In this post I discuss psychopaths and abuse. As with most of my posts, there are pertinent videos on the subject as well as a further reading section with some professional articles. If you are trying to recover from psychopathic abuse there are also some articles I recommend in bold type.
Since this blog is about studies in abuse topics, particularly when it comes to narcissistic abuse and abuse by alcoholics, I thought I should cover psychopaths briefly because they tend to be the most abusive humans on the planet, they tend to have addictions like alcoholism, and they do have a lot in common with narcissists. Narcissists are still plenty dangerous and often cause trauma to those around them, but psychopaths carry with them even more danger because of how their minds, nervous systems and emotions function (they are different from most of ours).
So, how do I tell if someone is a psychopath instead of a narcissist?
It is very hard to tell the difference between narcissists and psychopaths because psychopaths have the traits of Narcissistic Personality Disorder, but not all narcissists are psychopathic.
But there are some differences.
Here is the clinical definition of a psychopath: click here.
As you can see they lump psychopaths in with those who have Antisocial Personality Disorder.
However, most domestic violence therapists and counselors distinguish abusers in categories that aren't in the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) like "malignant narcissist" and "vulnerable narcissist", and even "sociopath" versus "psychopath". Narcissists fall under the category of "Narcissistic Personality Disorder" even though the "vulnerable narcissist" acts very different from the "grandiose narcissist". The DSM is just a diagnostic manual and doesn't entirely help survivors of abuse tell the difference between people who "can be dangerous" from people who are "likely to be dangerous".
Professor and clinical psychologist, Ramani Durvasula, characterizes the difference between sociopaths from psychopaths this way:
"Psychopaths are born, and sociopaths are made."
In other words, psychopaths will act a lot like sociopaths as young children (with some differences) whereas sociopaths will grow into the disorder.
Narcissists and sociopaths mostly come from homes that are characterized by inconsistent parenting: parents who are "splitting" (the psychology term of "splitting" that is: the link takes you to my post about that), or abusive parenting (the link takes you to my post about that), or neglectful parenting (parents who are not focused on childcare, child nurturance and child safety, or are abandoning or preoccupied in some way), or substance-addicted parents (alcohol or drugs), or who have a parent who has Borderline Personality Disorder, Histrionic Personality Disorder, Narcissistic Personality Disorder or Antisocial Personality Disorder. Sometimes parents with Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder can cause trauma to their children because of their inability to accept different methods for completing tasks and their reactions towards their children for not completing tasks as expected. There are other ways parents can be inconsistent, but these are the big ones that cause PTSD in a young child.
The way that inconsistent parenting is interpreted in a child's world is that the child does not feel consistently loved or cared about, or safe. If the inconsistency never lets up it manifests in the child as anxiety and stress. With enough stress and anxiety over time, other symptoms begin to develop that can include sleeplessness, nightmares, an inability to focus, depression, withdrawal from social activities, easily frightened, jumpiness and jitters, headaches, stomach upset, stomach aches, muscle aches, weight issues (not eating enough, or eating too much), heart issues, and hypervigilance. In severe cases, it can cause life threatening symptoms, dissociation, and arrest brain development in a child.
Most narcissists and sociopaths have a rarer form of PTSD that manifests as aggression towards others, insistence on the domination of other human beings, and acting superior with hypersensitivity to criticism (even though most of them dish out criticism ad nauseum). They also show emotional dysregulation consistently when they feel criticized or their superiority is being challenged manifesting as rage or vindictiveness (this is what sets them apart from others who suffer from PTSD). More about that in a future post.
Psychopaths, on the other hand, can grow up in consistently loving, consistently safe, normal environments without any of the above factors. They are born without empathy, without a range of emotional responses, including the emotions of shame, sadness, joy, regret, guilt or feelings of accountability. They also don't experience fear or anxiety in stressful situations most of the time. Psychopaths as a whole do not develop PTSD and are not prone to PTSD. More about that later in the post.
Most children begin to grow out of narcissism at age 10 and then can revisit it in varying degrees in teenage years, and finally grow out of it entirely in their early twenties by entering "the age of accountability." Narcissists and sociopaths seem to be stuck at an emotional age of 6 - 10 and never make it to "the age of accountability". That is where the arrested development takes place in their version of PTSD. They make use of lies, blaming and gaslighting to avoid accountability for their actions and words.
Psychopaths also never grow into "the age of accountability", but their minds and emotions were never built for it in the first place. It's not like they were stunted in the growing process. It is largely an inherited disorder.
Children with ADHD can also develop "conduct disorder" too, the latter being the precursor to Antisocial Personality Disorder (and primary psychopathy), however there has also been controversy that too many children are being over-diagnosed with ADHD (one in ten in the present day). There are many other disorders that overlap with a few of the "symptoms" of ADHD including bipolar disorder (mood swings, risk taking, hyperactivity, and others), PTSD (daydreaming, forgetfulness, losing things because of forgetfulness, loss of focus, learning disabilities) and other disorders, so ADHD has to be diagnosed carefully so as not to rule out other disorders, especially PTSD as that can sometimes point to trauma and child abuse (a more external cause).
Like narcissists and sociopaths, psychopaths also make use of lies, blaming and gaslighting in their dealings with other people. So they have more in common with narcissists and sociopaths than not, although they lie for many more reasons and conveniences than narcissists and sociopaths do. In fact, it is not uncommon for them to be lying all of the time, in every communication, and at every opportunity, for instance.
The one personal quality that psychopaths have that narcissists don't is that they feel no remorse for hurting other people, none. These are people who cannot feel guilt, and in fact they feel superior to, and sorry for, people who do feel guilt. And the more you try to hold them accountable, the more manipulative and forceful they will become.
Psychopaths are "reward driven" rather than "narcissistic supply driven" (narcissists are more focused on manipulating other people to their way of thinking in ever-more sophisticated ways than just getting a reward at all costs).
Normalcy is indicated by abilities to be "compromise driven" and "morality and ethics driven". With narcissists, sociopaths and psychopaths, you will not be able to obtain that.
Here are some other traits that set psychopaths apart from narcissists and also those of us who have normal constitutions.
THERE ARE TWO KINDS OF PSYCHOPATHY
According to Takahiro Osumi and Hideki Ohira (in the article, Selective Fair Behavior as a Function of Psychopathic Traits in a Subclinical Population), there are
... two psychopathic traits: primary and secondary psychopathy. Primary psychopathy is characterized by callousness, shallow affect, manipulation, and superficial charm. In contrast, secondary psychopathy is associated with impulsivity and lack of long-term goals, and is related to hostile behavior ...The graphics:
PSYCHOPATHS HAVE DIFFERENT AUTONOMIC NERVOUS SYSTEMS
For an explanation on what an autonomic nervous system is, you can go the Wikipedia article about it.
In that article you will find a sub-category that discusses the sympathetic nervous system, which also takes you to a link, the entire article on the sympathetic nervous system.
The important thing to take away from that article is:
Messages (sympathetic nerve fibers - my insert) travel through the sympathetic nervous system in a bi-directional flow. Efferent messages can trigger changes in different parts of the body simultaneously. For example, the sympathetic nervous system can accelerate heart rate; widen bronchial passages; decrease motility (movement) of the large intestine; constrict blood vessels; increase peristalsis in the oesophagus; cause pupillary dilation, piloerection (goose bumps) and perspiration (sweating); and raise blood pressure. One exception is with certain blood vessels such as those in the cerebral and coronary arteries, which dilate (rather than constrict) with an increase in sympathetic tone.This happens when we feel threatened, frightened and stressed about by what we perceive as imminent danger, and often when we know we are accountable for some mistake or wrong.
For instance, let us say that it is 1:30 in the morning and you are on a back country road with no traffic. You feel a little brazen and enlivened by the successful evening you have had at a party and you decide to drive 20 miles an hour over the speed limit. You figure there will not be any police about because it is an obscure country road and you let your guard down. But ... any of the following two situations happen:
1. a police officer pulls you over:
normal reaction: your heart races, your muscles tense, you feel shame at breaking the rules, you feel disappointed in yourself, you feel you deserved the speeding ticket. You promise not to do it again, hoping you won't slip up again.
narcissistic reaction: your heart races, you feel shame over being caught (you felt that getting caught was the kind of trouble other people got into and that you conquered), you lie to the police officer that you were being chased by a madman. The policeman doesn't buy your story as he sees no other car in the vicinity, and you become enraged at the police officer for not considering your story. You try to convince him that you are a victim! The officer gives you a ticket anyway and tells you to bring it up with the District Attorney if you want to fight it, that he is just doing his job. The District Attorney is willing to lower the charge to $50.00 instead of the initial $200.00 charge of the ticket. You become enraged at the District Attorney for having to pay $50.00 when you were being chased by a lunatic (forgetting that being chased was a lie you made up to avoid culpability).
psychopathic reaction: you think about a speed chase to get out of pulling over and hope this weeny, bumbling policeman gets into a crash. But to be realistic, you reason that you can talk yourself out of it. What an annoyance, having to sit at the side of the road cramping your style while this lowly being writes out a traffic ticket! Just look at him! He thinks he's tough! You could take him out right then and there with your own knuckles! You wouldn't even need a pistol, though a pistol would do the job. You fantasize about this tough-acting policeman being wimpy by being terrorized and slowly tortured by you. In your mind, you can see his blood running into the ditch on the side of the road. You just want to scare the hell out of him so he won't mess with you again. The police officer gives you a speeding ticket and you tell the officer in a low voice with your eyes slit that he better not try this again if he knows what is good for him. "You threatened me! It is against the law to threaten a police officer!" he shouts, appearing highly agitated. You are about to do something to him as his emotions are getting stupidly out of control, but then you realize that you can get out of this another way: your elderly mother keeps money in a jar in the kitchen and you'll just steal the money from her to pay off the parking ticket. You are going to be damned if you are going to be made accountable by inferior people like your mother and this officer. So you tell the officer to calm down and not make a big deal of it, that you don't mean it, even though you do. You slit your eyes at him again so that he gets some sort of message not to mess with you. As you drive away, you think about hunting down where he lives, where his family lives, where his kids go to school, if he has pets. You want to do something: if it wasn't for cops and the proliferation of cops, the world would be a lot better place for you, you think ...
