Explaining the sociopath

Twenty states have "civil commitment" laws to keep dangerous sex offenders off the street after their jail sentences are complete. This year, the programs will cost a total of more than $500 million—five times the cost of regular incarceration. Why? Because of all the behavioral therapists, social workers, psychologists and psychiatrists who are treating the predators. In Lovefraud's view, this cost could easily be reduced, because many of the sex offenders are psychopaths, and psychopaths can't be rehabilitated. So the solution is to help those who can be helped, and throw the rest in jail. Read: Treatment for a sexual predator costs a whopping $175,000 per person per year in New Y …

The high cost of locking up sex offendersRead More

In a local tragedy a week ago, a woman, Tracy Coleman, her brother and her 13-year-old son were shot to death by the woman's boyfriend, Sharif Whitlock. The murders took place 45 minutes after the woman had filed a domestic violence complaint against her boyfriend. The perpetrator fled the scene and later hanged himself. The case was the lead incident in a story published yesterday by my local newspaper, the Press of Atlantic City. It was entitled, Hamilton Twp. shooting deaths show familiar domestic violence outcome. The well-done story focused on the larger issue of domestic violence. In Atlantic County, New Jersey over the last two years, 13 people have been killed in domestic violence …

Domestic violence and digital abuseRead More

This is a big topic, and I fully intend to flesh it out in future posts. But allow me, here, to consider this question from the perspective of the work I do with couples. It is often surprisingly easy, from a couples therapy perspective, to weed out the narcissists from the non-narcissists; and more importantly, the salvageable from the unsalvageable narcissists. Narcissists, as we know, will struggle to see things from their partners' perspective. But let's be clear: it is the reasons they struggle with this, not that they struggle with it, that signals their narcissism. At the risk of oversimplifying, narcissists struggle to appreciate their partners' perspective fundamentally …

Is He A Narcissist? Is He Salvageable?Read More

Editor's note: Lovefraud received the following letter from a reader who we'll call “Nora.” The names in this letter have been changed. One Saturday, in October 2009, I married someone I thought was the man of my dreams. When this man came into my life last year, I had suffered several losses and was very vulnerable. I thought I had finally met an honorable, loving, understanding, romantic, Christian man. We laughed together, planned our future together, and seemed like the perfect couple. I should have remembered when something seems too good to be true, it probably is. Although I didn't expect everything would always be rosy, soon after we were married, I discovered that everything I tho …

LETTER TO LOVEFRAUD: Marriage, then discovering the liesRead More

A recent study analyzed data about 14,000 college students collected over 30 years. The shocking findings: today's college students are 40 percent lower in empathy than students from 20 or 30 years ago. Read Empathy: College students don't have as much as they used to, on Newswise.com. Link submitted by a Lovefraud reader. …

Empathy among college students declinesRead More

The headline of a New York Times article sent to me by a Lovefraud reader last week was, Maybe bullies just want to be loved. Yeah, right, I thought. The article related the findings of two recent studies, one of them about schoolyard bullies. Dutch researchers from the University of Groningen investigated 481 elementary school children. Their findings, according to the Times: Bullies tended to divide their classmates into potential sources of affection and targets for domination. The latter were children who had already been rejected by kids the bullies cared about: They didn't count. Interestingly, bullies cared only about the approval of classmates of the same sex. Boys pick on …

Even experts on bullying are clueless about sociopathsRead More

Although some see sociopaths as too emotionally deficient to experience the despair necessary to suicide, I see suicide as offering a viable option for some sociopaths, and I'm going to explain why. Let me start with a bit of crude, brutal logic: for many sociopaths, as we know, life is very much a game; hence, when game over, life over. No more game, what's left? The answer may be, nothing. And yet it may be less “despair” and “depression” with which the sociopath is left when his act has been shut-down than his preferring no longer to deal with an existence he  knows will cease supplying the gratifications to which he's grown accustomed, perhaps addicted and certainly privileg …

Sociopaths and SuicideRead More

Stories in the newspaper yesterday were disheartening. After reading them, I had to conclude that full-blown sexual predators are everywhere, and doing something about them will be difficult. The first story I found was about Canadian Col. Russell Williams, an elite pilot who was commander of Canadian Forces Base Trenton, the largest air force base in the country. In 2005 he was photographed with Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Phillip. On February 7, 2010, he was charged with murdering a young woman who had been missing for almost a week. That's not all. Williams, considered a “shining bright star” in the military, has been charged with the murder of two women, sexual assault of two oth …

Sex crimes and punishmentRead More