive posture. Spaths ALWALYS trash-talk their victims. In my case, I’m a bitter, old, jealous, dangerous bitch to everyone that was a mutual friend between the exspath and me. Yeah, it sucks the big kielbasa, to be sure, but the only thing over which I have ANY control is myself, my actions, and my choices.
Yes. Do nothing in defense, and I’ll try to explain why this is the best course of action. If I even allow discussion about the exspath, divorce, etc., then I’m providing FUEL for addicts of drama/trauma, along with words that can easily be twisted, warped, and deliberately misinterpreted to paint me as the violent loony that I’ve been accused of being. If I keep my mouth shut, my boundaries high and thick, and put the immediate HALT on any discussion about the exspath experiences, I am clearly and at decibel level 97 shouting out that I will walk away without a backward glance if those boundaries are tried.
Darwinsmom is 100% spot-on that FEAR is a driving force, here. It was the same with me, Sunflower – fear of rejection, fear of disapproval, and fear that I wouldn’t be “loved.” Well, my fear-based decisions resulted in precisely the opposite of what I really deserve. What I deserved is nothing within the same galaxy as what I allowed and tolerated because of my fears.
I worked at a huge equine ranch for about a year. We did a lot of the emergency care, ourselves – it cost a LOT of money to have a vet come out to stitch a laceration or treat something that we had the ability to do, ourselves. There was a mare that developed an enormous abcess from brushing against something that punctured her skin. The skin closed up around the puncture, but the wound had become infected before the skin closed up and infection created a painful abcess.
At first, it was unclear why the mare was so uncomfortable. There wasn’t anything immediately visible. On closer inspection, I found a bulging spot on her flank exactly where the girth lay to keep the saddle tight around her. So, my job was to excise that abcess, drain it, clean it, pack it, and keep a close eye on it as it healed.
Toxic people are like abcesses. They aren’t immediately identifiable as something obvious, but there’s a level of discomfort that they cause. When we excise that negativity OUT of our lives, we leave a space that we fill in with ourselves – our own growth, power, control, and healing. As that happens, a better quality of people begin to enter our lives, by proxy, because we won’t ALLOW toxicity to infect us, again, if we can prevent it with boundaries and “No Contact.”
Brightest blessings
Truthspeak
Darwinsmom, I think that you’ve really put it together: we don’t care that THEY don’t care. Academically, I know that the spaths that I’ve encountered do not care, and never have. The only thing that they “care” about is supply.
I’m feeling more and more that I don’t care that the exspath doesn’t care – if that makes any sense, I’d be amazed.
Yah….I have NO use for enablers, no matter whom they might be. No Contact, and a barred door for enablers as much as the spaths.
Brightest blessings
Eralyn
OxD,
I laughed when you used the Ted Bundy example. When my mom would start explaining away my fathers awful behavior, I would say, yes and someone even loved Ted Bundy as there is good in everyone but they fried him didn’t they?
My friend of many years said he had never heard anyone defend themselves as much as I did when speaking to my mother or father. I knew what he was saying but I just couldn’t get how I kept ending up in those shoes. It’s very exhausting. I did however make a rule with myself that my feelings or emotions expressed were not up for debate. It’s probably one of the healthiest statements I made. I have also taught my daughter this from day one. Her feelings are hers and nobody has the right to say argue with her about them. They are entitled to feel their own feelings and different from yours but that’s it.
I really like the statement, feelings are not facts. This is funny how simple it is and how I would have probably gone my whole life without coming up with that thought……..
Truthspeak
An interesting thing happened when I cut the ex-convict female sociopath out of my life. Nothing. She never called to ask why I wasn’t speaking with her. The only thing that she HAS done is to try to spread wild rumors about my divorce issues, and any attempt that I might make to defend or explain myself would only VALIDATE her assertions.
