Misadventures with Angry Alcoholics, Bullies and Narcissists: psychopaths

Showing posts with label psychopaths. Show all posts

Monday, October 17, 2022

Setting Boundaries (for Victims of Narcissistic or Psychopathic Abuse)

edited slightly on the day of posting, and a very minor passage on 10/19/22

Note: this will be part of a series on strategies you can use to set up boundaries.

In this post, as with many others, I have a "further reading" section at the bottom so that you can see what other authors have said about this subject.

One reason that many of us end up in abusive relationships is that we have poor boundaries. From bad parents we learn to "normalize" abuse. On the opposite spectrum, good parents and growing up in a highly empathetic respectful family where members get along and feel love and compassion for each other most of the time, we learn that with empathy, we can transform relationships and even the world (no we can't, especially when we come across people who are narcissists, sociopaths and psychopaths).

The first part of setting good boundaries is: What are our morals and ethics? Or if we come from a toxic, abusive family, what do we want our morals and ethics to be, going forward?

This is where we get into the realm of spirituality, which can be difficult to do if you are raised in an atheistic abusive family who puts pressure on you not to adopt any spiritual practices. You are supposed to be one of those craven individuals who only looks to consumerism, money, influence over others and general selfishness as your God, don'cha ya know?

Once you contemplate what morals and ethics you want in the world at large, it is a spiritual practice. There is no getting around that. Now you have entered the forbidden territory against the traditions of your family, and their power-and-influence-and-money-is-everything family members' focus, and this will invariably start arguments, and maybe even bullying. "You aren't any better than us! Let's abuse you just to see how spiritual you really are!" they might think, and then go through with it. You're supposed to be arguing and strategizing outcomes like the rest of your family all of the time, don't you know?

But this is the only way boundaries can happen. Your morals and ethics keep the boundary walls up so that abuse will no longer be tolerated.

If you come from a religious family, but you are required to treat them differently than they treat you (more deference, with respect, by putting them first, by squelching your needs and wants because you are "supposed to be saintly" by not having a selfish thought in your body) while the authority figures in your family don't treat you with deference or respect, rarely put you first and who live selfish lives that are far from saintliness, then they are hypocrites, far from saintliness themselves. And we know that grossly un-saintly selfish, immoral people should not be trying to teach others how to be saintly. It doesn't work for them, and they know it.

So, let us say that they are sending you away to college, and they have paid for it. They put you on an airplane to come home on school break and they are paying for that too. And by the way, the parents who are paying for your college and the trips back home are your father and stepmother. They hate your biological mother, and they make their hatred very known to you (it's even a pronounced parental alienation issue, something that is against the law in their jurisdiction).

When you get home, you discover that your mother has come down with an illness and needs your help. So you spend the entire vacation with your Mom, driving her to the doctor, making her meals, watching T.V. together.

Meanwhile, your father and stepmother say over the phone to you, "She's not really sick! She's doing this on purpose to keep you from visiting us! It's a ploy to get attention! Don't you know her by now?"

But you defend your mother on the phone, and there is nothing you see that is convincing you that it is a ploy. In fact, it seems like what they are accusing your mother of being is what they are being.

Then you have to meet your plane to go back to school. So you ask another one of your siblings to take care of, or look in on your common mother. And then you go to your father's and stepmother's house so that they can drive you to the plane the next morning.

But when you show up, they are in a rage. They tell you how much money they paid for the plane ticket and school, and how selfish you were to spend their money on seeing your mother instead of them. In fact, "You need to see which side the bread is buttered on!" they shout at you. "Are you going to put your mother, who has very little money first, or learn to be grateful for the money you are getting from us? Which is it going to be?!" In fact, "You owe us! When we send you a plane ticket, your duty is to us, not to her! She's horrible! She's like our enemy, and you spend our hard earned money on our enemy!"

But their rage is not all there is to this matter. They tell you that "You need to apologize to us and make a promise to us that this will never, ever happen again! If you don't, then there won't be any more school, and there won't be any more plane tickets! You can just work at Walmart's in town until you can behave yourself!"

If this was a young child, they would be learning that money is more important than people, and more important than compassion for others, that you should put people with money first, that in order to be accepted by your parents (and not punished) that you should cut out your other parent from your life because your "all powerful father" thinks of your mother as the enemy (even if you love your mother, even if you can't quite believe money and rewards are "everything"). And it might mean your father might reject you if you love your mother. Your father seems to be in a competition with your mother for attention. In other words, it's a nightmare parental alienation situation which sends your anxiety through the roof, and a pretty common one when you have a narcissistic parent.

If you apologize and tell them it will never happen again, it is likely to be inauthentic if you have any sort of morals or ethics at all. If you don't have morals and ethics, you wouldn't be taking care of a sick mother to begin with, unless your only motivation in taking care of a sick mother is to get an I.O.U. from her later on (strongly unethical, and definitely "narcissistically transactional" - this would make you another narcissist just like your father). But let us say that you lie to keep your father and step-mom happy. But it's not just the lie that makes you inauthentic, it's pretending to be a non-empath too. It's pretending to put money and people with money first, and empathy last.

And if you truly have empathy, the next vacation your mother is sick, you will be spending it with her again, only this time you'll be breaking a promise to your Dad too, the promise to put him and his money first. And the same punishment will come up in that conversation, only this time, maybe he will react to it by teaching you the lesson that "I will hurt you , and keep hurting you, if you don't put me and my money first." - and by the way, that is abuse.

So then this situation becomes an ethical and moral "mess" that challenges your morals and ethics again and again. The more you "give in" to your Dad, the more likely it is to erode away any morals and ethics you have. You'll be just like him. And is this what you want?

So in order to keep your empathy and ethics intact (and also to keep from getting ill yourself with PTSD symptoms), you have to create the boundary with your truth, your morals and your ethics: that Dad and his money do not come first; he is not any more important to you than your mother is, that threats will not work. Throwing money at you won't change the love you have for your mother or for him. Bullying you won't work. If he has any smarts, he knows this already, but narcissists like to have excuses to hurt other people, especially other people who are "showing boundaries", so this becomes his opportunity to hurt you, to try to bend you to his will, and into being a mini-me version of him.

What usually happens in these situations is that Dad stops paying for college and abandons you completely, but he does not abandon the "hope" that you will turn yourself around and realize "what you've done".

What you have done is actually a good thing, but narcissists can't see it because money is "God" to them, not ethics or morals. Although you may have inadvertently pushed your father out of your life by saying no to coercive control, it is the beginning of making a boundary of what you will, and what you will not, tolerate in your relationships. You will either abandon your morals and principles, seeing how hard life can be by not having your father's presence in your life, and not going for the money and mini-me pressures. However, if you can keep with it through all of the extortions, the threats, the PTSD, the other raging flying monkeys that your Dad sends your way where they'll insist he's the victim, and all of the odds that you might fail, plus all of the narcissistic carrot sticks (which most likely will be money or favors too), you can keep your morals, your ethics, and your empathy intact.

They haven't succeeded in destroying the best part of you and that's the best part of all of it.

Some of you might make an inauthentic promise to this kind of a Dad not to see your mother again, and then not talk to your father again, or accept his money again after he sends you back to school on the plane, but I would still bet you will feel guilty about it, at least a little.

He is trying to trick you into a promise you know would be immoral to keep, and you are trying to trick him by promising something you will not keep. So what this creates in the end is that he doesn't trust you, and you don't trust him.

In another chapter I'll be discussing how, when we are in a relationship, when trust is trashed for the darker narc gods like money or coercion, or when trust is trashed by not keeping promises, it's like a chess game where the chess pieces represent trust: he takes away your rook so that you have less power, but in the next move you take away his bishop. Both of you have less pieces. In the end, you may only have two kings left, chasing each other all over the board in attack or defense for the rest of your life. That is how trust dissolves in relationships too. You can't get it back once either one of you start playing with it.

So what kind of god-awful relationship is it then? Why would anyone want to be in a relationship that is that diminished, where the name of the game is to either protect yourself by retreating from attack, or protect yourself by attacking your opponent? What kind of father would want to play a game like that with their own child, and what kind of a child would want to be coerced into a game like that with a parent?

My guess is that you (the child) walks away from the relationship and the game long before there are only two kings left.

So let's say that you do have good boundaries. You've passed the test at not being coerced or blackmailed. Let's say that you've proved it by going through the hellacious ring of fire through all of your Dad's narcissistic tactics, more sadism than you knew he had, and more brainwashed flying monkeys than you thought he had too. The more lies, sadism and abuse you see, the more hardened your resolve becomes, much like an army trying to drive out enemies from it's borders. This is also how you keep your boundaries from being porous again. If you put up the boundaries that "I do not give in to the coercion and threats" of your father, surely you can use it on others who are coercively controlling too.

It seems harsh, but this is one way you put up boundaries. Narcissists aren't going to listen to you when you plead with them to stop, or tell them that what they are doing is really hurting you, when you tell them that what they are doing is immoral and possibly illegal. They have said to "hell with" all of those things long ago. They chose to take the path of renouncing empathy and reasonable solutions long ago. These are the spiritual challenges you have to undergo to put up boundaries too. It's the fight of "good and evil". Of course, not everyone's challenge will come by way of a parent (which is really the ultimate challenge), but these challenges are necessary unless we want to live in a world of domestic violence scenes in every house, a world of being unmoved to help anyone who is sick or going through coercion and bullying, a world of on-going invasions, war, and ecological Armageddon or Mordor. Yes, it really comes down to that, effecting the entire world. What happens in the home, effects everything outside the home eventually.

If everyone is adopting money as the most important god of all of "the gods", and the invasion of ethical and moral boundaries is commonplace, the world will get there faster than ever before. We have to make the choice about whether we are going to contribute to the holocaust of narcissistic invasions of boundaries, or not. When we give in, we contribute to it. When we don't give in, then boundaries are more likely to be respected as long as most of the population is on the side of the "protection and necessity" of moral, lawful and ethical boundaries.

