Thursday, July 17, 2014

A cold dish of revenge

This is a really amazing story in the New York Times of an incredibly elaborate revenge scheme:
When Mr. Ramrattan, dressed in a suit and tie, first entered her restaurant in 2006 and introduced himself as a police detective, Ms. Sumasar, a single mother, recalled being impressed.

The two began dating, and Mr. Ramrattan eventually moved into Ms. Sumasar’s house. At first, he seemed attentive, but she grew suspicious of him. He lied constantly, she said.

“I said to Jerry, ‘You tell so many lies, I think you actually believe what you are saying,’ ” Ms. Sumasar said.

Throughout 2008, she said she begged him to leave but he refused.

After Ms. Sumasar said she was attacked, on March 8, 2009, she pressed rape charges against Mr. Ramrattan, who was arrested and released on bail. Soon after, Mr. Ramrattan sent friends to intimidate her, prosecutors said.

They said that when she would not back down, he vowed to put her away.

The key to his scheme, prosecutors said, was to spread fake clues over time, fooling police into believing that all the evidence pointed to Ms. Sumasar.

They said he coached the supposed victims, driving them past Ms. Sumasar’s house so that they could describe her Jeep Grand Cherokee and showing them her photo so they could pick her out of a police lineup.

The setup began in September 2009, prosecutors said. An illegal immigrant from Trinidad told the police that he had been handcuffed and robbed of $700 by an Indian woman who was disguised as a police officer and had a gun, according to court documents.

Prosecutors said Mr. Ramrattan had persuaded the immigrant to lie, telling him that he could receive a special visa for victims of violent crimes.

Six months later, another man said he had been robbed in Nassau County by two police impersonators and described the main aggressor as an Indian woman about Ms. Sumasar’s height. The man said he had managed to take down the first three letters of the Jeep Grand Cherokee’s New York license plate — AJD.

All the while, Ms. Sumasar had a strong alibi, including cell phone records showing that calls were made from her phone at a casino in Connecticut on the day of the robbery.

But Sheryl Anania, executive assistant district attorney in Nassau County, said Ms. Sumasar’s business was foundering, so she appeared to have a motive.

The final fake crime was conjured in May 2010, officials said, when an acquaintance of Mr. Ramrattan said she had been held up by a couple posing as police officers. She said they were driving a Grand Cherokee, but she gave a full Florida license plate number.

She said she heard the pair call each other by name — “Seem” and “Elvis.” Elvis was the nickname of another former boyfriend of Ms. Sumasar, who owned the Jeep.

When the police looked into the Florida plate number, they found that the day after the purported March robbery, the title and the plate for the Cherokee had been transferred from Elvis to Ms. Sumasar’s sister in Florida.

Ms. Sumasar, who holds a Florida driver’s license, had driven the car to Florida to register it. To the police, she seemed to be covering her tracks.

With all the evidence pointing to Ms. Sumasar, the police arrested her. Bail was set at $1 million.

Prosecutors said the scheme unraveled in December 2010 — just weeks before Ms. Sumasar was to go on trial — when an informer told the police that Mr. Ramrattan had staged the plot. The informer gave detectives a number for a cellphone owned by Mr. Ramrattan.
On the one hand this shows the sheer ingenuity and potential determinedness of someone like Ramrattan. On the other hand, it sort of reminds me of an episode of Scooby Doo for over the top nefariousness ("and I would have gotten away with it too..."). Still, it's a cautionary tale for those who might underestimate the potential harm from engaging with a sociopath.

