UPDATED FOR 2023: Lovefraud received the following email from a reader whom we’ll call “Agatha.” She wonders, does falling for a sociopath mean you’re stupid?
Since I found your website I have been doing a lot of reading, learning, and understanding.
I made my break from my spath about three years ago. I keep reading how a spath knows who and how to catch a person in their web. Seemingly being very intelligent as to getting exactly what they want from us.
In my case, my spath doesn’t seem to be all that intelligent. Does this mean that I was taken in by a man of low intellect, and what does that say about me?
I’m having trouble understanding how a man who seems to have no common sense and lacks vision (he has been trying to sue me, but I seem to be one step ahead, so far) could possess the intelligence to fool me in the beginning.
Getting fooled by a sociopath has nothing to do with intelligence. I’ve heard from thousands of smart, successful people who were taken in by these predators.
So how does it happen? Why can sociopaths get us to act against our own self-interest? Two reasons: Our humanity, and our cultural myths.
Trust makes us vulnerable
The human race survived as a species because of trust, according to Paul J. Zak, author of The Moral Molecule the source of love and prosperity. Back when we were cave men and cave women, trust enabled us to live in groups, which enabled us to protect ourselves, which enabled our species to survive.
We are biologically programmed to trust — literally. A brain chemical called oxytocin, called nature’s “love glue,” makes us feel calm, trusting and content, and eliminates fear and anxiety.
Oxytocin is released into our brains and bloodstream when we experience intimacy, and not just sexual intimacy. Hugs, empathy and even conversation cause our bodies to release oxytocin, increasing our level of trust for whomever we are interacting with.
This is all normal and natural. It’s the human bonding system.
Sociopaths as hijackers
Sociopaths do not bond like the rest of us do. They have excess testosterone, which interferes with oxytocin. And they are missing the “oxytocin receptors” that are necessary for oxytocin to work. These issues help explain why sociopaths have no empathy.
Even though sociopaths do not feel empathy, they know that they can manipulate us by taking advantage of our empathy.
Therefore, sociopaths hijack the normal human bonding system. They engage us in conversation, they appear to be affectionate, they offer emotional and physical intimacy.
Sociopaths use our humanity, our built-in predisposition to trust others, against us.
For more on how oxytocin works, read my previous Lovefraud article:
Oxytocin, trust and why we fall for psychopaths
Cultural myths
The problem with our natural instinct to trust people is that we don’t realize that we need to be very selective about whom we trust. We don’t know that there are people in the world who seem to look and act just like us, but have totally different motivations.
We don’t learn about personality disorders. If we hear about sociopaths and psychopaths at all, it’s through movies and TV shows, in which they are unrealistically portrayed as deranged villains.
In fact, all our lives we hear messages that hide the truth about the human predators among us. Here are the most dangerous cultural myths:
“We are all created equal.”
“There’s good in everyone.”
“We’re all God’s children.”
“Everyone deserves a second chance.”
“Treat everyone the way you want to be treated.”
“Everyone wants to be loved.”
“We’re all basically the same.”
The problem with these statements is that they contain the words “all” and “everyone.” Yes, they are wonderful principles to live by — as long as you’re dealing with people who are not disordered.
If you are interacting with a sociopath, following these principles can lead to your own heartbreak, devastation and destruction.
Serious disadvantage
In the end, falling for a sociopath doesn’t mean you’re stupid.
It means that you’re a normal person, trusting as we are meant to trust, and believing all the cultural messages encouraging you to trust.
So please don’t be hard on yourself. Until the existence and tactics of sociopaths become common knowledge, normal, empathetic people are at serious risk of being exploited by sociopaths.
Learn more: Maybe you’re not codependent — you’re traumatized
Lovefraud originally posted this article on Nov. 16, 2015.
LETTERS TO LOVEFRAUD: My journal entry about susceptibility to the sociopath
This is the best explanation I’ve seen about how the sociopath is disordered. In the case of mine he showed absolutely no empathy for anyone, ever. Good to know there is at least a real explanation, not just that the devil made him do it!
My spaths all want love and the adoration they see others experience but their search is usually unfulfilled because they themselves are incapable of really feeling these emotions. I see them as endlessly searching for the love they felt from their moms as babies. Once a negative is experienced, they simply move on to another potential victim.
That is very interesting.
Thank you.
In that cultural myth list…’Everyone wants to be loved’…that’s the one that I have a problem with…
Do even sociopaths WANT to be loved? I struggle with that as a mother of one.
Can anyone answer that? How can we even be sure?
