Therapist Clueless About Sociopaths

[Valentino]

The idea that mental health professionals are actually experts with specific clear science and understanding about sociopaths or psychopaths and how best to diagnose them is a common belief that I find lacking in the evidence. At best they're simply better at making educated guesses. I think it can be just as dangerous to dismiss the observations of peers, friends and family members who have spent a lot more time socially interacting and observing suspected sociopaths. With combined observations, they have more objective information which might lead to a more accurate and practical diagnosis.

This is an interview with Dr. James Fallon, a neuroscientist who diagnosed himself as a pro-social psychopath, after decades of stubbornly resisting similar opinions from his peers. But in this interview another expert Dr. Simon Baron-Cohen a psychology and cognitive neuroscience professor and research expert on empathy disagrees with the diagnosis. An example of how varied diagnosis opinions can still be with mental health experts.

 

[radicalgratitude]

I'm back...whew! I feel better enough to post.

@Dana1010, I get the feeling that your outward stubbornness about this issue is stemming from some deep emotional pain.

Basically it's like I wrote earlier, it helps to stop the projection - all people are like me, and if I were to do something like that, the person would have to really deserve it, so I must have deserved it.

The rest of us are engaged in an intellectual conversation about the topic of psychopathy. When I felt like it was no longer an intellectual conversation for me, I took a break.

However for you, if your father is not a psychopath as others like @anthony have questioned, and also your therapist, then it may make you go back to feeling like you are somehow responsible for how your father treated you. Because if he's a psychopath, then "Oh hey, it's not my fault. This is why! I'm not the b*tch/stut/whatever I thought I was. He has something wrong with him!"

Am I on the right track?

If I am, then I would like to tell you, it is not your fault. It doesn't matter if your father was found by a psychiatrist to be completely sane! The fact remains that he hurt you and he manipulated you into thinking you were the cause of it. It sucks. It simply sucks. Having a diagnosis is not going to make it suck any less.

Even if your dad isn't a psychopath, you still need to process with your therapist that your dad, who is supposed to love you unconditionally, hurt you. The sense of betrayal and loss from this is overbearing. You'll get there. :hug:

 

[Sarah_Rose]

Yes, I do agree with you that it should be involved in your therapy. My abuser was without a doubt a sociopath. She sexually abused me over and over, started making jokes about the incest to my face, she would call me fat and encourage me to use extreme dieting methods, then she got sick of toying with me and started saying horrible things about my family to our extended family. That's when I had finally had enough and told my family bits of the truth so they'd kick her out. I am one of the few people who has seen who she really is. She is not just a messed up person, she literally feels no remorse for her actions, will do whatever she wants when she wants, and I personally believe she just enjoys doing horrible things. If my abuser was someone who was mentally ill, or obsessed with power, or something like that, I think it would affect me differently. Because I know she is a sociopath I know I can never really "get even", not that I really would want to, but even if I told HER family, she'd manipulate them into thinking I'm the evil one. With other people who are not sociopaths that isn't often the case. I don't know, i've just alway felt that with sociopaths it makes you feel even more like a victim. I think all sexual abuse is horrible, but I do believe there are different forms of treatment for each scenario. If I was raped by a stranger I would have to relearn how to trust strangers again, if I was abused by an uncle I may have to learn to trust other uncles, but being abused by a sociopath doesn't mean I need to learn to trust other sociopaths, it means I have to learn how to avoid them and not blame myself.

 

[greenleaf]

A suggestion for the folks who are questioning Dana's definition of a couple people as psychopaths... None of the rest of us know the people in question, and Dana's understanding of the abusers isn't harming anyone. It's possible that the people involved are really really obvious examples of classic psychopaths!!!

Nor do I see Dana running around slapping the label on everyone in sight...

Having had many people deny a simple label of "abusive" that I put on my brother (they only met him in public situations where he used his "good" behavior" I'd like to posit that we not say things that invalidate Dana without good evidence ourselves that these particular folks aren't! Doesn't sound like the therapist was necessarily very supportive to me...

This thread jumped into questioning Dana really early and hasn't really left that attitude. Just my observation though...

 

[Dana1010]

However for you, if your father is not a psychopath as others like [DLMURL="https://www.myptsd.com/c/members/1/"]@anthony[/DLMURL] have questioned, and also your therapist, then it may make you go back to feeling like you are somehow responsible for how your father treated you.

