If your new romantic interest exhibits all or most of the following behaviors, be careful. He or she might be a sociopath.
1. Charisma and charm. They’re smooth talkers, always have an answer, never miss a beat. They seem to be very exciting.
2. Enormous ego. They act like the smartest, richest or most successful people around. They may actually come out and tell you that.
3. Overly attentive. They call, text and e-mail constantly. They want to be with you every moment. They resent time you spend with your family and friends.
4. Jekyll and Hyde personality. One minute they love you; the next minute they hate you. Their personality changes like flipping a switch.
5. Blame others. Nothing is ever their fault. They always have an excuse. Someone else causes their problems.
6. Lies and gaps in the story. You ask questions, and the answers are vague. They tell stupid lies. They tell outrageous lies. They lie when they’d make out better telling the truth.
7. Intense eye contact. Call it the predatory stare. If you get a chill down your spine when they look at you, pay attention.
8. Move fast. They quickly proclaim that you’re their true love and soul mate. They want to move in together or get married quickly.
9. Pity play. They appeal to your sympathy. They want you to feel sorry for their abusive childhood, psychotic ex, incurable disease or financial setbacks.
10. Sexual magnetism. If you feel intense attraction, if your physical relationship is unbelievable, it may be their excess testosterone.
For more on this topic, see Donna Andersen’s book, Red Flags of Love Fraud—10 signs you’re dating a sociopath.
Wish I had received the IDEALIZED phase. I never got love bombed. But… considering my childhood, that prolly would have raised red flags for me.
The DEVALUE happened behind my back for years. I couldn’t figure out why people I had Never met were so rude to me. Then the DEVALUE started happening slowly, in WTF moments. Then in earnest. B/c I am SO dumb to catch on that I am being abused. Abuse is normal. So I didn’t get it until it was blatent.
The DISCARD? He kept saying he didn’t want me to go, and then have you found a place yet? HOw long before you move? Then back to swearing it was all me abandoning him. Yet, doing nothing to give me a reason to stay. When I found out about all those women? Was after I felt pushed to go, but blamed for leaving….
Confusing to me, the one who always wanted to fix whatever was wrong, but could not FIGURE OUT what I was doing wrong.
Denver,
It’s your interpretation that he cannot face the women out of guilt, aided on by his lies. It’s very likely that instead he does it because it’s so disrespectful and callous.
There’s also one other thing they know eats away at their victims – closure. We seek understanding and closure. By discarding us so callously without ever giving closure, they are aware they torment the victim more.
Last Easter ex wanted me to take down the warning I had put on a warning website about him (name and pic). He had others first try to emotionally blackmail me into deleting it, along with the claim that he couldn’t get a job in Costa Rica otherwise. He couldn’t find one either when he was with me and there was no warning on the internet about him. I knew he was never interested in “finding” a job anyway. I thought it was in order to get married and have the UK recognize it as a genuine marriage. It was up already for a year, and he hadn’t cared about it so far, until suddenly I was being contacted left and right about it. I knew the reason would be something he wanted really badly, that he would really need it… and a job was never something he really wanted badly.
Of course, UK legal instances would do background checks on him to see whether there was a high risk of it being a sham marriage. And if you typed his name, the site was the first link in google, over that of facebook. When I blocked his enabling cousin after she begged me to do it for her and my friendship with her, after I ignored his new intended to be, he sent me a threat mail. I responded cold as ice, that I would only CONSIDER deleting it, if he asked me VERY politely and admit what a people user he is. Other than that I told him he was free to make a warning about me if he wanted, and I’d just post his threat mail in response to it. I also told him that if he ever showed up on my doorstep (this was before I moved), I’d call the cops on him. I called him bluff. I knew he mostly wanted me to do what he desired me to do, than not me do it. And I warned him he had only one chance to ask me properly. Regardless of the content of his next mail, I would block his email address after that.
And so I get the politest mail ever after a few more days. It couldn’t have been politer than that. And he apologized for his earlier mail, explaining it away as him being angry (his kind of threats were bully threats, not angry ones), and how I knew he’d never would want to harm or hurt me, and how I knew he would never come to Belgium anymore; how I knew he’d never used me for my money (no he used my money to use me in a spath way… he simply enjoys people WASTING money on him; and note how I didn’t ask him to admit how he used people for money; but used people, period.) Next followed a long polite letter of “his side of the story”… Basically he said, we had grown apart, had to tell each other less and less, how I switched between ending it (which made sense to him) and then me wanting to have another go for it (and he couldn’t hurt me)… All sounded so plausible, like a normal ending and closure talk, if I didn’t knew what he had been up to even when we were still “close” and he supposedly so “in love with me” (it’s the info I found out about that period that was what makes him a fraud from start to end).
Here’s the interesting thing: I did not ask for closure, but he thought that was what I was seeking, and made a closure story where I was made out to be the unstable one who drove him away, and he had been the good guy in all of it. He was simply trying to play with my mind again, not actually trying to give me closure.
I did delete the warning, for pure personal reasons. It was the last contact thing, a wrong lifeline to him that I had installed myself. I wanted that lifeline cut myself. And then I sent one short line where I told him: “It’s done. Anyone who wishes to believe your lies is absolutely free to do so.” I blocked him after that.
