Charlie Taylor, expert advisor to the British government on behavior, has suggested that nursery schools identify toddlers showing early signs of aggression so that they can receive specialist intervention. The Daily Mail reported: Taylor said nurseries should be able to spot children with behavioural issues and recommend them for specialist tuition to provide them with boundaries and social skills. Mr Taylor said: 'Any child can go off the rails for a bit and what we need is a system that is responsive to them and helps them to get back on the straight and narrow.' He said it was easier to tackle poor behaviour among young children because habits were less ingrained. ”˜If you ca …
Getting picky about the definition of psychopathy
After reading about the book, The Psychopath Test, Kayt Sukel, a Psychology Today blogger, wondered if psychopaths were, in fact, everywhere. So she asked Joshua Buckholtz, a neuroscientist. He said that psychopathy needed to have meaningful diagnostic boundaries. Buckholtz told her "a true psychopath is going to show high aggression, low empathy and high narcissism in all contexts." I wondered about that description. Here at Lovefraud, we know that psychopaths are capable of faking love and concern, quite convincingly, when it suits their purpose. How does the expert account for that? Read Psychopaths everywhere? on PsychologyToday.com. Link supplied by a Lovefraud reader. …
The brain of a narcissist
A researcher conducts a study that reveals just how much narcissists focus on themselves. Read: The definitive fMRI test for narcissism, on PsychologyToday.com. Link supplied by a Lovefraud reader. …
When Love Isn’t Real – The Shame Of Deception
I've just travelled back from the UK today, and during my journey I read an article that made me sit up and take notice. It's the story about a teenage girl, Gemma Barker, who created three separate male aliases in order to dupe her female friends in to sexual relationships with her. She had made enormous efforts to develop and maintain these aliases. She succeeded so well, in fact, that not only the victims but also their families were fooled in to believing that Gemma was a boy. Whilst it's claimed that she suffers from autism spectrum disorder and ADHD, the judge still called her “Cunning and deceptive” and the report states that she showed no remorse when handed her sentence. Ring any bel …
Does anything work in getting a victim away from a sociopath?
Since Lovefraud launched in 2005, I've collected 2,850 cases—people who have contacted me to tell me about their experiences with a sociopath. In nearly 100 of these cases—3.4%—the person who contacted me was not actually the victim, but was a friend or family member who was trying to pry the victim away from the sociopath. For example, here's an email that Lovefraud recently received: I have a sister-in-law who is dating a married man, who claims he will be getting a divorce, which is still yet to happen. Now she's pregnant with his kid so things are more serious. They were supposed to move out together a couple months ago, but when the day came he disappeared, then a couple weeks later s …
Does anything work in getting a victim away from a sociopath?Read More
When hope becomes malignant
By Joyce Alexander, RNP (retired) What is hope? The word “hope” means a kind of “expectation of obtainment” and an emotional state of optimism, a trusting that what we want is going to come true. Here is how Wikipedia defines hope: Hope is the emotional state, the opposite of which is despair, which promotes the belief in a positive outcome related to events and circumstances in one's life. It is the "feeling that what is wanted can be had or that events will turn out for the best" or the act of "look[ing] forward to with desire and reasonable confidence" or "feel[ing] that something desired may happen". Other definitions are "to cherish a desire with anticipation"; "to desire with expect …
What is forgiveness? Does it condone evil or defeat it? (Part II)
Editor's note: The following article refers to spiritual concepts. Please read Lovefraud's statement on Spiritual Recovery. Special note from the author, Travis Vining: Some of the content in this article may be unsettling to some. I would ask that the reader please recognize that the following definition and interpretation of forgiveness is from years of personal experience, reading, learning, practicing and teaching. It did not come easy, and in the beginning, I was just as unwilling as most to accept forgiveness as a possible solution to my problem. It is very “normal” to experience an emotional response to the idea that we play a part in our own suffering when the pain is still fres …
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Saying “Yes” Without Reading The Small Print
This week my post is inspired by a throw-away comment from my son. We were sitting in the kitchen, eating vegetable soup together while he downloaded a new app for my iPhone that will allow us to stay in contact more easily when I'm in the UK. As is often the case, the carrier has updated their terms and conditions so, before I could complete the download, I had to agree the changes. “You don't really want to read the 55 pages of new terms and conditions do you Mum?” asked Dylan, just checking the seemingly obvious before checking the “I agree” box. I laughed and shook my head - of course I didn't! And that's when he said “Did you know that's the biggest lie that people tell — not just on …
BOOK REVIEW: Character Disturbance
Character Disturbance—The Phenomenon of Our Age, the new book by George K. Simon, Ph.D., does two things really well: It paints a no-nonsense picture of how people with personality disorders, including sociopaths, behave. And it explains why traditional psychotherapy, in attempting to understand these individuals, gets it so wrong. The basic problem, Simon explains, is that classic concepts in psychotherapy, like those advanced by Sigmund Freud, propose that people develop defensive strategies against a cruel, heartless world in order to protect their deep, authentic selves. This results in "neurosis," defined in Wikipedia as "a variety of mental disorders in which emotional distress or u …
Other aspects of crime and mental disorders
I read two interesting articles in the newspaper this morning. The first was about the original mass murderer, Howard Unruh, who in 1949 walked down a street in Camden, New Jersey, and killed 13 people in 20 minutes. Psychiatrists at the time tried to find out why he did it by giving him "truth serum." On Oct. 20, 1949, Camden County Court Judge Bartholomew A. Sheehan signed the final order of commitment for Unruh after a team of four psychiatrists classified him as a case of "dementia praecox, mixed type, with pronounced catatonic and paranoid coloring." In modern parlance, he was a paranoid schizophrenic, a classification that would appear again and again in Unruh's records. Read …