I’ve spoken to many people who have had their lives shredded by sociopaths. They are traumatized about their physical, emotional and financial injuries. They can’t understand how someone can cause them so much pain, and be so callous about it.
A statement I hear frequently is, “I didn’t know such evil existed.”
Why don’t we know about sociopaths? I think there are several reasons:
1. Mental health professionals can’t agree on terminology and diagnostic criteria.
These disordered individuals are referred to as sociopaths, psychopaths or people with antisocial personality disorder. Which is the right term? It depends on whom you ask.
Dr. Robert Hare, the guru of the disorder, uses the term “psychopath,” which he applies to people who meet the criteria of his Psychopathy Checklist Revised (PCL-R).
The American Psychiatric Association uses the term “antisocial personality disorder,” and the definition is vague, unwieldy, and open to interpretation. This professional body has no diagnostic criteria for a psychopath.
For more on the different terminology, see Psychopath or Sociopath? on Lovefraud.com.
The point is that the professionals are in disagreement and disarray. So where does that leave the rest of us? How are we supposed to figure this out when the professionals can’t come to an agreement? More importantly, how are we supposed to educate others when the basic facts—what to call the disorder and how to identify it—are so cloudy?
Here on Lovefraud, many of you refer to these predators as P/S/N psychopath-sociopath-narcissist. It works among those of us who know what they look like. But people who have not had the experience of being defrauded, devalued and discarded don’t get what we’re talking about. The awkward terminology makes trying to explain our experience even more confusing.
2. The media won’t write about sociopaths.
When it comes to sociopaths, most journalists don’t get it. I am comfortable making that statement, because I was once a journalist who didn’t get it. And it seems that journalists don’t even want to get it.
Many people have told me that information about sociopaths should be in women’s magazines. I agree. In fact, I’ve tried to get their attention.
I am a magazine journalist. I was the original editor of Atlantic City Magazine, and I’ve written for other publications. I know how the business works. To pitch a story to a magazine, you first study the publication to determine how it serves its audience. Then you craft a story idea to match the publication’s approach. Then you send a query letter to pitch your story idea. Then, when the magazine accepts your idea, you write the article.
Since 2005, I’ve sent 18 query letters to magazines such as More, Good Housekeeping, Redbook, Ladies Home Journal, New Woman, Self, Health and Psychology Today. I tried a range of approaches to bring attention to the problem of sociopaths.
Every single query was rejected.
Personally, I think the magazines are afraid of touching anything that sounds “nasty.” But publications face another problem—defamation lawsuits.
Media lawyers don’t want the publications or broadcasters they represent to publish anything that may lead to a lawsuit. Here’s what they tell their media clients:
- Don’t accuse someone of a crime unless he has confessed or been convicted.
- Don’t say someone has a physical or mental disease unless you have proof.
- Don’t accuse someone of being incompetent or dishonest in his occupation.
- Don’t say someone is unchaste, especially if it is a woman.
Sociopaths commit crime, are portrayed as having a mental illness (although it is actually a personality disorder), are dishonest at their jobs and are downright promiscuous. Saying any of it could cause legal problems.
This is apparent in the case study on Lovefraud.com about Ed Hicks. The victim in the case, Sandra Phipps, received a lot of media attention, because her ex was married seven times, and committed bigamy four times. Every time she was interviewed, she said, “In my opinion, Ed Hicks is a sociopath.” Usually the newspapers wouldn’t print her quote.
Sandra was even on the Dr. Phil Show about her case. When the show was taped, Dr. Phil himself said Ed Hicks was a sociopath. The lawyers cut it out.
See Call Ed Hicks a bigamist, but not a sociopath.
3. Hollywood sensationalizes the disorder.
Most people believe psychopaths are serial killers. Deranged, diabolical murderers. I think this is a direct result of how they are portrayed in movies and on television shows.
The classic, of course, is Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, which had nothing to do with a psychopath. More recently, the TV show Dexter is about a serial killer who channels his violent impulses to only kill people who deserve it. Many describe the Dexter character as a psychopath or sociopath. I don’t know what Dexter is, but he wouldn’t be diagnosed as either.
