I do much couples therapy, and occasionally have had the interesting, if disconcerting, experience where one of the partners is a sociopath, or has significant sociopathic tendencies.
Unsurprisingly, it is always the nonsociopathic partner who is occasionally successful in dragging his or her sociopathic counterpart to counseling. The sociopathic partner, just as predictably, will have no collaborative interest in the relationship’s improvement. However, he or she may be sufficiently selfishly and manipulatively motivated to attend.
For instance, the relationship may offer conveniences the sociopathic partner does not want to see end. The nonsociopathic partner may have reached wit’s end and may really be prepared to end the relationship, arousing the sociopathic partner’s concerns that the gravy-train, as it were, may be over.
This can be the sociopath’s inducement to try to “patch things up with,” to “settle down” the nonsociopathic partner, in order to salvage the perks of the relationship. (The quoted phrases are meant to capture the sociopath’s condescending, self-serving thinking.)
The couples therapy environment provides little cover for the sociopath who, for this reason, will prefer generally to avoid it. The reason that sociopaths fare so poorly in disguising their sociopathy in a couples therapy situation is that, facing an aggrieved partner, the sociopath will struggle, and often fail, to produce responses of convincing sincerity and depth.
In other words, the sociopath’s fundamental defects of empathy and sincerity, in the emotional hotseat of couples counseling, are at risk of being flagrantly unmasked—sooner, typically, than in individual (court-mandated) counseling, where the sociopath, safe from the spontaneous challenges and disclosures of his or her abused partner, can more effectively misrepresent and deceive.
Couples counseling is inadvisable when a partner is a suspected sociopath for several reasons. Among them:
1) The therapist does not want to enable the belief (especially the nonsociopathic partner’s belief) that a nonabusive, honest relationship can possibly evolve with a sociopathic partner.
2) It is inherently humiliating for the nonsociopathic partner to make him or herself vulnerable to a partner whose only capable response to that vulnerability is exploitative. The therapist does not want to collude in this process.
3) There is the risk that the sociopathic partner, who is probably blaming and possibly vengeful, will use his or her partner’s complaints during the session as a basis, after the session, to punish him or her for having had the audacity to expose him or her.
This risk, incidentally, applies to any abusive individual in couples therapy. Narcissists’ abusiveness in this situation will arise most likely from their sense of entitlement—for instance that their partners owe it to them to always make them look, and feel, good (in private and public).
For sociopaths, exposure may be experienced as a sort of defeat: their mask is uncovered; their leverage as an operator—and with it their parasitical lifestyle—is threatened. Their game may be over. They may be mad.
One accidental benefit of stumbling upon a sociopath in couples therapy is the chance it affords the therapist (who recognizes it) to be a professional (and desperately needed) witness for the nonsociopathic partner.
The therapist may be in a position to provide the vulnerable partner, in subsequent individual sessions (after the couples counseling has been appropriately terminated), critical validation, information, and lifesaving support.
All of this presupposes the therapist’s ability to identify the sociopathic partner. When the couples therapist fails to identify that he or she is dealing with a couple in which one of the partners is sociopathic, the ensuing counseling process will undermine all of the nonsociopathic partner’s interests.
In failing to expose the sociopath, the counseling, by definition, will be abetting the sociopath. It will be structured on the false pretense that two reasonable clients are having problems with each other that they’ve co-created, which will not be the case. This false assumption will support the unequal, exploitative playing-field the sociopath has sewn all along.
For this reason—especially if your self-esteem has been battered in a relationship—I encourage you to explore assertively with a prospective therapist the extent of his or her experience with narcissistic and sociopathic personalities. Your inquiry should be met with absolute respect. A defensive response should rule the therapist out, as should vague, general responses, along the lines of, “Well, yes, I’ve worked with these kinds of clients. Is that what you’re asking?”
The answer is “no.” That’s not what you are asking. You are asking for a more substantive response, characterized by the therapist’s interest and patience to discuss in some depth his or her clinical background with the personality-disordered population.