Sky,
I’d consider him killing you still as a literal form of ‘dumping’ you 🙁
I read that Ted Bundy had idealized a socialite gal he dated and she dumped him, and he went and “loove bombed” her til she came back to him then he DUMPED HER IMMEDIATELY…his whole purpose in getting her back seemed to be to get her where HE COULD BE THE DUMP-ER, NOT THE DUMP-EE.
The D&D phases can take various scenarios depending on the relationship…my egg donor d&d’d me because she thought she had my DIL to play the ROLE in the “family drama” (Greek” Tragedy for a script) but then when the DIL betrayed her–I still laugh at egg donor’s comment “BUT THEY WERE ALWAYS SO RESPECTFUL OF ME.” LOL, like they are gonna be nasty to her before they get her hooked. LOL She just didn’t get it that they were conning her…catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. LOL
darwinsmom
GREAT observation. The Ultimate discard. Scary. and Why we must NOT underestimate the ability of a person with no conscience to MURDER, even if they have NEVER done it before.
I was reading that several of you are very extraverted, and I remember that Donna mentioned this in her red flags book as an extra risk factor. So, although I am convinced that my ex is an spath–especially because I know for sure his second wife and his new girlfriend are very extraverted–I am wondering what he got out of his time with ME, as I am quite introverted? Much of what we did together was watch TV shows and movies. I actually got bored with it!! I just wonder what the draw was for him… Maybe the fun for him was that he made up such elaborate lies to keep things going with me; I just discovered he basically made up a whole past for himself in terms of his education and other details, hence the reason I only met his parents and sister once in 1.5 years!
darwinsmom,
yes, true. He pretended that he told the crazy husband stealing neighbor that he had cut up my body and dumped it in the community well. The point being that I wouldn’t have known I was dumped.
If my parents had not overheard him 25 years earlier, I still wouldn’t have understood wtf? was going on. And furthermore, if the sushi guy hadn’t told me what he was and what to do, who knows what would’ve happened. He might have ensnared me again. IDK.
Oxy,
yes, Bundy didn’t just love bomb her, he CHANGED completely to become everything she wanted and admired. She had complained that he had no ambition, so he enrolled in law school and became active in political action circles. When he had transformed himself, he came back to see her and as soon as she admired him, he dumped her. Then he began killing women who looked like her, if I recall correctly. The substitute victims.
WOW DARWINSMOM — good for you! It’s funny you mention the closure email your spath sent to you — sounds much like a made up story. The lines my expspath used on everyone he “dumped” was the same – “You are a wonderful woman and deserve the best” ” You will find someone who can make you happy” Then he would go on to say that he was just too busy and a workaholic and he knew they deserved better. It was ALWAYS the same song and dance closure line – but again, he did this crap in emails. One woman did email him back demanding answers but of course he just ignored the email. However, to him EVERYONE was a WONDERFUL WOMAN — that was his main line when he dumped someone — even me when he tried to get me to dump him. He never did dump me and if we did break up for an hour or so, I would go back begging to work things out and he would say “Ok, if you can handle it and you can let go of the past.” It was always on his terms– he wanted me to do everything his way; there was no other way but his!
You’re story is truly inspirational and what you went through is horrendous — I hope one day I can be as strong (mindfully) as you are today! 🙂 Thanks for sharing this “closure story.”
Laura,
It’s not that spaths are necessarily attracted to extravert women, but that HIGHLY extraverted women have a high risk of being highly attracted to men who are higher extraverts than themselves and there is a big risk this type of high extraversion falls in the disordered/abnormal range.
If you’re an introverted woman you’re likely to feel more chemistry for an extravert faster, than for an introvert. There’s nothing wrong with either introversion or extraversion by itself. It gets tricky when it gets to abnormal levels. For an introverted woman a large part of the extraversion spectrum will be attractive to you. A lot of these men in that spectrum are normal, healthy individuals. You happened to really have bad luck, if you regard it from a pure statistical pov.
The extraversion range of the extraversion spectrum that I’m chemically attracted to is very limited – from my own high level to higher. Chances that one of them is a spath are therefore higher. So, being highly extraverted as a woman makes that if you fall for an extravert, you run a higher risk than an introvert that you end up falling for a disordered extravert. But remember: statistics are never absolute, just a higher or lesser chance/risk.
Hope that explains it. But it’s not as if spaths don’t consider introverted women less interesting victims to toy with. Nor do I think that every spath is necessarily an extravert.
moving past the facade says: For a long time I kept asking if he wanted to stop, that I was fine with that~~~I did that too. I gave him every chance to get out. I even told him that if he wanted to date other women it was ok with me but to just be honest with me about it! He didn’t want to date other women (he just wanted to screw them) I really think he knew that if that was the arrangement we had that I would be free to date other men and the thought of that drove him crazy. I think he didn’t want me but he didn’t want anyone else to have me.
darwinsmom says: The ex sent me a one line message over fb: sorry, I met someone else. He then ended the relationshit status and asked a relationshit status with the new woman” all within 5 mins time.~~Wow… I “ended” things so many times with my spath and he would come back begging time after time and I fell for it every time. I guess I really didn’t “fall” for it but allowed myself to get sucked back in.
Denver, I think the online thing is their way of preying on women. They get a feel for them. Mine did it. He found one woman and her profile said “Looking for Prince Charming” he ended up sucking her in and promising her things he never intended to do. It also feeds their ego. Mine also told me he was always the one that ended the relationship with other women. I think that was just bs. He was also always the one being pursued. He was a legend in his own mind LOL