Read Psycho movies add to the confusion.
The cultural image of psychopaths and sociopaths makes education even more difficult. Yes, some of these disordered people are bloodthirsty killers. But only a tiny fraction of them, at the highest end of the PCL-R, match the profile. Far more run-of-the-mill sociopaths exploit, abuse, cheat and defraud, but stop way short of killing.
So educating people about sociopaths is an uphill battle. First we have to overcome their currently skewed image, delivered by Hollywood. Then we have to overcome the confusion in terminology and diagnosis in the mental health field. Then we have to convince the media to deal with the disorder, and the people who have it, accurately.
Sigh. This will take awhile.
seeingclearly – well, where did you friend get his knowledge?
we talk about this here often – how the spath’s mirror us and dupe us with our own deepest wants and qualities. it makes us hurt like crazy when they devalue and disacrd us – we have shown them our deepest selves or at least we feel that they have seen our deepest selves….then they hurt us, and cut us free. and in the process they cut us off from ourselves. i think it may be because they have devalued us. not sure, but i need to figure it out, ’cause i miss me. i am so afraid of someone else hurting me that i have ‘disowned’ myself to a large extent. don’t show/ no hurt. don’t engage/ no hurt. i htink a lot of the anger i feel at the spath is because of this.
thanks for bringing his up again; it’s timely for me.
One Step
The thing for me is I don’t have the anger toward him nor myself. I know who I am and what I will and will not do. I feel pity for him but will never give him another ounce of my energy. He is for all intents and purposes dead to me.
My deceased husband and I had a normal relationship with good sex and good communication. So the PLAY sex with sp did not hook me. It was a short term relationship but so out there that is why I went searching for answers.
I have been around a lot of barracuda’s, jerks, A personality traits in the business world and know how to deflect their advances b/c I am tuned into it. I had no guideline for what the s/p agenda is. In the bus world these guys are trying to get an advantage or your business the s/p is trying to steal your soul along with everything else. I will be on hyper alert you can bet on that. FOOL ME ONCE……
Stay Strong Stay Safe and STay Sane.
Dear Notcrazee, I’m not trying to dampen your fight to get the word out, so maybe what I was trying to say didn’t come across well. I don’t think there is ANYONE with more desire to get the word out than I have…it is that I just don’t EXPECT it to change the entire world.
When I was 18 I was a very cocky and arrogant kid (aren’t most kids that age! LOL) and I thought I knew the entire answers to how to change the world! I thought I was going to set the world on fire and make significant changes in everything from politics to world hunger! As I matured I thought that I could not change the ENTIRE WORLD but I did Thought I could change SMALL PORTIONS of it ONE PERSON AT A TIME….then, finally I came to realize that the ONLY PERSON I COULD CHANGE WAS ME! That was the turning point for me in not being disappointed in my efforts to “change things”—I can’t change the world, I can’t change anyone else but I can change MYSELF. If I change myself, then THAT CHANGE OF MYSELF EFFECTS THE ENTIRE WORLD.
ANYTHING that is “changed” in the world changes everything else in the world. If a butterfly is killed in Indonesia the changes it makes in the environment there may be SLIGHT but it changes how that ecosystem is working, and that changes something else, and the changes move on down to the city streets of New York city. So by changing myself, I DO CHANGE THE WORLD.
The prolific writings of Laurens van der Post, quite frankly a high level narcissist who abandoned his wife and children to starve financially and emotionally, and sired a child by a 15 year old girl he had been given custody of, etc, influenced my thinking quite a bit. Laurens rose from a poor Afrikaner farm boy to be Prince William’s god-father, and a prolific writer. Through some friends I know Laurens’ daughter (and I know the emotional damage he did to his children) yet, his writings, including about the Bushmen of the South African desert (the San) are very inspiring. So even a psychopath (and I truly believe he was one) can have positive influence on the world as well as negative. Laurens was also a true hero when he was in a Japanese prison of war for four years in the Pacific. He risked his life to save others and did without food and water to give to those more in need. He was a disciple of Jung and wrote a wonderful biography of Jung. Yet, Laurens was a complete and pathological liar. Go figure.
