have you ever come into contact with a psychopath?

[ollieplimsoles]

Me and dh love discussing psychology and people's traits/ thinking.

I have a strong suspicion that my father is a high functioning psychopath. He's incapable of expressing any emotion other than anger. He is a pathological liar, a cheat, aggressive and manipulative. He's also very grandiose and resourceful, he seems to have no fear and often leaps into things other people wouldn't dare do.

One of dh's uncles also possesses many of the traits.

Aibu to ask- do you suspect anyone?

I'm with pounding in my 20's I would have score 90+, now I'm 51 because I've learnt to care about people and that we can't all be perfect all the time.

I am sure my ex is a psychopath. He is incredibly charming, everyone loves him when they meet him. He is calm and collected, but cold and manipulative. He is very arrogant and thinks he can do anything better than anyone and he ALWAYS knows best.
He once leant over to me in a crowded room, with a smile on his face, and whispered in my ear that he wanted to smash my face in.
Unfortunately we have a daughter together who is totally a Daddys girl, he is Disney Dad who has the answer to everything and can give her anything she wants and I am just a stupid pathetic nag.

Someone who I work with is, I had no idea that's what it was until I read the definition and he ticks every box.

He started having an affair with a very senior member of staff, was abusive to her in front of all the staff at the summer party, constantly still puts her down all the time (despite her being more senior). He is demanding but won't give you any time; life and soul of the party until something flicks and he stops; flouts all rules (ie sets up meetings and then just doesn't turn up); manipulates and twists your words then tells everyone so you can't possibly defend yourself because the story is so far gone.... He's an utter cunt, in short

No rtft but saw your OP ollie

bloody hell you are surrounded by complete batcrap crazies!! (DF, MIL and uncle!!)

Anyone else??? I trust you're keeping your DD clear of the lot?!
if so, any tips?!

Ollie

I would love a chance to interview someone who scored highly. Do they still use the 40 point scale based on 20 traits?

Yes, score between 0 and 2 for each trait. 30 points is the criteria to be a psychopath here (interestingly the US only requires 25 points on the same criteria).

The inventor of the scale, Hare, is quite a money maker and requires pretty significant fees to use his scale and diagnose.

Yes, my grandfather, whose awful legacy has destroyed lives generations on. Terrible man. My poor mother, who couldn't mother me. They take so much for so many.

Convinced my toxic sister is Something though I'm not sure what. Have NC'd. She has bullied me relentlessly all our lives and seems to become more desperate and obvious about it with each passing year, so much so that I can see not just why she's doing it but the thinking behind it too. Of course she thinks I'm oblivious.

She has a "tone" she adopts when being fake and I now know it for falsehood when I hear it.

She doesn't stay long in either the one town or the one job. I think moving whenever people have started to see the cracks - LOTS of friends but with no depth to the friendship, or friendship that vanish all of a sudden.

Has decided to train in therapies recently I can't think of anyone less suited frankly.

Potentially she's a NPD

Must also add that her marriage failed after a very short time quite amazingly, and she has painted herself the victim and everyone has taken her part. Only I really know/see the truth here, that she showed him her true colours and he knew better than to have children with her.

Cannot sustain a relationship, dismisses people for shallow reasons.

She fits everything except easily bored although there have been moments where she has either started on me or negotiated a situation in which I appear in a bad light simply for sport. Which would indicate picked on me for entertainment because bored. And also a false superiority ie my Aunt doesn't like my job, (cant explain w/o outing) so my sister started a seemingly innocent conversation knowing that intense criticism of my job was an inevitable consequence but also thinks she's so clever that no-one including me would see that she set that up.

The scariest was a really good friend of mine, like best friend, who later turned out to be a sex offender. I'd never have believed it until it happened. I might have believed him innocent too if I hadn't been the victim. Dead now, thankfully.

Aren't something like 1 in 25 people psychopaths? I'd say we've all encountered at least one.

Yes STBXH said to me "I'm only keeping house key as back up, I'm not a psycopath". I knew that he had already used it twice to enter house since abruptly leaving for OW and counsellor confirmed he appeared to have no conscience based on his actions towards me.

