Choice Theory (16 page)

A sociopath is good at fooling people because he believes he is much better than almost everyone else. He may be funny and even seem kind. When you notice he has some flaws, he may cheerfully admit them and compliment you on how perceptive you are. He’ll tell you how much he appreciates your love, that with it he’ll change. He’s been looking all his life for a woman like you, and that’s true. But you have not been looking for a man like him. For this unscrupulous predator, life is a hunt and you are the game. He’ll use any weapon to get you; there are no rules in the games he plays.

This man is genetically incapable of feeling love or belonging for anyone. He may be charming and sexy, but only to exploit, never because he really cares. Once he has gotten all he wants from a woman, he will run away if she attempts to cling to him because of his need for freedom. If she is too clinging, he may beat her in the hopes that she will do everything for him and expect nothing from him except more beatings. He may even beat her for not guessing what he wants—he won’t tell her—but after he beats her he will say, “You should have known.”

If you have
any
suspicion that you are involved with a sociopath, look for his friends. You will find that he doesn’t have any; they are always far away or about to visit, but they never show up. One thing about him that you can absolutely count on is that you can never count on him. Never! If he does what you ask, it was a mistake or it’s part of a scheme to exploit you further. If early in the relationship he takes you out to an expensive place and tells you he’s forgotten his credit card and asks to borrow yours, never see him again and make sure you get the card back. If he says he misplaced it, cancel it immediately. He has no credit cards, but he is already thinking about going on a spree with yours.

The workless person is the most puzzling of all the people we encounter. He easily relates to others and, at first, you may easily relate
to him. But if you get close, if you marry him, you will become increasingly frustrated. There may be women among the workless, but they are less visible because it is still more accepted in our society for a woman not to work and to be supported.

Unlike a sociopath, who quickly shows his true colors, the workless person goes about what he does slowly. You may get deeply involved before you realize who you are involved with. Also he doesn’t prey on you directly; you are hurt more by what he doesn’t do than by what he does. But, in the end, because of your longer involvement with him that may take up years of your life, he may hurt you more than the year or less of
adventure
that you will have, if you survive, with most sociopaths. I call this person
workless
because he doesn’t work. Although he doesn’t usually drink or use drugs excessively, he is like an alcoholic in that he needs enablers—wives, family members, and friends—to survive. And like an alcoholic, he usually finds them.

The workless person seems able to work and may hold a job for a while, especially when he is young, but never for more than a few years. Mostly he gets fired, but sometimes he quits. By the time he is in his forties, it is unlikely that he will ever work again. He depends on others to take care of him.

I believe that the workless person has a very low need for survival, significantly lower than the sociopath, and a very high need for power, much like the sociopath. But he has none of the
ganas,
the desire to work hard to survive that I talked about in chapter 2, so he rarely if ever is able to satisfy his need for power.

The low need for survival has left him with insufficient drive to do anything for himself, much less for others, even for an employer who will pay him. The high need for power has inflated his opinion of himself to the unrealistic idea that almost anything he is asked to do is beneath him. But it is the relationship between these two needs, a lot of power but no drive to achieve it, that is the critical part of his need profile. He talks and dreams big, but he performs small.

The workless person’s need for freedom may be average or slightly above average. He does move around a lot but I don’t
think it’s so much for freedom as just for something to do. He likes to drift around, meet strangers, and talk about himself. The latter is characteristic. He talks to you, never
with
you, about himself or people he knows. He is not interested in what you have to say. He has no real interest in anyone but himself. He also seems to have no insight into the fact that he is the way he is, especially, that he doesn’t work.

The workless person does have the ability to receive love, an ability that is foreign to the sociopath. He likes to be loved and, even more, to be befriended. Unlike the sociopath, he has no problem making and keeping relationships, as long as nothing difficult, such as holding a job, is required of him. When he is asked to do the things that are normally done in a close relationship like a marriage, he won’t do his part. If you marry such a man, you are marrying a child who will never grow up. He is so pleased and appreciative when you give him love and friendship that this show of appreciation will fool you and his parents into thinking that he can give some back, but he can’t; he has none to give.

He does, however, have a very high need for fun in a childish sense. He tends to like school and makes up a significant proportion of the group called perennial students. Sometimes he finishes what he is studying, but mostly he doesn’t. It is typical for him to get right to the end and then drop out. What he fears is finishing and having to go to work using what he has learned. If he goes to work, he does nothing. He acts as if he doesn’t know what to do or what is expected of him.

The workless person has little contact with the reality of the world; his reality is almost all of his own making. He seems normal, and as long as nothing is expected of him, he can act as if he’s normal, but he’s not. If you marry such a man, you may have a good companion as long as you support him, do almost all the work, and don’t ask anything of him. When you ask him to take a little bit of responsibility, he won’t do it and can get quite mean and abusive if you persist. When he does something, which at times he may, it is more for himself than for anyone else.

Generally, if the workless get into top jobs through family influence,
they do nothing, just sit there, paralyzed, while things fall apart around them or bark a lot of senseless orders that no one pays much attention to. The workless man tends to live in the past with the fantasy that before now, I was very competent and things were fine. He is perfectly willing to talk about his nonexistent
accomplishments
and may talk about school, where he may have done fairly well.

If the workless person worked a few days, he talks about it as if he’d worked for months. The past, as he remembers it, is always good. He also treats the future like a world of opportunity that is waiting for him. What he doesn’t want to do—and doesn’t do—is live in the present, work, take responsibility, get things done. For him, life is always back then or soon to be; it’s never now.