(This article is copyrighted (c) 2008 by Steve Becker, LCSW.)
I once had a therapist who tried to seduce my boyfriend behind my back! When confronted, she had no remorse for what she’d done, and she accused me of having the problem. I do agree that there are a lot of therapists out there that have no business practicing. Some of them are not licensed psychotherapists and go by other labels. Sociopaths are everywhere, and they certain can hide under the auspices of psychotherapy. On a humorous note, does anyone remember Kimberly on Melrose Place? She ended up becoming a therapist to the same people she had tried to kill in the previous season. And they trusted her!
I would not recommending blindly giving your trust to any therapist. You should be able to check their reputation out first.
DEar “Lucy”
Sorry ou didn’t get any sleep, and aren’t sleeping today either. Been there and done that myself a few times, in fact, still struggling with good sleep on a regular basis (sleep apnea and all that entails) hopefully you can now get some good sleep. (((hugs)))) “Lulabye and good nite” (singly quietly) LOL
Your above post is very good, and specific and you seem to be back on your track of your usual wonderful posts. I do understand how his post could have triggered you though.
PTSD does make ME TEND TO BE defensive and easily triggered, though I am starting to get better since the EM therapy. I think you know that there are few people here that I think have more insight than you do, or that I respect more than I do you. ((((Lucy))))
Oxy,
Yes, i am uber-sensitive to this. I have been triggered. I am angry. I am angry from the past and I am hurt by the post. Yes, I agree there are PDIs in the field and they don’t belong there. Yes, I agree that it’s a waste to ever bring in someone who doesn’t want to be there. I don’t treat clients who don’t want to be there. What am I gonna do with them? Play checkers? Drink coffee and chat about the weather? And yes, it can be more dangerous to have the S/P in therapy where they can learn how to con people better.
You know how to infuriate an antisocial PDI? Keep the focus on them and give them no reaction at all. Last week one of them threatened to stab me in the back when I went out to the parking lot to my car. She said she’d paralyze me and wanted to know what I would do. My response, “Well, I assume someone would call 911 and I’d be taken to the hospital.” Her response, after a minute of watching her jaw clicking as she grit her teeth she finally said she would go to the hospital as well if she got hurt in the altercation herself. Hmmm…I didn’t ask her what she would do LOL. Next question, “So how does this correlate to what we were talking about?” Nice attempt to redirect the conversation. Didn’t work.
And what did I do after the session? Go to my supervisor to discuss how to end therapy with this client. It is a waste of my time. I have said it repeatedly. There’s nothing therapeutic about it. I am a pawn that she is trying to play with. Been there done that. It’s not a game of control here, I have better things to do than entertain a psychopath. Yet now if I terminate therapy will she then go off and kill random people as she’s threatened? I have no idea. You may see me in the paper being blamed for a dozen deaths because I couldn’t cure her.
So am I angry? On so many levels. I can’t help her. I can’t throw her in jail as she hasn’t done anything. I can’t hospitalize her because she knows what to say to get out of being detained and what would that hospital do but infuriate her more? But it’s my neck out there on the line if she kills someone. That’s the way this society functions.
So reading a post that says we put up with sociopaths in our personal lives, we fail to pretty much call a spade a spade and we fail to encouarge our clients to take care of themselves. Yeah that upsets me. Life is not that simple and it’s not that black and white. Are there some horrid therapists out there. Yes! But have some respect for thsoe of us who work our assess off.
In addition, as I’ve shared before, I was also diagnosed with PTSD in 2005. Why? Because I was the lucky therapist to walk in and find a dead client who had overdosed. Yay. So put a therapist down or even insinuate itmaking any generalizations and yeah I’m defensive. And especially in regards to psychopaths. If anyone had any idea of what we see, what we hear, what we witness, they’d stop before getting that last word out. I am good with people, I find myself very effective wtih my clients. I didn’t think I’d ever be able to counsel again after my ex. But I am. And do I defend what I do. You better believe it. You want to express an opinion go ahead just name it that…your opinion. Hell, name it your personal experience with someone. But don’t generalize.
