How to recognize and recover from everyday sociopaths - narcissists

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More confusion over antisocial personality disorder, sociopathy and psychopathy

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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 …

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How a deficits disorder can cause so much grief and pain

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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 …

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Turning in My Father in 2004

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My memory of the murders (Lost Memories of a Sociopathic Killer) my father committed came back to me on a Thursday. On Saturday morning I called information for retired homicide detective Dan Nazerchuk's home phone number. He was the lead investigator that helped convict my father of murder 17 years earlier. I was nervous about it but knew it was the right thing to do. My biggest fear was that news of this might get out and affect my family and career. I'm married with a beautiful daughter and heavily involved with the community and her school. I also own a small business and most people & associates around me knew nothing of my father. It is hard to explain the mixed emotions that …

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LETTERS TO LOVEFRAUD: I have looked into the eyes of Satan

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Editor's note: A Lovefraud reader, we'll call him Jeff, sent the following e-mail to tell his story. In 1981, I met the woman who later became my wife when we worked together in a furniture factory. She was 44 and married and I was a 30-year-old single "Christian." What started out as a frequently adversarial interaction became a friendship within a year, and by 1982, she was telling me how horrid her marriage was because her husband was so loveless and mistreated her. White knight that I thought I was, I let my sympathy turn into action and eventually was convinced I loved her, which led to her inviting me to her home on an evening when her youngest daughter and husband were gone. It now …

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Lovefraud Extra: Colombian victims of corporate sociopaths riot in the thousands

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Many have conjectured that the recent financial didaster in the US is due to corporate sociopaths. I do not know enough about economics to agree or disagree with that. But consider a society where drug cartels run by sociopaths have a strangle hold over the government. That appears to be the case in Colombia. To watch an amazing video of tens of thousands of people posted by the UK Guardian click on this text. The company, DRFE was apparently a money laundering front for a drug cartel. According to the Associated Press "A total of 600 million pesos ($270 million) is believed to have been lost by the investment company "Dinero Rapido Facil Efectivo," or "Easy Money Fast Cash" in English." …

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A ‘female’-type psychopathy?

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We know only too well that by far the majority of psychopaths are men. Or at least we think we know that. Could it be that the criteria used to identify psychopaths are biased towards men? After all Hare began his work in male prison. Think about it. While behaving and being the way the PCL-R without doubt earns one the label psychopath, this is simply a list of symptoms. It says nothing about the underlying dynamics. If psychopathy is life centered on the principle of power (as opposed to love) and if it is therefore characterised by what Liane Leedom nicely calls 'warped empathy', then wouldn't you expect there to be more or less the same number of woman as men psychopaths? And wouldn't …

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Sadism and warped empathy in sociopaths

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Many who have been hurt by sociopaths develop a general distrust of others. This distrust is understandable given how difficult it often is to tell if another person is a sociopath. However, going through life with distrust is not a pleasant way to live. Victims naturally then want to know in detail what sociopaths are about so they can identify the untrustables, and go back to trusting everyone else. One of the purposes of this website is to describe sociopaths and teach people to identify them. Sociopaths are pathological liars who like to talk as experts on many topics. They manipulate others and generally have a high opinion of themselves. They also lack remorse for their actions and …

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A Call for Help Denied

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The Call - December 12, 1987 I came home in the late afternoon one day and put the news on before going to work. We had a sunken living room and I was standing in the middle of the room when I saw the report. I had been watching the news very closely lately (with good reason). I was looking for news about a recent murder”¦but I wasn't ready for this. It was one of the local news stations. I immediately recognized the artist sketch of the suspected murderer. It was my father. They had just identified the body of a missing woman and they described the suspect. They had found her body three days earlier, in the same field where two bodies were found just days before. My father was re …

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The New Yorker writes about researchers’ struggle to study psychopaths

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Two Lovefraud readers brought an article in the latest issue of The New Yorker magazine to my attention. It's entitled Suffering Souls—the search for the roots of psychopathy, by John Seabrook. The article starts off describing the work of a researcher, Dr. Kent Kiehl, who is using an fMRI machine to study the brains of prisoners in the Western New Mexico Correctional Facility, searching for physical indications of psychopathy. The author provides a brief history of the evolution of scientific understanding about this personality disorder, and describes today's conflicting opinions about it. Seabrook reviewed the literature and interviewed experts, including Dr. Robert Hare. All in all, t …

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When Mom or her partner is a sociopath

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It seems obvious that sociopaths make lousy parents and step parents. But the courts have not always seen it that way. One father trying to protect his daughter from a sociopathic mother was asked by a mental health professional, "So she's a liar does that make her a bad mother?" Furthermore, the texbook I use to teach forensic psychology says that professionals who evaluate parents in custody disputes "should avoid diagnostic labels" and "accentate the postitives." There seems to be a lack of clarity as to what makes an adequate parent, a good parent and a bad parent. The court also does not recognize that the biologic children of sociopaths may have special developmental needs if they …

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