Is every violent person a sociopath? Are all sociopaths violent? What is the relationship between violence and sociopathy/psychopathy? These are the questions we will think about here. I welcome your comments and stories.
In his book “On Aggression” Nobel Prize winning ethologist Konrad Lorenz expressed deep concern for the human race. He pointed out that other social animals have “releasers;” these are inborn signals that turn off aggression. For example, when wolves fight, if one animal turns over on its back, the fighting generally stops. The purpose of aggression in social species is simply to enforce dominance, so when the victor gets the signal it is dominant, the fighting stops.
Lorenz said screaming and crying act as releasers for humans as these tend to inhibit aggression. The problem for humans is that we have created weapons that enable aggression to occur at a distance so the natural releasers don’t have a chance to turn it off.
Yet we also know there are those who enjoy seeing other people suffer. In these individuals there is not only no mechanism to stop aggression, there is also a positive incentive toward violence. An extreme example of this is serial killers who seek out victims to enjoy the act of killing them. Some people are fascinated and mystified by the behavior of these serial killers, but actually the behavior is pretty simple to understand. I’ll explain it using two other pleasures with which you are familiar- eating and sex. These are two examples that illustrate the way the pleasure system works.
First, let’s consider eating. The purpose of eating is to nourish the body, but eating is also much more than that. Eating gives us pleasure and can even reduce anxiety. Why it is that eating feels good is likely connected to our need to overeat during times of plenty. Eating during times of plenty allows us to become fat and thus protected from famine. If eating stopped once the body was nourished, we couldn’t get fat. So to keep us eating more and more, Mother Nature made it an enjoyable act.
There are different was to get pleasure from eating. Foods that are sweet, sour, fatty, or meaty all stimulate different nerve cells. People also differ with respect to the pleasure associated with different tastes. Some people don’t like sweets very much and some people are repulsed by meat.
Now consider that sex is the same as eating in many ways. The “purpose” of sex is procreation, but it also strengthens social bonds, is pleasurable and reduces anxiety. We are prone to becoming “oversexed” just as we are prone to becoming obese. There are also different flavors of sexual pleasure.
The dominance system is another instinctive behavioral system just like the feeding and sex systems. The pleasures associated with the dominance system come in different “flavors.” One “flavor“ or pleasure associated with this system is winning at a competition. Whether the competition is a chess or baseball game, winning is a pleasure.
In social groups the dominant members are the “enforcers” as they get to administer rewards and punishments to others. Helping people can actually be a function/pleasure of the dominance system. Similarly, enjoyment of hurting others is also part of dominance. The alphas get to punish those who don’t do what they want and they take pleasure in inflicting this punishment.
What we see in some sociopaths is a type of “fetish” of the dominance system. Just like some people are excessively turned on sexually by underwear, some sociopaths are excessively turned on in the dominance sense by violence.
If you think about what I am saying you will see that there are two pathways to violence in sociopaths. The first is an immediate impulsive response to threats to their dominance. The second is a premeditated seeking out of the pleasure associated with hurting. Both of these occur and the presence of one correlates with the presence of the other because an over active dominance drive underlies both.
Lack of empathy is important to the development of the enjoyment of violence because a person who lacks emotional empathy, lacks the releaser Lorenz talked about so there is nothing to turn off the violence. But it is also possible that some sociopaths have a modicum of empathy that is drowned out by the pleasures of dominance.
The take home message for you is that if you are involved with a person who is preoccupied with dominance, control and manipulation you have to wonder what violence they are capable of. It is like the sexual pervert, you may only be seeing the tip of the iceberg. We just do not know how to pick out those sociopaths who lead secret lives in which they kill. If you know a sociopath who has a track record of violence, please assume the person is potentially very dangerous.
Style and tobehappy,
just picking up an earlier thread from above – regarding how to tell when you’re dealing with an spath/n.
i’ve notice a few things that can test them, red flags that can tip us off – and in the process, you test your own sense of self-worth and strengthen it.
we all know from our past experiences that what feels like love can be the very opposite. many of us attract spaths and Ns because of our upbringings, that conditioned us to believe lies, and give our love away for pretty much no real love in return.
the questions I asked myself many times is how do you know when someone loves you, in a healthy way? how do you know when someone who makes you feel good is actually doing it for the right reasons?