So ,yes, there are negative aspects of the field. But my point is the same. Don’t ever come from a point of view which dictates what a therapist does or what they like to do or anything like that post. And don’t say it on a website where there are victims of sociopaths. Because you never know. You might run into one pissed off therapist who has been victimized like me!
takingmeback: I read your first sentence, about being sleep deprived and perhaps you’re in a bad way emotionally right now… And your focus on my comment about the people I’ve known who’ve had marriage counceling that went wrong…
I stopped reading, because I don’t think it would do either of us any good at all. I’m feeling very uncomfortable already. We’re clearly not on the same page. It feels like we’re in different volumes, written in different languages.
The fact that I haven’t been to marriage counceling myself is supposed to mean I have no clue about suffering, enduring the bad actions of ruthless people, that I don’t understand what it’s like to be mistreated, used, abused, or taken for a ride?
It just means I haven’t been to marriage counceling with an abusive spouse.
Way to jump to conclusions. 😉
Did it occur to anyone I might have the opinions I have now BECAUSE OF the trauma I have endured?
Ox:drover:
If you asked anyone who knew me, they’d all tell you I constantly say “Pride goes before the fall” – it being one of my favourite sayings!
Just because I don’t post all the details of my past personal humiliations & tragedies on the world wide web, doesn’t mean I haven’t been living life, experiencing suffering. It also doesn’t mean I’m at odds with people who currently do talk about what’s happened with them.
It just means there’s reasons nowadays that I don’t tell everyone I come into contact with all the intimate details of the hardship I’ve had in my life immediately upon conversing.
One of the big reasons would be that I do my best to no longer act on that feeling the need to make everyone else understand what I’ve been through, what I think, and what I feel. This is my personal decision.
But I have to say, that “shenpa” got me by the tail today. 😉
My first impulse would be to pour out all my trials & tribulations, the things I’ve seen, the things I’ve experienced… the people I’ve known, the wrongs done to me… to try and make you guys understand.
But that’s not really going to get me anywhere. I know that now. It won’t cure the uneasy feeling I have of feeling like I’ve been painted a villain. It won’t make anyone else stop feeling pain. And it won’t make anyone be nice to me. 😉 And most importantly, it won’t make me feel any better about being misunderstood in the first place. I just have to feel that until it passes.
And believe it or not, for those of you currently suffering from a recent serious blow… there will come a time when those of you in the very depths of suffering will get through it, the pain will subside, and it will come to the point where it’ll take more effort to suffer than to not suffer. I believe this to be true. It’s my experience, at least.
Of course there was a time when I felt that if I allowed myself to stop suffering, stop railing , I would be diminishing the importance of something. Like if I allowed myself to heal from wrongs done to me, that I would be, in effect, condoning the wrongs. I realize now how that thinking didn’t help me, and didn’t really change anyone else or change any other circumstances either. Indeed, it made things worse in some ways.
The post on forgiveness is especially relevant to this, for me.
Taking me Back and Oxy… Howdy. i certainly can not keep up with all the post now that I dont have internet at home. I think it was a positve move for me. I have a question? I have been seeing this therapist, she is very nice and mild and meek. She told me she was a athiest and her life dream was to be on oprah and talk about being a therapist. Any way that is all good and fine. But this is my question. Iwant to talk about the past 3-5 years of my life with Mike. I have a life full of crap. But I have dealt with it. Intellectually I know why and how and who and what mike is. I know who I am. I don’t live my life ruminating and complaining about the past. Most of the tome I am very focused and happy. I have said goodbye to the illusin, the actor that played his part so well. No more sad songs for Mike. But the unbelieveable extent that he decieved me criminal. I have ptsd or I am in shock with the truth of what has happened. I don’t want to drive one hour to my therapist and listen to meditation tapes with the lites out. I want to fuckin talk about what happened. She just says things like , it’s amazing what bad people make good people do. I say a physciatrist, and he got it he validaterd me. He siad Mike (BPD) would just as soon kill you as look at you. Am I out of line?
and oxy I will take you up on that bet. Mike will never knock on my door again….