My own spiritual walk was positively influenced by Laurens though at the same time, I saw that he was what he was. I helped his daughter to cope with the same pain that my own P-sperm donor caused me and Laurens caused her. We talk about “six degrees of separation” between people, and how I met his daughter (he was dead by then) was through someone I met in 1965 in Africa that I still keep in touch with, and there is a man here in US who is doing a biography of Laurens—though there was one done by a man named Jones who focused more on the Lies that Laurens told and the bad deeds he did, trying to negate the good deeds that were TRUE, particularly because he did not like Laurens’ daughter (who herself is a well known journalist in London.) The mutual friend who introduced us actually “worships” Laurens friendship and memory, not realizing that Laurens was a psychopath, as do others with whom he came into contact (i.e. Prince Charles and others) That doesn’t mean though that some of his espoused and spoken and written philosophy is not however true.
We each can change ourselves, and that change IN ourselves can thus influence the world in a wider sense. We may never see, as Donna Andersen has done with Lovefraud the blog and the book, the DIRECT influence of our changes, but as we change ourselves, those changes in the world WILL occur and will ripple through the UNIVERSE, in both positive and negative ways for GENERATIONS TO COME, not just for a little while.
I firmly believe that EVERYTHING and everyone in the universe is connected and changes in one thing, effect changes in another. If one thing I say to someone makes a difference in the choices they make, then my change as effected a change in them, and in their children, and their children….and I may never see that change or even know it took place, but it is still there.
Like the ripples in a pond from a stone thrown into the water…we all change the world if only in a small way, by the changes we make in ourselves. I no longer try to make BIG WAVES but try to make ripples within my own self.
I hope that makes sense. I’m not trying to discourage you from wanting to “get the word out” not in the least, but to encourage you to make the changes from within which will then radiate out to the Universe (big U). Anyway, I hope that makes sense. (((hugs))) and God bless.
SeeingClearly:
“My question to all of you is this. Did we really just fall in love with ourselves? Your thoughts please” –
for me, abso-bloody-lutely! He mirrored me so precisely that I would joke to my friends that he was like the “boy version of myself”, I constantly marvelled at how well-matched two people could be.
Everything that I said I loved and that was important to me, was suddenly everything that he loved and that was important to him. I restored old furniture and so he began to do the same, stating that he had always wanted to but never had the opportunity before. And on, and on….it was almost eerie.
Much, much later, it dawned on me that it was all a lie. I gave so much of myself away so quickly, openly and freely, because that’s who and what I am. For a bottom-feeder like him, I was putty on a plate, to do with as he pleased. He didn’t even have to work hard at sussing me out – I was transparent in my interests and my standards and outspoken enough in my opinions for him to make the perfect idiot out of. He simply gathered information, assimilated it and then fed me back the “boy version” of myself; “soul mates”; my “perfect match”.
When I thought harder about it later, he had had no interests of his own when we met, no friends, no hobbies, no social circle, he just absorbed and went along with all of mine. It’s why, when things began to go badly off the rails, that his counselor and I thought it might be BPD. We were wrong, of course – people with BPD generally have the capacity to feel remorse and to demonstrate a self-loathing that was not truly present with him. My insistence that he must be excused for his “BPD” only stopped me from working it out sooner.
It was all a game for him, right from the start; I was the prey and then the supply for 7 long years.
Once I realised that truth, the hurting began to stop. The damage is still there, but I’m “growing back” to who I was before he ate my life and then spat it all out at my feet.
Seeing clearly,
I agree with you, and after my husband died, I was so needy, so needful, lonely desperate and feeling that I would “never again have what I had with my loving husband, woe is me…I’ll die by msyelf and never have another love” WOE IS ME!!! Fortunately, it was for me also short term, but very intense because I was SO NEEDY and lonely.
