A Cambridge professor, Simon Baron-Cohen, has written Zero Degrees of Empathy: A new theory of human cruelty. In this review, the author explains the professor’s ideas.
Read Why a lack of empathy is the root of all evil, on Independent.co.uk.
Link supplied by a Lovefraud reader.
Oxy,
I know that the book is a fictional drama. My point is that the ex-husband is revealed as the culprit (along with his new mistress-dupe) while during the book he does the pity ploy, so everyone feels sorry for him.
So, even though it is fiction, it is true to life in that, when something like this happens, there is always a psychopath and it is ALMOST always the ex-spouse-spath.
In the past, I would have thought this was an ingenious and creative ending, an unimaginable plot-twist. Absolutely shocking. Not anymore. I knew the ending just by reading the blurb. It’s so amazing how much my eyes have been opened by the P.
Oxy,
funny thing about what your egg donor said to you. I think you are right – I’m sure of it – that she was making some kind of psychic jab at you, trying to gaslight you and make you fear for your future. Even as you were comforting her. Fuck! WHO DOES THAT?
Sky, yea, you are right, it was SOME KIND OF JAB covered up with a “mask” of “fake concern” about my future….and funny thing is why she had decided that NO ONE would care enough about me to take care of me when I got old and infirm…well, I KNEW that P-DIL wouldn’t and that Patrick P son wouldn’t but you know there is always son D and so on….so I wasn’t worried about what MIGHT OR MIGHT NOT HAPPEN 10, 20 years down the line when I MIGHT need personal care or a nursing home…and frankly, if I had to go to a nursing home, so be it….doesn’t mean that no one loves me, just that my care might be too much for “at home.”
My friend that came today is Buddhist and I was talking to her about the egg donor’s comment and she said “funny how Karma comes around…she is all by herself now with only hired care givers to come in and look after her.” Yea, you know, that is right….it was like she “cursed” me and then it came around and bit HER in the butt. I am sure she is milking it for sympathy from all her friends though about how her mentally ill daughter has deserted her….LOL
LL don’t get your panties in a wad, I’ll do a book review on the book and then you might decide not to read it….who knows. LOL Patience my friend! Let me finish it first so I can talk about it intelligently (hopefully) both pro and con.
Oxy, thanks for solving the mistery of the ROTFLMAO. I had no idea what it meant. Interesting the meaning…
I’ve read your last posts and i agree it’s manipulation. Ah! how many non psychopathic people are psychologically manipulative in a higher or lower degree. It’s disgusting.
To be alone at old age sometimes happen to good people. It’s a manipulation to say its the old person’s fault. Sometimes good people are abandoned by their descendants, and it’s not their fault their sons/daughters faulty conscience.
Skylar, the bug seems is in charge of an external, still dependant of the university, company that sends graduates to teach Spanish to some American universities. As well as bringing American students to learn Spanish in the universityb of this Spanish city. It’s a business, no altruism here. This recruitment process is not any exclusivity of him, it’s public, can be done through the government. But he likes to get people involved in the process because it takes some months to know if you’re accepted, and he also promises a letter of recomendation. It’s all a manipulation because it’s the American university who selects the students. He’s a psychopath remember? ROTFLMAO
Eva, in working with the elderly through the years in my nursing career, I have seen people whose family were “trash” that just dumped them in a nursing home like taking a dog to the pound, and I have seen others who sacrificed their entire lives to taking care of an elderly person for decades and everything in between.
I’ve seen great care in nursing homes and horrible care…and again, everything in between.
I took care of my step father for 18 months during his cancer and I was glad to do it, and the time was wonderful and close between us. Those months are some of my best memories of laughs he and I had during that time. He was such a gentle man, and tolerated so many invasions of his privacy and dignity, but we laughed about it all…just thinking about some of those times makes me smile still yet. The warm memories of our relationship are totally different than my feelings about my egg donor…the best thing she ever did was to bring him into my life. She had him fooled too…but he was THERE for me, and I was glad to be able to be there for him.
She is financially able to hire someone to care for her either in her home or a nursing home…so I have no responsibility to care for her, AND since she canceled my power of attorney I have no authority to do so even if I was inclined to do so. No authority = no responsibility, so while she thought she was insulting me by canceling my POA as an act of lack of faith, she let me off the string and hook of being her caregiver. Second biggest favor she ever did me.
Oxy, re: your egg donor’s comment.