Bev,
I think the short answer is personality disordered people want to be in control, to get what they want, and to get out when they are done/bored. Love is an abstraction for them. If you cannot empathize, cannot feel responsible toward others, and cannot therefore make a deep human connection…well, you cannot love, and you cannot want to be loved.
You don’t even have a clue of what love feels like, what it needs to thrive.
Thank you slimone.
My husband and I are both so torn. I am further along in this realization of what a SP son means, than is my husband. I KNOW that my son has no real feeling or caring for us. No loyalty whatsoever.
Mu husband thinks that our son NEEDS us, especially me, his mother.
My husband and myself both have wonderful loving mothers, so this is difficult for both of us.
Your post has helped. Thank you. I appreciate any input at all on this issue. 🙂
Bev
Some sociopathic behavior looks less about the sociopaths being smart themselves and more about emotionally hijacking our brains to be used for them. They hook us into bonding with them and empathizing with them, accepting them into our trusted inner circle, and once we’ve bought into the overall idea they presented (which they do very quickly) they don’t need to bother being consistent or be smart. They can do whatever they want at the time, if their mask slips they deny it later, and they get us to make up excuses for them in our efforts to have their actions and words fit with the impression we already have of them and keep our view of things secure. We can even customize the excuses to what we best accept. We do that mental work, not them. We also can’t analyze issues it never occurs to us to question, no matter how smart we are.
I’m trying to get myself to notice when I’m making excuses for someone that they don’t bother to make themselves, and from there see whether they’re relying on me doing that for them. It’s illuminating. And once I make people come up with their own excuses, they’re often not very good ones. Basically, I’m trying to keep my brain for my own use, not others’ use against me.
Yes! My husband DOES make excuses for our SP son.
Things like, ‘he’s just like all the young people these days’ or ‘he’s just going through a divorce like millions of other people’. Only, in our son’s case, his SP-y makes it much worse than so called ‘other’ peoples’ happenings or problems in their lives.
Too right, your post. Also,the SP RELYING on others to make the excuses for them. Nothing is EVER their fault. They are always being wronged. Illuminating indeed!
Very good post! 🙂
Hi Justkeepwalking – I always enjoy reading your posts with so much insight and wisdom. I learn a lot.
Sorry, to bother you here on a different threat. It is just that I posted something on my thread that is worrying me quite a lot at the moment. I thought to ask for your opinion on it if you don’t mind.
Thanks.
Bluedolphin
justkeepwalking – This comment is extremely astute and embodies exactly my experience. The quick, startling but flattering, interest and bond they establish, their ability to get under our skin to the pt where we make excuse after excuse for their bizarre, inconsistent, questionable behavior….yes, we attempt to keep the fairy tale going, it feels so heady. We want them to fulfill our original “view of things” so we lie to ourselves to keep it going. Yes, as you said, we do the mental work, they don’t.
“We also can’t analyze issues it never occurs to us to question, no matter how smart we are.”
Exactly!!! I did not even consider the path in my life to be anything but somewhat bizarre, one day sharing overly personal info, the next, refusing to reveal his vacation destination. To be honest, I asked only to be nice and was surprised (as always) that he’d tell me what his shrink said about his marriage but not where he was going on vaca. But that was the extent. Once things were over with, ending in the most freaky of ways, I began to Google his behaviors and got page after page of SOCIOPATH. That’s how I found this site.
I do think paths look for vulnerable women. They are deathly afraid of strong, openly confident women who aren’t concerned about what people think of them. The path in my life had a very responsible job and was frightened to death of the outspoken, strong women in our office. He saw me exactly as I was, a pretty, vulnerable, older woman, that he thought he could use and abuse. They don’t like stupid women for more than sexual abuse because they get bored so easily.
Great article. I used to feel the same way, how I could I be so stupid? But the further away from him I got and the more I processed the experience, I was able to see how he used my love for him…well who he pretended to be…against me. The few skip ups he made when in was making my break woke me up and help me escape successfully. I was able to put it ti to perspective, he duped everyone around him, to include the federal government. He competed for, and won, a competitive grant for a brillant project and was awarded $109,000 to run the project which would have greatly benefited the community he lives in. Instead, he spent $60k on drugs and women. So he duped the feds as well. I decided not to feel bad about it anymore. I was no match for him, I could never envision doing the things he had done. So I would say to “agatha” to be gentle with yourself. These are experts in manipulation to a degree that is unfathomable to those of us who are not.
I think it is vital to understand the information that Donna presents on biology and culture. As a former victim of an extremely clever and successful psychopath,
I am an experienced psychotherapist, and since the veil has been lifted have been helping many many women to get out from under the spell and toxicity of being in a relationship with the disordered man.
