I haven’t met Martha Stout, but I feel I’ve been in therapy with her since reading her book, The Sociopath Next Door. That was nearly twenty years ago, and I needed a lot of treatment, but if you’re troubled by a social predator, you can benefit from her work immediately.
Psychology Today reports:
“Martha Stout, Ph.D., served on the faculty in psychology in the department of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School for more than 25 years and was a clinical associate at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. She practiced as a clinical psychologist specializing in recovery from psychological trauma and PTSD. Stout has taught psychology at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research in New York, the Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology, and Wellesley College. She is the author of The Sociopath Next Door, The Paranoia Switch, The Myth of Sanity, and Outsmarting the Sociopath Next Door.”
In my past life, I was enough of a thug to be put off by Stout’s Ivy League background and hints of her upper-crusty Bostonian practice. And the fact is, until a person’s had their life screwed over by one of the conscienceless, they can’t truly relate to Stout’s The Sociopath Next Door. When it was published, one renowned critic said:
“Despite the alarmist appeals of Martha Stout, a practicing psychologist and an instructor in the psychiatry department at Harvard Medical School, readers are unlikely to set down The Sociopath Next Door with a new awareness of a previously unrealized threat. Instead, they’re apt to feel a new awareness of the ludicrous nature of pop psychology.”
I might have never given a hoot about the hotshot critic or Stout, except that a superior psychopath handed me my head. There’s nothing quite like it for getting over one’s self. You can read the fictionalized version in my Memoir of a Repentant Psychopath, available on Amazon. But for right now, if you’re like me and thousands of others, you’ll know precisely what Ph.D. Stout is talking about in The Sociopath Next Door. And exclaim, “Yes!” throughout.
When social predators inflict their logic-defying nastiness upon others, it can go unbelieved. Our minds jump to incredulity; “Oh, hell no…” we don’t even say to ourselves; the assumption is just there. But when it happens to you, the stealing, lying, manipulation, betrayal, and outright assaults can damage your mind more than your body. Patching up and redefining your perception of reality may be the hardest thing you will ever do.
Martha Stout believes; she’s seen the damage wrought by predators in her trauma patients and describes the attackers perfectly. Given her depth of feeling, I suspect she’s experienced the phenomenon firsthand.
Regardless of how she came to her insight, she’s got it. And the wonderful thing, in my opinion, is that she extends her umbrella of comfort and understanding to countless others through her brilliantly written books. And it’s not just her commiseration, although that’s priceless; the accomplished therapist, teacher, author, and student of life, Stout also offers tangible steps for identifying and dealing with predators.
Here are some links to interviews and excerpts from Stout to help you decide if she’s got something for you:
Book Browse: An Interview With Martha Stout, touches upon many principles from The Sociopath Next Door, including ‘Thirteen Rules for Dealing with Sociopaths in Everyday Life.’
That interview is full of great information, but for a closer look at Stout’s compelling style, see the Psychology Today article, Why It’s So Hard for Most People to Recognize Sociopaths. It’s a nearly verbatim excerpt from Stout’s book, Outsmarting the Sociopath Next Door, published in 2020. The Sociopath Next Door was published fifteen years earlier, in 2005. Although both books may be vital to understanding conscienceless people and how to survive them, I suggest reading The Sociopath Next Door first. For a preview of either book, click Amazon and see their ‘read sample’ feature.
But since none of these samples reflects Martha Stout’s compassion as effectively as the entirety of her writings, here’s a helper excerpt from yet another of her books, The Myth of Sanity:
“The survivors I see in my practice have known undistilled fear, have seen how nakedly terrifying life can be, and in many cases have seen how starkly ugly their fellow human beings can be. Listening to their stories, no one at all could be surprised that they consider the possibility of not going on. In a struggle with the power of their past experiences, even the biological imperative to survive is puny.
No. Their choosing to die would not be surprising. What is so extraordinary about these people is that they choose to live—not just to not die, not just to survive, but to live.”
When I first read that passage, I was unsure whether I wanted to go on living, an uncertainty proven by years of drugging and drinking. But Stout, a master psychologist, plants a seed of hope. She praises her patients by implying that their refusal to give up is the substance of human worth. I clung to the possibility that even my shoddy life was worth continuing—if for nothing else than to flick a middle finger at fate. Desperate times, but I held on.
I urge you to hang on if you’ve been decimated by one of the remorseless. Stout’s book, The Sociopath Next Door, can help you make sense of what’s happened, convince you that you’re not alone or crazy, and help you begin recovering from your unfortunate experience.
And don’t forget about the other help sources on the PsychopathSavvy.com homepage and posts. Drop me a line at RobertRedAct@protonmail.com to let me know how they’re working out.
Until next week, if you’ve got ideas for identifying and avoiding social predators or recovering from their attacks, send them along; be a star!
Robert Red Act