Dear sweet TAkiingmeback,
I do understand, that’s why I had to retire after the PTSD from my husband’s death, I just couldn’t do it any more. I really do know how hard it is for you to work with these people and have PTSD as well. I was babbling, and I can tell you HOW HARD IT WAS for me to be “on the wrong side of the clip board.” I am just glad I did have sense enough to realize I couldn’t go on and that I COULD retire (I was 57). I took a big financial hit for retiring so young, but at the same time I didn’t want to be responsible for someone else’s life, and It was a wise decision. Also, I know with all t his other stuff that went on later, I would not have survived if I had also been distracted by work—I wouldn’t have had the strength to not only leave my home for my safety but to abandon my job as well. I put too much in it. I know that you do too.
Sometimes I felt like I was walking on shards of glass barefoot, because I couldnt’ help people and I wanted to. It is frustrating.
After my husband’s death I was so “hair trigger” that I went off on someone who told me (meaning to be kind) “I know how you feel.” NO, YOU DON’T KNOW HOW I FEEL.!!!! Another sweet friend of ours came to the house (drove 7 hrs to be there) after my husband’s death and that night she kept chattering and chattering (anxiety, not knowing what to say) I couldn’t focus with her chatter and I kept asking her to stop talking to just be quiet and go to bed. She then went off on another chatter session about how she had offended me and oh, sorry, etc. and I WANTED TO KILL HER if that is what it took to shut her mouth. I really did want that very minute to kill her if that would make her shut up. An “over reaction”? YEP. Then, I felt so guilty for being so angry and over reacting. I think I ended up comforting others more about the death of my husband than anyone did for me.
I do understand how easily PTSD allows us to be triggered, and boy have I been. It is getting better now with the EM therapy and with just healing in general. I’m gaining back my “reserve energy”—whatever you want to call it.
The mammoth amount of strength you have to continue to function and to interact with these people in a professional setting is so admirable. I do hope though that you are taking care of YOU as well. Your response to that P was absolutely great! They really don’t know what to do when you don’t react to their threats.
My P-bio father threatened to kill a man once if the man didn’t do what he wanted him to illegally and the man (I admire him so much) just shrugged and said “Well go ahead.” I wish I had been a fly on the wall, because I can only imagine his reaction when the man showed no fear and wouldn’t cave in to his threats. My P-bio-father forever after had a special hatred for this man. He also had a forever after special hate for me too, because I wouldn’t cave in to his demands. I think that is in many ways why my P-son has a special hate for me, because I did thwart some of his schemes when he was a teenager, by calling the police and turning him in when I caught him with stolen goods. Back when I was still talking to him he kept telling me that I “shouldn’t have done that” and I kept asking, “what would have been a better alternative”? He didn’t have an answer, but the next person who “ratted him out” was the girl he killed in 1991. They don’t like to be thwarted. Or redirected either.
Get some sleep, my friend, or take a walk and burn some of the adrenaline off and then sleep.
My son C will be here in 2 hours and I’ll be spending as much time as I can with him. I am going to be gone part of the weekend doing “private duty” nursing with a friend who had knee surgery Thursday and whose wife is a traveling nurse and has to leave for her job early in the morning. But I will be back and forth from their house to here during the weekend. When I am gone, it will give him and my son D time to be together too without me interfering with their “guy talk” LOL
takingmeback,
I have read your last few posts, and I wanted to speak up on your behalf. I do not feel it is the job or obligation of a therapist to diagnose a person he/she has never met. I think it is an added bonus to a client if the therapist has gone through the same thing. It can sometimes make the therapy more effective. It can also be counterproductive, if the therapist still has unresolved issues in that area. Ultimately, the focus of therapy should be on the client herself (or himself) and helping empower them to set their own limits and draw their own conclusions. The client is always free to seek other support and opinions. I talked to 2 or 3 counselors and a variety of different people when I was looking for answers. I even googled “sociopath” which is how I found this site.