(Of course there are women psychopaths but we all know that the majority of these creatures are male.)
However, one of the commonalities I’ve noticed in the 40 to 60 women I have worked with over the last five years who have been in this situation is that we share a few traits, one of which is a degree of emotional neediness, and perhaps less than adequate boundaries.
I think that these and other traits, some of which have been identified by Sandra Brown in her book Women who Love Psychopsths, make those of us who possess these traits easier targets then women in the general population.
There are probably some very interesting feminist analyses of how women in general or vulnerable to these men by virtue of being an oppressed class but that’s another discussion!
In my work with clients and then my own reflections about the 20 years that I suffered with this man, I think it’s important to make a distinction between factors that leave us vulnerable, on the one hand, and aspects of psychopathy that are complex, nuanced, and critical to understand if one is to heal and prevent further entrapment with another.
I just read the accompanying article on traits and some comments about the need for data and the use of the word codependent. I have a strong research background and I’ve also not found the term codependent useful.
But we are at th early stages of understanding these things and compiling data from differerent sources using different means can eventually create strong explanation and be used to publicize the extent and impact of psychopathy, which I think of as a silent public health crises.
I would give anything to see family docs, nurse practioners, ob/gyns more tuned into this as the pact of being involved is so serious in terms of physical health in addition o the emotional damage.
Getting the word out is crucial, as are our discussins and exchanges.
Thanks Donna for creating this vibrant forum and community.
Same with a course in psychology for the legal profession (police, attorneys, court employees, DA’s) all to become more adept at spotting and dealing with this growing mental illness.
Yes, these personality disorders DO seem to be growing.
I wonder if they are, or if we just are more knowledgeable about them now. The ‘difficult’ people that we encounter in our lives may not just be simply difficult!?
Ever since I realized that my son is a SP, I have found out about two additional people that probably are as well! One, that my husband works with and another that my own boss is dealing with, who is my boss’s friend.
Think about leaders of all kinds; sports and media “stars”(Lance Armstrong, Corporate CEO’s. financial advisers (Abramoff) “cult” leaders (Jim Jones), Heads of State (Hitler), attorneys, police…anywhere there is power and control.
For years I have blamed myself for not leaving my sociopathic spouse. I was raised by a disordered yet physically beautiful mother. From the beginning I was told I was “nothing and no one”. “You are not important, you don’t count, if anyone thinks about why they love you, this person will probably change his mind” . Just a sample of the ferocious use of language to belittle and harass her child, me. By the time I was nineteen years old, I married the first person who asked me. His name was Steven. I knew him only one week. By the second week, we were engaged. I left the state and became immediately, his sex slave. Without boundaries, completely unsupported, and ill equipped for the challenges of being married to a psycho, I became a walking, talking zombie.
Over several years, Steven and I raised 3 children. My shame at not leaving my husband is pervasive simply because his mind set and corrosive value system were absorbed by 2 of my three children. My emotional deprivation compelled me to remain in denial for years and years. Only many years later did I finally seek a divorce. My son and my daughter have developed that superficial charm that masks a truly cold heart. There is no loyalty or feeling of affection toward me. My son has been in prison, petty theft. My daughter is sexually permiscuous to such a degree I fear for her safety. Both, my son and daughter, were adopted as infants. I nurtured them from three months old onward. How could I not blame myself for failing to protect my children from the influences of their psychopathic, but charming, father!! I am not ignorant but I behaved ignorantly. Could my story help? I’m not really sure. My story haunts me as a mother. Thank you. Kalina
Hi Donna, You point out that they “have an excess of testosterone” which interferes with ocyticin, the affection chemical we have in our bodies. We all know, though, that women can also be sociopaths. What research has been done on their brain chemicals? It’d be hard for me to accept that female sociopaths have excess testosterone.
Synergy – yes, female sociopaths also have elevated levels of testosterone
Thanks for you support in naming so many of the cultural myths I fell for Agatha. I fell for them all.
The one cultural myth I don’t see on your list is to “give them the benefit of the doubt.” it is the basis of our legal system. You cannot give benefit of the doubt to a pathological liar or one without conscience. They, or at least mine is indeed not responsible for anything “he” did because he manipulated others to do it by proxy, or he created alternate identities, or he gave assets to others outside our marriage. Yet, I can assure you he is responsible for the devastation to my family.
Until the legal system and law makers understand the true meaning of psychopathy, they really wont ever create a system that deals with them. It is this chimarical effect we have to solidify so everyone can see the absence of humanity in these individuals.