We know only too well that by far the majority of psychopaths are men. Or at least we think we know that. Could it be that the criteria used to identify psychopaths are biased towards men? After all Hare began his work in male prison.
Think about it. While behaving and being the way the PCL-R without doubt earns one the label psychopath, this is simply a list of symptoms. It says nothing about the underlying dynamics. If psychopathy is life centered on the principle of power (as opposed to love) and if it is therefore characterised by what Liane Leedom nicely calls ‘warped empathy‘, then wouldn’t you expect there to be more or less the same number of woman as men psychopaths? And wouldn’t you expect them to come across differently?
I am beginning to wonder whether there may be two broad types of psychopathy – a ‘male’-type and a ‘female’-type. I place these in quotes because, when I think about it, men with might be thought of as ‘female’ psychopathy come to mind and we all know about women with ‘male’ psychopathy. And yet, at the risk of being un-PC, I want to maintain these descriptors for now so that the difference I think I see doesn’t disappear.
A ‘female’ psychopath would not necessarily commit crimianl/antisocial acts like her male counterpart, but she woud be as power-driven, as toxically narcissistic as a ‘male’ psychopath. The control, the manipulation, the dishonesty, the selfishness, the callousness – all these would be present, but we might not recognise them for what they are because of 1. media portrayal and 2. medical diagnosis of psychopaths. The difference would come in the gendered style of their behaviour.
In my clinical work I have come across this phenomenon. For example, a woman I now consider to be of the ‘female’-type of psychopath didn’t come close to committing a crime and yet the way she mothered her daughter, my patient, came close to destroying the child’s mind. This seems to me to be a perversion of motherhood eqivalent to the perversion of fatherhood we read about on this website.
Do readers have any comments? I’m particularly interested in any examples you might have of how ‘female’ psychopathy – if such a thing does exist – manifests itself?
Annie –
LTL is much quicker typing!! I agree with you and hope that the damage in the first three years is treatable. And, I must add, damage doesnt always happen in the first three years…it could be at any time. My mother had a severe mental illness… yet I am told in the first few years of my life she had a maternal instinct that surpassed both of her two “healthy” sisters. At around 4 or 5 or maybe even later … her mental illness took to new heights and she left home. My older sister was her “focus” and received the brunt of my mothers illness. But certainly for me, my childhood life was not “normal” by any means.
I believe everyone has their own beliefs and as such are entitled to them, Ive come to learn in my own life that yes… as a result of a dysfunctional immediate family life (a mentally ill mother and a workaholic father)… I believe I became less than what I would have otherwise become… perhaps personality disordered in a way of lacking trust (both of others and myself) lacking self-everything (or the understanding of such things) and low-selfesteem. Having been raised by my grandparents and ultimately my father taking responsibility during my teenage years – gave me the immunizing influences you refer to — in the sense that the greater part of me was able to learn and grow and achieve. But to be totally honest with myself and others in my own personal experience it would be wrong of me to suggest that I walked away from my childhood with an unaffected personality.
Perhaps ultimately allowing me to get involved with a toxic relationship. Simply not having the tools, the awareness as well as willingly and openly taking ownership to a percentage of the dysfuctional cycle in that toxic relationship. The difference is I wanted to learn from the experience. I wanted to change. I wanted to become a better person, a more educated person, a healthier person. He does not…or perhaps simply cannot.
And it doesnt help to know that there are a percentage of psychopathic parents, bi polar parents, personality disordered parents, etc. that are a result of their own dysfunctional childhood. And the cycle can and will continue for the ones who dont have immunizing influences.You were blessed to have received such wonderful immunizing influences in your life.
Ultimately it is up to each and everyone of us to create our own path and want to create a better path if we are able to wrap our head around our truthes. Terrible things did happen… we dont need to prove them to anyone else… we need to find our own ways of healing, learning and growing and changing the cycle and even more importantly we have to WANT TO.