One, I think the lack of trust we have in ourselves to keep ourselves safe is a BIG DEAL. I am not sure I ever really knew how to keep myself safe (DUH!!) but I THOUGHT I DID, and I lost that delusion of keeping myself safe. NOW I think I have learned how to keep myself safe, maybe for the FIRST time. I know the red flags, so I can CAUTIOUSLY get close to people again….and feel safer in doing so. No, I don’t give out trust freely again, but that’s okay.I think part of what got me into this trouble with psychopaths in the first place was that Pollyanna carp of giving out trust willy nilly and the idea that I SHOULD give second changes and third and 100th chances for people to change how they treated me when they had SHOWN that they were not trustworthy.
I know you are not religious, One, but go online and read the story of Joseph in the Bible’s old Testament and see how he managed to TEST his brothers (who had sold him off into slavery) before he trusted them. This story has some great lessons for us as former victims in learning how to CONDITIONALLY trust people safely! UNconditional trust I think is something that is definitely a myth of delusion. Funny thing though, my P-son RAGES about how he is NOT given UN-conditional “love” (meaning trust) and that makes us BAD people! ha ha snarf ROTFLMAO Yea, boy, I DO trust you–100% trust you to ACT LIKE A PSYCHOPATH!
Dear Ox
one of the most profound books that I have ever read early in my youth is Atlas Shugged.(sited here many times) It truly was the begining of me shaping who I wanted to be. I do not profess to all the teachings of Ayn, I had wonderful mentors that guided me through several pitfalls. I have read Atlas at least 8-10 times in the course of my life. Whenever I feel I need to adjust my compass.
I was a Christian in my early years however I have returned to my Jewish roots. The Bible is still a great source for lessons. Some times we read these stories and they are just stories. It takes life experiences to make them relative.
Your life is a true testimonial to the survival of the fittess. Evil can not enter our lives unless we allow it. And we are the ones that MUST cut it off from it’s food supply so it will die.
God in His Mercy spared you the path of your parents. You choose the path less taken. Wreather you know it or not. YOU were meant to do exactly what you are doing. Helping each and everyone who comes to this site see the light at the end of the tunnel. Because if you can live through all of that and still have a soul( and I’ m sure you haven’t told the half of it all) so can each of us.
Like I tell my children : The right thing to do is some times the hardest. I believe you have done a lot of RIGHT THINGS.
Lots of love and hugs to you dear.
Stay Strong Stay Safe and Stay Sane
Dear Oxy; I have to tell you that when I read your post my heart aches for the little girl you were. I see you on the shore staring asking WHY WHY WHY and I hug you and cry with you and I wipe away your tears. You are special, what has happened to you should never never have happened. Thank you God for sparing Oxy and bringing her here to help heal all the other children that hurt. Stay Strong OXY, you are needed and loved here. Respectfully, Seeing Clearly
Dear Seeingclearly,
Yes, I was familiar with those old Bible stories, but I have been reading them with a NEW UNDERSTANDING NOW of what they are teaching. There are so many levels of wisdom in them. The one that I got the most out of in the Joseph story is that he “forgave” his brothers long before they showed up in Egypt…but he did NOT TRUST THEM until he had SEVERELY tested them to see what kind of men they had become in the 20-30 years since he had seen them last. He saw that they would have SACRIFICED themselves in order to protect their father by keeping Benjamin safe from slavery. The brothers had realized that they had wounded not only their brother Joseph but their FATHER severely by what they had done, by the lies they had told.
You will notice too, that those brothers had never confessed to Daddy what they had done! Of course after they realized who Joseph was, they had to confess….but that part of the story wasn’t told (which I find interesting).
The story of David hiding from King Saul is another interesting story that I got a lot of wisdom from this time around. I realized that God could have protected David from Saul in other ways than warning him (through Jonathan) to flee to the hills and caves, but I think there was a LESSON OUT IN THE WILDERNESS for DAVID. David wasn’t a perfect man, in fact, he was quite a sinful one; murder, adultery, etc. but the thing that made David a “man after God’s own heart” was that he REPENTED of his sins, truly repented. I think that shows us that WE (who are also not perfect by any stretch of the imagination) can grow and learn from our previous “sins” and mistakes…even the deliberate things we do, knowing they are wrong.
