Adventures in Narcissistic Sociopathy, Part 50 Billion
Dealing with one is like being on the world's worst merry-go-round
Several years ago, I sent the following list to my daughter, with the question, “Who does this remind you of?”
“Oh my god,” she wrote back. I cannot recall whether this was before or after this person, whom I’ll call Igor (mostly because it’s funny in what is overall not exactly a funny story) made a car that wasn’t his disappear. I do know it was after he shouted at me, “IF YOU HADN’T OPENED YOUR BITCH CUNT MOUTH YOUR HUSBAND WOULDN’T HAVE LOST HIS BUSINESS!” I do know it was after he took five social security checks of an elder in his universe out of her mailbox and - because the universe has a way of helping things in the right direction - accidentally left a phone message on said elder’s phone wherein he and his girlfriend discussed, after it had been discovered that he had the missing checks, the best way to make it seem as though his discovery of the checks was somehow heroic.
“It’s always hero or zero with him,” a friend of Igor’s since childhood once told me, which put things I should have been seeing all along in perspective.
Having perspective helps, and it does not. Because most people do not expect to be lied to or otherwise manipulated, they do not recognize it right away. Example: I tell you I am driving to the CVS and will be right back. Since you know the CVS is a 20-minute drve, you might assume I’ll be back in an hour, maybe 90 minutes if I run other errands. And then it’s ten hours later, and then it’s next day, and I am not back. In normie-world, this might cause you alarm. But you are no longer in normie-world when you are forced to associate with an Igor, you’re in a place where their mission is to not let you know what’s going on; to keep you a little or a lot in the dark. Thus never knowing an Igor’s whereabouts, or expecting him to be accountable, becomes the new norm, with everyone else picking up the slack.
If Igors were themselves delightful, or generous, or funny, or kind, we might chock this up to some sort of eccentricity, “Oh, you know Igor, so mysterious!” But usually they are not, or not much of the time. Can they charm you when they think it may be of use? Oh yes. As I once write in a WSJ book review, “The terrific and terrible gift of the [socio]path is to make you feel as if you ‘get’ him as others do not.” Therein useful alliances are formed. But they are always fragile, and leave the person who’s been charmed holding the bag, or hurt, or wondering if what happened was their fault. (For more on this, check out The Sociopath Next Door.)
In my experience - and I admit Igor seems to hold a special opprobrium for me and my child - they are not needlessly charming. Maybe it costs them too much. Their default seems to be paranoia and suspicion and vengefulness, all not super not-fun to be around, and after years of this you find yourself going dead quiet when, for instance, Igor follows you to your car yelling that you bought the wrong kind of salami; that the trash cans are too full, that you’re “pathetic.”
At their most innocuous, Igors are fault-finders, and when I learned the word cavil, it struck such a bell, the raising of trivial objections the go-to for an Igor, every interaction a play for dominance, the result being an inexhaustible stream of insults and grievances, the sad or scared person’s bid, one supposes, for primacy, as though that next harsh word will tip the scales in his favor, will make Igor feel not sad or scared, will make him feel respected, feel loved.
Can you have sympathy for an Igor? Yes. Also, after getting figuratively kicked in the face over and over, you choose to avoid being anywhere near him. You realize that the dictum “the only way out is through” is untrue; that you can go around, for now or forever, that the walls of recrimination have grown too tall; that should you and your child present Igor with a warm basket of puppies, the result would be his screaming in your face as he did last time, and the time before that, and the time before that.
How can you not feel bad for what is going on inside this person? How can you be around it?
Until I became a senior prosecutor, like most people, I had only very occasional encounters with true sociopaths.
Eventually I was both explaining the pathology to jurors and both giving speeches and writing op-eds about "anti-social personality disorder" because it is so alien to most people it would be like trying to explain the wonderful taste of a sauce to someone who lacked taste buds.
I explained that in crime there was a "food pyramid" much like the now-outdated USDA one we saw in schools - At the base of 75% of felons were the drug addicts, lazy, impaired, slightly mean and selfish people who were not evil, but consistently made bad and selfish choices. At the next level, at 15-20% were the professional criminals, professional bank robbers, drug dealers who did NOT get "high on their own supply," essentially people who made a career decision like many gangsters that crime was a good choice...for them.
Then at the top, usually no more than 5% of serious criminals, were the sociopaths. Not psychopaths, which generally includes people with delusional thought disorders which can be treated, but the symptoms Nancy enumerated from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association.
There is no medication, no therapy that cures sociopathy. A few of them can channel their extreme self-centered behavior and ironically can really prosper as lawyers or in the upper reaches of the entertainment industry. Think of the advantages you have if the consequences to other people played absolutely no matter in your decisions? But the ones I met in court are profoundly scary people - usually not to me personally, because they targeted vulnerable people.
One not need believe in God to realize that evil exists, and sometimes walks in the front door.
Oh boy. This is my stepdaughter to a T. Last week, it appears that because I am obsessed with her, I paid one of my employees to join the private club she is a member of. Also, when my dog peed on the sidewalk what looked like his name in cursive I went through elaborate means to manufacture it. Thank god my husband and her mom have my back.