Lovefraud recently received the following email from a reader in Holland whom we’ll call “Anika”:
Today I registered to your love fraud site. Nice that you created it. It is a great help when you are abused by a socio-psychopath whatever you call it. I’ve been divorced from mine almost 30 years. Only 3 years ago I read a book that explained to me why, after my divorce, my life changed from a drama into a hell.
And this blog and sites are very helpful. Knowledge gives power. So I am together with a cousin (who is also divorced her psychopath), working on creating something like this in Holland. In our country it seems to be an unknown subject.
I want to write especially about the troubles the Nps-ers can cause between the children and their mother or fathers. That’s what happened in my case. My ex trained the children in abusive and cruel behavior towards me.
My son doesn’t know the facts of why I divorced his father. His father (who works as a homeopathic doctor) told my kids, when they were in their puberty, that the great drama in their lives was that their mother caused them a lot off harm by having this (so called) depression after the divorce. I only found out years afterward he what did, because he never told me that he was putting this idea in their heads. (And he forgot to mention his messing around with other women and lies about that, which destroyed our marriage.)
When I asked my children if they please can explain to me what happened and how, they most of the times get very angry, start to scream at me, or walk away but cannot give any example. They avoid contact with me most of the times.
I have had no contact with my daughter for several years. One year ago I gave it another try. First by e-mail and then I paid her 2 visits that were 2 very pleasant occasions. I could feel her love, and the atmosphere was very good.
She wrote me this also in a e-mail. And then she started to create distance between her and me.
My son, luckily, has 2 kids and he likes me to be the grandmother. I am very lucky with them that contact is very good, we love each other big time.
Well that’s my story in a nutshell.
Anika’s story is just like many of the 3,600 stories that have been sent to Lovefraud—and that is exactly why I posted it. This story came from Europe. Sociopaths are everywhere—Lovefraud has received stories from all over the world. Sociopaths are in all demographic groups. They are male, female, rich, poor, all races, all religions and live in all communities.
Anika also said that sociopathy “seems to be an unknown subject” in Holland. Well, it’s an unknown subject all around the world. Yes, we’re talking about social predators here on Lovefraud, which is based in the United States, but that certainly doesn’t mean Americans have any more awareness of this personality disorder than anyone else does.
Because Hollywood and the media typically portray sociopaths as deranged serial killers, our “understanding” of them may do us more harm than good. Why? When people believe sociopaths are all deranged killers, it may blind them to the fact that a lying, manipulative, abusive partner or colleague may be a sociopath. Because the individual hasn’t killed anyone, it may be hard to believe that he or she has a serious personality disorder.
The fact that predators live among us is like a giant skeleton in the closet of the human race. It’s a massive problem that no one wants to talk about.
Defining the problem
One reason why this huge problem remains outside of our awareness is that it is poorly defined. Even though people have been talking about evil since biblical times, there is no widely accepted definition of what it is.
In my book, Red Flags of Love Fraud 10 signs you’re dating a sociopath, I suggest that the word “sociopath” be used as a generic umbrella description for social predators—people who live their lives by exploiting others. Within the framework of “sociopathy,” experts (who disagree on what to call this personality disorder and how it should be diagnosed) can define specific diagnoses, such as antisocial personality disorder, psychopathy, narcissism and borderline personality disorder.
Massive numbers
Experts estimate that up to 4% of the population have antisocial personality disorder, up to 6% have narcissistic personality disorder, and up to 2% have borderline personality disorder. Add these figures together, and as many as 12% of the people who live among us are social predators.
As of July 2012, the population of the United States was nearly 314 million. If up to 12% are sociopaths, that means as many as 37 million social predators in America.
The world population is almost 7 billion. If 12% are sociopaths, the total is a staggering 837 million. This is a massive problem.
So why are there 837 million disordered people in the world, exploiting almost everyone they meet, and most people don’t know about it? Perhaps the whole concept is just too scary.