Ive LEARNED our background and circumstances may have influenced who we are, but we are responsible for who we become. And Id like to change what I said earlier today on a different thread…life isnt necessarily about finding ourselves…its more about creating ourselves! 🙂
Dr. Steve,
Several years ago my boyfriend and I were targets of his soon to be ex-wife, who I believe to be a psychopath. If she is not a psychopath, she most certainly has psychopathic tendancies.
Long story short, he was convinced to get married very early on in the relationship. After a few months, he realized he made a mistake and asked her to leave. Upon the request, she suddenly had Ovarian Cists and couldn’t leave. After he continued asking for a divorce, she started various other stalling tactics (obviously the cists miraculously disappeared and was subsequently replaced by Leukemia). Finally he filed for divorce, at which point he and I started seeing each other (long distance).
Two months later she hacked into his e-mail account and got all of the contact information, including mine. What ensued was an onslaught of harrassing e-mails to me, slanderous e-mails to my place of employment as well as to his business contacts and a campaign of harrassing text messages and voicemails to my boyfriend.
In these e-mails she alternated between trying to convince me that my boyfriend is NPD (she specified dangerous & abusive) and attempts to shame me for dating a married man. All contact was ignored, which seemed to fuel her frenzy instead of dissipating it. In her e-mails she contradicts herself. You can actually see her changing tactics or trying a different angle, but by doing so in the same e-mail she made herself quite obvious.
She also put tiny pieces of information together to draw her conclusions on how we met and when we started dating. She drew the wrong conclusions, but would state her conclusions as facts. I suspect in hopes she hit the nail on the head and we’d be intimidated by her extensive knowledge/sleuthing skills.
I still have many of the e-mails she sent me and I believe he still has the digital files of the voicemails she left him and I know he still has a record/chronology of the text messages she sent him. She never got my phone number or address so her only contact with me was via e-mail. She did find me on MySpace and attempted contact through that as well.
It has been almost three years since this ordeal. He and I are happy together and a year ago we relocated from our respective coasts and live together now. To this day, she still checks my MySpace, even though it’s private and she can’t really see much. Last summer on my birthday she sent me an e-mail on MySpace, but I deleted it without opening it so I have no idea what it was about. All I remember is her subject on the e-mail was “Thank you.”
If it would be helpful to your research on female psychopaths I’d gladly provide what we still have to you. Obviously I am not a trained professional therefore I am in no position to diagnose this woman. However, her behavior is what lead me to this website and there are quite a few posts that had both my boyfriend and me dropping our jaws.
Absolutely female sociopaths are underrepresented… I was targeted by a malignant narcissist in highschool from years 9-12… she is a textbook N, really… I witnessed her stealing from other girls and seemingly glibly satisfied about it. She liked a shirt i wore to school once and asked if she could wear it that day, and never gave it back. She also once referred to me as her “slave” behind my back. It did come back to me but at that point I think I was so brainwashed that I didn’t really know what to think of it and kind of brushed it off… being 14 and having no knowledge that sociopaths even existed… by 12th grade i went NC but she would try and get attention out of me anyway by “asking me random questions” through people I had befriended.. at that point I was extremely traumatized, I experienced dissociative symptoms and i went from a girl who was described as “always smiling” to someone who could barely function in the school environment, let alone make eye contact with my teachers.. I had been thoroughly brainwashed and I thought it was all my fault. I lost friends, my reputation was damaged. And I left church, when all throughout my life before this point I had always been a very strong christian…
just goes to show that sociopathy starts at a VERY young age.
It has been three years since i’ve graduated highschool and a very long three years but I am in a much better place now. Still healing, but I finally have some semblance of peace” I’m 20 years old now.
“Do readers have any comments? I’m particularly interested in any examples you might have of how ’female’ psychopathy – if such a thing does exist – manifests itself?”
