If your friend is a sociopath should you dump her?

Answer 1

It depends. Is she abusing you?

Or could she possibly have been misdiagnosed?

Is she in denial? If she admits to it, is she willing to do whatever needs to be done to mitigate this devastating condition?

Do not put yourself in danger. Sociopath or not, you should never let her or anyone else abuse you, period.

I was diagnosed in 1992 as a primary psychopath (sociopath); it took me a decade to find anyone who would treat me.I'm a pariah, yet there are still some people who arewilling to deal with me, KNOWING about this, and carry no prejudiceinto the dialog.People say NOTHING CAN BE DONE. Except for one thing: themere fact that some scientists know as much as they do about the brainof a sociopath means that solving the problem is no longer animpossible and obscure wish -- it's moving within the realm of concretepossibility.As soon as large numbers of sociopaths begin to be treatedin a way that actually helps them, that corrects as much as possiblethe chaos of misdirected signals in their confused and disorganizedbrains, and then a form of therapy that in addition to that, bynecessity, teaches them to cope with the resulting maelstrom of emotionand impression that was formerly impossible, so that they can put it in order and start to develop the heretofore dormant and silent segmentsof their brains and better use those formerly mixed-up areas where norecognizable order ruled, THEN THE OTHERS MAY BEGIN TO NOTICE WHAT ISGOING ON...and they will know at least this much: instead of "the kissof death," a diagnosis of ASPD (the DSM-IV way of saying sociopathy orpsychopathy) will lead someplace; that there will be things done thatactually make a difference.Crippled as they are neurologically, sociopaths are yetshrewd, and they're always looking out for themselves in a way similarto that of a loner predator. Seeing others like them actuallybenefiting from treatment will have to start persuading them thatthere's something to gain in going for help after all. Not beingrejected or met with "We can't help you; you're evil incarnate," or theequivalent thinly disguised in euphemistic psychology jargon; NOT beingmet with a situation where they'd have to substitute symptoms of an"acceptable" illness in place of those they bear in secret -- thatwould almost certainly, if gradually, have an effect: if a sociopathcan clearly see a benefit coming from admitting his or her realsituation, there's nothing to stop him or her from doing just that.It's already started to happen, if in a tiny, barely perceptible trickle.Right now, all science has at the ready for them is to usevarious types of preexisting medication given in attempts to counteractthe chaotic way the brain of a sociopath functions. That and types oftalk therapy carefully altered to avoid the pitfalls that have in thepast caused regular therapies to make sociopaths worse instead ofbetter. But the more that scientists such as Robert Hare and hiscolleagues delve into and experiment with the new types of brain scansand learning what makes sociopaths tick like human bombs, the morelikely that it becomes with each passing year that a means will soon beisolated to defuse those bombs.The primary source of a sociopath's infamous rage isfrustration, of a sort so alien and so extreme that almost no one elsecan understand what it means.

Once they start getting taken seriously,that frustration, and the wild rage it provokes, will lessen, and sinceit is a primary source of the constant distrust that makes regulartherapy fail sociopaths, the defusing of that rage and its maddeningcauses will be a huge step in the right direction.