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?
Apologies for dropping out of this dialogue when it was getting so interesting. I’m doing a lot of hit-and-run posting right now because I have several new clients, and I’m basically visiting LoveFraud on coffeebreaks and then running back to work. And in the evenings right now, it seems like everyone I know is going through transformative challenges so I’m putting in a lot of phone.
So anyway, I’m back. And first a response to Kim’s long post. You mentioned reading about the mutual attraction between borderlines and narcissists. And it brings up another issue about borderlines which I didn’t really get into. I mentioned that they turn themselves inside out to keep a relationship afloat. That wasn’t really accurate. What I meant is that they will sometimes transform themselves to be whatever the lover wants them to be, at great cost to themselves.
I ran into this issue with my ex-BPD, who explained what lengths and sacrifices of personal character and inclination had been made on my behalf. I didn’t know it at the time. In fact, I felt that for the first time I really getting what I wanted in a relationship (except for the excessive demands that I narrow down my social life to nothing but the relationship). If I expressed that something was important to me, I got it. In fact, looking back, the whole relationship was a fairly accurate reflection of my fantasy life. Which in a way was a very bad thing, because it was like getting the gold ring, and that led me to refine my ideas of what I really wanted, which set me up for the sociopath who looked like an even bigger gold ring. (Giving people what they really want isn’t always the way to keeping their love.)
Which brings me to the second point about this relationship with the BPD, which that is, looking back, I was never so much a narcissist in any relationship in my life. Previously, I had been needy and otherwise dysfunctional as you might expect from a basically untreated incest survivor. But this relationship was all about me, me, me. I really didn’t see it at the time, because I was always seeing things that weren’t quite right, and then making new “suggestions” that kept my partner in a state of agitation and retrenching. But what I see now was that I had the power in the relationship, in a way I never had before.
I’ve always thought that people polarize in relationships, particularly in terms of power. And that it happens in both the overall relationship and in the details. One person might be the dominant partner overall, but in some details — like control of the kitchen or in parenting or in sexual choices — the other partner may have the greater power. And this concept pays out a lot in the visceral attractions we have to people with complementary personality disorders or tendencies. Or in attractions to people who have some characteristic we particularly need at some period of our lives, such as when we’re dealing with a recent trauma or loss, or perhaps unusual challenges (such as when I started my business and it grew virtually overnight to nearly a million dollars a year in revenues).
So maybe weakness is attracted to strength, and maybe vice versa. I didn’t see my ex BPD as a weak person initially. I was actually looking for a dominant partner. But what I learned in that relationship was that in dominant-submissive relationships, the submissive partner holds the real power, which was something I’d read, but never understood until I started playing Scarlett O’Hara swishing around with my fluttering eyelashes and humble little complaints, underlined by the threat of locking my bedroom door. (I hope you LoveFrauders realize how much embarrassing stuff I spill in these posts. The older and smarter I get the more I realize I could never write an autobiography.)
(And oddly enough, this power of the submissive, I think, is also true in our relationships with sociopaths, who are the ultimate dominants, but whose success as predators is totally dependent on our acquiescence — which we can always retract, at least in theory. This is something we understand intellectually pretty early in recovery, when we’re beating ourselves up, but we have to progress through more healing before we realize how to use that instinctive knowledge to empower and protect ourselves in the future.)
So the point of this long meditation on power in relationships is to say, once again, that the natural polarization that occurs in relationships could be the cause of the appearance of BPD symptoms. Or maybe that latent tendencies to fall into BPD-style relationship commitments (imagining that one single person is the answer to all needs and therefore we must do anything to keep that person loving us) are triggered by the N/S/P style of relationship. The weak love or commitment signals from their side (or unbelievable ones or ones confused with unloving signals) trigger that “I have to have this and I can make him/her love me” thing on our sides. And a template is set.