Some of these things are just based on personal experience and may sound silly, but they helped me detect what i was dealing with.
1. watch a movie with your potential beau. pick one that makes you feel a wide range of emotions on a significant level. I like the film Rushmore, because you need empathy, and a benevolent acceptance of human weaknesses in order to ‘get it.’ Anyway, watch for a perplexed and/or disdainful look on your guy’s face throughout. Ask him questions about it after, to see if he got it. And a smart observation by another person who posted to LF a while back is that you shouldn’t show your own emotions during the film. Don’t give you potential any clues to the film’s emotional meaning. Laugh in places where things aren’t funny. If he laughs then too, you’ve probably got a live one on your hands!
2. Can he say he’s sorry when he’s wrong, can he name/identify the wrong behavior, and correct it? Will he admit to being wrong about something when you point it out to him. Many Ns will apologize when they’re in trouble, just to smooth the situation over, but none of them will admit to their actual fault (at least in my experience). they’ll apologize for something else, something closely related, but never actually the thing they did wrong and need to correct. Do the issues get more complicated, or cleared up when the N/Spath ‘apologizes’? Can he resist telling you that you’re ‘too sensitive’, or ‘misunderstanding the situation’? If he can say sorry when sorry is appropriate (and that’s where your exercise in self-worth comes in), then he’s okay. If he dances around the issue, never actually coming into contact with the issue you feel is important, then it’s a huge red flag. the beauty of this one is that you can test him on something small. Ns won’t even admit to a small infraction, the tiniest of wrongdoings. They may say ‘sorry’ to get past the uncomfortable situation, but they will never own up to whatever caused the problem.
3. Say ‘No’ to something that he wants you to do. Say it in a nice way, or a firm way, whatever you think is appropriate to the situation. Watch and see if he respects your wish/boundary, or if he plays on some emotion in you to get you to try to do whatever ‘it’ is. If you know your weakness is to feel guilty about things, for example, watch and see if he tries to exploit that. An N or Spath will have figured out what your weakness is, and will try to use it against you. The self-respect exercise that this one incorporates has to do with you setting boundaries that you know make other people uncomfortable, but still doing what’s right for you (after having gotten in touch with whatever that might be).
4. Ask him about what he loves most. He may have glib comments about loving his children or whatever, but that could just be a co-dependent thing, a sham used to maintain social legitimacy, etc., so dig deeper. Can he talk about loving someone/something that involves emotion, rather than stuff that just boils down to control, sex, power, prestige? Ask innocently and in passing, or he may catch on to you.
5. Get angry about something when it’s appropriate (again, this is a chance to exercise some self-respect, which involves being angry when you or someone else is mistreated). See how he handles it. Does he tell you that you’re wrong to feel what you feel, does he try to tell you how to feel, or does he say something that is consistent with empathy?
6. Ask him how his last relationships ended? Do you hear him saying he did something wrong, contributing to the failure? If what he says he did ‘wrong’ really only amounts to him not seeing what was wrong with the other person, you may have an N on your hands.
7. Ask him for help with something that’s important to you, when you know it will require him to make some sort of small, even very very tiny, sacrifice of what he wants. Is he willing to give a little for your sake? Make sure you’ve set up a request that will get him NOTHING that he wants in the immediate future. That said, my last potential N boyfriend wanted nothing more than to do me favors, shovel snow, buy me chocolates, clean my pots and pans. So the key, as I saw it, was to ask for something that he really didn’t want to do, that would require him to sacrifice something he didn’t want to sacrifice. In my case, it turned out that asking him to say he was sorry about something that was out of line, in order to help resolve an argument, was more than he was capable of.
8. Tell someone that you suspect of being an Spath something that causes you fear, worry, anxiety or anger (but you don’t have to give any of your ‘real’ buttons away) – see if you don’t find them at the bottom of a situation that’s been designed to upset you. A very simple example, since i”m not being so clear on this one — I told my Spath colleague at work how much I love Indian food, and how much I didn’t like the Chinese restaurant around the corner from our office. A short while later, we were interviewing someone for a new job in our department. My Spath colleague invited everyone, but me, to take the new-hire out to Indian food. And in front of everyone, so that she would still look nice, she said to me ‘our new hire loves Chinese, so I set things up so that you two could go there for lunch tomorrow.’
