What were we talking about? Oh, that's right, Dr. Stout's book, the sociopath next door. This seems like a good place to pick it back up:
You can't appeal to their conscience if they don't have any!
Sociopathy is more than just the absence of conscience, which alone would be tragic enough. Sociopathy is the inability to process emotional experience, including love and caring, except when such experience can be calculated as a coldly intellectual task.
As a counterpart to sociopathy, the condition of narcissism is particularly interesting and instructive. Narcissism is, in metaphorical sense, one half of what sociopathy is. Even clinical narcissists are able to feel most emotions as strongly as anyone else does, from guilt and sadness to desperate love and passion. The half that is missing is the crucial ability to understand what other people are feeling. Narcissism is a failure not of conscience but of empathy, which is the capacity to perceive emotions in others and so react to them appropriately. The poor narcissist cannot see past his own nose, emotionally speaking, and as with the Pillsbury doughboy, any input from the outside will spring back as if nothing had happened. Unlike sociopaths, narcissists often are in psychological pain, and may sometimes seek psychotherapy. When a narcissist looks for help, one of the underlying issues is usually that, unbeknownst to him, he is alienating his relationships on account of his lack of empathy with others, and is feeling confused, abandoned, and lonely. He misses the people he loves, and is ill-equipped to get them back. Sociopaths, in contrast, do not care about other people, and so do not miss them when they are alienated or gone, except as one might regret the absence of a useful appliance that one had somehow lost.
Thirteen Rules For Dealing With Sociopaths
- The first rule involves the bitter pill of accepting that some people literally have no conscience.
- In a contrast between your instincts and what is implied by the role a person has taken on - educator, doctor, leader, animal lover, humanist, parent - go with your instincts.
- When considering a new relationship of any kind, practice the rule of threes regarding the claims and promises a person makes, and the responsibility he or she has. Make the rule of threes your personal policy. One lie may be a misunderstanding. Two may involve a serious mistake. Three ... cut your losses and get out as soon as you can.
- Question authority.
- Suspect flattery.
- Redefine your concept of respect. Too often, we mistake fear for respect, and the more fearful we are of someone, the more we view him or her as deserving of our respect. In a perfect world, human respect would be an automatic reaction only to those who are strong, kind, and morally courageous. The person who profits from frightening you is not likely to be any of these.
- Do not join the game. Resist the temptation to try to outsmart him, psychoanalyze, or even banter with him. IN addition to reducing yourself to his level, you would be distracting yourself from what is really important, which is to PROTECT YOURSELF.
- The best way for you to protect yourself is to AVOID HIM.
- Question your tendency to pity too easily. Respect should be reserved for the kind and the morally courageous. If you find yourself often pitying someone who consistently hurts youor other people, and who actively campaigns for your sympathy, the chances are close to 100 percent that you are dealing with a sociopath. I highly recommend that you seriously challenge your need to be polite in absolutely all situations. Sociopaths take huge advantage of this automatic courtesy in exploitive situations. Do not be afraid to be unsmiling and to the point.
- Do not try to redeem the unredeemable. If you are dealing with a person who has no conscience, know how to swallow hard and cut your losses. At some point, most of us need to learn the important though disappointing life lesson that no matter how good our intentions, we cannot control the behavior - let alone the character structures - of other people. Learn this fact of human life, and avoid the irony of getting caught up in the same ambition he has - to control. Help only those who truly want to be helped. I think you will find this does not include the person who has no conscience. The sociopath's behavior is not your fault, not in any way whatsoever. It is also not your mission. Your mission is your own life.
- Never agree, out of pity or for any other reason, to help a sociopath conceal his or her true character.
- Defend your psyche. Do not allow someone without conscience, or even a string of such people, to convince you that humanity is a failure. Most human beings do possess conscience. Most human beings are able to love.
- LIVING WELL IS THE BEST REVENGE.
Happiness is when what you think and what you do are in harmony. -Mahatma Ghandi
Warning to all sociopaths: If you oppress, rob, murder, and rape enough people, eventually some of them will gang up on you and take their revenge!
Having never made much of a mark on the world,the majority are on a downward life course, and by late middle age will be burned out completely. They can rob and torment us temporarily, yes, but they are, in effect, failed lives. For most of us, happiness comes through the ability to love, to conduct our lives according to our higher values (most of the time), and to feel reasonably contented within ourselves. Sociopaths cannot love, by definition they do not have higher values, and they almost never feel comfortable in their own skins. They are loveless, amoral, and chronically bored.
The absolute self-involvement of sociopathy creates an individual consciousness that is aware of every little ache and twitch in the body, every passing sensation in the head and chest, and ears that orient with acute personalized concern to every radio and television report about everything from bedbugs to ricin. Because his concerns and awareness are geared exclusively towards himself, the person without conscience sometimes lives in a torment of hypochondriacal reactions that would make even the most fretful anxiety neurotic appear rational. Getting a paper cut is a major event, and a cold sore is the beginning of the end.
A person without conscience ... even a smart one ... tends to be a shortsighted and surprisingly naive individual who eventually expires of boredom, financial ruin or a bullet.
You may yourself be caught up in the snares of sociopaths from time to time, and on account of your scruples, you may never be able to take satisfactory revenge on the people who have hurt you.
But YOU will be able to look at your children asleep in their beds and feel that unbearable surge of awe and thanksgiving. You will be able to keep others alive in your heart long after they are gone. You will have genuine friends. Unlike the hollow, risk-pursuing few who are deprived of a seventh sense, you will go through your life fully aware of the warm and comforting, infuriating, confusing, compelling, and sometimes joyful presence of other human beings, and along with your conscience you will be given the chance to take the largest risk of all, which, aswe all know, is to love.
Conscience is the place where psychology and spirituality meet.
The Golden Rule is expressed in nearly every religion and belief:
Do not do to others what you would not have done to you. -Confucius
Do unto others as you would have them done to you. - Jesus
What is hateful to you, do not to your fellow man. - Jewish proverb
Do naught unto others which would cause you pain if done to you. - Dharma (Hinduism)
One going to take a pointed stick to pinch a baby bird should first try it on himself to feel how it hurts. -Yoruba of Nigeria
All things are relatives; what we do to everything, we do to ourselves. All is really one. - Lakota Indian Religious Leader, Black Elk
Conscience blesses our lives with just this kind of meaning every day.
I vote for the ones who are loving and committed, for the generous and gentle souls. I am most impressed by those individuals who feel, quite simply, that hurting others is wrong and kindness is right, and those actions are quietly directed by this moral sense everyday of our lives. They are an elite of their own. They are old and young. They are people who have been gone for hundreds of years and the baby who will be born tomorrow. They come from every nation, culture, and religion. They are the most aware and focused members of our species. And they are, and always have been, our hope.
( the sociopath next door by Martha Stout, Ph.D. )
I don't know that I will ever completely understand how an abuser's mind works, but maybe, that's a good thing?
I do know that my life is much easier without the direct influence of narcissists or sociopaths. Now, that I have seen a few, up close and personal, it is my plan to AVOID THEM as soon and as fast as I can! They are NOT my mission. I didn't break them. I can't fix them!
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