Wednesday, September 2, 2009
Don’t Reason with a Sociopath!
For the profile of a sociopath watch this short instructional video
Sociopaths have a perception of the truth that is all their own.
The problem is they are so convinced of their truth, that they have this amazing persuasive ability with others. They are the type who can lie, steal, rape, abuse….and it never happened. You are making things up and you are the one who is crazy. You present evidence that is concrete – they can convincingly explain away your concrete piece of black and white evidence. On the other hand, they have an uncanny ability to manipulate a flimsy piece of paper that is barely legible so that even an intelligent judge will sit there with a blank, glassy-eyed stare, nodding in agreement with them. It beats anything I have ever seen. I think they must have some sort of hypnotic ability.
If you think you can reason with a sociopath or appeal to their conscience, forget it. You probably could if they had one, but they don’t. That is one of the things that makes them so dangerous.
I have a theory that parental alienators are sociopaths. That is what enables them to heartlessly keep a parent from a child, even though there is no real compelling reason to do so. They just want to destroy them.
I personally witnessed this with my daughter who flew 4000 miles from Alaska to Texas just to surprise her son on his 6th birthday only to be refused access to him. All of our appealing to the child’s best interest was to no avail. He even said he did not believe he is harming the child by intentionally keeping him from his mother (typical sociopathic denial). We were naive enough to believe that once he won custody, his controlling ways would stop. Please, if you’re reading this, don’t make that mistake. Like Elizabeth Bennett says – Bullies Do Not Grow Up: They Grow Worse. (Read her article here http://www.bloggernews.net/118363)
Having come away from such an unpleasant confrontation frustrated, sad, feeling powerless, watching my daughter sob, I at first felt angry, then depressed, then angry, then energized – so I started this blog.
I realized, though, after that experience, that I was obsessing over it so much that I was making myself crazy – and that’s when I had the revelation. You can’t reason with a sociopath. They don’t care about your pain – and they never will. They don’t care about what’s best for their kid, and short of a lightning strike to reboot their brain, they never will. Nope. The only way you can deal with a bully is you have to find someone to stop them. And no, I don’t mean a hit man!
The court is supposed to prevent that sort of thing. We shall see.
Anna
Citizens For Family Law Reform: Don’t Reason with a Sociopath!.
Parental Rights 
Reading this was so frighteningly familiar, I am completely in shock. It’s like writing about my own life, what I’ve experienced for the last 20+ years. Spot on and so true, it’s SICK!
This article is insightful. Parental alienators are sociopaths who use social aggression as a weapon. Social aggression is described in Rachel Simmons book “Odd Girl Out”, and can be seen in a very simple form in the Megan Meier murder. Saying that a sociopath who attacks by using the children to have PAS is like saying a sociopath who attacks with a hammer has ‘hammeritus’. Sociopathy is a growing problem in America and perhaps world wide, I believe this can be seen in such studies as, http://www.dukenews.duke.edu/2006/06/socialisolation.html. Just at a time when we need protection from sociopaths who would use children and such methods as false allegations, we instead have created more weapons for them to use in the family courts and DV establishment. See the much more extreme case of a mother who had her child held in a psychiatric ward because he wanted to live with his father, http://www.ITIOaChild.com
I learned so very much from Anne Wilson Schaef’s When Society Becomes An Addict, Harper and Row, 1986. and a book by Gershen Kaufman, Shame. For me sociopaths come from such childhoods. Forced to become chameleons. Shame based. John Bradshaw was my introduction to this and probably saved me my life. For such a person to be able to care is for them to face a lifetime of lies. They have lied to themselves first to survive a chaotic household. A friend introduced me to Richard Wilbur’s poem called “The Undead” but it was about a vampire. This is their story I feel,e.g. never born, truly. I too am the victim of many sociopaths, severe level parental alienators. But I am able to spot them so much better today. Kudos to Richard Gardner, Mike Jeffries, Amy J.L. Baker, Katherine Andre, and others who have put PA on the map.
Groups against PA: It amazes me that groups like Justice for Children, for example, can exist when it rejects PA but goes into courtrooms to take a parents child from them based on mistaken erroneous belief and understandings. I am a classic victim of them.
Alienating parents who won’t settle for anything less than the total destruction of the other parent’s formerly loving relationship with his or her child pull from a bottomless well of creativity, energy and anger without any regard, empathy or sympathy for the people they are hurting — including the child.
We write about this extensively in our book, A Family’s Heartbreak: A Parent’s Introduction to Parental Alienation. However, the one area where these alienating parents differ from a true sociopath is in the area of consequences. While sociopaths may not typically respond to the threat of real consequences, alienating parents might stop their alienating behavior if courts imposed consequence for disobeying court orders aimed at protecting the parent/child relationship.
mike jeffries
Author, A Family’s Heartbreak: A Parent’s Introduction to Parental Alienation
http://www.afamilysheartbreak.com