I'll never forget the moment I had the realization that my father was sociopathic. I had always known that something was different about him, but I, like many other children of narcissists, would always try to rationalize his behavior and lack of emotions.
First, a little background information: My father had come to live with my family after he realized he could no longer drive due to an accident he caused and he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease. One uneventful day, he was sitting in the family room scratching off his lottery tickets (his obsession) while I sat a few feet away at the computer catching up on the daily news. I came across a particularly disturbing story about a mother who was being charged with child abuse and murder for the death of one of her children. This story detailed some of the most heinous acts of violence against anyone, let alone a child, that I had ever heard. The fact that all of her children were under the age of six and had suffered her abuse brought tears to my eyes.
Just as I was finishing the article, my husband came through the door from work. He must have noticed the look on my face because he said right away, “What is it?” I then began to recount the story in all of it’s horrific detail, including the tender ages of these poor babies, when all of a sudden, my father, not stopping what he was doing, said. “Maybe they were being bad!”
My husband and I looked at each other in total shock, not quite believing what we had just heard. I said, “What did you just say?” and he repeated exactly what I thought we heard. I then said, “What could any child possibly do to deserve such treatment by anyone, especially their own mother?” All he said was “Well?” and continued on scratching those damn tickets.
That answer, by the way, was exactly what he would say my entire life whenever he was confronted about anything, I could and probably will write a post just about that someday. Anyway, that comment revealed to me his true nature in a way that nothing else had ever done before. I was crushed. I knew that psychopaths had no empathy for anyone except themselves, but my dad was no Ted Bundy. How could any normal, feeling person think the same way? I realized then that he was in fact, just like Ted Bundy in his thinking, he just didn’t carry out violent acts against others.
This incident compelled me to research sociopathy, psychopathology, etc. and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s all part of the same type of disorder; having a total lack of empathy for life and the level of dysfunction a person exhibits determines where they fall on this spectrum. This is just my opinion, of course, I’m no expert in psychology by any means, but I think it’s a valid one given that I’ve been raised by someone who was extremely disordered. I’m sure anyone else in the same position can relate, at least, to what I’m saying.
