Exactly. I actually believe that for many of them psychopathic behavior is just a by-product of being worn down and torn to shreds by a constant struggle to maintain a narrative about themselves that is nowhere near true. This is why I actually think they are treatable, but not in any conventional or legal way.

Hello,

bran scan studies show that the psychopath does not feel fear. the most shocking stat that i saw was even when being given a life sentence they responded nonchalantly. check out wiki on this.

but that is the crux of the matter, they don't feel. that's why they are so impenetrable. i'm sure they get frustrated... when they don't get what they want, or there is some satisfaction when they do.... i've actually (wow, i hate all these hindsight discoveries) never seen my dad truly gleeful - joyful.. never seen him burst into a laughter or smiles.. it's always a disconnected look. so disturbing. so screwed up to grow up with this crap. sometime i just think what is it like in there, in his mind..he feel so superior to others and i'm sure this is the base of that.. that he sees other people as being uber emotional.. controlled by their emotions.. as he is not.. so - there you have it... totally superior..he blames all of his kids emotionalism on my mom - poor girl.. she didn't have a chance.

the worst fng part is... he can't be any different.. it's so troublesome to see anyone on here thinking they can be fixed. it's like turning a pumpkin into a car... they do not possess the qualities that make humans human.. it's the social and empathy qualities.. in any study of animals to human comparison.. most often those are the qualities they use to consider an animal more human. and these Psychopaths aren't human.

To me it is a simple equation, no conscience, no fear. I don't think they even think of consequences. I have sat in on a couple of trials here, it is fascinating to watch them.

One of the non socialized ones I watched actually took the stand and admitted to 2 of the stab wounds when there were multiple (he was caught at the scene, caught on camera buying the knives and all the evidence was clearly stacked against him) and actually said the it was the fault of the victim, that is how screwed up their logic is. NO normal person would taken the stand and state such an admission in front of the jury. Cool as a cucumber, I watched him like a hawk and saw no emotion even when he was sentenced, he actually was very relaxed acting. It was a small courtroom and I was sitting in the front row on the prosecution side (the victims relatives were sitting a couple of rows back), he actually started ducking when I was watching him and he saw me watching him. Didn't take the jury long to come back with a guilty charge.

They mimic behavior that is why you see them when they get caught actually laughing, I am sure all of you have seen pics of Casey Anthony, she did a lot of chuckling and laughing.

They see themselves as the victims when they do get caught. It is an interesting equation, they victimize kind, loving people and they actually see themselves as the ones who were wronged.

I don't believe for a second they feel fear. They may act like they do to worm their way back in but they lack the brain wiring to feel anything for anyone but themselves and saving their own skin.

You nailed it daddysproblem, totally superior, that sums it up. Nothing is their fault or ever will be, to me that sums up their no fear of their actions.

Di

Not sure which disorder the man you mention here has, but I can see a psychopath taking all kinds of things nonchalantly, especially if it contributes to his illusion of a personality of a strong individual. To us it sounds insane, but his ego is so fragile, that he is ready to tolerate much more than a life sentence, if it will keep the ego intact.



The last psychopath I met is not inhuman, but more comparable to a dog that has been raised wrong. An abused dog or just a natural follower raised without a leader will be extremely anxious and see only threats and victims, trying constantly, but totally unable to be the alpha. The reason I say this condition is treatable is that, if he has nowhere to run, the psychopath will bend to the alpha and be more relaxed. He's still a psychopath, but is much more controlled when he knows his boundaries and those are being enforced.

In our society where you have the option of moving a few blocks and becoming someone completely different, the psychopath can re-invent himself within a day if he needs to get away from an alpha or find a new victim, or even tear the alpha down using people from the outside who don't know the nature of the psychopath. Our isolation is what makes the psychopath able to operate, not some inhuman potential that the psychopath has.

Ok, let me clarify that I have not had the dubious pleasure of knowing any psychopaths that are murderers and I believe that only very very few psychopaths ever become full blown violent criminals of that sort. That said, let's look at the rest of your post.



The first sentence is not validated by the second one. You can feel extreme anxiety and nothing positive for anyone else at the same time - that is almost the definition of being afraid. Once fear sets in, you will step on other people's heads to save your skin; just like you said. All the psychopath is doing is rationalizing the torturous consequences of his inferiority complex. Given, there is great variation in nature of psychopaths, but the bottom line is the same: the way they act is motivated by presence of something, rather than absence of something.

Here is what absence of fear does: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126224885

Overly trusting to the point of putting your life in other people's hands in an instant - does that sound like your average psychopath?



I think that that is what they would like you to think. Having you think they "feel supperior" or "have no feelings" validates their fantasy personality and wards off potential attacks. Anything that can threaten this image causes anxiety in them, because they by no means feel superior and will always feel like the victim. This is why they want to isolate you - they are afraid of rationality that a simple conversation produces. But make no mistake - they are terrified.