You may have to give up on a parent to keep being empathetic, and to experience the empathy of others.

The reason why you cannot experience much, if any, empathy while in relationships with narcissists is because there are still more people with boundaries than without boundaries. They see you getting beaten up, hurt or coerced and many will take off: "I don't want to be around your parent. I want to be around my own parent who is much nicer than your parent. You can spend time at my house." Or if it is an adult: "I don't want to be around a person who is that abusive to their child." Or if it's not a child: "Your husband scares me. I can't be around that. Who is to say he won't threaten and beat me up too?" Being with coercive abusive people is very isolating. It is also isolating because they tend to want to control everything about you, even your perceptions, as well as every movement you make in your own life. Plus they work very hard on other people's perceptions too in "smear campaign style": that you are the perpetrator and they are the victim.

Much has been made of the fact that abusers escalate abuse, but they also escalate immoral and unethical deeds. A father like this has probably been having affairs, has triangulated and smear campaigned his co-workers so that he gets the competition fired, has lied like crazy to get sympathy and people incensed enough to approach you and tear you to shreds. In other words they have kept going down the darker and darker hole of unethical and immoral deeds for a long time, and covered up those deeds with more lies, diminishments, off-hand quick answers to avoid questions and research, false narratives about what happened, and any tool they can use that will cover up how far down the deep hole they are. Meanwhile, you have been going in the opposite direction, toward more light.

When you have a parent who is acting in an evil way, you may have already gone down the hole a lot, a lot more than you are presently comfortable with. But you reach a point where you can't make them happy without sacrificing yourself in the kind of way that is anxiety-ridden and where every fiber of your being is balking at going down the road they are demanding, a road that you foresee will make you sick and self flagellating if you ignore your own morals and ethics. None of us are perfect, and if the coercively controlling, unethical, evil, but awarding person is your very powerful parent, you may have given into them a whole lot before you got to the point where you can no longer go down that dark hole with them any more.

When you get to that critical mass, they may focus on your evils, your faults, how you acted no better than they acted in what ever situations they bring up, to make you feel that you are not better than them, and not worthy of the light, but the thing is, when you are going up, you are no longer at the same level of darkness that they are. In fact, the tendency is that the more you go up, the further they go down in dirty tactics and deeds in order to punish you. The more they punish you, the more likely you are to go up. That is because the more you adopt ethics and morality, the more disgusted you will be by the tactics down in the hole.

I haven't talked about PTSD (or C-PTSD for children of parental abuse), but it can also be looked at as an illness of spirit that has emotional, physical and mental symptoms. You have been exposed to too much evil that it has made you sick. Even if none of it was your fault at all, the PTSD is a sign that your boundaries have been violated way too much. Your boundaries are like this amorphous blob that other people have tried to mold and beat up to suit their needs. The best way to really understand the concept is to understand sexual abuse. Let's say it is sexual abuse of children because they are almost guaranteed to get PTSD from the abuse. While emotional abuse can be just as damaging, sexual abuse is how you can understand emotional abuse. You were coerced or treated with force into unhealthy, unsafe, or unethical acts by an abuser ... Now to compare it with emotional abuse: even the unethical act of smashing a child's self esteem is still very, very destructive, and yes, invasive. It's an invasion of his emotional and psychological health and well being. It may be invasive in a different way than sexual abuse, but it is still very invasive, and causes the child pain, and can cause PTSD just like sexual abuse does. You do not have a right to carpet bomb a child's self esteem.

And by the way, why would you want to? That's the real question that should be answered, and answered without excuses, diminishments, lies, blame-shifting and other evil tactics. By the time "your abused person" is going up while you are going down, you are fed up with and disgusted by these tactics, carrot sticks and the never-ending fake honeymoons followed by punishments/campaigns to "make-you-suffer".

One of the most horrific aspects about having PTSD (which for now I talk about briefly at the bottom of another post) is that cruel people pick on people with PTSD, and in many ways, seek them out to torture. So the PTSD gets worse for you, the victim, while their very dark deeds against you keep getting darker and darker and more dangerous for you. This has a lot to do with their lack of empathy mixed with their incredible desires to perpetrate attacks "predator style".

The one thing I haven't talked about in terms of narcissistic people in this post is that they can't deal with, or want, lateral relationships. If you go towards them in any kind of lateral way, i.e. "Look at me as an equal human being", "Look at me as having feelings where I can be hurt as much you can be hurt, and for the same reasons", "Let's do such and such together as equals", they won't have any of that. When you go lateral, they always go above you, in a haughty superior style, no matter how much you insist on lateral humble communications.

Their relationship with you is always going to be about infantilizing and objectifying you. When you throw in their lack of empathy, it is a dreadful combination. They see you as narcissistic supply, a product to consume for their own ego. Thus they really can't see or know you.

And if you don't play their game of telling them they are entitled to things and experiences, and that they are superior to you, they will turn on you in the most cruel ways possible. They'll even lie about you just to retain the image of superiority.

Most of us can't live like that in the sacred places of our homes or within the context of much healthier relationships that we have. They get abandoned a lot, but survive it and move on to other narcissistic supply. I imagine that lying, blame shifting, insulting their exes, playing the victim and avoiding any accountability also helps them survive so many abandonments. So for this reason you should not feel guilty for abandoning them because most likely they have an elaborate, if dark, coping process for dealing with it.

In fact, what ever we non-narcissists experience will be much worse than what they experience, so we can also leave with that in mind too.

Being around narcissists for any amount of time will cause trauma for the average person. Dr. Ramani Durvasula is very much about leaving the narcissist if you can, and putting your energy into saving your health and mental health that was compromised when you were in the relationship. Dr. Judy Rosenberg is about putting the narcissist aside in most all ways in order to heal all of the psychological wounds they have made. Dr. Les Carter is very much about not accepting the narcissists way of thinking and relating, and saying "no" to how they try to influence you, that you should remain firm as an individual who has the right to make your own autonomous decisions, and the right to dignity, respect and self worth (and mostly would prefer that his patients leave narcissists behind too). Lisa Romano prefers to live without narcissists in her life, and tells you how she did it, and how you can do it too. Life coach Richard Grannon is very much about leaving the narcissist and saving yourself. Professor Sam Vaknin, a psychologist, university professor and self proclaimed narcissist, believes everyone should abandon narcissists always, and if narcissists need help, they should go to a therapist instead of back to their old relationships. When you go to domestic violence counselors, they tell you to get out and why it is necessary. All of these experts in the field who study abuse and narcissism, keep saying "abandon, abandon, abandon", that there is nothing good for them or for you in staying in the relationship.

"Stop feeding the evil, avoid the trauma bond and move on with your life", in other words.

However, if you are not too close to them, having the most superficial relationship you can think of may work for a lot of you. It is especially useful in workplace situations if you are not their scapegoat for rage, abuse or blame. That can be the ultimate boundary you set: superficiality with very little contact, and preferably in crowds. What this achieves is avoiding the inevitable smear campaigns, false narratives about what happened between you, and dark triangulations where they try to convince other workers that they should not have a relationship with you, and that you should be fired.

If you are their kid or spouse, you have to be braced for this anyway. I've known very few situations where being superficial works in personal relationships like family and love relationships, but to be honest, most of the people I have known who tried this were scapegoats. Some of them endured lots of smear campaigns just to get to their goal of a superficial relationship, and hated the superficial relationship so much that they drifted into "no contact" anyway. With co-workers who are narcissists, it works much better and they can have the opinion that you are "so boring - all she talks about is laundry and making food dishes! Who does that?! I tell her what to do, and she listens but doesn't respond! What's wrong with her?!" But most co-workers won't see anything wrong with how you act or how boring you are, and will back off on making any harsh judgments (unless they are other narcissists - I will talk about how you can beat office gossip in another post).

Unfortunately, this is what it has come to in many work situations.

My own personal story is that I went "no contact" with narcissists in my personal sphere, but it took awhile to withdraw (you know: hopes). When I was first discarded by one of the narcissists, my life was in more turmoil and pain than anything I ever experienced. Then they played the victim and expected me to relieve their state of pretend-victimhood. The experience was truly horrific and there are things I should have done to make it less horrific, but I didn't have the tools then. Because their discard was done during the lowest point in my life (surgeries, two very close people dying, dealing with two major diagnoses), it drove up the trauma symptoms (note: I became "no contact" after the discard).

But then at some point, my life improved in a drastic, wonderful and profound way, a way that I never thought possible. It made me realize that setting boundaries against the narcissist's trojan horses, puppet strings, and infantilizations are possible to do and come out the other side in better shape. There were glimmers of it when I started to go to Alanon meetings where, in my case, empaths ruled the sphere of influence. That was so eye-opening, that empaths are not always shunted off to the side, unheard, and used for coercion, blaming and scapegoating. But then even more new experiences opened up, and a new kind of life emerged that I had never experienced before, and in many ways didn't even know existed. I kind of felt like a bird who has left a very confining anxiety-ridden dilapidated prison-like nest and has flown away. I don't feel like the same person I was before. If I was to say anything about how I got here, I would say that setting personal boundaries and working on what my own ethics and morals were and what I needed to do to firm them up so that my boundaries could, in turn, firm up, was one of the major factors, as well as hard work on understanding what I had gone through in the deepest way possible, and blind ass luck. But I would say you have to know what boundaries to set, and why it matters.

Now for those of you with kind, empathetic, close families who are devoid of predatory family members, and you have inadvertently ended up with a narcissist ... Let's say you somehow got tricked by an abuser's charm and their words of flattery, and you are married to that abuser now, and you have kids ...