Cultural conspiracy
Human beings are social creatures. We live in groups and depend on each other. How do we cope with the idea that some of our own species are predators? They look like us and act like us, but their objective is not to live in community with us—it is to take advantage of us and perhaps destroy us.
Maybe we just don’t want to go there. We are, after all, capable of massive conspiracy. Take Santa Claus. I’ve always been amazed that every adult in every country where Christmas is celebrated knows, in the presence of children, to keep the Santa Claus story going. So maybe we’re living with another massive cultural conspiracy that goes something like this: All people are basically good and want the same thing is life—to love and be loved.
It’s a cultural message that we hear time and time again. Unfortunately, it is not totally true. There are exceptions to this general belief in the goodness and sameness of people. The exceptions are the sociopaths.
We need to open the closet and shed light on the fact that 837 million social predators live among us. They look like us, but they do not live like us. These people do not love. They care only about power, control and dominance.
The first step towards protecting ourselves from sociopaths is knowing that they exist.
This is just awesome! This is a posting that gives validity to so many situations! Much damage is being done, because most people don’t want to face the facts! The fact that people are evil, people like this walk among us, they are in every avenue of our lives and society. Most folks where rose colored glasses. I know that to be a fact, because once upon a time I had a pair myself. Thank you Donna, for this most necessary article!
Donna, thank you for posting this article. To “Anika,” I extend my most sincere sorrow that she has had the experiences with an spath that she did and that her children were estranged from her by the spath father – in the U.S., it’s a legal term called “Alienation Of Affection” when one parent deliberately poisons a child’s relationship with the other parent.
Attempts to educate children of psychopaths/sociopaths is like walking on dangerously thin ice – it may hold up, and it may not. When a spath parent wants to harm the mother/father of their children, they often use the children as disposable machinery. The “hurt” to the non-disordered parent is accomplished by turning the relationship into dust via outright lies, manipulations, threats, abuse, and FEAR.
We don’t acknowledge sociopathy in general terms because (IMHO) human beings no longer live in small, tribal communities. Human life has become very large and lore and mores (pronounced: more-aze) are no longer a part of cultural awareness. We do not sit by a fire with our elders and extended family to hear folklore of how evil isn’t tolerated and working together for the sake of the tribe is rewarded. What we see, on a daily basis, is that “bad people” are rewarded with fame, infamy, celebrity, and (in the cases of reality shows) financial gain.
I typed in another response to the Law & Order article that domestic violence/abuse and the dynamics should be a course requirement for high school graduation – this belief extends to discussion of predatory people who are either spath or simply toxic. The reason that I feel that this is necessary is addressed in the paragraph, above. For precisely the reasons that I stated, we are no longer teaching (or, being taught) that “bad people” are OUT there and that their bad behaviors are intolerable – meaning, that they do NOT have to be tolerated.
Skylar and others have discussed “shunning” as a possible solution to toxic and predatory people. At this time in our cultural and societal history, “shunning” isn’t even in human vocabulary and needs to be revisited.
Again, thank you so much for this article. I’m glad that “Anika” found LoveFraud and the answers that she needed.
Brightest blessings
Donna, great and very true article! I would add though that NOT ONLY the people who “qualify” as a socio-psycho-path but those who NEARLY QUALIFY, the people who score 29, 28, 27, 26, etc. are a ALSO TOXIC and predatory to some extent so that raises your level of toxicity much greater than 12%.
Look at the crime stats in the US 2 point something MILLION PEOPLE INCARCERATED this moment and 5 point something on parole or probation and the average score on the PCL-R is 22, with 25% of these people scoring a 22 (it takes 30 points t qualify as a full blown sociopath) and I wonder what the rate of EX convicts there are in the country?
And I firmly believe that some cultures are essentially trained “psychopathic” in treating their women and children as chattel, or being willing to blow themselves up in order to indiscriminately kill people of another political or religious group.
And within a greater culture there are those who are trained to act in psychopathic ways…to the point that you can’t tell where the DNA influenced and the environment did. The Branch Davidians, and others who join or grow up in radical cults.
Yet in our country schools teach that there is “good” in all people, and that all people can change if you just love them enough.
