Empath vs Sociopath - classic battles

general topics
81

It’s an interesting question!

I don’t think its language for me, but experiences.

I always heard about human compassion and forgiveness and love thy neighbor. But i never saw it for a long time. Not in any way that mattered.

I was also kept in a house from 5-15… a battered child, I almost died several times, from injuries I sustained while being violently abused.

People knew… of course. I remember someone knocking on my door, a neighborhood kid, to tell me he could hear the screams all the way down at his house. Four houses down. I remember praying to god that the neighbor who was a truant officer himself would call someone when he saw my father chase me in his underwear though the neighborhood one Sunday morning, Screaming death threats.I got punched in school in front of teachers who turned a blind eye. Every day. I was molested at school. In a study hall. In front of everyone by one particular kid, while people pretended not to see.

I was a pariah. I could never figure out why. I remember the day I rejected everything people had told me over the years.

I was also aware I was a phone call away from help. Child services could have opened the front door to my house and known something was very very wrong. It was a phone call I couldn’t make. But if someone else did… I’d be OK.

That call never came. No one ever showed up.

Then one day… I had a paradigm shift. I rejected the whole thesis.

Even if I was a worthless piece of shit that had ruined everything in the lives of everyone around me, and deserved all I got and more, at least I could be on my own side. At least I had that… at least monsters could be on their own side. Everyone gets to be on their own side.

So things changed for me after that. That was 15. No one died, or got hurt, and I never ate anyone or anything.

I had some conversations with my father, and my family, about the new realities they lived in. I wasn’t going to kill myself… despite their encouragement to do so. If anyone hurt me or abused me again, I’d kill them. If they didn’t like that, they could kill me. It was as far as it could ever go. No further, and never again. We had reached the final act.

I kept my father so scared of me that he never laid a hand on my mom again. Because I made it clear that killing me wasn’t personal to me… Hurting my mother would end up with peoples faces chewed off and old men gutted and bleeding out in the woods alone. It would be bad. That was a no-no. And a promise. That was personal. That was unforgivable.

I carried this attitude to school too. They all readily agreed to the new terms too. A long coat and a facial expression was all I needed to communicate this. I never said a word to them.

That was bottom. Things have steadily gotten better for me since. But I reached full on psychopathy or sociopathy by the way these things are measured.

It’s always us/them with people. I lack the sophistication most folks seem to have mastered with that. To me its either everyone but me is a them, or we are all us’es. All the Hilters, and Stalins, and Mes… all here with you good people. All sociopaths to one degree or another…

In a great big happy us.

Hug time?

7 Likes
82

I’m glad you got out and I’m sorry you had to go through that.

7 Likes
83

Jesus Christ dude. I only had my father try to kill me once, and that was traumatic. What you described is worthy of a Hannibal lecter story.

I may tease, I may joke, but believe I hold your pain as real and present.

You won’t escape my fish puns though.

9 Likes
84

No one escapes the fish puns.

8 Likes
85

Fuck. So glad you escaped.

7 Likes
86

Judging fro the thread, I don’t think everyone has the emotional distance from the issue at hand to find it ‘interesting’ - and I can’t say I blame them.

Regarding the evolutionary theory, I would observe that a trait doen’t need to be valuable to the group to survive, but only to the individual. I wouldn’t be surprised if psychopathy was a kind of freeloader strategy.

87

I’m so sorry you went through that, and I’m glad to hear things are improving.

This is one of the things that frustrated me about Malcolm X’s autobiography (I finished listening to it this morning). All humanity can come together and treat each other as brothers and sisters… if they become Muslims. He saw some amazing empathy between people on the Hajj that wasn’t the case elsewhere and concluded that this was due to their beliefs. Other people do the same and ascribe it to the power of Jesus, or whatever their own shared beliefs are. I’ve found the same effect - amazing closeness with people from completely different backgrounds and parts of the world based on our shared Christianity. Then the relationship between him and the Nation of Islam sours, and:

“Any number of my former brothers felt they would make heroes of themselves in the Nation of Islam if they killed me. …I knew that no one would kill you quicker than a Muslim if he felt that’s what Allah wanted him to do.”

This isn’t a condemnation of Muslims - it’s just a depressingly human trait to act as if humanity is fundamentally split into us and them. I’ve met people that I could get on well with until I saw how they treated women, or acted toward minorities. His thinking seemed to be developing toward a much more inclusive view, but as @AcerPlatanoides pointed out earlier, it’s depressing to see that people have this “empathy switch” or the ability to divide the world down racial, ideological or other lines and show so little empathy for the “others”.

