So why is there no psychopath awareness?

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ephemerella wrote:

That makes a lot of sense, I wonder if it is hard for people to see people (whether male or female) with traditionally feminine or childish traits as anything that could be considered dangerous. My ex's first therapist knew about his violent rages as well as all of the other horrible things he did and still treated him like a victim, she also mentioned once that our roles seemed to be reversed in that I acted like the stable unemotional man (I am a female) and he acted like the emotionally unstable female, he is much, much larger than I am and has a violent temper, yet at one of his sessions when he started trying to push my buttons and start something with me and I assertively asked him to stop it (he picks fights and then uses that as an excuse to rage on you), she immediately stepped in and felt the need to protect him! because of his ability to use posture and facial expressions to appear like a child that is being picked on, all I said was "stop doing that!" after he spent at least 10 minutes pushing buttons and she jumps in and says "don't attack him" are you kidding me! did you really not see that what he was doing or saying or that I did nothing more than tell him to stop doing it.. and she really didn't see it, he spent several months in therapy with her trying to find a reason for his actions rather than dealing with helping him to stop his dysfunctional behavior, "oh he seems like such a good guy, he must have been abused lets all pity him", which is what created a lot of his problems to begin with, a mother that pitied him instead of setting boundaries and acting like the friend instead of the Parent.

I can't imagine how hard it would be if I actually were a man and him a woman, how do you protect yourself from the societal bias in that case, especially an autistic or aspie male, that seem like an impossible situation to escape if you don't see what is going on soon enough to escape (before they have you trapped).

ephemerella you have a really interesting way of making seemingly fruity concepts (such as emotional vampires) seem logical, I can see the logic in those ideas but have a hard time expressing them to people that are also overly logical, you should consider either blogging about your theories or maybe writing a book, I personally would love to hear more about your theories.

What is with all the people defending psychopaths here.. WTH! is this a BPD or mental illness forum or is it an autism spectrum forum.. I am starting to think thou doth protest too much when I read them getting all offended that we have a different opinion than they, sort of makes me wonder if they do have someone in their life like my psychotic ex, as he can make you feel like he is the best friend you could ever want, but if you stop giving him what he wants or if you ever get in his way, he will throw you under the bus and not think twice about it, I have seen him break up relationships that got in the way of his friendships with people, and only once did one of his so called friends (victims) even notice that he was behind the breakup.

Exactly.

Actually you are somewhat right. They do hurt themselves but they also hurt others. And they don't care about the people they hurt. They just pretend to care to get out of the consequences.

You bring up some good points. Actually, For every female with autism there are four autistic males. The same female to male ratio with dyslexia, adult stuttering, and tourettes. And borderlines are on the same spectrum as narcissists, sociopaths and histrionics and the disorders often overlap. Those four disorders are Cluster B personality disorders.

Be careful...

OMG This describes some of the BPD traits of that narcissistic, sociopathic woman who targeted me, in a nutshell. She would even call me up and say that she was lost, on the couch and she didn't know who she was! Is the BPD comorbid with sociopathy and narcissism? It seems to me that BPD was so ambiguous, I actually went out and bought a book (layperson) about it. This was, by the way, in-between her sleeping with professors all throughout the UMD Math Department and Washington DC (via Craigslist), with each person thinking she was such a lady, when she was a malevolent, sinister, narcissist with an evil grin that lit up her face whenever she heard about somebody's misery, or when she talked about how corrupt married men (whom she had affairs with) are. She projected herself as a sexy, tender, appealing, emotionally connected, intellectual childlike creature but she would turn into a psychologically abusive backstabber in a flash. She would attack anything or anyone that made her look inferior or questioned her grandiose self image or stories. She got into vicious fights with people at work, like to cover up when she didn't know the answers to things at meetings. She used to say the guys in Guantanamo Bay were "the stupid ones" who got caught, and weren't important. She was from a Muslim country and was a foreign national, and went around looking for married defense scientists in high positions to get into affairs with (like my professor). She really freaked me out. I thought she was a spy or something. But after I learned more about personality disorders, I think she was just really screwed up.

I found her to be, under her pseudo-sophisticated, charming and emotionally intense exterior, to be really curiously stupid and empty. She memorized conversations and wine lists, and things like that, in order to sound interesting. But she had no real ideas or thoughts in her head at all. And person-wise, there was nothing inside, like a creepy empty hole where most people would have their natural personality. She also had different personalities, and it looked like she went into a trance sometimes, and then over the course of a few minutes she would shift from one "person" to another. And she had different life stories and narratives (like the same life but told by different witnesses). I don't think she had multiple personality disorder, tho, because I think she was consciously aware of what she was doing and in control of her changes. Like if the phone rang when one guy on it, she would change voices in a flash. I think she was a great actress... and was talented in that way.

