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Plus some of us have/had a parent-child relationship with our spouse or xspouse and they don’t want to lose their ‘mommy’.
He has always been needy and always trying to pretend he isn’t. Actually, that was one of the reasons I was so stunned to learn that he would do ANYTHING to jeopardize our relationship. I have since decided he is some variation of borderline. My husband doesn’t read books….any books…he is too ADD and prefers magazines and the web. He bought a book titled “I hate you-please don’t leave me. Understanding borderline personality disorder”. I was floored and then I thought BINGO. Of course, he hates me but feels he cannot cope without me.(in his mind) That really explained his erratic behaviour to me. The things he did were like what you would do to someone you hated? His cheating was NEVER detached from me…I was ALWAYS a big part of it…even all those years I had NO IDEA he was doing it. He was satisfying himself and “getting me” at the same time. You HAVE to be crazy to cling to someone you think you hate?? When he isn’t hating me he is deifying me…one extreme to the other? I
cannot even imagine living inside his twisted head…..
I’m of the opinion that ALL of them are needy for one sick reason or another. They are VERY good at masking their need. In Asia, mine had me convinced he would let me walk away without much reaction at all….until I did. Then he just about had a breakdown and had to go on medication. What a f’king
idiot. I hate even talking about him…..I prefer not to think about him. I cannot believe my life got used up on a crazy person…that he ALMOST had me crazy too. Its impossible.Sociopath or narc? Doesn’t matter, but I read that book and think my husband is both.
Karen, love that line “I cannot believe my life got used up on a crazy person, that he almost had me crazy, too.”Karen I wish you could end your marriage because you have so much to offer. I know you arenot attached to him I would just like to see you be ‘free’ of him. Your life would just blossom and you deserve all good things!!!
Love, Napxo“I cannot believe my life got used up on a crazy person.”
I think this is probably the greatest loss of all in all of this. It’s bad enough they waste their own lives, but they waste ours as well. That and the damage they do to their own kids.
karen, this hit me like a ton of bricks. and it’s a perfect example of on of the reasons why it IS personal.
‘His cheating was NEVER detached from me…I was ALWAYS a big part of it…’
I read this post last week and while intrigued, I didn’t really think too much about it b/c on that particular day, I wasn’t interested in diagnosing my h. However, this week, when talking with my therapist & explaining how I think my h. is living this life where now he’s pulling the wool over on his therapist and even on his SA group buddies, she said he sounds a little sociopathic. I was wondering is that possible? Or is that like being “almost pregnant”? I guess there is a sliding scale for narcs and sociopaths and that is why so many of our h’s could fit into either category – they exhibit some traits from both disorders. One of the main traits my h. has is a lack of empathy, which I think is a narc trait. I think he’s learned to fake it so it’s not so evident all the time but that has been there as long as I have known him. For example, any time one of our daughters hurts herself, his immediate reaction is to scold, “what did you do?” instead of “are you okay?”
He even admitted a few months ago that he doesn’t “feel” things the way most people do. He understands it intellectually but he just don’t feel it like the rest of us.
As far as I understand FC, they can have sociopathic traits without being a full blown sociopath. You think thats weird, when I first learned my H had had an African hooker in my bed- after years and years of what I thought was a happy, monogamous marriage- needless to say I reacted pretty strongly. I remember distinctly thinking “I can see his mouth moving but I just don’t understand the words that are coming out.” Anyway, afterwards he did what 90% of them do- panicked, pleading, so sorry blah, blah blah. In an email he said he knew he had killed me and he wished it could be him. He said he would do everything he could to help me but he wasn’t sure what he could do as he “wasn’t real” and that I was not to waste my time grieving over a sick, sociopathic, bastard like himself. That may have been the only time in our marriage that he was completely honest with me and in hindsight
he was absolutely correct. He wasn’t worth grieving over and he certainly isn’t “real”. We have to be nuts to even waste a second thought on them. They are all batshit crazy. Assholes….each and EVERY one.Wow, Karen, talk about believing them when they show you who they really are- he actually let the curtain open quite a bit, it sounds like.
I think sometimes there is some kind of measure of sociopathic tendencies. There’s like a sliding scale of degree. I read that somewhere- “Sociopath Next Door” maybe?
As I said in another thread, I just watched part of Doug Weiss’ “Healing Her” I think it’s called. He is SA with 23 years sobriety he starts out saying (and then goes on and on narc-style about all his accomplishments). He is probably about as good as you are going to get from an SA, I would expect. He treats SA’s and spouses. He gets some things right- he says it’s like she got hit by a truck and now she needs to heal. She didn’t sign up for this.
He talks about how the pain that the SA causes the spouse is like when she is in labor with your baby. He says something along the lines of, “you know when she is in labor in pain with your baby and you caused that? You caused that pain?” and then he equates that to what an SA does to his wife when she discovers his addiction. It frickin’ sounds like he’s bragging. And that is from someone who has been sober for 23 years and treats spouses and supposedly gets it. Don’t expect them to get it, ever. I really think they do not have the gray matter to get it. It’s not there.
I came across this today about psychopath’s language…
“In February of 2013, researchers from Cornell University and the University of British Columbia analyzed the speech patterns of 14 psychopathic murders and 38 non-psychopathic murderers when they were talking about their crime. Keep in mind, all of the people they interviewed had been convicted of some type of homicide crime. What the researchers found is interesting: Psychopaths used more language that indicated a cause-and-effect thinking style than the non-psychopaths. For example, a psychopath might say, “I hit her because she mouthed off to me,” as opposed to, “She was mouthing off and then I hit her.” Psychopaths also focused more of their crime speech on “material needs” like “food, drink, [and] money.” They spent less time talking about social engagement, family, and religion. They also said “uh” and “um” more, and they tended to talk more in the past tense than the non-psychopaths”
Hancock, J. T., Woodworth, M. T., & Porter, S. (2013). Hungry like the wolf: A word-pattern analysis of the language of psychopaths. Legal and Criminological Psychology, 18(1), 102-114.
Jesus Christ- I’m dealing with a freaking Sociopath! Shit! It’s late and like usual I don’t have time to read all the replies- but Kelly I read your first one and it scared me.
I feel I was in a very abusive relationship with a sociopath and when you talk about dominance bond or whatever it scared the shit out of me. He is always so calm and cool in court and he has no shame. None whatsoever!
Gosh I am feeling really afraid lately. What am I going to do?
Sorry I know I am panicking and venting on someone else’s post but I feel terrified.Mine has been diagnosed with ADHD. He, in my therapists opinion, also has narc PD with sociopathic tendencies. She also thinks he has borderline PD….it’s different than bipolar. Doug Weiss is an asshole. I was there and got into several arguments with him. Dr ahole never showed much emotion about anything. I used to joke that I could be on my deathbed and he would still go to work. I should have had a clue then.
Alice, you already are doing it! I think you are even better off now bc you have some knowledge under your belt. We are all dealing with the same thing…you will be fine. Just expect him to suck. The same boat we all are in.
From The Sociopath Next Door:
As it turns out, even at the level of electrical activity in the brain, normal people react to emotional words (love, hate, cozy, pain, happy, mother) more rapidly and more intensely than to relatively neutral words (table, chair, fifteen, later, etc.). … In terms of reaction time and evoked potentials in the cortex, sociopathic subjects in these experiments respond to emotionally charged words no differently from neutral words. … 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. … Narcissism is, in a 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.[end quote] There is a lot more good stuff but I don’t want to write the whole book here. 🙂 Highly recommend this even for Sisters whose Hs aren’t sociopathic spectrum.
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