Lovefraud invites you to complete a survey about your experience with a sociopath/psychopath/narcissist in order to help professionals diagnose this disorder properly.
Two days ago, the American Psychiatric Association released a draft of the fifth edition its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM 5). This book is the standard classification of mental disorders used by mental health and other professionals. The revision has been underway for a decade.
A work group of 11 doctors and psychologists focused on the section about personality and personality disorders. They have recommended significant changes to the description of antisocial personality disorder, which is also referred to as sociopathy and psychopathy. In fact, one of the suggestions is to change the name of the personality disorder to “antisocial/psychopathic type.”
The new description of the disorder is much closer to what most of us at Lovefraud have experienced. You can read the description here:
Antisocial/Psychopathic Type
The American Psychiatric Association has invited public comment on the draft of DSM 5, and Lovefraud is taking the doctors up on their invitation. We thought the best way to do it would be to survey our readers, asking you how well the proposed description of antisocial/psychopathic type matches your experience with one (or more) of these individuals.
Please take the survey. This is serious, so be thoughtful and accurate in your responses. It will probably take you about 15 minutes, so please start it when you are sure you have time to complete it.
The survey will be open until March 3, 2010. After that, we will tabulate and analyze the data. We will prepare a report of the findings for the American Psychiatric Association. The results will also be published on Lovefraud.
Go to the survey:
Greenfern – i typed your name in the searchbox and this seems to be your most recent post above. yesterday at 4:16pm is that what you are referring to?
I just completed the survey and I must admit, the questions made me feel human, like it wasn’t my fault after all. God, thank you for the survey, thank you all for the countless words of encouragement all the time. I read daily, I read this site like I do my Bible. Just knowing how easily Doug took my life over, how he left me to die, to just not be cared for at all still leaves me confounded and angry. I am so compassionate and loving, so full of life and wonderment, so willing to help anyone, everyone and to know that he took my trust in humanity with him infuriates me. I am struggling to let my former husband, who is an angel in that he loves me even though I left him for four years to be with this jerk after 30 years of marriage. He absolutely loves me too death and I don’t feel I deserve it and I am struggling to trust him. He never gave me reason not to but Doug did. Doug ruined my trust in people, my own sense of self and self-expression. He caused me to doubt myself. No one ever did that to be ever!! I am 5’9″ and 150 lbs. and he told me how ugly and fat I am, how no man would ever want me. Yet, I have been not only a teacher but a model for various companies up and down the Eastern Coast since I was 18 years of age. I still model furs and sportswear. He is a 5’9″ wrinkled up piece of crap who cannot put a sentence together without a horrible misspelling and grammatical error. He is a teacher and it is so pitiful. He writes as if he is in the fifth grade. He always begged me to do his lesson plans and written requirements (projects, etc.) and his supervisors thought he was brilliant!!! When I finally told him to get f—ed, the administration started to see a marked difference in all of his written submissions!!! DUH!!! They demanded he retire in 2009 because of misuse of the internet viewing porn sights while supposedly working, planning vacations with various women and telling administration he was “sick”. He was sick alright, sicker than I even knew. When I reported his behavior and gave proof of my input in his “lesson plans and other required submissions,” they almost s–t a brick. He was forced to retire. The hell of it is, he still finds a way to get a hateful and horribly disturbing message to me telling me I am fat and ugly and “crazy”. That is the part that hurts the worst. He was so good at being a son-of-a-bitch he had convinced everyone else I was a nutcase. After almost a year without him, I can thank my God for justice. People who at one time believed him against me now are calling me, coming to visit me, telling me how sorry they are for being nasty to me because he was so damn convincing. I welcome all of them with open arms and now I have started a support group for people like myself who have been the victims of a son of a bitch sociopathic narcissistic piece of crap!!! I have a really big group and it is absolutely the most healing, validating and confirmation of myself that I could ever have. I thought I was all alone, I am not. Oh my God! There are a hell of a lot of jerks out there and I am still so afraid of even my husband. I don’t want to be but he is so wonderful, he puts up with me and lets me have all the space and time I need while providing nothing but love and support for me every single moment of my life. I am trying to trust him but I have been hurt so badly, I don’t know if I can ever have a relationship with any man on this planet.