As I healed, one of the most important things I learned is that we are capable of so much more than we think we are. I had to heal to recognize the narcissistic and sociopathic traits and capabilities in me. And to realize they were a natural part of the human spectrum of feelings and tactics, and also probably a piece of all the motivations and behaviors that I had previously thought were so classically dependent and codependent. Somehow, recognizing all this freed me, not only from judging other people so easily just because they didn’t fit into my model of how I wanted it to come out. But also in recognizing that I had the power to use whatever capability I had, as long as I was willing to pay the price. In some ways, it’s easier to be a victim that to be a person who exerts power to shape her own life. As a victim, we may not accomplish much, but we can always shift the blame to the more “powerful” person. As a self-empowered person, we take our own lumps, but we also build something that truly belongs to us.
With all that said, maybe black and white thinking isn’t so bad, if we understand that it comes down to yes or no, in terms of what we want or don’t want in our lives. Yes, we can extend ourselves to be generous and compassionate, if we have some reason to want to. If we meet someone we trust and really like to be around, and we know the feeling is mutual. And maybe there’s nothing wrong with trying really hard, and trying some experiments with seeing things their way, as long as we understand that we can always pull back if it doesn’t work for us. Saying no is always an option. And that is the ultimate power that actually puts on an equal footing with anyone. When we know that, we know that the power games are just games, nothing more. In the end. we belong to ourselves.
Kathy
Kim, (that’s my real name also!)
I believe it’s wonderful that you are making a list of the stellar character traits you have always possessed. And, also, your own personal likes and dislikes.
A past member, who I unfortunately cannot remember his name, wrote that conscientious folks tend to focus on the negative character/physical traits they possess rather than the positive.
I totally understand that mentality as I was consumed for many years by how worthless and useless I incorrectly thought myself to be. Not anymore. No way. I squashed that stupid myth firmly into the ground until it no longer existed.
I think positive, optimistic thoughts about myself now. I focus on the good and yes, if I consider there is some glitch in my psyche/emotional makeup that is hindering me from spiritual growth, hindering me from seeking universal truth, peace and joy, I work on it.
I don’t beat myself up about it, like I once did, but analyze and contemplate my thoughts, words and actions in an effort to actually visualize the big picture, to understand a situation more clearly and to better myself. For others as well as for myself.
It’s like cleaning house, sweeping away the dust bunnies under the bed that aren’t really all that nasty, and never seen, but can be distracting knowing they are there. So, I collect their fuzzy selves, put them in the trash bin, and breath a gentle sigh of relief and accomplishment.
Does that make sense? I’m not as gifted with analogies like most of the lovely LF members are.
Anyway, sweety, I applaud you for realizing that you possess tremendously, wonderful, glorious character traits, convictions, ethos, morals, values which place you in the highest pinnacle of what it means to be a true human being.
That is directed to all of the LF members and awesome folks living in the world. You rock!!
🙂
(ps…I’m a crappy speller also. I open the Answers.com website, copy and paste my probably misspelled word into the search area and click away!…haha.)
Kathleen,
My older sister was diagnosed as a Borderline Personality Disorder and I can tell you…it ain’t no picnic being around her for very long.
I think she’s on the extreme spectrum as I’ve met folks in my past who might have been borderlines but were much more restrained, much more giving and loving than she is.
She’s a nightmare to anyone who loves her including her two daughters and her lovers. She is selfish, self absorbed personified and obsessed with money. Other people’s money.
Although she makes high dollars as a nurse, she blows through that money like it’s confetti, spending it on impractical nonneccessities. Then she tries to con cash from my Mother or boyfriend or whoever.
She’s also very moody, very angry and very violent. She has 0 self control over her emotions and reacts in self destructive and destructive ways.
It’s been difficult for me to love her as I don’t like her. But she is sometimes so damn sweet and nurturing, the sister I love and cherish that I can’t completely go NC with her. We don’t talk hardly at all but I think about her quite a bit and I do feel compassion for her suffering with this disorder.
