There comes a time when nurture becomes nature.
This is the time when nurture and nature become inextricable, inseparable.
I suspect nobody knows precisely when this point arrives in the development of a given individual, but the immediate ramification is this: When you are involved specifically with a sociopath, or any exploitative personality, it is imperative that you stop asking how this person became who he is?
Sure, he likely endured—and was shaped by—some form of neglect or abuse growing up, and if this wasn’t obvious in the history, it was still likely there.
But here’s the point: it doesn’t matter. Not one bit.
Instead, you must relinquish your empathy, compassion and curiosity—in short, every emotion that supports your obsession to understand the genesis and evolution of your exploiter’s pathology—and confront the reality that you are dealing with (as I propose) a case of nurture becoming nature, about which there’s not a damned thing, at this point, to be done.
The damage, in other words, was baked into his character a long time ago. There is no ameliorating it now. Not all the love in the world—nothing that you have, or think you have, or thought you had to give him—will dent the petrification of his psychopathology.
His diseased personality disease is immutable, as good as etched in his DNA. Case closed.
And so what you do is this: You run for the hills, just as you’d run from a rabid dog that perhaps once was innocent and gentle. Now the dog is rabid: it no longer matters how it became rabid. And so you run, fast, and you don’t look back, because every second you allow false hope to delay you increases your risk of grievous harm.
You may have loved that dog; maybe loved it before it became rabid, or maybe it was rabid all along and you just didn’t know it. And maybe you even still love that rabid dog, or the persisting fantasy of it as unrabid.
But the dog is rabid, and a rabid dog doesn’t love you, and it was probably rabid going way back and never really loved you as you once imagined, but again”¦it makes no difference.
There are rabid animals, and there are rabid people, and neither loves you.
And so the time for analysis, of him, is up.
To be clear: I appreciate the need to make sense of trauma. But at some point, the analysis of exploiters can assume an obsessive desperation that subverts, rather than supports, the processing of trauma.
I speak here from the position of having worked with many victims of exploitive personalities who are very much like stunned deer caught, and as if suspended indefinitely, in the headlights.
One of the vital tasks is to unstun them.
And sometimes the dogged determination to “make sense” of, to “analyze” the exploitive traumatizer can be a disguised obsession with discovering something in the history (his or yours) that you insist on imagining would have made a difference”¦would have made him different?
We can search this angle interminably. And unless we call off the search, we will.
And it’s a search we’re wise to call off because it can effectively bring us to a standstill, forever.
(My use of “he” in this article was a convenience, not meant to imply that women aren’t capable of the behaviors and attitudes discussed. This article is copyrighted (c) 2009 by Steve Becker, LCSW.)
Excellent article. I went through a short period where I wanted to learn as much as I could about sociopaths. I read a few books and read dozens of articles here. However, the process of going through therapy is turning my focus inward. I feel healing can only start when we stop obsessing about the other person and focus on ourselves. This is the only way to innoculate ourselves against bad people, moving forward. It’s a long, painful process for some, but there’s really no way around it.
I have to agree. This was one of the best articles I’ve read on LF. I see the logic in many of them, but can’t always use the advice as I of course feel my situation is different. I suppose we all feel alone, even when we have common threads in our lives, and our ex-s/p.
My biggest issue right now, is the possibility of being locked in a cage with my rabid dog. I do NOT love that dog, and realize that I never did, because he really was ALWAYS rabid! Even though I’ve given up my association with all the mutual friends we had, at great grief to me, I can not run from that dog gone bad. At least not now…
I haven’t seen him in almost a year, and I do go over and over and over why I became his victim when I had so much to lose. But like you said, it doesn’t matter any more what I lost, or why I lost it.
It does still matter to me what I might still lose because of him though! I’ve been working in a temporary position for the last year, and as the year finishes off, I may end up having to go back to the office where we both worked, and where he used his position to take advantage of me.
I’ve been trying to get a job somewhere else for several years, but the job market stinks. I’m hopeful that HR will see the danger involved in us being in the same office, and find me a different position permanently. Him being the classic s/p could work all day and treat me like I wasn’t there. However he will not quit his MO in his favorite hunting ground, WORK, and if he continued like he has for years and years, I would have to say something about it, even if no one wanted to hear.
Of course every one says, “let others find out for themselves.” No one tells you thank you for warning them about a rabid dog that has trotted up to be patted, but they sure will be sorry when it bites them.
THEN THE QUESTION: Could you watch a dog you knew to be rabid, fallow someone and stay silent? Even if the dog was wagging its tail? Even if you didn’t know the person? Would you still say….BEWARE OF THAT DOG, IT BITES AND HAS RABIES? Or would you be silent and say… NOT MY PROBLEM?
Now ask yourself if that person was someone you liked? How about if that person was blind and couldn’t see. Would you warn them even knowing they would get mad at you for chasing the dog off when they liked petting it?
Now if you mentally put yourself in an office where the people are split in half. Half where really enjoying petting the dog, and you spoiled it for them, and the other half had been bitten by the rabid dog, and are mad at you for being a know it all.
Welcome to my world if I have to go back to that office. If I go back, and it causes too much disturbance it will be ME they are trying to fire, and not him. If I get fired, I will have to take him and the office to court in my own defense. If I go to court, I probably have less then a 50/50 chance the judge will have a clue, let alone will agree that it is a chargeable crime.