2. you crash the car on a nasty turn that you didn't see coming:
normal reaction: after you have crashed, your heart races, your mind and body are so overtaken with fear, anxiety and adrenalin that you can barely move, you have the sensation that your head is buzzing, and you are shaking uncontrollably from head to foot as you sit there and try to gather your senses. You can't seem to gather your senses. You feel like you are in shock. But you try to calm yourself. It works for a few seconds, and then you try again. You have to get this seatbelt off of you.
Once the seatbelt is off and you get out of the car, you feel like you should have known better. The speed limit was set for a reason, and one of them was this nasty turn. You shake your head. "How could I have been so stupid! I've ruined a good time with this! And, 'oh, no!' ... I'm going to have to explain this, go to the insurance agency, buy a new car, maybe go to the hospital, though nothing hurts." And maybe that's the blessing: your life is still intact. "But why did I have to be so dumb!" As you start to calm down, the reality of the situation comes into focus, and slowly you are able to shake the feelings, the nerves, the trauma enough to try to come back into a state of focusing on what needs to be done to solve the situation of being stuck out in the country in the pitch black with your car wrecked.
You wait until you stop shaking to hold the phone and call for help ...
narcissistic reaction: after you have crashed, your heart races too, and you also experience fear to the point of shaking, but there is also some rage, someone to blame for the state you are in. Eventually as you sit there shaking, the rage overtakes the fear and you start blaming your husband: if he had bought better tires, the car would never have slipped off the road like that. If the headlights were cleaned to perfection, you would have been able to see the turn coming up. If he had warned you that this road had a lot of twists, you would never have taken it. He is the one who put you in grave danger. This whole accident is his fault!
You call the ambulance, the police and the local towing company.
When the ambulance arrives, you tell them you are sore everywhere, and especially in your neck, but in reality your neck only hurts a tiny bit. But you want the best of care, and the most attention you can get, so you exaggerate injuries and pain.
When the police arrive, you tell them that if your husband had done x,y and z, the car would have not crashed. The car was defective in some way. Now you will have to fix it, and get your wounds attended to at the hospital, and "it's all too much!" You have to exaggerate so that the police will attend to you and pay attention to you. However, you don't want them to call you "lady". They need to look at you as though you are a close friend or relative, someone they care about. So you go on about each phantom wound and all of the details about your car crash.
When the local towing company comes, you tell them how to handle the wreckage. They don't seem to be doing it right because tow truck guys aren't as bright as "brilliant narcissists", so you try to micro-manage the situation. They call you "lady" too in the most condescending way. This makes you feel enraged too. And while they laugh and shake their heads, you yell, "How dare you! Who do you think is paying you for being laughed at! I just endured the worst car accident of my life", ("Oops, there was that worse one in Italy, but they won't know the difference", thinks the narcissist), "and all you can do is laugh at me! You should be ashamed! Really, really ashamed! If you think I'm going to pay you for laughing at me, you have another thing coming..."
When you arrive at the hospital, you greatly exaggerate where it hurts. But they can't find anything wrong. And your husband needs to be a lot more concerned than how he is behaving ...
When you get home, you really give it to your husband. You yell at him for at least forty five minutes about all of the things he has done to the car, and how he has done wrong by you in general, until he is frustrated, worn out and worn down. After you see how despondent he is, you give him a little reward: a kiss.
psychopathic reaction: after you have crashed, you immediately find a way to get yourself out of the car. You are out of it in a matter of seconds. You are cool as a cucumber: "Well, I made it out of a car crash! What do you know?" You feel elated and think you can make it out of any car crash. It's like you are bullet proof. You feel you are a superior person who can survive the kind of car crashes that most people can't. You laugh about the wrecked car. "Are you all right, sweetheart?" you say to the car and laugh. You know that it's totaled. Good! You need a new one anyway. Perfect opportunity to get one that can steer better than this one! But then some resentment sinks in: "Damn car! Who makes things like this!" you think. Someone inferior obviously! So then after chuckling a little, you might kick the car in a rage. You smash the headlights out too and throw the muffler and tail pipe out behind the car. You hope that the mechanic will never think of fixing it, and you don't like the idea of someone else making money from the parts. If anyone should get money from the parts, you feel it has to be you.
You might consider getting all of the pertinent information out of it and burning it if you have wrecked a lot of cars and don't want anyone to know that you wrecked this one too.
But let's say that you can't burn it. You don't have the wherewithal to set it on fire. You don't even have a match. You call your brother up and ask him to give you a lift. You tell him that you don't want to deal with it, and that you need him to deal with it for you. But he has a million excuses (he doesn't want to get involved in any more of your schemes, so he uses excuses). All of his excuses make you more and more angry. You tell him that there will be a big reward if he will just deal with the accident. That doesn't seem to make a difference. Then you start threatening him, and that doesn't make a difference either. So then he says he has to go as soon as you start with the threats, that he'd help you, but can't, and he suggests your new wife should deal with it. "Just give her a call. Just do it," he says while he hangs up.
You don't really want her to get involved because you don't want to lose your luck too fast, but there is no one else, so you call her.
This is your sixth wife, but she doesn't know it. She only knows about two others. You have only been married for six months and because the relationship has been so short, you feel you can easily talk her into taking care of this mess for you.
When she gets to your location, you try to convince her that when she talks to the authorities, she needs to convince them that she was driving the car instead of you. You promise her things if only she will do it. "Why would you want me to lie for you? What is going on?" she asks. You tell her to calm down, that you are badly hurt, even though you aren't, that you just need her to take care of the whole thing. The two of you argue a lot that people know you left the party with the car you crashed, which is infuriating (she should just listen to what you are saying), but you play on her sympathies to get what you want. She's a sucker for love and romance.
When she is driving you both back home, you ask her drop you off at the hospital so that you can get checked out, and you feign limping as you go through the hospital doors, but as soon as she pulls the car away, you go to an all-night strip club, you scr#w one of the girls, and play some poker with your pals to see if you can make a few extra bucks.
Not only does "the wife" take "the rap" grudgingly, you do a great deal of verbal and psychological gymnastics and games to get her to pay for a new car for you too. You know that if she won't do exactly what you tell her to do, you will have no trouble punishing her and making her pay in some way for any aberrations she exhibits from your commands, because you have done it before with all of your other wives with enough success until you could exchange them for another wife, but for now you are "off the hook".
These are just "instances" of how different personality disordered people "predictably" act when they have a confrontation with the police, or when they total a car from driving too fast. It also shows how the sympathetic nervous system works for each. In at least 95 percent of the population in the USA, they will exhibit the "normal" responses to getting pulled over by the police and getting into a car accident from speeding.
The people with "normal" responses will learn a lot from their mistakes.
Narcissists won't because they will put the blame on anyone but themselves. They will still speed when it suits their agenda or when they feel like it because they reason it can always be someone else's fault. And they will still find someone else to blame if "it gets wrecked again."
Psychopaths won't learn anything because they will get others to take full responsibility for everything having to do with the accident, the car and the aftermath of the wreckage, including the financial responsibility most of the time.
Both narcissists and psychopaths believe all people are just like them, only not as intelligent. They both use projection to describe others. In terms of entertaining the possibility that all others are just like them, it is the farthest thing from the truth. Neither one of these types have any idea of what is really going on with people without Cluster B traits because their scope of understanding is limited to a dominant/submissive kind of relationship for narcissists and a predator/prey kind of relationship for psychopaths.
Both are terrible at reading others successfully, and even poorer at self reflection. Narcissists are so focused on what "other people are doing wrong" that it serves as a way to avoid looking into their own mistakes, and psychopaths could care less what other people do right or wrong so long as what others do serves their purposes, with a bit of arm-twisting, threats and coercion.
Now it does get tricky. Because there are narcissists with sociopathic traits (the malignant narcissists), and there are two kinds of sociopaths, one called a "functional sociopath" and the other not so functional (the dysfunctional sociopath gets quite a bit more press than the functional one). They have slightly different reactions to what I have written in terms of the two kinds of scenes (the cop, and the car wreck), and perhaps I can devote a post to explaining the differences. But for now, I think it is good to know the differences between your run-of-the-mill narcissists from your run-of-the-mill psychopaths, and also to know that these kinds of people do exist. In the USA people with these personality disorders are becoming quite a bit more prevalent than they used to be, and one of the first signs you might run into one of these characters is by recognizing coercive control, which is thankfully becoming illegal in bits, backslides and starts in the USA and well underway in Great Britain (as a way to stem the tide of child abuse cases and partner abuse).
I have yet to do a post on coercive control, but the bold highlighted text above will take you to a brief definition.
PSYCHOPATHS THRIVE IN TOXIC WORK ENVIRONMENTS
AND ABUSIVE FAMILY ENVIRONMENTS
Because psychopaths have such different sympathetic nervous systems, toxic work environments and toxic family environments are like playing a game of chess for them. They make a move. You make a counter move, but when it is the psychopath's turn to play, he makes a move in such a way that it gets you to believe that you are winning the game. Then he goes in for the kill.