She needs psychiatric help, she does and the only time she seeks it is when she is in a crisis, when she runs to the hospital saying she’s wants to commit suicide.
She receives help, support and guidance by the health care workers during her crisis time but never seems to follow up or even care to follow up on therapy. She doesn’t seem to give a fig if she’s mentally and emotionally unhealthy and all the damage, pain she has inflicted on her own immediate family.
That girl is in denial and her head’s like a block of cement. I can’t reach her as I surrendered that desire years ago. I am fundamentally aware I’m far removed from perfect as we all are, but at least I don’t continue to hurt people when I realize my words/actions are causing harm. I try to make amends. She does not. Only when it suits her own selfish needs and wants to apologize.
That’s the crux of her disorder: she hurts the people who love her most. So very tragic but I’m holding a tentative hope that she can be healed. For her loved ones and for herself.
I’ve just read through the rest of this amazing thread. And thank you, Mike, for the great compliment. I am so pleased by the idea of a painting of Oxy and me, and can’t wait to see it.
You said you couldn’t accept the idea of me as a sociopath by proxy. Believe it. (And if it makes it any easier, a lot of the saints had pretty wild backgrounds before they get spiritual. Not that I’m anything like a saint, but I’m working on the theory.)
The part of it that bothers me is the “by proxy” and the fact that I harmed people for no good reason. As I’ve written before, finding our inner sociopath is, to my mind, a good thing. Or it was for me. I needed to learn how to think about things in terms of my own good. I needed to learn how to focus on what I wanted, and plan on how to get it and follow through. And to an extent, I needed to learn how to stop worrying so much about everyone else’s feelings or what they’d think about me, and just get on with it. And also, live with the idea that, in some cases, my achievements were going to come at the cost of someone else not getting what they wanted. Because some situations involve competition.
What I hate, in retrospect, is being used by someone whose intentions were against my wellbeing, whose dreams and ethics I found childish or obnoxious, and who finally was someone I was slumming with in almost every way. I am better than this. More mature. More compassionate. More able to see and plan things that really mean something.
It took a long time to forgive myself. To stop saying, ugh, what was wrong with you? And just get down to realizing that something wasn’t working right in the cogs and gears of my psyche. And if I cared about myself, I had to figure out what the problem was, because I was worth more than that.
I’m spending time these days on websites about spiritual awakening, and one of the themes that keeps coming up is that the people who are destined to change things — however large or small their reach might be — come into the world with early challenges. When you talk about how your parents treated you as a child, I have to admit I am envious. And I look at how beautifully you write, and the depth and scope of your thinking, and there’s a part of me that wants to say, “Oh, well, he is better adjusted than me, because his parents really cared about him and treated him with respect and went out of their way to give him opportunities to develop and grow.” It’s the part of me that thinks like a victim, and in victimhood, can find excuses for thoughts and behaviors that “pay me back,” which is the most fundamentally sociopathic and addict-style thinking there is.
And then I remind myself that you grew up with autism. And though I can’t really understand everything that means in terms of how it affects your perceptions or nervous system or capacities, I know one thing that you faced that I really understand. Autism made you different and you couldn’t hide it. I spent my whole life trying to hide the truth about me. In some ways I got really good at it, at being charming and articulate and dazzling people with my knowledge and intellect. But in other ways, there was no way to hide it. I knew this from the kind of people I attracted and didn’t attract. And from the fact the I could spot other people like me within a few moments of conversation, or even across a room.
So a huge amount of my healing work was making peace with who I am, of coming to the same conclusions that you have, that my experiences shaped me in terms of knowledge and interests and even the trajectory of my life, but it is not who I am. I am not what I’ve lived through, not my best or worst thoughts or behaviors. There is something behind all that, something that is more “me” but also larger and better in ways I can barely imagine, that is waiting for me to resolve all the history that holds me back, and get some sense of choice about all the things I imagine I can’t live without, and open my eyes to more of the world and go live in a way that is more involved and courageous and just open to learning and pain and joy and risk and even the possibility of dying. To reach beyond all these ideas about who I am, and what I can’t do and must do, to push beyond my comfort zone, and risk failing or looking silly in becoming more than myself.
