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Posts Tagged ‘sociopath’

Quoting Liberty from Lies quoting Kathy Krajco:

Facing Facts

One reason why the victims don’t face facts about a narcissist is because we don’t want to face the fact that we mean nothing to them. The ego doesn’t want to know that. For, being valued by another at absolute zero is a degrading value judgement.

When this is someone in your family, that fact is traumatic. We think about how much we have loved them, how often we have stuck up for them, how many times in the past we sacrificed for them. And here all along they cared NOTHING for us in return!

They just fed off us like a parasite, taking us for a sap.

This is why denial is so dangerous. Facing facts, no matter how unpleasant, is better. Because when you do address the issue in your mind, you see who is degraded by the narcissist’s refusal to relate humanly to human beings.

Not the human beings, that’s for sure.

Knowing that makes you able to accept the truth about them. And when you accept the truth about them, you break the cycle of abuse.

Kathy Krajco [who passed away unexpectedly and suddenly]

http://libertyfromlies.blogspot.com/2009/11/facing-facts.html

What Kathy termed narcissists I would term sociopaths (or psychopaths).

From transsociopathica:

For a normal human being at the end of a relationship with a Demonic Sociopath Entity, one of the most startling aspects/horrors of them ending a relationship with you is how they can literally switch you off as if you never existed.

http://transsociopathica.blogspot.com/

One of the reasons that narcissists are often confused with/considered sociopaths is that they can do the above also.  Without going into it here, I think narcissism is a deep psychological choice but sociopathy is an alternate genetic arrangement.

I often feel I should be spending more time posting, but as you can see there is a lot out there.

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This is the first time I’ve ever seen this search.  All I can say, the most extreme female sociopath I’ve ever known said cats and dogs hated her.  Was this just something unique to her or do dogs and cats have some innate sense of fairplay?  Did they recognize her as a rapacious, reptilian-minded predator?  I don’t know.  [More in the comments below.]

Other searches

Pseudologia fantastica in real person: Yep, it’s real alright.  Actually if one is not immediately caught up and swept away by the pseudologue’s “pity play” then they are more obvious than regular sociopaths — their stories are so extreme and fantastical.

How to get a workplace sociopath to leave: Good luck.

How to let go of a sociopath: This will happen when your soul (not your mind) realizes there is no soul in the other person.  If this doesn’t happen, perhaps the other person is not a sociopath or perhaps you are actually fighting a realization that one of your parents is sociopathic ($50 please).

Or in the emotional immediacy of transsociopathica‘s words:

A few months after you have recovered you will wonder what you ever saw in these things. They will rapidly seem cold, ugly, empty, pathetic, distorted and almost deformed to you. That’s because this is what they are, always were, and you are finally perceiving them in their real unmasked state. This ‘broken beast’ is all that’s left and the only memory you’ll have of them going into the future. It’s all they deserve, because it is all they are.  http://transsociopathica.blogspot.com/2009/10/farewell-my-sociopath-hello-real-love.html

Sociopath at parties: Due to few inhibitions and no shame they can be real lives of the party.  Read “The Incredible Charlie Carewe” (http://www.amazon.com/incredible-Charlie-Carewe-Mary-Astor/dp/B00005W69S). Some are also very, very skillful at party crashing. (https://kat.cr/the-incredible-charlie-carewe-mary-astor-mobi-t7972573.html, https://openlibrary.org/books/OL5798604M/The_incredible_Charlie_Carewe).

Sociopath and blackmailing: Goes together like ham and eggs.  They love crimes without consequence.

Pictures of  Thomas Capano: Hmmm.  This is a repeat search.  He’s the only one of my blog’s possible sociopaths (more than possible in his case) whose picture people seem particularly interested in.  I don’t know why.

I was with a sociopath for 8 years…why? For one thing, since no one is ever informed of this possibility as they are growing up or upon reaching romantic age, it often takes years for someone to realize their situation.  Also, as the sociopath often cons relatives of the non-sociopath, individuals in your position are really on their own.  Addressing this is one of the main missions of my blog.

You have a lot of company.  Ann Landers was married for thirty years to the sociopath, in my opinion of course, Jules Lederer (who she described as the best salesman in the world).  They met while she was shopping for a wedding dress for her upcoming marriage to another person.  Just the kind of challenge that might appeal to a “super” sociopath.  Also, as I recall, her sister, Dear Abby, criticized her after the divorce for not understanding her husband.

Are sociopaths giving to neighbors and friends? I have witnessed such behavior, but it was only used to engender goodwill to set up later depredations.  Like a “pity play” (all sociopaths excel at inducing people to feel sorry for them) it brings people to their side emotionally.  Often, it seems, they want a reservoir of protectors before they commit their antisocial depredations (such as date/friend rape, “dress gray” rape, tricking a teen neighbor into prostitution, outright thievery, “murder by suicide” bullying (this is no exaggeration), blackmail, etc.).  They want the accuser to be met with angry disbelief (anger that such a nice person would be accused).  Not only do they wish to protect themselves through “plausible lies,” they want to place their victims in the position of having to claim “implausible truths.”

