If you live within an hour of San Francisco, I hope you will consider an evening of theater at The Marsh, this holiday season. On most nights, Carlo D'Amore performs No Parole, an autobiographical one-man show that points to the fact that “family is a life sentence.” Carlo has a great deal in common with all of us since he grew up in the shadow of his late mother who was a con artist. Although Carlo left home as soon as he could at age 18, he continued to have contact with his mother. Towards the end of her life, she suffered a right brain stroke and could not live alone. Carlo took her in and cared for her. Even in this state, his mother continued to con and manipulate him. He explained …
The Single Most Powerful Signifier of Sociopathy
What is the single most powerful signifier of sociopathy? How about, lack of empathy? I don't think so. As an isolated factor, I don't think lack of empathy best nails the sociopath. Many millions of people, after all, lack empathy and aren't sociopaths. Also, exactly what constitutes empathy is a subject of some disagreement. Some LoveFraud members, in fact, question whether sociopaths even lack empathy (some asserting, to the contrary, that the sociopaths they've known have used their capacity for empathy to exploit them). But the biggest problem with lack of empathy is its weakeness in explaining the single, truly best signifier of sociopathy—the characterological exploitiveness o …
Freedom from a Sociopath’s Destruction
I am not sure if I will continue to post each week. Many of the stories carry the same theme and I think most of you on this site know what a sociopath is capable of, how much destruction they leave in their path and how we all felt once we discovered the truth. For me, it's really about the road to recovery. The first and most helpful tool I was given was Martha Stout's book The Sociopath Next Door. It helped so much to see it in writing, the same behaviors, manipulation and the different types of sociopaths. Lovefraud provides the best resource I have found to date (thank you Donna). Then it was all about acceptance. I needed to accept that my father never loved me. That one took a …
The Mask of a Sociopath
By Peggywhoever All sociopaths wear a mask. The mask of kindness. The mask of generosity. The mask of romance. The mask of attraction. The mask of intimacy. The mask of seduction. And so on. This is what reels us in. The pretense. The acting. The mask. The mask of perfection. And we, in our infinite loving goodness, reflect that mask back to them. The perfect mirrored reflection of beauty and adoration. And then one day, that mask cracks. You remember the moment.. The moment when you look in their eyes and you KNOW the truth about them. The moment you recognize the pathological lies, the deception, the manipulation, the con. The game is up. And from that moment on, your relationship with …
I am thankful
By BloggerT7165 I am a survivor. And I am thankful for that. It's not something I take for granted because I know there are many who do not survive the abuse that is inflicted by their loved ones, trusted spouses or friends or parents. This is a hurtful experience that literally kills people. And if the wound itself doesn't kill, then the infection that follows from the collusion of friends, neighbors, confidants, professionals, and others will many times finish off the job. Every abuse story is a tragic one, but the stories of those who successfully commit suicide are among the most heart-wrenching of all. Many abuse victims survive in body, but are lost in other ways. Lost to the …
A Trip to Death Row
I had visited my father on Death Row before, but this trip was different. I was traveling to Union Correctional Institution with two homicide detectives with the intent to record a conversation with my father about two murders he described to me years earlier. Actually the main purpose of this visit was to get him to tell me about another murder, one that he never confessed to me, but one that I know he committed. It was his first victim, but they still have not found the body. It was an old friend of my fathers that disappeared after meeting with my dad, but this is a story for another day. It is so hard to write about my father's activities simply because of the number of victims and …
Pennsylvania State Senator Vincent J. Fumo on trial for corruption
Daily newspaper accounts of two big trials currently underway in the Philadelphia area have put sociopaths on display for all to see, if only people knew what they were looking at. In the first trial, Pennsylvania State Senator Vincent J. Fumo, a Democrat who represents Philadelphia, is accused of 139 counts of conspiracy, fraud, obstruction of justice and filing false tax returns. The testimony emanating from the Philadelphia courtroom is far more colorful than those charges sound, and we'll get to that in a moment. In the second trial, taking place across the river in Camden, New Jersey, five young men, all foreign-born Muslims who grew up nearby Cherry Hill, are accused of plotting a …
Pennsylvania State Senator Vincent J. Fumo on trial for corruptionRead More
The psychopathic world of David Mamet’s plays
Hilton Als writes this in a recent New Yorker magazine: Among the many terrible realities to which David Mamet exposes us in his exceptional, calculated work, one theme stands out: suckers will never get a break in this wretched world. In the sixty-year-old playwright's fictional universe, the humane are too soft and dim-witted to survive; their tormentors chew them up with dry relish. Mamet treats the stage as a kind of bloody forum; the gladiators one finds there are skinny con artists, callow film producers, real-estate agents in cheap suits, and ghastly lovers who spar, using the author's hyper-stylized language as both spear and shield. Even to refer to some of Mamet's characters as …
More confusion over antisocial personality disorder, sociopathy and psychopathy
This semester I taught both Forensic Psychology and Abnormal Psychology at the University of Bridgeport. The students there are an ethnically diverse group and I think are fairly representative of America's young adult population. In both classes we discussed those individuals who have a “a pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others.” I wrote antisocial personality disorder, sociopathy and psychopathy on the blackboard before we began our discussion. I then asked the students if they had heard of these terms and if they could tell me the definitions. Only a small percentage had heard the term antisocial personality disorder, nearly everyone had heard the word …
More confusion over antisocial personality disorder, sociopathy and psychopathyRead More
How a deficits disorder can cause so much grief and pain
Sociopathy, many experts agree, is a deficits disorder. The sociopath, in this view, is missing something—things like empathy, remorse, and basic respect for the boundaries of others. When you think of a deficit—something missing—you don't necessarily think dire consequences. You may think, instead, things like less”¦incomplete”¦limited. For instance, the idea of intellectual deficit might spark the association, mental retardation. Instead of invoking fear, this tends to elicit our understanding, even empathy. The mentally retarded individual is missing something that most of us have—a normal intellectual capacity. You think, this is unfortunate, for that person. When you think o …
How a deficits disorder can cause so much grief and painRead More