I read a website where a woman’s mother murdered her father when she was a teenager, and was tried for it but got off. Then when he was 13, her son stabbed her 4 year old daughter to death for the PURPOSE OF HURTING HIS MOTHER and he got a 40 year sentence in prison in Texas, and this poor woman has the idea that inmates can be “loved into reform” and she has formed a foundation in her daughter’s name to help these poor misguided criminal inmates like her son, who sounds to me like the poisoned psychopathic DNA offshoot of that poor mother’s murdering parent, his grandmother.
I think it iis a long, UPHILL BATTLE to educate the American (much less the world) population about psychopaths, even the criminal ones, much less find a way to deal with them in society.
Currently we are locking many of the criminal ones up, but 99% of those eventually are turned back loose, even the rapists and murderers. Look at that rapist/photographer that targeted Liane Leedom…he was out on parole for RAPE when he raped and killed those other girls. When I was a kid in my state forceable rape was a capitol crime, or life without parole and I think it should be life without parole now. The statistics are that only 3-4% of “sexual offenders” will reoffend in the first 3 years after release, BUT the thing is that the “label” of Sex Offender includes flashers and non violent “offenders” as well as rapists and pedophiles.
OxD…..spot-on. I maintained a system of faulty beliefs that ALL people could be redeemed and that ALL people were “good,” at heart. This is precisely how a predatory, toxic, and/or psychopathic/sociopathic human being is so able to exploit the misguided trust of their victim targets.
Our “global” community/culture simply does not address predatory human behaviors as being intentionally “bad,” nor are there run-of-the-mill consequences. I don’t mean prisons, etc., but simply holding people accountable for their behaviors.
It’s like I was referencing, above: smaller communities were better able to recognize, isolate, and “shun” predatory members of their tribe with far better effect than we are able to do, today.
In the tiny community where I live, I’ve met 3 people who fit the profile of sociopath, hands down. That’s 3 out of 300? Those are only the people that I was personally involved with on one level or another. There are others that I met who are “suspect.”
Good article and good discussion is going to result, I think.
hello it has been awhile since ive been here.
ive been at a loss and much helpless. we joined this group before the murder of our nurses daughter. we could not adequately protect. the existence of The Other is a topic no one seems to want to face. in a way we almost feel that we contributed to her murder by the sheer act of The Other recognizing itself when we immediately saw him for what he was. he knew who and what he was by our reaction to himself. we are autistic. some of us have a ‘disabled’ sense of senses. sensory integration disorder. lights too bright, sounds too harsh. nothing filters through at times. we have other gifts? as one nurse states. but we came here because we knew something was dangerously wrong. we smelt it in the air. that tightness. we knew before anyone else did what he was capable of. there was nothing we could do about it and he knew it. he knew we knew and knew that no one would listen, that we were helpless to do anything to stop him. one nurse says we can smell/recognize evil. i do not know if we can. i can say of myself, mine wife and mine severely affected autistic child that we have no personal concept in our minds of what evil actually is. as well as we have no concept of what hate actually is.
i think we can live simply knowing that it exists in others although not in our world. we do not hate The Other. but we do recognize its existence. we often fear The Other even if we do not hate The Other. but as we recognize The Other as well The Other also recognizes us too. The Other has existed since man existed as we have. although our survival was not always as secure as that of The Other. We are a much weaker and fragile tentative population but we have been here too.
the sheer fact that we knew. we knew something would happen but could do nothing about it left me at a loss. i think i came here in hopes that i would find a way. mine childs keening and my wife’s rabid howling when we first met him. even myself i got sick. i lost my capability of speech and escaped away into my autism. and a quote from shakespeares macbeth came to mind “by the prickling of my thumbs. something wicked this way comes..” he then knew that we knew and also knew that there was nothing we could do to stop him. what could we do? tell police that he smelled really bad? that he smelled like he was about to pounce? that we felt/smelt danger looming? i have Asperger Syndrome. i communicate well. i function well. i can move better in this world than my wife and child can. but we can not protect the everyday people. we are weak. often we can’t speak or tie our shoe laces or we are spending time in another world where The Other can never follow or invade.
