FWB

Friends w/Benefits



I hate this phrase. It's ugly in so many ways. It implies immediately that being a friend is not good enough, that only sex makes a relationship worth something, only relationships we get something from. Should read: get off on. That's sickening. Friends are supposed to be cared for and caring, not objectified and used.

The psychopath I reference tried to convince me to be a FWB. I laughed, I didn't think he could be serious. He was. And since he didn't get sex, he used me in other ways. Mainly to stroke his ego, if not his penis. And while I am grateful every day I was not physically involved with this psychopath, I still hurt from being used.

Being used rather than being appreciated, loved, values and or just respected is soul rape. He absolutely refused to acknowledge me. The most I got was a hello and a perfunctory "how are you?" After that he launched into his day, views, plans, fears, suspicions, and observations- "wow a huge truck went by." I was used to listen, because he could not stand to be alone ever.
I recall one day he called as he was walking down a crowded city street. He called to tell me he could see himself marrying any of these women, they all were interchangeable. The hubris of thinking anyone one of these women would marry him and the misogyny of lumping all women together as one. God sees us all as unique, the Devil sees us all as prey.

A friend is not a spouse, using a friend sexually makes one an enemy.

You say tomato and say tomahto: psychopaths, sociopaths and narcissists! Oh MY!

Hare claims that there are at least two million psychopaths in North America, and over 100,000 in New York City alone. How he arrived at such a figure is not really explained, but its simple citation is certainly alarming. Anyway... this is, in Hare's view, a significant problem. But what is a psychopath? In very basic terms, it is a person without a conscience. I had always been under the impression that a similar definition applied to a "sociopath". Apparently that is the case. The words are used virtually interchangeably by professionals and laypeople alike. The main difference is that, while a sociopath has arrived at his/her condition by exposure to environmental influences, a psychopath is defined by certain innate personality traits. To confuse the reader even further, Hare tosses in the DSM III-R* diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder. This affliction is defined by the presence of objective, socially deviant behaviors that can be clinically assessed. Although this is the technical term for a "psychopath", it discounts subjective determinations such as the evaluation of personality traits. Therefore it tends to be more of a catch-all label for criminals, rather than having the specific connotations that people generally associate with the "psychopath".
http://dgrim.blogspot.com/2007_03_01_archive.html


Kathy Krajco's comment are well-worth a read:
http://narc-attack.blogspot.com/2007/01/are-npd-and-psychopathy-same.html


I started out believing I was dealing with a narcissist, that's after I had an epiphany and acknowledged I was indeed dealing with something that was not normal, and not my doing. For the longest time I tried to mediate the relationship's problems, thought if only I.... There was never anything I could do right, if I was perfect he freaked out over NOTHING. Literally pulled outrage out of his hat, bizzarrest incident was actually over a benign comment about a hat.
And at this point I figured he was just pulling away and making any excuse to escape, never had I dealt with such immaturity and cruelty before during the disintegration of a friendship; but that's how I read it. So I backed off, and then he was angry and in full pursuit. Jealous and seething I had any friends.

It was not enough to desert me, he had to devalue me and then assure himself I was ever in the wings waiting if he chose to return. I was a mouse and he the cat. And I as came to realize the nature of his actions, I saw the pride inherent in his behavior. In turn the obvious relationship between the state of his soul- mired in mortal sin- and his personality. He was and is evil. Evil because he acts pridefully first and foremost. Pride is the root of all evil and comes as we know before all falls, big- as in Eve- and small -as in self-aggrandisement.

Realizing he was, and is, chronically full of himself and therefore pathologically prideful I concluded he was evil, and being evil in lay mans terms means one is a psychopath/sociopath/malignant narcissist. His total self-involvement has driven him to neglect

children, marriages,work, and commitments these are the major nonpunishable "crimes" he has committed. In terms of everyday cruelty, he is Pol Pot.



But most people brush off emotional abuse as one persons word against another or one person being too sensitive, when in reality it's often one person disregarding and annihilating the other's humanity. Most fail to realize abandoning ones children and spouse for no good/moral reason is like burning fields and poisoning the water of generations to come. Courts don't award co-workers, friends and lovers of malignant narcissists awards for emotional damages.

