Wouldn’t you like to be able to recognize scam artists before you got cheated out of your life savings? Wouldn’t you want to identify Losers before you become romantically involved with them? They say that one learns more from experience than from books, but that’s not necessarily the case. Bad experiences can cause so much financial and emotional devastation that recovering from them becomes very difficult: for some, even impossible. How many times have you run across women who date the same kind of bad men, without learning anything from their experiences except heartache? Eventually, many women settle for bad men, believing that all men are like that or that they somehow deserve the mistreatment. Learning to recognize dangerous individuals can spare us and our loved ones years of hardship. In fact, personal experience and psychological information can work together. Books that identify the characteristics of dangerous individuals can help us recognize red flags and escape real-life predatory relationships early on, with far less damage to our wallets and our lives.
One of the most helpful books in this genre is Dr. Sandra L. Brown‘s newest edition of Women Who Love Psychopaths: Insde the Relationship of Inevitable Harm with Psychopaths, Sociopaths and Narcissists (Mask Publishing, 2009). This is a long title for a book that gets straight point in explaining clearly, for a general audience, the characteristics of dangerous individuals. Dr. Brown explains that dangerous men (and women) suffer from unfixable personality disorders: psychopathy and narcissism in particular. Such individuals have constitutive emotional deficiencies. They can’t form meaningful bonds with others. Although they don’t bond emotionally, they do attach to others. Just as parasites latch on to healthy bodies, so psychopaths latch on to decent human beings to suck the life out of them. If they would be easy to detect, most of us would avoid these social parasites like the plague. Unfortunately, however, psychopaths are social chameleons who can disguise their evil natures. They come across as exceptionally charming, friendly, humorous, kind, entertaining and very romantic. Initially, they appear to be perfect romantic partners. Their glibness and charm, as well as their propensity for deception and disguise, often masks their malicious intent. Psychopaths have no conscience, are impulsive and reward-driven and get bored easily. For such individuals, cheating, lying and hurting others is a pleasurable game: a form of entertainment.
We often read about psychopaths in the news. Their lack of conscience enables them to commit horrible crimes, including rape, pedophilia and murder. Most psychopaths, however, aren’t hardened criminals. They’re swindlers and love frauds, temporarily attaching to decent human beings to milk them of money, shelter and affection: sometimes, to destroy them. For all practical purposes, how psychopaths became disordered isn’t as important to their victims as the fact that they can’t significantly improve their behavior. Whether they’re evil by nature, nurture, or a combination of both, they will still cheat on you, lie to you, use you, and perhaps even steal your money along with your heart. When involved with a psychopath, Dr. Brown emphasizes, there’s nothing you can do to change him or his disorder. The one thing you can–and should do–is save yourself.
Because psychopaths cause so much harm to society, there are numerous clinical studies of their personality disorder. In addition, the true crime shelves of bookstores are packed with salacious accounts of their misdeeds. But there are practically no comparable studies of their tens of millions of victims. Just do the math. Psychologists estimate that between 1 and 4 percent of the population is psychopathic. This adds up to several million psychopaths in this country alone. Because psychopaths are highly promiscuous and form dozens of relationships, a single psychopath can damage the lives of dozens of women. That’s several million persons hurt, sometimes beyond repair, by the malicious actions of these disordered individuals. In the literature on psychopathy, the victims are often the forgotten part of the equation: even though they outnumber by far the psychopaths themselves. Women Who Love Psychopaths is the most comprehensive study I know of about the female victims, from their own perspective. This book reveals the whole picture: the psychopaths and their hosts.
Dr. Brown focuses her clinical study on a few dozen women who depict in great detail their horrific experiences with psychopaths. But it’s important to note that these women could be any of us. They weren’t particularly weak, or gullible, or uneducated individuals. On the contrary: this book reveals that the women who fall in love with psychopaths tend to be trusting, accomplished, devoted persons with good characters and high emotional investment in their romantic relationships. Psychopaths prefer to test their strength against strong and moral women, not against those they consider weak or already corrupt. These women became involved with psychopaths because they were initially fooled by their “mask of sanity”: the good image that any psychopath projects to those whom he wants to seduce and use. They fell prey to the ruse not because they were especially naive, but because very little prepares us in life for the kind of person who systematically deceives, uses, exploits and harms others, just for the fun of it and with malice. Statistically, psychopaths are relatively common. But psychologically they’re highly abnormal. We will not be able to identify them or comprehend their malicious motives if our frame of reference is relatively normal human beings. To identify psychopaths and protect ourselves against them, we need to become acquainted with the basics of abnormal psychology.
Moreover, it’s not easy to see through a psychopath’s mask of sanity before getting burned. This is especially true when the psychopaths themselves are educated, attractive and employed in well-respected professions–as teachers, professors, lawyers, doctors, counselors, therapists or businessmen–which is often the case. Without a basic understanding of personality disorders and awareness of our own vulnerabilities to dangerous individuals, most of us couldn’t spot or defend ourselves against these wolves in sheep’s clothing. This is exactly the invaluable information that Dr. Brown’s book offers us.
Women Who Love Psychopaths focuses on psychopathy as a relationship between psychopaths and their chosen targets. Looking at psychopaths in isolation is not enough. It doesn’t reveal how they latch on to normal individuals; how they fool us. Without finding numerous willing partners–to dupe, mistreat and use–a psychopath ceases to function. To grasp the danger posed by psychopathic individuals, we therefore need to understand both sides of the coin: the personality traits of the psychopaths themselves as well as our own potential vulnerabilities to psychopathic seduction. Women Who Love Psychopaths reveals this more complete picture. Think about how many self-defense classes are taught in this country. Sadly, there’s no equivalent for psychological defense. This must-read book is about emotional self-defense, which should be our first line of protection against social predators.
Claudia Moscovici, author of the upcoming book Dangerous Liaisons: How to Avoid and Escape from Psychopathic Seduction ( )