You already grew up with ethics and morals, so you know that their abuse is a violation of your ethical and moral boundaries. You already have good boundaries. You have been taught to have them. But unlike the child in the last paragraphs, you have more choices, more autonomy at your disposal (hopefully). You are an adult, and that gives you more leverage, and even more hutzpah to resist. You are probably not as hostage to this situation unless you think of yourself as a helpless child, bound to your abuser by money, children, pressures from the church, threats, isolation, constant physical abuse, what ever it may be. As an ethical and moral person, you know that it is evil to abuse someone else. It is evil to abuse the happy child within you too, and it is evil to purposely traumatize you ... You may even be aware that it is evil, even as you are being constantly brainwashed by that abuser that everything is your fault ...

Here is where empathy gets us into trouble. You may have been taught that all souls seek salvation from sin. However, research into narcissism and psychopathy, both Cluster B personality disorders, tells us that for them, it isn't so. One thing we know about psychopaths, who make up a large number in the prison population is that they use sob stories to commit crimes. "I have a flat tire. Can I come into your house to use your phone to call the service station?" "My wife is absolutely nuts, and hurt me so much, but you are my savior," "I left my money home and I need to take a bus to see my dying sister," and so on. They get access to you through sob stories or victim stories and naturally your empathy goes out to them. We know that psychopaths have something like trojan horses, that if you let them into your world with your empathy, they will probably commit crimes against you. It may be a petty crime or a murder, it may be a little scary or absolutely terrifying. All of it is a violation of the boundaries of ethics and morality.

Narcissists have trojan horses too: their primary trojan horse is to traumatize you emotionally, mentally and sometimes physically, and to take over your life, and demand and command and dominate, by sweet-talking you into marriage, and sweet talking you into certain perspectives, trying to take away your autonomous decision-making little by little and confusing you so much with gaslighting that it takes away your ability to see them as the puppet master. If you don't do what the domineering narcissist wants you to do at all times, they put you through scary rages that can escalate to physical abuse, or scapegoating, both quite dangerous.

Thus the "trojan horses" of narcissists can be as unethical and immoral as the "trojan horses" of psychopaths, and more importantly, as dangerous. The psychopath takes a much shorter time to get to danger than the narcissist, that's all. It's all a violation of the boundaries of decency and respect.

BOUNDARIES TO CONSIDER

Most of the boundaries to consider have to do with what is immoral and unethical in religious or spiritual terms, and are, in fact, narcissistic and sociopathic traits.

"Do not bring us into temptation, but deliver us from evil" from the Lord's prayer can mean not being tempted by the temporary rewards of evil people, and can also mean not being tempted to use your empathy on evil people as well. Also, you are praying not to be evil yourself, and not to be tempted to use evil against others. So every time you set boundaries of what you will or won't accept from others has to mean what you won't accept from yourself as well.

So suppose you set the boundary of not tolerating harshly judgmental people into your private life, it means you cannot be harshly judgmental yourself. You end the tolerance of harsh judgements, period. And by the way, narcissists are extremely judgmental of others, and they are usually harshly and cruelly judgmental, expecting their victims to be "absolutely and totally perfect" in all deeds and actions towards them, and sometimes even in looks, while not being that way themselves. By not accepting narcissism to flourish in yourself and in others by shutting narcissism down and out of your own psyche and close personal relationships, it allows more peace and intelligence into the space that is left.

Why peace and intelligence? If you take on the narcissistic idea that you are special (that you don't deserve harsh judgements, but that other people do), you are never going to be able to understand people as they are, without your labels on them. You won't have insight into them. Being harshly judgmental tends to be a trap of closemindedness as well as a compulsion to psychologically nullify the complexities of other people from your thoughts. If you are kind of twisted, it might make you feel better to be harshly judgmental for awhile, but then you have to live with being a close minded individual. "This person isn't worthy of my consideration or politeness, so bam!" - and if it is done a lot, to a lot of people, which it is for the majority of narcissists, they rarely see any kind of judgement (or truth, or glimmers of truth) beyond that. If you notice, opinions that narcissists have about other people, even their own children or a spouse, never change. They live in the hellacious experience of what they perceive as unchanging people, an unchanging world, unchanging conditions, and so they adopt unchanging responses to other people as well.

So let's imagine that some people are apples and some people are oranges. As a "consumer", you may prefer oranges over apples, and just buy any old orange to satisfy your need to consume. But what you may fail to understand is that in the act of consuming, all oranges are different, from types, shapes, where they are grown, the soil in which they are grown in, the care they receive, the rainfall they had. The consuming is so overwhelming that it blanks out all of the rest. If we become narcissists, we might develop harsh judgments about apples, a fruit we don't like as much as oranges.

It is what we have left after we have reduced them down into consumables for our own hungry egos. Since so many narcissists have exempted themselves from the same harsh judgements, the hypocrisies and evil inside of them flourish and gain ground.

It might be said that the rest of us are harshly judgmental of narcissists, and if you've been hurt by one, you are likely to see them more in black and white terms than you did before, i.e. you may become slightly more narcissistic (it's a natural psychological mechanism to see them more as "black" than as "white" when you've been hurt or traumatized by them). And even the psychological mechanism of them not pleasing you is there too. But the one big difference is that most of us don't go around expecting others to treat us with kid gloves while we light into them about how imperfect, awful, stupid and crazy they are (i.e. we are not so harshly judgmental that we are in effect, terrorizing them, and invading their peace of mind and state of self esteem in order to have them submit to our wills).

In other words, narcissists will argue with you indefinitely about how horrible you are unless you are pleasing them, and living up to their standards of perfection (while they would never live up to the same standards that they set), while at the same time not giving a damn whether they are sensitive to your feelings, let alone pleasing you. Most of us don't expect from others things that we are not capable of delivering ourselves; that's where the rest of the population differs from them. Our minds are open enough and humble enough to know that people are their own entities, just like an orange on a tree will exist in spite of the fact that no one might eat it. Human beings are not just pleasers (i.e. consumables for our egos).

Usually when you see harsh judgements, you'll also see a lot of arrogance, how they shut down conversations that you want to have with them, sometimes about important matters that really should be discussed. You'll probably also see lack of empathy when you notice harsh judgements. Somehow it all goes together in a toxic brew. Harsh judgements mean not being at peace with others.

In Buddhism you tame desires, and therefor suffering, by accepting things and people for who and what they are without your influence. You no longer have the desire to remake, to lecture others, to be a blind consumer. You let the action spin around you.

In Hinduism there is a space called "bad company" where your energy is drawn down to the first chakra: arguments, fighting, anger, despair, issues unresolved, etc. Bad company happens because you are more drawn to arguing your point of view, defending, and to surviving the fights, than to enlightenment. In Dr. Ramani's course, the DEEP technique is also somewhat of a Hindu perspective: "don't defend, don't engage, don't explain, and don't personalize". If you use this technique, you are not likely to attract "bad company" to you to begin with, so then you don't have to get drawn into endless arguments, their rage sessions, their need to pull you in and throw you away over and over again, or take what they have to say personally. Then you put your mind towards enlightenment instead.

Enlightenment requires inner peace and contemplation, something you can't do when people are trying to pull your energy downwards to their level. It also requires the desire to hear, understand and to tell the truth. Without that desire, you can't reach enlightenment. You want the truth even despite what your ego wants you to do at certain moments, or what your ego wants from you. It requires trustworthiness, continually opening your mind, compassion and being mindful of the feelings of others, and of course diligent mindfulness of morality, ethics and transcendence in ourselves and others. All of it is meant to reach into higher chakras, and even higher states of "the company you keep", and therefor transcendence from the karmic wheel, and the gravity of this particular way of living within the confines of this particular wave of existence we are experiencing. It is hard to reach the Hindu ideal of enlightenment, because there are a lot of life tragedies that we aren't prepared to deal with, and lots of beings who want to draw our energy down, whether by arguing, punishing, treating us badly or abusively, continual conflict, refusing to resolve, war, or seeing us as food, whether literally or for their egos. Something will always challenge our path to enlightenment and transcending karma. And the ego is the first stumbling block.

That's a very shortened simplistic version of what is required in that faith. Our sins in that faith are not "forgiven just because we look to God or accept God", but require very hard work and a desire for transcendence out of living in the haunted house of our sins (or karma in that religion), and any sins/karma we pass down to the next generation.

We should not want our children to be mini-mes. We want humans coming into the world to have a higher state of consciousness than ours, and even more of a conscience (since the last hundred years has generated Putin, Hitler, Pol Pot, etc ... we are capable of bringing up another generation better than that! - and in the meantime, make a world that is more enlightened too). We want better beings to inhabit the place we must eventually leave behind when we die. Therefor, we don't feed dark energies. We want to ensure that "better energies" are left to the next generation. That is also a simplistic version of the whole concept. It is meant to keep us from enslaving our children, whether as mind slaves, or literally. Our children should be versions of our higher selves, not our lower selves.

So in setting boundaries, we are renouncing and discouraging dark energies in ourselves and in others in order to bring the vibration up, not only in our own lives, but for the life of the planet and all that exists on the planet. We won't be engaging with either narcissistic traits or echo-istic traits if we can at all help it. This is assuming we have "ways out" of these kinds of relationships and interactions, of course. We are in the transition point of ending being a victim (assuming most of my readers are victims of abuse). We are committed to not being blind or to "giving dark energies the benefit of the doubt" - remember, that is how psychopaths get in and wreak havoc on our lives and on the lives of others.

So, the list of what we may want to avoid (using the DEEP technique, or what ever technique you want to adopt) to create boundaries and bring the vibration up is a familiar list if you have been reading my blog. The list is basically narcissistic and psychopathic traits. You can decide how much of these traits and tactics you want in your personal and professional lives. It's up to you. But I bet if you get in over your head with these traits and tactics, you won't be feeling well, and that PTSD symptoms will start emerging. The first sign is anxiety, by the way, and the second sign is having sleep disturbances. Stomach aches, nausea and headaches usually follow. And then other symptoms can emerge, and it all can get really bad ...

