Claudia Moscovici 
Sandra L. Brown, M.A. published a very informative book on the psychological profile of the women who love psychopaths, to which I’ve alluded frequently in previous chapters. It’s called, descriptively, Women who love psychopaths: Inside the Relationship of Inevitable Harm with Psychopaths, Sociopaths and Narcissists (Mask Publishing, 2009). This is a timely and groundbreaking book. Although there are many books about domestic violence as well as numerous clinical studies of psychopaths and psychopathy, this is the only book I found that focuses on the female victims from both a clinical and lay perspective. It combines victim testimonials with a clear psychological explanation of how psychopaths operate, their victims’ perspectives and their damaging effects. Given that the victims far outnumber the psychopaths themselves, it’s very important to understand their behavior as well. I’d like to summarize here some of Brown’s findings by using the structure of addressing common misconceptions. You can also find out additional information on this subject by visiting her website, saferelationshipsmagazine.com.
As previously mentioned, Robert Hare, who elaborated the clinical standards of evaluating psychopathy/antisocial personality disorder used in prisons and elsewhere, estimates that between 1 and 4 percent of the population suffers from this personality disorder. The bad news about this statistic is that there are millions of psychopaths in this country alone who negatively impact tens of millions of lives. The good news is that it’s still a relatively small percentage of the population. You have no doubt met a few psychopaths during the course of your life. But chances are that they weren’t your husband, your lover, your son, your daughter or your sibling. Perhaps they were your colleague, your teacher, your acquaintance or your boss: essentially, people with whom you’ve had relatively superficial contact. We already know that in casual contact psychopaths come across as absolutely wonderful. They can be charming, cool, eloquent, sweet and sociable. They love to be the center of attention and bask in public approval and applause. This means that you probably won’t be able to relate to the degree of malicious damage that psychopaths inflict upon their partners and their families.
Most people have encountered jerks. We’ve met people who cheat, lie or steal. But those individuals aren’t necessarily psychopaths. They may feel remorse for what they’ve done wrong. They may not harm others deliberately, to inflict maximum damage. They may be capable of love and empathy. Most people have also run across people with narcissistic tendencies. We probably met individuals who are very full of themselves and consider themselves superior to others. These people are annoying and, in some respects, ridiculous. But they’re usually capable of remorse and of respecting moral boundaries. They can love others. They just don’t know how to express their feelings because they’re too focused on themselves.
Most people have also run across people with psychological problems, such as neuroses, depression, anxieties or mood swings. Those individuals are generally more harmful to themselves than to others. Moreover, they’re usually capable of empathy. Many women have at some point been burned by players, or men who are either sex addicts or just plain promiscuous. If you’re looking for commitment and emotional depth, these men certainly spell trouble. But they generally don’t engage in the degree of malicious deception that psychopaths do. They rarely try to convince you that you’re the love of their life. They don’t usually tell you that they want to marry you and spend the rest of their days with you. If anything, your ordinary players give you very clear signals that they run around with many women, that they don’t want any commitment and that you’re one of many to them. You either accept this unpalatable arrangement or you refuse to engage with them. But at least with your ordinary players you generally know what you’re getting yourself into. With psychopaths you don’t.
Consequently, if you’ve been the partner of a psychopath, most people won’t relate to your experiences. They won’t understand why your suffering is so extreme and why it takes you so long to get out of that relationship and to get over it once you leave him. Many people whom you tell about what’s happened to you—once you clarify that you’re not dealing with your ordinary jerk or player—go to another extreme. They erroneously assume that psychopaths are obvious predators who are very easy to detect. Because it’s mostly psychopathic murderers who make it on the news, they may also mistakenly associate all or most psychopaths with notorious serial killers like Ted Bundy, not with your seemingly ordinary, charming husband or boyfriend who is a teacher, a lawyer or a doctor: the man you live with day to day, who appears to be healthy, devoted and normal. They can’t understand what it’s like to have spent your intimate life with someone who creates the illusion not only of normalcy, but of hyper-normalcy: namely, of being far better than your average man and of being engaged in an extraordinary relationship with you. It’s very difficult to explain to most people that in a long-term romantic relationship with a psychopath, you feel not only cheated, but also emotionally raped. In other words, a close relationship with a psychopath is, fortunately for most people and unfortunately for the victims, beyond the pale of normal human experience and comprehension. The seventy-five women who participated in Brown’s study all report being deeply traumatized by their interactions with psychopaths (Women Who Love Psychopaths, 231).