It seems a little clumsy to say "narcissistic sociopathic BPD". But that is what she was... Perhaps the sociopathy (with socially aggressive Machiavellian traits), the BPD and the narcissism were really all separate things that just appeared in that one (horrific) person.

Last edited by ephemerella on 10 Dec 2008, 2:01 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Wow... careful about who?

Seriously, what a rude think to say.

If you didn't know it was rude before, you know so now. Autistic people aren't exception from the humane treatment of others. They must treat others with respect too.

It's always different with those whom we had bad experiences with, but you don't even know my friend and didn't have a personal history with them.

I had horrible experience with a few autistic people. But I'm not telling others to be careful with autistic people. Or that they're stupid, mean, out to hate other autistic people who're not like them. Because there are many more autistic people who're totally different. A lot more than those who happen to be autistic and not very decent persons.

I can understand that it's hard to believe for some people that not all autistic people are horrible, cruel humans due to that they had such experiences with one or a few autistic people.

...aaaah, I'm turning tables here for reasons of reflection.

Try that with inserting borderline instead of autistic.

I can understand that it's hard to believe for some people that not all people with borderline are horrible, cruel humans due to that they had such experiences with one or a few people with borderline pd.

And, both is reality. Same as with Down's, MR, LD (have ignorance towards that every day at work), other pds, bipolar...

And just talk of all those autistic folks with borderline pd! They are here too. Some members of WP have both diagnoses.

They get the hate from both sides.

Okay, don't "be careful." You obviously have great emotional attachment and faith in your friend. Sorry. I didn't intend to insult your intuition or faith in her.

Wow! Thank you. I can't believe you said that. I'm working so hard to improve my verbal skills. I've been writing day and night for about 9 months now, struggling to improve my ability to articulate things about social behavior and people that I was never able to even think about or articulate before. I came under attack when targeted by a sociopath and had no way to defend myself or enlist aid, in part because of my lack of social insight but mostly because I was totally inarticulate. Thank you for the feedback on my verbal skills (rhetorical) self-training effort.

Hey, I think cubedemon started a thread in the "Health" category for us to blog our theories. It is his special interest, too. See his comment above? http://www.wrongplanet.net/postp1910745 ... t=#1910745

I will try to blog some more info there by tmw. Very busy today...

I've bought some books on sociopathy. The only one I've read is Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend by Barbara Oakley . It was really good. It discusses a lot of the neurobiological issues, as well as charting her personal history with her likely sociopathic sister. Another good book , though I had to leave it at home when I went away to school, is The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout.

Sociopathy is a big interest of mine, so I'm glad to see this topic.

yep, they're very much a kind of demon force.




In my most recent sociopath experience (I've known many), she just would not accept boundaries, she delighted in crossing or ignoring boundaries because that's a 'power' play. Ultimately, I just dumped her and have no further contact with her (I warned her that would be the consequence of her failure to respect boundaries). They really don't see that their actions have consequences so it's a bit useless.

Cutting them off from any information is important, as information and gossip are like money to them, they need that stuff to manipulate people and to impress others with their social connectedness. I also told her at one stage that if our relationship was going to continue, I would only treat her the same way she treated me, ie as something to be exploited and used - that seemed to enrage her, they hate it when others play the same game they do! She came close to saying That's not fair!, how laughable.

Interestingly she passed herself off as bipolar/MPD when pressed. She claimed that's what the shrinks told her anyway. I think sociopath is such a negative label that no-one in their right mind would admit to having it (apart from a few bloggers), so they use other dx'es to account for their behaviour, or perhaps shrinks are loathe to give people the label sociopath unless they're criminals. I also wasted time looking into bipolar/MPD to try to understand the creature when really the condition was 'psycho'.

Last edited by Postperson on 10 Dec 2008, 6:51 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I have the second book not the first, which sounds really interesting. My sister has some occasional sociopathic periods. Thanks for the book recommendation

So there is hope, after all. I'm humbled by the knowledge on this thread. I should have come here long ago, instead of spending months and years trying to work through all this stuff piece-by-piece on my own.

The above is awesome. Thanks so much for sharing!

Trying to "work" with them and think you know what they're about is probably a foolish and dangerous thing to do if they're really a sociopath. If they're just unpleasant to you, that's hardly the same thing and is probably not really so dangerous.

Je le doute.

There is little to none of the glibness/superficial charm alternating with hostility and contempt that define the psychopath's relation to the world. Obviously I haven't read it all, but I don't even think psychopaths have the patience to write blogs. They're more likely to break a computer for not doing what they want it to do.

BPD.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qt9SOvILMI8[/youtube]

So is BPD the result of someone who was raised through a very bad enviroment, abused and abandoned? I know not all who went through that will be labelled with BPD but is this the triggering factor?