Can God change a sociopath? The short answer is no.  That would be akin to changing a stone into a block of wood, or lead to gold.  If the question is actually can sociopaths be lead to see the error of their ways and cease being sociopaths, unfortunately the answer is absolutely not.  Sociopaths have their own nature, they are the way they are born to be.  “Socially acceptable psychopaths” (SAPs) who, by definition are capable as passing in normal society, can choose whether or not to follow society’s norms and laws but they can’t feel them.  Justice and empathy are just empty words, even to them.  This searcher might be interested in the post,  More structural brain abnormalities seen in psychopaths.  I think its clear that most sociopaths are born with these brain structures.  Related posts on psychopathy/sociopathy brain structures:  https://pathwhisperer.info/2014/12/09/psychopathy-marker-neurodevelopmental-marker-for-limbic-maldevelopment-in-antisocial-personality-disorder-and-psychopathy/https://pathwhisperer.info/2011/11/29/criminal-minds-will-testing-the-brain-even-before-birth-separate-the-good-seeds-from-the-bad/https://pathwhisperer.info/2015/02/01/psychopaths-brains-dont-grasp-punishment-scans-reveal/https://pathwhisperer.info/2014/02/03/post-redux-what-the-heck-are-these-brain-structures-meaningful-or-not/https://pathwhisperer.info/2015/09/18/test-all-presidential-candidates/.

Drifter & sociopath: The drifters and rolling stones of life are in fact often sociopaths, driven by boredom and lack of emotional bonds.  Boredom is simply one of their prime driving forces.  Thus the backwaters, catch basins and outposts of empires or large nations have a much higher sociopathic percentage — for example, California, Australia and New Zealand.

Will my baby be born a sociopath?: Here’s a heart breaker.  From the little I know, it seems the genetics of sociopathy is very complex.  I’ll try to look into this further.  If this searcher was attracted to a sociopath because one of her parents was sociopathic the odds aren’t good.

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For those unfamiliar with Alice Miller or her thinking I’ve summarized her thinking in two sentences (as I understand it).  First, individuals when they become parents, all too often seek to answer their own psychological neediness by “feeding” off the child, rather than answering the child’s own psychological needs — this pattern can last for generation upon generation.  Secondly, children only know they are entitled to their emotions if an adult mirrors these emotions.  I believe these two ideas to be extremely powerful.  The first one shows a way out from the phenomenon of generations of dysfunctional families.  The second promises the possibility of training “witness for soul” therapists as opposed to the hit or miss current system, in which capable therapists are essentially individual accidents.

Dear Alice Miller,

Some ten years back, I read and studied quite a number of your works.  Since that time I have, on my own, studied, thought and written about psychopaths.  I don’t recall much mention of psychopaths in your works but I don’t expect you to believe they are born, not made.  However, I don’t actually know that, this is just a surmise.  I’m very curious to know your view of psychopathy, if you have a chance to answer this.

I don’t see a contradiction between your thinking and the existence of genetic psychopaths.  Quoting my blog, “When one considers all the seemingly conscienceless and subtracts the attachment disordered, the narcissistically rigid, and the hideously abused and needy, there is still a core of the emotionally/morally colorblind, a.k.a. the Cleckley psychopath (from Cleckley’s Mask of Sanity), a.k.a., the Charlie Carewe psychopath (from the actress Mary Astor’s The Incredible Charlie Carewe).” https://pathwhisperer.wordpress.com/past-notes/.

I, and others, see psychopaths as developmentally arrested psychologically — but up through puberty they go through most of the same psychological developmental stages.  So following this line of thought, I would say that Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer were serial killers due to psychological abuse, their psychopathy simply made them extremely skillful at it.  Unclaimed and left in the hospital, as described in their bios, they screamed for their primal birthright, loving maternal attention, until their tear ducts dried up and their psyches came to realize that help was not on the way.  Left with vast, unplacated, infantile rage which went subterranean to reappear again and again throughout life but now with an adult’s capabilities and, in their cases, a psychopath’s talents.  Serial killers are created in infancy, I assume you agree.

Perhaps you would also be interested in my posts on incest, I believe I have adopted your view of psychological cause and effect:  https://pathwhisperer.wordpress.com/2009/03/08/incest-dad-represents-self-in-court-cross-examines-daughter/ & https://pathwhisperer.wordpress.com/2009/03/18/post-redux-josef-fritzl-and-reflections-on-incest-52308/.

I look forward to your reply.

