I get that. Known many a people myself. It’s just from experience I always end up finding out they never got help, the people around them never gave them help or they didn’t get the correct help.
This reads like buying into the structure of everyone being oriented around the most negative, disordered, destructive person in any personal network (family, friends, etc.).
And coming up with
explanations for what is, in the most extreme cases (I put Nick there for a few reasons, mostly attitudinal), a selfish bastard who organizes his world with people who agree to his insistence that he is the center of the universe, is what I believe is commonly called enabling.
The problem with these people is not that no one gave them proper attention or that, alas, they just didn't get the right support; the problem with these people is that they are shit and that the people around them come up with constant reasons to excuse a bastard who's going down and taking the orbiter with him.
...
(different topic, but related)
At some point I don't give one fig whether a person gets help, is feeling better, is finally acting like a semi-decent person. They destroyed good - people who loved and depended on them - and squandered whatever life they were fortunate enough to have. People like this are destroyers, and at the root of it is a major flaw in their constitutional makeup. Call it a personality defect, call it a blighted soul, call it the hard, hard life of being raised comfortably and secure with not one thing on the lower rungs of Maslow's hierarchy to worry about in their whole sorry lives, call it whatever. The "reasons" don't matter if they're the type of person who is so defective or dishonest or obstinate that they never truly let go of their penchant for getting away with things. The "reason" - psychological or lack of"the right help" are ultimately just magically (magically = well-meant gifts from enablers) appearing slats on the rickety third-world bridge they're using to cross a gorge for the thrill of it.
Many, many people have a proclivity toward dependencies or even at some point get a bit powerless or at least self-indulgent. But they either abstain or are able to keep it to healthy indulgence. Others might spend some time going a little too far, but either pull up before any consequences, or push further, testing the boundaries...but then snap to sanity after some hand-slaps or losses, maybe big losses. But they can get their head straight, or at least reduce the damage to non-devastation levels.
But people like Nick - the ones who fetishize their charm and cleverness and perceived superhuman powers and specialness, the ones laughing in glee at what they can get away with, the ones who lie and shade and hide as a matter of course and as a way they have gotten by in life, their literal stock-in-trade - those are the ones who never become a good and healthy person. Never.
First, they will never truly change their who constitution. They might quit substances for awhile or (sometimes) forever, but they'll still lie and sneak and think they're superior; or they might gain actual humility but then lose to the addiction because the only thing that brought humility was literal physical ruination. Usually one or the other. There are exceptions, of course.
But also, for these people, the damage they do can never be truly made up. And in truth, they don't really try to, and that is why they're still bad people.
You cannot undo failing your kids. You can't undo failing your clients. You can't undo fucking people up that you drew into your orbit and used or ruined, tangibly or intangibly. You can't undo the money gifted from people who admired you (lol still can hardly believe anyone ever fell for it, but a lot of good and savvy and smart people did - which is why every successful con thinks he is a god). You can't undo giving your children no security despite having all the basic life security in the world. You can't undo shaming your family's name and giving aging parents a heartache.
And people like Nick don't even try. The 8th (iirc) step of AA is the biggest crock of shit. As employed, anyway. Yes, absolutely, facing those you harmed and "making amends" is absolutely critical. Problem #1: for people like this, that step is about themselves, unburdening themselves, crossing off a step. Problem #2 (and this is where AA, sponsors, addicts, everyone who supports the program or others like it FAIL): making amends is not words. It's not an apology and some idea about how a destroyer's real or fake humbling or that they are mindful of the pain they caused or that they're sober now or they feel really, really bad about it all. Making amends means
making it right. It means paying money stolen or wasted or owed with 5000% interest; it means going out of your way to make those people's lives better in every way you have power to do; it means being forever on your metaphorical fucking knees toward everyone you severely harmed, and doing that in a way that tangibly and constantly benefits the people you tornadoed through and left in rubble. Even if they've recovered on their own, put shit back together before you came so bravely and dutifully apologizing. Because you can never make up for their time or life wasted by you.
I have never met, nor even heard of, one of these kinds of people doing anything anywhere close to that. Most don't even bother with the token acknowledgment/ apology, to be honest. They're too busy focusing on their own life, "working the program," "forgiving myself," in therapy to learn to love themselves more, spinning another, newer tale of fake virtue and fake redemption.
Congenitally dishonest people - the unironic grifters, the unaccountably underachieving "smartest men in the room," the self-appointed popes who mistake cheap irreverence from a clown for ordained genius and make a mission of convincing others likewise, the ones who treat integrity as an advertising gimmick - do not getter, do not become good people. Ever. Getting sober, even if they ever really do [x], doesn't do it; eating crow for a minute doesn't do it; losing reputation, occupation, money, family, friends - none of that does it. Those kinds of people are beyond worrying about or hoping for. Everyone's mental energy would be better spent staring at ants on the ground.