I had a somewhat similar WTF? moment that I’ve had (I think)a similar reaction to yours. It sounds crazy but it bothers me as much or more than any of the extreme physical violence she did. I get the feeling that this seemingly small thing your ‘ed’ did had a similar disproportionate impact on you as mine did on me. Physical violence is easy to understand: when it’s extreme you don’t feel ‘mixed’ because it’s obvious and anyone observing would know exactly what was happening. Nobody other than LF talks about MF – so the damage can be deep when you don’t know, and can’t figure out, what just happened. In my case my ED, who had recently migrated from physical violence to MF after I ran to the next door neighbours for protection, pretended to ‘befriend’ all my new friends (we’d just moved) and became everyone’s favourite ‘Mom’. One day after we’d come home from shopping and were modelling our new outfits (at her request)she looked STRAIGHT AT my best friend and said “ANNIE – don’t you look BEAUTIFUL!” It wasn’t until I got here to LF that I finally got a handle on what was happening there – but I admit it still leaves me baffled as to what her mindset was and what she hoped to accomplish. But it feels similar to what you just described with your ED.
So I have a question for you: did she say it in front of your son? If so, I would hazard a guess that it was as much about ‘seeding’ the thought in his mind as it was about MF’ing yours. It’s taken me years to realize that, as well as MF’ing me, it was also putting a WTF barrier in between me and my best friend.
Annie,
I can’t remember who she said it in front of…I’ll have to think about that…I know she said it in front of the Hospice nurse, the house keeper, my step father…Son C who was married to the P DIL wasn’t over there much when I was there (he worked full time and helped take care of his step son in a WC) and Son D was usually working at the airport and was only there on the weekends when I was either at work or asleep most of the time…I worked weekend option two 12-hour shifts and had an hour each way to drive so had to be up by 4 a.m. to make it to work at 6:30 a.m. and then got home at 8, went almost straight to bed, and rinse and repeat the next day….so I think it would have most likely been in front of distant family members, neighbors, hired help, etc. rather than close family.
But Yea, it was a WTF??? moment—of when it “whizzed by your head” you stopped to wonder “Have I just been insulted?” The answer is OF COURSE I WAS, but she was pretending to compliment me….sort of like “You’re not too ugly for a fat buck-toothed girl” LOL ROTFLMAO
I realize too that most if not all “compliments” she ever gave me had a “but….” attached to them.
The thing about the more subtle forms of emotional abuse is that you sort of don’t realize what has happened until it is even too late to respond appropriately. LOL
I don’t guess I will ever really understand just why she picked that particular way of insulting me….or trying to worry me or make me feel unloved…but like my friend said “it is sort of karmic justice” that now she is having to have hired caregivers because there are NO volunteers.
Oxy,
I meant what she said to you that you would end up alone when old. That’s hurting. And above all without real base, though i suppose for her has sense caregivers must be family members even if they’re forced or hired caregivers, nothing in between.
You know, this is proving to be an eye-opening topic (the WTF moments) for me.
Because looking back there were WTF moments from time to time where we were alone. But mostly they were done with an audience. And, looking back, I can see there was a predictable pattern and usually predictable result from that single WTF comment:
1) the MF shock tactic to unseat and paralyze the victim
2) probably more importantly, modelling and potentially seeding mobbing behaviour in the ‘audience’, who were also shocked enough to realize that if things escalated they were safest to withdraw and get out of the way – therefore ensuring I had no supporters because they were running for cover themselves. Although in this case ‘running for cover’ usually looks like “I see nothing…”
3) testing for like-minded predators who might be inclined to either participate, or at least ‘spread the word’ to others so that the mobbing would have a life beyond the original participants in the WTF incident. At a minimum it would cast a seed of doubt about me in the eyes of even the decent people who would, understandably, be confused. I’ve had my fair share of the not-so-subtle insinuations that I must really have been the awful person my mother described (but always using the compliment/”but” technique you described), because mothers just wouldn’t DO that type of thing unless there was a reason.
So I don’t want to project my situation onto yours, or vice versa, but the ‘audience’ you described sounded soooo familiar. So just thought I’d throw out the observation.
Eva, yea, I got what you meant, and I think she thought that no matter how she treated me I would “kow-tow” (bow down to) her like a servant….that I was RESPONSIBLE for taking care of her and giving in to her DEMANDS….NOPE, I set boundaries and she didn’t like it, so she thought she could “bribe” other caregivers like my P-DIL and the Trojan Horse Psychopath, never thinking that they would betray her.
I loved how she screamed “BUT THEY WERE SO RESPECTFUL TO ME”!!!!!! She had said I wasn’t respectful because I spoke my mind, and set limits on her finally….LOL She didn’t seem to get it that they PRETENDED to be “respectful” to gain her confidence while they robbed her and actually planned to kill some or all of us. LOL
Oh, well, she can “buy” respect from her paid caregivers and if they want her money badly enough they will put up with her cheet, if not she will be able to find someone who will put up with her, but it won’t be me….or either of my sons, C or D. Or my cousin who is her Power of Attorney….either. So she is essentially on her own until she can’t manage any more, then the Cousin has control of her legal affairs to hire her caregivers or put her in a nursing home, etc. and she is at someone else’s mercy. But it won’t be me.