How to recognize and recover from everyday sociopaths - narcissists

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Anxiety: An inevitable outcome of involvement with a sociopath/psychopath

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According to the National Institutes of Mental Health, “anxiety is a normal reaction to stress. It helps one deal with a tense situation in the office, study harder for an exam, keep focused on an important speech. In general, it helps one cope. But when anxiety becomes an excessive, irrational dread of everyday situations, it has become a disabling disorder.” Put another way anxiety is supposed to help us. The parts of the brain that produce feelings of anxiety are similar to the parts of the brain that process pain, another negative emotion. Anxiety and its cousin pain help us by signaling danger and causing us to avoid. Their job is to inhibit behavior. The part of the brain that pro …

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There is no drabber place to be

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Why is it that in the popular media super-psychopaths like serial killers are portrayed has having such rich inner lives? (Consider the highly cultured Hannibal Lecter.) That's not right at all. Anthony Lane, film reviewer for the New Yorker, makes the point well: There was a time when, as a God-fearing member of the community, you could commit a single murder, drop a couple of clues, and wait to be unmasked. Now it's all serial slayers, stacking up bodies like air miles. Filmgoers are supposed to find this multiplicity enticing, and we are constantly being invited to enter into the “mind” of the serial killer, but in truth there is no drabber place to be, and the idea that there might be a …

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10 tactics for child custody battles with sociopaths

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Dr. Liane Leedom wrote about the tragic case Dr. Amy Castillo, whose children were murdered by their psychopathic father after several judges issued rulings that failed to protect them. I hope this terrible and extreme case will be a wake-up call for family courts.Lovefraud frequently receives e-mail from men and women involved in child custody disputes with sociopaths, who hopefully, are not murderers. Here is one of them:I am involved in a custody case with a sociopath, however, my case is being fought in Europe where I recently relocated to (I am American, he is European). After being the sole caregiver of my children for five years, I had no choice but to leave them with their father and …

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Post Traumatic Growth: After the sociopath is gone.

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It has been almost five years since the sociopath was arrested and I was given the miracle of getting my life back free from his abuse. It is amazing to me to know that once upon a time, I was abused. I was downtrodden. I was completely broken. The walking, breathing dead. At the time of his arrest, I had given myself up for dead. I dreamt about dying, yearned for my life to end. And then, the police walked in and arrested him and in that moment, everything changed. Life began again. It was not life as I knew it. Life as it was. It was new life, with a whole new perspective and outlook. A whole new appreciation for what it means to live within my human condition, what it means to be …

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Judges allow psychopathic father visitation and children are murdered

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Here we go again, another three children murdered after the family courts allowed a psychopathic parent unfettered access them. This is the story of doctor Amy Castillo (a pediatrician) as was told last night on Larry King Live. Dr. Castillo's problems with her husband began in full force about two years ago when he began “staying out all night.” The couple had decided that he would stay home with the children and that she would practice. However, she was unable to go to work because he could not function in the caretaker role. Due to his behavior, she left him. After threatening to kill himself he was hospitalized. According Larry King “court documents say that Mark was diagnosed with a m …

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Heeding the exploiter’s earliest warnings

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Editor's note: This article was submitted by Steve Becker, LCSW, CH.T, who has a private psychotherapy, hypnotherapy, and clinical consulting practice in New Jersey, USA. For more information, visit his website, powercommunicating.com. In my work with clients involved with exploitative personalities, it's not unusual to learn, together, that detectable, early warning signals went unrecognized, minimized, or both. This isn't to blame the subsequent victims of abusive partners; there are many instances where such clues were lacking (and even when not, blame is inappropriate). But it's to appreciate, undefensively, that the honeymoon phase of a relationship is almost, by definition, one …

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Josef Fritzl – psychopath

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By now everyone knows about the astounding case of incest, etc. in Austria. No doubt some are going to excuse Josef Fritzl by suggesting that he must be a mad man. Others (for instance here) will find fault with society. These rationalisations are because for regular people the immensity of the crimes are blinding. But there are enough clues already that what Fritzl is is a psychopath and as such is responsible for his actions. Take one small detail - the alleged role of drugs in the case. Franz Polzer, the Austrian police chief leading the investigation, said Fritzl had given the impression, during protracted interrogations, that after 24 years he now actually believed the web of …

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Victim loses to a con artist, and then to the courts

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"A victim of crime shall be treated with fairness, compassion and respect by the criminal justice system." So states the Crime Victims Constitutional Amendment, added to the state of New Jersey constitution in 1991. New Jersey also has a 14-point Crime Victims Bill of Rights (NJS 52:4B-36), which expands upon the constitutional amendment. Among its provisions, crime victims and witnesses are entitled to: Be treated with dignity and compassion by the criminal justice system. Be informed about the criminal justice process. Have inconveniences associated with participation in the criminal justice process minimized to the fullest extent possible. The Bill of Rights sounds good, …

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ASK DR. LEEDOM: How can I move on?

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This week we received the following email. I am sharing it with you because what she reports is very common on a number of levels that I will discuss. I was married to a sociopath for 25 years. They were horrible years because most of that time I had no idea I was married to a sociopath. I was deeply in love when we met. He told me everything I wanted to hear. Knowing all my weaknesses and fears he fed them, made me totally emotionally dependent on him. He helped me get great jobs, pumped me up so I would keep making more money, while of course he lived off me. But at the same time kept telling me I was ugly, fat, sickly. He had affairs. All of this and I still kept hoping he would change …

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The opposite of love is … what?

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Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel is just one person who has said the following: "The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference". In other words, the opposite of love is not hate, as might have been expected. We've all heard this contention and been struck by it. Yes, we've thought, it is terrible to be ignored. (Pretty awful being hated too, of course.) But I'm grateful to Dawn Eden for mentioning another powerful proposition. Eden, promoting her book 'The Thrill of the Chaste', is currently visiting Canadian high schools. The students seemed interested when I told them what Pope John Paul II called "the opposite of love." It's not hate, as some of them guessed when I asked them what …

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