Since they are mostly impervious to developing PTSD, they can stay in the environments for a long time until they get the reward that they want. Remember: everything is about "the reward" for psychopaths to the point where nothing else matters. They sacrifice everything for it (morals, ethics, playing fair, whether they hurt others, or get rid of others through unscrupulous means, and nothing is sacred except the reward itself).
Normal people in abusive toxic environments get traumatized eventually, showing symptoms of depression and sleeplessness (at the very least; there are also a myriad of serious physical symptoms associated with PTSD), and they will leave the rewards behind to find a better life. In fact, usually by the time that PTSD symptoms arise, they will do just about anything to get out of these environments. Psychopaths will lie to stay in these environments, and normal folks will lie to get out of them (what we refer to as "white lies": "Oh, you're all good workers; I just had to move on" - because most normal folks do not want to hurt anyone ... however if the environments are too toxic, they sometimes become crusaders, or part of suicide statistics, or they pursue legal avenues). Before the normal folks leave, however, they will try a number of things first including the fawn, fight, freeze, flight responses (and usually in that order). Typically really toxic environments with psychopaths in it, only the flight response truly works at reducing symptoms and debilitating trauma responses, and moving beyond the environment, the experience and the psychopath's manipulations, threats and lies.
The "normal" sympathetic nervous system is like a five alarm fire in toxic environments and around abusive people. It is especially like that if you are a scapegoat of a bad work environment or family environment. It is usually a smattering of symptoms that makes normal people feel disabled, and eventually makes them quit. They don't want to deal with unethical people, hypocrites, people who are evil, people who can't own up to mistakes or bad behavior, or even people who only care about rewards. The sacrifice of ethics for rewards becomes disgusting to them. If you notice, for most court judges it does too.
It becomes more of a survival strategy: the victim is able to survive and thrive better without the toxic work situation or without the toxic family situation. In the reading section at the bottom of the page, there are several professional articles that go into how vulnerable you are to predatory-like victimization in future situations. It turns out to be quite a lot. In work or family environments where victimizing is going on, the cues of depression that you are experiencing can cue other predators as an "already-made, and therefor easy victim" (research in those posts below back this).
It is why victims ultimately, after trying a number of strategies, leave a toxic environment. They need to get rid of their "victim auras", or "depression gaits" as one researcher suggests (it is in the further reading section below). One way to do that is to get rid of situations that are rife with victimization because if you don't feel like a victim, your chances of not becoming another victim are going to be higher. You work on healing to decrease your vulnerabilities to other predators. The best way to reduce your vulnerability is to not "feel" or "look like" prey and you can't do that by keeping any present predators in your life. First you have to keep past offenders away from you and go dark on them: in other words, you don't feed them information about yourself, and they stay out of your life.
Once you are healed, find ways to keep any past predators from effecting your present life. Some therapists in the domestic violence field and trauma fields are adept at giving lessons and workshops in assuming a confident purposeful gait, types of communication that will deter past, present and future predators, and types of boundaries and stances that will not allow people to dominate you (vulnerability to domination is one of the first vulnerabilities to exorcise out of you and the one that psychopaths latch on to first).
Getting out of the "victim mentality" can set you up to not be a "victim" in other ways too: of poverty, of bad jobs, of bad bosses, of bad co-workers, of bad partnerships, of depression, of unempathetic people. If you fake confidence to get where you need to be, "faking it" becomes "making it", and if you know how entertainers deal with stage fright, you know that it is possible.
Predators, on the other hand, will continue to maintain their objectives within the toxic family and workplace by getting rid of everyone that stands in the way of their "reward objectives", and if that means crime and bullying with some fast-talking, they will do it.
Toxic work and family environments do not deal with victimization (they typically neglect allegations): sexual harassment, sexual assault, threats, violence, bullying, you name it. If they are exceptionally toxic environments, they give perpetrators and psychopaths promotions.
For instance, a normal person with a normal sympathetic nervous system won't go out and rape a co-worker to traumatize them and get them out of the work place, but the psychopath (and sociopath) will either entertain the idea, or act on it, or make elaborate plans to do it (Machiavellianism) and then do everything in their power to put the blame on their victim or on someone else, and not to get caught up in the consequences of the legal system.
Playing chess games with the law is also the main way that psychopaths try to "game the system" to keep getting rewards without consequences for their actions.
Everything to do with laws is also "cat and mouse". Psychopaths are even likely, at some point, to intentionally provoke law enforcement as in the example of the cop pulling over the speeding car.
When you can't trust a "safe" work or family environment, it is not a situation of "reward" anyway. Environments that adopt victimizing tend to get worse for victims, and the rewards of membership become lessened. That is because when nothing is done about the victimization, it sends a message to the perpetrator or perpetrators that they can continue on their journey or victimization. It becomes an environment of further victimization, period. It's a shaky, collapsing environment at that point.
I think we all know of one business and one family where psychopaths are running the show.
Narcissists also care about the rewards quite a bit more than normal folks, and because they are so arrogant they will stay in the game with a psychopath thinking they will win. Of course, the narcissist may not know they are dealing with a psychopath because they do not read people very well beyond black and white thinking. But even a narcissist is no match for a psychopath in the end. Psychopaths have no regrets about driving people out of a business or family, or stealing from it, or gutting it for their own purposes, taking advantage of others including narcissists who may be lecturing them on how to "play nice", trying to make them "walk on eggshells" or attempting guilt trips (because psychopaths aren't about to play nice or let the narcissist dominate, even if they pretend to as part of the chess game). They won't care if they hurt the narcissist, betray them or lie to them either.
However, your run-of-the-mill narcissists may have regrets for being unfair or lying about your integrity, especially if they lose you over it, or you are believed for your side of the story of the break-up, as you had become such an easy source for narcissistic supply or blame at one time, and they miss that.
Psychopaths on the other hand rarely miss anyone, including their targets, unless re-victimization is part of their goal for more rewards. They leave a path of destruction behind, including people they used to know, and hop from one "convenient relationship" to another to take advantage of whoever and whatever they can. With no "symptoms" or "self reflection" or "empathy" and "no regrets" over their own actions, they can go far into "the dark side". This is especially true if no one ever stops them, and they keep alluding culpability, or if they become darlings of these toxic environments.
I haven't talked all that much about sociopaths, but they are somewhere inbetween a narcissist and a psychopath. As I said earlier in the post, the way a parent can "make a sociopath" (sociopaths are made, and they are often brought up by toxic parents - more about that in future posts) is to ignore signs that a child is violent, selfish, unable to compromise, is always "me first", and so on. They will act quite a bit like psychopaths later on in terms of getting rid of the competition to get the rewards of a business or family. They will grow into "reward seekers at all costs" just like the psychopath. If there are never consequences for bad behavior in childhood, and they are never taught by their parent to share, to compromise, to be sensitive to others' feelings, to self reflect and not blame, and to not just be out for rewards, they are in danger of narcissistic or sociopathic behaviors.
If you are parents and want to avoid bringing up a little sociopath, down-play reward seeking, pay special attention to how much you are teaching them in terms of lessons of compromise, talking things out with siblings, empathy lessons with siblings, making sure they understand every family member matters, that there has to be equitable distribution of resources and parental love among all siblings. If you, instead, pit members against each other, you will later have a nightmare on your hands. Signs of conduct disorder (which are usually a precursor to becoming a sociopath) include bullying and cruelty and other aggressive behaviors, stealing or breaking personal property, being deceitful, breaking rules of conduct, little remorse for hurting others, boasting, cheating on tests at school, and as I said, too focused on rewards. The killing of small or helpless animals for boys seems to be somewhat common among children with conduct disorder. Females with conduct disorder typically break other people's property.
Males tend to develop conduct disorder and Antisocial Personality Disorder much more than females.
But what is most important than the typical "traits" of conduct disorder, is how the child relates to others. Does he lack empathy? Does he make fun of others? Does he use other people? Does he act "bossy"? Is he a terrible listener? Does he talk down to others? Is he insulting others? Is there a tendency to engage in a lot of schadenfreude (the misfortune of others)? Does he victimize others? Does he engage in physical abuse? Does he act entitled? Does he believe he is more deserving than his peers or siblings? Is he in "team playing mode" or is he trying to dominate others? Does he tell his peers or siblings what to do? Does he play mean-spirited tricks on others or on his siblings? Is he arrogant and bombastic? Is he power-hungry? Does he seem to act happy when the emotional state of his siblings are such that they are displaying sadness or depression?
These are all bad signs as they show a lack of empathy.
Is he always talking about his successes, or does he talk about both his successes and failures in equal proportion? Talking only about successes and leaving out mistakes or failures is a sign of arrogance, and a sign that he is adopting an inauthentic self.
Does he put others down while he aggrandizes himself? This kind of grandiosity is a bad sign and a precursor to Antisocial Personality Disorder.
And most of all, is he allowed to get away with all of these behaviors?
If you try to start these lessons after childhood, and especially after teenage years it will fail. It is too late by then. Like narcissists, sociopaths don't change, and they are even quite a bit less likely to change than narcissists. Trying to teach an adult sociopath will mean the sociopath will be playing head games with you instead, out-psyching you, out-maneuvering you in addition to a lot of deceit.
If he is over-exposed while growing up to the influence of a deceitful parent, grandparent or other caregiver, he will learn from experience that deceit is an acceptable behavior that you use to get what you want and to use when you get caught at something unethical (i.e. sociopaths learn to "play the victim" and blame either their victim or another convenient target).
Sociopaths sound and act quite a lot like psychopaths in the end.