Thank you,

The Path Whisperer

For more information on Alice Miller and her writings:  http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw_3_12?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=alice+miller+prisoners+of+childhood&sprefix=alice+miller&sprefix=alice+miller&sprefix=alice+miller&sprefix=alice+miller, http://www.alice-miller.com/index_en.php.

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Our Embassy in Afghanistan Is Guarded by Sexually Confused Frat Boys

. . . security contractors get their kicks peeing on one another, simulating anal sex, doing “butt shots,” and “eating potato chips out of ass cracks.”

. . . According to POGO, employees of ArmorGroup North America—a unit of contracting giant Wackenhut—get their jollies off by “deviant hazing [that] has created a climate of fear and coercion, with those who declined to participate often ridiculed, humiliated, demoted, or even fired.”

http://gawker.com/5350465/our-embassy-in-afghanistan-is-guarded-by-sexually-confused-frat-boys/gallery/?skyline=true&s=x

Think six to eight year old boys’ sex play.  Then add “peeing on one another,” “butt shots” — sociopaths are simply fascinated by the orifices of sex and waste elimination being identical or in close proximity.  Their level of sexual maturity and development is that low.  See the sex scenes of the wooden puppets in the movie Team America, complete with defecation and urination.

I would imagine that the sex play went further than this.  Ah yes, story below.

Kabul U.S. Embassy Guard: Sexual Deviancy Required for Promotion

Whistleblower Says Bosses Required Sex Acts for Guards Seeking Best shift, Promotion

Private security guards at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul were pressured to participate in naked pool parties and perform sex acts to gain promotions or assignment to preferable shifts, according to one of 12 guards who have gone public with their complaints.

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=8474937

OK, think boyhood sexplay with orgasms, bullying and dominance thrown in — even more sociopathic.  This sexual bullying by superiors makes this story no longer private, but actionable.  It’s not about what people do in private.

These male sex parties/orgies have also been reported from the Jim Bakker/PTL scandals and the Stanford White scandal.  To quote from my UBS Musings page (https://pathwhisperer.wordpress.com/ubs-musings/):

Sociopaths essentially are pansexual.  Since friction orgasms are all they know or can know, the more variety the better.  All cats are gray in the dark.  The sociopathic architect Stanford White (of “Red Velvet Swing” notoriety) had numerous affairs (one led to his murder by a rival), molested his own daughters and hosted male group sex parties at his architectural firm [http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1996/07/08/1996_07_08_049_TNY_CARDS_000376111] (no doubt some of the participants were heterosexual life style males who developed a taste for such behavior by being incested by their own sociopathic fathers).  Imagine such a group sex party network in an investment bank.

Indeed, there were rumors that approached “common knowledge” that such a ring existed at UBS when I worked there.  It may seem difficult to imagine responsible adult males in positions of authority taking part but the photos accompanying the Kabul story, which included supervisors and managers, may make it less difficult.

The only reason sociopaths are considered adults is due to their adult bodies, imo.  Quoting Robert Kegan from an earlier post:

Robert Kegan in “The Child Behind the Mask: Sociopathy as Developmental Delay.” In W. H. Reid, J.W. Bonner III, D. Dorr, and J.I. Walker (Eds.) “Unmasking the Psychopath“. (New York: W.W. Norton), 1986. (1986), p.  68:
The sociopath can sit still, inhibit immediate aims, defer gratification.  Indeed, if he did not have these abilities (which most latency-age children also have), people would not confuse him with an adult even with his adult-looking body (which most latency-age children do not have, and which has more to do with why latency-age children are not confused with adults than people realize).  [Kegan is saying, I believe, that it is the sociopath’s adult looking body that gets him into the door of adult life which he is actually unsuited for and absolutely untrustworthy in.]  https://pathwhisperer.wordpress.com/2009/02/21/how-could-mado…s-for-13-years/

One thing I’ve noticed is that participants are relatively often married family men.  Perhaps they were molested by sociopathic, or otherwise corrupt, fathers and then took a liking to it (a totally normal reaction paradoxically).  Or some I knew to be graduates of aristocratic boarding schools.  I don’t know what sex games take place in these schools but I can imagine.

It seems that there may be a window of plasticity in early puberty.  Thus after male to male sexual activity during pubescence, the taste remains for recreational male to male sex throughout life. While in other cultures and times this is completely normal (the ancient Greeks perhaps), in this culture the participants are exposing themselves to potential blackmail.  And, of course, sociopaths and pseudologues with their immature sexual development are absolutely attracted to these sex game circles.  Further, blackmail is a natural for a sociopath seeking power or security and such a sex circle would allow both outright and implied blackmail.

Sometimes gay communities will be fully accepting of sociopaths due to their alternate sexuality.  However individual gay lovers will of course be as devastated as straight lovers upon being discarded by their emotionless, predatory chameleon lovers as easily as one turns a page of a book, who they had believed they had been close to.  The survivor blogs, the WTF-happened-to-me blogs, the how-come-I-didn’t-know blogs almost always include gay posters.  E.g., Indigo Blue at the Lovefraud blog:  “It reflected True male beauty but on the inside was rot and emptyness and longing, hopelessness,depravity,envy,greed,anger,madness!” http://www.lovefraud.com/blog/2008/10/20/revisions-and-enhancements-to-lovefraudcom/#comment-14448.