I think that one of the essential balancing acts of life is to live simultaneously as social creatures and as self-actuated individuals. And I think that the gift of our encounters with sociopaths is that it sets us on a path of becoming more self-actuated. I find that now, after this long healing process that made me more aware that I was allowed to be self-oriented, self-defensive, self-caring, I am finding new experiences that are drawing me out of myself in situations where I am challenged to be caring, kind and generous again. But now they are different. They’re not about getting my needs met, as they once were. Now, I’m finding life asking me if I can get out of myself and lend a hand in ways that bring me nothing in return. Not even the sense of being a good person, because one of the things I know now is that I can’t really know how anything will come out, even my well-intentioned help.
At the end of all this, I am thinking now that the only thing I can really trust is my heart, my feelings. And even in that, I don’t know how it will come out. I gave up other people’s rules a long time ago, and now I’m gradually giving up my own. Increasingly, I’m living on intuition and instinct, but with all that hard living and hard learning behind it as a kind of advisory chorus of little PTSD modules, each with its own particular wisdom. I have a choice to listen to them or not. If I listen, I stay safe in what I already know, but close off the potential for new experience and learning. If I don’t listen, I risk another wound, another healing process, but if I don’t take the risk, I miss the chance for something beautiful and easy that was meant for me. It’s my choice, always my choice.
Finally, from this perspective, I realize that I’ve been doing this all along. Looking back at some of the less savory moments of my life, like the experience of being a sociopath by proxy, they were all part of taking big chances. I got involved with the sociopath, faced the huge and ongoing risks of that relationship, accepted all those wounds and losses, because I wanted to change my life. Change it in a big way. That was what he looked like to me, like a doorway into another life.
And that really was what he was. If I hadn’t take that chance, if I’d stayed with what was safe and known, I don’t even like to think about where I’d be today. I think our hearts are smarter than we think they are. It just sometimes takes some time to realize that.
Jane Smith, I read what you wrote about your sister, and how you finished it by saying: “That’s the crux of her disorder: she hurts the people who love her most.”
I’m going to take a big chance here, and you can whack me with Oxy’s skillet if you want, but I think that’s the crux of your problem with her disorder. It’s not the problem she is dealing with.
You describe someone who has out-of-control needs and out-of-control behaviors in response to those needs. BPDs very frequently are addicts, as well as being highly volatile emotionally, and your sister sounds like an addict. But the underlying issues that are driving her bus are not clear anywhere in your description. And it’s very likely you don’t know (not because you’re not perceptive, but because BPDs are often ashamed of their real needs, and because addicts lie).
My BPD was multiply addicted, as well as in major denial about both the addictions and the (to me) crazy and self-destructive behaviors. It wasn’t until many years later (after being in and out of psych wards because of suicidal impulses and recovery programs and different types of therapy) that I finally learned about the mountain of lies I had taken as truth. And though our friendship continued, I still take everything with a grain of salt. You may wonder why the friendship continues. It’s because no one has ever given me more encouragement and understanding and support — the “good side” of the BPD. And right now, with us living about seven states apart, I can enjoy the good parts of that friendship, and share encouragement and support in return.
Sometimes what I write here is probably not exactly helpful to people healing from an encounter with a sociopath. An essential part of our healing here is to get better at discriminating and acting quickly on situations that are not good for us. The ones that drain our resources or make us feel bad or trigger old PTSD modules in our psyches. So if she makes you feel bad, then you clearly owe it to yourself to respond appropriately for your own well-being.
