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.)
Yeah they are all sneaky with “their” money but frivolous with OURS!!!!!!!
Hey, for those you who had the fortunate of experience of already owning/buying your own homes and then allowing them to move in with you, did your S/N/Ps ever refer to the house payment and utilities associated with the home as YOUR debts?!? Hey, I married this nut, even added him to the deed to property although the home was financed in my name only. It was HIS home, too. It was his shelter, he benefited from all the utilities by staying warm, water, phone, cable TV, etc. However, he didn’t feel that he should pay MY bills. Also, on the rare occasion that he MIGHT cut the grass or weedeat, he’d come in and definatly announce that MY grass was cut or that MY weedeating was done! WTF?
I meant defiantly announce…can’t typ today!
TYPE!!! Good grief!
Yep……I made the mistake of wanting him back after my father past….and we moved cross country, thank god the house fell through, thank god I did not sign the will leaving him in charge of what happens to me, thank god he is not on my child’s birth certificate…he sat around and drank all day(blamed me for enabling him)…. bought him vehicle that he thought was HIS POSSESSION, I kept telling him no license, no money to pay the bills I need to sell it!
Oh boy I was stoopid for selling it for that price I got screwed well… who cares I sold it because YOU WOULDNT PAY THE RENT, I WAS PAYING ALL THE BILLS….
Wait it gets better…. now I AM GETTING EVICTED… longer more convoluted story…. the plot is juicy but its all made up in my head, he used the landlord to humiliate me as well….. who knows if he had an affair with the old bat as well…. but I AM THE ONE WHO IS RUDE so I am being evicted as he says… it was not because he didnt HELP pay the bills….. Sorry I needed to VENT wooo I feel a little better……
How can they have the audacity? to think the world owes them… while they live off other people? and leave when the going gets tough … COWARDS
Tami
maybe Tin man is better b/c he has no heart. You all seem to be ‘generally’ over your S duping you with the infidelities and the leech-like behaviors. Last night, I went to bed shaking after I realized he probably had a car the whole time. I am still so in the dark. I say that I can assume everything was a lie but to be confronted with it hurts like hell. How do I get past this phase?? I feel like I took a major step back last night.
Yes, you’re right about the marriage/kids. I read more and realized that HE needs the wife/kids to make him look like an upstanding surgeon who has a family, etc. They are there for the purpose of him, not the other way around. He has no interest in loving his children or taking part in their growth, only if it makes him look good. The wife is there to make him look good. Of course he made her out to be the witch. “oh, she brainwashed the kids to not like me, etc” And if they left, he would feel angry, but not necessarily missing them. It’s a different perspective I guess.
I just have to comment on one thing that bothers me about all the information given about AsPD. In all I read, abuse or neglect is always mentioned in the personal history of the sociopath. I believe my daughter is a sociopath but there was never, ever any neglect or abuse. She was raised in a stable home with loving parents and four siblings who have turned out to be wonderful, productive, caring adults. You’re right when you say it doesn’t really matter how the sociopath came to be but not all sociopaths come from dysfunctional or destructive backgrounds. I have spent years trying to figure out what’s up with my daughter and where we went wrong. We didn’t go wrong, i truly believe she was born this way.
FD…The initail finding out hurts like hell, but in the months to come be prepared to find things out that will shock you even more. That was always the case with my EX S. I went to bed many times shaking after finding the truth out after the fact. And then I sit there and try and put all the pieces of the puzzle together and it hurts when I i figure it out and things click. And the worst part is, we had such a small group of close friends so I still hear things that make me cringe. For instance, the last time I found him cheating on me, he swore up and down she has just always been a friend which of course I didn’t believe for a second….blah blah blah…well, my sister went out a couple nights ago with all of our old friends and they were like, oh yeah they’ve been dating for a while, we were wondering where amber was. And the general consensus is that everyone thinks she’s really strange. A few people have said, Whoa that’s a step down (which I have to add, makes me feel good) and another friend said that he thinks she’s really weird becasue the one time they talked all she talked about were guns. So good. Sounds like two S/P have found each other and maybe they will kill each other off in the end.