The list will have some of my comments, but you don't have to necessarily go with my comments. You might think about how these traits effect you instead.

Some of the list:

* blame-shifting: blame-shifting culpability is pretty darned immoral and unethical in my book, especially if it's done more than a couple of times over your life time (this is accounting for letting people make mistakes 2 times).
Blame-shifting is where arguments come in, where you are on the defensive to keep injustices from happening to you.
In my experience, once they go down the "blame-shifting" dirty road, they do it again, and again, and again, on and on.
They lecture you with the intent of trying to get you to buy into being culpable for every conflict between you eventually. They eventually get to have the attitude that "I'm never at fault, so you have to believe it is your fault every time." Blame-shifting becomes a horrific norm in your relationship.
They invade the boundary of justice. If they can't get you to take the whole burden of fault on your shoulders, they tend to pull away or punish you in some way.
Accepting a blame that does not belong to you to get them to stop with lectures, black-mail, threats or arm-twisting to get back peace in your relationship with them, is extremely unhealthy for you, and you are indulging in the practice of lying on top of it all.
Should you be lying in order to keep them from feeling the pain of culpability? Should you be lying just for them to feel comfortable in their own skins? Should you be a martyr just for them? Should you be carrying not only their pain, but the pain of the injustice, the pain of the martyrdom, the pain of repetitions of this dirty little practice of theirs?
What I saw: If they feel you are an easy target for blame, they do it every time they have an urge to blame. That's how you become their scapegoat. And once they put you in the scapegoat role, they will not accept you being out of this role, ever (that is what I've seen in forums and in real life). It often graduates to blaming and shaming for made up fantasies, or for the most erroneous things you can think of.
In order to end it all, you have to end the relationship to end the role. Scapegoating is very dangerous, and often boils down to mob bullying. Anyone in the mob can get out of hand and justify atrocities, murder, maiming, domestic violence, stealing, and any order of tortures. I will touch on the dangers in another post (and it's not just going to be about PTSD, though that is a huge factor too).
Families who do this to children kind of remind me of a commercial I used to see. I think it went like this: "Let's give the cereal to Mikey! He'll eat anything!" In scapegoating it is "Let's give all of the blame, shame, culpability, and punches to Mikey! He'll absorb anything!"
Many children endure it for a long, long time because they see no way out and family pressures are not something a child is going to be able to cope with that well.
But as adults, we really do have a way out of this.
If your boundary is ethics and morality, how is this moral, or ethical to take on blame where it doesn't belong to you? Let alone the scapegoating? You are babying the evil and allowing it to grow.
So I say "no" to blame shifting. If they feel better by discarding me over it, let them. I am done with showing empathy when it turns me into a martyr and a beaten down slave to someone else's needs to stay clean of fault at my, or someone else's, expense.
You can do what you want with this one. But I found "no contact" the best way to deal with this kind of escalating situation.

* gaslighting: I think most of us know this term by now, and if not, it is about someone else trying to make you feel that you are crazy, playing with your perceptions, making you feel inept because you don't have the same perspectives they have. A lot of name calling, invalidation and erroneous blaming is really gaslighting at its core. It is used mostly by unempathetic parents who don't love their child, or as an excuse for a parent to be neglectful, unappreciative, unresponsive to their child's feelings and thoughts, and disengaged in the difficult job of child rearing.

If they can convince a child that the child's experience of not feeling loved or cared for has to do with having a "crazy mind" that can't get reality right, then a child backs away from asking, wanting or expecting love, care, compassion, reasonable solutions and familial belonging. In other words they take the lack of love and neglect on as their fault (i.e. "being crazy") for their parent being disengaged and unloving.
The other problem with this is that the child often feels he or she has to believe or make believe they are crazy to be barely considered or loved by Mom or Dad, whoever is doing the gaslighting.
But in believing or make-believing, the parent will use it for another dirty deed: to isolate the child, which is even worse than being called crazy: "Well, you know, my child is crazy, so you probably shouldn't talk to him or her." It makes it too easy for no one to be concerned for the child and it renders the child voiceless. Therefor believing or make-believing brings out even more evil in the parent, exponentially more evil, even if they are getting their way in being neglectful without detection. A lot of gaslighted children get thrown away at the worst times of their lives (the point is to make the child desperate enough to put up with more gaslighting and abuse).

Adults can experience gaslighting from a partner too, but it is much harder to do. The typical gaslighting experience from an intimate partner is to be overly kind to one person, or to total strangers, and friends, and then to be absolutely cruel and impolite to you, in Dr. Jekyll Mr. Hyde style.
Gaslighting at work sometimes happens in the form of trying to get you to believe you do not work hard enough, and that they are a better worker than you are. Or they steal your ideas, claim them as their own, and tell you that you are "crazy" for thinking they took your ideas and presented them to the boss. A worker might give you the silent treatment to make you think you did an egregious thing, and when you confront the worker about why they are giving you the silent treatment, they say, "You know what you did!" - extremely typical gaslighting to make you think you are doing things you are not aware of.
Gaslighting can also happen in sibling relationships. Such as saying to a parent: "You know she's crazy. Why would you ever question my motives. You should question hers instead."
Gaslighting is pretty evil. It is especially evil when done to a child, which is where it manifests the most and continues well into adult-hood. There is absolutely no reason, or excuse, to do it to a child, none. It's cruel inhumane treatment and the child's sibling is liable to use it too.
Even if the child is insane enough to be disabled, is parental neglect, rejection and abuse really the best way to treat mental illness? If a child has cancer, do you go around and remind the child over and over that they have cancer, and therefor you don't want to hear what their feelings and thoughts are, and that neglect and abuse is the best way to treat the cancer?
Because that is what we get when a parent gaslights a kid.
The other thing we get is a child who might tell others that he (or she) is crazy, and that Mom or Dad told them so, and we know that disabled kids get bullied a lot. So it opens up the possibility of school bullying, being kidnapped, being sexually abused, of being a choice target for predatory people. And then the perpetrator can claim, "I would never do that! You know he (or she) is crazy!" ... even when they are not crazy.
And because narcissists don't care all that much about their kids beyond narcissistic supply, co-dependence, power, control and domination, the possibility that the kid will get the proper kind of help is not likely happen.
Gaslighting is about as immoral and unethical as you can get. It requires a whole host of dark motives including lying, manipulating, scheming, not caring, neglecting, twisting facts, making up stories, trying to get a child to be gullible and to have soft permeable boundaries where you can fill his thoughts, motives and experiences with what ever you want at any inconvenient moment, invalidating his reality, feelings and thoughts because you don't want to be bothered with having to relate to him in an open, humane, polite, attentive, empathetic and considerate way.
I've gotten to the point in my own life where gaslighting is a total deal breaker. It is, in its own way, an invasion of boundaries too, in terms of keeping to the boundaries of decency and respect. I certainly will not tolerate it any kind of close relationship, or even in a work relationship.
You can contemplate how much of a boundary you want to place on this one.

These are some others I might expound on later, but in the meantime you can ponder what boundaries you want on these:

* cruelty and sadism
* punishing adults in close personal relationships
* false narratives
* shaming
* triangulating
* invalidating
* harsh judgements, making fun of others, schadenfreude
* close-mindedness
* broken promises
* bigotry, prejudice
* scapegoating
* the silent treatment
* stonewalling
* stealing
* name calling and other verbal abuses
* extra-marital affairs
* unsolicited advice
* lying (black lies, not white lies)
* scapegoating and mob bullying
* sibling abuse
* workplace bullying
* manipulations and coercive control
* rage when they are criticized or when you refuse to do what they are pressuring you to do
* rage: when you are being required to walk on eggshells
* erroneous blaming
* infantilizing and parentifying people
* hypocrisy
* people who are immoral and don't change their immoral behaviors
* stalking and people who push boundaries
* lack of empathy and lack of respect
* argumentative and baiting you for arguments
* lack of respect
* so jealous of you that they are destructive and sabotaging
* plain ol' sabotaging
* smear campaigns
* financially abusive
* rejecting and discarding
* people who bring trojan horses into your life
* co-bullies
* blackmail
* child abusers
* neglect
* threats
* arrogance
* insincerity
* heartlessness
* people who are out to make you feel uncomfortable or frightened
* people who believe they will get away with abuse or crimes
* disrespect for the property of others
* passive aggressiveness
* criminals
* people who shut down conversations between you (so that they control what you talk about - and not just for safety reasons)
* people who have committed crimes or abuses towards you, but say they have changed
* people who demand you respect them but who rarely, if ever, treat you with respect
* people who demand and command, but who ignore you when you ask them for something
* people who insult you, but demand that you treat them with dignity and respect
* people who are constantly lecturing you about your behavior ("behavior lectures"), but who do not behave themselves in the way that they expect from you, or are downright abusive
* people who talk about torturing, tricking and killing animals in an arrogant way
* if you have PTSD, what boundaries are you going to set with abusers and abuse going forward
* if you have PTSD, what boundaries are you going to set with people who like to indulge in arguments going forward
* if you have PTSD, what boundaries are you going to set with people who are demanding, commanding, swearing, and loud

Friday, February 26, 2021

Psychopaths and Abuse. How Do I Tell if Someone is a Psychopath Instead of a Narcissist?

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 ...

In contrast, there are at least four types of narcissism including "grandiose narcissism", "vulnerable narcissism" (also referred to as "covert narcissism"), "malignant narcissism" and "communal narcissism". Some psychologists have made even more distinctions than these as research comes in.

There are also some graphics on Google to explain it (and a video towards the end of the post by psychologist, Dr. Todd Grande).

The graphics:

HERE is one, and there are others HERE and HERE and HERE

For the sake of simplicity and less confusion, in the post I talk more about primary psychopathy than secondary psychopathy.