By this definition, malignant narcissists are most certainly psychopaths.

Gosh Darn't I am not good enough,and that's OK!

Stuart Smalley had it all wrong....

The Problem with Self-Help Books: Study shows the negative side to positive self-statements
In times of doubt and uncertainty, many Americans turn to self-help books in search of encouragement, guidance and self-affirmation. The positive self-statements suggested in these books, such as "I am a lovable person" or "I will succeed," are designed to lift a person's low self-esteem and push them into positive action. According to a recent study in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, however, these statements can actually have the opposite effect.
Psychologists Joanne V. Wood and John W. Lee from the University of Waterloo, and W.Q. Elaine Perunovic from the University of New Brunswick, found that individuals with low self-esteem actually felt worse about themselves after repeating positive self-statements.
The researchers asked participants with low self-esteem and high self-esteem to repeat the self-help book phrase "I am a lovable person." The psychologists then measured the participants' moods and their momentary feelings about themselves. As it turned out, the individuals with low self-esteem felt worse after repeating the positive self-statement compared to another low self-esteem group who did not repeat the self-statement. The individuals with high self-esteem felt better after repeating the positive self-statement--but only slightly.
In a follow-up study, the psychologists allowed the participants to list negative self-thoughts along with positive self-thoughts. They found that, paradoxically, low self-esteem participants' moods fared better when they were allowed to have negative thoughts than when they were asked to focus exclusively on affirmative thoughts.
The psychologists suggested that, like overly positive praise, unreasonably positive self-statements, such as "I accept myself completely," can provoke contradictory thoughts in individuals with low self-esteem. Such negative thoughts can overwhelm the positive thoughts. And, if people are instructed to focus exclusively on positive thoughts, they may find negative thoughts to be especially discouraging.

As the authors concluded, "Repeating positive self-statements may benefit certain people [such as individuals with high self-esteem] but backfire for the very people who need them the most."

Michael Jackson death from narcissism

The tragic end of Michael Jackson
By RABBI SHMULEY BOTEACH

In many ways his tragedy was to mistake attention for love. I will never forget what he said when we sat down to record 40 hours of conversations where he would finally reveal himself for a book I authored. He turned to me and said these haunting words:

"I am going to say something I have never said before and this is the truth. I have no reason to lie to you and God knows I am telling the truth. I think all my success and fame, and I have wanted it, I have wanted it because I wanted to be loved. That's all. That's the real truth. I wanted people to love me, truly love me, because I never really felt loved. I said I know I have an ability. Maybe if I sharpened my craft, maybe people will love me more. I just wanted to be loved because I think it is very important to be loved and to tell people that you love them and to look in their eyes and say it."

One cannot read these words without feeling a tremendous sadness for a soul that was so surrounded with hero-worship but remained so utterly alone. Because Michael substituted attention for love he got fans who loved what he did but he never had true compatriots who loved him for who he was. Perhaps this is why, when so many of his inner circle saw him destroying his life with prescription medication - something he used to treat phantom physical illnesses which were really afflictions of the soul - they allowed him to deteriorate and disintegrate rather than throwing the poison in the garbage.
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1245924935526&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

Please take my narcissistic abuse survey! Chance to win book!

Click here to take the survey now. The survey was created with eSurveysPro.com survey software.

If it walks like a psycho and talks like a psycho- it's a psycho...

A visiting general reported that "his gait became shuffling ... his movements slow as in a slow-motion film." (comment about Adolf Hitler)


Ability to literally imagine oneself in another's shoes may be tied to empathy


New research from Vanderbilt University indicates the way our brain handles how we move through space—including being able to imagine literally stepping into someone else's shoes—may be related to how and why we experience empathy toward others.

The research was recently published in the online scientific journal PLoS ONE. The full article is available at: http://tinyurl.com/lw6qmv.

Empathy involves, in part, the ability to simulate the internal states of others. The authors hypothesized that our ability to manipulate, rotate and simulate mental representations of the physical world, including our own bodies, would contribute significantly to our ability to empathize.

