Psychopaths in Therapy

By now it should be quite obvious that a psychopathic partner will agree to go to therapy with you only if he believes that there’s something in it for him, not because he actually cares about you or values your relationship. Perhaps you offer him a useful income, a home, or the cover of normalcy he needs to better manipulate you and others. Or perhaps he hasn’t yet secured another target who’s as willing to tolerate his abuse as you are. Keep in mind that psychopaths always have self-serving motives, even when they appear to be other-regarding and willing to please. If you still want to save the relationship with a psychopath, it means that you have not yet accepted the fact that you’re dealing with an evil human being who can’t be fixed through love, kindness, compromise, medication, therapy or understanding. As one of the regular contributors to lovefraud.com wisely stated, no matter how much you may pet a snake, it won’t grow fur and become a puppy. Sooner or later, perhaps when you least expect it, it will strike against you. Your attempts to redeem the irredeemable will therefore prove as futile as your efforts to please him have been. However, since psychopaths cultivate highly addictive relationships and since they can be charming when it suits them, you may not be willing to abandon the impossible goal of saving him and your relationship with him. You may need to undergo further humiliation and abuse to hit bottom, as therapists say about alcoholics and drug addicts.

Robert Hare begins Without Conscience with a telling anecdote. As mentioned in the previous section, he and his students did research “to monitor electrical activity in the brains of several groups of adult men while they performed a language task” and submitted their article to a well-regarded professional journal. The editor of the journal rejected their article. He stated, “‘Frankly, we found some of the brain wave patterns depicted in the paper very odd. Those EEG’s (electroencephalograms) couldn’t have come from real people’” (Without Conscience, 1). Hare objected that he and his research team certainly didn’t do their experiments on aliens. They conducted them on “a class of individuals found in every race, culture, society, and walk of life. Everybody has met these people, been deceived and manipulated by them, and forced to live with or repair the damage they have wrought. These often charming—but always deadly—individuals have a clinical name: psychopaths” (1).

But you don’t need to conduct neurological research to know if your partner is likely to be a psychopath. If you notice a consistent pattern of deception, cheating and manipulation—all masked by supposedly good intentions and a thin, but often compelling, layer of charm—you have sufficient information to know that you’re dealing with a dangerous man. Since research shows that psychopathy is partly due to a genetic deficiency that can’t be cured in adults, the only reason why you’d go into therapy with a psychopathic partner is because you haven’t fully accepted, on an emotional rather than just rational level, the seriousness and permanency of his personality disorder. You may also be exactly the kind of partner a psychopath seeks: someone who’s willing to do everything possible to hold on to him. Steve Becker argues that the effort to please a psychopath is futile and self-defeating. Such a disordered individual doesn’t seek a successful relationship with anybody. Instead, he’s looking for a scapegoat whom he can use, manipulate and humiliate. Becker notes:

I’m often surprised in my work by the tenacious investment exploited partners make in solving the needs and complaints of their self-centered mates. Of course, they’ll never succeed, but as long as they continue owning the exploiter’s blame for the latter’s discontent, they can keep trying, keep striving to be a better mate—to become, finally, the good-enough mate the exploiter has claimed to deserve all along. Let us emphasize the futility of this scenario—the exploiter really doesn’t want a satisfying or, for that matter, even a perfect, partner; rather what he or she wants is a partner who, in his or her insecurity, will continue to accept on some level blame for the exploiter’s unending, habitual exploitation. The exploiter, in other words, is looking much less for the perfect partner than the perfect scapegoat (lovefraud.com).

Furthermore, the psychopath may manipulate the therapist or take advantage of the structure of couples’ counseling itself. Counseling generally functions under the assumption that both partners have flaws and need to make an equal effort to improve themselves and their relationship. This symmetrical structure is unlikely to address the fundamental asymmetries of the psychopathic bond. For as long as you seek ways of improving your relationship with a psychopathic partner, you’ll continue to run around in circles like a gerbil on a spinning wheel. As Becker observes, not only will you fail in your efforts to save the relationship, but also you’ll never be rewarded by the psychopath with any real appreciation:

The exploiter is, of course, incapable of appreciating his or her partner’s devotion. But even if not, he or she would intentionally withhold such recognition anyway; his or her object, remember, rather than to uplift his or her partner, is calculatingly the opposite—to engender hopelessness and depression in him or her. On and on the cycle goes, until the vulnerable partner, just as the exploiter has sought, finally feels so low, incompetent and disempowered that he or she can’t seriously imagine a different future (lovefraud.com).

To imagine and actually live a different future, you need to end your relationship with the psychopath. Undergoing therapy with him won’t improve your life. On the contrary, it will only propel you along the same downwards spiral that has undermined your dignity and happiness so far. Instead of undergoing therapy to save a harmful relationship with an inherently bad person, it’s in your best interest to get individual counseling from someone who understands what you’re going through and has your best interest in mind.

Dangerous Liaisons/Legături Periculoase, Editura Vremea, http://www.edituravremea.ro/leg–turi-periculoase–cum-s–recuno–ti-un-psihopat–i-s–scapi-din-mrejele-lui