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

Psychopaths do not have a range of emotional expression. They tend to be flat emotionally. They don't feel much of anything except for desire, competitiveness and vindictiveness. So they tend to put their energies into thoughts.

Narcissists can also lack a range of emotions, especially if they are malignant narcissists, but they are not as disgusted by the emotions of others as psychopaths are. Also, since they make it a life goal to be socially accepted by others, narcissists try to fake emotions to be accepted. Some psychopaths can try to fake emotions too, but usually only if they feel they absolutely have to, to get what they want, though they are not as believable.

Psychopaths also do not emotionally or cognitively understand the emotions of others, though they will be insistent that they do and that they can read people accurately. No, they can't. For a lot of people, this is where they lose their trust in the psychopath, and where the psychopath becomes creepy. They are actually quite a bit worse at reading people accurately than the general population except in a predatory way.

Narcissists can cognitively have some understanding of the emotions of others, depending on where they sit on the narcissism scale. Run-of-the-mill grandiose narcissists can cognitively read emotions much better than malignant narcissists, for instance.

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.

One typical way that they show an inappropriate response comes from a personal story.

I told a man who was trying to make a "business deal" with me that I was in no state to make a business deal after we had talked because my husband was in the hospital. However, he kept insisting on it, and that I needed to send him money to "seal the deal." And then when I said again that I didn't really have a clear state of mind because of my husband's condition, he started threatening to take away things that he had promised in the deal, and when I still wouldn't budge, he threatened to take away even more. At the time, this made no sense to me. I was exhausted from no sleep and the crises I experienced at getting my husband help, and I started to cry. At which point he said: "Cut that out! Lady, stop that right now!" I hung up on him. Then days later he left me a message on my answering machine that he was willing to give some of the things in the deal back to me again, but not all of them, and that if I wanted "the contract" with his latest terms to call him before the end of the business day. Then days later when I was caretaking my husband at home, he showed up at the front door, which seemed particularly creepy and inappropriate ...

When I met with a domestic violence counselor he said that the behavior was highly suspicious and "It sounds like you had some dealings with a psychopath!"

"Really?" I asked.

"Well, I'm joking, of course, because I don't have the authority to diagnose him. But this is not normal behavior by any stretch. What would you do if someone's spouse was in the hospital?"

I answered, "I would say, 'I'm so sorry! I had no idea! Please excuse me. This deal is not as important as what your husband is going through and you can call me any time. Don't feel you are obligated or under any pressure. I understand. The deal is yours any time.'"

And he said, "Bingo! You see? This guy does not have normal reactions, so the business deal that he proposes seems highly suspect to me."

When I got home, I decided to research him. I found out that his business was brand new, and yes, he had a prison record a mile long, several incarcerations, drug charges, many charges of fraud and racketeering, one charge of theft, one charge of grand larceny, and one charge of assault and battery. So, for all intents and purposes, this counselor knew something with very little information, and you can too.

I could tell you more of the story that corroborated it (a friend had hired him, which is how I got his name), but I think most of the story is best left where it is for now. I can say that the work he did for my friend was exceptionally sloppy and unprofessional and had to be completely re-done. That can be another sign because the reward carries much more importance than the work for these people. Also, my first meeting with him at my friend's house he presented himself as exceptionally charming, self assured, flattering (though I did not want that) and made promises that seemed a little too grand. Those are signs too.

"Cut that out! Lady, stop that right now!" is fairly common when you have a crying spell in front of a psychopath. Some others are, "I'm not up for this drama! You need to stop that!", "I don't want to hear about this! You're crazy! You know that?" and variations thereof.

Some others:

You tell the psychopath that you don't trust him. Typical answers include: "Well, if that's how you feel, then everything is over!", and "If you're going to be like that, then I want nothing to do with you!", "If you're going to act like that and make crazy accusations that I'm not trustworthy, then you need help! Don't discuss this with me further until you have come to your senses!", "If you're going to be like that, you're going to pay for that!" - the threats and stonewalling come out. By the way, sociopaths, like psychopaths, can make use of threats when you tell them you don't trust them either.

Narcissists on the other hand will say things like, "You have never trusted very easily. Maybe you need to look at that", "I'm so sorry you don't trust me. Maybe you need to see a Shrink", "It's interesting you don't trust. It's because of (x, y, z) from your past. But I think you need to put that away when it comes to me", and if they are particularly nasty they will say something in a shrieking mocking tone: "PPPtttt! 'I don't trust you! Boohoo!' "

Normal responses are: "What can I do to gain your trust?", "I hope some day that you can trust me. I know it takes a long time to trust. It's okay. Take your time. I completely understand. You have been hurt a lot", "I'm sorry. I'll help you if you let me. I want to be there for you."

So those are the differences. And they are huge differences.

Some others:

You tell someone a personal story of trauma or hardship where personal discourse has begun to be part of your relationship (or it is well underway). The personal story could be anything - like the husband in the hospital. It is a story which raises emotions in you as you relate to them what you went through. And he doesn't respond. He doesn't call for days, or weeks, or he got too busy to respond, or he forgot that you told him that story, or he makes the excuse that he had nothing to say at the time, or he talks about his issues without seeming to comprehend yours ... All of these responses show indifference and a lack of empathy. Disappearing acts during traumatic events for you are a bad sign (a lot of people who do disappearing acts will have a Cluster B Personality Disorder, of which psychopathy is just one, except perhaps, people with Borderline Personality Disorder).

If you are unfortunate enough to become the partner of a psychopath, here are some other inappropriate responses:

You are in the hospital after an operation, and his visits are spotty at best. He decides to have an affair at that time. Not a "normal response" either.

After surgery, you come home with pain medication, and instead of helping you into bed or into a chair, he says he has something important to do. He takes off for most of the day, and the days following. And the pain medication is gone too.

If he gets enraged by your pointing out his lack of empathy, the reaction of rage is typical of narcissists, sociopaths and psychopaths. They can't stand being criticized about their lack of empathy, or being noticed for that. They think they are the only ones who have a right to complain about how people treat them.

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.

Other signs:

When you are upset or crying, most people will look into your eyes, and be quite focused on your eyes, and how you are feeling. Psychopaths will either look at your mouth or they will look away.

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.

When narcissists verbally abuse you, they may look into your eyes for a second or two, but then they most often look away as they continue to verbally attack you. Very often just at the end of their verbal abuse, they will let out an audible heavy breath sound with their head titled back in an arrogant way.

Psychopaths are different in that they will verbally abuse you while looking directly into your eyes. Not only that, but most often they will lean forward, or assume a dominant position by trying to get slightly above you, or get into your space (verbally abuse you from three feet away or closer). Verbal abuse with psychopaths comes with some intimidation.

NARCISSISTS ABUSE YOU DIFFERENTLY AND FOR DIFFERENT REASONS

THAN PSYCHOPATHS DO

Psychopaths are always in relationships to act a part and to exploit. They feel no connection whether emotionally or physically to others. Manipulating people for personal gain is really the only "connection" they have with others.

Psychopaths often abuse in secret, and they don't share their experiences, not even to build a case of being "a victim" instead of a perpetrator. They don't like to talk about their abuse and manipulations of other people.

Psychopaths are loners in this way, even if they might be married or hold down a job.

Sociopaths, on the other hand, can form a close relationship to at least one other person.

Narcissists have their entourage of "golden" admirers and defenders.

This makes a difference in how they abuse others.

Psychopaths put their focus on one or more things they want to exploit from the other person. They usually ply their victims with great charm, unflappable confidence and flattery at first. Once they have gotten everything they need, they abandon the person. There are variations to this of course, particularly if they think that their victims might try to "push back", or they sense there is more to be had, or there is the danger of law enforcement getting involved, or if they have gotten in trouble with the law before for exploits and need to cover their tracks better, or if they just want to bury any evidence of the exploitation.

The abuse can be simple threats, to "mock makeups" in order to exploit some more, to "exploit then abandon", to battery and assault, to torture, to experimenting with drugs or poisons or in general premeditating a torture or murder, or outright murder. What ever the psychopath deems as most convenient for him is the route he will take, keeping in mind that "coverups" are also part of their strategies.

Run-of-the-mill narcissists usually abuse via the cycle of abuse (here is another link to the cycle of abuse).

Because the graphics of the cycle show more physical violence than some narcissists want to do, the cycles of emotional abuse are more effective at explaining it. Typically the cycle of emotional abuse is "idealize, devalue, discard" ... then another cycle of "idealize, devalue, discard" and on and on.

Furthermore, discards are often between two weeks to three months. This is because their victims are still in the grieving process, reeling from the instability that the discard does to their lives, and therefor vulnerable to "fake" promises, apologies and overtures of regret from the narcissist. There is usually financial abuse involved too, which can make some victims feel desperate for the stability that an apology, and reinstatement of bills being paid, can bring.

Most victims will go through these cycles with the narcissist a number of times until it becomes clear that the promises and the commitments to "change for the better" don't add up, and are, in a word, "phony".

Not all narcissists will return to you (hoover), and some of the reasons are varied including finding the idealized all-encompassing narcissistic supply they want somewhere else, no longer attracted to you (possibly because the narcissist sees less reward and more problems in relating to you), the narcissist feels shame but is too arrogant to apologize, fears that their hoover will not work, feeling threatened that their victim has too much dirt on them and will never believe them, fears that their victim has too much support, and so on.

Among narcissists, there is also the malignant brand of narcissists (malignant narcissists). They are not as common as the run-of-the-mill narcissist, but they are becoming a lot more common, perhaps as high as 30 - 40 percent of all narcissists.