I think clients don’t always have reasonable expectations of their therapists. But this can also be part of the therapy, in helping the client understand why they feel this way toward the therapist (as you’re no doubt already aware of). Sometimes this can be where real therapy starts.
When I was talking about bad therapists, I was referring to the percentage of them who are legitimately screwed up and should not be helping people.
Oxy, I slipped back into angry mode again LOL. I admit I’m very defensive regarding this topic. I don’t make any bones about that. I have been triggered. Ugh!!!
But in forgiving myself I struggle a lot with even realizing when I saw anything. I can easily look back now that I’m not tangled up in things. But honestly, this man was not a stranger to me, he was respected by our mutual friends who knew him better than I did. He was in a good profession, had a nice family, at least for the time I spent with them. He volunteered a lot of his time, had friends, etc. But the catch was the fact that he had lost his wife to Leukemia less than a year before. Being long distance, knowing that information, I truly believed he was depressed. When he said he was self-sabotaging I believed that as well. I thought perhaps he felt guilty in our relationship after losing his wife. He said it was sad she had to die for him to be happy and to have the chance to be with me. He said it was an awful marriage until just before she got diagnosed (like a year before she died) made my heart go out to him. Why wouldn’t it? I thought I made him depressed because we were so happy together. I wanted to let him go and give him time but I loved him so much. I thought it was me being inpatient not allowing him to grieve and go off and do the things he needed to do for himself. But I started to feel alone in the relationship. I blamed myself for reacting to that and he always had a great excuse for why he needed to do something for himself. I thought he needed love and attention and support.
The more time we spent together the more I started to see negative moods. I didn’t understand the irritability and asked questions. He got upset with me. I thought he was just sensitive talking about his loss and that’s why he clammed up. Then he was always saying bad things about his late wife and he said maybe it was easier to be angrier at her than to cry. That makes sense in grieving too. But he detached from me. I know now that he was never really attached emotionally. The gaslighting I didn’t see until later. He focused on the fact that I didn’t give him enough space and time to figure himself out. He focused on the fact that I did break up with him and hurt him. But nothing from that point on made a difference.
He withheld everything from me that I asked. Always needing more time. Then I found out he was lying to me. Telling me one thing and telling his sister another or his online blog buddies something different. We were states away. I had no one else to check in with. Then I realized that He talked about marriage right away and he would daydream outloud about our life together. He named our children. He made plans of when we were getting engaged. He planned our trip to Puerto Rico where I’ve always wanted to go (yeah, never made it). He told me he was moving in with me when he came back from climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro (a previously planned trip with his ex g/f). He gave me the one-carat Tiffany diamond ring telling me it will stay on my finger until we were engaged by the spring. He did all this.
And when I got scared because he seemed to be drifting away I got punished. But I didn’t see that then. He cried a lot. Always following a good time together. I thought again the he felt guilty, like survivor’s guilt. It was always tears over work or his house that he hated where his wife died. T made make sense.
I’ve shared a lot that he did that I now see as sociopathic that I don’t need to recall here. I don’t question his narcissism. I don’t question his own words that he thinks he’s antisocial. Or his words that he never forgives, has no empathy and has never really loved anyone. The contradictions, all it. All of it so quietly blended in with was could have been real. But in the moment I saw a sweet man who never yelled at me, never raised a hand to me and who was often crying. I felt like a total bitch for hurting him any more. But in the end, it was never about me. All that kept the focus on him and the rest is history.
So Oxy, am I to blame for not seeing something? Am I to blame for making mistakes? I broke up with him and I tried. I never let him off the hook with his inconsistencies. But it didn’t go on for long. Just long enough to witness one complete face-to-face Dr.Jekyll/Mr. Hyde. That’s when I broke down. He scared me and started showing signs of paranoia. I lost touch that night. I came home called my mother and said that I needed help. I had believed I was the horrible impatient one causing him grief. But what I saw that night wasn’t a grieving widower and something clicked. I didn’t know what it was. That was the beginning of the final chapter.