Just as people tend to have false assumptions about psychopaths, they also have correspondingly false assumptions about the kind of women who become ensnared by them. Since they believe that the signs of psychopathy are either mundane (such as a jerk or a player) or obvious (a serial murderer), they assume that the women who fall for such men are gullible or, worse yet, just as corrupt as the psychopaths themselves. Brown’s research helps dispel these false assumptions. Granted, in some cases, it may be true that the women targeted by psychopaths are not very deep or that they’re disordered as well. But usually that’s the kind of women whom psychopaths target for more superficial contact, such as flings and one-night stands. Psychopaths, as we’ve seen, depend on double standards. For longer-term relationships, they generally select moral women who won’t do unto others as is done unto them. These women tested particularly high in empathy, which is the emotional underpinning for moral behavior. Psychopaths only abused their partners’ empathy. “Just what can too much empathy do in the hands of a psychopath?” Brown asks. “He can keep her tied to the relationship way past the point of sanity” (Women who Love Psychopaths, 135). Sandra L. Brown’s research also reveals that the women whom psychopaths select as their partners—meaning their wives or long-term girlfriends—tend to be educated, independent and accomplished. As we know, psychopaths enjoy a challenge. The challenge, in this case, consists of taking a healthy, strong, high functioning woman and turning her into a puppet. “To some degree,” Brown elaborates, “this is the ultimate power play for a pathological to take someone strong and slam them to the mat emotionally. This is the totality of psychological triumphing for the psychopath” (Women Who Love Psychopaths, 229).
If you think about it, there’d be no challenge for the psychopath if the woman he selected as a partner were as bad as he is. There’d be nothing to corrupt and nobody to fool. A link between two psychopaths occurs sometimes. In fact, it’s the subject of one of my favorite French novels, from whom I borrowed the title for this book: Dangerous liaisons. But such relationships are rare and don’t last long. Two psychopaths in a couple is one too many. Each tries to outdo the other in wrongdoing, promiscuity and harm. Neither can dupe the other because they’re equally well versed at the art of manipulation and deception. So two psychopaths “in love” are likely to part ways rather quickly. They may enter into a provisionary corrupt agreement, like the Count of Valmont and Mme. de Merteuil do in Dangerous liaisons, to compete for how many people they can seduce, dupe, use, etc. But even in those cases, as in Laclos’ novel, the two psychopaths eventually turn upon each other. As we’ve seen, psychopaths have no loyalty to anyone but themselves.
But if the women who fall in love with psychopaths are usually decent, intelligent and moral individuals, as Brown’s study indicates, then why don’t these women get away from the disordered person who becomes their partner? This question leads us to a second false assumption that people tend to have about the women who love psychopaths: insofar as they think about the subject at all, of course. They assume that these women are very insecure and weak if they put up with the kind of abuse a psychopath is likely to dish out. Brown’s research reveals that this hypothesis is partly true, but largely false. It’s true that if you’ve been in a long-term relationship with a psychopathic husband or boyfriend, you’ll have adjusted psychologically to the manipulation, the lies and the domination. No doubt, your confidence and self-esteem have suffered as a result. But it’s factually false that you were therefore a weak and unconfident person initially, when you first had the misfortune to meet the psychopath and the misjudgment to become involved with him.
Throughout her book, Brown describes the women who fall in love with psychopaths as successful professionals: doctors, lawyers, teachers, therapists and nurses. This information may seem counterintuitive. We know that psychopaths want control. Logically, it’s much easier to control weak individuals. But keep in mind that psychopaths enjoy power games. They’re not sufficiently entertained by dominating a person who is already meek and passive. Where’s the fun in pushing against an object that offers no resistance? You’re not going to exercise your muscles by doing that, just as you’re not going to exercise your manipulation skills against malleable and gullible targets. As Brown goes on to explain, psychopaths tend to be attracted to women with strong personalities and high relationship investment. They prefer tenacious individuals who will engage in their power games and stick it through the inevitable difficulties they create in the relationship. As Brown documents, for such a woman, “… her trust, tolerance, and hope will win out keeping her loyal even in the face of betrayal” (Women Who Love Psychopaths, 141).
