One day I bought Larry, my ex-boyfriend, a massive salt water aquarium. It was three hundred gallons if it was one gallon. He spent many days setting up the filtration system, collecting the corals and rocks, trading and catching many fine aquatic fish for his new hobby.
Larry guarded and loomed over the tank consistently. If one fish was picking on another, he would grab a wooden dowel stick at the ready and chase the hostile fish away from its victim.
Larry brought home a reef fish that would back its tail into the small hole it lived in and make quick darts out to retrieve what foods would fall in front of their hole. Larry let the fish slowly adjust to the temperature and acclimate to the new salt water. He eased the fish so carefully into its new environment. When he finally let the fish free in the tank Larry stood by with his dowel stick, chasing all the other fish away from the new-comer.
The new fish hastily found and choose its new home but this location didn’t suit Larry at all. He stood on his toes with the dowel stick in the tank and chased that fish from its home and forced it to the hole he wanted it to live in.
There would have been an infinitesimal difference in the look of the tank to have one fish, of a few dozen fish, in that hole instead of a hole one foot to the left but it mattered so much to Larry that he would spend hours watching the tank, staring at that fish until it dared to go where it wanted to. Then Larry would jump from the couch, grab the stick, dip it into the tank and chase the fish back over to where Larry wanted the fish to live.
The fish soon learned that being where Larry didn’t want it to be was the most dangerous place to be and I truly recall the gleam in Larry’s eye when he no longer had to chase the fish over to its unnatural home. The fish had accepted defeat and it was a great success for Larry.
All of the fish more or less acted like fish should, but if there was any deviation from what Larry want to see and have occur in his fish tank, Larry would grab his dowel stick and swish it aggressively at the law-breaking fish, demanding its conformity.
Maybe the fish could acknowledge that when they fought or lived in the wrong part of the tank, the dowel would come in and stop it or move it or somehow drive it to behave differently than what it wanted to, than what was innately natural to it. No matter what the fish wanted.
For those fish, the price of life, acceptance and safety was utter obedience, complete compliance to the selfish and dangerous tyrant that wanted something pleasing to look at and needed something to control and torment;
Something like me.
I consider myself a caring person. I recycle everything and care for my roommate’s dog. I cook nightly merely to put a healthier meal in my man’s stomach and I place sidewalk-stranded worms safely in the dirt. I always say please and thank you because I mean it and I know it’s a good experience for the receiver.
So what would make me fantasize happily and without guilt about snipping one particular man’s fingers off with my gardening shears and feeding them to the feral cat that wanders my neighborhood? What’s that? Am I a sociopath, you ask? No. But I was gathered up by a sociopath two weeks after my sixteenth birthday. I was raised by a sociopath.
It had only been three years since a rather physical ejection from my father’s home and I still suffered from PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) from those years. Rather than help me heal my heart and soul, like the man who claimed to love me should, Larry used the ruins of my being to build the pedestal for him to stand on. A pedestal I was apparently unworthy to even stand in the shadow of.
He told me that it was my ‘stupid’ fault the strip club he got me a job at just a few blocks from my own apartment found out I was sixteen. He convinced me of anything it took for me to leave the state with him, away from family and the men I slept with who I called friends. But Larry said he loved me and made me say it too; every night before he sent me to work at yet another strip club.
Larry never struck me but during my daily dose of belittling it seemed it was all he could do not to punch me in the face. Somehow, by paying all the bills while he sat at home doing cocaine I didn’t even know was around, I seemed to have driven him to utter fury. Nose to nose he would yell how worthless I was, stupid, fat and ugly.
No wonder your father beat you! Larry would scream and spit in my face. His manic need for complete control of me was morbidly relentless and grew worse year after year. And often, as I was staring mindlessly at the TV watching some silly sitcom, he would blurt out, Penny for your thoughts?
I was watching TV. I wasn’t thinking anything. I would answer, totally caught off guard by the abrupt interruption of me wishing he would die.
Mind’s a complete [expletive] blank, huh?! That [expletive] figures. Then he would shake his head in monumental disappointment with a distasteful, disgusted sneer my direction. And that kind of crud was happening to me every day for eight years instead of the therapy, rehab and parental supervision I actually needed.
I fantasized about suicide like it was a beautiful dream I didn’t want to wake up from. I wanted this fat, stupid, worthless, ugly, maddeningly dense idiot, me, to be dead. During a break-down cry one night, I did have a rather moving spiritual experience and left Larry a few days later. And when he sent me a letter through my mother, I didn’t open it, I didn’t read it. I didn’t tear it angrily to shreds or burn it in the hotel sink. I tossed it casually in the trash can like last week’s junk mail. I decided I wasn’t ever going to let Larry effect me in an emotional way again.
And I wish that thought had held true. His torment has stayed with me to this day. I know because I feel entirely too driven to share this article, my story of life with a sociopath, with the public. I still have moments of worthlessness and even now I still occasionally consider suicide as an acceptable option when I’m feeling really down on myself, reliving Larry’s hurtful words.
I don’t like to think there are bad people in the world, but what of the sociopath? Are they hardwired without a good-person gene? Or did something so bad happen to them that anything good was destroyed long ago?
I have struggled to find sympathy, compassion and forgiveness for Larry. But he took too much from me when I needed the most help. He used every weakness I had and used it against me, to get me to do what he needed to make him feel a power over another. And I did what he said for just his claim of loving me, the very thing I needed to hear. He came in and filled the exact place I needed filled. And yes, it was totally too good to be true.
Some sociopaths make themselves the person that we can turn to for safety in the world they put us in when we were taken from all that we knew. Then they chase us around with a dowel stick until we realize they are the biggest threat in the fish tank and that the price of life, acceptance and safety was utter obedience, complete compliance.
Larry wasn’t a serial killer or rapist or someone who could easily be seen as a threat. He hustled and commanded that I cared, then used my feelings as weapon against me, first and foremost to harm my being and secondly, to fill his pockets with cash and drugs while I dreamt of jumping off my balcony into the traffic many stories below to relieve the world of my worthless presence.
I don’t want another person to be victimized by a sociopath. I believe the best way to protect yourself against such a person is to know yourself better. Know what your weaknesses are, know what you think would make you feel safe. And don’t let anyone fill that gap but yourself. Sociopaths have no power over those that really know themselves. In my opinion the only other defense against a sociopath’s crime is complete withdraw from trusting all others.
But anything a sociopath’s victim doesn’t rebuild is the sociopath’s victory. I’m not going to let Larry win by still living my life within his past insults of my worthlessness. And neither should you.
Here is an interesting article you can read: Difference between Sociopath and Psychopath
