According to research by Dr. Paul Babiak and Dr. Robert Hare, one in 25 business leaders may be a psychopath. Their research will be presented in a BBC Horizon documentary called Are you good or evil?, Wednesday, September 7, at 9 p.m.
Read One in 25 business leaders may be a psychopath, study finds, on Guardian.co.uk.
Story suggested by a Lovefraud reader.
I know grand loves “Papa”, but views him as old and unhip, which he is. LOL Grand has him in like a different category. He craves the attention of, let’s face it a Dad, which he does not have. My youngest son spends time with him, but I don’t want to impose on him all the time. Oh, I can see Grand manipulate my son too.
All of the therapists grand has seen have been under the supervision of the psychologist we originally took him to when he was just three. So, like you EB, we never had to start all over with our sad story and that has helped. But, I think a change is needed.
Thanks guys
Donna, Oxy, Milo
I could write a short story on the grief I went through with my son to get him on the right path. He was tormented by his N father who hates women.
I think Milo said it – about flooding children with positive role models, I think that is SO important. Alternate choices to emulate aside from the toxic parent. That was AS IMPORTANT as therapy, in my humble opinion.
Oxy said it’s a good idea to consider letting the children pick a male therapist. Yes, yes, yes. I thought consistency in a therapist was so important – my son started with a woman at the age of 4, at about age 8 he had had “enough” of her – and rebelled – so I let him interview a number of therapists, and he picked one, a guy, who he stayed with for 5 years. Then he outgrew that therapist and selected another one (I had him briefly hospitalized to break his drug addiction) – he found this third therapist at the hospital. It was ALL HIS CHOICE.
I don’t consider myself a great mother. I try. I have ADD. I work full time. I beat myself all the time for not being patient enough, flexible enough, whatever it is.
But I did try. And, yes, Oxy, I think it was a stroke of luck. And I am so grateful for all the wonderful people around who helped this kid get his head on straight.
SK
SK ~ Interview and pick his own GREAT IDEA. I can come up with ones I approve of, then he can pick. SK, you must know my Grandson, that is ONE way that he is sure to cooperate, because it was HIS idea.
And that is all any of us can do TRY, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but we were there to try.
Thanks – MiLo
Dear Sk, I am also ADHD as well, so I understand. I also raised an ADHD son who while he is not perfect (in fact he is an arse!) but he is not a psychopath at least, so there is something positive to say about that! LOL I do not believe that kids who are ADHD or ADD cannot control their behavior or should not be held responsible.
I had a patient once ADHD kid who threw a chair at his teacher (he was 13-14 at the time) and his mother used that as an excuse for everything…she said “well what do you expect, he has ADHD?” I said “I expect that he NOT throw chairs at his teachers.” LOL I also realize that there are degrees of ADHD, but my kid was as ADHD as they get, couldn’t sit still at all…and I took him out of public school, he couldn’t function well in the classroom, but I did get him through college and he is self supporting and hard working, and is not a criminal, so I feel like to some extent I was a success there—especially considering what I had to work with genetically.
I don’t feel like I was a “failure” with the other one, the psychopath, though I was not able to pull off a miracle, I did the best I could with what I had, but HE HAD CHOICES TOO, and he chose to exercise those choices to break the law instead of to exercise the choices he had for college etc.
Doing the best we can is all that any parent can do…with the resources we have available. It sounds to me like YOU DID A GOOD JOB, as well as your son made some positive choices as well. So TOWANDA for you!!!!
i had a move in neighbour up the street when i was 14. she was 29 and had kids. I didn’t realize what an asshole her husband was ( i found out about 3 years later – and this was right, i shouldn’t have known and she kept it to herself) she and i became friends and i could talk to her, and she didn’t judge me. it was a very important relation ship for me. my mom was mortified (i am sure she could see how bad this woman’s life was. plus, my mom is a snob.)
i reconnected with this woman when i came back to town – she lives out in the boonies, and because i don’t have wheels I haven’t seen her in at least a year. but she saved my emo self as a teen. she really did. i didn’t have role models outside my family. I had a couple of teachers i admired, but they were not involved in my life at all. i grew myself up in that fucked up dysfunctional household and when i couldn’t stand the repression any longer, i got stoned. at 13. and stay stoned for about 3 years. and then stayed half stoned for another two years, then got the fuck out.
you know it’s all very weird tonight. I know i am off because have had mold exposures – but it’s like all of a sudden most of the people i have dated or are in my family look really disordered…..