I have to take issue with such a statement. How can a Psychopath terrorize the victim and at the same time feel terrorized themselves. I have studied them not only from having this forum for many years but involved in cases where I got to see how they behaved up front and personal. Our forum members I believe have been terrorized by the Psychopaths in their lives, not the other way around.

If you have every read some of Ann Rule's excellent books about socialized Psychopaths I didn't walk away thinking any of the Psychopaths she wrote about were terrorized by their actions. It is usually their lack of any reaction that usually gets the police on their tail. They sure don't act terrorized when they attend a funeral of someone they murdered, quite often or in most cases that I know of their actions and lack of concern usually draw the attention of others by their behavior. I bet Scott Peterson terrorizied his pregnant wife Lacey the night he murdered her and dumped her in the San Francisco waters. At the vigil when they didn't know she was dead, he was on the phone chatting with his mistress telling her the background noise was because he was in Paris, where was his fear? and wandering around cracking jokes, he was the only member of the family not up on the podium. I don't see that as someone who is terrorized or showing any symptoms of fear but the person who terrorized the victim and really could not give a damn.

While I do believe that non socialized Psychopaths are more likely to end up in prison, I do believe they are all capable of murder given the opportunity or when the mask drops.

I feel that is offensive to our community who has in fact been terrorized and live in fear for a very long time from being in contact with a Psychopath.

You can't be in two places at the same time, how can you say that they feel terror while they are terrorizing victims?

One case I was involved in and watched closely, I saw no signs of terror and no fear over their actions, clearly it was a non socialized Psychopath but still the same (that was also their defense), the bank videos showed it all and they had entered with pre meditation (bought the guns the day or so before, had a get away driver and knew when the armored car showed up), it is my theory they knew that information because the armored car people carried guns and the odds of someone walking into the bank certainly wouldn't have guns and even if they had a concealed weapon they sure wouldn't have had time to pull it out of their pocket to defend themselves. The did NOT rob the bank but like a sport they point blank killed people as they walked through the door, I sure didn't say to myself after watching the video, hey that guy is terrorized or feeling fear. It showed me they had no conscience or feelings about their actions, they did in fact terrorize a normally sleepy, kind hearted small town where people went about their day and didn't lock their doors, they had no reason to live in fear until that happened.

The part that backs up my views is I saw the mug shot of the leader when he was booked not many hours after the crime oh and by the way, they were caught eating lunch right after the crime. He had a wide smile on his face so wide I almost threw up, I had to delete it immediately because the horror I felt was so strong, my empathy is with the victims. I don't know about you but if I was feeling terror or fear however you word it, stopping for a bite to eat would be the last thing on my mind. It is a small town and you don't meet anyone here who wasn't affected or terrorized over this horrific crime.

I don't buy that Psychopaths feel terror or fear.

I hope we can have a civil conversation but I just don't get how you can make such a blanket statement that a Psychopath feels terror or fear, it goes against what every victim here has suffered at the hands of. Who knows I could be wrong but we have never had a member enter our community who did not express the terror and extreme fear over what they endured at the hands of a Psychopath. To say the Psychopath is the one who feels terror or has any fear is offensive to me but we are a civilized community so I think I have made my views clearly.

I will leave this conversation for the members to add their thoughts. I am not going to argue the point it is counter to what I believe so others can share their views. This is just my view point.

The victims are the ones who are terrorized and live in fear not the other way around.

Di

Psychopath lacks the sense of personality and will try to create one through others. When a psychopath first meets a free-spirited and strong person, he will get an emotional high from convincing her that he is wonderful, caring, loving and better than any man alive. He is essentially addicted to YOU creating his personality. This can never be a lasting arrangement, because once he has convinced you, the fix wears off - to get a new high he has to either go further or go somewhere else.

Going further means convincing you he is even more than what he told you so far - for most psychopaths this is an impossible task. He can tell you that he's secretly Superman, but his inability to fly you to China for dinner will make a healthy dent in his personality fairly fast, putting a question to everything he has ever said. Not only that, but the victim at this point starts peeling the lies away from underneath him and this in turn not only removes his high completely, but brings around a terrifying low of facing the little [censored] he really is. The victim is rightfully and effectively destroying the psychopath's invented personality. He knows that a bad guy is much easier to play than Superman and now he has to act; in his mind it is self-defense 101.

The psychological high produced by his bad-guy personality will wear off and any threat from the outside (friends, family) will dig into him, so he will have to both isolate the victim and provide periodic 'good times' ("I joined therapy", "I got a new hobby", "I discovered Buddhism"). He can now re-enact his 'awesome' personality and turn for the worse shortly thereafter, all the while blaming it on his victim - he is basically recycling his victims awe and fear in order to feel like a man for a bit longer. This will eventually completely destroy his victim psychologically.