I’m letting sleeping dogs lie and the spaths can have each other for as long as they can stand one another. And, the minute that I decided that she was as toxic as they come and that she was OUT, I felt a weight lift and a dark cloud departed. Enablers are JUST as toxic as spaths – they do the spaths’ bidding and accomplish damages without the spath having to even lift a finger in effort.
Truthspeak
Eralyn, I’d love to take credit for that, but my counselor taught me that. When she said that to me, I literally stopped breathing for a few seconds. Holy shitballs, it made sense to me! LOLOL
That’s my mantra, now. Keeps me out of the anxiety vortex most of the time. 😀
Back_from_the_edge
O MY: so right on darwinsmom!
THANK YOU FOR YOUR POST AT 3:30 pm!!!!
Thank you for all do you as teacher.
I wish “I” had YOU for a teacher.
Discipline is not a bad thing.
Children need to learn how to ‘hone’
themselves before entering the big scary world.
THANK YOU darwinsmom…
You are special and priceless to the world.
Dupey
Eralyn
Truthspeak,
You can take credit for passing along such great information for another to use. 🙂
It’s wonderful for so many who have experienced these types to share what has helped them while validating so many of us.
We are all so intelligent in areas but maybe not in others. I really don’t get some things that seem to others as simple and basic and it is so frustrating (probably for them as well as me)but then I am intelligent in other ways as we all are. I think it’s difficult for others to understand how certain things are just not computing. I ask my friends questions like, what do you see in my mom? I used to see her as a woman who walked on water and had a gold carpet to heaven and then BAM I questioned where she’d live eternity but it was well into my 30’s. She’s the kind who never has emotional highs or lows. That’s what gave me the evidence I needed to believe something was up with her. Everyone around her was popping off with extreme emotion but there she was…. The puppet master.
darwinsmom
Yes! Yes! Yes! Thruthy! Nothing happens when you cut them off. No more drama! Just blessfull PEACE! Having NOTHING happen with these people is a pure BLESSING!
Hugs, Dupey! It seems we are all finding revelations in each other’s words tonight!
darwinsmom
Sunflower, I don’t mean control or punishment in the same way as spaths do… not in a malicious manner.
It’s not abnormal to try and apply some control over their environment. It’s part of being human. We wouldn’t have built cities, houses, grow food if a part of us does not try to control our surroundings. Trying to exert some control can be done for protective measures… We build houses and get jobs to pay for the house to have some type of security against the elements: against the cold, the heat, the sun, the rain, etc… You can see a house like a physical boundary we set up against the weather outside. The difference between a house and giving someone a head’s up on a boundary of ours by telling them “Dont do that.” is that when we sit in our house we built against the rain and the cold, we don’t expect the weather to stop raining or stop being so cold. We know the weather will do whatever it will do: rain, cold, heat, sunshine, …. And when we sit inside, we don’t spend our time all day at the window to mope about the fact it’s raining outside. We will notice it sometime and we will think, “I’d love it more when the sun’s out,” but we don’t end up feeling bad for ourselves when it doesn’t. Instead we turn our back to the window and the weather outside and do something else and we forget all about the rain.
When you go NC it’s like that house we build agains the weather. It’s a protective measure, but we cannot expect the these people to suddenly drop their disorder or their age old drama behaviour, their act, just because we shut them out of our emotional and mental home. They’ll do what they’ve always done: raining, hailing, howling, storm outside to whomever who cares to look and dares to go out in such a dog’s emotional weather. It’s alright to glance outside and think “Pity they’re no sunshine in my life, but just dreadful rain.” But there’s no need to go beyond that glance. Just let them rain all they want outside, and enjoy the cozy hearthfire with a mug of chocolate milk. If you do go out and tell them to stop raining, then you’re piling too much responsibility upon yourself.
It doesn’t make you an awful person at all to try to teach them to stop. But there is a lesson for you to realize you can’t make them stop. You can only stop them from doing it TO YOU, by not having them in your life.
Hugs 🙂
And TOWANDA on not letting yourself be entangled in another guy like the ex!!!