How Sadistic People Attract Their Victims and Vice Versa

  The Development of Masochistic Personality Organization
When repeatedly maladaptive ways of coping, feeling, thinking, relating and defending become self-defeating and patterned in nature; the person may be considered a masochist by members of the psychoanalytic community. A person whose self-defeating actions result from attempts to maintain and continue relationships despite “whatever cost” (McWilliams, 2011) is considered a relational-masochist. Masochistic personalities may be recognized by their hallmark of “defensively acting out in ways that risk harm” (p. 272). Such a person is in a constant state of anxiety waiting for a person on the higher end of the power differential to punish him or her; the less powerful and dependent person. The constant state of anxiety one experiences while waiting for punishment to me meted out can only be relieved by the provocation of the authority figure.Those whose backgrounds include frightening, negligent, abusive or otherwise traumatic elements may need to recreate those circumstances in efforts to triumph psychologically through “successful” recreation. In relational-masochists, self-defeating efforts may be viewed by the psychoanalytic community as a defense against separation anxiety (as cited in Bach, 1999). Others become engaged in and involved in devaluing or criticizing the relational masochist. The relational masochist evokes the exasperation of others by whining and self-abasing behavior. Winning moral victories can be more meaningful to this client than finding solutions for practical problems he or she faces. This is especially true for those whose masochism is more introjective (p. 273). My coaching client “Ralph” was in a good relationship with a woman he cared deeply for. Things were going so well that Ralph decided to ruin the relationship. He failed to show up on time for a very important event the couple had committed to attend and gave his partner the idea that he was not happy to be there with her. She assumed that neither she nor the relationship meant enough for Ralph to protect and treat well and so she broke things off with him after the event. Ralph began to “act out” further through exhibitionism in order to be paid attention to, and to demonstrate the pain he was in over the breakup. In other words, “pay attention: I’m in pain” (as cited in Reik, 1941).

Attachment Contributions from Infancy

Some masochistically organized personalities prefer to reap the “sympathetic indignation” (McWilliams, 2011) others can offer them versus solutions to problems. Bemoaning about worldly injustice may be the masochist’s unique way of handling the introjective depressive conviction that one is “bad” (p.273). Prior helplessness can be relived and presently grieved for as though past and present injustice is circular or somehow infused or entangled. If for example, the masochist is organized at the psychotic level; interventions may be slow, laborious yet eventually worthwhile. A self-injurious masochist may be able to trace the prototype relationship; that being the one she formed with her mother during development, as the source of abuse, trauma and anguish. A client such as this may act out in self-defeating ways during a blind rage as an adult and create peculiarly reflective circumstances that eerily resemble earlier traumas encoded during the developmental stage of pre-verbal helplessness. Step children are notorious for provoking a well meaning step parent to behave punitively by overt acts of resentment and defiance. Perhaps the unconscious guilt these children harbor in their psyches causes them to prefer a “sense of guilty power to helpless impotence” (McWilliams, 2011). A coaching client of mine provoked his stepfather to deflect attention from his own wrongdoing and to support his assertion that the stepparent is “bad” (p, 274).
   
Self-Defeating Personality

Parents who are otherwise not too attentive to their children may find a wellspring of action within themselves should they sense a particular degree of hurt or danger in their child.  Such a child would be infused with the hope of being attended to and cared for. Such hope would be preferable than the normal feelings of neglect, abandonment and worthlessness. Masochists deny they feel pain and suffering from their abusers yet their words and behavior are frequently demonstrative of their discomfort. In fact, masochistically organized clients will often remarkably protest evidence to the contrary. Said differently, this client will deny their abuser means to harm them and attribute the abusive behavior as “for their own good” (p. 274).  “Seth,” a coaching client of mine, had a dad who was a narcissist organized at the psychotic level who treated him harshly most of the time. Seth remarked to me during a session that, “his dad is showing how much he loves him by yelling,” and “his dad only yells because he cares.”

Therapeutic Interventions for the Masochistically Organized Personality.

If the origins of masochism “lie in unresolved dependency issues and fears of being alone” (as cited in Menaker, 1953) it offers an explanation to how the masochistically organized person prefers to return to the close proximity of their abuser rather than be alone. A client I coached was a battered woman who returned to her abusive husband despite how close he came to recently killing her. In front of their four children, her husband put the car in park and beat her within an inch of her life, literally. The most recent beating stopped an inch short from her skull being bashed to the point her death. The police charged him with attempted murder because he had the forethought (premeditation) to put the car in park before commencing the near fatal beating. Still, my coaching client felt obligated for numerous personal and other reasons to return to the marriage and try harder this time. Being alone was simply the scarier choice. My client learned as a child that the only time her single father showed her emotional interest was when she was being punished, so she learned to associate attachment with pain and suffering. My client learned that the price of a relationship meant excessive, abusive, sadistic suffering. She preferred to be beaten rather than neglected. Her marriage to an abusive man had been her subconscious attempt to recreate this pattern for herself as an adult. In the case of this coaching client, we see an extreme example of how masochistically wired people gravitate towards sadomasochistic attachments that result in self-defeating recreated relationships in adulthood.