When I was married to James Montgomery, who I believe is a psychopath, we once attended a local trade show together. We ran into a woman whom I didn’t know at all and James barely knew. After about one minute of conversation, James started offering to help her with some project that she was working on.
“What did you do that for?” I asked James after we continued on our way.
“What?”
“Offer to help that woman. You hardly know her.”
“Do you know who she’s married to?” James asked. It was a man that he believed could possibly be useful to his plans.
Psychopaths are always on the lookout for people they might be able to manipulate. A study published last year by Canadian researchers seems to indicate they have an enhanced ability to spot and remember potential targets.
The study was called A pawn by any other name? Social information processing as a function of psychopathic traits. It was conducted by Kevin Wilson and Sabrina Demetrioff, of Dalhousie University, and Stephen Porter of the University of British Columbia-Okanagan.
The study
The researchers created a series of fictional characters using photographs of men and women with expressions conveying that they were happy or sad. They assigned biographical traits to the characters indicating that some were successful and some were not, along with other details such as “likes skydiving.”
Forty-four male undergraduate students participated in the study. They were first given a personality test to determine their level of psychopathic traits. Then they were shown the photos and biographical information about the fictional characters. Afterwards, they were asked to recall the characters.
The researchers anticipated that the study participants with high psychopathic traits would best remember useful or vulnerable individuals—the happy, successful male was probably most useful, and the unhappy, unsuccessful female was probably most vulnerable.
The results
Study results indicated that they were partially correct. “Participants with high levels of psychopathic traits demonstrated enhanced recognition for the unhappy, unsuccessful female character; arguably the most vulnerable individual presented in our study,” they wrote. “In fact, the high-psychopathy participants demonstrated near-perfect recognition for this character.”
The researchers called this “predatory memory.”
“Psychopathic traits, even in the absence of overt criminality, are associated with a cognitive style that is predatory in nature,” the researchers concluded. “In extreme cases, this may allow individuals with clinically diagnosable levels of psychopathy to spot vulnerable individuals for future exploitation.”
Remember—the study subjects were not criminals in jail, they were college students. The conclusion we can draw is that people with psychopathic traits are out in the world, spotting potential victims and filing the information away for future use. It’s frightening.
Dear Donna,
The woman my son is still with has isolated him from me and my daughter and I’ve only seen him twice briefly in 2 years, what sort of disorder is commonly known for doing this, is it BPD?
Trying to heal:
Sociopaths typically try to isolate their victims from others. I don’t know of people with BPD do this as well.
Donna
Dear Rune,
“with no convenient “EXIT” signs”
Look for the blinking light that says “Don’t Give a Sh-hit”. It worked for me. I was stumbling through the chaos and haze of the Sociopath’s sphere of influence, then my son was diagnosed with a serious medical condition. The Sociopath whined, tantrummed and drummed his heels because I was busy taking care of my child. I looked at the S, and saw him for what he was. I looked at my son, my husband, my daughter, my family and my friends, and realized every minute and every dime I gave to the S was stolen from those I loved.
I realized my old habit of caring too deeply was just so much excess baggage. I stumbled to the door and out into the light. I left a lot of stuff behind, and quite a few totally clueless people. Whatever. Investing in the S or his dupes was dumb, dumb, dumb!
Now, if there are legal entanglements, then breaking free takes a bit more time. Still, no S/P/N is entitled to rent free space in our heads. Not caring is freedom. Don’t care if the S lives or dies, don’t care if he stays or goes, don’t care if he is punished in this world, the next, or never. Don’t care.
Here’s another way of thinking about it:
In a physical combat situation, it is helpful to desire as little as possible. When under attack, do not desire to stay or to leave, to win or to defeat, to harm or to control. Do not commit to any particular offense. This is the quiet mind state that permits the combatant to reach the other side of the conflict with minimal strikes exchanged. This is an aspect of the much mysticized yet extraordinarily simple “mind like water” approach. It requires you to be keenly aware of what your true self values, and readily willing to discard the rest.
If you must duke it out with an S/P/N for any length of time, read The Art of War by Sun Tsu. Don’t bother with the expensive annotated editions. Pull it right off Gutenberg Books. It helps with perspective.