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Real estate can be deadly:  British tycoon kills stubborn tenant

September 8, 2009.  This story just screams sociopathy.

. . . Papalexis quickly positioned himself as king of his world, installing a throne in his office, renting an impressive mansion, and throwing lavish galas that were filled with A-list partygoers . . .

By 2009, however, it had all begun to fall apart. He was fighting against creditors, and was in arrears on rent for his mansion. Worse yet, his girlfriend — a former porn star and prostitute who charged almost $2,500 per night — had turned on him. During a fight, the woman, Rebecca deFalco, asked him if he’d ever killed anyone and Papalexis told her the story of Bambi, a “nobody” who “got in the way.”

In many ways, DeFalco represented another side of Papalexis’ life. In addition to his gilded lifestyle as a member of Palm Beach’s elite, he was also a sadist who described himself on one website as “The King of his own realm.” Certainly, his darker pursuits played a part in Christodoulides’ murder: before strangling the shy, lonely man, Papalexis brutally tortured him. . . .

http://www.dailyfinance.com/2009/09/08/real-estate-can-be-deadly-british-tycoon-kills-stubborn-tenant/?icid=main|hp-desktop|dl1|link3|http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dailyfinance.com%2F2009%2F09%2F08%2Freal-estate-can-be-deadly-british-tycoon-kills-stubborn-tenant%2F

DNA Shows Man Is Not Long-Lost Boy

John Barnes and the missing Stephen Damman

John Barnes and the still missing Stephen Damman

DNA testing confirmed that a Michigan man is not a toddler kidnapped on New York’s Long Island in 1955, the FBI said Thursday, closing a chapter in a bizarre mystery that started after the man began researching his roots on the Internet.

The FBI said in a statement that a test showed John Barnes, an unemployed man in his 50s who lives in a trailer in northwest Michigan, is not Stephen Damman, who disappeared at age 2 from outside an East Meadow bakery while his mother shopped.

The sample showed Barnes could not have the same mother as Pamela Damman Horne, the sister of the toddler who was with him when he disappeared, the FBI said. She was found in her stroller, unharmed, around the corner from the market.

The case had raised the hopes of the toddler’s father, Jerry Damman, who runs a 300-acre farm in Iowa, and stunned the community where the Halloween kidnapping occurred. Damman, now 78, had said he hoped for a resolution after five decades of silence.

“It’s too bad we had to go through all of this for actually nothing in the end,” he told The Associated Press.

http://news.aol.com/article/man-says-hes-missing-boy/529079

A detailed series of articles can be found here:  http://www.newsday.com/7.25434?q=john+barnes

It would seem we have a pseudologue here.  It recalls to mind the story of Binjamin Wilkomirski/Bruno Grosjean, the author of Fragments, which purported to be a Holocaust memoir (http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1999/06/14/1999_06_14_048_TNY_LIBRY_000018396).  There are a couple points that I would like to concentrate on here, first, the odd relationship between reality and these individuals and second, the emotional desires aspect of their claims.

I should really write about pseudologia fantastica more often, even if they are just ‘thinking aloud’ posts since pseudologues are such a puzzlement.  Every day readers find me through searching for that term.  My “Suzy Bass — What is Pseudologia Fantastica?”  post is one of my most visited posts (https://pathwhisperer.wordpress.com/2008/10/23/suzy-bass-what-is-pseudologia-fantastica/).  In a sense, pseudologic sociopaths are more obvious than other sociopaths because their claims are so extreme.  Apparently readers are searching the internet to understand this phenomenon.

Most sociopaths seem to know perfectly well what’s real or not (though cause and effect are another matter).  Pseudologues don’t seem to know the difference between reality and the stating of it.  In both of these cases the individuals should have known their claims could not survive DNA testing.  That there is a “real” reality out there doesn’t seem to impinge upon their consciousness.

Concerning the emotional desire aspect, both of these cases featured the claimants being long lost relatives passionately wished and waited for.  It appears that this was a prize to be desired for these individuals.  I recall a description of  visitors to the Christian holylands sometimes coming down with a temporary derangement and claiming to be Jesus reincarnated (on edit:  Jerusalem Syndrome).  (To the best of my recollection, this came from a Smithsonian issue in the early nineties — if anybody has back issues to check I would certainly appreciate it.  I haven’t been able to find it in Readers’ Guide however.)  Again, there is a real emotional drive here to be what they think others want them to be or to be what others would respond to.  The psychologists were further quoted saying that these individuals would almost always go back home and return to normal — to me, that’s like saying serial killers go back to normal in between killings.