I’ve since learned to feed that Spath deliberately confusing information about what I like and dislike, what’s important to me and what isn’t. Though I avoid telling any lies (it’s tricky!).
I mention these as small things anyone can do to get a decent amount of information about a person. I suppose lots of people who aren’t full- blown Ns or Spaths can exhibit these behaviors out of simple immaturity and selfishness, but every time I’ve caught onto an Spath or an N in my life, these little kinds of things have helped me.
Just thought I’d share that one for fun, and would love to hear what other techniques people have used to catch on to the frauds in their lives.
Psyche
Hopeforjoy,
Thank you. I think part of the problem is my steadfast faith in people, because as Christians, aren’t we suppose to have faith? I am a good listener and have an open mind, but I’m thinking that isnt such a good thing to have in a deal like this either. I think I just need to find the power and strength, if he contacts me again, to say “NO” and not believe him AND make that belief stick. Right now it just seems odd to have to think that way.
Hopeforjoy,
Just a quick note – grief and general sadness are natural in this process. at some stage, there will come a day when you realize you care less and less what other people realize, and more and more about what YOU know, what YOU understand. A hard part of that is when the people in your life, who are used to you caring too much what they think, looking to them for validation, realize that you care more about what you understand than what they understand, well, they may end up disliking you a LOT for it. I’ve had to ‘divorce’ myself from many former ‘friends’ who only liked me because of my insecurities. They liked that I used to look for them for validation of my own feelings and realization. Getting the things that matter to me out of the hands of people who liked me to be weak and exploitable was important in this process. I had to give up some things as pure losses, just to divorce myself from some of the people who were abusing me (and they were no small losses, they were things I had invested more than 10 years of round-the-clock work in). What can I say, I was so distracted by doing my work that I didn’t notice how evil people were embedding themselves in my life?
Anyway, not sure that applies to you, I’ve only seen your one post. Hope it helps. Glad you have a counselor who gets it!!! That’s really something.
Psyche
oops, sorry Hopeforjoy, i spoke too soon. if your counselor is telling you to stay with him, she really doesn’t get it. yikes. maybe she’s just saying it to help you see that there’s no real option there, in an indirect way, but that’s dangerous. – Psyche
Oh, yeah, also, I was also always left wondering what happened and I was either ignored or the question was evaded when I would ask. Must be part of their plan…but to do it with no guilt or remorse is just baffling.
Guys,
I think its really simple. You ask yourself if you are happy and fulfilled by the relationship with this man. If the answer is no, then you have to decide what YOU are going to do about it.
Continuing as you are is one option. But only one.
Its up to you.
It really doesn’t matter if you can get a diagnosis. If they really are a SPATH, chances are they are going to end up in jail anyway and the diagnosis will be done there.
Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to decide what makes your life the kind where you get up everyday and get out of bed happy to have your feet on the ground. Only you can make it so.
There is no magic answer or insight. YOU have to make decisions and follow through. Until and unless you do, not even Providence can move forward with you.
The man who doesn’t sleep here anymore was the most romantic, sensitive, caring, apologetic, interesting, charming person in the world except that he was lying, legally married and dating as well as a fugitive and is now serving Federal time as a repeat offender.
If somebody is going to fool you, they can for a while, but not long term and when you realize what is true- then what?
Its your life, your call, your move.
When YOU know, you must decide.
Heartsick,
I know some people have recommended having compassion for Spaths, and while I don’t agree with that per se, what about having compassion for yourself? God gave you wonderful gifts, to become who you are supposed to be in this life. If you throw your ‘pearls to the swine’ (by pearls, I mean your finest qualities, including empathy and love) to your Spath/N, to abuse however he wants, aren’t you just mistreating the gifts God gave you? Aren’t you lacking compassion for yourself if you allow yourself to stay with an abuser? How can an Spath heal if you keep putting yourself up for abuse. That actually makes his bad patterns stronger, and what’s good in you weaker. These are just rhetorical questions, and I don’t mean anything personal by them since I don’t really know your situation.