You didn't read my post right. My father was diagnosed as a psychopath, and neither my therapist nor @anthony ever challenged that. There is another person I am assuming is a psychopath (in my heart, I would say I know) and that is who my therapist questioned me about labeling.

Nor do I see Dana running around slapping the label on everyone in sight...

When asked how many psychopaths I've met, I give the most conservative estimate possible precisely for this reason - I don't want to throw the word around. I think when you've dealt with the real thing, you develop a respect for the term and how potent it is. I'm certainly not the person hollering, "Psychopath!" every time someone cuts me off in traffic. I can understand why people who've never met a person would balk at someone labeling them a psychopath with the hyperbolic and heavily pejorative connotation it's been given. That said if someone close to me was involved with someone and beginning to think that person was a psychopath, my reaction wouldn't be to gaslight them and tell them they're overreacting; I would advise them end the relationship ASAP.

 

[whserenitynluv]

Before I started treatment me ex abuser tried to label me as a sociopath. He even went as far as saying it to people I know, and that scared me. He didn't think I knew he was doing that but I did. I went to several of my well respected friends, even one was a nerophysicist to talk about what a sociopath was. Ptsd can make people believe you are a sociopath to some because of the withdrawel of emotion and running away, whic leaves people thinking that you just don't care about how people feel. The biggest difference between a sociopath and someone with ptsd is they might act like they don't care, but the reason for withdrawel is because they might feel so much guilt and pain that they don't know what to do. For me when I would be around my ex abuser, he would try to label me with all kinds of stuff. When he would abuse me and bully me I would retreat and cry and was in an enormous amount of pain, thinking what did I do to upset him. I would always want to make my part right and appologise. Sociopaths don't feel remorse and they don't appologise. My abuser didn't realize what the true definition was on sociopaths. His loss, my gain, and I am truly grateful for this forum and not being a sociopath. Sorry you guys have dealt with one :(

I have some examples but the dr who Ihad spoken to mee it very clear the differences and that made me feel ok. The first thing was a sociopath doesn't worry about being one. He filed bancruptcy several times has huge family dependance and doesn't hold any boundaries to his mother at all. Plays a victim, and had told me about a babysitting incident that he actually molested a baby and it was a relative had sexually abused me and never listened to me at all if it was about him, he was extremely emotionally abusive took pride in holding a rebel flag as a child, he's been to jail for abusing a child and has had three restraining orders, but denies they were for a good reason. Lack of remorse is one if the categories. Victim to the world,
Now that I think about it my ex abuser has a lot of these signs and that is scary!

My ex abuser tried to label me as one of these. HE said I had the characteristics. Ptsds can make people very unavailable emotionally without treatment. Dorm being called that I went and asked a few drs if I was, and he said no. I have huge guit and remorse I am brutally honest and my selfs respect and boundaries to abusers was limited, he said my ex was more of a sociopath with the severe dependencies to his mother, the lack of empathy to anyone but himself and the fact he would never appologise,neither did his mother ever! His mother even threatened to throw him in a mental ward if he didn't do what she wanted. He still loves with her and is indebted to her, he admitted he had molested his own nephew as a baby, he has has three three retraining orders one for putting his hands around a child's neck and he denies he had don't it and claims he is a good guy when he is an abusive person. HE ALlows to be abused by his mother for financial gain. His mother insists he give it all to her and when he doesn't or confronts her with things he might not like about her behavior she screams and yell so and punishes him by avoidance but never appologised. HE has spread rulers about me, when he is so very wrong. If I didn't have empathy or guilt I wouldn't have stayed in such a relationship, I felt huge remorse and felt like everything was my fault until I got sick of it.

mod edit to remove copywritten material. You must not copy and paste whole articles; only include relevant portions. You must include a working link back to the material. This is the second time we're letting you know. -JL

 

[Pencil]

Dana, when the fisticuffs have petered out I'd like to have a conversation with you about the 'quality' of abuse of a psychopath / sociopath / sick f*ck, or whichever title is technically correct (I don't care what they're called, we know the horror - by any damn name or label), and why it is important to be able to classify it.

 

[anthony]

(I don't care what they're called, we know the horror - by any damn name or label)

There is zero argument about what you want to discuss, within this thread. Nobody is diminishing Dana's trauma at any stage. This discussion is about whether you should be saying someone is sociopath / psychopath without full and proper evidence. A person can have sociopathic / psychopathic behaviours, which may come across as one, but that does not make them one. Behaviour and personality are very distinct discussions. The first is learnt and can be changed, the second is hard wired.

