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?
kim i think from what i’ve read that you do not seem to be at all BPD.
i wouldn’t rely so much on some of what therapists or even psychologists say. it’s just a professional opinion. An opinion is all, but how professional is it? And how educated?
when first taken to a psychologist (and autism wasn’t so well known then) my parents were told i had a form of schizophrenia. did i have schizophrenia? no. did he have reason to think it was schizophrenia? yes.
but he didn’t know enough of what was going on to really tell anyone what was really going on. it took a neurologist to really diagnose me correctly and even then once i became high functioning they thought there must be something else since only classic autism was recognized at the time…
all it was was an educated guess which proved to be wrong with me. and whoever had diagnosed you with that i feel is very wrong to do so even if they had some reason to think in that line.
Mike
Oxy, Okay. I appreciate your response and believe you meant no harm.
EB, you’re probably right. I mean borderline but only said BP because I don’t completely accept the disorder part of it.
I do have some tendancys, however, but I’m working on that.
Identity problems, emotional instability, black and white thinking, fears of abandonment, etc.
However, I’m not mean, or deceptive or particularly manipulative. Just touchy and insecure.
I feel better, though. Thanks.
Kim….
BIG
XXXXXXX
OOOOOOOOO’S
From Me….EB…..the one who can be mean, deceptive and particularly manipulative….UNDER THE RIGHT CONDITIONS…..
With the S!
I’ll be the personality side of the Borderline…..OKAY?
EB, you tootin’ your own horn thinkin you got a big patootie personality?
Kim said: I do have some tendancys, however, but I’m working on that. Identity problems, emotional instability, black and white thinking, fears of abandonment, etc.
However, I’m not mean, or deceptive or particularly manipulative. Just touchy and insecure.
I feel better, though. Thanks.
geez i may be that as well come to think about it. Black and white thinking. could be autism then. no one is more black and white in thinking as an autistic… Identity problems my wife thinks she’s a dog. he he… hugs. and smiles.
Kim we have some of our kids wrongfully labelled as emotionally disturbed (for reasons of just plain ease to do so, these are school psychologists mind you, doing these things to kids, labeling them in such a way as to brand them unfairly for life) and the kids are just sensitive intense souls with much the same issues you are talking about. we like to call them gifted in a sense.. check this link out
http://www.rocamora.org/giftedness_personality.html
http://talentdevelop.com/
Mike
Kim says
“I do have some tendancys, however, but I’m working on that.
Identity problems, emotional instability, black and white thinking, fears of abandonment, etc.
However, I’m not mean, or deceptive or particularly manipulative. Just touchy and insecure”
Safe to say- you are human. And we are all pretty much in the same boat here.
Including when dealing with the long terms stresses of dealing with a N/S/P.. we can SOMETIMES tend to be as EB pointed out ” mean, deceptive and particularly manipulative”
Touchy and insecure happens…as long as we balance it with protective and confident – we may make it through this thing called life.
And OXY — Im LEARNING to say nothing – I SO WANTED TO JUMP IN AND EXPLAIN TO KIM WHAT YOU EVENTUALLY WERE ABLE TO POST THAT YOU WOULD NEVER INTENTIONALLY WANT TO HURT HER OR ANYONE HERE…BUT I THOUGHT…PATIENCE, WAIT, IT WILL WORK OUT WITHOUT YOUR 2 CENTS IN IT…AND VOILA…HOPE YOU ARE FEELING BETTER ABOUT THE MISUNDERSTANDING TOO.
ok…im rambling… LTL xo
Kim, sweetie, if you will look at the “qualifications” in this article of a “female psychopath” (dishonest, meanness etc) I do NOT think you fit that description, AT ALL, but I think many people are UNFAIRLY labeled “BPD” when they are NOT personality disordered. They may not be “ideally functional” but HEY, which one of us here can say we WERE “Ideally functional?”
Many of us have “abandonment” issues cause we were abandoned by first one P or another, or have had “chaotic” lives because of the abusers in our lives, and so on, insecurity, but that doesn’t mean you are PERSONALITY DISORDERED.
Unfortunately, though, I think tooo many times women who ARE psychopathic are instead of being labeled “psychopathic” are labeled BPD instead. And sometimes people with insecurity are labled BPD when what is happening is they are reacting to a perceived abandonment because of the insecurity. JUST MY OPINION….
We have had some BPDs and Psychopaths come here on this site and post and they USUALLY STICK OUT LIKE A SORE THUMB because they are so selfish and hateful, and they go away quickly. You’ve been here a long time, Kim and I’ve seen you get your feelings hurt a time or two but never seen you “mean”—so whatever therapist hung that label on you, I think you should take another look at it and see that maybe it doesn’t fit.
All of us I think have made bad choices in our lives, me FOR SURE, and I’ve done some things I sure wish I could take back, even said some pretty nasty things to people, because I was angry or hurt but learning to forgive OURSELVES and to change our way of doing things is a CHOICE we have to make.