Of the two pseudologues I believe I have known, one would place himself at the very center of historic events.  The stories would be long and convoluted with the excuses for not being mentioned in the news stories or photos even more so.  I never knew him to draw back from these stories or in anyway signal that he wasn’t serious. The desire to be in these stories seems to have been the driving force.

Police: Duke University official offered adopted son for sex

Frank Lombard
Frank Lombard

A Duke University official is accused of offering his 5-year-old adopted son for sex on the Internet, according to the FBI and court documents in the case.

Frank M. Lombard, 42, was arrested last week at his home in Durham, North Carolina. During an Internet chat, Lombard allegedly offered the child to the person he was chatting with, who was a task force officer from Washington’s Metropolitan Police, the FBI said in a statement.

The chat was initiated after a confidential source facing child pornography charges told authorities they had witnessed a man, allegedly Lombard, performing sex acts on a child over the Internet.

During the chat, according to the complaint filed against Lombard, he told the officer that he had performed multiple sex acts on the boy and that the officer could do the same if he came to Durham.

According to a transcript of the chat, reprinted in the complaint, Lombard allegedly told the officer that he had to hide the abuse from his partner and that he drugged the child with allergy medication.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/06/30/duke.molestation.internet/index.html

I have known a number of sociopaths to pass themselves off simply as being gay.  Ask any gay friend or acquaintance how many “trysexuals” they know (“trysexuals” of course means what it sounds like, pansexuals who will try anything sexual).  Prepare to be stunned.

Judge tosses out mom’s convictions in MySpace hoax — Girl killed herself; ruling tentative

Lori Drew
Lori Drew
U.S. District Court Judge George Wu
U.S. District Court Judge George Wu

A federal judge yesterday tentatively threw out the convictions of a Missouri mother for her role in a MySpace hoax directed at a 13-year-old neighbor girl who ended up committing suicide.

U.S. District Judge George Wu said he was acquitting Lori Drew of misdemeanor counts of accessing computers without authorization, but he emphasized that the ruling was tentative until he issues it in writing. He noted the case of a judge who changed his mind after ruling.

. . .

Wu said he allowed the case to proceed to trial when Drew was charged with a felony, but she was convicted only of the misdemeanor, and that presented constitutional problems.

. . . .

Prosecutors said Drew sought to humiliate Megan by helping create a fictitious teen boy on the social networking site and sending flirtatious messages to the girl in his name. The fake boy then dumped Megan in a message saying the world would be better without her.

She hanged herself a short time later in October 2006 in the St. Louis suburb of Dardenne Prairie, Mo.

http://www3.signonsandiego.com/stories/2009/jul/03/judge-tosses-out-moms-convictions-myspace-hoax/

This story is very troubling.  “Murder by suicide,” I believe, is a great favorite of sociopaths — it’s a crime without consequence.  How did Lori Drew react to Megan’s death?  Was it, “Chortle, chortle, snort”?  I have no idea.

Judge Wu said the ruling was tentative and that he would have accepted a felony verdict.  What kind of nonsense is this?  The jury acted on good faith on the misdemeanor charge — why was it allowed in?  The great danger of sociopathic judges is not the outright corruption I’ve written about elsewhere in this blog, but rather, the siding with the co-sociopathic that appear before him or her.

Anthony Stancl accused of sick sex blackmail on Facebook

AN 18-year-old high school student is accused of posing as a girl on Facebook, tricking at least 31 male classmates into sending him naked photos of themselves and then blackmailing some for sex acts.

The incidents happened from spring 2007 through to November, when officers questioned Stancl about a bomb threat he allegedly sent to teachers and wrote about on a school’s bathroom wall. It resulted in the closing of New Berlin Eisenhower Middle and High School.

According to the criminal complaint, Stancl first contacted the students through the social networking site Facebook, pretending to be a girl named Kayla or Emily.

The boys reported they were tricked into sending nude photos or videos of themselves, the complaint said.

Thirty-one victims were identified and interviewed and more than half said the girl with whom they were communicating tried to get them to meet with a male friend to let him perform sex acts on them.

They were told that if they didn’t, she would send the nude photos or movies to their friends and post them on the Internet, according to the complaint. Stancl used the excuse to get the victims to perform repeated acts, the complaint said.

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/sex-fiends-facebook-blackmail/story-e6freuy9-1111118764973

Anthony Stancl
Anthony Stancl

Domination, bullying, arrogance, demonstrating his superiority — it has all the elements.  Blackmail seems to be a great favorite of sociopaths, another crime without consequence (usually).

Murder for ratings? Brazil cops suspect TV host

In one murder after another, the “Canal Livre” crime TV show had an uncanny knack for being first on the scene, gathering graphic footage of the victim.Too uncanny, say police, who are investigating the show’s host, state legislator Wallace Souza, on suspicion of commissioning at least five of the murders to boost his ratings and prove his claim that Brazil’s Amazon region is awash in violent crime. Police also have accused Souza of drug trafficking.

