How to recognize and recover from everyday sociopaths - narcissists

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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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Researchers want to know about your experience with a psychopath

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Plenty of scientific researchers have studied psychopaths. But few have studied the victims of psychopaths, so there is little documentation of what we have all been through. Perhaps that is beginning to change. Lovefraud has been contacted by a researcher from Carleton University in Ottowa, Ontario, Canada. She is conducting a study entitled Victimization, coping, and social support of adult survivors of psychopaths. The graduate student is working under the supervision of Dr. Adelle Forth, who is a colleague of Dr. Robert Hare. The purpose of the study is "to gain an understanding of the victimization experiences of adult (18+) survivors of psychopaths, in an attempt to raise awareness …

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Sociopathic children and psychopathic traits during childhood

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This is a very tragic story left by one of our readers: My daughter was misdiagnosed with ADHD. Then bipolar disorder, then Oppositional Defiance Disorder. I stormed out of her psychologist office when she told me that she saw something “dark” in my child. That was when she was 7. When she was 8, her sociopathy increased and she purposely drowned my poodle. She also tried to smother my baby by my second husband. The strain of her and my carrying the baggage from my last relationship has driven he and I apart and we currently trying to file for divorce. She steals daily, has even stolen as much as $500 from my wallet. I lock things away, and she will simply pry open the lock, break the …

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Medication used to treat sociopathy/psychopathy

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It turns out that Sandy Brown, M.A. is quite correct in stating that any talk of treatment of sociopathy makes people (particularly women) reluctant to give up on a dangerous relationship. We received a note this week from a woman asking for more info about treatment and wanting to know if there was any hope for her man. He was the only man she had ever loved and she was actually still grappling with the meaning of his diagnosis. This week, I will discuss medications that can be used to treat sociopathy. But before I do I want to make it clear that I encourage people to break away from sociopaths. Remember that the sociopath's doctor and therapist will want you to stay with the sociopath …

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Book review: Antisocial Personality Disorder A Practitioner’s Guide to Comparative Treatments

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I had a nice conversation with a friend today. She said that part of healing from a relationship with a sociopath is getting to the point where one realizes that sociopaths deserve pity for being disordered. In that regard, we both hope that science will progress to the point where sociopathy is preventable and fully treatable. In this blog I will discuss treatment options for those diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder. Following the format of the book I am reviewing, this disorder is called sociopathy or ASPD and the personality traits that give rise to the disorder are called “psychopathic personality traits.” Regarding whether sociopathy and psychopathic personality traits are …

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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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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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It’s not that the psychopath’s beliefs are awry (they are); it’s that his desires are too perverse and too uninhibited

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I was recently reading a 2003 paper in the journal Nature called Forensic psychology: Violence viewed by psychopathic murderers which is both interesting and frustrating. Interesting because it demonstrates that, even amongst murderers, psychopathic murderers are different. Frustrating because the authors extrapolate their finding in a way that is ultimately misleading being so narrow as to completely miss the point. I pick this particular study only because it is rather typical of scientific studies in the field: 1. it neglects to consider what the psychopath gets out of behaving the way he does, and 2. it let's the psychopath off the hook. The study 13 psychopathic murderers, 17 …

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Q: Can writing improve your health?

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There is a form of writing which has been shown to have remarkable effects on research subjects' well-being, social functioning, and cognitive abilities. The best-known of the scientists who study 'expressive writing' is James W. Pennebaker, chair of the Department of Psychology at the University of Texas. Pennebaker and several others around the world have found that a short series brief exercises of this particular form of writing about emotional upheavals can improve physical and mental health. An early study   In his accessible book Opening Up: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions (free chapter here) Pennebaker describes an early experiment. Fifty students were asked to …

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Questions that best identify sociopathy in a person

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It really bothers me that researchers haven't developed a measure to help people figure out if their loved ones are sociopathic. Instead, measures have been developed and the public is told NOT to use them to “diagnose” anyone. What good is research if it doesn't teach people how to protect themselves? It would not be too difficult to identify a group of sociopaths, then determine a few easy questions related to the disorder most of the sociopaths answer yes or no to (that is sensitivity). The questions would be even better if non-sociopaths were unlikely to give the same response (that is specificity). In a recent study (Comp. Psych. 48, 529), Dr. Heather Gelhorn and her colleagues from th …

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