On the other hand, I have seen some encouraging signs that it isn’t necessarily like that. I have many friends from my Christian days who I haven’t spoken to for years, and every time I talk with one of them it’s like coming out. Will they still accept me, or will they reject me or try to reconvert me? Will they see my rejection of their beliefs as a betrayal? So far I’ve generally been very pleasantly surprised. I recently spoke to an Indian cabinmate who is living in a mainly Hindu area now. After some initial attempts at reconversion, we had a really good conversation where he talked about the corruption he’d seen in churches and Christian organisations and the need to associate with people from other faiths rather than building empires. Nowadays he wants to show a good example in his community and care for his wife and family rather than supporting the negative religious and gender models that he’s seen. It’s one of the things that I hope to see more of - friendships and connections between people who are not in the same group, showing traditional wisdom that unity is based on ideology to be a lie.

8 Likes
88

Out of likes, but yes, totally hug time. :cry: :heart: :heart: :heart:

8 Likes
89

Thanks!

I saw an opportunity to both contribute a different viewpoint and also make @AcerPlatanoides feel awkward at the same time, and I couldn’t pass it up. So I said all that. But I don’t want to worry anyone.

But there’s a happy ending to the story and for me.

I had that home I needed. I ended up singing passive aggressive songs to my mom about how I loved her anyway while she made me breakfast. I had an epic, fully funded, curfew free, health insured, insane anecdote filled teenage rebellion. I made my dad pay for a ton of therapy for everyone!

I beat him at his own game. He was an abusive nut. I read Machaivelli and the Art of War. He was locked in there with me. And the new game was Leave it to Beaver or else!!!

He was a coward. Like men who beat women and children always are. My mother wanted to keep him. I made sure he knew it was like that. That’s how it was.

All she saw was me shouting him down and sending him to his room when he got out of line. She was delighted. She was safe. He adjusted.

It was insane. And awful. But it was happy there at the end. I’m a sucker for happy endings where everyone lives, then they do the where are they now thing in the end, and it works out like you’d hope it would. It’s a goal for me. I get to make choices. I get to write this story too.

I push as hard as I can for happy endings.

17 Likes
90

Saw it, bookmarked it for later reading. (Up to my neck in chores that can’t be put off, not even for one more day. ) Thanks. Probably will end up sending it along to my friends working in the homeless support networks here in central Texas.

I have talked with more homeless people in the Austin-megapolis whose humanity is intact, folks who either have opted to live outside in the rough because shelters are full or dangerous; or who have been forced through complications and circumstance into homelessness, than in any other big city I’ve lived in.

There but for the grace of cosmic good fortune etc. go I. They have been some very patient, truth-telling teachers for me. I have no idea whether any I spoke with are sociopaths. I was raised by a parent with a full-blown classic narcissistic personality disorder (never treated), and a co-dependent enabler parent. I have often wondered if the source of my empathy comes from my familiarity with sharp edges of human behavior, or in spite of it, or both.

7 Likes
91

16 Likes
92

I seem to remember quite a few BB commenters identifying as INTJ (as do I). Not to give too much credence to Myers Briggs, but the external similarities and internal differences are interesting (and pretty accurate, in my case). An older article gives this list of traits:

The INTJ:
Doing things to excess (i.e., exercising, dieting)
Can have a idiosyncratic value system, especially around sexuality (They may use sex to humiliate themselves or to show profound caring)
Act impulsively, especially under pressure
Very sensitive to criticism (at times with certain people)
Pursue ideas that are unrealistic
Appear cold and shallow
Appear unsympathetic
Enjoy change, challenge, and variety
Single minded, stubborn

The Psychopath:
Selfish
Callous
Accomplished liars
Con artists
Remorseless
Irresponsible
Inflated sense of worth
Unstable
Shallow emotions (though they may try to appear as if they have genuine emotions)
Risk taker
Deviant lifestyle
Parasitic
Anti-social
Unrealistic goals
Needs excitement
Promiscuous

ETA: I hadn’t realised that this was a comparison people made until this morning, when it was a question in Quora:

2 Likes
93

Does anyone feel like this is happening on a national and global scale? How do you organise an intervention with a voting population to help them get out of abusive relationships with sociopaths?

9 Likes
94

I do. The heuristic idea of abusive, self-interested, deceptive, cost-externalizing corporations victimizing trusting, collaborative-but-traumatized, corporate-identified communities is useful for assessing and planning interventions. We use it a lot for gender violence survivors, political and community work.