PSYCHOPATHS TEND TO LIVE SHORT LIVES
WHILE NARCISSISTS TEND TO LIVE LONG LIVES
Psychopaths tend to live short lives because they leave a path of destruction (and often unlawful behavior) that they never attempt to "fix". Run-of-the-mill narcissists try to "fix" their mistakes a little via the cycle of abuse (i.e. returning to a honeymoon/idealize stage with their victim), even though it is not for good reasons. But it often makes other people around the narcissist happy that they are making overtures (and are less likely to listen to a victim when the victim complains yet again: "After everything they have done for you! After every overture they have made towards you! Look at how they treated you <during the honeymoon stage>. I can't listen to this any more!").
And that is the big difference between them: narcissists generally adopt the cycle of abuse while psychopaths (and sociopaths) tend not to, or they go through only one cycle and then stop. Psychopaths get what they want, then do great harm to their victims, and then ditch their victims in a horrible state. They will even laugh about how they destroyed their victims and got away with it. Again, sadism is easy for psychopaths because they don't care how you feel or what kind of state they left you in.
Narcissists care how you feel, if only to keep them in good standing and good opinion by others they need for narcissistic supply. They are very much about appearances.
One of the reasons why psychopaths tend to have short lives is because they have attitudes like "I'm bullet proof! I can survive anything!" They feel they can do just about anything to anyone, they can drink or take drugs with abandon and won't ever have to pay health consequences, they can cleverly steal and never get caught, they can lie and go around being undetected, they can f$ck and f$ck over who ever they want and ditch anyone who complains about it, and that their lives will be forever unaffected by their own behaviors. And they do tend to indulge in a lot of behaviors that are aberrant and that are likely to get themselves in trouble.
They don't care if someone or a group of people thinks of them as evil. It's a badge of honor to a lot of them. Their fearlessness, and their commitment to get out of every mess they create unscathed, has to do with their sympathetic nervous systems, not being rattled by fear, or trauma. An inability to sympathize, empathize or care about the consequences means that when they leave their victims a wreck, they leave their victims for others to deal with. Usually.
When they get caught (many of them do eventually), they act just as cool and collected as when they are torturing someone. They believe strongly that they will get out of the "next mess" too. One of the reasons that they live shorter lives is not so much getting caught by law enforcement (though that tends to happen as they become more and more brazen, reckless and leave more and more victims and lives shattered), but also because their addictions give them a death sentence, or because they eventually find the wrong victim to torture: another psychopath, or a sociopath. As they age, they leave a dizzying number of victims in their wake, and since one in every hundred people in the USA has Antisocial Personality Disorder (the recent uptick may put this at more like five percent), they are likely to victimize one of them at some point in their lives.
Also: Criminals like to run in the circles of other criminals. When you want someone to lie or break the law for you to get you off the hook or out of "messes" that you create (reference the scene above where the psychopath expects his wife to take on the responsibilities of the auto crash), and if you need these people consistently, you are going to be attracting psychopaths and sociopaths who don't have morals either.
There is a reason why Bonnie and Clyde worked together. In their story, impulsivity and going from one "reward" to the next, ruled their days and ambitions to the end of their lives. They both died in their early twenties.
A lot of psychopaths have the same impulsivity as Bonnie and Clyde, but there are also a number of them who are Machiavellian, planning out what they are going to do in great detail. Revenge and Machiavellianism tend to go hand in hand, which is another reason why psychopaths live short lives.
The reason why run-of-the-mill narcissists tend to live long lives is because so many of the people around them walk on eggshells. "Don't upset the narcissist!" is the unspoken policy around so many of them. And indeed, when you upset narcissists a whole lot of confusion, triangulating, different versions of the same story of how the rage happened and why it happened, effects everyone around them. Narcissists do like to tell the story over and over and over and over again about what set them off and why they are so hurt (unlike psychopaths who leave their stories for others to tell - they are on to the next adventure and victim, after all).
Psychopaths have taken off before anyone can say, "Don't upset the psychopath!" Telling elaborate stories of why they are a victim at the juncture of every rage they experience isn't as much of a concern for them as it is for the narcissist.
Narcissists actually enjoy playing the victim to avoid culpability. Psychopaths play the victim too, but do not enjoy it (it holds them up), and it tends to be more compulsively driven, their statements often have no forethought (there are known linguistic ways they describe their "victim-hood" which some police investigators are often trained to recognize), and they are not as believable.
The thing is, narcissists like to tell the story over and over again, for years on end even, with a lot of different variations, and the variations tend to change from person to person, depending on what "role" you play in the narcissist's mind and life (narcissists like to put people in roles, categories, fixed opinions, etc). This creates a lot of confusion. False narratives are extremely prevalent as are smear campaigns when you are dealing with narcissists. When narcissists turn to you for their next tongue lashing or tirade, it means that their rages will not only effect you, but even effect people who do not necessarily know them. The people around you who care about your well being and who value you (narcissists will try to completely devalue you and treat you as a "non-existent"), will in large part, be picking up the pieces, helping you to heal, and encouraging you to stay away from the narcissist and their rages. The narcissist's rage therefor effects their victims' support teams.
But narcissists also have what is termed as flying monkeys in psychology circles, people who are brainwashed by false narratives and "their false victim persona".
The typical way that flying monkeys try to shame the narcissist's victims is to say things like:
- "You have no right to criticize (Mr. or Ms. Narcissist)!" - when narcissists criticize others ad nauseum.
- "How dare you say those things! After all that (Mr. or Ms. Narcissist) has done for you!" - one of the reasons narcissists do "so much" and flatter you in the beginning of your relationship is to use this guilt trip later on. However, they also usually don't give you more than they can "spare". And they do it because they want very badly for you to feel indebted to them for co-dependency objectives. In fact, narcissists are quite a bit more selfish than your average person - refusing to be culpable for anything is just one sign of their selfishness. Refusing to talk to you and using passive aggressive tactics like the silent treatment and smear campaigns is another. False narratives about your character isn't all that generous either. "Idealize, devalue, discard" isn't particularly generous. Neither is invalidating you. Wanting to be the dominant one in the relationship at all times is particularly stingy.
- "I know (Mr. or Ms. Narcissist) to be an upstanding person!" - that doesn't mean they are like that to you, or behind closed doors; also false narratives do not make them upstanding.
Anyway, most psychopaths don't have these "champions" who will fight for their honor.
Psychopaths have a lot less flying monkeys than narcissists do on the whole, and if they do, they tend to be other people who are sketchy and are also in trouble with "victimizing" others. Narcissists have a "golden child", a "golden best friend", a "golden worker", people who they flatter endlessly and give their best to which makes them a lot less suspect to people who hear of their wrong-doings. They can also be overly sweet to people who are suspicious of them. Psychopaths don't have "golden people" that they lavish praise or gifts on, so they tend to lack on-going social support when they are held accountable. They show superficial charm and flattery and that is about it.
Narcissists are more like alcoholics in how their rages and gaslighting reverberates outward to many, many other people. The point is that narcissists effect the sympathetic nervous systems of anyone with a normal constitution, so who ever cares about the narcissist's victim, even a person the narcissist does not know, will have been effected indirectly by the narcissist. This is true with alcoholics too, which is why self help groups like Alanon exist, so that "victims" of alcoholics (and the enforced lifestyle that many alcoholics lead which becomes your default lifestyle and burden after awhile too) can get support and advice from others who are dealing with alcoholics. It allows for some autonomy from the alcoholic's needs and demands too. So, in a way, the alcoholism, and the emotions effected by dealing with someone who is alcoholic, is effecting this whole group of Alanon participants, not just the family and friends of the Alanon participant.
Alcoholics have a way of traumatizing people over the long term too, the trauma often being similar to people who deal with psychopaths. And many psychopaths are alcoholics (alcohol can be one of their many addictions), so you can get a double whammy of trauma.
To reiterate, the reason why narcissists tend to live a lot longer than psychopaths is because people around them walk on eggshells attempting to make the narcissist's life easier so that they won't rage, while at the same time the narcissist sloughs off culpability for their actions against others by playing the victim and creating confusion with their super sweet flattery to one set of people, and abuse of another set of people, and their many and varied false narratives of one story.
Whereas psychopaths tend to live much shorter lives than narcissists because they don't spend endless hours like the narcissist does at explaining away their rages and why they had to hurt another person in the way that they did, and trying to think up believable explanations for why they are actually, instead, a victim of the person they victimized. All of the narcissist's talk soothes them into a mental space of security at fooling others, that they are not that culpable for their own actions and mistakes, that they are exactly as their flying monkeys say they are, so they tend to live lives without stress, and without changing their character. No guilt means no stress means longevity. The only stress they might feel is in the beginning of the process of making their false narrative "believable" to others.
Stress won't kill a narcissist because they are so busy shifting the stress off on to others.
Psychopaths tend only to "explain away" on the spot, and only to people who are finding them culpable for past behavior. Also, psychopaths tend to do more destruction to their victims (most run-of-the-mill narcissists try to keep their destruction to coercive control and emotional abuse only, and slipping in the physical abuse only if they believe they are completely safe from detection).
PSYCHOPATHS DO NOT HAVE A RANGE OF EMOTION
AND LACK AN ABILITY TO RESPOND APPROPRIATELY
TO THE EMOTIONS OF OTHERS
Mostly psychopaths are labeled as "cold" and "cold hearted" not only for their lack of empathy, but for their lack of emotions, and appropriate emotional responses.
Psychopaths are usually particularly irritated with the emotional expression of others. It doesn't really go with their cool-headed manipulative tactics and chess games.
Also when you are upset or crying, most people will be effected by your emotions and often cry with you, or their mouth will be down-turned in sadness and their brow will be furrowed with worry. Psychopaths are usually either unaffected or irritated.
Paranoia isn't something they experience because their minds are usually bent towards the future rather than the past. They will only look to the past to "hone their skills" and "avoid mistakes".
