Understanding the Sociopath: Why antisocials, narcissists and psychopaths break the rules of life

Contents

Copyright and License Notice

Understanding Sociopaths

Why antisocials, narcissists and psychopaths break the rules of life

By Donna Andersen

Copyright  © 2019 Donna Andersen

Published by Anderly Publishing

License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Lovefraud.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019948924

ISBN: 978-1-951347-00-0

Contents

Introduction

10 facts to help you explain your experience with a sociopath

Sociopaths range from sleazy to serial killer

The answer: Why psychopaths do what they do

The eyes of a sociopath

5 reasons why the sociopath’s behavior in your relationship makes no sense

Sociopaths keep changing their demands, keeping you in turmoil

10 translations of ‘I love you,’ when spoken by a sociopath

The truth about sex with sociopaths

Sociopathic deception: A plan or second nature?

How could such a wonderful young man turn into an evil sociopath?

Dark core of personality: what antisocials, psychopaths, sadists and other miscreants share

Sociopaths, information and power  — what you need to know

11 answers to questions about sociopaths

5 reasons why antisocials are great actors

Think of sociopaths as aliens — it may help you understand them

One trait or behavior does not make  a sociopath – look for a pattern of traits and behaviors

Will the sociopath treat the next wife better?

Naming the social predators among us

10 reasons why sociopaths’ lies seem so believable

Explaining evil – the psychopathic agenda

If a sociopath cries at movies, does it mean he has feelings?

9 reasons why sociopaths blow your mind

Why psychopaths don’t change

Sociopaths and double lives

Sociopaths say they want love, but what they really want is supply

7 reasons why sociopaths are hot in bed

Why do psychopaths want to mess with your head?

Sociopaths as chameleons — they become whatever they need to be for their latest scam

Do psychopaths know what they are?

Replacing a sociopath with a borderline personality disordered man

Sociopaths and sex: What you need to know

12 ways sociopaths say, ‘It’s not my fault’ — what have you heard?

Sociopaths and love

Sociopaths change how we look at the world

Overcoming the hype to educate people about sociopaths

Letters to Lovefraud: I am a sociopath

10 things sociopaths want (besides money)

Hastening the demise of sociopaths

Sociopaths keep the charade going for a while

Sociopaths explain their own words

Why do psychopaths lie?

Letter from a sociopath

The Marriage Masks: Three types of  sociopathic relationships

Do sociopaths know what they are?

How disordered motivation explains psychopathic behavior

The philosophy of a sociopath

The flaw in viewing sociopaths through normal eyes

Sociopaths and sex: neither straight nor gay

Most cheaters are amateurs; sociopaths are professionals

What is a sociopath feeling?

Why sociopaths succeed: Style matters more than substance

10 reasons why psychopaths get away with it

Why sociopaths cheat

Letter to Lovefraud: Is his goal to break me?

The sociopathic MO in three easy steps

With sociopaths, words and actions can both be lies

Sociopaths change our beliefs about being human

About the author

Introduction

Imarried a con man. James Alwyn Montgomery, my ex-husband, took $227,000 from me. He cheated with at least six different women during our two-and-a-half-year involvement. He had a child with one of those women, and then, 10 days after I left him, he married the mother of the child. It was the second time he committed bigamy.

I certainly didn’t know all of this was going to happen when I met him. Montgomery swept me off my feet and showered me with affection. He told me I was the woman he’d been waiting for all his life. Together, he promised, we’d make his entrepreneurial dreams come true, and we’d soon be living in the lap of luxury.

When everything fell apart, and I discovered the extent of his lies and deception, my head was spinning. I simply could not understand his behavior. I asked my therapist, What kind of person does this?

He sounds like a sociopath, she said.

A sociopath? What was that?

Like most of us, I’d heard the word, but didn’t really understand what it meant. So I started researching. The first book I read was, Without Conscience — The disturbing world of the psychopaths around us, by Robert Hare, Ph.D. The people Hare described sounded much like my ex — except for the fact that most of them were convicted criminals. James Montgomery, as far as I knew, had never spent time in prison.