10 Likes
95

It’s interesting because, with traumatized individuals, it’s important to start with culturally sensitive listening, safety planning and economic supports.

Since consensual relationships are the normative lodestar, the coercive aspects of a relationship may take time to see … though faster during periods of crisis. The rational, “political” question of “escape or risk death” is much trickier.

It’s not a “rescue” if that makes sense.

7 Likes
96

I’ve never been in a relationship with a sociopath, but seeing one from the outside is crazy. It’s sometimes just so flipping obvious and the other person often doesn’t even see that they need to get out, even if you help them to find a safe path. They’ll even defend their abuser or push away people trying to warn them, even though they get nothing from the other person. One time we were looking after a toddler because the father spent all his money (and some of the mother’s too) on drink. She was starving and looked really ill (although she was quite heavily pregnant), but she had to keep working. He had been violent with her before and we were worried that he would start again, but she wouldn’t leave. He was charming and was able to get better jobs than her (even though he didn’t bring the money home), but we couldn’t convince him to get out of working in bars and sort his life out or later for her to leave him to protect herself and the children. As can happen, they had moved away from her family and friends, but even though her family invited her back and we raised money for the travel costs, she wouldn’t go. Honestly, I think they both would have been better off apart, but there was nothing we could do about it.

Apparently INTJs can spot sociopaths easier than others - I have no idea if that’s true, but I do know that the relationships that some people get into blow my mind when there are so much better people around them.

5 Likes
97

That’s not happenstance; it’s one of the well-known steps to get a victim away from any form of support or reality check.

9 Likes
98

This is what I meant - there was a pattern that you could see from outside the relationship, and it was systematically exploiting weaknesses that the other person had. It’s more than fear of violence or anything like that too - she would stay with him even when leaving was less risky. I took his dog when he threatened violence against it and I still wish I’d gone through with my threat of calling the police (at that point I hadn’t realised that he had a history with them).

4 Likes
99

I’ve worked on gender violence issues for over 20 years. FWIW, complex trauma, socioeconomic and cultural factors can combine to make escaping abuse counterintuitively complicated.

A key point to remember: The risk of domestic homicide increases during separation and/or divorce.

So the behavior of the person injured by abuse can seem irrational while actually well attuned to her — and possibly kids’ — survival. Our outside-the-relationship ideas about how to survive can range from useless to risky to harmful.

It’s tempting but unhelpful to consider “obvious” etc. that she “needs to leave” for . . . reasons.

A more effective approach is to concentrate on safety as determined by the abused person.

Agreed.

Lundy Bancroft’s work (mentioned above) is excellent for digging into these questions. Judith Herman’s book is great for learning about trauma.

There’s 24-hour intimate partner (domestic) violence and/or rape crisis lines for every county in the U.S.

Those are often legally privileged which increases safety. The advocates who answer the crisis line and respond train each other to do safety planning and long-term support for escaping abuse.

They can often offer supported referrals to teams of professionals with relevant, grant-funded expertise. More important, they’re trained not to blame or judge . . . to be patient and useful the caller, to concentrate on her safety.

And the Nat’l Sexual Violence Resource Center is a faster resource if a game plan is needed more quickly.

7 Likes
100

It was difficult in this situation - it was in the Canary Islands and they were from different European countries. I’m not sure whether he planned to take her away in order to isolate her or not - work was difficult to find and they were both being exploited in illegal jobs, but many people came with romantic ideas of island life. He was intelligent, multilingual and got on well with people, so he could have made something of himself if he hadn’t been trapped in a destructive cycle. We didn’t come up with the idea to get her out of there - she asked us to help her go back to her parents, but then she backed out at the last minute. It would have been relatively straightforward to leave just after he got paid - he would disappear for a few days and come back broke. I think it took another year or so before she did leave him, but by that point she had to stay in the area as she had two kids and no money to fly back. I had warned him that I would call the police if I ever heard of him acting aggressively again, and I never did. Mission accomplished? Maybe, but I don’t feel good about it at all.

I don’t believe in telling people what to do and I don’t presume to know more than they do, but neither do I think that the decision to stay is always the most rational one (even given the risks). Going back to the society level, just because a leader is pretty objectively bad for a group doesn’t necessarily mean that it won’t continue to support them. People are frustratingly easily exploited in predictable ways, despite being intelligent in many others (and I’m not excluding myself from this assessment).

4 Likes