All conscientious people, when there’s a problem in a relationship, take a look inside eventually to see where their fault or responsibility lies. In a good couple relationship, you might have a fight over something, but then at some point, you talk about it and get a different understanding of where your partner was coming from, which can change your perspective. You might realize you reacted because it pushed some sort of button in you, perhaps some experience from your past, or you misinterpreted something. In this interchange, both people in a mutually caring relationship should eventually take responsibility for their part of the conflict. Through resolving the conflict you should end up growing closer, and this ultimately can lead to healing whatever old wounds or misperceptions you are over-reacting from.
Could it have been my fault?
Of course, this never happens with sociopaths. They are incapable of taking responsibility for their part in a conflict, or understanding you if it differs from their perspective. So, we who are responsible look to ourselves to figure out what’s not working. It’s what we’ve been taught.
If you’re still involved with one, you might be wracking your brain to think of some way, some approach, to get through to him/her. You might be feeling so frustrated because you can never make your partner understand you, or how their behavior affects you. And so you probably take on the responsibility, because it really has come down to you. You’re backed into a corner. You have committed your love to this person, made a life, a family. Somewhere inside a voice, perhaps a panicky voice, says, “This is not going well!” You may ask yourself, how can I make this better? How can I be better? How can I get through to him/her?
Maybe you have already decided to leave or have left the sociopath. Even then, when it’s clear how this person you loved violated your trust, tricked and betrayed you, you somehow keep bringing fault back to yourself. What was I doing there in the first place? How could I have been so weak? Why did I stay so long? How could I have not protected our children and just left? From beginning to end, we could be torturing ourselves with these questions, and be consumed with feelings of shame and guilt.
Who’s to blame?
My question is, why do we find it so easy to blame ourselves? It may be partly a conflict between an empathetic nature and assigning blame. Blaming others goes against the grain. Our consciences have us take responsibility for our behavior when things are going wrong. Some of us were raised to take too much responsibility in our families, which just makes it familiar to do. And, if you had children with the sociopath, a parental guilt of a particularly hellish sort can make it nearly impossible to let go of the regret of not having protected them from the sociopath.
Let’s not forget that sociopaths, by their destructive victimizing behaviors toward us, are transferring their own shame (which they are not consciously aware of) onto us, and therefore blame onto us. We are left feeling stunned, confused and immobilized. We do not know what to do after we’ve experienced the manipulations, the anger, the control, the dismissing, the shaming and blaming and what I call, “Jedi mind tricks” from the sociopath. Our selves get repressed and get lost.
It’s a bit like being in a one-person cult. You’re initially love-bombed and subtly, methodically, brain-washed and broken down over time. It literally is that insidious. The healthiest individual would not have defenses against that, once taken in. It’s like a trap that you find yourself in, that you didn’t see coming, but now you’re hanging upside down in a net and it’s going to take time to figure out how to break free.
Accepting my vulnerability
What if we assigned blame where blame is due? What if we accepted our naivety that made us fall for someone who was devilishly artful at presenting him/herself as a wonderful person? What if we accepted our “vulnerability”? People in intimate relationships are supposed to be vulnerable! What if we accepted our own “weakness”? If we consider loneliness or the longing for a partner a weakness, then the whole world is weak. To be loyal and committed, to fight to make a relationship work is the only thing a loving partner would do. Love trusts, love is open and vulnerable. Love never gives up. You did all that love should do, and can feel good about that. How dare your partner discard that love or use it to his own advantage! A normal caring person would have treasured that love.
What if we even accepted that some harm may have come to our children as a result of living with a sociopath? We can’t always protect our children from harm like we think we should. So many things are out of our control, including the behavior of another person. But we can focus on the love we gave our child, and the good intention of trying to keep the family together while we still had hope.
I did the best I knew how to at the time
What if we accepted that we made a choice we thought was fine at the time but turned out to be wrong? We are fallible humans who make mistakes, and hopefully grow from them. What we can and perhaps have done, which is very good, is to recognize we don’t want to live this way anymore. If you’ve gotten out, it is very good you have gathered the strength and resources to have done it. This obsession with blaming ourselves, going round with, “I should have done it sooner, I shouldn’t have been a fool, etc.”, is only an exercise in beating ourselves up. Let’s not carry on what the sociopath has been doing all this time! Let’s stop the beatings!
Maybe you did it at exactly the right time, the only time you could have, considering your circumstances and where you had to get psychologically to recognize who you were with. Now you do know what a sociopath is, and now it is appropriate for holding yourself responsible for not falling in with one again. And, now you can support others who have fallen prey to their carefully constructed webs.
Oh and as far as logistics, the spath texts me when he’s 10 minutes away (and boy did that take months of training) and then again when he’s in front of my house. I don’t see or talk to him during our exchanges. Works just fine, and NO CONTACT!
Maizey I’m 10 years out this June. It is a matter of rebuilding you, the core you that hasn’t been stripped bare, rebuilding all that self confidence that has been stolen from you and recovering your ‘Joy of life’ as someone mentioned earlier in their poem. Although it may not seem it at the moment, it can be a wonderful opportunity to rebuild yourself as totally new person. I hope that doesn’t sound trite.
I was a burnt out shell and remember saying to my mum I don’t know who I am any more. Over the last 10 years I worked on self development and explored all sorts of things and am now a lot stronger and more aware. I learnt a lot about myself and why I had attracted him to me – turns out he wasn’t the first so I was repeating a pattern. This was the only way I could deal with it, to take something so horrendous and turn it into a positive, otherwise I would have disintegrated. In a way I’m grateful to him as I’m a totally new person, a better person, which I wouldn’t have been before that.
