Getting away from: Users, Abusers, Liars, Cheaters, Thieves, Manipulators, and Violent Assault
PsychopathSavvy.com
I’m dedicated to giving you the best in predator awareness, defense, and recovery. So please reach out if you want to know more!
PsychopathSavvy.com
PsychopathSavvy.com examines ruthless ‘one-percenters’ and how to deal with their attacks. I will use the terms psychopath, sociopath, and social predator interchangeably, and I apologize up-front to any academics or healthcare professionals who feel a layman shouldn’t meddle in their domain. And my sincerest apologies, up front again, to those sociopaths and psychopaths who don’t place in the vicious-and-destructive end of the spectrum. But to be clear, I’m defining social predators as people with little or no conscience who specialize in abusing others. This maltreatment is sometimes to achieve a practical outcome but is just as likely for entertainment. It boils down to controlling, manipulating, and hurting, which get the predator’s juices flowing. Hijacking your cash, credit, sexual attention, and self-esteem provides fun and meaning for the predator. And that’s just a warm-up for a lot of them.
My goal is to increase awareness and help you defend against them or at least recover from their attacks.
I was part of the problem for over forty years. But when a larger shark than myself ate me up, which happened decades after I got out of prison, I realized what a self-centered maniac I had been all along and decided to change.
Getting used up by that superior psychopath sizzled my self-image. The ensuing self-pity, ironically, morphed into something else: a startling revelation of the misery I’d put others through. Now I knew what they felt like. It was the beginning of empathy. Unlike me, though, most abusive personalities will fight to the death rather than fight to empathize. For me, it’s an ongoing battle.
I’m not better than other psychopaths; I’m just lucky. It took twenty years of epic humiliation and fighting change – almost to the death, over and over – before I miraculously emerged from the ashes with an adjusted attitude.
Mental health professionals estimate between one and four percent of humans are psychopathic, sociopathic, antisocial, or just don’t give a damn about anything but subjugating their fellows. Regardless of the terminology used or the impossibility of knowing how many exist, I’m convinced from experience and study that many people thrive on lying, cheating, thieving, manipulating, using, and abusing. I wish I were exaggerating, but I’m urging you, from decades of firsthand immersion in personality disorders and another ten years of formal study, to educate yourself and to set tripwires and alarms against the predator’s approach.
Professor Hare’s Psychopath Descriptors:
Shallow emotions
Self-important
Remorseless
No empathy
Deceptive
Manipulative
Impulsive
Need excitement
Irresponsible
Behavior problems from childhood on
See Professor Hare’s highly proprietary Psychopathy Checklist, Revised.
Since the checklist is meant to be administered and evaluated by a trained professional, I caution you not to use it to identify ‘psychopaths.’ Still, if you wish to learn more about the PCL-R and its application, I recommend Kent Kiehl’s book, The Psychopath Whisperer. Professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of New Mexico, Kent Kiehl, trained under Professor Hare and gives a practical case-by-case analysis and introduction to the use of Hare’s world-acclaimed Psychopathy Checklist, Revised (PCL-R).
Many social predators fall under the heading of ‘psychopath.’ Psychologist Robert Hare, the creator of the world-acclaimed psychopathy checklist, revised (PCL-R), describes the earmark traits of the psychopath (see left). However, he warns that psychopathy is an accumulation of features expressed consistently over a lifetime and not just an occasional manifestation of one or a few of these traits that we should watch for. Much of Hare’s work reflects the pioneering efforts of psychiatrist Hervey Cleckley, whose clinical profiling of the psychopath in 1941 set the standard for future generations (see right).
Please note Dr. Cleckley and Professor Hare are just the tip of the spear in our battle against social predators. Throughout the life of this blog, I’ll recommend many different mental health professionals’ (and laypersons’) advice for identifying, avoiding, and recovering from social predators’ impacts on your life.
With empathy born from my own horrendous experience with a (superior) psychopath, I hope to console and encourage others crushed by bad actors. So, email me if you wish, and I’ll provide a sounding board for your plight, although I may recommend someone better qualified than myself to help.
This site strives for real-time benefits by developing a cyber community of experts (via feedback from the readers) on what works against social predators’ attacks. I recommend websites, people, and organizations with impeccable credentials and intentions. Still, I’d like to get individual confirmations and testimonies from you, the reader, on how these help sources actually work. And more, I invite all of you to suggest additional resources and personal strategies. You can use the contact form below, or email me at RobertRedAct@protonmail.com.