My ex is married with kids too. He can tell me till he’s blue in the face that he’s a good dad, but a dad that spends that much time away from home, that’s a liar, a cheater and a cokehead is not a good dad. They only have these families to look normal to their extended family or for their careers. He would often say that his kids were the only people that could still love him becuase they didn’t know the truth. But that will change. They are 10 and they will grow up to realize that their dad is unavailable and a horrible person. The only reason that he went to rehab is because his kids found his stash and the wife told him it’s rehab or you’re out. Well, he went to rehab to make her happy, but I don’t think he was clean more than a month before he was using again.
And I agree that there’s no way they are living happy lives. Mine had no issue telling me how much he hated himself. That he wishes that he could just die, so the pain would stop. First red flag should have been on our second date he said that he destroyed everything that he touched and that he wasn’t a very good person, and he wanted to warn me what kind of person I was getting involved with. (why I didn’t run then, I’m still trying to figure out.) He would tell me that he didn’t see good in himself. That he was dark, empty, didn’t feel anymore. And he knew it was because of the destructive life he lived. I just always questioned that if he knew that the way he was living made him hate himself so much, then why not try and change? And it’s as if he couldn’t control it. That it was in his DNA. And people like this I truly believe can’t change.
That is the only thing that makes me happy at the end of the day. I know the truth. I know the hell that he is really living. How unhappy he truly is. He can’t keep up his act forever. He can’t pretend to play it off to the rest of the world, but he let me in, and I KNOW. That may be his biggest mistake in the end. I know right now he’s living in fear that I am going to detroy his world, the world that he has everyone else believing. He’s afraid I will out him for what he truly is. Maybe I will, maybe I won’t. But at the end of the day, I have the ability to move on and be FREE and HAPPY. He doesn’t. He will continue this viscous cycle until his insides rot completely, or he has a heart attack from the copious amounts of cocaine he does. (either of which can’t come soon enough) Karma will catch up with him someday. Educate yourself, stay positive and be thankful that this man didn’t steal more of your life. You’re free now! Stay strong. There will be set backs, but as long as you know that and you have the knowledge and the strength to know how to deal with those setbacks, you’ll be ok. Good luck to you. Hugs.
You are all correct that the wife or partner and kids are to give a show of normalcy to the outside world and some stability to the crazy life.
Dianne – the literature seems to solidly point to a minimum of 50% of this disorder being inherited – brain scans and linguistic tests show stark differences – psychopaths don’t light up in pleasure centres for nice things the way regular people do – they light up in pleasure centres watching images of torture, pain and death. They also cannot recognise emotion either in the voice or facial features of other people. So it almost looks like a disability they are born with – or should we call it a lifestyle advantage. However unlike folk with Aspergers, Autism spectrum disorders psychopaths wreak so much havoc on others and cannot be cured so it raises some interesting societal questions – should they be locked away to protect others?
The ex psych always got the best deal during the marriage. He would pay the rent and I would pay all the bills and groceries and EVERYTHING else – clothes, doc appts, socialising expenses, pets, car problems. Somehow he convinced me it balanced out. He moved back after a yr of separation as a flatmate as he pulled such a pity play, let his life crumble around him in ‘depression’ and made me so guilty for ending it (now I know that was just another hook for more manipulation). From the minute he moved back he paid half the mortgage and that was it – no utilities, no half the groceries nothing. He would bring a couple of cat tins a week or a milk or loaf of bread – certainly not half of what was spent.
They are such shameless pigs – how do we get so entangled?
Dear dianne,
I have a psychopathic son, and he started acting out at puberty and it got worse and worse, he is now in priosn for murder and has been for 20 years. the thing is that my biological fatehr (that he never met) is a flaming, violent Psychopath, and my son is just his image…I believe strongly that hereditary influences in my son;s case were very HIGH, and can trace this back through the generations on both sides of mY family and on his fahter’s side as well.
Why does one kid turn out like that, why do the P-genes switch ON and when? Who the heck knows, but the point is that once they are switched on and at SOME point in time they become BEYOND redemption, because they are not bonded to the rest of the human race except in the same way a TICK is bonded to a dogs ear—as a parasite.
I know that having a P child is a heartbreaking situation but do not “blame” yourself in any way—the fact that your other kids turned out well is a testimony to both their genes and your nurturing. None of us are perfect parents, but you can’t make a ‘SILK PURSE OUT OF A SOW’S EAR” and frankly I think I gave birth to something that was a sow’s ear from the get go. I just didn’t want to believe it—and waffled for decades trying to find a way to save him. Can’t do it. So now I am saving myself!