An S is always at war with the rest of us. As soon as we recognize that it’s war, much of what we thought was real becomes false. People cope with the reality of war in all sorts of ways, most of them bad. Sun Tsu’s Way is better than most.
PS – Not caring is hard, if you’ve spent a lifetime caring too much.
A few days ago, I let the S’s ministry website expire, along with the web-mail and rights to the site name. I bought it, I built it and I maintained it. I funded it for years, and spent untold hours keeping it up. The S was and is in no way capable of this sort of work. If he hadn’t been incredibly cruel to me, my children, and a huge number of other naive people, I would still be taking care of this for him. As it is, I still feel guilty about dropping this burden.
Boy am I a dumb-bunny! Talk about misplaced guilt! Taking care of these things for him was ENABLING – on a grand scale! Supporting the activities of somebody who was mercilessly playing people was wrong.
I was caring all right – myopically, and about the wrong things!
Now I don’t give a “beep” about this S, and when I slip up and feel myself caring, I give myself a swift kick in the pants. The time and money spent babying the S is better spent on people who act decently.
henry,
“No contact is our only weapon, the closest thing to revenge we will get.”
I too believed this for the longest time (the part about NC, but sorry I disagree it should have anything to do with revenge) until one day I understood that exposure is also a tool we can use.
Exposure for me is a necessary part of the learning process I am going through. By exposure with these types of people, we will accomplish three things.
I call this type of exposure by the initials W.A.R
1) Warn: others about these types of dysfunctional and parasitic people.
If I only knew more about those that suffer from having a personality disorder before I met and started a family with my ex s/p I know things would have been different. I know I would have tried harder to save my children and I from years of verbal abuse by her. Even if I had to break the law I would have tried harder to protect my children. If only I knew about what a personality disorder was, I would at least had more options.
So now my life’s work is expositing these type of personality disorders and the risk one takes whenever we date marry or get involve in these types relationships albeit personal or business.
2) Aftermath: I am dealing with the after effect of my personal dysfunctional past relationship with my ex s/p. Now our mind have this ability to “forget” the really horrible and bad events in our lives. The reasons, I am sure there are many, but anyway by exposing these type of people we will remember and not naturally block out those EM (emotional memories) but instead deal with them and try to understand why this happen and how to prevent it from happening again.
3) Reaffirmation. Whenever we take the steps to exposure someone with a history of abuse and “bad” relationships, we confirm what we believe to be the truth, as we understand it. The only example I at the moment have is the holocaust and how we must never forget what happen during this war and those that for years suffered and die in silence. Many people would love to forget the holocaust but to do so would allow something like this to happen again. But by us remembering this horrible event and reaffirmation with ourselves of it’s reality, we can pray and hope it never happens again. The same applies to our past relationships with our s/p. By remembering and reaffirming what really did happen we can go on and let go of this past and leaving it when it belongs “in our past”. And then pray and hope it doesn’t happen again to someone else.
Lots of good nuggets in post and comments. I’m seriously considering that “hostility, mistrust, and backbiting” group dysfunction, is as likely an indicator that a sociopathic puppetmaster is at play, as it is what the ’common wisdom’ suggests – that stress, “personality conflicts”, or some ’sum total immaturity threshold’ is causing the hostility.
In addition, I’d say that if the person you’re about to have a relationship with appears to be the center focus of that kind of group, you’re quite possibly dealing with a sociopath.
“Sociopaths typically try to isolate their victims from others. I don’t know of people with BPD do this as well.
Donna”
LOL. So now I have to change my diagnosis (amateur) of my ex-tox from BPD to S? Yeah, couldn’t stand visiting my family on the holidays. Isolated me from them, especially after she got her mother in town from a neighboring state…twice the chaos then, and isolated me even more. They were two of a kind, whatever they were.
Jim:
“They were two of a kind, whatever they were.”
May I submit aliens? And not the illegal kind…
Matt…legal aliens? They need to be rounded up, put on the mother ship, and sent back from whence they came…then we might have “Peace on Earth, Good Will toward Men (and Women). We can dream….nearest black hole would be good…they’d fit in.
“Even the worst of us can serve, if only as a bad example.”
We need ’em. As long as they’re around, we can point to their train wrecks and say, “See, that’s how NOT to act!”