Tuesday, July 15, 2014

Famous sociopaths (part 2)

Another recent find is the artist Amedeo Modigliani, as featured in a recent NY Times article:
  • A recent biography "recasts the artist’s character from dissolute victim to active performer, one who controlled the way his life would be viewed by his contemporaries, and by ­history."
  • "[H]e tended to carry himself like a prince. And the experience of having survived a series of childhood health crises, including tuberculosis, only increased his sense of exceptionalism.
  • "Unsurprisingly, he viewed artists as privileged beings. At 17, he wrote that as a species they had “different rights, different values than do normal, ordinary people because we have different needs which put us — it has to be said and you must believe it — above their moral standards."
  • In seeking financial support: "Sometimes it came in sustained relationships with women like the British journalist and poet Beatrice Hastings. Hastings, under the name Alice Morning, wrote a running account of the Parisian art scene for an avant-garde journal called The New Age. She had a caregiver’s temperament (she collected stray animals and nursed wounded wasps back to health) and money she didn’t mind sharing, and she liked to get high. She was everything he needed.
  • "[H]e consciously used intoxicants as a cover to hide a “great secret,” that being the recurrence of his tuberculosis. . . . Modigliani, terrified of the social ostracism that would result if he were known to have the highly contagious disease, deliberately fostered a reputation as an alcoholic and addict to prevent detection. This cover allowed him to freely drink the wine that soothed his coughing, use the drugs that gave him energy to work — his output of paintings surged in his last years — and pass off as drunk and disorderly any irritable or violent outbursts. . . . [T]he very idea of someone keeping quiet about a lethal and contagious disease raises serious ethical issues. Did he ever warn his friends, and his countless lovers, about their risk of infection from him? We have no evidence one way or the other."
  • "[O]ne of his dealers, described him as 'all charm, all impulsiveness, all disdain.' The writer Max Jacob, who was very much part of Modigliani’s bohemian crowd, called him 'the most unpleasant man I knew. Proud, angry, insensitive, wicked.'"
  • Cheated on his pregnant, teenage girlfriend, who killed herself days after he died.

Thursday, July 10, 2014

Empathizer

From a reader:

Hello!

First I have to say that I found your book absolutely fascinating. 

Now, to start with, I've done plenty of my own research, asked my therapist various questions, dropped casual questions about their observations of my various behaviors to friends and family, and I've come to the conclusion that, while I am not diagnosable as a sociopath due to a lack of recorded juvenile delinquency, very few relationships, and no police encounters, I decidedly identify with a higher level on the antisocial spectrum.

You talk in your book about how sociopaths don't "tap into" true human emotion, and that part of the condition is that we have to work in order to understand social currents. A reply you highlighted on your website said we are different "in the sense that they do not comprehend normal emotional responses and connections."

I've always understood human emotion. I'm brilliant at reading facial expressions, changes in posture, word choice, and I don't find it too difficult to empathize, though only ever for a brief time (about 10 seconds, or however long it takes me to successfully get a grasp on how the other person is feeling in order to properly respond,) and then it's as if I slip out of the emotional persona and back into my usual self with the understanding of the mechanics and nuances of that state of mind. Isn't this comprehension? And, more importantly to me, does this put me outside of the range of an antisocial personality, despite the rest of the traits accurately describing me? 

This question has been the greatest road block in my being able to accept my own (probable) identity as a sociopath. Everything else about sociopathy rings true to me, but my ability to understand and experience emotion confounds my ability to truly identify.

If you have time I'd love your opinion on it.

My response:

This is an interesting question. I'm not sure I really understand what the difference is either. But here's a story that I think illustrates it ok. Recently I was with my father, someone that I believe could probably be diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder. He was talking to an employee of his and was joking around about how he has chickens and you can eat chickens but his grandchildren just got kittens, and can you eat kittens? I knew that the lady he was talking to had a dog and a cat and had just gone back home during the lunch hour because she was worried that the HVAC system in her home wasn't working properly and they might be uncomfortable (she told me the whole story), so I was like 94% sure that she would not think his joke was funny and pretty sure she might actually be horribly offended. So I understood and predicted her emotional reaction better than he did. I've also been around empath types who get so caught up in their own emotions and their own issues that they lose track of their ability (or choose not?) to identify with others. And they say that people with autism have affective empathy but not cognitive? And sociopaths are opposite? So I guess I don't really understand what people mean by empathy. I certainly am able to identify people's emotions. And often I do that by sort of imagining myself in their shoes. And I think that's cognitive empathy, but it's hard for me to understand how affective empathy would be any different. 