OneJoy,
You are probably right. Me too.
The masks worked especially well on those of us who were raised by disfunctional people. We naturally didn’t even question the disfunctional behavior. At this point in my life, EVERYONE is suspect, but especially those people whom I feel very close and bonded with too quickly.
It doesn’t matter too much though, because the red flags eventually emerge and I know a spath when I see one now. And I think you do too. The last piece of the puzzle was my mother. She is not your typical spath. She works hard, she meets her responsibilities, she prays and encourages others to pray. She is shallow. That’s how I know that the other “good” things about her are just a mask. A good mask.
sky – the ‘tell’ with your mom is the the un-christian like behaviour paired with the ‘form’ of christian worship. behaviours not adding up. wha tthey are doing and what they say they are doing being diff. cog. dis.
Skylar
Can you tell me what you mean when you say your mom is shallow?
My expath told me he was shallow, I still can’t process what that means.
i think my mom just heaped all the shit of her life on her kids – transferred all her own fears and pains from her life onto us. i don’t think she was particularly reflective, just scared and messed up all the time, and in her early 40’s banged up badly in a car accident that pretty much ruined the possibility she might have had to change her life for the better. and that selfish husband of hers didn’t insist that they move and that he could get a job that would support us, so that she didn’t have to work in her half healed state. nope. she was supply and he is an n.
i am thinking my n ex might be a spath. sky she was ALL about the mask, and the sex and keeping people on the line, and being charming and explosive rage, and being ‘just right ‘ for me….hmmmm. she pretended to be a buddhist. she wasn’t any kind of Buddhist i recognize. her mom is a whack job extraordinaire.
SK,
shallow is a word that I had used to describe people, in the past. But I didn’t know the true meaning of the word, until I learned about spaths.
It’s hard for me to explain, but I’ll try.
Shallow is a huge word. It was used by Cleckley and Hare, as in, “shallow affect”, meaning that they feel emotions but not deeply. Spaths can move in and out of any emotion, the way an actor would. I wrote once that it’s like a method actor’s procedure for creating the emotion required for a scene. The emotion is not long lasting because it isn’t deeply rooted.
Shallowness is also a result of not having any values. That’s why spaths wear other people’s skins. They see someone who impresses them (they are easily impressed) and they want to be that person. The very next day, they could meet someone else, who is the complete opposite, and they will want to be that person too. They do this because they value nothing, instead, they borrow values. They are like infants with memetic desire. Rene Girard explains it very well with his theory of subject, object and model.
My mother’s shallowness is apparent in her lack of values. I realized early on (around age 10), that she did not pass on any values to me. I felt an emptiness when I looked inside to search for what was important to me. I found nothing.
I’m working to find values, still to this day. I’m discovering my own values, but none came from her. This was confusing to me at first, because I thought that I had failed to connect to her values, but on closer inspection I now see that she didn’t have any.
But, she values her garden. It’s a riotous jungle of greenery and flowers, but there isn’t much order. It’s what she uses to upstage the neighbors. It’s her facade. She values the garden because she gets complements on it.
Most of my family members value material wealth and the things which show wealth. That’s it.
It’s interesting that your exspath said he is shallow. Most people who are shallow are not self-aware of it. Most of them actually believe that the symbols of a certain thing are equal to the thing itself. They don’t understand that it’s a shallow representation. To them, it’s “real” because they believe it’s real. Reminds me of Peter Pan.