My DM is a sociopath :-( she has lied and manipulated to isolate me from the rest of the family. Truly horrible. My worst fear is becoming like her with my DD. Luckily i seem to score very low for thr traits!

Several.

One ex. Was an actor so could play the part, whatever the part was. Charismatic, charming (when it suited), capricious, egotistical. Odd glimpses of the underlying sense of humour kept me intrigued but in the end - a dissembling fruitcake. His behaviour was so suspcious I ended up getting on his computer when he was out and ran a search for a certain file extension, as I knew that trawled up all the AOL user names someone had ever had. There must have been hundreds, if not a thousand. Also logs of cyber sex with numerous 'women' and logs of him trying to pick up 15 year old girls (trying to get them to meet him 'for a coffee' after their 16th birthdays - more than one of those conversations as he seemed to be logging a chat room for teens). I was 6 years older than him as had been a previous girlfriend, and had no clue he was even attracted to little girls.

I made a screenshot of the most incriminating conversation I could find, and left it on his machine, and walked out. He later denied it was him (no-one else ever used his machine so there was no way it could have been anyone else). He was later arrested for harassment, but the police said they had too much evidence to go through and so didn't go looking further afield for things like chat logs (This was over ten years ago - I think they would be very interested in that, now).

He did an Alpha course after I left him then got the members of his 'church' to act as character witnesses when he was done for harassment. Some of them were surprisingly well educated people. (But then so was I). They never saw through him even when they heard it all in court.

He was mad as a box of frogs yet (successfully) sued a Sunday tabloid paper for using a headline about him that referred to him as a nutjob.

I suspect he dumped the naive christians the second he got away with it in court (found guilty but a suspended sentence, after the parade of character witnesses). They too had served their function.

I had two kids with him before I realised who and what he was. He has never paid a penny for them. He is currently holidaying in a very fancy looking part of Italy. The kids have never been on a proper holiday. He knows this. He doesn't care. Although he did spend years pursuing me through every court in the land trying to get to see his kids. Luckily the Family Courts saw right through him and he had no contact.

Another - my stepmother. Really deeply mentally ill and probably in more ways than one. (Also a keen churchgoer, but am sure that's a coincidence).

She'd say the most horrendous things to me as a child - and my mother wasn't long dead when my father remarried. But was always careful to do it when dad was out and then denied everything. Before they even married, she got one daughter to take me aside and tell me she had told the daughter not to speak to me as I was a 'bad influence'. My dad refused to believe me and when I got upset and ran off, she said that was proof I was nuts (I was just a grieving, cared little girl).

She systemcatically neglected/starved me. Aged 19, I weighed 6 stone. (And am average height).

As a former teacher, will echo the poster upthread who said - every Head they have ever worked with.

Ex flatmate, if women every start disappearing in the city where we used to live I'd be looking at him. Actually if I ever disappear I'd suggest looking at him, fairly sure he stole my car after I 'stole' one of his friends away from him.

He used to tell stories about putting his cats in the microwave and freezer as a kid. Lots of bragging about various forms of revenge he had committed on those who wronged him (often aimed at their car). He considers himself to be a genius, and capable of winning any argument. Unfortunately he is not, and his go to form of argument is repeating the same point over and over getting louder as he goes.

He hated me, and would throw my belongings out the window, look through my (incredibly boring) room, and once found my diary and tried to read it to the other flatmates, and was subsequently filled with rage when he couldn't make any sense of my tiny and messy handwriting that I use in my diary (grew up with a brother, no one but me can read that book). Yes it was my fault that he couldn't read my diary.

And don't get me started on the bragging about how wealthy his family was. No sane 20 year old is that proud of their parents new $1200 chairs. I knew his fathers income, the value of their house and cars, how influential his fathers job was, it was so tedious.

My Dad has those traits. Definitely very narcissist, no remorse, completely self-centred with a saviour complex but all for his admiration. His Mum was the same and too stupid to hide it completely which he isn't.