What do you think? Should we publish exchange on the blog and see what other people have to say?


Sunday, July 6, 2014

Loving a sociopath child

From a reader:

I have just finished reading your book, Confessions of a Sociopath, and appreciate so much the wider view I have gained as a result.  Having read every published work on sociopathy previous to yours, I had become disheartened by the firmly held clinical theory that all sociopaths are “unredeemable” and therefore not worth the effort to help them to manage to live among “the rest of us” (whoever “we” are).  This is a position without hope for the sociopath or those who happen to love them. 

I spent all of my adult life trying to understand my childhood and how I was different (and therefore somehow less than) the other members of my family.  It was in my graduate education to become a Licensed Mental Health Counselor that I came to understand something that years of therapy had not shown me: that both of my parents and two of my siblings are sociopaths.  A genogram study of my family-of-origin, going back four generations from mine, looks much like that of an alcoholic family: mostly sociopaths with an “empath” or two thrown in for fun.  My antecessors and contemporaries were not the productive-but-easily-bored variety, however.

Fortunately, naming a thing can grant one dominion over it, and this was the effect of that understanding for me.  All the literature pointed to the fact that it was “them” and not “me”’ thus providing me with the permission to “feel” and also the label of “normalcy.”  I determined not to repeat the past.

Unfortunately, though, one of my own children, my only daughter, is also a sociopath.  Her birth 27 years ago provided the impetus for a different view of the “problem.”  How can one not be part of the “problem” while also producing a child, which by all accounts, is “damaged goods?”  Her lack of empathy, fear, and conscience, as well as her intelligence, manifested themselves at the age of 14 months in a single event that I captured in pictures because I was so baffled by it: When I left the kitchen for a brief minute, this child climbed from the floor to the top of a wire-shelved pantry, removed an unopened 5 lb. bag of flour from the top shelf, climbed back down, opened the bag with a sharp knife retrieved from a drawer with a toddler lock on it, and began loading the flour into the cat food dish on the floor to “make them stop crying, and you took too long.” She was angry and NOT worried about the cats.  She was angry with me for leaving the room.  She also moved to “fix” the problem of the crying cats by feeding them in a way she had identified as a means to her own sustenance.  I did not at that time know the significance of that cluster of behaviors. 
                
This child’s lack of fear and empathy caused me so much distress in her early years that her brothers are significantly younger than she is.  I knew I did not have the capacity, and I certainly lacked any sort of empathic filial support, to bring another child into the world until this one was pretty much self-sufficient.  She marched off to kindergarten about the time her first brother was born.  Her entry to school seemed like a much-needed break from the “watchful” parenting and constant lessons in application of the Golden Rule.  However, this was when the real problems began, as public schooling only served to exacerbate the difficulties she encountered in trying to “fit in” with their fungible “rules” and lack of training in any sort of excellence.  We tried private schooling, Christian education, and finally ended up homeschooling her (and her brothers) so that she might adopt a set of values not unlike the ones you described having in your book.  It also became necessary to terminate contact with unproductive and sadistic sociopathic relatives. 
                
