My father is a very intelligent, and well known doctor. He saves people's lives on a daily basis. He is handsome, charming, well dressed, and latin american. The ladies have trailed after him his whole life. He has had three wives, five children, and only god knows how many mistresses. I have known that my father was a sociopath since he was diagnosed by a court appointed psychiatrist when he was "in trouble" for malpractice about ten years ago. I have known my whole life that my daddy was very different from every one else's.
My father left my mother for another woman and a "better life" when I was six. My parents had both been married before (my mother married very young to escape her own abusive father, and that's another story), and it was the 80's, and they decided not to get married before they had a child. My father told me when I was thirteen and visiting his home that I was an accident, he had never wanted me, and that my mother had tricked him. He told me that he only married my mother two years later because he loved me. In reality, it was to get my mother's name on the deed of the house so that we wouldn't be out of the street due to his latest court battles.
I shied away from my father after he had a child with his current wife. I was shunned after I refused to fly to see him the Christmas after 9/11. I was living at the time in NYC with my mother, and was too afraid to leave her, let alone get on a plane. He didn't speak to me for three years. I called him when I was fifteen and asked to come see him. The entire time I was there, he paraded my little sister around, and bragged about what a great relationship he had with his two year old, more so than my mother ever allowed us to have, and that she would be the first female president. I stopped wanting to visit after my stepmother spent hours explaining to me how to live my life as a woman, and how my mother went wrong in her marriage with my father.

The next time, the last time, I attempted to have a relationship with my father, I really laid all on my cards and guts on the table. I wanted to go to graduate school and I needed help financially. I entered into a pseudo agreement with him and his wife, and ended up with two years a office work under my belt, and pretty much nothing else. His promise to pay my loans is gone now that I was fired for "not meeting expectations". I worked in his office, and was emotionally, verbally, and sometimes physically harassed by him on a regular basis. Instead of paying for my education he has spent over a hundred and seventy thousand dollars on a personal jet and training to fly it.
Oh, and did I mention he never paid his child support correctly while I was growing up? He never paid on time, or enough, or regularly. Instead he held it over me and my mother's heads. My mother sued him before I became independent, and she won. That was a huge victory for a woman who was hit, punched, and humiliated regularly while she was pregnant with me, and who was emotionally abused for most of her life by indecent men.

I am new to this group. I have never shared my story this way, but I feel that it is suddenly important to do this knowing that there are others out there who have just encountered their first sociopath, and who have been hurt, and have only questions and no answers. The answer is within you. The answer is to recognize that there are people who care for nothing but themselves, and that there is simply no amount of yourself that you can give that will make them care about anything other than their own interest. There is a delicate dance I had done in realizing that the reason my father is the way he is, is because he was hurt so deeply at one point in his life that he envisioned a future of never being touched- to be superior to all humanness. To be human is to love and be loved, and these creations of ill-fated nature have no capacity to receive or give love. It is in this ability to love that you will heal your wounds, and revitalize yourself for the better future and company that you deserve.