By Ox Drover I recently read The Gaslight Effect—How to spot and survive the hidden manipulations other people use to control your life, by Dr. Robin Stern. I highly recommend this book to Lovefraud readers. Robin Stern, Ph.D., is a therapist specializing in emotional abuse and psychological manipulation. She teaches at Hunter College, Teachers College and Columbia University, and is a leadership coach for faculty. This well-written book is quite reader friendly. Dr. Stern starts off by defining the term “gaslighting” as being “pressured by someone else to believe the unbelievable.” She goes on to show that gaslighting is “an insidious form of emotional abuse and manipulation that ca …
Sociopaths and Suicide
Although some see sociopaths as too emotionally deficient to experience the despair necessary to suicide, I see suicide as offering a viable option for some sociopaths, and I'm going to explain why. Let me start with a bit of crude, brutal logic: for many sociopaths, as we know, life is very much a game; hence, when game over, life over. No more game, what's left? The answer may be, nothing. And yet it may be less “despair” and “depression” with which the sociopath is left when his act has been shut-down than his preferring no longer to deal with an existence he knows will cease supplying the gratifications to which he's grown accustomed, perhaps addicted and certainly privileg …
Sex crimes and punishment
Stories in the newspaper yesterday were disheartening. After reading them, I had to conclude that full-blown sexual predators are everywhere, and doing something about them will be difficult. The first story I found was about Canadian Col. Russell Williams, an elite pilot who was commander of Canadian Forces Base Trenton, the largest air force base in the country. In 2005 he was photographed with Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Phillip. On February 7, 2010, he was charged with murdering a young woman who had been missing for almost a week. That's not all. Williams, considered a “shining bright star” in the military, has been charged with the murder of two women, sexual assault of two oth …
Violence in sociopaths
Is every violent person a sociopath? Are all sociopaths violent? What is the relationship between violence and sociopathy/psychopathy? These are the questions we will think about here. I welcome your comments and stories. In his book “On Aggression” Nobel Prize winning ethologist Konrad Lorenz expressed deep concern for the human race. He pointed out that other social animals have “releasers;” these are inborn signals that turn off aggression. For example, when wolves fight, if one animal turns over on its back, the fighting generally stops. The purpose of aggression in social species is simply to enforce dominance, so when the victor gets the signal it is dominant, the fighting stops. …
Are we born with a sense of right and wrong?
Researchers at Yale University developed studies to answer the question: Do babies have a sense of right and wrong? What they came up with may surprise you. Read The moral life of babies, on NYTimes.com. Be sure to watch the video. Link submitted by a Lovefraud reader. …
The LoveFraud version of “The Ugly Duckling”
By Ox Drover Once upon a time there was a mother duck who hatched a large clutch of eggs. She had done this many times before and had raised her clutch of identical ducklings, all fluffy and yellow when they were born, into pristine white adults who then had clutches of their own yellow ducklings. This time, however, one of her ducklings was not yellow and fluffy like all the others. His neck was quite long and his feathers were an ugly gray color. Plus, he was quite clumsy when he walked. He was so much larger than his siblings that he sort of stuck out like a sore thumb in her otherwise identical clutch of babies. She was very puzzled about this odd baby and didn't quite know what to …
Supreme Court upholds law to keep sex offenders in jail
In 2006, Congress passed the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act, which established a civil commitment procedure to keep dangerous federal sex offenders behind bars after their sentences were complete. Some inmates challenged the law, stating that Congress had exceeded its powers, and it was overturned by a federal appeals court. Now, the Supreme Court has reversed that decision and upheld the law. Read Supreme Court upholds federal sex offender law on the Christian Science Monitor. …
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EMBRACE yourself. You are all you need to hold onto.
Seven steps to healing the lovesick heart. We've all had them. Those icky, sticky, yucky feelings of love gone wrong. The sense of loss. Of abandonment. Of feeling devalued and discarded. Of being ”˜less than' the light of love in our lover's eyes. We've all had them and sometimes, those feelings linger for longer than is healthy for us to reclaim our sense of self-worth, of beauty, of joy in our essence of being alive. EMBRACE yourself. You've got all you need to hold onto is a seven step process that guides you through letting go of the love that was (and will never be again) into loving what is and will always be within you. You. Whole and complete. Living the 3Ms of self-eMPOWERED YO …
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James Montgomery, aka Jim Montgomery, revives Major Fraud in Australia
I can't believe it. Almost five years ago, in August 2005, I blew my sociopathic ex-husband, who was impersonating a war hero, out of the water in Australia. Recently, he tried to go swimming again in the same water. For those of you who don't know the story, I launched Lovefraud because my ex-husband, James Montgomery, took a quarter-million dollars from me, cheated with at least six women during our two-and-a-half year marriage, had a child with one of the women, and then, ten days after I left him, married the mother of the child. It was the second time he committed bigamy. One way that Montgomery was able to gain my confidence was by pretending to be a war hero. He told me that …
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The self-fulfilling prophecy
By Ox Drover My first encounter with a self-fulfilling prophecy (though I didn't call it that name) was back when I was a band-aid-covered kid learning to ride a bicycle. I kept hitting rocks on the streets on which I rode, and even though I did my best to avoid those rocks and the inevitable spills that hitting them meant, it seemed I could never miss a one. I seemed to hit them all. When I would see a rock ahead I kept my eye on it so I could avoid it, but somehow always seemed to hit the darn thing even though I was trying to be careful to avoid it. I felt like I was doomed to hit every rock on the road. One day my stepfather mentioned to me that if I would not look at the rock …