Even for people who are not believers of these as divine messages, those old stories have wonderful messages I think, of mistakes and sins (deliberate bad acts) and redemption through changing our behavior, and changing our attitudes!
Dr. Viktor Frankl’s book “Man’s search for meaning” which he wrote after his stay of several years in the Nazi death camps, was a turning point for me like Atlas was for you. Dr. Frankl’s idea that all pain acts like a gas, and completely fills the container whether it is a small amount of gas or a large amount, it expands or contracts to fill the vessel. So if you lost a little or a lot, the PAIN IS STILL TOTAL. A baby drops his rattle and is devastated totally in emotional pain and loss…we are devalued by a psychopath and we are devastated totally…the cause and the “size” of the pain is relative, but it is TOTAL. So I no longer feel that my pain is bigger than someone else’s or that theirs is bigger than mine, they are equal and TOTAL.
The old story about “I cried because I had no shoes until I saw a man with no feet” makes us feel grateful that we do have FEET, but at the same time I do not feel guilty either that I have grief over not having shoes. If that makes any sense.
Yes, the right thing is many times if not most times, the hardest thing to do, but in the end, it is the BEST thing and will cause us the least amount of pain in the end. I am also learning that doing what is best for ME is the right thing to do in ALL CASES. If I don’t do what is best for ME, how can I do what is right for anyone? Doing what is right for me doesn’t deprive anyone else of anything that they have a right to….if it did, it would not be the right thing for me.
I am doing my best to stay strong, safe and sane…doing what I know is right for myself and taking care of me, allows me to help (but not enable) others, and in the long run, is best for them as well. (((hugs))) and my prayers.
Dear Seeing clearly,
We posted over each other with your second post. THANK YOU SO MUCH! I’m doing my best to love that little girl and to give her the care she needed and didn’t have when she was little. She is only a phantom now, but yet, there is much of her left, and inside of each of us there is that same phantom of “little _____” inside us, that we can nurture and love. Jesus said that “unless you become as little children ye shall not enter the kingdom of God” and I think that is what He meant. We need to nurture and love that little child inside each of us, because it is in many ways the best part of us that will ever be! He also said that “anyone who offends one of these little ones…would be better off if a mill stone were tied about his neck and he were tossed into the sea” and I also believe that! The psychopaths, who destroy the inner child in themselves, and then set out to destroy the innocent child in us are the worst “murderers” in the Universe, worse than Hitler and Mao, because they seek to destroy the SOUL not only the body!
Dear Drover:
I whole-heartedly agree with both of your last 2 posts.
I wonder how big my father’s millstone will be? He rushes around being the “helpful Christian” to all and sundry, looking like a jolly good fellow; yet has emotionally gutted all 3 of his own children – and continues to do so every chance he is given. It makes no sense at all. I had hoped that when my youngest brother was born (we were 25 and 23 when mum miraculously fell pregnant on their “retirement” holiday traveling around Oz) that he had been given a second chance to do it right – after all, he had mellowed considerably since our childhood. He did seem to make more of an effort with number 3. Yet, sadly, my 19-year-old baby brother recently poured his heart out to me and guess what? He has all the same same demons that our other brother and I have; all the same self-doubts we had at his age; and the same complete sense of hopelessness in ever being able to reason with, stand up to and face down our bullying, overbearing father. I cried and cried for my brother. (But at least he has us – whereas we had nobody) I don’t presume to judge my father; perhaps God will see something in him that his own flesh and blood cannot. Still, it’s such a sad state of affairs. Our mother is lovely, but a more able enabler was never put on this earth! She truly has no idea that she does it.
As for spaths seeking to destroy our souls – and you are 100% right, that they do – I take comfort in that although they come close to doing so, and although we have all at times felt that their missions have been accomplished on us – we have all risen up and fought back, or we would not be here on LF, sharing and holding out our hands to one another.
The Bible also says, “Fear not those who kill the body, but cannot destroy the soul”. They can try (and they will) but only God has the power to do it – I’d much rather take my chances with Him over a spath any day!