Children play into this in an interesting way:
1) he can try to establish a make-believe personality of a 'proud father'; sons are preferred. He really has no interest in the child itself, so this will be a massively traumatic experience for the kid.
2) the stronger attachment of the woman to the psychopath makes his personality creation through her less effective, since the more reachable she is, the weaker the base for his personality does her awe and fear provide. This is actually a pretty good time to ditch the psychopath, because he is losing interest for both the children and the woman and inconvenience of people wanting to defend the children grows. Many women let him go with the next victim at this time and feel lucky to have gotten away, which in my opinion works, but for me personally is not acceptable.

Throughout their life psychopaths get more and more accustomed to the fact that each victim will reach the stage of questioning and non-worship, so they start preparing for it from the outset. Tattoos, stories of a dark past, saying things like "I'm afraid of what I might do to you" are all calculated preparations that at a later time will make you believe his newly invented bad guy personality more thoroughly.



Don't get me wrong - the victim really IS a victim. The psychopath does not care one bit about his victim, no more than he cares about a knife he uses to cut the bread. He is just sharpening the knife more and more often as the edge wears off. His primary and only objective is to maintain a personality and nothing less then genuine awe or genuine dread from people around him will do. Since this is impossible to do effectively in a group for most psychopaths, he will try to isolate the victim. His massive ability to understand his victim's feelings tells us that he is not empty of empathy either; the empathy is rather 100% in service of his goal of maintaining a personality and is honed to its utmost.



Again, I have never known any psychopath murderers and this world may be somewhat different. I am not defending the psychopath or trying to tell you they are not dangerous; on the contrary! When their personality is in question, you are in essence questioning their existence and this can result in a considerable amount of terror. I can see how murder can be a part of this terror, but I believe this is extremely rare in the psychopath 'community' and that you should definitely not be scared by stories of murderous psychopaths.

For most people just making access to you complicated enough (strong friendships and family work wonders against isolation, focus on the safety of your children likewise) to push him off and being rational and unafraid is good enough. Personally I do not think a life in fear or being cow-towed is worth living, so going all the way against a psychopath is almost a given for me. I am considering going after the last one I encountered on a more personal level. I am considering warning his new girlfriend (who has a child, which makes it more likely that I will), warning people at his work, telling him outright that he is a pile of nothing slithering on the bottom of the bucket and basically not letting him breathe. I have some ideas on how he will react, but I will beat him regardless.



Why all this focus on murderers? Am I missing something here? The standard psychopath is a psychological parasite, not a murderer. We should stop scaring ourselves with morbid stories and start asserting a more unafraid and free personality. I am convinced that that is the only real way to defend yourself successfully.



I am sorry you feel that way. What I am saying here is my experience and my sense of what is going on behind those eyes when I confront a psychopath and I hope someone can use it positively.



Like I said, it's really the same place. They terrorize because they are terrorized. We should not feel bad for them, or have feelings of guilt towards them, although I know their victims have a tendency to do so. These individuals are mad dogs, grown children with no personalities and no regard for anything other than their own little problem and anyone feeling anything but disgust and disdain for these creatures does so on his and his children's and his family's and all of ours peril. I have read theories explaining psychopaths as some kind of 'evolutionary play' to forward humanity with no regard to consequences; I am convinced that this is wrong on its face: these people bring our species to the verge of extinction on daily basis because of their disregard for everything and they should be squished under a boot like the vermin they are. All this mysticism and 'no fear' 'no feelings' etc. is just confusing the issue.

If a psychopath read the last paragraph, he would know that its contents actually make you, the reader, more likely to sympathize with him, because of the ordinary compassionate person's inclination to be the devil's advocate. He knows this because he is not different than you and I, but he has different priorities. This simple question of priorities will destroy you, if you do not put your safety and your children's safety before your compassion and fear towards a psychopath. Let me repeat: treating a psychopath nicely because of his little problem is a mistake you will regret and nothing I say here should be interpreted as a defense of a psychopath. Understanding his little problem is necessary in order to defend yourself successfully, which is why I am writing this.



Again, I must point out my lack of experience with psychopath murderers, but I will say that psychopath groups are virtually non-existent. These people are, by the nature of their little problem, unable to forge bonds. I do not believe all of the guys involved in the killings were psychopaths and quite possibly none of them were. If I was to speculate, one of them at the most might have been a psychopath and his personality narrative of a bad-guy needed a new and more radical fix; the rest were just the audience to his staged performance.

And again, psychopaths who kill people are very very rare and I do not find these types of stories very helpful when dealing with your ordinary functioning psychopath limited to threats and psychological torment. We should try to be less afraid of them and act more rationally to protect ourselves, not feed ourselves stories from the Twilight Zone.



