It could be argued that the sociopath is cynical: contemptuous; mocking; concerned only with his own interests and typically disregarding accepted or appropriate standards in order to achieve them – the opposite of idealistic.
And there is a danger that one who has learned the hard way about sociopaths becomes jaded: dulled, blunted, deadened, inured; tired, weary, wearied; unmoved, blasé, apathetic – the opposite of fresh.
The online version of the Guardian newspaper runs a series in which readers provide their responses to ‘Ethical conundrums’. Given the nature of our interests on this blog, this one caught my eye: Is it worse to be cynical or jaded?
One reader’s response captures the issue I raise above (our key terms inserted):
A jaded person [someone who has fallen for a sociopath] has loved and lost. A cynic [sociopath] has never loved at all.
Another provides some clues as to how come the sociopath and his or her victim get together in the first place:
I don’t like either alone, together though: the jaded person before becoming jaded makes friends with a cynic and then they both have a great time. So long as the cynic enjoys the doses of optimism and doesn’t get annoyed by them. And the optimist doesn’t become disillusioned by hanging out with the cynic. Because that would be boring, pointless and gloomy. Cynics and optimists together can be really proactive and make great company: CAN be…
Or not, right?
One reckons that positivity can turn into negativity, but seldom the other way round:
Pessimists tend to become cynical, as they tend to believe the existence of a hidden motive. Optimists, with experience, tend to become jaded, as the world falls short of their expectations. Jaded people tend to become cynical, but cynical people rarely end up jaded. So, being jaded is kind of the scenic route to cynicism.
One reader sees the merit of cynicism:
Cynicism is essential for surviving this lousy superficial society. Being jaded is the result of being insufficiently cynical.
I was tickled by this one:
Someone who’s jaded hasn’t lost the will to change, they’ve just lost the means….Polish the surface of a jaded person and you’ll find they’ll come up good as new.
As we get a new year underway, what are your thoughts?
Got that part Skylar. I am so very very experienced in COVERT abuse. In the works of the sycophants. (PUN intended, SICKO phants.) But I kinda disagree about evidence part. In my experience, the evidence was there, we just didn’t want to give it the gravity that it deserved.
My husband was GIFTED in the way he was able to get others to do his bidding. His sycophants did harm even without his knowledge just to be able to go back to him and say “see what I did for YOU!?!” and they’d bask in his approval. My husband played people off each other, they’d jockey for favorite spot.
OXY Sorry that you have a great example of who’s worse, the enabler or the abuser? My question, what’s the dif??? Same outcome. a trojan is just an unbridled sycophant.
Oxy,
yes, you’re right, eggdonor is getting off on your fear of your son. But then doesn’t that make her a spath? I mean, a different type of spath. One that doesn’t get caught because she uses pitbulls to sick on those she wants to attack. They cunningly use slander and other verbal weapons. Aren’t these the MOST diabolical when you think about it? They never let the mask slip – maybe even not to themselves?
Katy, for sure there was some evidence there. Like when my spath had everyone call me on garbage pick up mornings, so I’d miss the garbage pick up. Well, anyone can see that it was a set up. But even with seeing it WHO WOULD BELIEVE IT? WHO DOES THAT?
So, here’s what I did, just to prove to myself that I wasn’t crazy. I called my good sister. She is so logical and stable and grounded. And I told her. She probably thought, “poor skylar, she’s finally lost it, she’s paranoid.” Of course I know she was thinking that, so I said, “What I want to do now, Sis, is predict everything that is going to happen next friday. I’m going to predict what time, spath will call and what happens when I tell him that the garbage is already at the curb.” So she went along with that for several weeks and EACH TIME, my prediction from the previous week would happen. A few times, it was to the minute!
Katy, my point is, yes, the evidence is there, but unless you know about the existence of spath, you will tell yourself that YOU are crazy and paranoid before you will believe that anyone could do this kind of stuff… it’s just not believable in the context of normal people.
Skylar,
You are right which makes LF so valuable. I knew when I finally left that my husband was bad, was very dangerous. But I did not learn about much of what he did COVERTLY until later and not even until this last year what it truely meant. LF taught me to take the blinders off. My attitude of looking for the good in people nearly got me killed…. I write strongly sometimes, but really I want people to feel angry at what I write. I feel upset when I read people enabling self destructive behaviors here on LF in the guise of being supportive. It’s NOT supportive to make excuses for bad choices. It is supportive to understand that hard choices are just that, HARD, BUT NECESSARY.
I was not the kind of person who stood up much for myself… but anyone mess with my kid and they were up against a mother of a lion. I hope that a mom who is passive for herself will find her spine when chosing what MUST be done to protect her child.
Katy, who wishes she knew about LF when suffering from her spath. I’d have made the choices sooner instead of questioning my sanity. (confusion and chaos are tools of the spath!!)
Looks like I will have some nice N drama when I go for the new job. My father is already up to his old tricks. I am going to be less than 30 minutes away from him. I called the stepmom yesterday to tell her I was coming. She talked about she was SO glad that I called. She was wanting to call me but she didn’t want to get in the middle between me and him. She had told him that she was worrying about me not calling after he sent the heinous email and he said “don’t worry she’ll come around” I’ll come around-from the one who didn’t think it was necessary to apologize for what he did.