PSYCHOPATHS ARE LIKELY TO BE ADDICTS OF SOMETHING
OR EVEN A LOT OF THINGS
Psychopaths are definitely addicted to exploiting and manipulating others. Narcissists can definitely have this trait in common with psychopaths, especially if they feel something is lacking in their image or a desire hasn't been met, or if they want to move in wealthy circles, or if they feel their social standing needs a boost and they feel the only way to do it is to be associated with, or exploit someone who has the kind of social standing that they lack. But psychopaths are addicted to exploitation for rewards, whereas narcissists can be addicted to exploitation for social standing, power and control, and for ego-boosting reasons.
But psychopaths usually have addictions which go way beyond exploitation and manipulation.
They often become sex addicts. They often become addicted to "thrill seeking" activities. They often become addicted to cheating and the thrill of keeping it a secret. They often become addicted to substances (alcohol and drugs). They often become addicted to lying, so that lying is their constant unwavering narrative. They become addicted to creating serial situations where they are in sole charge of what happens. They become addicted to dumping people in the same way. They become addicted to taking in the same way. They become addicted to certain plans and schemes and ways of seeing things through.
They can even become addicted to torture or murder because of their propensity not to feel guilt, regret or remorse.
PSYCHOPATHS WILL ALWAYS TAKE MORE THAN THEY GIVE
For a person who is only geared towards being rewarded, you can see why this is true. They will even take from small children if the small child has what they want, or if they believe a small child can serve their desires in some way.
Psychopaths are known especially for taking financial advantage of others, so that they can live their lives fulfilling one desire after another. Some tend to be extremely lazy and self indulgent too, particularly about food, leisure, sex and alcohol or drugs.
In comparison, narcissists can be self indulgent too, but there are times they can be generous too, especially if they feel that it will serve their purposes or keep them in good social standing. They might also be generous because they are jealous of how someone else flaunts their wealth.
As I have said previously in the post, narcissists have handpicked "golden people" that they feel dominant over, and therefor secure with. These "golden people" are where their generosity is expressed.
But there is always a down-side. In family situations, the golden child is "over-provided" for, while the other children are "under-provided" for and often starving for love, affection, validation, resources, medical treatment and attention, consistency, and even some of them are under-fed with food (yes, even food - I will be covering that in another post). I cover a lot of these family dynamics in the favoritism in the family post.
When psychopaths have children, all of the children will be exploited in some way, even if in different ways. There are no "golden children" who will be spared per se. Although one child being overindulged and another being used for shaming and abuse is where the commonality lies with narcissists. Psychopaths, however, can treat all children unethically; narcissists primarily establish one "never-can-do-wrong" golden child and at least one scapegoat for the use of family abuse and blame. With psychopaths, they may have a favorite child, they don't really treat one child "much better" than their other children. We know this from psychopaths who kill their own children. When psychopaths kill their own children, the favorite child does not particularly have any specialness when it comes to being spared the same murders their siblings received.
Psychopaths will take a lot more from their children than they give. Often children of psychopaths are neglected and abandoned if they aren't abused.
PSYCHOPATHS ALWAYS CHEAT ON THEIR SPOUSES AND LOVERS
Narcissists tend to cheat on their spouses and lovers a lot more than the general population, but psychopaths most always cheat on their spouses and lovers. Sex and getting away with extramarital affairs, and setting up a new situation to exploit is what so many psychopaths are about.
Cheating has to do with their addictive natures, and of their "taking" mentality.
Narcissists are also predisposed to cheat, and they tend to cheat quite a bit more than the general population, but there are also many narcissists who don't cheat. The ones who don't cheat get power and control by becoming leaders of religious, moral or political doctrine for instance (i.e. attaining submissive subjects), espousing a philosophy which keeps "narcissistic supply" from escaping, or adopting "communal narcissism" as a way to bring in more narcissistic supply.
The cheating narcissists however seem quite a bit like the cheating psychopaths. Narcissists may be somewhat more "emotional" or "passionate" with their partners, and their attention span on new partners may not be as short, but otherwise the cheating looks like it comes from the same playbook as the psychopath.
If you want to learn more about psychopaths and infidelity, you can check out the article, Serial Cheater Psychology: The 3 Personality Types Most Likely To Cheat by Carmen McGuinness, PhD, BCBA-DHere is an excerpt from the last article:
It is sometimes said of psychopaths that they can temporarily force themselves to be nice, caring, kind and committed, but it never lasts too long, simply because they find it boring. They much prefer drama, conflict, mind games and constant new stimulation.
This is why they are not built for long term intimate relationships, often bumbling from one disastrous failed relationship to the next. Their short attention span and relentless boredom just means they get irritated and agitated with “nice” people and harmonious relationships and seek new stimulation very quickly ...
... Psychopaths Cheat to Triangulate & Play Mind Games With Their Victims
Another more malevolent motive for the psychopath cheating on their partners is that sometimes it is part of a pre-meditated game they like to play, where they groom and charm their victims, before slowly turning on them and then coldly discarding them and moving onto someone else. It is often called the idealize-devalue-discard cycle in the recovery space.
The victim is often left with a whole host of emotional wounds, wondering what they did wrong to make this person suddenly “flip” and turn nasty and abusive. The reality is that the psychopath had planned this all along, viewing the entire relationship with a cold, amused detachment ...
... Before, you were the new person listening to their sob stories of their crazy ex; now, you are the new “crazy ex” with the new target listening to all their invented sob stories of how mean, nasty and crazy you were. The whole cycle repeats.
PSYCHOPATHS RARELY, IF EVER, RESPECT YOUR BOUNDARIES
Psychopaths feel entitled to break your reserves and boundaries if it suits them.
If you do not want to be involved with them, they can keep convincing, flattering, showing up, and pushing you to accept them. The movie Gaslight (which I have written about here) is an example of this.
But narcissists often do the same thing psychopaths do. They can seem just as insistent.
Narcissists choose people who they think are weak in some way: without family support, from an abusive family or an alcoholic family, who they deem they can talk into things that aggrandize the narcissist, who they think has poor self esteem, who they think will not set boundaries against them, who they think is down on their luck or who is going through a traumatic event that they think they can exploit for narcissistic supply, who they deem they can gain power and control over.
Psychopaths may do this too, but they also do not understand or care enough about the subject of morals and ethics to sway certain kinds of people. Narcissists usually understand quite a bit about ethics, morals and codes of polite conduct so that they can at least appear to have morals and ethics too, or at least have them in public, even if they do not have them behind closed doors with the people they say they love or are closest to.
Run-of-the-mill narcissists can respect your boundaries eventually, especially if police get involved, or you have protections and people who you live with who don't like them or respect them and want them to go away, or you keep insisting on them leaving you alone over and over again, and give them no hope.
This is obviously quite a bit harder with Malignant Narcissists who may want to get through your boundaries to enact some sort of revenge. Flying monkeys don't just attack the Capitol building of the United States, they can attack on the part of your ex-lover or a conniving relative too. In that case, it may be better to move somewhere where they can't find you, and get a post office box for your mail. You can always try fortifying those things and people that will keep you safe, but always get advice from a domestic violence counselor first who can examine your particular risks and history of abuse.
When malignant narcissists try to sway you to break your resolve over boundaries, and lure you in order to get you into a compromised position where they can attack you again, they can be dangerous. And even with egregious attacks, they will still try to play the victim. This is why sharing your personal life, your personal feelings, your personal tragedies and triumphs, your desires, and your ambitions with narcissists is dangerous. They often use information against you and try to ruin your life, livelihood and your reputation. They seem more dissuaded when police are involved because that is the one thing that can ruin their reputations and their "needs" for status, and evermore narcissistic supply from ethical people, albeit brainwashed ethical people.
In contrast, psychopaths won't necessarily respect your boundaries with police involved, or with a home security system, or when you are living with people who don't want them around, or when you keep insisting that they leave you alone forever, reiterating that over and over again. If they want something from you, they make it their plan to get it from you, and it can turn into a sole plan, and a "cat and mouse" game for them. They become fixated on the one exploitation, or punishment, or desire. This is just one of many reasons why victims of psychopaths become traumatized.
In general, look into a person's past. Have they victimized anyone? - and don't think you are "special", and therefor "too special for their abuse", even if the narcissist or psychopath says you are. In fact, you are likely to be victimized yourself, because victimization isn't a matter of "specialness"; it is a matter of the personality disorder that lives within them.
Most of all, walk away to save yourself grief and a broken life sooner rather than later when you see the first signs of lack of empathy, coercive control, and coercive behavior, or a disappearing act when you are going through a tragedy.
(note: I realize there are some narcissists who read this blog. If you are feeling that someone is showing lack of empathy for you after you have shown them lack of empathy, made it clear that showing respect or loyalty to you means them letting you dominate them, or you did a disappearing act when they were going through a traumatic event, or that you feel criticized and therefor gravely hurt - realize that this is narcissistic behavior. If you have never criticized or insulted them, if you are just as willing to be dominated by them as you want to dominate, if you continually show empathy for their plight, if you never abandon them when they are going through a traumatic experience, then you have a right to complain. Expect the behavior that you expect from others from yourself first; in other words, model what you want from others ... otherwise, counselors will be telling the people that you hurt in this way to leave you).
PSYCHOPATHS AND PARENTING
I described some of that above.