“The order to execute always came from the legislator and his son, who then alerted the TV crews to get to the scene before the police,” state police intelligence chief Thomaz Vasconcelos charged in an interview with The Associated Press.

The killings of competing drug traffickers, he said, “appear to have been committed to get rid of his rivals and increase the audience of the TV show.”

Souza denied all the criminal allegations and called them absurd, insisting that he and his son are being set up by political enemies and drug dealers sick of his two decades of relentless crime coverage on TV and crusading legislative probes.

http://www.salon.com/wires/ap/world/2009/08/11/D9A0T31O1_lt_brazil_tv_killings/

Wallace Souza
Wallace Souza

Texas police shake down drivers, lawsuit claims

Police in the small East Texas town of Tenaha are accused of unjustly taking valuables from motorists.

TENAHA, Texas (CNN) — Roderick Daniels was traveling through East Texas in October 2007 when, he says, he was the victim of a highway robbery.

The Tennessee man says he was ordered to pull his car over and surrender his jewelry and $8,500 in cash that he had with him to buy a new car.

But Daniels couldn’t go to the police to report the incident.

The men who stopped him were the police.

. . .

“To have law enforcement and the district attorney essentially be crooks, in my judgment, should infuriate and does infuriate everyone,” Whitmire said.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/05/05/texas.police.seizures/index.html

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The Talented Mr. Gerhartsreiter

Phony Rockefeller

Eyed in 1985 Case – Cops Say Suspect Is German Con Man

Multiple identities.

Claim of amnesia.

Repeatedly inspired confidence.

Ease of lying.

Full expectation that lies will be believed.

Unlimited nerve.

The complete chameleon.

A special report in the Boston Globe (by Levenson & Ellement) on Clark Rockefeller:  Detailed story

To the present:  Liane Leedom, over at Lovefraud Blog, asked readers to support Sandra Boss (Christian Gerhartsreiter’s ex-wife) in the blogs, particularly at the Boston Globe, http://www.lovefraud.com/blog/2009/06/02/lovefraud-extra-lets-support-sandra-boss/#comment-38323.  Here’s my post (which includes my post in the Boston Globe):

OK, I posted a comment there. I strongly believe that psychopaths of his caliber are a danger to society, a danger society must be protected from. Involuntary commitment to mental hospitals should be applied to them, with different rules of evidence than required in legal proceedings (but that’s another subject). Anyway, the post:

“Clark Rockefeller” is the real mccoy, a psychopath in full expression, the equivalent of an alien masquerading as a human. Whoever finds the distinctions between his DNA and the norm would win a Nobel Prize.

Psychopathic conmen/bullies move in on their victims inexorably, like rust. His aim from the start was to undermine her personality, her self trust, her strength of character. That he was willing to spend years doing this, single mindedly, is one of the traits of psychopaths. That she lost her ability to defend herself is tragic (that she was able to gain it back, is to her great credit).

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Fritzl, of course, is the Austrian accused of imprisoning his daughter in a cellar and fathering a family with her (three of the children also imprisoned, three raised in the aboveground household), BBC. All incest fathers are vampire fathers, they truly are draining the child’s lifeforce, but this is absolutely the most extreme case in my memory.

The question here is whether Fritzl is a sociopath.  Roughly what I do is check facts and behavior against an informal checklist and then attempt to flesh out the individual and understand his motivations.  For those interested there are well-thought out formal checklists for sociopathy.   The linked Mask of Sanity lays out a checklist in Section III, Clinical Profile, pgs 337 – 366, or see the Table of Contents.  Robert Hare, author of Without Conscience, has a formal diagnostic one, which can be used informally by anybody, in my opinion — not to diagnose, but in an attempt to understand behavior.  This seems to be a reasonable overview: PCL Overview. His own site is www.hare.org.

Fritzl certainly appears to be a sociopath.  There is no internal prohibition against incest for sociopathic fathers at all. Non-sociopathic incest fathers need to overcome their conscience and a very severe prohibition against such acts.  For sociopathic incest fathers it is merely childhood sexplay, as is all their sex.  They are absolutely, totally unaware of any “soul effect” on the daughter (or often, the son).  The sociopathic sense of entitlement is absolute — check.  Urge to dominate — check.  Lying ability — check.  Telling his wife the imprisoned daughter had run away and joined a cult.  Explaining three foundlings to the authorities and his wife (the three infants he brought up from the cellar).  This ability to lie while appearing totally sincere, with complete eye contact with the target to be duped is one of the key sociopathic abilities.  Self confidence — check.  Arrogance — check.  Optimism — check.  No remorse or guilt — check.

