How to recognize and recover from everyday sociopaths - narcissists

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BOOK REVIEW: Travis Vining writes about life with his serial-killer father and miracles

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Editor's note: The following article refers to spiritual concepts. Please read Lovefraud's statement on Spiritual Recovery. Most of us who have tangled with sociopaths have stories that our friends and families find hard to believe. Yet despite what we've been through, we know that some of us have been through far worse. Travis Vining has one of those really bad stories. He's written the book. Perhaps someday we'll see the movie. Travis wrote a series of articles for Lovefraud back in 2008, which you can find in the Travis Vining Category. He will begin contributing articles again, starting tomorrow. Growing up with a sociopath Travis' father is a sociopath. But the man wasn't …

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It’s Up To All Of Us Now

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Wow, last week's course with Dr Robert Hare was absolutely amazing!  A huge eye-opener on how offending psychopaths are measured and dealt with in the criminal justice system — and also an insight in to the astonishing man who has given so much to so many of us. I'm planning to cover more about that in future posts... This week I'd like to talk about another subject that came up last week. It was also spelled out loud and clear in the Fishead movie that I know many of you have seen. It's the point that, even though it's widely acknowledged that a psychopath cannot ”˜get better' (and therefore it stands to reason that we cannot change the way they behave) it's also true that the vast major …

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Making the sociopath accountable: How far do you go?

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A Lovefraud reader using the name Dawn H posted the following comment quite awhile ago. At the end of her story, she brings up important questions. My ex and I grew up in the same small town. We were like Barbie and Ken”¦expected to marry and live happily ever after. I watched him grow from a very nice guy into a predator and a very evil person in just a few years. After our child was born he started a new wonderful job in a bank and quickly climbed the ladder to success. I put him through law school as he became distant and harsh and wouldn't touch me. I found out he was bragging at work about secretaries' children being his. One of his secretaries divorced her husband to sneak around with …

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“Beware the tyranny of the weak”

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By Joyce Alexander, RNP (Retired) I'm a sucker for “one line philosophies,” and sometimes I hear a new one that makes me perk up my ears and start to ponder on the phrase. Thus the quotes around today's title. The person who told me this, and said that she had heard it from her mother, I later came to believe is a psychopath. At the very least, she was incredibly demanding toward me, but all in the name of being “helpless” and therefore entitled to my help or entitled to doing it her way, entitled to inconvenience everyone else for her immediate gratification. Of course she never shouted at me to get her way, but was very soft spoken and politely demanded that her will be given in to …

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Reclaiming Who We Are

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I'm so glad that so many of you found Fishead useful. It's yet one more resource, one more educational tool that can only help to highlight the cause about sociopaths. This week I am on a training course run by Dr Robert Hare, so next week I'm sure I will be writing about my experiences. Today, though, I felt it appropriate to share something of my own experiences following the aftermath of my relationship. It's a post that was written on the 19th June 2010, fourteen months after I discovered the truth. It was a time when I'd really begun to make progress. I had survived (probably the most important thing at the time!), I knew exactly what I was dealing with (in terms of the personality …

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Woman sues over web of Internet deceit

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A case is now percolating through the Illinois courts that may have implications on whether perpetrators of online deception can be sued for damages. The case is Paula Bonhomme v. Janna St. James. Bonhomme lives in Los Angeles. She is a fan of the TV show Deadwood, and back in 2005, joined a chat room about the show. There she met St. James. St. James eventually introduced Bonhomme, online, to a man by the name of Jesse. Bonhomme and Jesse exchanged emails, phone calls and handwritten notes, and their relationship blossomed into a romance. Jesse introduced Bonhomme to his family and friends via email. Bonhomme sent gifts to Jesse and his family. They planned a future together, and …

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Psychopaths: perfectly suited for high finance

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Why are we facing a world financial crisis? Perhaps because psychopaths are running the show. In a post on the website Reality Sandwich, author Jonathan Zap writes: Most psychopaths are not violent criminals; they may be more likely to pursue white-collar crime, where the payoff is so much higher and the odds of detection so much lower. Psychopaths are perfectly designed for success in many fields, especially business, law and politics. They have higher IQs on average than the general population; they are charming, charismatic and manipulative; they can be decisive and take risks without anxiety, and they are ruthless, cunning and coldly rational. Psychopaths often personify many of the …

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The consequences of stress

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By Joyce Alexander, RNP (retired) One of the things I studied in school was the findings of researchers on the effects of stress in our lives. Two researchers who have become the “gold standard” with their attempts to quantify stress and some of the effects on our lives (sickness and accidents) are Holmes and Rahe, who developed the Holmes and Rahe stress scale. According to Wikipedia: In 1967, psychiatrists Thomas Holmes and Richard Rahe examined the medical records of over 5,000 medical patients as a way to determine whether stressful events might cause illnesses. Patients were asked to tally a list of 43 life events based on a relative score. A positive correlation of 0.118 was found b …

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