A friend of mine (or so I thought a friend) was definitely one. The dude wreaked havoc in my life and is in prison currently I believe. Any time I got involved with him my life ended up smoldering.
How about you guys? I feel like people here are more real and honest than on Reddit, I appreciate you all and much love.
My father, my step-father, most boomers, and every manager I've met.
I think my ex may have been one or something like it, or extremely narcissistic. To put it short he literally always failed to consider how his actions affect others, and always acted incredibly surprised when then they end up being hurt by him and failed to take responsibility for anything. Top it with having grandiose plans that would always fall apart in an obvious way, and very peacocky behaviour, unusual clothing style and wanting to fuck everything that moves with very little consideration if it's a good idea or not.
Took me more than a year to recover from the breakup and him, and I'm still having some bad moments now, two years later.
Sounds like a sociopath or narcissist yeah. Though I’m leaning more towards sociopath because your ex sounds a little bit more hardcore amoral than most narcissists I’ve read about.
Much love Miss, sorry about him putting you through the trauma. Truly take it easy on yourself
Thanks. I'm over him, but it sucked for a while. And still to this day I'm always baffled when I remember his :surprised-pika: face whenever something absolutely obvious would backfire or he gets called out.
Yeah, that’s a psychopath, lying as quickly and as often as he did.
Glad you got away, they don’t always turn out to be immediately dangerous but they often are down the line.
Much love to you
my ex was the same. more narcicistic than legit socio/path.
I too am still dealing with some deep shit years ago... def talk to someone if you can. that shit can be so hard to juggle yourself.
oh my god that first paragraph describes my Ex to a T.
everything was always about him. He literally saved a note he got from a friendly housekeeper he got years beforehand because it was positive affirmation. He kept a picture of himself in his room...
sure he had an ass that wouldn't quit, but wow not healthy.
I mean sociopathy isn’t actually a thing so I wouldn’t worry about it.
People having a lack of empathy is a very real thing. Semantics is fine, i should have used anti-social personality disorder to be absolutely correct. There are people who just lack the capacity to care at all about other people and will even murder if someone gets in the way of whatever plans they have . People are objects to be used and manipulated by people with anti-social personality disorder. Depending upon the degree or type I guess. When people refer to someone who is cold without conscience or remorse and say psychopath, yes they just mean anti-social personality disorder.
My roommate in uni. On day one living together, I was the one bringing weed to the party, be he told everyone "guys don't forget that I smoked you up". He had dreams of being a drug lord, and he'd do all these small deals in the room (for which I couldn't care less). But he'd always do deals stupid late, like at 2am on weeknights. He'd come in, turn all the lights on 100%, careless to the fact that I had classes at 8am.
He used to always push my boundaries, like smoking cigs in the room or eating my food. He put his fucking speakers around the middle of the room, and flip out of I bumped into them slightly. He stole the longterm gf of a mutual friend.
Of course his family was rich as fuck. He drove a Benz. His dad was on the Western side of a shit government that's been forced out, so he came to the this country a multimillionaire (trying not to dox myself). It was satisfying when this guy failed out of uni twice, but honestly it didn't set him back much.
He got into the Native American spiritual anesthetics, became something of a tech bro, and spun awful house music as a hobby. Thankfully I was never close to the guy, so it wasn't s traumatic as a lover or a friend. He was just a rich tool. I should thank him for moving me on the path of communism.
my father (parents were divorced when i was small) was certainly NPD, which was difficult as a kid and early teen, but it taught me to recognize sinister traits and the need to protect myself from people who lack compunction.
but a no-joke psychopath? just one. a coworker over a decade ago. just a real piece of work, constant lying, using/trying to use sex as a weapon, just wanted to watch everything burn. took me about a week after they showed up on the scene to see/feel something was way off. that unsettling urge to run that climbs up your spine.
i tried to discretely warn others, people i regarded as friends, but i was regarded as too sensitive and my warnings were dismissed. that hurt, but i try to remind myself that a lot of people can't recognize them. the precarity of capitalism saved me and i had to suddenly relocate hours away to find employment, which had the benefit of me scrambling too hard to dwell on what all had transpired. i ended up getting a shittier paying job but working with a lot of great people, so a remarkably better situation. it was refreshing to work somewhere i didn't have a 4 lb ball of lead in my gut.