But later, when we get solid with our capacity to take care of ourselves, and also make peace with the idea that neither we nor anyone else is exactly perfect, I think we start to shift into that space I call compassion. It’s not pity and it doesn’t require us to do anything to help. It’s just recognizing that we all have our own demons, or chattering monkeys in our heads, or emotional constructs that keep us locked into hamster wheels of dysfunction, and we can feel for other people but also leave them to their own paths. Everyone grows up eventually, either in this lifetime or the next. And I really that sounds awfully Buddhist, but it makes sense to me.
So I’m ready for my boink, if that was all too obnoxious.
Kathy
Dear Kathy and Janie,
Janie, your sister sounds more like a P than a BPD—full blown P–female version. They learn when they get into “trouble” to play the “I’m gonna kill myselF” routine and it gets them (many times) a “pass” on the problems they have created and the medical and legal professions see them as a poor “mentally ill” person. Even my darling P x-son used the “grief” process of his “nephew” that he NEVER MET, being sick with MD as a reason for his “grief”—and therefore the special priviledge of different housing because of the stress he was having coping with the illness of this kid he had never met!
I think the “cluster B” diagnosis criteria are pretty overlapping and ought to be a “continuum” of symptoms along with the severity. Differnt ones have essentially the same symptoms but in various degrees of it.
There is the N who will eat the last piece of cake, knowing you haven’t had any at all and he’s had 3 pieces, but he isn’t TRYING to hurt you. That same N wouldn’t rob your bank account but might try to talk you out of a loan he couldn’t pay back, but wouldn’t deliberately rob you, but wouldn’t be really upset with himself when he didn’t pay you back and you lost your home, say. He’d at least find some reason that you made him mad as an excuse not to pay you back. But you know, there are those that MAX OUT on all the criteria.
Your sister, to me Janie, sounds more P-ish than anything, the “hurts the ones who love her most.”
I really am sorry she is a nurse, though. UGH!
But the thing is I think anyone who is TOXIC is someone we don’t want to let have the “keys to our heart”—-no matter what the diagnosis is “officially”—-if they are not TRUSTWORTHY with us, we must keep them at a distance we can feel SAFE with them at, and that may be NC or Long Distance C, or anywhere in between. We each have to make up our own minds on each individual so that our needs are met without undue INVESTMENT, RISK or DAMAGE.
Nah, Kathy, I won’t let her borrow my skillet, she might hurt your pretty little head, you know what a “ravenous beast” Our Janie is! LOL ((((hugs))))) to you both! oxoxoxox Oxy
Kathleen,
Thank you for responding and no, I’m not going to boink you with Oxy’s skillet. I’m not a good boinker, more of a boinkee type of gal.
And, seriously, I understand what you’re saying. I do. She does have addictive tendencies, whether it’s food, sex, alcohol and/or prescription drugs. She pops pills like crazy, especially Zanax which is just scary for me to contemplate.
But she’s not always under the influence of a foreign substance, chemical and is many times quite lucid and aware of what she says and does. I’ve known her all my life and I can tell you she was dysfunctional, self destructive as a child, a teen and now, an adult.
And I expressed in my post that I absolutely do feel compassion for her suffering but I can’t save her. I can’t heal her and I can’t stop her from hurting and taking from others.
That’s her responsibility not mine, her childrens, my Mom, or her husbands, or her many lovers. Hence, why I am distant from her, literally and figuratively. She is toxic.
Oxy Pooh,
I do see psychopathic behaviors/traits in her sometimes, but what seperates her from the real fiends is that there is life in her eyes. Not those dead shark eyes we all have had the misfortune of glimpsing one or many times from past involvements with family, friends, lovers.
And I have also seen the tormented woman she truly is. Many times.
Borderlines are transparent as far as the raw emotions they exhibit. And believe me…she is RAW all the time. Must be so exhausting for her, her two daughters, her current lover. Was for me.
I wish her the best and sincerely hope she reaches out for healing from any available resource. Deep down, she’s a good and decent woman. And I love her. Always will.
PS…ravenous beast?! What the hell does that mean, Oxy dear?…haha.
