Goodness, this never even crossed my mind. Because I keep thinking about my father’s culpability as the main reason for cutting him off, while at the same time I am aware that I cut him off because I couldn’t deal with him anymore. But I keep confusing the two, especially when people ask about the situation and I start justifying myself. Excellent insight EJ. Keep them coming. I hope that the OP is finding this helpful.
Mainly it helps with the self-accusation that you are “not a forgiving person” or the sociopath’s likely accusation that you are “you think you’re better than me, but you’re not” or “you’re just like me, you just won’t admit it” or “sheesh, I thought you were a Christian, but I guess you’re not the forgiving sort” or “yeah, sure, punish me…just like everybody else in my life.”
This accusations are all wrong because** the decision to cut off social contact is not about being vindictive**. If you were a fellow sociopath and you wanted to be vindictive, simply cutting off contact isn’t what you’d do. No, first you’d have to give in to the temptation to get back at them, to beat the b*****d at their own game on the way out the door: set them up to get thrown in jail or lose their job or you’d try to manipulate them better than they manipulate you or take some of their stuff because you deserve it or something preposterous like that! (Not that everyone who’d let themselves try to beat a sociopath at their own game is a sociopath, but that a true sociopath could hardly be expected to do anything else.) Neither does cutting off contact exclude coming to a point where you can let go of the past and wish the person no harm. It will probably make that day come sooner! Forgiveness comes easier when the offending behavior is not ongoing.
Cutting off contact, rather, is about keeping safe from an unreasonable and unnecessasry threat of harm that the person poses to you, it is about making a realistic assessment about whether a person belongs in a particular position of trust, and it is about denying someone a near occasion of sin. It is about taking the most direct and effective route to stopping offending behavior.
When it comes to dealing with sociopaths, it takes awhile to realize that you can separate the person’s extremely low likelihood of amending their behavior from the question of whether or not their are culpable for that behavior.
That is a distinction a sociopath does not want you to make, because they get power by eliciting pity! It takes awhile to realize that they don’t have a good grip on the reality of their own situation and don’t feel a need to tell you the truth about it when they do. All that matters, though, is making a realistic assessment of what good can come out of contact, and at what risk.
To go back to my bear analogy–you don’t keep a bear because you feel sorry for the bear. A person who keeps a bear but isn’t up to it is probably going to get themselves mauled and so get the bear euthanized. If you’re going to keep a bear, it is because the option of freeing the bear isn’t possible and because you have the skills and facilities to keep the bear safely. Otherwise, you just give the bear room to be a bear or hope for the bear’s sake that someone with the right skills steps in, because you can’t…and
if the bear has already mauled you, you probably can’t do that work even if you are the greatest bear expert ever born, because the bear has no respect for you. You don’t get into whether its the bear’s fault that it is the way it is. You just reconcile yourself to the sad truth that the situation is what it is, and act accordingly. Whose fault it is could not matter less.
These are very sad situations to go through. Letting go of the temptation to blame anyone really helps, though, I think, even where blame is richly deserved. Getting to safety makes that easier, not harder.