If you worded your thread title correctly @Pencil I doubt anyone would diminish anything. But you can't go around calling people something, without evidence. Present behaviour is not direct correlation to past personality formation. Behaviour can be learnt anywhere in a life spectrum.

To call someone a sociopath or such, you are talking about their core personality.

To say someone has sociopathic behaviours, does not make them a sociopath by personality, their core being.

 

[Bookoffee]

the look in their eyes ..it can be frightening as you know they are not feeling anything - you can see and feel it, and yes if you pull their covers , expect to be harrassed, initimidated and anything else they can throw at you .

I saw this thread earlier today. I was interested in reading it but with my current unstable mind I thought I would put it off. I have been told that I have been raised by sociopaths. I have always doubted it and thought they were just unstable abusive people.

Then I read this. I see these eyes, the frightening and threatening eyes when my step-father broke my pet's neck and shot another in the head. One because I told my sister that he touched me and the other because we were homeless.

Would you consider him a sociopath?

I haven't read any other thread after this post. There are too many to read for me right now. I just needed to comment and get these eyes off me and hope for better ones.

 

[ghotiff]

I see these eyes, the frightening and threatening eyes

I don't know about psychopaths but those eyes say "I have no limits in what I will do to have power over you". Very scary.

My abusers eyes said "the more discomfort I see in you, the happier it makes me" as he giggled with glee.

 

[Dana1010]

@Bookoffee, none of us can diagnose someone we've never met. If you think it would help you to know if those people were sociopaths, you can start by reading the literature. A good place to start is Robert Hare's Without Conscience.

As for the stare, many people can have a frightening and threatening stare. What characterizes the sociopath's stare is the total lack of feeling. It is completely still, unwavering, sort of like a person who has died with their eyes open. It's not like this all the time; when they're doing their act, they may become very animated. I notice Ted Bundy (diagnosed psychopath) had a way of smiling with his eyes, wrinkling them at the corners. When I caught my suspected sociopath when he was alone and thought no one was watching, that's when I'd see this otherworldly, frozen stare into nothingness, and it scared the sh*t out of me.

 

[greenleaf]

@Dana1010 -- having known one confirmed, diagnosed psychopath horribly well, and researching the topic, in my opinion could make you well aware of the "sense" of such a person. I get gut senses of people who seem likely to be potentially violent on occasion; it sometimes feels like a sort of "aura". No, I'm not a believer in mystical beings in that sense. I think that our ancestors and mammalian relatives had millions of years to learn to pick up on subtle details and to get a "sense" of others of their species, and the ones who did a better job sometimes survived better. Evolution. Humans who work with nonhuman primates report that chimps, etc. are much, much better at picking up the humans' moods than other humans are!

Such impressions of people can be mistaken, of course. We can also have our "radar" set too sensitive for behaviors that harmed us, so we have a responsibility to be very cautious with any dealings with other humans. It sounds like you are quite aware of that stuff though, given your response that you don't use this label a lot.

My new, trauma therapist mentioned that when people she knows have a trauma history get such a "feeling" about an individual, she pays attention. To me, that felt really validating.

I suspect that these gut-level senses will eventually be explainable by science, but first some scientists would have to be convinced that survivors might have figured something out at some level... Big leap for some...

I spent many years in a martial arts class taught by someone who seems, in retrospect, to have been of the opinion that anyone who had my history was just broken in certain ways, that nothing I observed about reality was especially valid... (sure maybe the poor broken things deserve some help but don't listen to anything they're saying...)

I have heard that police learn to trust their guts, and yes they have to be careful and verify as appropriate of course... Society extends them respect for having learned something, seems to me... but similar respect for abuse survivors' learning ability is sometimes not present where it really should be.

So, are police trained to ignore their guts, treat everyone the same in all situations, and only assume someone might be violent if there is a well-documented paper trail of diagnoses available... maybe for some guy radiating anger and violence, with a large bag, walking into a school...? There are in fact appropriate ways to use and combine our reptile brain, mammal brain, and neocortex abilities, to try to keep ourselves and others safe!

Any attempt to keep the guy from a certain job, away from careers with kids, etc. etc. should in fact be confirmed by a well-documented paper trail, the courts, etc, on the other hand, in my humble opinion.

Yes, we do have to be careful! I'm not trying to deny our guts can make mistakes, but the whole "confirmed diagnoses only" thing feels totally bizarre to me given the context of this forum and the original post here.