A Lovefraud reader posted the following comment awhile back: I just have one question for everyone here. Does anyone trust people after these sick people did what they did to us? Unfortunately for me, I have run across a few of these sickos but NONE like my ex. Whoever I meet now I'm thinking to myself, who is this person really? Do they have a secret life like the Scott Petersons and Ted Bundys of this world? I don't let my children out of my sight and I'm already training my kids and they all know the signs of a sociopath especially my girls. I feel like I'm in a prison sometimes in my mind as I try so hard but just can't trust anyone. Yes, it is possible to trust again. Remember, …
Risk Assessment for Violence, Playing the Odds
By Joyce Alexander, RNP (Retired) I recently bought a book, Violence Risk and Threat Assessment: A Practical Guide for Mental Health and Criminal Justice Professionals, by J. Reid Meloy, Ph.D. I actually bought it to give some “credence” to the statistics I put into my letter to the parole board protesting the release on parole of the Trojan Horse-Psychopath that attacked our family, Of course this book is directed, as the title says, to professionals, and to assess risk of violence. But since we are dealing with psychopaths, it is, I think, a good idea for us to be able also to look at the assessment for possible violence in our own psychopaths when we thwart their desires, or kick the …
No parole: Family is a life sentence
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 …