Dangerous Liaisons by Claudia Moscovici
What do Scott Peterson and the timeless seducers of literature epitomized by the figures of Don Juan and Casanova have in common? They are charismatic, glib and seductive men who also embody the most dangerous human qualities: a breathtaking callousness, shallowness of emotion and the incapacity to love. In other words, these men are psychopaths.
Unfortunately, most psychopaths don’t advertise themselves as heartless social predators. They come across as charming, intelligent, friendly, generous, romantic and kind. Through their believable persona, or “mask of sanity,” they lure many of us into their dangerous nets.
I am a victim of psychopathic seduction and the author of two books on this subject: the nonfiction book, Dangerous Liaisons: How to Recognize and Avoid Psychopathic Seduction and the novel The Seducer:
http://www.amazon.com/Dangerous-Liasons-Recognize-Psychopathic-Seduction/dp/0761855696/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1318095970&sr=1-1 http://www.amazon.com/Seducer-Novel-Claudia-Moscovici/dp/0761858075/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1326297451&sr=1-1
Making a clinical diagnosis of personality disorders is, of course, only up to professional therapists, psychologists and psychiatrists. But identifying potentially dangerous traits isn't just for experts. Any of us can be adversely affected when we allow disordered individuals into our lives. Therefore, knowledge is the most essential form of self-defense for all of us.
To help other victims of psychopaths, both male and female, I have started the website Psychopathyawareness. This website explains clearly, for the general public, what psychopaths are, why they act the way they do, how they attract us and whom they tend to target. Above all, I hope that psychopathyawareness will help victims find the strength to end their toxic relationships with psychopaths and move on, stronger and wiser, with the rest of their lives.
Claudia Moscovici, psychopathyawareness
Dangerous Liaisons: How to Identify and Escape from Psychopathic Seduction
21 Comments
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Dear Claudia,
I have just discovered your incredible site….thank you!
I have been the targeted prey of a nefarious psychopath who is masquarading as a veterinarian, even though he doesn’t have a vet license. After four years of a barbed -wire like relationship with this human automaton, i am now in the process of foreclosure and have lost over 250,000.00 to this ‘man’.
I spent three and half years of this time searching for a mental health professionsal who could help me…only to be told i was ‘co-dependent’. Thank God i found Sandra Brown and during a 3-day intensive with her was totally cured of the pathology of the psychopath.
I am only grateful that he was not the murdering kind, as he possessed and exhibited all the other traits of the psychopath. Had one of the 12 mental health ‘professionals’ had a clue about psychopathy, i might not be financially wiped out now.
Thank you for your insightful site, Claudia….as these pernicious beings walk too freelly among us, we must be armed to save our money, our lives, our souls from these human vampires.
Best regards,
Carol
Dear Carol,
I’m so glad that you found Sandra Brown’s safe relationships website and mine as well!
The more people we can reach and help, the fewer victims these evil social predators will have.
We can’t wipe out psychoapthy itself, but we can help reduce the number of victims by spreading
information about this personality disorder.
Best wishes, Claudia
Thank you for this great blog, it is very important information. I am still recovering after a second poisonus relationship. In the beginning I was blaming myself, I lost self-confidence, I was even considerating suicide. My life became a hell some time because of posttraumatic stress disorder after traumatic events inflicted by to men I thought that cared of me (different circumstances and years between, but both events have had a strong influence on me and the second one made all old bad memories come back). I made a simiilar failure twice being attracted to a wrong type of men because I knew nothing about psychopathy. Information you post here helps me a lot to understand what has really heappend and why. I wish I knew all this before and reacted to the red flags in time. Now I am slowly buliding up self-confidence and trust in other people. I have found new aims in my life and I see how important it is to take care of each other. I stll feel very wounded and have problems finding happines in life. I hope I will manage it one day. But now I have learned a lot about psychopathy and I am not going to make the same failure once again. It is depressing that most of people doesn’t understand how much harm a psychopath can do. Keep up this great work , I hope it will help many others! (I am sorry for my bad English, I don’t live in an English-speaking country).
Best regards
Lena, thank you for sharing with me your experience. I’m so glad to read that you’re on the way to recovery.
I can relate to the post-traumatic stress syndrome, because the shock of being so deliberately betrayed is very difficult to absorb. Everyone makes mistakes, but psychopaths don’t make normal human errors: they are very scheming, duplicitous and malicious in hurting and using those who love and trust them most. They also have a whole bevy of people willing to tolerate this disordered behavior, go along with it and cover for them. Information about psychopathy helps out every victim. What I found also helps is doing something constructive with that information and one’s life, to get out of the pattern of focusing on these insignificant cockroaches–I mean the specific ones who hurt us–and move on to things that add meaning and purpose to one’s life (including our loved ones, our true friends and informing others about personality disorders, so they won’t make the same mistakes we have).
