BARBARA'S TCHATZKAHS

(for D., gone but not forgotten) (March 8, 1957 - January 1, 2000) Introduced by another sociopath I had the misfortune to know in November 1975, D. wielded svengali -like control over me for some time. After a while it was control by fear.  There was physical, emotional, psychological and sexual abuse.  But I covered it up - knowing no one back them would believe me thanks to D.'s smear campaigns.  Back then I knew nothing about sociopaths, brainwashing or trauma bonding. When we first met and he took me out he was very charming and came on VERY strong.  I found out later he didn't believe I had a boyfriend in high school. When he found out I did (t he boyfriend wrote me all the time and came to our college to visit me.  D ran into us in the college dining hall ) he freaked out. I later learned that D. had taken off with his parent's credit card for a motel in town (off-campus) and holed up there getting high and railing about me for 2 days when...

Beyond therapy: Some evil can't be cured by Norman Doidge What, other than our wish that it be otherwise, makes us think that every human vice is treatable by some form of psychotherapy? That this wish is not just naive, but, at times, harmful is illustrated by a recent Canadian study on group treatment for 238 sex offenders (rapists, incest offenders) from Warkworth penitentiary in Ontario. These prisoners included some well-documented psychopaths. All were taught to "empathize" with victims, and understand their "offence cycle" as part of treatment. After their release, it was found that those who had scored highest in terms of "good treatment behaviour" and who had the highest "empathy" scores were the more likely to reoffend on release into the community. Hannibal Lecter Charm School teaches good manners, but not morals. The important study by Seto and Barbaree replicated -- unintentionally -- a 1992 Canadian study that found treated ...

by Underground Panther in the Sky When I was growing up and I faced people in school on the bus, people who rejected and bullied me, soon I felt strange, like I had been marked. When kids from schools I had never attended, kids I never met spat on me, it felt like I had some invisible neon sign on my forehead -- I could not see it only bullies could see it. It felt bad like the mark of Cain. It was burned into my being by abusers. The contact I had with psychopathic evil that erased my self-hood as an innocent kid, in repeated blinding soul-shattering moments of senseless unspeakable horrors and betrayal, made a mark. If you care and can feel, and see too much of the evil in the reality we live through, too soon, too close it changes you forever. I knew this was true even when I was 6 years old. I just didn't have the words to express it than like I do now. It felt as if abuse had made a change within me, a message I did not want to send out, advertising the damaged goods -- I am w...

Mary Jo Buttafuoco's New Book Aims to Help Others Living With 'Sociopaths' By LEE FERRAN Seventeen years after she was shot in the face by her then husband's teenage lover, Mary Jo Buttafuoco called her ex-husband Joey Buttafuoco a "sociopath and a liar." "I believed him when he said he had nothing to do with her [shooter Amy Fisher]," Mary Jo told "Good Morning America" today in an exclusive interview. "He was a very good sociopath and a liar. ...When I thought about it and looked it up on the Internet, and looked at sociopathic tendencies ... I said 'Oh my God.'" Joey filled all the criteria, she said. In May 1992, Mary Jo Buttafuoco answered her front door at her Long Island home to see 16-year-old Amy Fisher point a gun at her face and fire. Fisher had been having an affair with Mary Jo's husband, Joey, who was more than twice Fisher's age. Mary Jo Buttafuoco miraculously survived the close range shot...

Typical sociopath - no remorse, not his fault, playing victim... Tony Alamo, a one-time street preacher who built a multimillion-dollar ministry and became an outfitter of the stars, was convicted Friday of taking girls as young as 9 across state lines for sex. Alamo stood silently as the verdict was read, a contrast to his occasional mutterings during testimony. His five victims sat looking forward in the gallery. One, a woman he "married" at age 8, wiped away a tear. "I'm just another one of the prophets that went to jail for the Gospel," Alamo called to reporters afterward as he was escorted to a waiting U.S. marshal's vehicle. Shouts of "Bye, bye, Bernie" _ Alamo was born Bernie Lazar Hoffman _ came from a crowd gathered on the Arkansas side of the courthouse. Some came from Fouke, the nearby town where Alamo's 15-acre compound sits. Others were former followers of his ministries in Arkansas, California and New York. The jury of nine men an...

