Lovefraud Blog

A sociopath will leave you out in the cold every time

January 2, 2009 // by Liane Leedom, M.D.// 213 Comments

The day after Christmas, I got a lesson in respecting the elements. It was about 35°F, not really that cold, but there was quite a wind chill. The kids and I went to the beach to run the dog on the sand at about 3:30 in the afternoon. We got back to the van at about 5 to discover that good old Mom had lost her keys. (Actually, a prior foster dog had chewed a hole in my jacket pocket and the keys fell out.) I ended up calling a taxi, but we waited in the elements for at least an hour total. We were all properly dressed with boots, hats, gloves and heavy jackets. In spite of being prepared, we were chilled to the bone when we finally got home. I said to my daughter, “I can see how easy it i …

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A Sociopathic Interaction

December 31, 2008 // by Steve Becker, LCSW// 97 Comments

I thought I'd depart from a more standard post and offer below some verbatim interactions I recently had with a client whom I've always suspected as having sociopathic tendencies. I share these interactions (with comments) not for their excitement, because their subject matter is in fact extremely mundane; but rather for the sociopathic elements I believe they instructively contain. My client, T, is a 35 year old male, with a “work history” of voyeuristic, sexually aggressive behavior towards females. My role with him is as a “consulting therapist” for a community agency. T is not psychotic, and has no reality testing impairment. He is a verbally quick, superficially engagin …

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Entanglements with sociopaths always have consequences

December 29, 2008 // by Donna Andersen// 479 Comments

At a Christmas party on Saturday night, the conversation turned to hot water radiators. My husband, who is mechanically inclined, explained to a woman, who was trying to save money by conserving heat, how to bleed the air out of an old-style hot water heating system. Eventually, the conversation revealed why the woman was trying to save money. She'd purchased an old farmhouse for her business. She secured a $150,000 construction loan to renovate the house and retained a contractor. The contractor insisted on installing the thermostat for the hot water heating system on a wall directly across from a wood burning stove. (For those of you who are not mechanically inclined, this is a really …

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Stop thinking about that sociopath and enjoy a Christmas Movie

December 26, 2008 // by Liane Leedom, M.D.// 45 Comments

A romantic relationship with a sociopath can leave a person sour on the opposite sex, or on people in general. I said last week that sociopaths try to train their partners in their disordered thinking patterns. Recovery involves purging the sociopath's mollifications and seeing the beauty in life again. Recovery means a renewed ability to appreciate the loving connections we still have. Sometimes art, music and cinema can help us do that. This Christmas we were not able to be with our family in California. But it was a “warm” beautiful day in Connecticut, so the kids and I walked the dog on the beach, went to the movies and ate out at a Chinese restaurant. I recommend the movie we saw bec …

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Finally, feeling the joy of Christmas

December 25, 2008 // by Donna Andersen// 70 Comments

On this Christmas Day, I am filled with joy, happiness and love. It has nothing to do with Santa Claus being good to me, or the gifts I offered to my husband and family—after all, there is a recession going on, and it has affected us. Rather, I am filled with joy, happiness and love because now, after the sociopath, life is good. In fact, life has never been better. This is a significant, even miraculous, change for me. In the years before I met my sociopathic ex—from age 20 to 40—I didn't feel joy, happiness or love. Instead, I was mostly numb. If anything broke through the wall of numbness, it was longing. Then the sociopath arrived, and promised me what I so desperately wanted—an end to …

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Overcoming Evil, Tragedy and Fear

December 24, 2008 // by Travis// 32 Comments

Editor's note: The following article refers to spiritual concepts. Please read Lovefraud's statement on Spiritual Recovery. It's Christmas Eve and I am full of gratitude today. I witnessed evil first hand as my father, a sociopath, murdered at least four (4) people and destroyed countless lives. It almost doesn't make sense that I could be so happy and peaceful today, but it is a fact for me. I do not ask or need others to believe what I believe; I only share my personal experience. It is Faith that changed my life. I came to a place, a way of thinking, that was just too painful to live with so I made a decision to try something different. I prayed for help, for truth and …

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Life’s Lessons 101: The Knowledge of Good and Evil

December 21, 2008 // by Joyce Alexander// 160 Comments

Editor's note: The following article refers to spiritual concepts. Please read Lovefraud's statement on Spiritual Recovery. By OxDrover In the Bible the story of Adam and Eve living in the Garden of Eden, in perfect paradise, is a story familiar to most children who have gone to Bible school at one point or another in their lives. If you take that same story, though, and look at it through adult eyes, you can see that there is a great moral to this tale, whether you believe it as a “creation” story or not. Before the “fall,” Adam and Eve had only dealt with a loving God/Creator who had given them a wonderful place to live in peace and plenty. They were naked and innocent in this para …

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What was Bernie Madoff thinking?

December 20, 2008 // by Liane Leedom, M.D.// 32 Comments

“It takes an extraordinarily heartless conman to swindle a survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald and Nobel Peace Prize winner out of all his charitable funds.” Wrote James Bone in the Times Online. “Yet that is exactly what Bernard “Bernie” Madoff is alleged to have done to Elie Wiesel, the author of the Holocaust classic Night and a friend from the Jewish community in south Florida. According to the Times Online article, "The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity now admits that it invested $15.2 million (£10.1 million) with Mr Madoff that represented “substantially all of the foundation's assets.” The charity of the Nobel laureate, in New York, will have to raise new funds if it is to main …

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Radar not for the sociopath, but for the wrong people

December 18, 2008 // by Steve Becker, LCSW// 328 Comments

Most of the people who will be bad for us are not sociopaths, and so we want our radar to be sharp, not specifically for sociopaths, but for wrong, bad people of every stripe. True, sociopaths will be terrible people with whom to enter relationships; in the end, though, they will represent a small fraction of a much greater majority of very wrong people for us. As I suggested in a prior post, there are two keys to protecting ourselves from Mr. or Mrs. WRONG: The first is developing intelligent radar; the second is acting wisely on that radar. After all, good radar, no less than good CIA intelligence, is useless if it's ignored or devalued. Now, are there cases of sociopaths (and the lot …

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Unreasonable Requests from my Father, the Sociopath

December 17, 2008 // by Travis// 48 Comments

I believed my father was a successful “investor” when I was growing up. At least that's what I told myself. He made a great deal of money, we lived in expensive homes and he always had plenty of cash. He spent money like water. But in my early twenties, suddenly things didn't look so good. We had started to have money problems. I came home from college because of money “to wait until his next deal came through”. That is when FBI agents began showing up at the house looking for Dad. My father was in trouble, but he kept telling us kids it would be alright. “The Feds were after him”, he said, but he would beat them, “they had the wrong guy.” That was his standard response when something w …

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Donna Andersen on Here’s the absolutely best way to protect yourself from sociopaths: “Truthmatters – excellent, excellent points. Even when we notice our instincts warning us, the sociopaths often try to convince us…”
truthmatters on Here’s the absolutely best way to protect yourself from sociopaths: “I would like to add a caution to all that ample disordered personalities know that your intuition will kick off…”
Donna Andersen on After the sociopath, proud of my healing: “Eleanor – Congratulations to you and all survivors. And thank you so much for your kind words. You, too, have…”
sept4 on Am I a sociopath magnet?: “Not me, I am one and done! My sociopath ex husband wrecked my life and I have never wanted to…”
sept4 on My psychopathic ex-husband is dead, and his pedophile brother is in prison: “Thank you Donna for sharing. My sociopath ex husband is a convicted criminal and continued his criminal activity after a…”