Um, I’ve known a lot of people like that. I’m not sure that I’ve just been blessed to know an abnormally high number of psychopaths, I believe instead it’s what’s known as “typical midwestern asshole traditional male.” See, also “Damn it, the Vikings game is on, get me a beer and shut up!”
faithfool, is your ex’s name Jim by any chance? I may have dated him too. 
Anyway, at my prior social work job, I worked with juvenile sex offenders. Many of these youngsters qualified for the “antisocial personality disorder” label, except for the fact that none were yet 18. Personality disorders are generally not diagnosed until adulthood; therefore, the younger offenders are usually labeled with “conduct disorder”.
However, you simply know you are dealing with a sociopath when, for example, you hear an eleven-year-old calmly (and proudly, with a bit of a smirk) talk about “grooming” his nine-year-old victim by showing the younger boy porn on an almost daily basis, then go on to describe the day when he was (finally!!..according to him) able to anally rape the nine-year-old. And, worst, I think, to not be able to admit or acknowledge he’d done anything wrong. He insisted the littler kid enjoyed every minute of it. Worse, maybe, than those dead eyes above the arrogant smirk.*
I’m so glad I don’t do that job anymore.
*details have been altered to protect those involved.
I worked with a guy who I believe was a sociopath (or very mild APD). He had done time for armed robbery, and came out wating to be a model citizen. He worked part time in my store, while going to college full time, or at least that’s what he said. He also claimed to have applied for clemency from the governor so that he could go to law school. He was charismatic, and like some other described here, could make you believe anything he said because at the time he said it, he truly and earnestly believed it himself. Not that he was delusional, just charismatic. Not too long after he quit (we had knocked him down to 3 hours a week for a couple of years because all he wanted to do was “security”), I saw in the paper that he had been busted for arms dealing. As in a large storage space full of weapons that were part of the NRAs wet-dreams. That was how he was supporting himself and his education. I think he wanted to live an honest life, but it was so easy for him to manipulate others that it was natural for him to do so rather than slog away at it like the rest of us. He was also in his early 40s at the time, and unmarried.
tanookies description of her father sounds a lot like a description of our dear friend Fred Phelps provided by his oldest son. I’m really sorry you had to go through that growing up, tanookie.
Vlad/Igor
Well… it is hard to truly convey the whole picture. He believed he was somehow the center of the universe. He viewed everyone else’s actions based on how they served him. He felt people did things for/against him and not for any motivations of their own. It is also a matter of degree. When I was 13 he decided the random violence wasn’t enough to keep me in check so he orchestrated this elaborate plan to make me believe I had angered a spirit in a ouija board. The only way to make the spirit not kill me was to provide him (my father) with sexual favors. If I said to him that I hated having to perform for him he would say “You know it bothers me when you say things like that.” No remorse at all - I was just irritating him with my objections to his aberrant behavior.
He had many girlfriends besides his wife. One of my jobs was to keep the girlfriends oblivious of eachother. He even brought them home. He was charismatic - people wanted to believe him. He told them I owned the home and took in my brother. I was 16! He’d have me tell my mother he was over the road one night, call work and tell them his father had a heart attack, call girlfriend Y with the OTR story then set up his date with girlfriend Z.
He would quit his job randomly throughout the years. He always had a “good reason.” I’ve never met anyone wronged so often by so many employers. He also came home with a lot of random stuff he got that “fell off the truck.”
He was proud of odd things too. He took us to the beach once and we found a ton of frogs. So we were collecting frogs in towels to bring back to drop on my mother who was sleeping on the beach. He decided it would be fun to take the frogs into this old building and toss them against the walls because they echoed. Then he had a frog drop kick contest.
He gave me his gun because he said I needed to know how to use it. Then when he told me to point it at him and shoot - I couldn’t do it. I threw the gun at him instead. He got quite angry with me for being a baby. This dovetailed into the whole “stop acting like a girl” speech I got all the time.
Define psychopath. I used to be a delusional schizophrenic but I just kept to myself (others could tell something was seriously wrong but nobody knew what). I wasn’t violent or destructive, but my social skills and ability to see things from other’s points of view were total shit (i’m still working on them). So that got me in a few baaaaaaaaaad situations. I have some anger over some of the situations but overall being insane never predisposed me to being violent, but the consequences of being insane (like not understanding social convention) left me angry a few times. But I assume anyone would be angry in situations like the ones i’ve had.
Yes, he’s serving life for beating a guy to death with a baseball bat. His last name rhymes with ustable, So everyone called him “unstable-[hisname]”. Anhoo he was heavy into drugs. He was having an affair with his drug-dealers girfriend.
I don’t know the whole story, threats were made. “Unstable” knocks on dealers door one day. Dealer had answered door with baseball bat. Unstable takes bat from dealer,beats him about the head untill dealer gives up the ghost. Unstable throws dealers kitten into microwave and leaves.