All of this served to produce a woman who is beautiful, somewhat ruthless, intelligent, talented, and never governed by her emotions.  I think she cares for her brothers, and she is always checking in with me to make sure she handles relationship and communication issues with coworkers appropriately.  She never emotionally eats or drinks.  She moved to NYC about 3 years ago right under our noses with a man more than twice her age so that she could live the big city life.  She dumped him like a hot potato (on Valentine’s Day, no less!) when he decided that at 60, he might like her to join him in living a slower, more rural life in Iowa.  She went back to NYC and slept on the couches of “people in her network” (“friends” to us empaths), tolerating circumstances for months that more feelings-oriented folks would find intolerable for the sake of her own goals.  She is currently seducing her next “provider” because “it is simply unacceptable for me to live for long in a three-bedroom apartment in this city with two other people without demoralizing them or wanting to ruin them, Mom.”  I do not subsidize her lifestyle because that would be to invite the ruin of us both, and I often feel like the ethereal father of the sociopathic killer on the series “Dexter” working to help her to identify “the code” by which to live the most fulfilling life possible.  I don’t know whether she actually loves me, or not.  I love her deeply, and have thanked God every day that he should give me the daughter I had wanted as a young woman nurturing her precious life in my womb.  I focus on being the kind of mother I need to be, doing what is best for my adult child as I did when she was an infant.  I think she has taken the tools I have given her and put them to mostly good use.  She has taught me not to ask God for what I want, but to be thankful for what I get.
                
I appreciated your view that sociopaths are just different.  This is what makes the world go round, and my belief in an all-knowing and perfect Creator informs me that just as Judas was part of God’s plan for the redemption of mankind through Christ, my daughter has a purpose known to him, too.  I had questions of faith with respect to the definition of words like redemption, sin, forgiveness, remorse, and evil.  I have come to believe that sociopathy cannot be a mistake, but is, rather, an act of creation and for the benefit of mankind.  Sociopaths are fearless, and in difficult times, this is defined as “courage”.  Your book was very helpful to me in the challenge it provided intellectually, maternally, spiritually, morally, professionally, and personally.  I wanted you to know this.  Thank you for taking the time to read this letter. 

Monday, June 30, 2014

People pleasing

People are sometimes surprised to hear how much I "care" about other people--how much I want to "please" them. To them, that's the only explanation for some of my behaviors, e.g. when I go out of my way to help a stranger, or when I'm solicitous or accommodating just past the point of mere politeness and into the realm of generous and sincere. That's where all the real payoff comes, though. Anyone can be politely civil, in fact most people are. If you put forth just a little more effort, you're a standout and in a good way (if you're going to be a standout, and let's face, we all are, it should be for good things as well as bad--it muddies up the signal strength and will make some people doubt their assessment of you as "off" or "wrong").

For example, the other day I was set to have lunch with a professional associate (someone who handles some of my affairs) to meet another possible work contact for a sort of sales pitch. Although it was going to be a networking lunch, I had a friend in town (not in the industry) so I asked if I could bring him along. The lunch went fine, but we didn't talk as much about business as perhaps the new contact wanted. Afterwards I asked my associate, "Do you think she felt like she wasted her time? Should I follow up about XX?" My associate listened to me for a while and finally asked, "Why do you care what she thinks of you?", as if it was the strangest thing in the world for me to be asking all of these questions. The thing is, I wasn't going to necessarily follow up with this woman, and I certainly didn't care whether she felt like she wasted her time or not for her sake, I just wanted to know. I wanted to know to better inform my own behavior just in case I met her again. I wanted to know whether I should be expecting a phone call from her and on what topic so I could plan my response ahead of time to achieve whatever goal I decided on. I wanted to know whether in the future it would be wholly inappropriate to bring a friend to a lunch of that exact type. I wanted to know whether I came off as charming as I hoped I did. I just wanted to know so that if I decided to do something--to snub this woman, to waste her time, to insult her career choice and her business acumen, to be incredibly rude, to have wasted any sort of opportunity, to do the same in the future--that I would be making an informed choice, not bumbling blindly through a world of unknowns.

Knowledge is power, particularly information about a person. It's a very valuable service to be able to anticipate and meet other's needs, should you ever care to. I always like to have that option, so that's why I keep a mental dossier on everyone I associate with regularly. It may seem like "people pleasing", but I think true people pleasing requires you to want what's best for them.
Join Amazon Prime - Watch Over 40,000 Movies

.

Comments are unmoderated. Blog owner is not responsible for third party content. By leaving comments on the blog, commenters give license to the blog owner to reprint attributed comments in any form.