anyway, like 3-4 months after i split from the situation, i get a call from a work friend at the old place. very out of the blue. they wanted to apologize and tell me i was right, that X had, in fact, been a terrible person who had torched the place socially and professionally and had been lying their ass off about all things big and small, manipulating others to cover for them.
now everyone was jumping ship and the project we had all been working for was dead in the water. but more than that, people were just plain shaken up. like, moving back home to "figure things out" or asking for old mentors to "please help me get out of here, i can't be here".
my way of dealing with that kind of thing now that i'm older hasn't changed a lot in the broad strokes. i stay away from them, socially and professionally, to the best of my ability. i acknowledge and listen to my fear. if circumstances are against me, i stay as uninteresting as possible around them to not draw their attention, while quietly trying to change the circumstances to increase the space between us. i do not seek to become embroiled in a conspiracy to isolate them, but if asked by someone i trust i may relay concerns in professional language, especially if it is to help protect one of their victims.
i've always been somewhat of a private person in larger groups. people like this, though a tiny minority of the population, are probably why.
Yeah I’ve only had one true sociopath in my life. They’re rarer than narcissists, most people will only meet one or two true psychopaths in their lives. If you’re lucky they won’t become a significant part of your life as your ‘bullshit meter’ will go off and warn you there’s something not quite right about this person.
Not that I know of, but I used to be friends with a narcissist. He always loved talking about his IQ and was a big fan of natural selection and Elon Musk. He was a step above your typical tech-bro.
I know he had some troubles at home, one parent had serious health issues and they got divorced. He also had an older sister who was supposedly some kind of genius and a brother that was a forbidden subject.
Anyway now he works for some EvilTechCorp and he employs people. Probably the most predictable outcome
your frembly remembly that diagnoses that categorize someone as inherently, irreversibly, even genetically evil, unfeeling, or inhuman, are Pure Ideology
? I’m not ever going to like advocate for purging anybody with some type of mental disorder, however you certainly need to be very careful about letting people with these particular personality disorders into your life. They can and have wreaked tremendous havoc on people’s lives, Mr Madoff for example.
Sociopaths and psychopaths are dangerous. I don’t know what else to say to this?
I don’t know about ‘evil’, but I certainly wouldn’t want someone with one of these personality disorders in my social or family circle.
There’s a reason at one point in time most of the shiftiest companies were actively looking for psychopaths to recruit because they supposedly could always make the hard and ruthless decisions for business
Huh. I relate to your former friend. I genuinely care about people, but in the moment a lot of basic things just don't register. I think I might be on the spectrum, maybe your friend was in the same boat.
These aren't all entirely sociopaths, but I thought it would be interesting to be thorough. Some of this may be triggering.
The first was a group of polyamorous pedophiliac transgender women. (I'm not joking: don't ban me, please!) This was a solely online "relationship", and in fairness, only one 24y/o (I was 13-14) was the main one I interacted with. (Although we get in to the question of who is worse: the one who commits wrongs or those who abides them?) She was physically repulsive, though generally nice to me; I don't recall any moments of being pressured, and yes, I was often told I was mature for my age. I actually was, in some ways, so this obviously worked well on me. The most prominent trait I remember of her is that she, literally, would take a lighter to her pubes to burn them.
This was early enough in my development that I can't trace any particular habit back to this. The other transgender women were overage (I believe one was 17, perhaps), but I never interacted sexually with them; they were very much the annoying moe-types, as all of us were. ^^ glomps u :3-types. The 24y/o I did interact sexually with, and sent nudes back & forth with. Something else that sticks with me of this time, however, is that the pedophile always assured me I was beautiful, whereas another female friend at the time told me that I should stop worrying about my looks, because it was statistically unlikely for me, or anyone, to look like a model anyway.