This web site has truly been a God-sent to me. I tried more than once to just take my life but for whatever reason I was not successful. When I started reading this website, I realized I was not alone and I have to tell all of you, I read every day and it helps me so much and I am growing within myself by the grace of God and all of you!!! All of you are God’s angels put here to help all of us and your words have made me feel absolutely human again and I thank you all so much for that. I do know now that I have so much to offer other people. I want to help, to heal and to comfort others as well as teach them what evil lies out there that we all need to be aware of. I have encountered so many other women that are in the very same shoes I have been in and I want nothing more than to raise them up, make them feel worthwhile and wonderful! If I can do this every single day, and I try to, I pray to God I lift up someone to a more positive positition than I found myself in. Thank GOD FOR LOVEFRAUD!!! It really did save my life and in the process, hopefully, I can help others by reaching out and also referring them to this wonderful website. It absolutely saved my life, literally and made me a better person. I am not perfect but I know enough to know that the best healing comes from helping others understand what you have been through and what you can help them with because I have absolutely experienced it myself. God’s gifts are within all of us and lovefraud, especially you, OXY-drover have helped me so much throughout these last three years. I value your opinion and I thank God he put you in my path. It would be a great honor to meet you one day. Your kindness and words of wisdom kept me from picking up the gun, in the basement of my home and blowing my brains out. I want you to know this. I want you to understand how reaching out and caring for people you do not even know can change their lives. You saved me by your words. You absolutely did and I thank you and God again for coming into my life this way. I am honored and priviledged to be even acquainted with you.
All of you have been hurt and I absolutely empathize with you all. It is only by the grace of God I am alive today to talk to you, to create and encourage my support group of women and men who have encountered sociopaths, narcissistic persons in their lives. My goal is to first be the best mother in the world for my four wonderfully successful children and my precious grandchild and my husband who never pushes, never insists on anything, takes my moods and my cooking (LOL) without a word of anything but encouragement. He is a counselor and I thank God he is my husband. He has forgiven me a long time ago but I am still having a bit of difficulty forgiving myself. Please keep the words of wisdom and funny encounters coming. I depend on you all to help me and thus you help me help my support group. I love all of you because I understand the hell we all have been through. Please continue to encourage and help one another and if you have the strength, reach out to others. I did and it has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. I did not have great knowledge or skills at first, only an honest interpretation of my hell which was so similar to everyone else’s. The honesty of what a sociopath can do to you is the most informational honesty you could ever offer to anyone. To realize you understand and acknowledge you have been there and done that, is such a powerful tool when you encounter a “deer in headlights”, so to speak. To help a person who is in the beginning stages of being “stunned and gunned” is a hell of a gift if you can help them acknowledge that you know for a fact they are involved with a sick individual. Based on my sessions with my group, all individuals knew that “something was not quite right” but they could not put their finger on it. Well hell, let’s all of us put our freaking knowing, been there, done that experience give others understand, hope, influence and wisdom from those of us that have, thank God, survived. Amen and there it is by God!!!
Please keep writing and sharing. My prayers and love go out to all of you.
Sarah
victimx, hello, I read your post, I think it is wonderful that you started a support group, what a fantastic idea, I admire you for helping others even though you were/are in so much pain. I can’t believe this man telling you that you are fat, ugly and crazy, he sounds like a 12 year old!!! I mean, after everything… it’s just such a stupid thing to say!!! This website has also helped me SO MUCH. I like your writing, how you expressed yourself about the people on this site… “God’s angels”… perfect, I agree 100% !!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Thank you so much shabbychic. The understanding, awareness and compassion for other human beings is the only reason I am here today. Persons like you lift me up, keep me going and give me purpose for continuing. I read so much about all the pain, the familiar pain that I thought only I encountered. So not true!!! Sharing the wounds and scars of a sociopath is so redeeming to myself and others. Just to acknowledge that we are not alone is a mountain of support and comfort. I do not post often but I read daily. Again, I thank my God for his “angels” who continue to help, support and validate persons who have been hurt, insulted, betrayed and absolutely emotionally abandoned by these sick individuals. Please continue to post, all of you, as it helps so very, very much. God has sent me angels, all of you. You all, without even knowing, gave me strength, empowerment and determination to continue to be better, to be God’s agent in helping others and to want to be the very best I can be so that I can possibly be of some comfort to others. This is truly the best healing in the world.