Dear abelrising, Thank you for your post, and your explaining how you perceive things. I read Temple Grandin’s book “How I see things” and it gave me some idea of how autism is. I also have worked some as a nurse practitioner with autistic children and know a couple of people with fairly severe Asperger’s.
I’ve also read Dr. Baron-Cohen’s book about empathy in Autism and in psychopathy. He says that empathy is in all of us on a scale, like a bell curve and that autistic people don’t have a lot of empathy and neither do psychopaths, but he calls the autistic person’s lack of empathy Zero+ and the psychopath’s lack of empathy Zero NEGATIVE, because the psychopath uses their lack of empathy to hurt people and the autistic does not try to hurt others just for the joy of creating suffering.
You also explained something to me and it makes sense that you would be able to recognize “the other” as you called him where most people would not. You listened to your instinct but unfortunately no one would believe you. That is frustrating and I’m sorry that happened to you. It hurts to see and recognize danger to someone else and not be able to help them.
Welcome to LoveFraud and I hope you will stay around and share with us. God bless.
I have been a lurker on this site for well over a year and cannot express how helpful it has been to me!
This article NEEDS to be published in EVERY major newspaper…. My experience with my ex-husband of 28 years has SO much in common with all the others that I sometimes do feel that they are handed the handbook of destruction when they are born…I do believe they come hard wired that way. I have been an immigrant from India for 30 plus years. They exist everywhere and my colateral losses are relationships with my son,who is his fathers child, and my mom who overdosed and died because she could not deal at her age to see me in so much pain. I have a daughter who is pretty solid and has been very supportive. She recognises her father is disordered but still has contact with him. My brother and extended family are strong honorable people and I have a superb support base.
The silicon valley ( told you I’m of Indian origin) is as saturated with disordered people as wall street is!!!! The world is getting smaller and people like my ex travel extensively leaving an “anonymous” wake of destruction. Its mind boggling!!!!!
Hi Donna & all the other survivers on this blog,
I’ve been reading this blog for quite some time now.I am happy to read Anika’s story,she’s my cousin,and I’m very proud of her,she survived one of the biggest assclowns in the world,she is a real strong lady,”tough as a nail”,and we are determined to do all we can to get it out in the open in our country,still lots of work to do.From what I read it’s a worldwide problem,people (and bystanders) just don’t want to know,they just don’t care either.
But never underestimate the power of a woman,specially suvivors of abuse,we will get there,one way or another.Thanks to all you’re a great help!!
ox drover. i remember you from the last time i was here. i was researching bullying and domestic violence. i saw the danger i came across lovefraud and spent some time here. i could not prevent the murder. in truth i did not know that was going to occur only that something was going to occur. i think he did not care that my wife and child recognized something ugly in him as they are more severely affected. i think he was more derailed by the fact that he felt i would attempt to stop him which i attempted to do. i had been researching lovefraud and other sites. unfortunately in lovefraud i found an outlet for victim’s after the fact while i was more in search of prevention. since her slaughter (i can not sugarcoat the manner of which he dealt with her). my autism. i find no comfort in holding hands or crying on someones shoulder. all i felt was my own failure in protecting a girl/woman from a brutal death at the hands of her ex-boyfriend. so i left the group as i failed in my mission. i have accepted the fact that although i’ve come a long way since being non verbal and lining up toy cars in color coded rolls that i can not really stop The Other from being what it is or doing what it does. he has been and done and will continue to do so. everyday peoples be aware. and if you see an autistic wetting their pants and clutching on to one of their animal friends as a reaction to an individual… RUN!!!!
abelrisin,
I’m so sorry for the trauma you all encountered. Sandra Brown runs an institute that offers a lot of relevant and helpful services….. she is spot on when she calls ALL relationships with disordered people relationships of “inevitable harm”.
Running while screaming to alert other decent folk is one way…the problem is that while the mask is firmly attached they seem so so benign!