Have you sent a lil spy to scope me out when I’m gleefully strolling down the grocery store aisles looking for goodies and filling my basket up?
Well, if so, I’m not one bit ashamed of my enthusiastic addiction to chocolate and other good eats. Food is life and since I love food AND life, estoy bien.
🙂
Thanks, Oxy, for watching out for me. I keep thinking about Mike’s painting, and wondering if we’re going to come out looking like Lucy and Ethel.
I’ve been thinking and thinking about your mother. No matter how hard I try to apply compassion-based thinking to your description, and to try to understand the wounded child under all those behaviors, I can’t get past the fact that she is behaving in ways that threaten your and other people’s lives. And no matter how desperately she needs whatever she gets from your P-son, I can’t help but feel there’s an element of punishing you in all of this, or maybe paying back someone else (the aggrieved entitlement of victimhood) far back in her history, and the whole thing just sounds like she’s gone around the bend.
You’ve already figured out everything I could possibly say about her. And try as I might from the perspective of communications theory or any kind of direct approach to her, I can’t find any inspiration to breaking through to her. She’s gotten herself stuck in some world-class stupid thinking, and in a better world there would be general recognition that she’s either become senile or is in serious emotional trouble and needs help. (I mean, she’s got a long history with sociopaths, no?)
Which brings me to the one thing that occurs to me as a strategy for you. It would require some acting on your part (or maybe not if you actually feel this way). And that would be, whenever people ask about your mother, tell them in a can-you-believe-it way that your mother is trying to help your son, the one that murdered his girlfriend, get out of prison and come home. And inquiring of people, “What in the world do you think is wrong with her?”
And when they say something like “Oh, it’s her grandson and she has to love him” or something equally inane, you can nod thoughtfully and say, “Oh you must be right. I was just thinking about how scared I am of him coming back here. You know, he’s already tried to kill my other son, and I’m afraid it’s about him wanting all my mother’s property. But I could be wrong about it.”
And then just walk away or change the subject. If they want more information, act embarrassed, and say, “I probably shouldn’t have told you about this family stuff. My mother would kill me.”
This would replace anything you’ve been telling people about not talking to your mother, or anything about trying to get them to understand what happened to your son C or you. The whole point is to embarrass your mother, in the most concerned and nicely daughterly way. And hopefully in a way that gets people thinking about the murderer who might show up in their own backyard.
From what you say about her, I suspect that the one thing that might shake your mother out of her craziness is social pressure. And particularly the type that’s based on other people knowing more about her than she wants them to know.
You, of course, can be very “over it” in terms of either worrying about your son or being embarrassed about talking about him. You could admit that it’s hard to hard a murderer for a son, especially since he was such a nice litle boy, and make some apologetic comment about discovering that his father wasn’t a very nice person after you’d already married him. But you’ve had to make peace with the reality of the thing, and now the only thing that really worries you is him showing up here. He’s a diagnosed sociopath and you don’t know what he’ll do.
I suspect none of this is your style. But you could regard it as part of the campaign to keep your son in jail, and just bite the bullet and practice wringing your hands a bit before you do it. Who knows what you might accomplish?
Love –
Kathy
nope,
not Lucy or Ethel. you are holding up a lantern and have a hawk perched on your shoulder, (remember the automatic visual input in autism) you are dressed somewhat grecian.
OxDrover is riding an ox, wearing like a viking type fighter sheild and sword, but female, down to roman sandals. i made you both in your thirties so younger than Lucy and Ethel. i pictured your hair sortof auburnish and made Oxdrover sortof blond from what can be seen underneath her armor as she’s dressed like an viking type amazon sort of but with a calm look not fierce. both made to hold a rather regal look…how you guys looks physically now doesn’t matter the soul doesn’t age and it’s more figurative anyway. it’s more like the manner of who you are than an actual painting of how you look today. i don’t know if ox drover is blondish even i’m just guessing in that aspect.
Des likes it. says it seems like you both.
Mike