Conscience is considered the seventh sense. It is felt instinctively. For the most part, it can't be taught or conditioned or rehabilitated. The absence of conscience is a non-correctible disfigurement of character. There is no effective treatment. In a word: Guiltlessness. More words: Remorseless, deceitful, manipulative, self-centred, callous, unscrupulous, emotionally shallow. There was a time when the condition was described as "moral imbecility," which still fits. The modern shrinking heads bible, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV, refers to the clinical diagnosis of little or no conscience as "anti-social personality disorder." More commonly, it's called psychopathy or the slightly semantic alternative, sociopathy. M.T., the 17-year-old girl convicted of first-degree murder on Friday for orchestrating - demanding, via sexual blackmail - the death of a perceived rival, 14-year-old Stefanie Rengel, is arguably a psychopath, or soci...

From my friend - the inscrutable Uppity Woman: A real American Story: Have octuplets, beg on a website , shop at Nordstrom ’s and don’t pay the mortgage When last we looked, poor poor Nadya Suleman, single unemployed woman who already had six kids and deliberately had a boatload of eggs-fertilized- by- her -boyfriend implanted into her womb, gave birth to 8 babies. Seeking fame and fortune and already on the government take for three of her earlier children, Nadya hired a publicist and was seeking $2 million to tell her story to American Icon shows such as Oprah! She also planned to star in her own TV show as a “Child Care Expert”. No kidding. You can’t make this shit up. But poor poor Nadya didn’t pass the smell test and she didn’t win her lottery as planned – nor has anybody offered her a TV show. Denying she was on the public teat because a reporter wasn’t clever enough to ask the “Entitlement” question instead of the “Welfare” question, it was discovered that Nadya was already coll...

By Hazel Parry Dr John Clarke, for years an expert in the criminal mind, remembers the day he suddenly realized that there might be psychopaths at large in millions of offices around the world. "I was giving a lecture on criminal psychology and gave a psychopath checklist," he said. "At the end, a woman came up and said 'You have just described my boss'." What Clarke discovered was that the psychopath is not just a person you find in prison, in a courtroom or in the pages of a thriller. He or she is scheming in workplaces all over the world. Research claims that 1 per cent of the adult working population are workplace psychopaths. (Probably more since the majority of psychopaths go undiagnosed) In offices large and small, in boardrooms and on shop floors the psychopath lurks; lying, cheating, stealing, manipulating, victimising and destroying coworkers - all without any guilt or remorse. Worse than that, says Clarke, these so-called organizational psychopat...

By Gene Messick On 11 December I wrote an Article for OEN about this: Opportunities to deal with sociopaths in American politics Since then, I've been collecting examples to prove my point. Just recently I discovered one of the most egregious examples to date, described in a recent Mother Jones blog by Jonathan Stine in which he wrote this: " Alberto Gonzales: Pathetic? Deluded? Crazy? Short fiction writer Alberto Gonzales is confused, asking in a recent interview, " What is it that I did that is so fundamentally wrong, that deserves this kind of response to my service?" If Gonzales is trying this unctuous nonsense in an attempt at image- rehabilitation, he needs to hire a professional PR company. If he's asking this question in earnest, he is demonstrably insane. As Think Progress points out, the answer to Gonzales' question includes: corrupting the DOJ by insiting on ideological purity tests in hiring; firing US Attorneys that refused to toe the Bush Ad...

Just what we need, another four years of morally insane leadership. Imagine - if you can - not having a conscience, none at all, no feelings of guilt or remorse no matter what you do, no limiting sense of concern for the well-being of strangers, friends, or even family members. Imagine no struggles with shame, not a single one in your whole life, no matter what kind of selfish, lazy, harmful, or immoral action you had taken. And pretend that the concept of responsibility is unknown to you, except as a burden others seem to accept without question, like gullible fools. Now add to this strange fantasy the ability to conceal from other people that your psychological makeup is radically different from theirs. Since everyone simply assumes that conscience is universal among human beings, hiding the fact that you are conscience-free is nearly effortless. You are not held back from any of your desires by guilt or shame, and you are never confronted by others for your cold-bloodedness. The ice...