The workless often marry and have children so, if this condition is in their genes, it can be passed on. They say they love children, but they do not love children enough to do much, if anything, for their own. When their children are young, they enjoy playing childish games with them. When their children are teenagers, these children may see their fathers more accurately than anyone else. At this point, many of the children lose interest in their workless fathers, and their fathers seem to lose interest in them. The fact that the children of the workless lose interest in them is a positive for the children; otherwise, they would be disappointed.

Almost all of us have known some workless men, and we want to help them. They are frequently sent to psychiatrists—I’ve seen a lot of them—but few are amenable to psychotherapy because the goal of therapy is to help people to develop better relationships, which they can use to live more effective lives. When the workless start therapy, they often fool their counselors because they are often charming, relate easily, and give the appearance that with a little help, they can straighten themselves out. But this is the point: They just
seem
to want help.

The workless love therapy. Instead of acting as clients and trying to get some help, they quickly become cocounselors, always talking, suggesting, and helping out. In a sense, what they try to
do is to go into business with their counselors. If their counselors realize this is going on and become confrontational, the workless get angry, blame the counselors, and break off the relationships. In therapy, they act the same way as they do everywhere else. As long as nothing is asked of them, they are fine. But they are fine only for themselves, not for anyone else.

In their efforts to deal with the hand their genes have dealt them, they may choose the up-and-down behavior that goes by the common diagnosis of bipolar disease or manic-depressive disorder. But whether they are up, down, or in between, the workless are never competent. This is what makes them different from other bipolar people who are quite competent when they are not choosing to go too far up or down. Unlike bipolars who are sometimes helped by lithium carbonate, I don’t think lithium or any medication will help the workless. (That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be tried.)

The workless choose bipolar behaviors because this up-and-down activity reflects their struggle with reality. Driven by their huge need for power, when they are on the high or the upper part of the bipolar cycle, they put pictures of themselves as very powerful, almost omnipotent persons in their quality worlds and go around acting as if they were such persons. They have no desire to see themselves as they really are. As high as they are, with all the energy the high releases, they cannot do anything of value. They are like cars burning a lot of fuel to keep the motors racing, but they seem unable to stay in gear. For them, the only gear is neutral.

Eventually, reality—other people’s, not their own—begins to impinge on their activities. They run out of money and a place to live. Wives, families, and friends stop helping them; they run out of gas and the engine turns off. Now they start to depress seriously. What they are depressing about is the fact that they live in a cruel world where no one seems willing to recognize their talents enough to stay with them. They never think of how little they give and delude themselves into not seeing that they are mainly takers.

They depress not because of all the lives they have damaged;
they never see it that way. Their depressing is a kind of resting and forgetting phase. After a while, they start up their motors again, and the process repeats—up and down but always standing still. When they are low, they may be suicidal, but not as suicidal as competent people who are better able to recognize reality.

If they run out of money and need care, their families or whoever else cares for them should offer them a structured home setting in which they have to prepare their food if they want to eat. It should also be an environment in which they can just sit if they don’t work. They should not be locked in; they should be free to come and go but given only enough money for the food they have to buy and prepare. There should be no passive entertainment, such as radio or television, except in a special room that they can gain access to only by working. Active entertainment like basketball should be available if they can find someone to play with. Activity is good for them; they are generally inactive. The staff should not talk with them unless they do something tangible for the house that is, in the staff members’ judgment, worth talking about.

I have described sociopaths and the workless as if they were pure cases. Sociopaths are close to pure cases; they don’t vary much, except that some are killers and others are not. What makes one a killer and the other not I don’t know. I suspect that the killer has the worst possible or nonexistent relationships, but this is a guess. If I was involved with one of them, I would always suspect the worst.

The workless come in many shades of gray. Some of the high-grade workless can hold special jobs in which nothing much is asked of them and they don’t even have to be present all the time. Some work for themselves doing odd jobs but never steadily and never if there is any hard work to do. If they have jobs when they go into their high phase, they will walk off them because they view themselves as overqualified for whatever they are supposed to do.

But I can’t think of any workless man of any shade of gray
whom you would want to marry. But if you are married to one of the high-grade workless and he treats you well, you may be able to stay with him. That is the real difference between the high-grade and the usual workless. The high-grade workless man treats the wife who takes care of him well. It’s like being married to an adult child. He won’t change, but he may not get worse. If I were married to one, I would make it clear that this trip through life with me will last only as long as he treats me well.

I have described these types of people partly so you may realize that the strengths of the needs lead to some unusual people, people you need to beware of. But only a few people have need profiles that push them to become sociopaths, although the workless are much more common. The vast majority of us have genes whose strengths lie well within three deviations from the norm, a wide range but still considered statistically normal.

Most of us can create quality worlds that work in the real world and are strong enough to create an effective life with good relationships. We are, of course, limited by things, such as our age, sex, size, looks, health, and talent. But even within those real-world limits, we have more choices than most of us even conceive of using. We are much more limited by external control psychology than by our genes.

W
HEN THERE ARE
two opposing pictures in your quality world at the same time, you have a conflict. The more you move in the direction of one, the more you frustrate the other. There is no escape as long as you want both pictures. For example, I want to be thin, but I don’t want to diet or exercise. I have one ticket for the game of the year, and the girl I have been begging to go out with me for weeks tells me that’s the night she’s free. My office meeting is going overtime; if I leave now, the boss will be furious, but if I don’t, I won’t make it to my daughter’s school play in which she has the lead. It’s been a struggle, but I’ve been dry for a year; a good friend who has invited me for dinner shows me a fine bottle of wine and says, “This is a great wine; try a small glass, I just want you to taste it, that’s all.”