Most of the research on people who have exploitative personality disorders — antisocial, narcissistic, borderline, histrionic or psychopathic — is done on two groups of people: prisoners and college students. Why? Because those are the populations that researchers can access.

People who have antisocial, narcissistic or psychopathic personality disorders rarely seek therapy, so psychology researchers have few opportunities to gather clinical data on them. As a result, little information is available on how people with these disorders behave in the community, which means outside of prison or mental institutions.

Because of my experience, I launched Lovefraud.com in 2005. Since then, I’ve been able to gather information from thousands of people who came to believe that their romantic partners, family members, friends or acquaintances were disordered. More than 10,000 people have shared their stories or completed Lovefraud’s online surveys.

On Lovefraud.com, I refer to these disordered individuals collectively as sociopaths. When psychologist George E. Partridge coined the term in 1930, he suggested using it to describe, anything deviated or pathological in social relations. He wanted sociopathy to describe a pathological condition in which people are maladjusted in their relations with others and society, and motivated towards antisocial behavior. This is how I use the word on Lovefraud — sociopathy is an umbrella term that encompasses the multiple official diagnoses of antisocial, narcissistic, borderline and histrionic personality disorders, and psychopathy.

Best of the Lovefraud Blog Series

Lovefraud.com now offers thousands of articles. It’s great information, but because it’s spread out over years of blog archives, the information is not always easy to find. To make it more accessible, I’ve collected, organized and updated the articles into this Best of the Lovefraud Blog series of books:

Understanding the Sociopath

Seduced by a Sociopath

Dealing with Sociopaths

Recovery from a Sociopath

Understanding Sociopaths explains the millions of exploiters who live among us, blending easily in our society. You’ll learn that yes, they truly do exist. You’ll learn how they typically behave. My hope is that with this information, you can spot them and get them out of your life — before too much damage is done.

10 facts to help you explain

your experience with a sociopath

The biggest reason why we get tangled up with sociopaths is that we don’t know they exist. We don’t know they live among us, so we don’t watch out for them, so we get in trouble.

Then, when we try to tell our friends and families what happened, they have no idea what we’re talking about — because they don’t know sociopaths exist either. So on top of the devastation we endure from the sociopath, when we turn to others for support, we are not understood or even believed.

If you’re trying to explain your experience with a sociopath, here are some facts to help you put your story in context:

1. Approximately 30 million people in the United States — 12% of women and 16% of men — could be diagnosed with exploitative personality disorders. The specific diagnoses are antisocial, narcissistic, borderline or histrionic personality disorder, or psychopathy. (For convenience, Lovefraud refers to them collectively as sociopaths.)

2. Despite what you see in the media and movies, sociopaths and psychopaths are not all serial killers. Most of them never kill anyone — in fact, many are never even convicted of any crimes.

3. Sociopaths can be found in all demographic groups — male, female, old, young, rich, poor, all nationalities, all races, all professions. They are everywhere.

4. Sociopaths look just like the rest of us — some are handsome, some are homely. They do not look like they’re crazy. They easily blend into society.

5. Although most people understand the word antisocial to mean someone is a loner with no social skills, people who have antisocial personality disorder are often friendly, charming, gregarious and fun. The mental health field chose bad terminology — no wonder we’re all confused.

6. Sociopaths are skilled liars. They are so good at deception and manipulation that anyone can fall for their lies. They can fool cops and psychologists, so the rest of us don’t have a chance.

7. Sociopaths do not have the ability to love — this is the core of the disorder. They literally do not feel love the way the rest of us do, in that they will never put the welfare of someone else before their own — not even the welfare of their children. If they do appear concerned about your welfare, it is an act so that they can exploit you later.

8. Sociopaths feel entitled to get what they want, when they want it and how they want it. Sociopaths also have no empathy and no conscience. Taken together, this means they will do absolutely anything to get what they want, and don’t care whom they hurt in the process.