Sometimes I still offend people I had no intention of offending, and as soon as I have done that ,and know I have done that ,I will take responsibility and apologize sincerely for offending them, and try not to do that again. I try to be more careful in the way I phrase things. (that’s the down side of a written blog rather than a face to face communication).
One thing I try very hard is to NOT make “snide remarks” about anyone here on this blog “behind their back” or to discuss one blogger with the rest of the blog without including them in the conversation. If I am making a comment that you find offenseive, please let me know, but please, also know, that unless your “NAME” is in front of it, I am NOT AIMING anything at you in particular. (((((hugs))))) And Peace. Oxy ps. thanks LTL
Regarding BPD, I’ve heard a number of comments here about people with BPD acting like sociopaths or possibly being sociopaths, and I think that there is some confusion about the psychology of BPD. And how it may be “like” sociopathy in some behaviors AT TIMES, but the underlying issues are not at all the same.
People with borderline personality disorder, unlike sociopaths, are highly attuned to love relationships. So much so, in fact, that they can turn themselves inside out to keep a relationship afloat in ways that make mere codependence look like child’s play. The problems BPDs face, however, often involve the fixation on a single relationship as a kind of essential source of all emotional security. And the famous black-and-white thinking of BPDs involves whether their “other” is or is not behaving in a way that allows the BPD to maintain keep their lover on the necessary pedestal. And with regard to to other people, whether or not, they are either helping or harming the sanctity of this essential relationship.
This is the most crude way of describing the fundamental twist in BPD’s disorder. There are a lot of subtleties to it. But if you’ve gotten into a tangle with a BPD that felt like you were dealing with a sociopath, chances are you were somehow interfering with this essential life strategy. They have huge need for emotional security, which can play out in need for personal acknowledgement and valuation. BPD is not the only personality twist that has these needs, but in BPDs, the black-and-white thinking (reflecting a kind of internal on-off switch of reactions to getting or not getting what they need emotionally) can cause fairly dramatic behaviors.
I was involved with a BPD directly before my relationship with the sociopath. Neither of us knew about the diagnosis until after we broke up, but the possessiveness, jealousy. and sabotage of my other relationships were part of what broke us up. One of the characteristics of this relationship that was so different from dealing with a sociopath was that I could make this person totally “whole and happy,” if I could remove all the issues that were creating insecurity. (In reality, I couldn’t do that without turning myself inside out, but theoretically it was possible, and this would not be true with a sociopath.) While it was going on, I simply could not understand why everything was so important, or the extent of the concession this person had made for me. Later when I found out about the diagnosis, I did some research on BPD, and it began to make a lot more sense.
What was even more illuminating was what happened to me in the relationship with the sociopath. In my previous relationship, I was the relatively cool partner who was more in control of my feelings. With the sociopath, I lost control of my feelings, and came to a kind of obsessive attachment where I saw him as the only cure for the pain he was causing me. When he was giving me positive attention, I was okay. When he wasn’t, I was in dire straits. Nothing else in my life carried anything like the same weight.
During this relationship, virtually everything I did, every new thing that showed up in my life, and all the decisions I made were balanced against how it would affect him and the relationship. It’s really hard for me to look at some of this now, because I did some things that were totally contrary to my ethics and my usual feelings. And in doing them, I harmed some people who I cared about. A lot of people here talk about “sociopaths by proxy,” especially in terms of the new women that sociopathic men get involved with. I always wince when I read it, because it could apply to me. Some of these things I did because he wanted me to. Others of them I did because I was so caught up in this obsessive attachment and maintaining it affected a lot of other parts of my life.
As far as I’m concerned, I believe that I lived for four or five years with a full-blown case of BPD. (I think I may have had tendencies earlier, which played out in relationship addiction, but the sociopath triggered those tendencies into a more serious condition.) The exquisite focus on a single source of emotional security and the resulting pain of depending on someone who was so incapable of providing anything like security was actually what finally made me able to realize that something was seriously wrong with me. And subsequently to use that focus and that pain to dig down into the sources of my damage.
Though BPD is considered a Cluster B disorder (the erratic, dramatic disorders), it because of the volatility of BPDs in relationships and in self-image. Cluster B is an odd set, which includes histrionic, narcissistic and antisocial. Looking at these types from the perspective of the disorder spectrum from dependent (other-reliant) to independepent (self-oriented), I think that both BPD and HPD are dependent disorders and BPD is probably at the far end of the spectrum, where emotional stability requires that essential relationship. But because the quality of that relationship must be so secure and fulfilling and “perfect,” the response to any kind of inadequacy or threat can elicit extreme emotional and behavioral responses.
As far as recovery from BPD goes, there is a lot of writing that cognitive behavioral therapy is the best approach. Which is a “trickle down” approach of changing behavior and internal dialog first, rather than directly attacking the damage through talk therapy. What I’ve seen in my own life and with my former partner is that the big challenge is to shift the focus from “the other” to our own behavior, and then ultimately to our own needs. As we discuss a lot here, we have to become our own source of validation, valuation and love.