I understand he’s been complaining that his wife hasn’t visited him.  Sociopaths don’t understand the “beyond the pale” aspect of their extreme behavior.  For them it’s not beyond the pale, it’s not extreme.  Presumably they believe all of us are capable of the same behavior or would behave the same if we thought we could get away with it.  So now he’s hurt and perplexed that his wife doesn’t visit.

It’s reported that the possibility that he also molested his 19 year old daughter/grand-daughter, Kerstin, is also being investigated.  (It was the hospitalization of Kerstin that exposed the whole situation.)  It would be shocking if he hadn’t.

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No problem for a sociopath.  Consequences, cause and effect are far beyond the developmental stage of most sociopaths. Joe Jett of Kidder Peabody never thought the parade would end either.

Look at that “little boy lost” look.

Robert Kegan in “The Child Behind the Mask: Sociopathy as Developmental Delay.” In W. H. Reid, J.W. Bonner III, D. Dorr, and J.I. Walker (Eds.) Unmasking the Psychopath. (New York: W.W. Norton), 1986. (1986), p.  68:

The sociopath can sit still, inhibit immediate aims, defer gratification.  Indeed, if he did not have these abilities (which most latency-age children also have), people would not confuse him with an adult even with his adult-looking body (which most latency-age children do not have, and which has more to do with why latency-age children are not confused with adults than people realize).  [Kegan is saying I believe that it is the sociopath’s adult looking body that gets him into the door of adult life which he is actually unsuited for and absolutely untrustworthy in.]

A list of Kegan’s publications:  http://www.gse.harvard.edu/faculty_research/profiles/publications.shtml?vperson_id=318

Earlier posts:

Bernie Madoff, probable sociopath, following in the footsteps of Charles Ponzi, definite sociopath

More Madoff — for sociopaths there is no such thing as an ingroup

Welcome to our sociopaths-gone-wild-economy

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From some of the searches that find this blog, it’s evident that people out there are wrestling with very difficult sociopathic problems.

My son is a sociopath, what do I do? This was one recent search.  The best I can do is send the searcher over to the Lovefraud blog (see link to the right) where a number of posters have been in this position.

One thing I can say is that as a sociopathic son enters puberty it is essential to protect younger siblings, particularly sisters but also brothers (sociopaths know only friction orgasms, they are essentially pansexual).  It would be nothing to most sociopaths to get a sister drunk and share her with his buddies.

Secondly, apparently some of the children dropped off in Nebraska were sociopathic.  If institutionalization or this route is taken I think I would (I’m thinking out loud, trying to feel my way through this) suggest staying in contact with the child.  Sociopaths fully experience most of the normal prepubescent emotions of childhood I believe.  Abandonment would be very real to them, not to mention also to the parents (who no doubt would be in a terrible bind).  Contact would be better for the soul of the sociopath (such as it is) and the parents.  Total abandonment would leave a sociopathic child angrier and more dangerous.  I believe the argument could be made that Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer were serial killers due to never having bonded as infants (Ted Bundy was left in the hospital for months with his mother hesitant to keep him as I recall) not due to their inherent sociopathy, which only made them more skillful at it.  Thus their murderously angry infant selves became a permanent part of their psyches, coming forth to use an adult’s capabilities and intelligence together with a sociopath’s manipulativeness and cunning to carry out their murders.

How to get a sociopath fired?  My advice would be to focus strictly on the malfeasance.  In my opinion it is very difficult to persuade someone of another’s sociopathy.  It seems that everyone thinks they are a perfect judge of such matters, even if they have never heard of a sociopath, or think they have never met one, or expect never to meet one in their lifetime.

If the problem is sociopathic workplace bullying or harassment then there are totally different problems.  Are any managers devotees of the sociopath, lovers, or blackmailed lovers?  Nobody wants to leave a job or co-workers they like but sociopathic bullying is very detrimental to the victim.  In my experience management and HR are usually of no help.  If you stay and fight, in my opinion, you need to get as vicious as possible as quickly as possible (maybe not, if you take the bull by the horns you may get gored).  Furthermore if a friend is seduced and blackmailed by a sociopathic enemy, then your friend is your enemy.  The situation can get very ugly, very fast.

To those who say that such things could never happen in their world I beg to differ.  ‘See no evil, a preyer’s prayer’ — to borrow a phrase.  Think what a shield to the corrupt the response of “Oh, that just can’t be happening” is. Or to those who say they have no enemies, ‘I’m a nice person why should I have enemies.’  I’m afraid you don’t understand sociopathic motivations.  The pick of a target for sociopathic workplace bullying may make no sense anywhere other than in the mind of a particular sociopath.

Without a professional and ethical management and HR department there are really no good options. While at UBS, I actually proposed creating an office to deal with sociopathic employees but was not taken up on it (https://pathwhisperer.wordpress.com/proposal-to-ubs-upper-management/).