"Our language is full of spatial metaphors, particularly when we attempt to explain or understand how other people think or feel. We often talk about putting ourselves in others' shoes, seeing something from someone else's point of view, or figuratively looking over someone's shoulder," Sohee Park, report co-author and professor of psychology, said. "Although future work is needed to elucidate the nature of the relationship between empathy, spatial abilities and their potentially overlapping neural underpinnings, this work provides initial evidence that empathy might be, in part, spatially represented."

"We use spatial manipulations of mental representations all the time as we move through the physical world. As a result, we have readily available cognitive resources to deploy in our attempts to understand what we see. This may extend to our understanding of others' mental states," Katharine N. Thakkar, a psychology graduate student at Vanderbilt and the report's lead author, said. "Separate lines of neuroimaging research have noted involvement of the same brain area, the parietal cortex, during tasks involving visuo-spatial processes and empathy."
To test their hypothesis that empathy and spatial processes are linked, the researchers designed an experiment in which subjects had to imagine themselves in the position of another person and make a judgment about where this other person's arm was pointing. The task required the subject to mentally transform their body position to that of the other person.

"We expected that the efficiency with which people could imagine these transformations would be associated with empathy," Thakkar said. "Because we were interested in linking spatial ability with empathy, we also included a very simple task of spatial attention called the line bisection task. This test involves looking at a horizontal line and marking the midpoint. Although this task is very simple, it appears to be a powerful way to assess subtle biases in spatial attention."

The researchers compared performance on the test with how empathetic the subjects reported themselves to be. They found that higher self-reported empathy was associated with paying more attention to the right side of space. Previous research has found that the left side of the face is more emotionally expressive than the right side. Since the left side of the face would be on the right side of the observer, it is possible that attending more to the expressive side of people's faces would allow one to better understand and respond to their mental state. These findings could also point to a role of the left hemisphere in empathy.

The researchers also found that in the female subjects only, the more empathetic people rated themselves, the longer they took to imagine themselves in the position of the person on the screen. Previous work has shown that women generally report more empathy than men and perform worse on tests of visuo-spatial abilities.

"Although it is somewhat counterintuitive that taking more time to imagine another's physical perspective was associated with more reported empathy, people who were slower at the task might have been engaging more resources to imagine another's mental state, or may be using a slower and less automatic strategy on the task," Park said.

More research on psychopath's "walk"
http://books.google.com/books?q=psychopaths+gait&lr=&sa=N&start=10


____________________________________________________________
FYI
When in a manic state Lil Napoleon, as a I refer to the psychopath I knew, would leap and take giant strides. I called him on this once as he bounded across a busy intersection, my benign comment pissed him him off and he retorted "this is how I always walk." Huh?

From Jack the Ripper to Great White Sharks

17 June 2009 Wiley - Blackwell
Under embargo until 21 June 2009 23:01 GMT
What do great white sharks have in common with serial killers? Refined hunting skills, according to a paper published today in the Zoological Society of London’s Journal of Zoology.
A team of US-based researchers have found that sharks hunt in a highly focused fashion, just like serial criminals.
Using the same methods used in criminology, the authors demonstrate how geographic profiling, a mathematical technique usually used to hunt serial criminals, can be used to study the hunting patterns of great white sharks.
The authors observed the location of 340 shark attacks and used the data to locate the sharks' anchor point. Interestingly, the study also showed that younger sharks exhibited less focused search patterns and were less successful hunters, perhaps because larger sharks excluded them from the best areas.
"Geographic profiling is an interesting new way to study patterns of animal foraging, and especially predation" says Dr Steven Le Comber, an expert on geographic profiling at the School of Biological and Chemical Sciences at Queen Mary, University of London. "Shark hunting patterns are extremely difficult to study and the work here will have important implications for our understanding of the ways in which predators hunt their prey."
http://www.wiley.com/bw/journal.asp?ref=0952-8369
Full bibliographic informationArticle:Hunting Patterns and Geographic Profiling of White Shark Predation DOI:10.1111/j.1469-7998.2009.00586.xDue for Publication Monday June 22nd, 2009