My friend's husband is a very successful salesman. He's charming, the life and soul of any party and incredibly generous. Everyone thought he was amazing.

As soon as she had their child he totally lost interest in her and has behaved in a totally chilling way. I saw him recently and it was like meeting a stranger, he is ice cold. He has a girlfriend who he takes on first class international flights while hiding money from his wife.

It's baffling until you read about psychopaths and sociopaths and he ticks most boxes

yes a woman I used to work with.

She was charm personified until she decided against you- often randomly. People often thought she was amazing until she turned.
She was very calculating and managed to inch her way upwards in workplace until I think she encountered someone with similar tendencies.

She has made me very wary of people who have similar traits.

Yep, an acquaintance of mine. Could be completely charming whilst in control of a situation but when he wasn't you could see the little cracks starting to form.

He did actually go on to kill someone, poor girl.

I've encountered a handful over the years. A family member of mine has a lot of the traits - this is someone who is very popular, very charming, very charismatic, very successful. They really present as incredibly down-to-earth, pleasant, easygoing and kind. But every now and then a 'tell' slips out. I get the impression that they fool most people to be honest, certainly within the family. Which is why I tend to keep my suspicions about them to myself.

I also think, in the same way that a certain percentage of people are psychopaths, that a certain percentage of people have this instinct for spotting them. The majority seem to fall for the charm - it can be perplexing to watch

Not all psychopaths aren't all bad though, are they? I watched a documentary a few years back - might have been the channel 4 one, I can't remember. But the presenter himself ended up testing positive for being a psychopath - but he was a respected, law abiding, non-horrible person. The conclusion they came to was that psychopathic traits are there from birth, but your upbringing can have a huge impact on whether you end up being a dangerous/horrible person or not. And Michael Mosely, the BBC health presenter is a psychopath - if you google it you can find out more. He found this out as part of one of his programmes investigating the brains of psychopaths. This description from the Channel 4 website sums it up quite well:

"Some of us may score higher on some psychopathic traits than on others. But unless you score high on all of them, you don't really have anything to worry about! Another misconception about psychopaths concerns diagnosis. A lot of people think that you're either a psychopath or you're not, that it's all very black and white. But there is evidence to suggest that it's not as clear-cut as this. In fact, psychopathy – like height and weight, for example – lies on a spectrum...

Within the framework of clinical psychology, a psychopath is someone with a distinct cluster of personality traits including ruthlessness, fearlessness, narcissism, charm, charisma, impulsivity, persuasiveness, manipulation and a lack of conscience and empathy. Sure, these traits may well come in handy if you aspire to be an axe-murderer! But they can also come in handy in the courtroom, on the trading floor, or in the operating theatre. It just depends on what else you've got going on in your personality, and the start you get in life."

At the sharp end you may well find your serial killers and axe murderers but, all of us have our place at some point along the continuum."

There are psychopaths, sociopaths and narcissists. They are technically slightly different things, but they all cause immeasurable harm. I've done a lot of reading and here's the thing: don't spend your energy trying to work out exactly which one they are. It's a waste of energy. Even if you got an answer, it wouldn't really help you. I tend to think of them as "One of those people. All you need to know is that the person will cause you immense harm, and you should take steps to get the hell away from them wherever possible.

My ex. He only had people in his life who served a purpose in some way. It was chilling. He was/is the most affable charming man alive and yet something is off key. Eye contact in some way - it's hardto define. He only EVER did what suited him, even if it meant massive disruption for everyone else. He would make calculated small sacrifices in order to win a bigger war.

Yep. My youngest daughter's dad (now diagnosed as having antisocial/dis social personality disorder). He put me through hell, over a number of years, I had to go to court and the judge said it was the worst domestic abuse he'd ever encountered (although it was EA, never physical). It was so extreme I had a book published about what he did to me.

LittleFluffyClouds

That sounds absolutely terrible! Are you able to say what the book is?

Queenbean - I'd better not as all names and locations had to be changed for legal reasons, and there's probably some quite identifying stuff on here about me if anyone did an advanced search. But I'll pm you and tell you what it's called :)