Sociopathic employee and HR.  Ha, ha, ha.  What does HR stand for?  Human Resources.  One would assume that HR’s job would be to take care of the human resources of a company, to see that their rights are respected in terms of both company policy and labor law.  Wrong.  In my experience HR’s job is to assist management in exploiting the workforce.  The term, Human Resources, is often merely a 180 degree lie.  Such lies are a great favorite of sociopaths so many sociopaths go into the field themselves, in my experience.  I have, more than once, seen sociopathic HR reps side with sociopathic employees, even criminal or mentally ill ones.

How to beat a sociopath in court? Another hard one.  Occasionally they defeat themselves, Thomas Capano and Wayne Williams insisted on testifying on their own behalf driven by their high self regard and pathological optimism.  In general I believe there is a vast problem of sociopathic judges, prosecutors and even defense attorneys siding with a sociopathic pleader even if this goes against the law or even the interests of a client.

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Madoff Even Scammed His Own Sister

Bernard Madoff’s own family was not spared from his greed and the Ponzi scheme that is said to have pilfered a massive $50 billion from unsuspecting investors. He is now said to have scammed millions from his sister, who is now desperately trying to sell her Florida home.

http://www.clevelandleader.com/node/8522

This is always a shock to people.  Everyone thinks that crooks and the corrupt have an ingroup in which they are caring about individuals.  John Gotti, for example, seemed to genuinely love his family.  However this is not true for sociopaths.

I recall an episode of Unsolved Mysteries that featured an “evil couple” consisting of a criminal sociopath and his corrupt normal wife.  Plan A, the crime (an impulse killing over an insult to his imperial sociopathic ego), failed, i.e., they were caught.  Plan B, their defense was failing.  So wife suggested Plan C, escape through faked suicide.  However, he neglected to inform her that he had a plan C1.  He salted the escape with real evidence, her body.  There is no such thing as a cherished ingroup to a sociopath.

Ripples of Madoff scandal spread everywhere

Your spirit and love of life have touched and changed all who knew you,” one friend of 40 years wrote in a paid death notice for [Norman] Levy that ran in The New York Times. “You taught me so much. I’ll cherish our relationship forever.”

The friend was Bernard Madoff.
. . . . .
In the summer, both families headed to the Hamptons.  . . .

For more than 30 years, the Levys also entrusted their personal investments to Madoff. When they chartered the Betty and Norman F. Levy Foundation, which reported assets last year of $244.4 million,  as the vehicle for their charitable giving, they again put their trust in their longtime friend.

My father believed in Bernie Madoff,” Norman Levy’s son, Francis, . . .  said in a recent interview with FOX Business News. “The one thing he said about Bernie (was), “If there’s one honorable person, it’s Bernie.”

http://www.foxnews.com/wires/2008Dec21/0,4670,RipplesofaFraud,00.html

That’s why they are called confidence artists, they truly inspire confidence.  But what’s a sister, friends of 40 years or neighbors to a sociopath, let alone charities and co-religionists? We’re all suckers to them.

I once worked with a very vivacious young woman, a real life-of-the-party type, uninhibited and fun loving.  She used to call us, her friends, “Suckers” and then laugh, and we’d laugh too.  But it was no joke. (This individual is worth expanding on. We shouldn’t have been surprised. She often regaled us with her wild and wacky life:  Great Adventure (an amusement park) had taken her picture and ordered her to never return (sociopaths in the absence of authorities they respect such as bosses or the police can really go wild); she said she sometimes slugged medical and dental personnel when getting shots (in the face of the pain, she totally dropped the adult self control act and her true primitive self came forward — she was an animal under attack and she had to respond.  With any sociopath or possible sociopath it is a very good idea to note at what point they lose the facade of self control.); and finally she said that cats and dogs generally hated her instantaneously (perhaps this indicates that cats and dogs have an innate sense of fairplay, I don’t know).)

Yet one more interesting twist, is that Madoff’s parents may themselves have been conartists.

Madoff’s mother tangled with the feds

The late Sylvia Madoff was registered as a broker-dealer in the 1960s but left the business after being cited for failing to file reports.

Accused Ponzi schemer Bernard Madoff was not the first person in his close-knit family to run afoul of federal authorities.

http://money.cnn.com/2009/01/16/magazines/fortune/madoff_mother.fortune/

In my opinion, Bernie’s genetics and brain structure should be studied for clues to his crimes. Is Bernie Madoff one of the “mimics walking shoulder to shoulder with us, who share no fellow human feeling, no empathy, no conscience” (to borrow my own phrase, https://pathwhisperer.wordpress.com/past-notes/)?  It seems likely.

It should never be forgotten that he was a past Chairman of NASDAQ.  Why would investors question the bonafides of a person who once had that responsibility?  In my opinion, no one, no matter what their position, education or background, should be exempt from consideration as a possible sociopath or SAP (socially adept psychopath).

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