Here’s a cursory profile of my mother, who I have no contact with for many years. This is bringing up a LOT of past traumas for me so some things might be missing (I try not to remember):
-other people are SOLELY recognized as a tool, a means to an end, she has no use for any real kind of relationship with another human being except in the context of what they can do for (thus leading to her conclusion whenever she doesn’t get what she wants it’s everyone else’s fault) – ie. her kids or partners when she has them or “friends” are ONLY there to serve her
-complete lack of boundaries (ie. has no clue what’s appropriate to talk about to anyone, will talk about her very personal sexual history with my dad to her kids, will tell extremely personal details to complete strangers, will often lie outrageously, fabricate stories, will walk around the house in front of her kids with no clothes on, use the washroom with the door open, ask her kids to massage her, violate privacy at will, go through anyone’s things, open mail, personal space is a foreign concept to her etc.)
-has absolutely no ability to understand humor or comedy (never gets the joke)
-takes glee in horrible stories (abuse, catastrophe, other’s misfortune)
-has no impulse control (this takes the form of lashing out physically or verbally as well as addictions)
-has no normal sexual appetite (scorns normal loving relations yet has a sick kind of interest in sordid stories and an invasive interest in other’s sexual life)
-complete lack of any loving feeling or empathy – putting herself in someone else’s shoes would be impossible for her (never showed any mother warmth or caring including never even uttering the words “I love you” – it’s always “Noboby does anything for me!!!!”)
-violent outbursts including verbal abuse, throwing things, threatening to hurt herself (which she never does), physical attacks (punching, elbowing, slapping, kicking, throwing things..I had knives thrown at me…burning).
-emotions are all for show (can turn them off on a dime)
My heart is pounding like crazy while I’m typing this so I’ll give you 2 examples (I could give hundreds if I really wanted to remember, which I don’t)
1.) Her second husband (who she married for the money and I’ve been convinced hastened his death, if not incited it), had just passed away (this was many years ago) and I went back to my hometown to go to his funeral. I was at my mother’s (his house that she inherited) and she was all manic going from one room to the next rambling about herself while smoking whatever cigarette of the multiple ones she had going in the room she was in. The phone rings. She goes to answer it. A SECOND before she answers it she breaks into sobs. She answers the phone and suddenly she is behaving like the heartborken widow crying her eyes out and all lost and forlorn garnering sympathy. I’m sitting there watching this in a sick state of deja vu. She hangs up the phone and IMMEDIATELY the tears stop, her face goes blank and her eyes dead Then like a miracle she’s suddenly all manic “ME, ME, ME, ME, ME, ME” again.
2.) When I was a teenager I called the police to my house when I was sure my mother was going to kill me in one of her violent rages. One of those instances I was getting ready to go out to some do (I forget what) and I was ironing a blouse. She started in on one of her rages against me. I tried ignoring her, tried to stay calm, not say or do anything to instigate her further (ha..yeah like that works…NOT!) and she got worse and worse, not getting a reaction out of me. Then she started punching me. I tried to block her punches with my arm. She got furious screaming, “YOU DON’T RAISE YOUR HAND TO YOUR MOTHER YOU BITCH!!!” I tried to get away from her and she grabbed the hot iron and came at me with it’s hot end aimed at my face. I screamed and pushed it away and ran to call the police. When they got there. She was calm and contrite and played the part of the suffering mother with an uncontrollable willfull daughter. I was traumatized and beside myself. I tried to tell them what she did. They listened to her sob story and lies about me that she told them. I was an honor student (which she HATED btw) and NOT anything like she told them. It devasted me what she did. And the cops believed her and she got their sympathy.
I got out of their when I turned 18.
There’s a lot more. But, that’s about all I can tell you right now.
Dear Icansee,
Yep, your mother sounds like she is VERY high in psychopathic traits, and has no conscience or impulse control and seems to enjoy hurting and controlling others.
You are WELL AWAY FROM HER. I am so glad you are NC with her, glad you got out as soon as you cold when you were a kid, and Yes, they do make us feel bad about ourselves by projecting their sick and nasty emotions on to us and blaming us for THEIR problems.
