This week events in my life have and people I encountered got me thinking about the blaming of victims. Coincidentally, I discovered this quote from Attorney Wendy Murphy. She wrote this in a comment answering others who commented on her blog: It doesn't matter if Sandra Boss was a 'gold-digger' anymore than it matters that the mother of Michael Jackson's latest victim 'consented' to her child being allowed to sleep at Jackson's home. It's equally wrong to rape a child - even if the victim makes it easier on the criminal to commit the crime because she's ill, or dumb, or uneducated, etc. There's no such thing as a criminal being 'partly guilty'. There's only guilty - or not guilty. …
BOOK REVIEW: The Betrayal Bond (redux)
In a post written more than two years ago, Dr. Liane Leedom recommended The Betrayal Bond—Breaking Free of Exploitive Relationships to Lovefraud readers. In fact, quite a few of you have been discussing the book in your comments. I finally finished the book, and I strongly agree: The Betrayal Bond, by Patrick J. Carnes, Ph.D., is must reading for anyone who is having difficulty leaving, or recovering from, a relationship with a sociopath. A betrayal bond, Dr. Carnes explains, is a highly addictive attachment to people who have hurt you. He lists 14 signs that a betrayal bond may be present in your life. Some of them are issues that I've frequently seen expressed on Lovefraud: When e …
After the sociopath: How do we heal? Part 13 – Happy Emotional Independence Day
Happy Independence Day weekend. It is a lucky coincidence that this is our topic, because emotional freedom is truly about personal revolution. It is an end to collaboration with and submission to abuse. It is an end to the emotional slavery of feeling responsible for other people's feelings and other things that are beyond our control. Emotional freedom is something that might be difficult to imagine when we are in the first stages of healing — especially if it's the first time we've ever processed an abuse-related trauma all the way through to the end. At least once, we need to go through all the stages to take a good look at patterns of denial or bargaining that made us vulnerable to a …
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Enabling a sociopath is unpatriotic
Sociopaths/psychopaths commit a disproportionate amount of both violent and non-violent crime in all Western countries. Today is July 4th or American Independence Day, so I am going to take this opportunity to ask that friends and family members of sociopaths stop enabling them. According to Webster's Online Dictionary the word enable means: 1 a: to provide with the means or opportunity b: to make possible, practical, or easy c: to cause to operate In her book A Dance With the Devil, (which I highly recommend) Barbara Bentley gives many poignant examples of enabling as she describes how her psychopathic husband accomplished his antisocial goals. The most shocking of many examples is …
Stand By Me
When I first was released from the relationship that was killing me, I felt lost, frightened, alone. I needed to focus my attention on something bigger than me, something beyond the despair of having being abused. I needed to connect to people who didn't know me, didn't know my story, didn't know about the man who promised to love me 'til death do us part and took the death part way too seriously, and so, I decided to volunteer. I thought, if I can give while I feel so impoverished, I will be reminding myself that I am not as “useless” as I feel. And it worked. Once a week, I joined a group of women and men at the church down the street from where I was living to make sandwiches for street p …
The Narcissist’s Commandments
You must not disappoint me. You must not inconvenience me. You must recognize all of my expectations as reasonable. You must, at all times, accommodate me. You must recognize my “special needs” (special in an important, not disabled, sense); and must always satisfy them. You must be glad for my good moods, and understand and tolerate my bad, nasty ones. You must see my anger, rage and contempt as always arising for justifiable reasons. You must make tireless efforts to placate me when you've upset me. You must appreciate that my comfort supercedes yours and everyone else's. You must find what interests me, interesting; and you must convey your interest. You willingly assume res …
Feeling guilty about a sociopathic stepson
Lovefraud recently received the following e-mail from a reader who we'll call Martha. I have a 33-year old adult stepson who I believe is sociopathic — he fits all the criteria. He has been a problem to the family ever since his mother threw him out to our house at the age of 13. By that time he was so oppositional there was no dealing with him in any reasonable way. We went through all the “standard” teenage issues with him — petty crime, running away, repeating years in school, counseling, adolescent psych facility, military school till we ran out of money, etc. What is different about our situation from everything I read is that my husband has stood by him for so many years, giving him …
After the sociopath: How do we heal? Part 12 – Reclaiming Self-Love
Love is huge topic that spans every other issue that we have discussed so far, and ones we have not touched yet. But for our purposes — to talk about our next steps in healing from traumatic relationships — we have to narrow it down. This article will discuss the most basic and important element of love -- how we love ourselves. We will look at how we our relationships with ourselves are changing. And how that is affecting what other people mean to us What we think of ourselves Years ago, when I was involved with a New Age bookstore, I ran into lots of programs that taught positive affirmations. That is, repeating phrases about how lovable we are, how successful we are, how loved we are b …
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New research says sharks hunt like serial killers
A paper recently published in the Journal of Zoology says that great white sharks hunt in a highly focused fashion, just like serial killers. According to a report on ScienceDaily.com, the researchers used geographic profiling—a criminal investigation tool used to find serial killers based on the locations of their crimes—to examine how the hunting patters of great white sharks off the coast of South Africa. Sharks establish well-defined hunting bases in strategic locations. The researchers noticed that smaller sharks searched further, and had less success, than larger sharks. They surmised that great white sharks refined their search patterns with experience, and concentrated their hun …
Two summer books about sociopaths
Two books about sociopaths could be on your reading list this summer. One of them, already out, is by the “Queen of the Best Sellers,” Danielle Steel. In her 108th book, Matters of the Heart, the main character, an accomplished female photographer named Hope Dunne, meets a man who seems to be too good to be true. He is. The guy is a sociopath. Read an excerpt of Matters of the Heart here. The author was interviewed last week on Good Morning America. Although I've never read any of Danielle Steel's books, I did like the fact that when she described sociopathic behavior in the interview, she got it right. “Sociopaths are interesting because one of the things they do is something called mirr …