How to recognize and recover from everyday sociopaths - narcissists

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Here’s the worst lie a partner can tell you and what to do about it

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If you’re looking for a romantic relationship and you’re also reading Lovefraud, you probably have some awareness of sociopaths and you’re trying to figure out how to not hook up with one. To help you, I will reveal the worst lie that a partner can tell you. If you encounter this lie, you absolutely should not excuse it. Lying sociopaths All sociopaths lie. This presents those of us who are honest with a huge problem. First of all, sociopaths are really good liars. They’ve been lying all their lives. They tell big lies, little lies, stupid lies. They mix lies with the truth. They lie like they breathe. Secondly, human beings are really bad lie detectors. Research shows that most people …

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After the sociopath, I still feel numb – what can I do?

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UPDATED FOR 2023. After discovering that someone close to you, someone you trusted, totally betrayed you, it would certainly be expected that you'd feel anger, outrage, or sadness. But many people who have this experience simply feel numb. For example, Lovefraud received the following email from a reader: It has been about 3 years since I discovered what happened to me. I've had no contact with my spaths. Yet I still feel numb and broken. I feel like I have tried almost everything to get through this dark time. I feel so lost. I feel so robbed of my life and my children have been too. What can I do now? I'm running out of solutions. I don't want to feel like this anymore.... please …

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When sociopaths threaten suicide

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If you’re a sociopath, and you sense that your latest target is tiring of your antics and getting ready to leave, what do you do? Well, many sociopaths threaten suicide. What sociopaths want most is power and control, and one of the most forceful ways to achieve it is to threaten suicide. This strategy is especially effective when they’re trying to hold on to their romantic partners. Why? Romantic partners care about the sociopath. If this is you, you are emotionally attached. Even if you’ve come to the conclusion that your relationship with the sociopath is not healthy, you don’t want to be the cause of anything bad happening to him or her. So when the sociopath threatens suicide if you le …

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What is narcissistic supply?

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Perhaps you suspect that someone in your life has a serious personality disorder. You’ve been reading everything you can find on narcissists, sociopaths and maybe even psychopaths. You keep coming across the term, narcissistic supply. What is it? Here’s how Tiffany Kettermann, LPC, CADCI, MPA, described it in her Lovefraud webinar, Understanding and Recognizing Narcissistic Abuse: Narcissistic supply is anything or anyone that feeds the narcissistic person’s ego and keeps the person artificially pumped up, protecting their fragile view of themselves. “Think of narcissism, the ego, as a HUGE tank that needs constant filling,” Tiffany says. “It’s an addiction, a need, for someone to pr …

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Early warning sign that a baby could grow up to be a psychopath

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UPDATED FOR 2023. Research suggests that a baby who prefers to look at a red ball, rather than a human face, may be at risk for developing callous-unemotional personality traits and could grow up to be a psychopath. Callous-unemotional traits, when seen in children, can precede the development of full-blown psychopathy. Researchers at King's College in London studied five-week old babies. They hypothesized that babies who paid more attention to an inanimate object, rather than a human face, would show higher callous-unemotional traits when they were two and a half years old. The researchers were right. Callous-unemotional Psychologists who study the origins of antisocial behavior …

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Understanding why the sociopath is just like your parent

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Most people who call me for personal consultations want to talk about an abusive romantic partner. They want to know if their partner is a sociopath, and usually, based on their story of lies, manipulation, cheating, stonewalling, gaslighting and sometimes violence, the answer is yes. Then, as we talk about how they were vulnerable to this person, they say that the sociopath is just like their parent. For example, here's a letter that I received from a Lovefraud reader: I was involved with a narcissist in 2013 and after a year of being with a complete nut case went no contact. (Can write a short story about it.) It's taken a few years but free now in my mind. My father is a narcissist …

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Her husband was engaged in theft, embezzlement and laundering money

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Editor’s note: Here’s a story submitted by a Lovefraud reader. Not only was the man she married cheating on her, but he was engaged in theft, embezzlement and laundering money. We met in an AOL IM chatroom in 2005, for people in their 40's. He lived more than 600 miles away from me. Two months after meeting online, we met in a public setting. He told me he was getting divorced when I first met him online: lie #1. He was still married; however, his wife at about that same time had found out about other affairs he had had locally, and left him the weekend he drove out here to meet me in person. Prostate cancer He found out he had prostate cancer 6 months after meeting me, had his prostate …

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Sociopathy is not illegal, so how do we deal with wrongdoing?

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All sociopaths lie. Their objective in just about every social interaction is to exploit and manipulate whoever is in front of them. Yet even though their behavior is atrocious, unethical and immoral, sociopathy is not illegal. People aren’t arrested because they have a personality disorder. So when we’ve been wronged by someone whom we believe is disordered, how do we deal with it? Sociopaths definitely cause harm, but some harm is “actionable,” to use a legal term, and some isn’t. What that means is some behavior can be subjected to legal consequences, and other behavior cannot. When we’ve been wronged by a sociopath, we need to evaluate what response is possible, and what is in our own be …

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The ulterior motives in good times with the sociopath

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Yes, it is possible to have good times with a sociopath. They can be the life of the party, exciting and entertaining. They can enjoy sports, movies, museums, exotic cars, fine dining and all kinds of music. They can love to travel, from local road trips to round-the-world voyages. And through all these adventures, they can create special, unforgettable moments. Correction: The moments seem special and unforgettable at the time. But once you come to the painful realization that the person you shared them with is a sociopath, you’re faced with another shock: All those good times with the sociopath were fake. Traveling with my sociopathic ex-husband I shared multiple memorable experiences …

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Is Byran Kohberger a psychopath?

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Two months ago, Bryan Kohberger was arrested and charged with the murder of four college students in Idaho. I wrote an article about him on Lovefraud, in which I compared what was known about his actions to the Psychopathy Checklist Revised (PCL-R). Is Bryan Kohberger a psychopath? The PCL-R is the gold standard for evaluating an individual’s level of psychopathy, especially in criminal situations. Surprisingly, Kohberger did not seem to score very high on the PCL-R. Since then, more has been learned about Kohberger’s actions. Stunning details were released in the police probable cause affidavit, which laid out the evidence for his arrest. According to the affidavit: DNA was det …

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