Three days later dealers body is found, and the kitten is found alive, although it needed surgery to amputate a paw or two (don’t recall exactly).
Thats my unpleasant little story for the day…
Well, I guess for purposes of this discussion the appropriate question would be, “Why not?” What motivate(d)(s) you to **not ** harm others? Is it because you know it’s wrong? Or is it because you just don’t feel compelled to? From what you say, it’s not out of concern for their feelings about being tied up and tortured and stuffed under the house–would that (have) bother(ed) you?
Have you ever seen the anti-drug commercials where they show someone who’s in danger (drowning in a lake or injured in a road) and their friend is just standing there watching them and doing nothing? The commercials are intended as a metaphor but there are people who could literally stand there and watch a friend die because they didn’t have a reason to save them.
That sums it up pretty well in a nutshell. There’s a lot of elaboration in that link.
About 15-20% of my patients are psychopaths (I work in a prison). As such, I need to be real concrete and direct in dealing with their physical health issues and let them know the basic consequences of their behavior. They change their behavior only if they perceive some very real benefit to themselves that outweighs any consequences.
It can be frustrating if you actually try to establish even a sympathetic relationship with them; avoid doing this at all costs. Rarely if ever will it help them, and it risks doing harm to the therapist.
It must be hell for family members, as previous posters have alluded to.
Well, that painted a different picture. I don’t know if it’s psychopathic, but it sure is messed up. Good job getting through that and still having the ability to actually communicate with other human beings.
I often wonder about the definitions of sociopathy and psychopathy. The differential gives so much wiggle-room, I can barely tell the two apart on paper. In person, probably I couldn’t tell them apart at all. My guess is that there is no good definition, and hence no good way to tell oneself if somebody is the dreaded “psycho” or not, unless they do something really blatantly egregious, in which case you hardly need an expert opinion to come to the right conclusion.
I had one girlfriend who latched onto me when I had nothing, and she had less. Family problems left her relying on me for a couple years before she ended her leave of absense from school and I went on to move to the Boston area and figure out what career path I wanted to take. When I decided basic science was the way for me to go, and that medicine was too circuitous a route to that end, I was simply discarded for a more economically advanced mate. It was cold, calculated, and brutally swift. One day I’m the guy; the next I’m not. One day I thought I was loved; the next I find I’m being cheated on, and that now I’m history. Three years of intense financial and emotional support meant nothing when the forseable future looked equally lean. I had no house, little money, and no near-term goals for children, and no long term hope of prosperity, since I was dooming myself to be a postdoc; so that was that.
Hence I’ve wondered myself if I knew a sociopath intimately. I still wonder, but I doubt I’ll ever know. Some would say her behavior, while machiavellian, was “normal”.
You may remember the scene from “The Winter of Our Discontent” where Steinbeck’s character gives his alcoholic friend booze and gets the friend to sign over the deed to his property.
I know a man who actually did that. Not “tried to do it” or “did something like that” but actually kept supplying liquor to another human being to drink himself to death to get the guy’s house.
By the way, he could be quite charming.
I’m not sure if he really makes the grade but he was damn sure close enough for me.
I was in the US Navy in Charleston in the '70s, working on a sub tender. We had a guy working in the division who was about to retire. Polite, normal-seeming and quite friendly, “Tom” and I used to discuss guns and camping, hiking, a lot of outdoor subjects and we would meet almost every morning. He would have been in his late 30s and I was 23 or 24. I had him over to the house a few times for a beer and conversation and he always struck me as being extremely reasonable and well adjusted.
Anyway, the big day finally came when he would leave us and go to Norfolk Va. for his retirement ceremony. He stopped by my apartment for a cup of coffee and to say goodbye and we had a pleasant hour or so before he drove away.
Two days later, we had dozens of police asking question about him. It seems that Tom had been in a dispute about a small piece of property (Around 20 acres of forest land) in W. Va. While waiting for his retirement ceremony, Tom drove to his aunt’s house. He cut the phone line and then used a glass-cutter to open the back door before walking in and killing 5 people while they slept. He got his aunt and uncle, a pair of cousins, someone who was simply spending the night, and a neice who amazingly lived through it.
Since then, I’ve never been sure. Was Tom normal the whole time and just snapped? Or was he crazy the whole time and just concealed it?
Regards
Testy
Testy, it’s hard to image a “sound” person reaching a breaking point over 20 acres of land and killing five relatives. I vote for sociopath or a brain tumor.
Inigo, does your brother ever talk about being a sociopath or is that something that you avoid discussing?
They know when they are, don’t they? Is it true that they never blush?