So then where does this false assumption about the weakness and naïveté of the women who love psychopaths come from? It comes, once again, from most people’s limited knowledge and experience, which mercifully excludes intimate involvement with a psychopath. To most people who lead normal, healthy lives, the signs of domination and abuse are obvious. Abuse means hitting one’s partner. It means rape. It means verbal insults. The more sophisticated psychopaths, however, don’t necessarily engage in such behavior. More commonly, charismatic psychopaths deceive and manipulate very charmingly. They generally present their machinations to you (and others) as doing you a favor rather than as sabotaging your life.
Research shows that psychopaths’ brains are constructed without the capacity to form emotional bonds. Yet such individuals tend to be very clever, particularly when it comes to Machiavellian maneuvers to get what they want. Most of their mental resources are channeled into strategies of manipulation, deception and disguise. Which leads me to my next point related to why it’s not so easy to recognize psychopaths. As we’ve seen in previous chapters, such individuals are natural chameleons. They change their personality traits and interests to appear compatible with any woman they want to seduce and use. They don’t necessarily fake interest. Temporarily, their interest in you may be quite genuine when they wish to pursue you. By extension, so is their interest in everything you care about. For this reason, psychopaths initially appear to be highly compatible with their partners not only from the outside, but also from their partners’ own perspectives as well. Moreover, as my analysis of Adolphe illustrated, their abuse is often subtle, gradual and presented as for your own good. Psychopaths are great salesmen. They pan off evil as goodness and their selfish interest as yours. By the time you wake up and realize that you’ve been emotionally conned, you’ve already slid down a slippery slope.
Sandra L. Brown, M.A emphasizes that the women who love psychopaths share an eagerness to please others. Such malleability leads them to engage in constant compromises with their increasingly demanding partners. This, of course, conforms perfectly to his plan. “For the psychopath, this level of tolerance is a pretty good guarantee she’ll be around for quite a while…no matter what!” (Women Who Love Psychopaths, 137). However, the author also reminds us that such women give in to the psychopath out of empathy and tenaciousness rather than out of weakness. The effect, however, is the same. Excessive tolerance and misplaced empathy leads these women to repeatedly bend to the psychopath’s will. Each time they do so, it diminishes their power and increases the psychopath’s hold on them.
The one thing that is usually true about the assumption that women who fall prey to psychopaths are “weak” is that psychopaths tend to select strong women at their most vulnerable moments. It’s as if their predatory instinct—plus all the information that you, yourself have disclosed—tells them that you’re going through difficulties. You may be suffering from marital problems, or a death in the family, or a broken relationship, or anxiety, or depression, or any kind of trauma that clouds your judgment. At the lowest points in your life, psychopaths can pounce upon you. They initially promise to fix whatever problems you’re experiencing. If you’ve gone through a painful divorce as a result of a cheating husband, then the psychopath presents himself as a faithful and trustworthy guy. In the beginning, when in your company, he has eyes only for you. When not in your company, well, that’s a different story, whose plot you can imagine. If you’re experiencing financial problems, the psychopath may offer you loans. If you have self-esteem issues, he will copiously flatter you: but only during the honeymoon phase of the relationship, of course. Afterwards, during the much less amusing devalue and discard phases, you’re made to feel far less attractive and accomplished than you actually are.
So, contrary to popular misconceptions, the women who fall in love with psychopaths tend to be strong, independent and resourceful women at the beginning of the relationship. By the end, however, these women have been duped, mistreated, maligned and controlled so much that their self-confidence is severely impaired. Sometimes they leave their jobs as a result of the psychopath’s direct pressure. At others, the psychopath’s constant criticism and drama leads them to lose their jobs. Because of the severe strains of the psychopathic bond, some of the women involved with psychopaths became mere shadows of the strong and independent women they once were. Fortunately, however, many of those women took charge of their lives after putting an end to their toxic relationships. They become stronger and wiser individuals as a result of their traumatic experiences, better able to distinguish real people with genuine emotions from their psychopathic counterparts.
Dangerous Liaisons/Legături Periculoase, Editura Vremea, http://www.edituravremea.ro/leg–turi-periculoase–cum-s–recuno–ti-un-psihopat–i-s–scapi-din-mrejele-lui