9. A key way that sociopaths manipulate others is by trying to make you feel sorry for them. They tell sad stories about their problems and the people who hurt them, all with the objective of convincing you to give them what they want.

10. Antisocials and psychopaths are profoundly different from the rest of us. They love being the puppet master, and are motivated by power and control. But because of the way most of us have grown up, believing that we’re all created equal and there’s good in everyone, we are susceptible to their deceit and manipulation.

Sociopaths range from

sleazy to serial killer

Lovefraud received the following email from a reader whom we’ll call Jason.

My best friend of 20 years I believe is a sociopath. It’s very sad because you want to give a person the benefit of the doubt, but after awhile it becomes apparent. He displays all the characteristics of the sociopath. I’m smart, but I can’t convince myself with 100% certainty that he’s a sociopath (maybe most people can’t.) It’s hard to reconcile with it. Is there any advice you can give me?

Yes, Jason. First I’ll give the somewhat easy explanation; then I’ll give the more technical explanation.

Cluster of traits and behaviors

The first thing to understand is that sociopaths are not all the same. This disorder encompasses a cluster of traits and behaviors. Any particular individual can have any of the traits and behaviors to greater or lesser degrees. Therefore, some sociopaths are definitely worse than others. They can range from sleazy to serial killer.

In fact, it’s often the low- to mid-level sociopaths who are most difficult to identify. Maybe they aren’t as grandiose as others. Maybe they sometimes seem to have empathy. Maybe they aren’t always aggressive. So they seem to have many of the negative traits, but not all of them — and you wonder if they really are sociopaths.

Professionals do not agree

Making matters even more complicated, mental health professionals do not agree on what to call these disordered individuals, and how they should be diagnosed. In fact, the word sociopath is no longer used as a clinical diagnosis.

Lovefraud, however, has proposed using the word sociopath as a general umbrella term to describe people who live their lives by exploiting others. This would include people who are clinically diagnosed as having antisocial, narcissistic, borderline or histrionic personality disorders, or psychopathy.

Psychopathy Checklist Revised

The best way to evaluate someone’s degree of psychopathy, one of the disorders, is the Psychopathy Checklist Revised (PCL-R), developed by Dr. Robert Hare. This is a formal evaluation that should only be done by a trained clinician.

The evaluation is based on a set of 20 traits and behaviors. They are:

Antisocial behavior

Need for stimulation and proneness to boredom

Parasitic lifestyle

Poor behavioral control

Sexual promiscuity

Lack of realistic long-term goals

Impulsivity

Irresponsibility

Early behavior problems

Juvenile delinquency

Parole or probation violations

Emotional/interpersonal traits

Glibness and superficial charm

Grandiose sense of self-worth

Pathological lying

Conning and manipulativeness

Lack of remorse or guilt

Shallow affect

Callousness and lack of empathy

Failure to accept responsibility for own actions

Other factors

Committing a wide variety of crimes

Having many short-term marital relationships

The clinician determines the degree to which an individual exhibits each trait, giving a score of 0, 1, or 2.

0 — the trait is not present

1 — the trait is somewhat present

2 — the trait is a reasonably good match

The maximum score on the PCL-R is 40, meaning the person scored 2 on every item. Someone who scores 40 is really, really disordered. The average person, who is not disordered, scores around 4.

A psychopath

Dr. Hare actually says no one should be called a psychopath. Hare prefers to say, This person scored (the number) on the PCL-R.

Why? Because although most experts say that anyone who scores 30 or above is a psychopath, this dividing line is somewhat arbitrary.

What about someone who scores 18? Or 25? This person is far nastier than an average person who scores 4, but is not considered to be a psychopath.

Another researcher, Dr. Reid Meloy, addressed this issue by clarifying degrees of disturbance. Here’s how he rates different PCL-R scores:

10-19 — mild psychopathic disturbance

20-29 — moderate psychopathic disturbance

30-39 — severe psychopathic disturbance

Feeling exploited

As you can see, it is difficult to say precisely if someone is a psychopath or a sociopath. But about the only time that it’s important to diagnose someone with precision is during a court trial.