In most ways, psychopathic parenting looks very similar to the way narcissists, and particularly malignant narcissists, parent. Some of what is likely to happen:
* sexual abuse from psychopathic fathers (and stepfathers), also:
sexually inappropriate material from fathers (and stepfathers)
* sexually inappropriate situations for children ("pimping", watching adult sexual experiences, over-exposure to adult nudity or adult sexual conversations, adult love-making in the vicinity of children, adult reading material and adult underclothes in full display)
* parental neglect of reporting, or denying psychological and medical treatment for the impact and trauma of child sexual abuse, or using the sexual abuse as a "weakness" to inflict more trauma and abuse
* abandonment and neglect from psychopathic mothers
* grooming for abusive, coercive or criminal acts
- Some of the rest are on the right (in the column part of this blog) including gaslighting, emotional abuse, shaming, blaming, taunting and goading, bullying, etc.
There is the very real danger of psychopath parents turning their children into sociopaths (about half of them do). In contrast, the number of children who grow up with a narcissistic parent, one in three become narcissists themselves, particularly children who are groomed, modeled and rewarded for abusive, coercive and exploitative behaviors.
Psychopathic parenting is too large a subject for me to take on in this particular post (it deserves a whole post of its own), but suffice it to say that law-makers need to be taking psychopathic parenting much more seriously than they do in the present day, especially when it comes to custody arrangements (which are practically inevitable as psychopaths do not generally stay with one partner). A child's exposure to psychopathic parenting brings untold trauma to some children and makes sociopaths out of others. It impacts the family as well as society.
"The Impact of Psychopathy on the Family" by Liane Leedom says this on psychopathic parenting:
... the trauma associated with parental psychopathy produces disorganized attachment and dissociation of parental object representations ... Psychopathic parents may select both favorites and targets for abuse from among the children of the family [93]. Favorites are overindulged and provided lax supervision, while targets are subjected to shaming and other abuse [93]. Psychopathic parents may enjoy inducing fear in their children and they may maintain poor sexual boundaries [93]. Psychoticism, defined as unusual beliefs and experiences, eccentricity, and perceptual dysregulation (DSM 5, Section III) is apparent in descriptions of parents provided by adult offspring and former partners; psychoticism manifests in the psychopathic individuals’ distorted worldview. The family takes on “cult-like” characteristics when psychopathic individuals demand that family members endorse their distorted views and unusual beliefs [93] ...... Pathological lying and the other interpersonal manifestations of psychopathy link to severe emotional and psychological abuse [93]. Invalidation and “gas-lighting” cause children to doubt their own perceptions of reality. Parental alienation (parental attempts to distance the child from a loving co-parent) may be one manifestation of “gas-lighting” [6]. Affective deficits and dominance needs cause parents to enjoy frightening and shaming children. Parents’ affective deficits produce guilt and confusion and impair trust [6, 93]. Lifestyle deficits cause unstable residence, neglect, and poverty ...
... 6.2. Assessment of children and custody recommendations
The clinical literature and the family courts may refer to couples where there is an abusive psychopathic parent and a victimized partner as “high conflict” [75, 128, 129]. Child victims are conceptualized as being caught up in “parental conflict” rather than in a situation where one parent has the burden of protecting them from abuse [130]. Such terminology conveys the impression that the non-psychopathic victimized co-parent is partly responsible for the family pathology. Although psychopathy in mothers and fathers is correlated, correlations are modest. Professionals involved with the family should therefore assess psychopathy dimensions in both partners using all available data. Evaluators should carefully consider the credibility of information they are given ... The presence of mood, anxiety, and substance use disorders in parents should be assessed. Domestic violence including all forms of partner and child abuse should be documented. Clinicians should attempt to classify the family according to whether psychopathy is significant in one or both parents and as to whether abuse is primarily unidirectional. There are sufficient data (Tables 6–8) to recommend that if there is a relatively healthy parent, contact with the psychopathic parent should be limited. For further discussion of custody evaluations, see Refs.
PSYCHOPATHS AND BLACK COFFEE
A lot has been made of psychopaths and black coffee. Does it really warrant so much investigation, and is it really "THE big sign" that someone is a psychopath?
Like everything to do with deciphering psychopaths, black coffee can be a sign. But it shouldn't be taken as seriously as lack of empathy, lack of guilt and remorse over the destruction of others' lives and well being, lack of a conscience when it comes to evil deeds and so on ...
Having said that, psychopaths tend to like black coffee. Note: it doesn't count if someone is drinking black coffee with a sticky bun or something else that is sweet. It has to be black coffee minus any sweets.
Other foods and drinks psychopaths tend to like that most people don't like:
black tea and black tea with lemon (again without something like an additional sweet food)
gin and tonic
celery
bitter salad greens
beer
radishes
unsweetened chocolate
lime juice
some bitter red wines like cabernet sauvignon, pinot grigio varieties, and some chardonnays
Does any of this matter? Not really. It is just trivia. But if other traits seem to fit, seeing them drinking or eating these kinds of foods on a consistent basis can be just "another sign".
WHAT PSYCHOPATHS LIKE TO TALK ABOUT
For both sexes:
* Situations which make them seem dominant and in control of others
* Scrapes they walked away from unscathed (boasting)
For men:
* boasting about what they got away with, or how someone wasn't clever enough
* sex
* money
- including how easy it was to get the money or get the girl
* expensive food
* anything that shows off their wealth (psychopaths often lie about how much money they have)
For women:
* gossip
* who is treating them to what
* who is doing better than whom
* name-dropping
* wealth related subjects (cruises, world travel, outfits from expensive stores, furniture from expensive stores)
What subjects they get bored by and don't like to talk about:
* religion
* morals, ethics
* spirituality
* medicine, nursing
* psychology (unless they are using it to put someone down)
* family and children (unless they use their family to aggrandize themselves: i.e. what they did for their family or a member, how they made a child's success happen, how a child married into a wealthy family, in other words "boasting")
Again, as in the previous chapter, it is just a bit of trivia. The main sign is lack of empathy, but these signs should make you suspicious enough to hold back on revealing yourself, until you know what kind of empathy they have and how much coercive "advice" they like to give.
IN THE AMERICAN CULTURE
We know that sociopathic/psychopathic societies usually become violent, lawless, militant, start invasions of other countries to dominate, control and exploit resources, and have scapegoats (groups of people living within the country who are increasingly marginalized, threatened, irrationally hated, and blamed and killed over society's ills).
Even fantasy shows like "The Witcher", "Carnival Row" and "Game of Thrones", all fairly popular, are rife with gore, sexual abuse and violence. Even the more tame highly popular fantasy romance "Outlander" which centered around historical events, also featured a psychopath who rapes and tortures the main character, Jamie, repeatedly in a grueling sadistic manner over too many episodes. It seemed completely unnecessary to the story to have it continue for so long and seemed to be "depraved entertainment", at least since it was a "fantasy". Most men I have talked to who have seen the series, describe those scenes as "the most disturbing" part of the series, frightening, and hard to look at. I hope that when they see women being raped and murdered in other series (way more prevalent than male rape), that they think a little more about what women go through when they watched rape scenes from Outlander.
Then as I watched historical dramas, I thought I might get a break from so many psychopaths and sociopaths, or at least from watching so much gratuitous violence. It seemed to me that since they were mostly based on historical facts that they would be a little more even-handed in terms of how they portrayed historical figures.
Two that I made myself sit through was "Vikings" and "The Last Kingdom", both of which take place at the time of the Viking invasions of England. Watching both series it would seem that everyone in the world at that time was either a sociopath or psychopath, except, perhaps, the monks of Lindisfarne, the peace-loving and peaceful monks who endured a terrible slaughter by Viking raiders.
At the recent riot at the Capital, it seemed that at least some of the rioters were emulating characters from these types of series, albeit with red, white and blue paint, and may have wanted the attention, the glory and violence that these series portray.
The problem with these never-ending series full of violence, criminality or war, blood thirstiness and communal psychopathy is that they keep the cameras consistently on the perpetrators, and very rarely on the victims. Even in real life school shootings, the press keeps the camera on the perpetrators, and very rarely on teachers and students who died trying to save the children. Does this mean we are fascinated by psychopaths and what they do? Do we glorify psychopaths? Do we teach them to love the spotlight they are given? Do we glorify the destruction they make?
And why are there just a few small offerings of films and series on the victims of psychopaths? Do we like giving psychopaths a lot of attention? Do we crave a psychopathic culture where laws and empathy are no longer a factor?
"These are the Signs of Dating a Psychopath"
from Med Circle
with Dr. Seth Myers, interviewed by Kyle Kittleson:
with Ramani Durvasula, interviewed by Kyle Kittleson
(long video ... settle in):
... The purpose of this review is to demonstrate that psychopathic tendencies in adults are positively correlated with fear deficits (Caes et al., 2012; Gillen et al., 2018; Marsh et al., 2011) and dysregulations of the limbic system (Boccardi et al., 2010; Boccardi et al., 2011). More specifically, this paper examines the relationship between fear and psychopathic symptomatology; explores brain abnormalities, particularly in the fear centers, in psychopaths; and identifies potential limitations, implications, and future research directions ...
... The purpose of Study 1 was to explore whether the association between victimization history and gait pattern could be accounted for by walker personality and/or affect. Given that there are confounds related to studying gait patterns (i.e., it is unclear if observers are making judgements based on gait alone, or other, related features such as age or attractiveness), kinematic point-light display technology was used to record individuals walking. Point-light display captures light-reflected body movement. The 4 recording that is produced shows a moving lighted skeleton (with extraneous cues such as hair and weight, removed). In Study 2, a sample of observers watched the point-light video recordings and rated the walkers on a number of characteristics including: vulnerability to future victimization, perceived submissiveness and dominance, and perceived positive and negative affect ...
