How to recognize and recover from everyday sociopaths - narcissists

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Sheep can teach us about love and it’s pretty scary!

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Last week I picked my daughter up from the Agriscience High School she attends and was greeted with a sure sign of spring. There are dozens of new baby lambs who have all just been born. They are very cute but they also look exactly the same to me. My daughter tells me that they look alike because although there are many ewes there is only one ram, so all the babies have the same dad. Even though the babies look alike and to me they smell alike, each one is unique and special to its mother.   Sheep live in herds and unlike some other mammals they do not care for each other's babies. A mother sheep must bond to and learn to identify her baby among the vast herd of lambs who are …

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“The conscience is a vital organ”

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Isn't it strange how the mind works? I read with approval Dr Leedom's latest post. In it she manages to be at once hard-nosed, realistic, and still keep positve. There are very real differences in the brains of those with psychopathic traits, she writes, but the brain is plastic and therein lies just a sliver of hope. For some reason the opening lines of Martin Amis' novel House of Meetings came back to me. It is set in the Soviet Union: Dear Venus If what they say is true, and my country is dying, then I think I may be able to tell them why. You see, kid, the conscience is a vital organ, and not an extra like the tonsils or the adenoids. Amis has also written a stunning nonfiction …

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BOOK REVIEW: Legal Abuse Syndrome

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"Victims are created in two ways: by violence or by deceit. Either type of assault immediately renders the victim hostage to the perpetrator." So begins the book Legal Abuse Syndrome, by Karin Huffer, MS, MFT. Lovefraud strongly recommends that anyone who has been victimized by a sociopath read this book, whether you have faced your perpetrator in court or not. The book explains how people who have suffered injury at the hands of some type of predator often face further injury inflicted by lawyers and the courts, who can be, at best, disinterested, and at worst, corrupt. Legal Abuse Syndrome, Huffer says, is a form of post traumatic stress disorder caused by prolonged contact with the …

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The Moral Brain

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Scientists are actively working on solving the mystery of what is different about the brains of people who have traits of sociopathy/psychopathy. Notice that I say “traits” because virtually none of the studies only include subjects who score above 30 on the PCL-R. These studies then by definition are about sociopathic traits and not psychopathy (see my post from last week). When I first realized that I had to understand sociopathic traits in order to properly raise my at-risk son, I studied the traits and organized them according to what I understood about human motivation and the organization of the brain. In my opinion, sociopathic traits form three categories, I call The Inner Triangle. T …

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The Borderline Personality as Transient Sociopath

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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. It is not unusual in my clinical experience to see, sometimes, some quite chilling sociopathic activity from my “borderline personality-disordered” clients. When someone has a “borderline personality,” it's quite likely, among other things, that he or she will present with a history of emotional instability; a pattern of chaotic interpersonal relationships; and poor coping skills under stress, reflected in self-destructive/ destructive acting-out and a tendenc …

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“He is the lie, from hello to good-bye”

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Donna Anderson's important latest post reminds me that one topic which will never be worn out is that of the psychopath's lies and their impact on others. This week I want to very briefly introduce yet another take on this inexhaustible topic. Everyone lies, but there's something else at stake in the case of the psychopath's lies. To illustrate: you might say about any regular (non-psychopathic) person, "Things would be better if s/he was to lie less often. Her/his soul or psyche would be healthier as would her relationships." That's true. Now try this on for size and notice how wrong it seems: "Things would be better if the psychopath was to lie less often. His soul or psyche would be …

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Humans are lousy lie detectors

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An article in last week's New York Times magazine contained the following amazing statement: "Repeating a claim, even if only to refute it, increases its apparent truthfulness." Although the article had nothing to do with sociopaths, the statement made me think of my ex-husband, James Montgomery. Among his many lies, Montgomery claimed to be a member of the Australian military, a decorated Vietnam War hero, and a member of the Special Forces. None of this was true, but from what I can tell, he'd been making the claims since at least 1980 (we met in 1996). They'd been repeated many times, for many years—which apparently enhanced their believability. Like most of us here on Lovefraud, I f …

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After the Sociopath is gone: The gift of unconditional love

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A couple of months ago I had emergency surgery to remove my gallbladder. I'd been feeling discomfort for some time, but put it down to what I was eating, or simply the fact there was a lot of flu going around. And then, one Saturday morning I awoke to excruciating pain in my abdomen. I'd been having little mini-attacks off and on since Christmas, but they had only lasted a few minutes and once gone, could be ignored and even forgotten. But that last attack simply would not stop. My daughter called an ambulance and once in the hospital they told me I needed to have my gallbladder removed immediately. After the surgery, I still wasn't feeling up to par. I was constantly nauseous and tired. …

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Psychopathy versus sociopathy again…

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I plan to review for you a very recent paper: Psychopathy as a disorder of the moral brain. Dr. Robert Hare is one of the authors. But, before I can get to explaining the moral brain part, I have to get past the first paragraph, so the moral brain will be have to be discussed more next week. As I sat down to translate this paper into plain English, I got stuck at the fourth sentence: “Antisocial behavior by itself is a nonspecific symptom common to many conditions, so psychopathy and antisocial personality disorder (ASPD, American Psychiatric Association, 1994) are not analogous constructs while most cases of ASPD (sociopathy) do not fulfill the interpersonal and affective criteria for p …

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Discrimination and sociopaths

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"Discrimination" has come to be a dirty word. It brings to mind unfair treatment of individuals because of race, religion, gender, national origin, physical disability, sexual orientation or some other broad categorization. People have been killed, beaten, denied jobs, denied housing, prosecuted, persecuted and denigrated because of some demographic category to which they belonged. All of this applies to one meaning of the word "discrimination." But there is another meaning that is vitally important when it comes to sociopaths. Here are the two meanings according to the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language: Discrimination Treatment or consideration based on class or …

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