I’m now at the stage where I grab opportunities, even though I’m scared, I say yes to things I previously would have been to nervous about failing at, I push my self to experience stuff I’ve always dreamed of doing and so on. Without surviving 10 years of living with an spath, I wouldn’t have learnt how to be me 🙂
Good to see you back freemama! Glad things are going well for you!
Freemama and I_Survived, it is VERY good to “see” you both!!!
And, it’s good to read of some strong recovery – it always gives me inspiration and encouragement!
Brightest blessings
dorothy2, as you said, mine did not take money as such but ruined my career bit by bit, initially with violence, later more covertly.. because he knew that was the most important thing in the world to me..
dear I_survived_The_Bastard, same here.. I too seem to have attracted 2 spaths in my life, the more dangerous one following very close on the heels of the first; in fact, I was recovering from the first when the second entered my life….still stuck there 20 years later…really thank Donna Anderson and this site for all the insight, encouragement, courage I got…God Bless Donna and the members here..
Stronger, even though the spath didn’t take your money in the same way that the exspath defrauded me of my finances doesn’t mean that he didn’t RELIEVE YOU of your sources of income by ruining your career. Taking away what was of importance to you was the primary goal, but the collateral damage was that you not only lost an important career, but also your source of income.
Fraud is fraud and damage is damage. The bottom line is that the spath deliberately, intentionally, and with malice aforethought took something away from you WITHOUT CONSENT.
Brightest blessings
I was always wrong, and it was always my fault. And she reinforced that with everyone she spoke to, including the neighbors (behind my back). While I am not without fault, I tried to own my mistakes but it was hard to own her’s too.
And I had no idea she was planning my demise, and the demise of our relationship, before we even met in person. She had a pattern and followed it precisely, right down to fabricating a story to the sheriff’s department and lying in court. And everyone believed her.
Now I am stuck with the aftermath, fired from my job, house in default, living off what is left of my savings, bank accounts drained, car taken… some pretty tough lessons. But I think I am beginning to claw my way out of the hole.
Garfy4321, it’s good to “see” you after such a long time!
Yeah….financial carnage is terrible because it removes any ability to “do things” that can assist in recovery. I’m glad to read that you’re beginning to feel some sense of recovery.
I can’t carry the weight of anyone else’s choices or decisions on my shoulders, and I’ll NEVER allow someone to make me “feel” that I can, or that I even SHOULD.
Brightest blessings to you
Maisey-
You are absolutely correct about your child’s take on his father if he had no contact with him. He would have a longing that would shape his character and your relationship. And the fact that you see your child as “nothing like his father” is GREAT news!
“Psychopathy” is genetically acquired. That does not mean that every child of a psychopath will become a psychopath, but that they can have the mix of body chemistry that could produce that affect. On the other hand “sociopathy” is aquired through social interaction during the formulative stages in a child’s life.
Whether the perpetrator is a psychopath or a sociopath, is not important to their victim. Their ability to harm the people around them is very much alike. They each will exhibit little to no empathy or remorse. They will connect with emotions that will disappear at their whim.
Some think that a Psychopath will demonstrate a more detrimental, ghoulish behavior than a Sociopath, but it is the origin of the disorder, not the extent of the behavior that denotes the difference.
How ghoulish they become could be associated with their childhood, but even the most foul psychopath could have a normal-seeming upbringing. It is thought that psychopaths who are raised in stable homes will tend more toward white-collar crime, lies and deceit, while a psychopathic child from a physically dysfuntional family may tend more toward physical violence.
In both pyshcopathy and sociopathy, the predator posseses little empathy, which is the basis for conscience.
While to a victim, there is little relevance whether the harm comes from a Sociopath or a Pyschopath, as a mother, it is helpful to know. Just as you would take precautions against any genetic disposition toward a physical ailment that could effect your child, it is important to protect them from developing the emotional disturbances they may be genetically wired for.
A child of a psychopath may display lack of empathy at an early age. They are the children who enrage others but feel very hurt when someone retaliates. They are unable to connect the dots between cause and effect. They’d be inclined to laugh when someone falls out of a chair and hurts themselves. They may walk around an injured child rather than coming to their aid. They may be impulsive and lack the moral reasoning to prevent “accidents” from happening around them.
As the parent who is not “disordered,” with a child who is “at risk,” it could be extremely important to stress recognizing “how other’s feel.” It is also helpful to convey the concept that doing helpful things for others is rewarding. Engaging them in volunteer work could be a foundation for self esteem. And pointing out the good feelings that resulted from kindness would be helpful.
I gave birth to the son of a man I believe to be a psychopath. His father committed rape-by-fraud and then abandoned the child that resulted. I was not aware of the signs of psychopathy in my son as he was growing up. He seemed to manage his sense of abandonment and I took him for therapy at several points in his life.
None-the-less, as an older teen, he realized how extraordinarily wealthy his deadbeat father had become, and spent the next few years cozying up to him. Eventually, he turned to me and said, “Now that I’m independent, what do I need you for,” and I have not heard from him in almost 5 years.
Life doesn’t give us 20/20 hindsight. While there is nothing I can do to go back and breathe caring and empathy into my child, I hope to impart the importance of this characteristic into the minds of folks whose children could benefit.
At first I was totally bereft at my loss, but as I began to understand how it all works, I was able to make peace with it. I miss the son he could have been, but not the son he is. I hope, by supporting the development of your child’s empathy, you are able to avoid the crush of estrangement that could otherwise lay ahead.