If you have faith, and I am a person of faith too, could you agree that the only person who can choose to heal and improve your Spath is your Spath himself? The state of his soul is between him and God. If you allow him to mistreat you, you allow him to keep compromising his own soul.
The state of your soul, your life, your God-given treasures are fundamentally your responsibility. To really make something beautiful of your life, you can align yourself with people who have respect for you, and your soul, as well as for their own souls.
Anyway, there’s that as a btw. Got to run.
Take care,
Psyche
Psyche,
Your list is enlightening. I notice he parrots comments I make about movies, if I keep them to myself and watch his reaction to sad moments, etc. I might be surprised. He doesn’t flinch when there is violence or torture, (like on 24, I cover my eyes when Jack starts torturing), and he can watch movies like Apcolypto (Mayan beheading in it) and not flinch.
Movies like Titanic are so sad, never see him get sad, our 14 year old son won’t watch it again because he feels so bad about the people that died. This is a really interesting point, I’ll be more observant.
Your second point, he didn’t apoligize to me for 16 years, everything was my fault. Now he is saying sorry for everything because he doesn’t want me to divorce him. He loves the idea of the perfect family. Maybe he doesn’t want to lose custody of our daughter. She will not stay with him ever.
Third point, he has been breaching my boundaries all week. I tell him that I need space and back off and he won’t. “I just want a hug”. He keeps wanting to stare in my eyes, I see disordered eyes staring back at me.
He would say he loves his family the most, but I believe it’s really his reputation. His ex-wife apparently wanted a new coat when his dad was dying of cancer, he couldn’t afford to come home and visit him because she bought the coat. He also said she had an affair. I no longer believe any of it!!
Thanks for all the tips, the one about movies I’ll try soon.
Heartsick-
They have no guilt or remorse. This is a sign that all is not right with him. Hold your head up high!!! There are better men out there who deserve your faith, ability to listen and empathy. They may be harder to find (now that we’ve been touched by spathies we can weed them out), but they are out there. I look at my son’s group of friends, really good kids. Not all of them are untrustworthy or will try and manipulate you. Hang in there!!!! Blessings.
Silvermoon-
I totally agree with you that not even Providence can move with you if you aren’t moving forward yourself. Trying to reconstruct the past, and make it all better (when we’re dealing with Spath and Ns) is like trying to ‘fix’ the relations we may have had with our parents. A natural desire, a very honest desire – but it doesn’t work, because you aren’t dealing with natural, honest people when you’re dealing with the disordered.
When God has given me a hand, at least when I recognize it most clearly, it’s when I’ve been trying to escape my abusers, and when I’ve tried to build things in new and positive directions. No, I don’t always attract good people to me now that I want to, but a few have shown up in my life, and I’m so grateful for true goodness, wherever I can find it these days.
Psyche
tobehappy
I hear you on the self esteem thing and thank you, it’s making sense, keep drilling it home because I am totally DISTURBED this week about the P and reading those SecretMonster posts from 2008
He ACTED his way into my heart. He said things I always dreamed my “soulmate” would say….does that make me low self esteem? I wanted to go for happiness, and everything he stood for beamed happy, healthy handsome and he LOVED ME.
High self esteem does not equip you to “read” or “predict” a cunning psychopath…that’s all I am saying. I guess ~i am saying loud and clear it is NOTHING TO DO WITH US, it is the level to which you can have faith in the unknown (which is what love is) only to have a cunning clever highly motivated psychopath “working you” ….NO ONE has a chance….people are murdered daily…nothing to do with self esteem…just they happened to be in the wrong place wrong time…
you have higher self esteem now and I congratulate you on that, it’s wonderful that you can meet new people and have such confidence. I am still hiding away, I just cant take the chance again (it would kill me) I do not know who to trust, even on this site I feel distrustful and wary, I feel my self esteem was toppled by the lie I was spun. The money I have lost and the humanity I relied on, in an act of faith thich I called “love” I was visciously lied to, robbed, cheated on and then dumped