Malignant narcissists are your sadistic and vindictive narcissists. The hoover may look the same as the run-of-the-mill narcissist, but they are trying to get back into your life for revenge and sabotage, to do more damage to you. The revenge can happen because they perceive that you hurt their pride since ego and appearances mean everything to them, or because you flourished and are doing well after their discard, or that you are not missing them "enough". They can't stand it when their victims do well and their minds become obsessed with what to do about it.

On the other hand, some malignant narcissists are too proud to hoover, and they try to build a case with their flying monkeys that you are the one who is solely to blame, that you are the one who owes the apology to them. In the case of this particular turn of events, discards can last for years, decades and a life time. Psychopaths are not as likely to take this route.

Malignant narcissists can turn hoovering into either stalking, harassing or into luring (luring you to a place where they can do the most damage to you - most often trying to get you alone). Psychopaths can lure, harass and stalk too, so this is definitely a commonality, however psychopaths are not as invested in vindictiveness over their image or how they may appear to a social club, so they will be doing it because they want to be sadistic to get a reaction, or they see another opportunity for threats, punishments and exploitation, or because they want to bury evidence.

Malignant narcissists can also treat you as though you do not exist, and were never important to them anyway, especially if they think that this will hurt you the most. Psychopaths also can treat you as though you do not exist and were never important too, but they can take it to another level where they pretend to have never met you to begin with. They discard forever because they are on to the next victim and the next exploitation (serial victims, and serial exploitations)

Superficially, it can be hard to differentiate between the malignant narcissist and the psychopath when it comes to discards.

PSYCHOPATHS DO NOT BELIEVE IN KARMA

As I have said before, psychopaths do not believe in consequences for their actions, and especially as long as they aren't experiencing consequences. When they do experience consequences, they believe they can get out of them through meticulous planning and blaming. Accountability is something they generally scoff at, and something that they deem "only losers" do.

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".

Narcissists are worried about Karma, but like psychopaths they also have the attitude that Karma comes only to "losers".

Narcissists obviously look at the past a lot. False stories, false narratives and playing the victim can't come any other way than focusing on the past. They can also be haunted by paranoia, something that psychopaths don't experience. Narcissists especially experience the paranoia of losing social standing, losing their image, losing narcissistic supply and potential "future" narcissistic supply, losing leadership positions or advisor positions, losing power and domination, and losing the feeling that they are "right all of the time, an expert", which is why they boast about successes so often, put on the act of "ethical leader", so that people will accept and believe in the "persona" they exhibit rather than looking to see if the abuse they are dishing out is real. This is a pretty big difference between them and the psychopath.

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-D

and 5 Reasons Why Psychopaths Cheat on Their Partners - by the administrators of the blog, "Psychopaths in Life".

Here 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 ...

... Criminal behavior and poor behavioral controls cause modeling of antisocial behavior, coercive control and physical abuse. The sexual symptoms of psychopathy cause exposure to multiple (perhaps psychopathic) stepparents, exposure to sexually inappropriate material, and sexual abuse [93] ...

... 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.

THE GLORIFICATION OF PSYCHOPATHS
IN THE AMERICAN CULTURE

I am not the only one who has noticed the proliferation of videos on You Tube and Amazon Prime about sociopaths and psychopaths. They are so prevalent, and often the main fare, in fact, that I am concerned as to how much it is effecting society in terms of the spike in the number of narcissists, sociopaths and psychopaths "infecting" the country. We know that narcissists, sociopaths and psychopaths "teach children by example." Wouldn't it follow that so many of these videos might do the same?

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).

It seemed to start with movies about the mob. Then it graduated with series like The Sopranos that ran every week for eight and a half years, filled with scenes of mobsters cheating on their wives, doing their deals in strip clubs, pushing the sex trade, lying, being part of financial swindles and illegal activities, having people murdered, with the main mob boss getting away with it all (for eight and a half years!). Does this teach anyone that it's cool to be a high functioning sociopath, to act like a wealthy mob boss and lie your way through life, and that accountability only belongs to others? When I have talked to people who watched every episode of the Sopranos, I would hear comments like, "You have to admire the guy", "He gets what he wants in life", and so on. What does it mean for society to admire a sociopath and people who break the law?

Around the time of The Sopranos, it seemed like motion pictures took an "anything goes" approach in terms of portraying the most prolific and evil psychopaths and sociopaths who commit the worse violence imaginable.

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.

The "real violence" and sadistic acts committed during these times is bloody and horrible enough, but the Vikings writers and producers also manufactured so much more of it than the historical record. Perhaps half of the battles, village slaughters and murders were fictionalized. It would have been a better series to have had some respite from it and seen more of what peace, food gathering and family life looked like.

In the series there are two "blood eagles", a sadistic torture where a subject who is alive is cut in the back and his rib cage spread out so that it looks like he has wings. It is known that the Vikings probably used this method as their ultimate torture, but did we really have to see it done two times?

The Last Kingdom is also a series that depicts a lot of war and torture and is even more fictionalized than Vikings. It gets to a point where the main character is always in mud and covered in blood as one battle after another and more slashings than one can count ensues. Some of the Vikings are portrayed as beasts with sharp teeth who revel in the most absolute versions of sadism, theft and destruction. While we know that a Viking grave was dug up in England and warriors were found with filed sharpened teeth, the depictions of these Vikings look more like Orks from Mordor than people (Orks as depicted by Peter Jackson's version of "The Lord of the Rings").

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.

Then of course, we have "Breaking Bad" a contemporary series that seems to depict a "normal" highschool teacher who somehow crosses the line into criminality and psychopathy to support his family. Incredibly it was the most watched series in America, and earned numerous awards.

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?

Which is made first, the psychopathic culture or the psychopathic series? Is it a "chicken and egg" kind of thing?

"These are the Signs of Dating a Psychopath"
from Med Circle
with Dr. Seth Myers, interviewed by Kyle Kittleson:

"The Psychopath & The Sociopath: A Masterclass"

from Med Circle
with Ramani Durvasula, interviewed by Kyle Kittleson
(long video ... settle in):

"7 Signs You Are Dealing With a Psychopath"

from Top Think

and resources from professional articles

listed under the video (find the links underneath the video directly from You Tube):

"What is the Difference Between Primary and Secondary Psychopathy?"

by psychologist, Dr. Todd Grande:

FURTHER READING

Psychopathy - Wikipedia

How to Recognize a Psychopath - by Suzanne Kane for Psych Central

Psychopathy and Intimate Partner Violence - by Olga Cunha, Teresa Braga, and Rui Abrunhosa Gonçalves for Journal of Interpersonal Violence

Gender, Psychopathy Factors and Intimate Partner Violence - by Kenna L. Mager, Konrad Bresin, and Edelyn Verona for U.S. Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health

Psychopathy rather than Machiavellianism or narcissism facilitates intimate partner violence via fast life strategy - by Satoru Kiire for Personality and Individual Differences, 2017

Are Male Perpetrators of Intimate PartnerViolence Different From Convicted Violent Offenders?Examination of PsychopathicTraits and Life Success in MalesFrom a Community Survey - by Delphine Theobald, David P. Farrington, Jeremy W. Coid, and Alex R. Piquero for Journal of Interpersonal Violence

Understanding the violent personality: antisocial personality disorder, psychopathy, & sociopathy explored - by Scott A Johnson, Licensed Psychologist, Forensic Consultation for Forensic Research and Criminology International Journal

The Role of Dark Personalities in Intimate Partner Violence - by Rachel A. Plouffe, The University of Western Ontario for Western, Graduate and Post Doctoral Studies

Sensitivity to facial affect in partner-violent men: the role of psychopathic and borderline traits - by Julia Babcock and Jared Michonski for Journal of Aggression, Conflict and Peace Research

Why Does It Feel Like Two Different Relationships When One Unwittingly Falls for a Psychopath? - by Rhonda Freeman, PhD, for her own website

recommended: Seduction and the Psychopathic Woman - by Rhonda Freeman, PhD, for her own website ... even more recommended: the video Female Psychopaths

recommended: Lingering Pain After a Relationship with a Psychopath or Narcissist part I - by Rhonda Freeman, PhD, for her own website (includes videos well worth seeing)

recommended: Lingering Pain After an Abusive Relationship part II - by Rhonda Freeman, PhD, for her own website

recommended: Blame Shifting | When a Selfish, Callous Partner Tells You ~ ‘It is all your fault’ - by Rhonda Freeman, PhD, for her own website

recommended: Superficial and Shallow Emotions | It’s Not that Deep - by Rhonda Freeman, PhD, for her own website (discussion about psychopaths)

recommended: Don’t Fall into the Trap of Normalizing Pathological Behavior - by Rhonda Freeman, PhD, for her own website (discussion about psychopaths trying to talk you into "I didn't abuse you!" - if you were verbally and emotionally abused and discarded afterwards, it is abuse, no "ifs", "ands" or "buts" ...)

The Fear Factor: Fear Deficits in Psychopathy as an Index of Limbic Dysregulation - by Vasileia Karasavva for Department of Neuroscience, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada and Journal of Young Investigators

excerpt:

... psychopathy is characterized not by an inability to escape punishment but rather by an attention dysregulation that impairs threat or punishment detection (Blair, 2013). Finally, the low-fear hypothesis suggests that psychopaths have a core fear-processing deficit that is expressed by a low level of subjective experience of fear and a reduced impact of aversive stimuli on emotional centers of the brain (Fowles, 1980; Lykken, 1957; Moul et al., 2012) ...
... 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 ...