... The submissive women appeared to use less expansive movements, they maintained the same posture for extended lengths of time, and they gestured more often with their hands and feet. Those who had been rated as submissive were also subsequently judged as more likely to be a victim of sexual assault. Simpson et al. (1993) argue that, similar to flirting behaviour, submissive behaviours imply “contact readiness” in relational communication. Submissive behaviours such as sidelong glances, weak smiles, and limited gesturing, are postulated to signal sexual interest and induce approach behaviour by another; these same behaviours also appear to suggest vulnerability. It is possible that nonverbal cues of submissiveness may unintentionally instigate approach behaviour in offenders during target selection ... Kilpatrick and Acierno (2003) argue that past victimization is highly predictive of future victimization (e.g., the risk of new assault for a previously assaulted individual is more than four times higher than someone without a history of assault; this risk appears 11 to increase linearly where an individual’s risk of new assault after having been previously assaulted twice is nearly 400%). Thus, a small proportion of the population experiences disproportionate amounts of criminal victimization (Kilpatrick, Acierno, Resnick, Saunders, & Best, 1997). Victim recidivism occurs across a range of crimes and “…repeat victims are often offended against by a number of different offenders…” (Gunns et al., 2002, p. 130). Research suggests that past victimization may predict future risk because: 1) being victimized alters the individual in some way (e.g., individuals who are victimized may experience anxiety and/or depression, and research suggests that highly anxious individuals are at an increased risk of experiencing victimization; Lauritsen & Quinet, 1995), or 2) because there is an unmeasured aspect of the victim that fosters their repeated selection by offenders (e.g., they exhibit risk-taking tendencies and/or work in a dangerous profession; Lauritsen & Quinet, 1995; Sparks, 1981). Measures of vulnerability are particularly important as individuals may be unknowingly indicating a weakness to others through various attributes and behaviours (Gunns et al., 2002; Sparks, 1981) ...
... . Interestingly, victims of crime appear to exhibit the vulnerable gait pattern more 12 often than individuals without histories of victimization (Wheeler et al., 2009). Therefore, it has been suggested that offenders may use gait as a target selection tool. A “Victim Walk?” Grayson and Stein (1981) examined differences in movement among individuals walking in a high assault area in New York City. The individuals (equal male/female split; n = 30 males, n = 30 females) were secretly video-taped to capture their natural gait patterns before they provided consent. Offenders (n = 53 male inmates) rated the assault potential of the various walkers and the walkers were divided into “victims” and “non-victims” based on these ratings. The findings revealed that the gait patterns of victims were significantly different from the gait patterns of non-victims. Grayson and Stein (1981) identified five gait movement categories that differentiated the “victim walk” from the “non-victim walk:” Stride length, type of weight shift, body movement, type of walk, and feet. Victims, it seems, tend to have long or short strides, a lateral (i.e., weight shifts side to side), diagonal, or up/down shift movement, a gestural walk (i.e., movement activates only a part of the body [e.g., the legs]), unilateral arm/leg movements (i.e., antisynchronous movement; only one side of the body moves at a time), and lifted foot movements.
... Nonverbal displays of fear and sadness are postulated to implicate vulnerability to others. Because emotion can be defined by its connection to action in oneself and in others, it is possible that “vulnerable” emotional displays in individuals elicit subsequent emotions and actions (e.g., approach behaviour) in offenders. Quick and accurate detection of these states would provide an indication of individuals who are “easy prey.” Furthermore, the reported short- and long-term negative effects on victims of crime may help explain why individuals with victimization histories appear to walk differently than others others ...
... They found that psychopathy was positively correlated with number of one-night stands and with the use of sexual and nonsexual deception. Further, there was a negative relationship between psychopathy and checking with sexual partners regarding contraception use. They concluded that psychopaths can be considered to be short-term interpersonal strategists ...
... Because psychopathic traits are associated with impulsivity, manipulation, callous affect, and thrill seeking, Jonason et al. suggested that psychopathic traits would represent an exploitative social style in short-term mating strategies and that people with these traits would not be geared toward long-term meaningful relationships. Findings indicated that psychopathic traits are associated short-term sexual attitudes and behaviors (e.g., regarding casual sex with different partners). Psychopathic traits were significantly positively related to number of sexual partners and with the tendency to follow a short-term mating approach ...
... Similarly, Book et al. (2015) found that the core of the Dark Triad (including psychopathic traits which was almost entirely encompassed in the core) was related to a variety of sexually and socially exploitative behaviors. Presumably, such an exploitive mating strategy would lead to a larger number of offspring with relatively lower parental investment (Glenn et al. 2011). Jonason and Buss (2012) suggest that psychopathy is characterized by a lack of commitment, allowing such individuals to get the benefit, without paying the costs associated with committed relationships. Such a mating strategy is employed by all three personalities in the Dark Triad (narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy) but is especially true of those with psychopathic traits (Jonason et al. 2012a, b, c). Recent research examining sexual fantasy in relation to the Dark Triad has also supported the link between psychopathy, sexual drive, and impersonal sexual fantasies (e.g., Baughman et al. 2014; Visser et al. 2015). Visser et al. found that psychopathy was associated with wanting novelty and multiple partners in fantasy and in actual behavior ...
... As people generally avoid interactions with people who seem untrustworthy, part of being a successful opportunist is the appearance of trustworthiness. In this vein, Frank (1988) suggested that successful cheating entails appearing to be honest/trustworthy while availing themselves of opportunities for personal gain at the expense of co-operators. Moreover, he suggested that cheaters are able to appear trustworthy because their cheating and manipulation are masked by feigned emotional displays that act as “commitment devices” ...
excerpt:
A trained eye can spot a callous and unemotional child by age 3 or 4. Whereas normally developing children at that age grow agitated when they see other children cry—and either try to comfort them or bolt the scene—these kids show a chilly detachment. In fact, psychologists may even be able to trace these traits back to infancy. Researchers at King’s College London tested more than 200 five-week-old babies, tracking whether they preferred looking at a person’s face or at a red ball. Those who favored the ball displayed more callous traits two and a half years later.
As a child gets older, more-obvious warning signs appear. Kent Kiehl, a psychologist at the University of New Mexico and the author of The Psychopath Whisperer, says that one scary harbinger occurs when a kid who is 8, 9, or 10 years old commits a transgression or a crime while alone, without the pressure of peers. This reflects an interior impulse toward harm. Criminal versatility—committing different types of crimes in different settings—can also hint at future psychopathy.
Psychopaths not only fail to recognize distress in others, they may not feel it themselves ...
... The second hallmark of a psychopathic brain is an overactive reward system especially primed for drugs, sex, or anything else that delivers a ping of excitement. In one study, children played a computer gambling game programmed to allow them to win early on and then slowly begin to lose. Most people will cut their losses at some point, Kent Kiehl notes, “whereas the psychopathic, callous unemotional kids keep going until they lose everything.” Their brakes don’t work, he says ...
For example, some research has placed focus on offenders’ spoken attribution of blame or responsibility, drawing upon a framework developed from the analysis of oral statements. There is some contention that offenders’ use of explanatory styles that defend, excuse, or justify (e.g., “That is just who I am”, “That’s just the way the world works”) and attributions of a hostile nature (e.g., “It is because everyone is against me”) can partially account for persistence in crime (Maruna, 2004). This form of justification or excuse-making to neutralise blame can be described as a form of cognitive distortion, although Maruna and Mann (2006) cautioned against the use of the term ‘cognitive distortion’ due to inconsistencies in definition for the umbrella term ...
... It has been mentioned above that rape offences often involve a wealth of verbalisation by the offender. Dale et al. (1997) found three overarching speech strategies, including the ‘do as I say’ approach, or less threatening strategies such as the ‘foot in the door’ approach and the ‘door in the face’ approach (Stahelski & Patch, 1993). In essence, the ‘do as I say’ discourse strategy often involves direct imperative threats or orders; the ‘foot in the door’ strategy is when the offender makes small demands which then increase in scale; and the ‘door in the face’ strategy is when the offender makes a large demand which is expected to be refused by the victim, followed by smaller requests which are more likely to be complied with due to moral obligations imposed onto the victim ...
5 Recent Findings About Dark Personalities (New research adds depth to our understanding of dark personality traits) - by Mark Travers Ph.D. for Psychology Today
... research examined affective empathy, which is the ability to have an appropriate emotional response to others’ emotions, and cognitive empathy, the ability to discern others’ emotional states. They found that all three personality types lacked affective empathy, but had unimpaired cognitive empathy. Creepily, all three felt positive looking at sad faces and felt negative seeing happy images. Narcissists and psychopaths also felt good seeing angry faces. Psychopaths liked seeing fearful faces.
Overall empathy was lowest among psychopaths and Machiavellians, and study participants who were high on any of the three personality profiles had the lowest affective empathy. Narcissists scored highest on cognitive empathy. The fact that these people are insensitive to others' feelings, while retaining the ability to assess others’ emotions, allows them to strategically manipulate people, while ignoring the harm they inflict ...
When individuals with psychopathy imagine others in pain, brain areas necessary for feeling empathy and concern for others fail to become active and be connected to other important regions involved in affective processing and decision-making, reports a study published in the open-access journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.
How to Tell a Sociopath from a Psychopath: The important distinctions between criminal psychopaths and sociopaths - by Scott A. Bonn for Psychology Today
Born or Made? History of Child Abuse in Subtypes of Psychopathy - by Alana M. Cook, for Pacific University, Oregon
How to Recognize a Psychopath - by Suzanne Kane for Psych Central
Where Are You On The Psychopathy Spectrum? Take our scientifically rigorous test. - by Tom Chivers for Buzz Feed
Also, if you have a score that is quite a bit below average, it can be a sign that you many not have a healthy amount of boundaries, self preservation, and self esteem. Low score people are typically sought out by narcissists, sociopaths and psychopaths for abuse, coercion, extortion and blame.