Anyway, an hour after I got off the phone with her I get an email from him telling me which way to drive to get there AND telling me that the opening day of dove season is on such an such a day and “you’ll need to ask off work for that”. How about asking if I even had any desire to go hunting with him anymore. Cuz I really don’t at all. I do not want to spend any time alone with him without her. All of this is SO not OK with me-his behavior. I am so freakin tired of him hauling off and being so cruel and then acting like it’s nothing at all. I sent him an email back saying that I am not allowed to ask for days off on the contract and we’ll see if I am off that day or not.
I am really hoping that this isn’t going to be a negative experience for me. I just want to make money, stop smoking, and lose weight and I have no desire for drama. I’m already going to have enough of a hard time with missing the woman and I don’t need to have crap going on with him at the same time. Plus, the whole missing the woman thing is not something that I can talk to him about or expect him to understand since he doesn’t want a lesbian daughter.
Liz, you know the drill. No Contact. If you don’t want to spend time alone with him, don’t. It’s very simple and you don’t need to get into any drama about it. And who would shoot a dove? ***shudders at the thought***
No contact is really a beautiful thing. You can evoke it with anyone at any time. And the beauty of it is that you can revoke it if you change your mind.
Sky, I can see (in retrospect) that by the age of 4 or 5 I knew I was not able to trust my egg donor to take care of me, to protect me….but even then I had learned to try to please her above all else, and I can remember wanting her approval at that age. I can also look back at our lives and our relationship together and see that I had MINIMIZED so many “head butting” sessions (for which I blamed myself many/most times) with her….and I can see that I had this fantasy of the relationship we had these past few years, up until the summer of “Chaos”—but if I sit down with a pencil and paper and make a “list” of the just shaity things she has done to me even in these “fantasy” years….I have to laugh at myself at the MINIMIZATION I have done.
She would not score very high on the PCL-R, she’s always held a steady job, gotten along with her coworkers, she fits more into the “snakes in suits” hole, but even then, she does feel “superior” to most people—-and the TOXIC behavior has been directed mostly, almost entirely, toward ME….and mostly because I wouldn’t go along with the family dynamics of protecting the family bad boy….so she doesn’t fit the “definition” of a psychopath per se, not even close….but the relationship is still ENABLING of AN ABUSER, ABUSIVE herself, CONTROLLING, PROJECTING BLAME, DISHONESTY AND LYING, and yes, she has a MASK that she wears for 99.9999% of the people she associates with. As far as I know I have only seen behind the mask a few times, and my son C has seen behind it once or twice, the rest of the time she keeps it firmly glued to her face.
Is she a DUPE? Yea, she is, but at the same time, she is TOXIC. Does that make her by definition a “psychopath”? Probably not, but it doesn’t make any difference, she is just as dangerous to me as he is because she FACILITATES his abuse/danger toward me.
OXY- Thinking about what you wrote in the above post about your egg donor and what i just wrote to sky about her clown anaology, i think a very healing exercise would be to draw / make the masks that we see them wear.
i have done a whole process for creating masks form the subconscious that might be transferable to this application. it is part of clown training through mask. I have both taken this training and used it to train kids when i was an artist in residence.
this is kind of exciting, and I am going to give it some thought. I’d have to try it out myself and get another of us to do it, to refine it, then I could put it together for people who wanted to try it as a healing tool. hmmm.
One, that is an interesting thought.
For those people who “can’t draw,” they could use faces cut out of magazines or photographs, and paste part or all of them onto cardboard, and use a tongue depressor for a “handle” sort of like the old “Funeral Home fans” that were advertising passed out and used by old ladies in churches before AC.
You could put the mask on a chair and sit in a chair in front of it and “Talk” to it like I used to drive down the road and SCREAM at the top of my lungs at the psychopaths, who were of course not in the car with me. Aloha and I used to laugh because she did the same thing, and we laughed about how people must have thought we were crazy– seeing these women driving down the road screaming at the windshield. LOL
Ox: I love it!
I thought “I” was the only one who screamed while alone at the top of my lungs just ranting and raving at the injustices and ignorance in our world. Now I know I am TRULY not alone. 😉
I wanted to share an excerpt from something I wrote earlier that I thought was especially important to share with all of you.
*Blessings for a nice day to you all*
HAHAHA: Now we got a tshirt and a tongue depresser fan!
YAY~! We could start up another LOVE FRAUD ONLINE STORE!
“Accessories” we will call it! 😉
Dupedster
“When I start having these ruminating, confusing, ‘feel like I am drowning’ moments, STOP.
I mean just stop; have a coffee; lay down; just anything to find a peaceful spot and think about WHY I am thinking these thoughts and feeling this way. Don’t dwell on it but recognize it and put it aside for something pleasurable. I know that sounds ‘trite’ to most. For most that would be just a natural response but for me it isn’t. For me, it’s ‘normal’ to be ‘on go’ 24/7. You see? That’s ‘normal’ for ME. I have to start doing something more conscious than where I am at. I mean, really struggling and giving it all I got on this one: stopping; getting away from everything and everyone and reprogram, consciously, that thought. ONE AT A TIME.
There is no guarantee that it will work. It will only work as well as what I put into it. But it’s another door that opened for me and I wanted to tell you about it. EMDR therapy is helping me tremendously and just recently the VA approved it as a treatment for PTSD. I was told again today, that I have done an excellent job of controlling my PTSD over the years. I was told that “IT” wasn’t the reason but the ‘trigger’. Jeez, wonder how that happened! ”
~Dupedster