At the hotel I used to work at back in Nevada, we had a man come in one night to get a room. My friend was working the front desk that night and checked him in. Apparently, there was something “not right” about the man and after he’d gone up his room, my friend came into the PBX room to inform everyone that he had “just checked in a psychopath.” Nobody really took him seriously, but he insisted that he’d gotten some sort of instinctive sense that this person was not a good man.
Later that night, the guest called down for extra towels. The guy I was seeing at the time was the night manager and, without really thinking about it, sent up one of the hotel porters. Her shift was just about to end, so when he didn’t see her again he didn’t think much about it.
They eventually found some of her body parts floating in a fishing pond.
I think it pretty much messed up the guy I’d been seeing for life. I hope he finally managed to get over the guilt, but it was a topic to never be brushed upon for years and years until I finally lost touch with him.
Let’s just say I’ve heard it before, and have an inkling of how difficult it actually is to diagnose psychopaths. There is no such thing as a one-question test. This is one of those cutesy things done by people at seminars in order to sound profound.
I suspect that a disproportionately large percentage of serious poker players are sociopathic. It’s only natural, I suppose. Sociopaths tend to be intelligent, which is a must for poker. Poker is also one of the few venues in which it would be appropriate to see a man sit down at your table with a wild, desperate look in his eye and this month’s mortgage payment in his hand, and say to yourself: “Oh, good, I could use a new TV.”
Long ago I worked in the maximum security forensics unit of a mental hospital in Oregon. Yeah, I’ve met a few. We once had two Jesuses (Jesi?) on our unit at once; but they weren’t psychopaths, just nuts.
My father. He is the kind that “passes” in normal society, but it’s just a thin veneer of normality. I think maybe that’s the worst kind. Because he has never done anything blatantly illegal, everyone can stay in denial about what he really is. I wrote a much longer post about what he’s like, but deleted it. It sounds so unreal. Let’s just say he’s high on the “Selfish, Callous, and Remorseless Use of Others” factors, but managed to stay on the right side of the law and had some career success (though he likes to break small rules and his career was limited because he couldn’t entirely control himself at work).
I’ve met a few that I suspect of true sociopathy. The hair on the back on the neck stands up, but they seem so reasonable, it’s difficult to just walk away.
[Believe me, refusing to self-indulgently beweep one’s own mortality at the death of an acquaintance is not sociopathy.]
I’ve known some really manipulative people.
One, no matter what she says, I vaguely wonder what the truth is; I wonder if there is a kernal of truth, or she is making the whole thing up. It never crosses my mind to actually believe her.
Another almost never lies; with that one it’s all spin. So the game there is figuring out the real story, what little details have been left out.
Recently I worked with two amoral manipulative people. The havoc they wrecked, not just in our department, but throughout the company! They both, separately, deliberately worked to undercut the reputation and work-product of any competent person in the department, luring accomplices in from other departments, to the professional detriment of those accomplices. If we hadn’t finally lucked into a sane, and very hard-ass, manager, they’d probably still be at it.
(I was instrumental in getting rid of both of them, but too late to do any good. I am ashamed of myself for that.)
I have an ex-friend who I wonder about sometimes. It wasn’t until years later that I noticed her apparent love of lying about people’s behavior, playing the clucking-tongued bystander or “concerned friend” who’s just trying to warn you. And of course, she’s just delightful and wonderful, and any naysayers are deeply jealous, and her career not going where it should be is due to people sabotaging it out of jealousy as well. I lost contact with her, thank goodness, but friends who live in her city say she’s still at it, even trying to poison marriages of friends of hers (she hasn’t been in a long-term relationship in many years) with her lies and manipulations. She even drove a married couple off some message board because she ended up harassing and even online-stalking them.
There seems to be some controversy as to the difference between psychopathy, sociopathy and antisocial personality disorder. Also, there are people who do not have anything psychologically wrong with them but are just insensitive self-absorbed jerks. Then again, there are psychological disorders that can make someone act like a jerk (like being bipolar).
I suspect I may have met some in the business community. I don’t think they’re chopping up prostitutes in their appartment like Pattrick Bateman. But we have all met that executive or sales guy who is just too polished and friendly and yet by their actions they apparently have no morals.
On the other hand, a psychopath’s inability to follow societies norms may prevent them from success.
And some of them (I’d wager, many of them) figure out early that fitting in with society is in their own self-interest.
I once knew a sociopath very well. He once compared people to socks, by explaining how their only purpose is to bring you comfort, and eventually they may no longer be suitable and you go around looking for new ones and throw away the old ones. He was the sort of person that could do unspeakably evil things to others and calmly explain why it really wasn’t his responsibility and he was the real victim. Fundamentally incapable of caring about other people, but would charm the pants off just about everyone he met. Very few people were aware of how completely messed up he was, because, as he explained to me, it was in his best interest to pretend to care about others, because it got him what he wanted out of life – respect, recognition, obedience, affection, etc.
I have a distant in-law that’s on death row. I didn’t really know him well enough - mostly the few times I met him, he just seemed a little crass, wanting to know how much something had “set us back” (house, car, big-ticket items) and insisting that we could have done much better if we’d talked to him first.
Others who knew him better had been saying for years that they felt something “not quite right” about him when they were around him.
Someone in the family is a cop, and knows casually some of the cops that had him under surveillance before his arrest, and they said that it was like watching two different people, that he kept his two “lives” more separate than the average person would be capable of doing.
Three, one was a “friend” who took me aside one day to tell me that she believed it wasn’t up to her to regulate her own behaviour, it was up to other people to tell her when she’d gone too far. She didn’t have the time to work out what was fair or right, she had too much ambition.
It took me a while to realise that this was her way of admitting she was screwing me over. Others reported the same pattern. I was lucky in that I had little money to be taken.
One long term boyfriend - it ended violently as he believed I had no right to decide when things were over between us.
One (very) short term boyfriend who, five years after I dumped him (for having sex with me while I was asleep!), felt it was perfectly fine to try following me home since I’d *have *to agree to go out with him again if he found out where I lived. It took police involvement for him to stop.
Most people I know and date are emotionally healthy and fun, that’s why I remember these nuts so well.
The long term boyfriend was later officially diagnosed as psychopathic.
It did not stump me, and I posted a thread about it (something like, Hooray, I’m a psychopath!). But I ran into it on the internet. If I heard a speaker deliver something like this, I think I wouldn’t trust anything else the speaker said.
But I also went to hear a speaker talk about psychopaths–at a Mystery Writers of America meeting. She knew a lot about them, and said that very few of them become serial killers (or any kind of killer) but a lot of them go into politics.
wow - I know someone very much like this! I do not view him as being evil, but he doesnt really do anything out of the kindness of his heart. He uses people and when he gets what he wants, he’s on to the next person(s). Many of his ‘friends’ consider him to be a sociopath. He’s harmless though - I think the idea of being locked up with a bunch of men is enough to keep him in line. But in all honesty, I wouldnt be surprised if he hasnt fantasized about doing serious harm to another in vivid detail.
Maybe not a psychopath, but scary. I was happy-go-lucky walking back to my apartment with two slices of delicious pizza. I looked at this guy standing in a doorway and turned away. He looked sort of grizzled and gaunt. As I walked by he bent down and whispered in my ear:
Psychopaths aren’t necessarily scary and violent. They’re just people without empathy and conscience, which CAN manifest itself in violence, but not necessarily.