THE CRIMINAL PSYCHOPATH: HISTORY, NEUROSCIENCE, TREATMENT, AND ECONOMICS - by Kent A. Kiehl and Morris B. Hoffman for U.S. Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health
Psychopaths are also way less likely to discuss other common subjects, research reveals - by Jessica Stillman
... Although psychopaths tend to be nocturnal, everyone needs sleep at some point. As Dr. Sal Raichbach PsyD, LCSW of Ambrosia Treatment Center tells Bustle, “There is some research to show that people who demonstrate psychopathic traits tend to sleep for few hours very restfully, without much tossing and turning at night. People who struggle with sleep often complain of stress or racing thoughts, both of which would be out of character for someone with psychopathic tenancies." ...
Things Psychopaths Say That Reveal The Roots of Violence. (Thinking Patterns, Attitudes, and Beliefs Behind Criminal Minds) - by Samantha Clarke for Medium.com
good article. one question I want to ask you about with this one Lise, is one facet of sociopathy and psychopathy that I believe is a "tell" is the inability to feel fear. One parent was incapable of fear, while for the other it was greatly diminished but oddly they had a phobia of driving over bridges. Psychopaths seem to be the ones who go criminal and violent and sociopaths have no empathy etc, but while they may break the law they usually are not caught and it's not violent crimes like psychopaths. Wouldn't a great percentage of malignant narcissists fit the sociopath criteria if not psychopathic?
ReplyDeleteI agree about the gait and learning not to let people prey on you when you become an ex-scapegoat. I have had to learn to do what I call "harden up" [hope this doesn't sound bad it's just the term I use for it] but I had to shut down some of the empath, try to please others, and other vulnerable stances to stop being a snack for the predators of the world. It did massively improve my life and lowered the incidents of abuse by quite a bit.
I haven't had much contact with full psychopaths in my life, there was some, I had plenty of clients who were [I worked in a place of incarceration of youth after all]but I believe I have dealt with many sociopaths and malignant narcissists, no fear, no empathy, winner take all attitudes. Functional level sociopaths, not your in and out of jail psychopaths with a trail of destruction behind them, but the pillar of society types. The sociopaths leave destruction behind too but it's more subtle. I know the terms overlap. Every sociopath and psychopath is a malignant narcissist but what about the other way around?
Hi Peeps,
DeleteMalignant narcissists have traits of Borderline Personality Disorder and Antisocial Personality Disorder as well as Narcissistic Personality Disorder. In that case they usually do not have primary psychopathy, but more the secondary type where the sympathetic nervous system resembles a more normal one (what we term sociopaths). The lack of empathy in sociopaths is more "learned" in that case, where the environment rewards to a large extent, the dishonesty, the violence, the culture of going after rewards by hurting others. Sociopaths learn these tactics in childhood. A parent can effect the transition into full Antisocial Personality Disorder, but it has to start early. Before age 10, the best results happen. Before age 13, there is still hope, but it is harder to get them on track and often takes on-going therapy and a lot of professional eyes on the situation. In teenage years, intervention becomes a huge uphill battle. There is still some hope, but it is fast dwindling because they are transitioning into full adult-hood, and parents don't have nearly the kind of influence they do in early childhood to mold a child. Teenagers, as a whole, begin to be inspired much more by peers than parents, and often find things about parents that they don't respect or like. So, that makes it much harder.
If one of the child's parent has narcissistic, sociopathic or psychopathic traits, intervention becomes a huge uphill battle at any age.
Sociopathy mostly "grows" in toxic family environments, environments of either inconsistent parenting, or parents with personality disorders or addictions, environments where allegations of abuse and violence are being ignored, or where there is a lot of neglect (whether purposeful or not purposeful).
Actually sociopaths can commit violent crimes just like psychopaths do, but because of the difference of the sociopath's sympathetic nervous system as compared to the psychopath, they tend not to go as far. Of course, if they keep avoiding accountability, and they become focused on rewards too much, they too can go far into "the dark side" of criminal, sadistic, violent behavior.
So, the answer to your question is that every malignant narcissist is a sociopath to some extent.
However, it gets tricky because there is the dark triad and the dark tetrad. The dark triad is narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism. The psychopathy can be primary or secondary in that case. The dark tetrad is narcissism, psychopathy, Machiavellianism and sadism.
You said, "One parent was incapable of fear, while for the other it was greatly diminished but oddly they had a phobia of driving over bridges." - "greatly diminished but phobic" is more a sign of a normal sympathetic nervous system, though they could have had a personality disorder too, though probably not primary psychopathy.
Thanks for writing in!
I would say one parent did not have a normal sympathetic nervous system at all, no fear, even when they were in some type of danger. With the one afraid of bridges, he showed evidence of a lack of fear though I don't know if that was from influence from the other. Like they took risks, where I remember them flying over these narrow roads on mountains in Colorado, some of us kids in tears, and both went with that. I definitely think one and multiple others in the family are full sociopaths. Aka no fear, no feelings, there's none of the borderline "feelings" stuff you see in some NPD people.
DeleteI think many grow into their sociopathy as you point out, learning what works and what will reward them. Both my siblings were influenced and identified more with parents than peers. I do think intervention has to come young. One thing I noticed is some younger ones seemed to have "some" empathy in childhood and even into the preteens, but it would be stomped out around puberty mid-teen age years. The time when the light in the eyes would go out, if you've ever seen that article I wrote.
Yeah sociopaths can go violent too, but I get the feeling if they go criminal and violent they do it more quietly, they are the pillars of society while psychopaths are more likely the ones in and out of courts and jail.
Thanks for answering my question yeah every malignant narc has a degree of sociopathy.
That's interesting about the Dark Tretrad adding on Sadism.
I think the parent who was afraid of bridges definitely was NPD, and may even have edged into sociopathy but not as advanced as the other parent who was incapable of fear.
I am rewriting one of the paragraphs - grammar issue (we have a tiny box to write comments).
DeleteSo here it is rewritten:
Part of growing up in a family full of narcissists and sociopaths is that you are continually shamed for feelings. And you are especially shamed if they perceive that you are criticizing them (like if you complained to them they were driving too fast, they might speed more). They tend to shame their kids when they perceive them as not taking them seriously, like taking what they say with "a grain of salt". The same thing can happen if they think that you are stepping back from being controlled (even minutely), or if they think you are not believing in their false narratives. They find all of this extremely threatening behavior on your part.
If they perceive you to be "acting out" in any of these ways, they tend to either be unkind or punishing. Regardless, they are dangerous for the destruction they do to normal childhood development.
ADHD er en psykiatrisk diagnose gitt til personer som oppfyller et minimumskrav for kriterier relatert til kroniske forekomster av hyperaktivitet, impulsivitet og / eller vanskeligheter knyttet til organisering og oppmerksomhet.
ReplyDeleteHi,
DeleteI am aware that ADHD can co-occur with conduct disorder. Is that what you are referring to?
The post I wrote was supposed to give an over-all review of primary psychopathy for abuse survivors and not include too many details beyond psychopathy. The reading section is supposed to make up for that.
However, I may edit this post to address the link between ADHD and conduct disorder, although ADHD can co-occur with other disorders other than conduct disorder including bipolar disorder, Tourette syndrome, depression and so many others. Because of the breadth of co-occurring conditions, I left it out.
I edited the post slightly to include ADHD ...
DeleteI wish you had never edited your post to include ADHD. I, for one, am furious about it still being used. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, it seemed like all my peers were being given this disorder including several of my best friends. When my closest friends and I got together for a highschool reunion a couple of years ago, we had ALL benn re diagnosed with PTSD. That's six of us thank you very much. we talked about all the abuse we endured, the constant insults and rage over nothing, the babysitter being T.V. because our parents were too busy to be real parents, but took all of the credit anyway.
ReplyDeleteWhile I got re diagnosted and felt better for it, I have a deep innate distrust over therapists. ADHD is just a soothing kit for lousy abusive parenting and one more reason to make their child appear guilty so they don't have to.
Please take this back down.
By the way, you know me. I don't want to leave my name and story on a public forum. I will contact you soon
Hi Anonymous,
DeleteI too have known a lot of child abuse survivors who were wrongly diagnosed with ADHD as children. Actually I was in a situation where the majority were. And you are right: it is over the top, and can be particularly damaging and never addresses the real problem. Plus the caretakers (or the abusers from the child's life) get off the hook with a wrong diagnosis.
I think the thing to do in this case is to write another post on the controversy of so many children in the USA being given the ADHD diagnosis and reference this post to that post.
The same thing was happening pre-ADHD where abused children were being given the diagnosis of "Childhood Schizophrenia". I knew a lot of child abuse survivors given that label too.
Now that diagnosis no longer exists. It has been taken out of the DSM and Schizophrenia can only be attributed to adults. We can only hope that ADHD might meet the same fate, or at least a revised fate.
Children go through stages much more than adults do, and you could slap on psychological disorders to a lot of the stages. Children tend to be much more emotionally reactive than adults. And then we have the problem of "labeling" children, something that can scar them, or even self-define them. They risk low self esteem and victimization from psychological labels, especially by adults in a child's life who use these labels in nefarious ways (like using it for blaming, shaming, blame-shifting and gaslighting and to avoid self-reflection).
Something is not right about all of it, and it needs to be looked into more.
Wow! Thank you for this! I knew my mother was way too cruel to just be a narcissist. I'm not sure she's a psychopath either, but maybe something in between? I look forward to hearing more about the differences.
ReplyDeleteI am sorry about that. Yes, I will be doing posts similar to this one about other disorders, as well as trying to wrap up traits of narcissism.
Delete