Dr. Cleckley’s Psychopath Descriptors:
Superficial charm and good “intelligence”
Absence of delusions and other signs of irrational thinking
Absence of “nervousness” or psychoneurotic manifestations
Unreliability
Untruthfulness and insincerity
Lack of remorse and shame
Inadequately motivated antisocial behavior
Poor judgment and failure to learn by experience
Pathologic egocentricity and incapacity for love
General poverty in major affective reactions
Specific loss of insight
Unresponsiveness in general interpersonal relations
Fantastic and uninviting behavior with drink and sometimes without
Suicide rarely carried out
Sex life impersonal, trivial, and poorly integrated
Failure to follow any life plan
Social Predators can throw anyone’s life into a tailspin, so here are some helpful links for getting back on course:
988 Calling, texting, or chatting 988 will put you in touch with the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline (formerly the National Suicide and Prevention Lifeline 1-800-273-TALK (8255); calls to the old 1-800 number will be routed to the new 988 number). An automated answering service will direct your call, text, or chat to a real person; “…the suicide and crisis lifeline is a national network of local crisis centers that provides free and confidential emotional support to people in suicidal crisis or emotional distress 24 hours a day, seven days a week.” The Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is not limited to social predators’ effects but certainly includes them. If you are driven to your wits’ end by any type of despair, you don’t have to go it alone; call, text, or google the number 988.
The Aftermath: Surviving Psychopathy offers a treasure of information on psychopathy but may be academically overweighted for those seeking immediate guidance. Let me know if any of you have tips for utilizing this site, especially the forums, and I’ll pass them on in a future post. But here’s one of the Aftermath‘s hidden gems: go to the “Resources” tab on this site, and then click on “Useful Links,” and then under “General Links,” see “The Psychopath – The Mask of Sanity,” where you can read the fifth edition, 1988 reprint of Dr. Hervey Cleckley’s Mask of Sanity, immediately and free of charge.
Out of the Fog: “Helping family members & loved-ones of people who suffer from personality disorders” Be sure to follow the internal and external links on this site. The creators combine experience, compassion, and thoroughness.
U.S. Dept. of Veterans Affairs – Mental Health
Your Life Your Voice: 24 hour teen crisis hotline
I’m Alive! Free and Confidential Online Crisis Chat
MOSAIC Method: Domestic-violence threat assessment; no fee, no strings. Go to the site and follow the prompts. You will input essential information (highly safeguarded), and the computer-generated program (MOSAIC) will effectively predict whether your domestic situation might escalate into great harm or even death. Your personalized threat assessment, based on thousands of real-life scenarios and how they worked out, could be an eye-opener that will prompt you to lifesaving action. To alert a friend or loved one, input their domestic history and share your findings with them, but always follow the prompts to keep this process secret from the aggressor.
National Center for Victims of Crime “The mission of the National Center for Victims of Crime is to forge a national commitment to help victims of crime rebuild their lives. We are dedicated to serving individuals, families, and communities harmed by crime.”
Al-Anon Family Groups – for people impacted by an another person’s alcoholism. “Al-Anon and Alateen are two programs that are part of a worldwide fellowship which offers support to families of alcoholics. Al-Anon is designed to help spouses, parents, siblings, and other family members, while Alateen is geared specifically towards younger people living with an alcoholic.”
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) “SAMHSA’s National Helpline is a confidential, free, 24-hour-a-day, 365-day-a-year, information service, in English and Spanish, for individuals and family members facing mental and/or substance use disorders. This service provides referrals to local treatment facilities, support groups, and community-based organizations.”
Use this form to submit additional help resources or personal strategies for overcoming social predators: ↓
While protecting your anonymity, I hope to help others by publishing how these websites helped you. For example, how they helped you recognize a con artist or regain your confidence after being duped. Of course, all of this assumes the existence of villains, emotional mutations, and superfreaks popping out from behind bushes at unknowable intervals – further begging the question of how we can live happy lives when we’re paranoid that everyone we meet might be a lying, conniving predator. For a continuing discussion on identifying, dealing with, and recovering from social predators, please see the PsychopathSavvy.com blog posts menu at the top and bottom of this page. To automatically receive new posts, select and click the email notification box underneath ‘Leave a Reply‘ below.
You can unsubscribe anytime, and all I’m promoting besides hope and encouragement is a book I wrote,
Memoir of a Repentant Psychopath.
To see what it’s about, you can read the first 50 pages on Amazon’s “Read sample” feature at no charge. If you’re not familiar with Amazon’s book preview option, you might want to check it out. It provides a thorough look before buying, and there’s something for everybody.
Until next week: Stay safe, and please, don’t give up if you’re under fire from a social predator; hold the line! There are many types of help available.
Robert Red Act
Use this form to submit comments for open discussion (subject to review before publication): ↓