I’m not sure I believe in god any more, after learning about the universe the hard way, through the eyes of my s/p, but if YOU do, you might pray that I get a different job before the next 5 weeks is up!
Still, all in all, I totally FINALLY know, he is and always was a rabid dog. However, it’s hard to run from him, or the consequences he will have on others, when you are locked in a cage with him.
The man I married, and subsequently learned was not the man I married, *materialized* after a 3-year absence (abandoned our marriage) living in FL with his mistress (and she has documentation that he is a married man and seems not to care or believe it — she apparently believes his lies even in the face of the red flags/documentation), now the legal fun begins.
What I fear, is that due to his *charm and charisma*, he will con wealthy people out of their money with his schmoozing and his considerable knowledge of building and repairing computers, networking capabilities — especially fearful of his access to proprietary information and computer hard drive *replacements* (questionable repairs).
Wealthy yachtees live in Fort Lauderdale, etc. and he behaves as a wannabe gigolo. I feel like I need to warn people because he can worm his way into people’s personal lives. I am fearful he will take advantage of senior citizens or other unwitting victims.
How do I process these thoughts? He did this to me, my family and friends. How do I let it go when I know of his underhandedness and con jobs?
I did wonder (obsess) many times about what caused him to become the person he is today. In the end, it doesn’t matter to me anymore.
He was like a flash in the pan. Breezes into people’s lives, makes a mess and disappears when he’s found out.
This was a very good anaogy. My daughter has been involved with a sociopath for three years and has now married him. To complicate this matter, she is BPD and becomes whomever she is around the most. So now she has some of his characteristics. To add to the mix, she is now pregnant.
I understand the overwhelming need to know why he is this way and in my case why my daughter is this way. After three years I understand which is helpful to me. However, my daughter does not yet understand. I frankly am headed for the hills on this one. There’s nothing to be done until (if) she comes to her knees on this one.
Dear sherry and Snowbird,
Unfortunately, many potential victims do not believe a warning, and having been both a warn-er and a warn-ee, I can see it from both sides. I did not listen to warnings about people I was doing business with—to my regret! I also warned others who did not listen, to THEIR regret! So I have seen both sides of that coin, and lost both ways—heads I lost, tails everyone lost except the P.
However, I do not feel guilty when I do not warn, and I ido not expect positive results when I do warn. So each person I think must make their own decisions based on each circumstance and so on. Sometimes, in trying to warn, we end up getting our own heads chopped off and no good comes from it in any manner. I guess you just “pays yer money, and takes yer chances.”
As many of you on LF know, I have tried repeatedly to warn my ex-S’s new wife about him and he left me for HER! I knew her before h targeted her and broke her marriage of 13 years up. I have never held any hard feelings towards her. I had been married to him for 8 years and all the warnings that people had tried to give me when I first met him had slowly started to become realities over the time I spent with him. So, I KNOW what he did to her and WHY he did it.
From the outset, I told her exactly what she could expect from him…cheating, lying, total dependency upon her for financial support because he would not work, etc. She thought I was crazy. That’s been nearly 3 years ago and EVERY single thing I warned her that he would do, he has done. However, I did not expect that she would end up contracting 2 incurable STDs from him! I’m clean of those…thank God! She has told me many, many times now that she wishes she had of heeded my warnings. However, she continues to believe his promises of changing for her and his sugary words are music to her ears.
All I can say is that we are no match for these monsters! I don’t know HOW they manage to do it but they possess the power to convince their victims that black is white and white is black.
The latest thing she has done is asked me to spy on him for her since I no longer work and she does. Of course, he doesn’t work and she knows that he has all day long to roam. He calls her on her job literally every few minutes to report his whereabouts…always at home…however he is calling from a cell…so she REALLY has NO idea where he is. As much as I’d love to play P.I., I refused her request and told her that it wasn’t because I feared him and that I’d love to be the one that exposed him through pics, etc. However, I told her that I really didn’t feel that she’d believe it if she saw it with her own two eyes because he’d find some way to convince her that what she was seeing really wan’t what it appeared to be. So, therefore, I will NOT waste my time! She’ll see it one day for herself and hopefully before the discard. It’s time that someone discarded HIM!
Sorry for all the typos in my last post…should have proofed it more closely!
tami:
Asking the ex-wife to play PI to keep tabs on the husband for he current wife….my God, biddy really has gone ’round the bend, hasn’t she? That she would even make that request of you floors me. Cut her loose, for your own sanity as well as her’s.
Yeah, I did the warning thing and felt better that I had. And when things broke down and they broke up, I felt like I may have played a small part in someone’s better future.
However, in the end, he was able to give me far more credit than I deserved. To the point of blaming me for the relationship’s demise.
The fact of the matter is, getting involved at all gives the P power and control. Their skill at taking partial truths and turning them into completely usable lies is something a healthy person just can’t fathom let alone truly contend with.
Staying away is a strong message to someone willing to hear it. And if the next victim can’t hear it, they’re not ready to hear the truth directly.
Namaste
There’s a very short summary of N/P/S’s . . .called “A Primer on Evil”, by T. I thought it was useful . . because it was so direct. If anyone is interested, it on Amazon.com.