Which I will say, as a writer, makes for something interesting -- the 'obviously' traumatic thing doesn't appear traumatic, whereas a backhandedly comforting comment sticks with me worse years after. (As an aside on pedophiles, I actually love Woody Allen's Manhattan: if you look up the ending scene, it's perfectly in-line with how pedophiles act. It's also a great film, to boot; Ike's bad writing & self-loathing narcissism make much more sense by knowing you should hate the main character.)
But, eventually that relationship rode its inertia to its end, as many things in life do. At 16, I was attending a local LGBT+ youth group when I developed a crush on two trans men there; the latter of whom was homeless before he moved in with the other, who was underage. (Subsequently, he lived with his mom.) The first one, "J", we'll say, threatened to once beat the shit out of me. I don't remember why, but it was over Facebook, so, really.
The second one was definitely sociopathic, as we later found out that he was wanted in another state for filming himself torturing animals & shit. He hung salamanders from his ears like earrings, we once watched Harry Potter together (again, I was 16) while cuddling, and he had some angry outburst at me & locked himself in the bathroom because he was, literally, so I remember it, on his period. I don't say that to be sexist, but I simply don't remember any other reason for it.
Other than that, I only found out about it weeks after I stopped seeing him, and it mostly just made me uncomfortable whenever he showed up to LGBT+ youth group meetings until the organizers banned him. I had a dream recently where he stabbed me, though I ironically never saw him with a weapon.
I've also dated three women with borderline personality disorder, which a neurologist friend tells me may be rolled in to its own form of sociopathy in the next DSM; but he is always quite unreliable.
The first was a transgender woman who accused me of rape and ruined my online reputation/friendships, most of whom immediately believed it: we had never met in person, and I was nothing but cordial in online sexual aspects. (I asked for consent and if she was comfortable very often.) To this day, I'm quite sensitive to uncorroborated rape accusations, even as most unfortunately turn out true.
Another woman, when I went to visit her in another state far from home, abandoned me on a street corner for 2 hours and later claimed I was sexually abusive to her because I would sometimes turn her head towards me to kiss her. I don't remember doing that, but I'm not a forceful person by nature, so obviously simply asking me not to do that would have sufficed. Perhaps some of it was a fear of abandonment on my part, so I reassured myself by kissing her? I'm not sure. You know, memory is a series of archipelagos connected by miles of thin, dark-brown tether. Don't ask why dark-brown comes to mind, it simply does.
She's still popular in her online sphere, I believe, and also did not pay for my return ticket when she asked me to leave the night I found out she had posted this accusation online. That, I think, informs a lot of my skepticism towards LGBT+ communities and why I don't hold any special regards towards certain identities; lesbians are often romanticized as soft & feminine lovers, yet they have similar domestic abuse rates to men.
There was then a 3rd woman, again with BPD; I was skeptical, but she promised me she was seeing a therapist for it and that it was treated. Well, she would continually cancel dates on me, and eventually accused me of pressuring her -- although I will say it was pretty funny when she haughtily messages me "I can't even begin to explain how fucking manipulative you are. (...) So, I do not want to see you in the near future, and perhaps after you've apologized, I'll think over allowing you back in my life." and I, accustomed prick that I am, simply immediately roll my eyes & block her.
But, to be fair, I do think I acted passive-aggressively after she cancelled a date an hour beforehand, and I shouldn't have done that. I still have some anger issues, but they are always internal; I know not to say things I'll regret after. I should note, also, that before anyone accuses me of "if you smell shit everywhere, check your shoe" -- I've been with several other women before and many of them say I'm one of the nicest persons they've been with. (Including the one who accused me of rape!)
My wife certainly agrees. (And for a final point of interest: she despises all the above people far worse than I do, to where she will still talk unprompted about how much she hates that "strawhaired cunt who left you on a street corner". I think it's because, aside from the first one, I chose all of the above people to be in my life, whereas she vicariously just ended up with them: it's a roll with somewhat loaded chances, and in her case it was weighted with lead.)
Not what I would call my interaction with the particular person I knew. You do you though
I met one in the military, he talked about how he and his dad killed baby rabbits as some sort of fucked up manhood ritual when he was a kid, the psycho sounded like he was proud of it or some shit