Dear Victim-x (Sarah)
My eyes teared up as I read your above post, and I am so glad that you are here and that you are doing the things you are doing and “spreading the gospel of LF” to others. I feel very privilidged that my words helped you in your hours of deepest dark. That feeling is an abyss of the deepest pain I can only imagine.
Please, if you have not gotten Dr. Viktor Frankl’s book “Man’s searchh for meaning” please do and read it, it was the spiritual turning point for me in helping me to FORGIVE MYSELF. I think the forgiveness we give to others should FIRST be given to ourselves. God forgives us, those that love us forgive us, but until we can FORGIVE OURSELVES we keep on feeling down and in darkness.
Look at the Apostle Paul for your example. What he had to forgive himself for was the death of a Saint. That’s pretty much a “big one” in my book.
We also must, I think LEARN TO TRUST OURSELVES before we can relearn to trust others. We have to learn to trust ourselves again after WE have let ourselves become embroiled in the “dance of death” with the psychopaths.
I am glad also that others are seeing that you were not “crazy” or turning their backs on you. That they are validating you about the P.
As far as him saying you are “ugly” and fat, etc. THOSE WORDS CAN HURT YOU ONLY IF YOU ALLOW THEM TO. He can SAY the world is FLAT, but that doesn’t make it so. You are only “ugly and fat” if YOU think you are.
I am 63 years old and when I look in the mirror I see my grandmother’s face—and I am working on taking off weight, more weight than I have EVER weighed in my life! But my wrinkles and my fat middle (and yes, I am wrinkled and fat!) are not what makes me “attractive” or “good” to anyone, it is what is INSIDE ME. Look at all the “beautiful people” on TV and in the movies, who are absolutely “perfect” physical specimines, but you know they are twisted drug addicts, etc. SO, who is a “beautiful person” is not what you look like outside. It is what is inside you that makes you beautiful.
Our society and culture stresses the external “beauty” that will fade. The Bible tells us our “treasures” are not those of this earth–youth, beauty, gold, silver, fame, etc—but the things STORED UP in Heaven. i.e. what is inside us, what cannot be taken from us.
King David was referred to as “a man after God’s own heart” but he was also a GREAT SINNER, but so WHY was he a “man after God’s own heart?” Because when he became aware of his sins, HE REPENTED AND CHANGED HIS WAYS. I think that is why David’s story was told in such detail, he had all the sinful lusts that every human has, he loved his bad son, and enabled him, he was selfish, coniving, killed a man to get his wife, tried to cover up the pregnancy first, but when that failed, killed her husband by using his position as king to get the man killed in battle. He was ungrateful to his people after the civil war and CRIED instead for his Psychopathic son who was dead—and had caused tens of thousands of deaths of the people in the war. David was a mortal man, with the sins we all must over come, but he was a MAN AFTER GOD’S OWN HEART, not because he never sinned, but because when he did sin, he repented and changed his ways.
It is the psychopaths like Jezebell who do not repent, who do not change their ways that are “doomed to hell” on this earth and I think afterwards. They are psychopathic and don’t want to change, they want to CONTROL others and can’t love or care for anything except power, etc.
So, please, FORGIVE yourself, learn to TRUST yourself to keep yourself safe. (((Hugs)))) and myy prayers for you always.
King David????He was one of the worst sinners……..but the most forgiven!!!!!!!!!!!! That is a conundrom(spelling) to me…
Oxy n others…….let it go ……. arh…… I waannnt to……the asshole still hurts….how do we??????we just doooo….don’t mean to be trite,….I’ll post this n then delete……
oops
can we/should we …. it is what I want to do….totally erradicate the AaHoles from our lives….why is it so hard????I think this is the place to band together as best as one can…..really I can”t imagine doing it
I truly am sorry for interrupting.