More education Less Titillation

The main reason I wrote Dark Souls was because after my encounter with said psychopathic narcissist I never wanted to have to see another woman or man have to go through what I had. Its the main reason why most victims of these predators write books about their experiences. However in hind site this is an unrealistic expectation to think we can help many, given the fact that most people are unaware they are being victimised until its too late and even those who are in relationship with these characters will often remain in denial for far longer than they should for wanting to see the “good” in these characters. The other thing is that even when caught out psychopathic personalities are hardly ever made accountable for their actions.

Occasionally victims like Donna Anderson, Sarah Tate, Claudia Moscovici and myself will write about their experiences in the hope they will reach out to other victims but the types of people who read our stories with be those who have been victimised themselves or even those who are abusers. My personal opinion is that abusers read these books in the hope they might glean some snippet of information and worse help them victimise people further.

Books are meant to educate and enlighten people. When I first started doing the psychopathic cartoons which were another way to educate the general population about disordered people I had a mixture of positive comments and a few negative comments. One woman in particular wrote “Get that f*cking video off” and another wrote that I was on some kind of witch hunt against psychopaths and that it was the same kind of mentality against minorities that Hitler had when they outed the Jews. I politely reminded them that Hitler was in fact a psychopath.

Recently a woman in the UK send me an email seeking advice about a book she was writing on her own experiences with a psychopath/sociopath and mentioned how Donna Anderson had been brave enough to expose James Montgomery by his real name in her book without any comeback.  She asked if she was to do the same there would be any repercussions?

I could not comment, however, when I first wrote Dark Souls, like many other victims I wanted to scream my ex's name from the rooftops and plaster his picture all over the internet.  On reflection of an earlier incident with him my own experiences about these characters may differ from others.

A couple of years ago An article was printed about me in a national newspaper which referred to another person who has also been diagnosed as a sociopath many year years ago and like my ex had high levels of narcissism. Often the two personality disorders go hand in hand. 

The article was supposed to be promoting a book I wrote on cheating.   However the newspaper decided to take a different slant and made the whole story about them instead. Despite the story painting the person as a womaniser with no real redeeming characters this person loved the fact the attention was on them and they were in the paper. In fact they called up all their friends to tell them the buy a copy. 

There is an expression that someone can be famous or infamous. Since people with high levels of narcissism don't really care what type of attention they are receiving any kind of attention will do. In their eyes it wouldn't matter what was written about them whether it be good or bad. Its also one of the reasons why they behave so badly. Like a naughty five year old they have got exactly what the crave the most, our undivided attention! 

This is one of the reasons I was so keen NOT to use my ex's name in the book. In fact at one point when writing it I didn't even give him a name at all. However the book became somewhat confusing and I finally chose the name Oliver after the character in the film Oliver who always came back to the table asking for more. 

In answer to the woman's email who mentioned Donna's Book, in my humble opinion, James Montgomery would be loving all the attention he would be getting. What better way to feed his overinflated ego than knowing that the whole of Lovefraud was talking about him even though most him, at the very least, a bumbling idiot. The fact that most people think he was a complete and utter ****** and a hes a sociopath is neither here nor there in his eyes.

When it comes to craving attention, you only have to look at another writer who has malignant narcissism, whose name I wont mention, and see how many posts they put all over the internet about themselves to see how little impact negative comments have on them.

sam vaknin

Is there a handbook for psychopaths?

I was coaching a woman today who mentioned a book called “The man with the Rockefeller suit”. After being conned out of nearly a million pounds by a man who could have easily taken much of the techniques from this book. I remembered having read Sarah Tate's own story, despite being written as a novel that if you had replaced the main character Bill with my ex Oliver you could have easily been talking about the same person. What's interesting is that like this woman, I had written another book previously which talked about online cheating, lying and other unscrupulous tactics these people use to con people and after getting his hands on a copy he ended up doing all of the things in the book to me. 

The similarities between psychopaths are more common than any differences they have, which poses the question, is there a handbook that these people use that teaches them how to be better psychopaths ? They may be intelligent but they are not always the most creative of creatures and one of the things they do is mirror people in the same way as they mirror their victims.  Why therefore would they not try and mirror someone who was a better psychopath than them? You only have to look at the one upmanship of serial killers. 

One of the books I found when researching Dark Souls gave a step by step account of how to con and manipulate people in the most psychopathic way. My guess is that most psychopaths will do their research not only on victims but be scouting around for whatever vile tools they can find to victimise people.

More Education Less Titillation

Until I had written Dark Souls and read the other books on psychopathy, sociopaths, narcissists and so on, I have always been of the opinion that there should be more books to educate people about these predators. However there's a fine line between educating ourselves and feeding into their psychosis. When someone emailed me and asked me if my book contained some additional tools to help them to victimise people it reinforced my view that the only people ever likely to read it are either going to be those who have been abused or the abusers themselves. You only have to go and read the posts on forums run by sociopaths and see how elated and excited they get when they read yet another victim story. In fact one of them recently posted an article on there saying how "pathetic we are as victims" and "when is someone going to write a story on how to get back at a sociopath".

Although this might titillate the sociopaths and give them all a laugh, this kind of mentality does nothing to educate anyone and makes us as victims as sociopathic as them.

It also made me question whether we should we be writing more stories about these people but instead be putting our energies into education people rather than just providing material for these predatory abusers titillation. I summarised this in the most recent article on how these predators steal ideas, email hacking and stalking. Until then, any new victim stories that are out there will provide them with more than enough supply to keep these predators conning, stalking and manipulating us for years to come.