Finally, as you might suspect from what I’m writing here, I sometimes wonder if BPD isn’t the opposite syndrome to the N/S/P in relationship. It’s not that all of us are BPD going in. Before I met him, I would have considered myself a flaming codependent or maybe a dependent type with a smidgen of histrionic. Not unusual for a woman brought up with my background. But if they hook us and our happiness depends on them, we are essentially in a BPD world. Our dependent or codependent traits become magnified.
And so, I would probably wonder whether any diagnosis of BPD given to someone coming out of a relationship with a sociopath isn’t perhaps a situational diagnosis. Not necessarily untrue. But once we detox and begin to go through the whole healing cycle, I doubt we’re going to come out of it either as BPDs or even with a lot of dependent tendencies. It’s not that the sociopath burns these tendencies out of us — although it may seem so while we’re doing all our grieving about capacity to love and trust. But that they illuminate some of our own dysfunctional behavior in requiring other people to meet out unmet needs. And that, ultimately, is the cure for virtually anything on the dependent side of the disorder spectrum.
Kathy
Thank you Kathy, for this post.
That’s part of the overall problem I think with “diagnosising” psychology in the “personality disorder” department (as it is called) there are GREAT OVERLAPS in behavior among all the “different” disorders. Even among what we here at LF would agree is a “flaming psychopath” would not necessarily be a serial killer, but yet, most serial killers would also be psychpaths.
Some psychopaths are OVERTLY narcissistic and grandiose, others are quieter and less openly narcissistic and grandiose, even feigniing HUMILITY. There are the OVERT and the COVERT behaviors, yet, whether they are serial killing or just serially destroying people using dupes to help accomplish this, or doing it directly, it is all aimed toward “self fulfillment” for the psychopath, whatever they perceive individually as “fulfillment>”
I coined the phrase “psychopath by proxy” for my egg donor, because some of the things she is doing are “psychopathic behavior” (trying to destroy me) because she is doing it to protect my X-son-P from me. So maybe by your definition, I should call her a BPD at this stage of the game. She will DO anything short of shooting me herself, to protect P from the consequences of his behavior. I could also call it “toxic enabling” or any of a bunch of other terms, including “co-dependent” because HER HAPPINESS DEPENDS ON only ONE thing, only ONE person, and that is P getting OUT of prison before she dies.
In going through the letters I have been searching through there was a copy of one the egg donor wrote to my X-son-P lauding how the TROJAN HORSE-P had been in prison, but he had gone to church with her and was “turning his life around” and she, of course, had SAVED him from his life of “crime” (she didn’t know at that time about the pedophilia) and that was also about the time she had “loaned” him the money for a new car.
During the time of this letter saying how the TH-P was “wonderful” and turning his life around, until the day he was arrested” she PROTECTED HIM FROM ME, protected him from the consequences of his behavior, by PERSECUTING ME. She refused to believe a word I said, decided I was “after her money” though HE was taking money from her, not me. She fell under the spell of the Ps and defended them totally. TOXIC enabling, usiing her resourses to accomplish what they couldn’t in persecuting me.
Son D and I grew afraid with the P on the premisis and being protected by the egg donor and fled for our lives secretly, communicating with the egg donor only by e mail. She didn’t even know we were gone from our house.
A few months later, she sent me an e mail with the subject line of “Treachery!!!!” and said that my assessment of the Trojan Horse P AND my DIL was right and they were in jail. She didn’t send me this e mail though until amost 7 days after their arrest.
For about a year after that, she did not write my P-son, but she DID send him money and lied about that, and she read his letters (I also did for a while, while I was still having contact with her) and then she eventually turned to him because I would no longer play the “family game” of “let’s pretend none of this happened.” She wants so badly to play that game that she will do things against me and son D and even son C that she knows are WRONG, EVIL, BAD behavior but she JUSTIFIES IT because she is “defending” her grandson. Just as she defended her brother, Uncle Monster.
I can’t come up with a “diagnosis” for her behavior that would fit in any catagory of DSM IV enough to say “that’s it!” She exhibits some of many different catagories, but not enough of any one to say “That’s It!” But RIGHT NOW, she is the proxy for making my life as miserable as possible, AND helping X-son-P get out of prison so he can act without a proxy, or to have the money to act by buying a proxy ex-inmate to do his bidding. Whatever her reason, if she succeeds, it will put my life in jeapordy, and probably hers as well, and definitely my other two sons’ lives.
I’m just trying to make some sense out of what she is doing, and why, and I can’t find any other way to do it.
Oxy, I think that latent tendencies can be triggered under stress. Or rather, that we go back to old coping mechanisms related to an old trauma, when faced with a new one, even if those coping mechanisms aren’t particularly useful or relevant. And at that point, we arguably fit the criteria for a personality disorder.
Based on what you say about your mother, I think she sounds a bit like avoidant personality disorder with a touch of OCD. It would make sense given her background. She has to be liked, she has to be right, and she’s totally flipped out by criticism. I know that she probably doesn’t fit the shy criteria, but I bet she keeps her circle limited to people who like and agree with her.
And I think it’s another one on the dependent side of the scale (dependent for her happiness on other people’s appraisals, but in this case also willing to close out all negative input from her life).
But here I go, armchair diagnosing again.