Sometimes it takes years of work, therapy and pain to undo and to accept what they have done to us as defenseless kids. We had to find a way to survive in that toxic environment, but sometimes those methods of coping that we used then are not really very functional in the adult world so we have to “regroup” and learn new ways of coping and growth in order to reach our potential.
My mother wasn’t as bad as yours but she still left scars on my soul and it has take me to age 63 to come to grips with the scars and to heal them, and learn new ways of coping. I hope that you will continue to stay her4 and read and learn because KNOWLEDGE REALLY IS POWER, and we have to take back our power to love ourselves. If you have not had therapy, I suggest that you see if you can get a therapist who will “get it” about your mother. I’ve had some therapy but it never did any good until I got to the bottom of the problem, my relationship with my mother that had skewed my coping mechhinisms and that I had not learned to SET BOUNDARIES in a healthy manner. now I am doing that, and LIFE IS WONDERFUL, but it has been a long, dark and difficult jouirney but WELL WORTH IT. ((((hugs))) and my prayers for you.
Oxy,
Thank you ((hugs)) I want to reply to your kind post. But, I’m going to have to do that a bit later. I’m in a bad state right now. I am going to go and lie down and listen to a relaxation cd I have to try and calm down.
peace
Dear Icansee,
GOOD FOR YOU! Taking care of OURSELVES is our first responsibility and I have never done that until the last few years when I started to come out of the FOG (Fear Obligation and Guilt) and I realized finially that my egg donor (she didn’t earn the title “mother” so I took it back) had perverted my faith in God to use to control me and my thinking. I finally broke away from that control and twisting of my thoughts and faith without losing my faith in God, in fact, I have GREATER faith in God than I have ever had, and have a PERSONAL relationship with a God that is not my egg donor’s “hateful, vengeful god” that she worships and dooms everyone but her to hell! LOL
It is an AMAZING thing to break free of the chains of our emotional slavery to these people who welded those chains to our little hearts when we looked at them as “gods” because we depended on them for our very survival as children. We took in every word they said as GOSPEL and TRUTH and their judgments as absolute. But now, as adults we can SEE that they were and are NOT gods, and that instead they are the antithesis of God, they are EVIL and malicious and we did not and do not deserve to have these chains of emotional enslavement tie us down for the rest of our lives. There is PEACE out there away from the slave pen of their control, and we CAN FIND IT!!! (((hugs))) and my prayers for you!
OxDrover:
I got out as soon as I could, but I didn’t go completely NC with her until a few years later when I was in my mid twenties and she attacked me on a visit. It was after that when I cut off contact and only saw her on sporadic ocassions like weddings and funerals.
I really understand now, after this last year how much I’ve been affected by the abuse from my mother and how I developed coping strategies that actually aren’t good for me.
I had therapy years ago but never got into my past with my mother. It’s no surprise to me now, that not dealing with it has put me right back in the same boat. I thought I has put my past behind me, but I guess you can’t do that in these kinds of cases.
“My mother wasn’t as bad as yours but she still left scars on my soul and it has take me to age 63 to come to grips with the scars and to heal them, and learn new ways of coping.”
Your mother might not have been the same as mine, and I don’t know if you can even make a scale of bad vs. really bad. Psychopathic abuse is abuse. It all scars the soul. I can fully understand it staying with someone for life if they don’t deal with the damage ((hugs))
I am so glad to read that your life is wonderful now and that you’ve gotten through all of the enormous pain and difficulty. It gives me hope! So, thank you for that and GOOD FOR YOU!! I know I have a long road ahead of me.
I have read on many of your posts, you referring to your “egg donor” and it confused me. I’ve been trying to figure out who you were talking about with that term. Now I know!! hehe. Nice one 😛 My mind is rather fried at the moment. My short term memory is shot and my attention span..well it’s like thoughts going through a sieve.
