With all the uproar over Arnold Schwarzenegger and his "love child," our friend Ann over at WomenExplode.com just wrote about her own experience of a cheating husband. Read I can relate with Maria Shriver ”¦ at WomenExplode.com. …
Sociopathy runs amok in murder of 15-year-old boy
This case is so shocking that it's difficult to know where to begin. It's a mix of multiple disordered personalities and vicious actions that exploded into the incomprehensible. The trouble apparently started when 15-year-old Seath Tyler Jackson of Belleview, Florida, a town of about 4,500 people located 65 miles north of Orlando, broke up with his 15-year-old girlfriend, Amber Wright. The breakup was public, played out in real time on Facebook. Wright had apparently taken up with a new boyfriend, 18-year-old Michael Shane Bargo. Jackson and Bargo hated each other, and Bargo allegedly wanted to do something about it. Here is what happened, according to media reports that quoted police …
RESOURCE PERSPECTIVES: Psychopaths, victims and therapy
Editor's note: Resource Perspectives features articles written by members of Lovefraud's Professional Resources Guide. Sarah Strudwick, based in the UK, is author of Dark Souls—Healing and recovering from toxic relationships. Re-traumatising and PTSD (Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) By Sarah Strudwick Sarah Strudwick profile in the Lovefraud Professional Resources Guide Everyone always writes about the positive aspects of coming out of a relationship with a psychopathic personality. You read things about how as a result of being in such a toxic relationship, it empowers you and teaches you how to recognise and spot predators. If you have never learnt how to h …
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Now, more SEAL impostors than ever
On Lovefraud's Is he or she military? page, we state that 11,000 soldiers actually completed Navy SEAL training, but fraud busters have found more than 35,000 fake SEALs. Now that Navy SEALs have taken out Osama Bin Laden, there are even more frauds, including a pastor from central Pennsylvania. Don Shipley, a real ex-SEAL who exposes the fakes, says it's not unusual to find members of the clergy pretending to be former SEALs: "It's something with these guys who are in a position of trust that causes a lot of them to do it," he said. "The fact that they are in a position where whatever comes out of their mouth is believed -- I think that causes some of them to take advantage." Shipley has …
Grooming a new generation of victims
Yesterday I attended a family celebration in honor of my little niece's First Holy Communion. The guest of honor, my niece, is in the second grade and is a beautiful, vibrant child—blond hair, blue eyes with a sprinkle of freckles across her nose. In her white Communion dress, she looked like a little angel. It was a sunny day and a pleasant get-together. Most of the guests had left when my niece and her friend, another little girl, wanted to put on a “show” for those of us who remained. We, of course, agreed to be the audience. With a video clip from the Internet providing the music, the girls sang and danced to the song Beggin' On Your Knees by Victoria Justice. I was horri …
BOOK REVIEW: Cold-Blooded Kindness
Reviewed by Joyce Alexander, RNP (retired) Cold-Blooded Kindness: Neuroquirks of a Codependent Killer, or Just Give Me a Shot at Loving You, Dear, and Other Reflections on Helping That Hurts is the tongue-in-cheek title of this book by Barbara Oakley, with a foreword by David Sloan Wilson. It belies the serious research and investigation done by this remarkable, highly educated and acclaimed woman. Oakley is associate professor of engineering at Oakland University in Michigan, and her work focuses mainly on the complex relationship between neurocircuitry and social behavior. The list of her varied experiences reads like fiction ”¦ she worked for several years as a Russian language tr …
Psychopaths, silly science and James Bond
The headline of an article that a Lovefraud reader recently sent to me is: Why women really do love self-obsessed psychopaths With a headline like that, of course, I had to read it. The article, from 2008, describes research on the “Dark Triad” and mating behavior. The Dark Triad refers to the personality disorders of narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism. I had some problems with the article, but before I ripped into it, I figured I'd read the original study. Here it is: The Dark Triad: Facilitating a Short-Term Mating Strategy in Men This study was published in the European Journal of Personality in 2009, and the lead author is Peter K. Jonason. To be honest, I find …
Culture or Psychopathy?
Editor's note: The author is well-known to all Lovefraud readers as "Ox Drover." By Joyce Alexander, RNP (Retired) I read an article today that made me start to think about psychopathic behavior in groups of people. About groups of people without empathy, without altruistic thinking. Looters hamper rescue efforts in tornado-ravaged Alabama Most of us here in the U.S. have read many stories about the horrible damage done in Japan by both the earthquake and the resulting tsunami which washed over the land, killing tens of thousands, and devastating a large thickly-populated area. We've read where people's life savings, stocks and bonds, and cash were found many miles from their …
Do Sociopaths Get The Last laugh?
We know that there are many unapprehended sociopaths who, exploiting others' vulnerability, have greedily taken things from them, material and otherwise—valuable, precious things they neither deserve nor deserve to enjoy, yet which they may feel they both deserve and deserve to enjoy, and often perversely do enjoy. And we know that many of these sociopaths possess smug, contemptuous and notoriously “shameless” attitudes about their exploitation—these attitudes, and the patterns they form, reflecting the essence of their disorder. And some of these sociopaths may indeed, in a certain sense, get the proverbial “last laugh?” Picture the sociopath lying on a Carribbean beach, or lounging …
Chernobyl–mistake or mischief?
Yesterday was the 25th anniversary of the explosion at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Ukraine, which was part of the Soviet Union at the time. Russia and the Ukraine held ceremonies to mark that terrible day. Read the story and watch the video on Russia, Ukraine mark 25th anniversary of Chernobyl nuclear meltdown at NYDailyNews.com. What caused that terrible explosion? In Nuclear Renewal, Richard Rhodes writes the following: Without question, the accident at Chernobyl was the result of a fatal combination of ignorance and complacency. "As members of a select scientific panel convened immediately after the...accident," writes Bethe, "my colleagues and I established that the …