AUTONOMIC RESPONSIVITY IN PSYCHOPATHS: A CRITICAL REVIEW AND THEORETICAL PROPOSAL - by Peter A. Arnett for Washington State University

Psychopathic Personality Traits as a Protective Factor Against the Development of Intrusive Memories - by Caroline Moul and Angela Nickerson for School of Psychology, University of NSW, Sydney, Australia (discusses lower incidence rates of PTSD in psychopaths compared to other people)

Psychopathic Traits and Physiological Responses to Aversive Stimuli in Children Aged 9–11 Years - Pan Wang, Laura A. Baker, Yu Gao, Adrian Raine, and Dora Isabel Lozano for US Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health

Psychopathic Traits and Perceptions of Victim Vulnerability - by Sarah Wheeler; Angela Book; Kimberly Costello for The U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs

recommended: Psychopathy and Victim Selection: The Use of Gait as a Cue to Vulnerability - by Angela S. Book, Kimberly Costello, and Joseph A Camilleri for Journal of Interpersonal Violence (my note: research suggests that victims of abuse and violence are continually used for more victimization by other predatory people and demeanor, way of communicating and gait can have a lot to do with why - see below ... for training on how to change habits of gait, communication styles and demeanor, contact a local domestic violence center or domestic violence counselor).

recommended: Walk This Way: A Kinematic Point-Light Investigation of Victim Vulnerability - by Brittany Blaskovits A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Affairs in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Psychology

excerpt:

An individual’s gait is one of the first behaviours that an observer has access to that can help them make judgements or form impressions about another person. It is therefore a key component in nonverbal communication between individuals. Recently, the perception of gait was found to be a cue in the prediction of vulnerability to victimization (i.e., individuals who indicate that they have been previously victimized tend to be chosen as potential future victims by others based on the way they walk; Book et al., 2013; Wheeler, Book, & Costello, 2009) ...
... 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.

The gait that is produced is essentially inconsistent and awkward: “Non-victims have an organized quality about their body movements, and they function comfortably within the context of their own bodies. In contrast, the gestural movement of victims seems to communicate inconsistency and dissonance. Condon and Ogden (1966) have called this phenomenon ‘interactional synchrony’” ... (Grayson & Stein, 1981, p. 74) ...
... 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 ...

... Overall, the preliminary findings suggest that gait patterns may respond adaptively when in a potentially dangerous situation, and that it may be possible to train individuals to walk with different features than they normally would (in day-to-day life), thereby mitigating their overall vulnerability. Replication of the results is required, particularly with larger samples. However, empirically-driven intervention/prevention strategies aimed at targeting nonverbal cues of vulnerability are an encouraging step toward reducing victimization. Applied research pertaining to gait movement and nonverbal cuing is necessary, and remains a virtually undiscovered subject area ...

Upcoming talk on psychopathy to focus on victim selection and prevention - by Amanda Bishop (contact, or look for workshops in your area)

Recommended: The Mask of Sanity Revisited: Psychopathic Traits and Affective Mimicry - by Angela Book, Tabitha Methot, Nathalie Gauthier, Ashley Hosker-Field, Adelle Forth, Vernon Quinsey and Danielle Molnar for Evolutionary Psychological Science (research paper)

excerpt (just a small part of the research):
... 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” ...

recommended: WHEN YOUR CHILD IS A PSYCHOPATH (The condition has long been considered untreatable. Experts can spot it in a child as young as 3 or 4. But a new clinical approach offers hope) - by Barbara Bradley Hagerty for The Atlantic Monthly
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.

But the biggest red flag is early violence. “Most of the psychopaths I meet in prison had been in fights with teachers in elementary school or junior high,” Kiehl says. “When I’d interview them, I’d say, ‘What’s the worst thing you did in school?’ And they’d say, ‘I beat the teacher unconscious.’ You’re like, That really happened? It turns out that’s very common.” ...

... In particular, experts point to the amygdala—a part of the limbic system—as a physiological culprit for coldhearted or violent behavior. Someone with an undersize or underactive amygdala may not be able to feel empathy or refrain from violence. For example, many psychopathic adults and callous children do not recognize fear or distress in other people’s faces. Essi Viding, a professor of developmental psychopathology at University College London recalls showing one psychopathic prisoner a series of faces with different expressions. When the prisoner came to a fearful face, he said, “I don’t know what you call this emotion, but it’s what people look like just before you stab them.” ...

... Why does this neural quirk matter? Abigail Marsh, a researcher at Georgetown University who has studied the brains of callous and unemotional children, says that distress cues, such as fearful or sad expressions, signal submission and conciliation. “They’re designed to prevent attacks by raising the white flag. And so if you’re not sensitive to these cues, you’re much more likely to attack somebody whom other people would refrain from attacking.”
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 ...

Psychopathic Traits and Interpersonal Judgment: Examining Accuracy, Tendency, and Influence of Sex of Judge and Target -by Sabrina L.B. Demetrioff Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Dalhousie University Halifax, Nova Scotia September 2013

Social, Sexual, and Violent Predation: Are Psychopathic Traits Evolutionarily Adaptive? - by J. Reid Meloy, Angela Book, Ashley Hosker-Field, Tabitha Methot-Jones, and Jennifer Roters for Violence and Gender Vol. 5, No. 3

The Dark Triad:Examining Judgement Accuracy, the Role of Vulnerability, and Linguistic Stylein Interpersonal Perception - by Kai Li Chung, A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of Edinburgh Napier University, for the award of Doctor of Philosophy October 2017

excerpt:
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 ...

... Using the case study method, Lord, Davis, and Mason (2008) utilised stanceshift analysis to identify sections in sex offenders’ oral statement transcripts where the offender changes the ways in which he or she ascribes responsibility. Stanceshifting occurs when a person changes his or her word usage patterns and can be detected using a computer-assisted coding system (Mason & Davis, 2007). Lord and colleagues found that rapists indeed push personal responsibility aside to justify their Chung, K. (2017) – Chapter 6 130 aggression. When describing the initiation of violence, the rapists often substituted pronouns such as ‘you’ or ‘we’ for ‘I’, as well as projected behaviour onto others citing ‘they’ instead of naming specific persons, perhaps to depersonalise the self as a way to deflect culpability ..
... 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 ...

How to Spot Psychopaths: Speech Patterns Give Them Away - by Wynne Parry for Live Science

How Psychopaths See the World (It’s not that they can’t consider other people’s perspectives. It’s that they don’t do so automatically) - by Ed Yong for The Atlantic

How Psychopaths Choose Their Victims (Just as they are a special breed, so too are their victims) - by Jeff Wise for Psychology Today

10 Signs A Psychopath Is Targeting You - by Elliot Figueira for Psych2Go

How Psychopaths Choose & Groom Their Victims - from the administrators of Psychopaths in Life

Bright Minds, Dark Hearts: Intelligence in the Dark Triad (Machiavellians may be the most intelligent of the dark personalities) - by Scott A. McGreal, MSc. for Psychology Today

How Do People Develop Into 'Successful' Psychopaths? (Some psychopathic individuals learn crucial skills that let them walk among us) - by David S. Chester Ph.D. for Psychology Today

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

Understanding Psychopathic and Sadistic Minds - by Maia Szalavitz for Time Magazine

Psychopaths, Sadists, and the Lure of Internet Aggression (What motivates these online chaos makers and why you should stop feeding them) - Traci Stein Ph.D., MPH by Psychology Today

From psychopaths to ‘everyday sadists’: why do humans harm the harmless? - by Simon McCarthy-Jones, Associate Professor in Clinical Psychology and Neuropsychology, Trinity College Dublin for The Conversation

Sadistic Personality Disorder - Wikipedia (discusses sadism as a stand-alone disorder as well one which occurs in unison with other personality disorders)

Everyday sadists take pleasure in others' pain - Association for Psychological Science

Machiavellianism (psychology) - Wikipedia

Dark Triad - Wikipedia (discusses Machiavellianism)

What is Machiavellianism in Psychology? - by Sheri Jacobson for Harley Therapy Counselling Blog

Beware of the Malevolent Dark Triad (Be cautious of involvement with someone who fits the profile of the Dark Triad) - by Darlene Lancer, JD, LMFT for Psychology Today

excerpt:
... 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 ...

recommended: 15 Signs You Work with a Narcissist, Machiavellian, or Psychopath - from the Academy of Management Insights (get the PDF version HERE especially if the poster is worthwhile to put up in the workplace)

Reducing the Overlap Between Machiavellianism and Subclinical Psychopathy: The M7 and P7 Scales - by Michael P. Grosz ; Peter D. Harms ; Michael Dufner ; Livia Kraft ; Eunike Wetzel for University of California Press

The Five-Factor Model is often used partially to diagnose Psychopathy. Link HERE. Or go to the Wikipedia article HERE.

The Empathic Brain of Psychopaths: From Social Science to Neuroscience in Empathy - by Josanne D. M. van Dongen for Department of Psychology, Education and Child Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Rotterdam, Netherlands

Psychopathy, sadism, empathy, and the motivation to cause harm: New evidence confirms malevolent nature of the Internet Troll - by Evita March, Federation University Australia, School of Health Science and Psychology for Science Direct and Elsevier

Neurological basis for lack of empathy in psychopaths - Science Daily

excerpt:
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 Sociopaths Are Different from Psychopaths (Both are forms of antisocial personality disorder) - by Marcia Purse (Medically reviewed by Daniel B. Block, MD) for Very Well Mind

What is empathy disorder? - by Katie Hoare, writer at Counselling Directory

Are Abusers Narcissists, Psychopaths or Sociopaths? (The differences between these three personality disorders) - by Amanda Kippert (with Ramani Durvasula)

“Did He Ever Love Me?” A Qualitative Study of Life With a Psychopathic Husband - by Liane J. Leedom.; Emily Geslien.; Linda Hartoonian Almas for Family and Intimate Partner Violence Quarterly

Sociopath v. Psychopath: What’s the Difference? - by Kara Mayer Robinson for Web MD

How to Tell a Sociopath from a Psychopath: The important distinctions between criminal psychopaths and sociopaths - by Scott A. Bonn for Psychology Today

What’s the Difference Between a Psychopath and a Sociopath? And How Do Both Differ from Narcissists? - by Brian Duignan for Britannica

Psychopaths Versus Sociopaths: What is the Difference? - by Xanthe Mallet for The Conversation

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

Here's How to Tell If Someone Is a Psychopath in the First 5 Minutes, Says Science (If the next person you meet says or does any of these things, they just might be a psychopath) - by Jeff Haden for Inc.com

Psychopathy Test - by IDR Labs

Dark Triad Test - by IDR Labs

Difficult Person Test - by IDR Labs

Psychopath Test (50 questions) - also gives a checklist of traits

Where Are You On The Psychopathy Spectrum? Take our scientifically rigorous test. - by Tom Chivers for Buzz Feed

The Psychopath Test - book by Jon Ronson - Wikipedia

Psychopathy Test - from Psych Central

Please note on the tests: psychopaths, sociopaths and narcissists can lie on these tests, and many do. But it might help in terms of understanding what they would say if they were truly honest.