It’s evil the way P’s will distort what is good for their own purposes, including the loving aspects of religion. I’m sorry your egg donor did that to you. It’s Sick.
I’m glad you’ve stuck around on LF 🙂
Dear Icansee,
Yes, it was a difficult road, and the therapy I got helped some at the time, but didn’t undo the poor coping mechanisims I had adopted, the worst one being “people pleasing” for those people close to me. I could set a buondary with people outside my family and did, but people who managed to get in CLOSE could never be kicked outside the boundaries, i had to make them “happy” even at my own expense.
It never FELT RIGHT, but no matter how I struggled to get away from that pattern, I went back over and over, especially with my egg donor and my P-son, I just couldn’t break free and STAY free.
Yes, there are some “scales of evil” I would say, but it can be emotional and/or physical and sometimes the emotional is worse than the physical.
Working my way through the MAZE of emotions, over and over again, and still “not getting it” what the bottom line was,and that was I was abused because I ALLOWED IT, I expected it, I tolerated it. There are always people in the world who will abuse you if you will allow it. I am NOT blaming the victim, even myself, but I DID allow it, I do NOT allow it now, and life is good because I make it good.
For a long time I felt “poor me” I’ve been given a bad lot in life, and, yep, I did draw some crumby cards, but any hand can be a winner if you play it right! Letting people abuse you when there is a choice is not playing it well.
Sometimes there is no choice, but those times are pretty rare, like in War or the times of slavery, but even then some people were willing to put their lives on the line and make a break for freedom, so I guess there is always a choice. It may be a HARD CHOICE, but fortunately we are generally not faced with those on an every day basis. I do know though, that as much as I value my home and farm, I value my safety more, I value my life more, and it took the horrible things that happened a couple of years ago to make me see just how little THINGs in this life are worth, it is LIFE itself that is worth somoething, and PEACE and JOY, and I intend to have as much of that as I can get for the rest of my life. I will not let someone else take that away.
I know about “fried minds” I’ve got CRS (can’t remember stuff) pretty bad from the PTSD but I’m managing to survive without much of a memory, and am over the grieving for losing my “mind” LOL I just laugh about it now, and keep lists and lose the lists! LOL I just let things slide off my back mostly like water off a duck’s back. The things that used to would send me into a tizzy or upset me, are NOTHING now, and looking back I can see just how stressed out I was, and how LONG it has taken for my body and mind to start to UNstress and get over the effects of that constant bathing in stress hormones.
No matter how smart you are or how hard you work at it there are just some things that take TIME…you cannot get a baby in 1 month by having 9 women pregnent and you can’t get over the effects of a life time of stress, pain and dysfunction in a month either, or even ini a year I think, and it is like a fever, it goes down slowly, not drops all at once. then one day you will just wake up and realize you haven’t had a fever for a while and you feel great.
You may even reach acceptence in the grief process and back slide some, that’s normal, but as long as you are making some progress and STAYING on the road toward healing, don’t EVER get off that road, or listen to the siren song from the swamps beides the road taht you have “reached” healing because every time I did that, and thought I was FINE, OK, etc I fell off into the depths of despair. I think healing is a journey not a destination and we must fight to stay on that road no matter what.
We must share the maps with those around us and encourage each otehr, but each of us must “walk that lonesome valley by themselves” but it sure does help to have someone to hold your hand and encourage you. I have good people who did that for me, and I am ever so grateful for those people who were my guides along the road. I hope I can repay that obligation to others and in turn each of them pass on the gift that we have all had here at LF. (((hugs)))
Dear I can see clearly, if you look at my blog on the thread,
“Deficit disorders’,-{below this thread,} you will see how my 19 year old daughter treated me. This, and much worse.
She is 45 now, and up to recently was still cheating me, lying, conning me out of huge sums of cash. She isa female psychopath, Im sure of it, she ticks every single box. love, Gem.XX {You asked if anyone on LF had had experience of female psychopaths.}