Do you know when I was there that night, I went to use the bathroom before heading home and I saw the ring he had given me sitting on a table in the hallway. I took it Oxy. He later asked me why. I don’t know why. When I realized I had it the next day I waited a week to tell him what I had done. I live two states away. I had to figure out how to safely get it back to him. I was so ashamed. I don’t remember a lot about that night. Something clicked and them the lights went out. It scared the crap out of me. I was terrified.
The night I returned the ring I emailed him to tell him about it. He laid into me online like he had never done before. Said I wanted him to come to my house and set himself on fire in front of me. Accused me of hating him and wanting him dead. He said a lot of horrible things. And I had loved him. Even then. But it was over. There was no turning backk. I knew I had to get away and was scared about my mental health but I was lost.
That night I overdosed on the mood stabilizer, anti-depressant and anti-anxiolytic they had given me. The mood stabilizer had caused me to crash into a deep depression pretty quickly less than a week before. I had called the doctor for help but I didn’t get a response. I was afraid to stop the medication because I truly thought I was going insane and didn’t want to get worse.
So I emailed my ex, told him I was bringing the ring back and I’d put a note on the passenger’s seat of the car with his address in case I didn’t make it. I couldn’t do it anymore. It wasn’t about losing him in the end. I didn’t want to live because I lost myself. I couldn’t function anymore. I had taken the ring and couldn’t figure out why. I wasn’t present anymore. I felt like I was already gone. I was no good to anyone and most certainly not to myself. I just wanted some peace.
I called my mother on the way there. I kept telling myself I was saying goodbye. A part of me said no way. But I knew. Then I hit the state line of Maryland and PA and started taking pills. That’s the last thing I remember. I woke up in the hospital ER.
In the hospital was the first time someone suggested that he was a sociopath. It still took me several weeks until someone gave me information on his aliases and all and it finally sunk in. A few months in and out of denail and then acceptance. He was believable. That I have to say. But the more truth that piled in the worse reality got.
That’s the story behind the deception.
Stargazer: I never watched Melrose Place… but you made me think of the therapist on the show Eureka – sci-fi show about a cloistered secret town of brainiacs – like a big think tank with contracts with the government or something.
The therapist character is CREEPY. She gets up to some really sinister behaviour…
I gotta think that this is art imitating life… It’s that it’s happened to enough people – bad experiences in one of the worst possible situations to have a bad experience – when vulnerable in therapy … and it’s worked its way into pop culture.
I’ve never had anything worse than an unproductive therapist personally. Yet just hearing about the woman whose therapist was FLIRTING with her abusive husband during marriage counciling… that sort of story sticks with you. I’m sure it’s not something she’ll EVER forget, even if she left her husband and found the best therapist on earth for individual therapy. I can’t forget it. And I didn’t even know the woman – just read about it on a forum.
Oh, and the worst part about that was – other people on the forum had to tell this poor woman that the therapist was doing something wrong. The poor woman was beating herself up with self-blame thinking that she was out of line for feeling jealous, that it’s not healthy to be upset about that, that she should feel okay if the therapist has a good flirty relationship with her husband. This husband had her so beaten down with twisted ideas about what’s appropriate or acceptable… she didn’t even realize the therapist was acting unprofessionally.
And believe me, there was no mistaking it.
There was touching involved – and I mean caressing of forearms & knees – between the husband & therapist, not to mention the giggling. That was what bothered the woman the most. The therapist giggling with the husband while she was constantly on the verge of tears.
And this poor wife thought she was just being inappropriately jealous.
The whole story shook me to the core.
It was so bad that at times I wondered if it was all some internet hoax. You know, someone making it up. But the woman’s posts seemed so genuinely hysterical… I wondered if I just WANTED to believe it was all made-up.