Exactly - his little performance went well and in his mind he's now a tough guy, feared for a long time to come. We should focus on understanding that, if he is a psychopath, he is not some super bad-guy, but just a little [censored] who does this to establish a personality. He is weaker than any normal person. His little problem sent him off to jail for no reason; it's a case of him wanting to 'look good' and lose, rather than 'look bad' and win. In his eyes all of us are losers because we don't have this grandiose personality he built up for himself, but the facts clearly tell the opposite story: he is off to prison and he didn't even take he money, for god's sake. He willingly self-destructed. You don't get much weaker than being totally controlled by an inferiority complex size of Jupiter.

Again the murderers row gets us off track. I am more interested in the victim being less afraid and acting more rationally when faced with a regular psychopath at work or in your family. Understanding why he does what he does should do that for you. He is weak. You can defend yourself if you act rationally and if you know someone who is dealing with a psychopath, you can defend that person as well. Sticking together and rejecting isolation is the key. Knowledge in this case really is a weapon.



Yes they do. Stop scaring yourself more than necessary.



Of course.



If you have any questions or comments to what I have explained so far, please do post them. I believe it should be clear to anyone that psychopaths indeed are very troubled individuals and that exactly this is what makes them dangerous.



Again, not a contradiction at all. The more afraid you are, the less you can afford to care about others. A psychopath is professionally afraid. He has removed his feelings of compassion long ago, probably in early puberty and has been honing his empathy for the purpose of manipulation for at least that long. Please do not let this make you feel compassion towards them, because they will rip you to shreds for it. Use it as a reminder that there is logic behind his actions and that you can beat him by simply not buying his bulls**t and taking threats seriously in a rational manner.



That's ok. I hope you understand that I am not trying to be offensive here.

To me it's interesting that you think there is such a clear dividing line between 'murderous' psychopaths and 'the other' kind.

Surely any sort of behaviour (on the psychopath's part) which they can use to subdue their 'victim' is fair game? Death threats, starvation, torture, sexual assault, rape...none of these murder, but all of these very effective. And I would suggest that these techniques are more widespread than you might like to think. Not such a clear dividing line after all.

What I am saying is that there is a almost non-existent chance of risking your life if you do confront a socialized psychopath, even smaller if you confront him as a group and no reason at all to constantly cycle this psychopath murderer image in front of people. It's exactly what the psychopath wants - everyone to consider him beyond challenge and throw all rationalization out the window. He's not beyond challenge.

I know these people are scary, they have ways to destroy people psychologically, but fear of murder should not be the first thing that freezes us stiff when dealing with one of them.

Okay, I am done with this. We have different views, I have NOT filled this community with murderous stories. I am only making my point that without a conscience all bets are off.

I could write a ton of stories I have followed of "socialized" Psychopaths who murder, watch the news if you don't want to follow their court cases.

There are no studies to date of socialized Psychopaths. The statistics of 1 - 3% come from studies in the prison population over 20 years ago. While studies are just now beginning, the socialized ones are too slick many times to get caught. Personally I would never confront and challenge a Psychopath, walking away is the only way to get off their radar and for many that is impossible when there are helpless children involved.



Quite the contrary. This was the first online forum and I have supported victims for over 14 years. The victims are the ones who live in fear, not the other way around. I get emails everyday from victims too afraid to post because they live in fear of their lives and yes ALL of them are in the hands of "socialized" Psychopaths from Dr.'s to all professions. Truly sad stories because many of them involve children trapped in the middle.

I am too sick to go on, you seem to know more than me, so carry on. Should the members find this conversation offensive I am sure they will post. We are a community so if anyone is not comfortable having a conversation that flies in the face of the absurd we will stop.

You will never convince me that they feel fear. They feel nothing. If I met and someone I found was a Psychopath, I also would be in fear of my life and it is not fear baiting it is reality. I am not a person to live in fear but I think I know how they operate and that they are indeed capable of murder given the circumstances. I would get as far away as I could and off their radar. If they don't actually kill you they will sure make you sorry you are alive when you are left with nothing. I would rethink your plan to talk to the next victim, go ahead if you think it is a good idea. While the victim is in the "honeymoon" state your words will fall on deaf ears.

I have stated my views and you have yours, I am not one to engage in circular conversations. You must be way smarter than I because you have experience with one. Over the years, sometimes it is hard to carry on when new members join our community and express the sheer fear they feel for their lives at the hands of the Psychopath in their life. I feel great empathy for the victims and am actually sad to see new members show up because I can feel their pain and the fear THEY feel through their posts. I pray for the day there would be no use for our community, yet it continues because there are many too afraid to post and this forum will be here as long as I am alive.

Anyways, I am too sick and not going to argue my point. I have stated what my views are and if someone who was involved themselves, not on the outskirts like you can tell me they think their Psychopath felt fear then I would love to hear from them, they have yet to say such words in all these years so I have to believe that it isn't just something I am pulling out of my hat.

Di