I used to work a lot of temp jobs. I got to know a guy from standing in the line at 5 AM, waiting for the agency to open. We got sent to the same job sometimes, so we were casual friends and hung out a bit. I’d been visiting him one early afternoon, then I left him to go do something. The next morning, his picture was on the front page of the paper. Later in the previous afternoon, he had stabbed his mother to death.
I didn’t know him well enough to be able to tell whether he was a truly sick person. He didn’t seem like it. He never mentioned his family to me, or indicated that he had anything serious happening. He didn’t act strange. As I recall, he also didn’t have that manipulation thing going on, he wasn’t trying to con me with smoothness, he was just a sort of ougoing guy that I met. I didn’t get creeped out by him, or our relationship, such as it was, wouldn’t have gone beyond “hello” in the early morning lineup. And then he offed his mom.
Well, that is my idea as well. (The sociopath part, I never thought of a brain tumor.) The odd thing is how normal this guy was. No ranting, conspiracy theories, nothing. Hell, I was probably weirder than he was. 
It has made me look at people a bit more closely than I used to. I don’t think I could actually detect someone like this but I have a good time trying.
Regards
Testy
I don’t know if it counts as a psychopath, but I knew a guy in high school who was perfectly nice and pleasant to hang around. He did get in minor bits of trouble now and then, but nothing out of the ordinary for a teenager. A year after I graduated, he stabbed his girlfriend to death in his driveway. :eek:
Man, that really freaked me out.
Wow! Only 15 - 20%? I would think the percentage would be higher than that.
faithfool, your guy sounds like he had a little paranoid schizophrenia thrown in the mix…
When I was in the Army going through advanced language training, there was this new girl who showed up. Very attractive. Seriously very attractive. Not just “hot” but what seemed like genuine good breeding, well educated class. She could be a model or actress or international banker, the way she came across. The whole unit thought she was great. She dropped lots of important names. She seemed like she really knew these important people, and had been to lots of these really cool places. She was descended from the Rothschild family, but due to mysterious family politics, blah, blah, blah she couldn’t at that time, claim the family fortune. OK, my bullshit meter went off a little bit. I’m a pretty good read of people. But you have to just take my word for it, she was slick. Even the command bought into her stories. You had to give her the benefit of the doubt. She seemed to speak fluent French because of course, she’d grown up there at least part time. Hell, I knew some French and her French was way better than mine, so what did I know? Could be.
She started dating my roommate. We’d socialize off duty, and we were all sort of the “cool crowd.” She knew lots of cool, classy, worldly things. Ok, yeah my bullshit meter was still going off a bit. Hey, I was gay (not out) so I wasn’t pussy whipped like most of the guys, and she didn’t (in retrospect) hang out with the other girls that much. I was able to observe her a little more objectively than say, my roommate who as far as he was concerned, she shit whipped cream.
So one day I’m running on the track with a female friend and this girl happens to be running too, by herself. We get to a point where we’re going to pass her and we say “hi.” She stops and totally goes off on us about how we’re so stuck up and think we’re better than everyone else and how can we be such assholes? My friend & I just looked at each other like, WTF? Where’s this coming from? This chick is nuts.
So time goes by and my female friend & I kinda keep our distance from psycho-chick, but she’s still dating my roommate so I can’t keep that much distance but it’s ok because she acts like the little “incident” never happened.
Along comes Christmas and most people take off for the holiday, as does she (where? to her beloved Grand Ma-ma who rescued her from the evil orphanage in France? Who knows, I never asked but I’m sure it was somewhere really cool). When we all get back and are sitting around, getting ready for the next duty day, we notice she hasn’t come back. On Monday we’re all in accountability formation and she’s still not there. A little time goes by and it turns out when she left, she left behind most of her stuff including her ID card & dog tags. Ooh, gossip, gossip, gossip. You don’t do that unless you intended to go AWOL.
Some more time goes by, and we eventually find out the investigators finally found her mother and it turns out she’s a simple Mid-western girl with a high IQ who’d been in a mental institution for a couple years, disappeared and ended up in the Army.
We were all going for high level security clearances so she pretty much had to go AWOL because about that time her background investigators would have begun physically interviewing people who knew her past.
I always wondered what ever happened to her? She reminded me of the guy in The Pretender who could pass himself off as pretty much anyone he wanted to. To my credit, I did sense there was something not quite right about her, but then again, will I always know when someone’s not quite right? If it hadn’t been for that one psycho slip up on the running track…
My father had discusions with others about how child molesters should be lynched. Impassioned discussions. And then we would all go home and he would molest me. He was president of my school’s parent teacher organization. He was a “big brother” and gave guitar lessons.
He was like a chameleon. He fit into whatever surroundings he was in. He could change his moods just as quickly. What sent him into a rage one day amused him the next. Kept us all on eggshells. Easier to control people I guess.