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 Psychopathic Mother (When children grow up without empathy or love) - by Joni E Johnston Psy.D. for Psychology Today

The Psychopathic Intimate Partner Batterer: a Non-Psychopathological Profile - by Jose M. Pozueco-Romero, Juan M. Moreno-Manso, Macarena Blazquez-Alonso, Maria E. Garcia-Baamonde for The Department of Psychology at University of Extremadura, Spain (translated into English)

Sex and the Psychopath (Why so many people fall for psychopaths—and how they can begin to heal) - by Seth Meyers, Psy.D. for Psychology Today (note: Seth Meyers is also featured in the first video above)

Psychopaths Cheat and Take Risks Due to Impaired Social Understanding - by the administrators of Association for Psychological Science

Worried you are dating a psychopath? Signs to look for, according to science - by Calli Tzani-Pepelasi, lecturer in Investigative Psychology, University of Huddersfield for The Conversation

Serial Cheater Psychology: The 3 Personality Types Most Likely To Cheat - by By Carmen McGuinness, EdD, BCBA-D for Mind Body Green

5 Reasons Why Psychopaths Cheat on Their Partners - by the administrators of the blog, "Psychopaths in Life".

The Impact of Psychopathy on the Family - by Liane J. Leedom (professional article)

Signs of Psychopathy in Kids - by Amy Morin, LCSW for Very Well Family

Clarifying the link between childhood abuse history and psychopathic traits in adult criminal offenders - by Monika Dargis, Joseph Newman, and Michael Koenigs for U.S. Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health

Psychopathic Traits and Deviant Sexual Interests: The Moderating Role of Gender - by Rob van Bommel, Kasia Uzieblo, Stefan Bogaerts and Carlo Garofalo for International Journal of Forensic Mental Health

Psychopathic Sex Offender | Life for Parents of Sexually Assaulted / Murdered Children - by Rhonda Freeman, PhD, for her own website

Interpersonal and affective traits of psychopathy in child sexual abusers: evidence from a pilot study sample of Italian offenders - by Adriano Schimmenti, Alessia Passanisi, Vincenzo Caretti (Pub Med article)

Psychopathy and treatment outcome: Results from a sexual violence reduction program - by Lindsay A Sewall, Mark E Olver (Pub Med article)

The Sexual Psychopath - Current Understanding and Future Challenges - by Stephen Porter, PhD, Sabrina Demetrioff, B.A., and Leanne ten Brinke, B.S. (Publication: The Sexual Predator, The Sexual Psychopath, chapter 13)

Childhood maltreatment and aggressive behaviour in violent offenders with psychopathy - by Nathan J Kolla, Charlotte Malcolm, Stephen Attard, Tamara Arenovich, Nigel Blackwood, Sheilagh Hodgins (Pub Med article)

7 Signs That a Child Will Be a Psychopath in the Future - Bright Side publication (my note: these are signs of the violent brand of psychopaths ... also "psychopath" gets interwoven with "sociopath" in the article ... this isn't a professional article and is more of a "pop culture" kind of article, so it is "limited"; otherwise it is fairly accurate in terms of "how to tell" if a child with empathy deficits will be a sadistic and violent adult).

Inside the Minds of Child Psychopaths - and the Surprising Character Trait Many of Them Inherit from Their Mums - by Claire Carter for UK publication Mirror (discusses Social Neuroscientist Abigail Marsh's research)

The birth of a psychopath - by Kelly Daniel for CNN

Kids who don’t do this might grow up to be psychopaths, researchers find (This behavior was witnessed in boys but not girls) - by Philip Perry for Big Think (interesting research that potential psychopaths do not laugh along with others ... but my note: take it with a grain of salt if the child himself is the "laughing stock" or being "mocked" - in that case it is bullying and a normal child won't necessarily be joining in on the humor or laughing).

A single gene has been linked with being a psychopath — and it’s very controversial - by Tanya Lewis for Business Insider (research on the so-called warrior gene, MAOA-L gene)

Psychopathic Traits Linked to Witnessing Abuse in Childhood - by Agata Blaszczak-Boxe for Live Science (my note: this could mean "learned" sociopathic traits in addition to "being born with" psychopathic traits in the prison populations studied for this article)

7 Characteristics of the Modern Psychopath (Seven signs of the ruthless and the heartless) - by Preston Ni M.S.B.A. for Psychology Today

Are Murderers Unfairly Labeled Psychopaths? (There is a robust link between murder and psychopathy) - by Scott A. McGreal for Psychology Today

Cardiac response and anxiety levels in psychopathic murderers - by Antonio de Pádua Serafim; Daniel Martins de Barros; André Valim; Clarice Gorenstein for Brazilian Journal of Psychiatry

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

Not all psychopaths are criminals – some psychopathic traits are actually linked to success - by Scott O. Lilienfeld, Professor of Psychology, Emory University, and Ashley Watts, Ph.D. Candidate, Emory University for The Conversation

Understanding Psychopathic Criminals (Egocentric and need to control others) - by Scott A. Bonn for Psychology Today

Are Psychopaths as Smart as They Seem? (New research questions whether psychopaths really are all that clever) - by Susan Krausse Whitborne for Psychology Today

Bitter Foods Linked to Psychopathic Tendencies - by Joy D'Souza for Huffington Post

Are You Really a Psychopath If You Drink Black Coffee? (A study has linked bitter taste preferences to antisocial personality traits. But there's more to the headlines than meets the eye) - by Amanda MacMillan for Health.com

Acute Alcohol Consumption and Secondary Psychopathic Traits Increase Ratings of the Attractiveness and Health of Ethnic Ingroup Faces but Not Outgroup Faces - by Ian J. Mitchell, Steven M. Gillespie, Monica Leverton, Victoria Llewellyn, Emily Neale, and Isobel Stevenson for Frontiers in Psychology

The Relationships Between Psychopathy, Alcohol Use, and Intimate Partner Violence - by Marisa Okano, McGill University, Jennifer Langille, University of British Columbia, and Zach Walsh, University of British Columbia for Law and Human Behavior, 2016

Addiction and the Dark Triad of Personality - by Emanuel Jauk and Raoul Dieterich for Frontiers in Psychiatry

Want to Know If Someone Is a Psychopath? Listen for How Much They Discuss These 3 Topics
Psychopaths are also way less likely to discuss other common subjects, research reveals - by Jessica Stillman

Bitter Foods Linked To Psychopathic Tendencies - by Joy D'Souza for Huffington Post Canada

6 Unexpected Nighttime Habits Of Psychopaths, According To Experts - by Kristine Fellizar for Bustle

excerpt of one of the habits:
... 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." ...

5 Things Psychopaths and Narcissists Will Do in Conversation (Odd and disarming tactics to watch for) - by Kaja Perina for Psychology Today (note: the type of narcissist she talks about in her article is "the grandiose narcissist" ... covert narcissists and malignant narcissists are often peppering you with questions instead)

Things Psychopaths Say That Reveal The Roots of Violence. (Thinking Patterns, Attitudes, and Beliefs Behind Criminal Minds) - by Samantha Clarke for Medium.com

What Does a Psychopath Do When They Are Found Out? (Here’s What You Can Expect To See). - by Samantha Clarke for Medium.com

A Very Murderous Narcissist – Analysis - by HG Tudor for Knowing the Narcissist

WHAT THIS BLOG IS ABOUT

research, writing, art, illustrations and cartoons about abuse, bullying and narcissistic disorders in terms of what it means for the victim and perpetrators

I also explore alcoholism as it relates to anger management issues

I am a mandated reporter in the state of NY. This means I report signs of bullying and domestic abuse to authorities

I am a former art teacher. My goal is to get an MSW and to be an advocate for survivors of child abuse, spousal abuse, incest, scapegoating and school bullying.

advocate of CoDA, ACOA and Alanon

my purpose is to help others

Blog table of contents below, but I suggest reading the featured blog post first below to understand what abuse is and who it is perpetrated by

Disclaimer: do not use these posts to treat any condition; please see a professional therapist or psychologist.

SCAPEGOATING IS MOB BULLYING:

"The purpose of the scapegoat is to pass responsibility onto someone else. Usually this person is unsuspecting at first and agrees because they are trying to get along with others. This technique of passing the buck is very common with narcissists, sociopaths, and addicts. Narcissists can't allow their ego to be tarnished by an error. Sociopaths do it for the sport of it."

~ Christine Hammond, Licensed Therapist

ARTICLES I RECOMMEND:

1 Toxic Families who Scapegoat

2 The Role of the Family Scapegoat in Dysfunctional Families

3 The Narcissistic Conspiracy: Scapegoating, Smear Campaigns and Black Sheep - How Narcissistic Groups Bully Their Chosen Victims

What is New?

Monday, October 17, 2022

Setting Boundaries (for Victims of Narcissistic or Psychopathic Abuse)

Friday, February 26, 2021

Psychopaths and Abuse. How Do I Tell if Someone is a Psychopath Instead of a Narcissist?