I wish you well, Claudia
I could have saved myself and my children a lot of heartache and grief if I had found your blog ten years ago. Sadly I now find myself married to a sociopath for life because of the three children we have together. I am currently in the process of divorcing my sociopathic wife and I do have primary custody of our children but thanks to her charming ways the judge awarded her unsupervised custody. And by charming I mean perjuring… The information I have found here has been so enlightening and sometimes absolutely frightening. I often have to stop reading. Thanks to the stereotype perpetuated by movies and books I never realized these people were in our daily lives… I never realized I was married to one. One thing I have noticed though is that there is very little reference to female sociopaths. I’m not sure it matters the traits seem so consistent that I usually just have to exchange the masculine pronouns for the feminine and it usually describes my wife perfectly. My biggest concerns at this point is how to recognize these behaviors in my children before they become an issue and I am of course concerned for their safety when they are in her charge. I don’t believe she would actively bring physical harm to them but the possibility of her inflicting emotional damage is a very real threat. Not to mention she has been very busy trolling for her next victim. In three months time she is on her third affair. I know that tw of these men have felony records and one has been ordered to stay away from his sister’s children. At this pace she is going to at the very least put herself in harm’s way but I’m mostly concerned with the harm these people could bring to my children. Can you direct me to any information that is more specific to my circumstances?
I need help. My children need help. I have devoted every available moment to studying sociopathy in effort to keep my kids safe but I feel that is not enough. I’m feeling very desperate and am trying to stay w/in the law but I am at war with someone who doesn’t play by the same set of rules. Failure is not an option. This war must be fought by any means necessary for the well-being of my children.
Dr. Liane Leedom wrote a book on the subject of having children (or a child) with a sociopath called “Just Like His Father”. It may be helpful to you in your circumstances. But the most helpful person is most likely a good lawyer who can help you get full custody of your kids, given the fact that your sociopathic wife is likely to be harmful to them, as she has been to you.
Dear Claudia,
From the bottom of my heart, THANK YOU for this blog. I posted a comment in your ‘No Contact’ section, and would comment on almost every single post if time would allow. Up until today, I had never really viewed my ex as a psychopath…I now realize that he is. I used to blame myself for not leaving him sooner, but from reading various articles on this site, I now understand how it is that I kept getting sucked back in to his vicious game. Furthermore, I now realize how dangerous my situation was, because my ex held no regards for me as a fellow human being. It’s amazing how someone can say “I love you”…yet in the same breath, threaten your well being.
Your blog site gives much insight and hope to those who have suffered from the mistreatment of a psycho. Keep up the great work…I look forward to future posts!
Superb site.
I am a fellow messenger and traveler on this road.
In a world gone wild over nonsense, it’s fortifying to find serious content like this.
Thank you.
Anna, I appreciate what you say and am glad you’re also spreading information
about relationship red flags. Maybe that can help some readers recognize and get out of toxic relationships
before they’re hurt.
Having spent a year with a socio & another reading about them I am stunned to find that they seem to share micobehaviors like the predatory eye,hypnotic voices, and strange speech cadences..like they can tolerate long pauses in conversation why they calibrate to you. Mine had all three traits & each was a lure for me. How can a group share what seem to be such individual characteristics? After I escaped the trap I went to a party and experimented with the preditary eye. I used it on a strange man to see if I could call him. To my shock it worked..so now I wonder if they practice and learn these skills or are they hard wired due to the condition? No one has answered this question, although the literature reports each of the behavoirs as common.
Andrea, I think that most sociopaths are very good naturally at these luring techniques, but also because they
are so promiscuous, they hone those techniques on countless sexual partners. So they improve with time and experience.
Practice makes perfect, as they say!
Thanks for your great blog! After ending a friendship with a sociopath two years ago, I am still struggling to gain my sanity back and still in a power stuggle with this monster who has destroyed nearly every friendship and relationship in my life.
You’re welcome! Psychopaths enjoy not only hurting you directly, but also setting people against
one another so that others do the dirty work and hurt you. They like playing puppet master
with people, create enmities among them, and sit back to enjoy the drama/show. I think it would
help to refuse to engage in any way in that drama or cultivated antagonism. Your only real
enemy is the psychopath, and no contact is the only way to deal with such individuals (unless
they do something illegal, in which case collect the evidence and turn it in to the authorities). Claudia
I can’t thank you enough. Unfortunately, this blog would mean nothing to me if I hadn’t experienced what I did with my ex first. I never in a million years would have considered him a sociopath. He is a Harvard grad, the most charming person you’d ever meet and so on and so on. He lies for the sake of lying and projects his issues with drinking and his obsession with sex onto me. I was going crazy and I couldn’t figure out why. I kept trying to rationalize the actions of an irrational person. He has a huge issue with infidelity which probably isn’t shocking. Darn near every article written here perfectly describes him. It sent chills down my spine after the first article I read. I met him online and the first red flag thrown in my face (which I ignored because he had such a great excuse for it!!) was that he stated he had never been married and didn’t have kids. Both are not true! He bad mouthed every woman he had been with and so eloquently put himself in the victim role on our first date. He also has very few, if any, real friends. He has “friends” in his industry which I’ve come to realize are merely his “friends” to aid in his professional advancement. He knew exactly what he was dealing with and that I would fall for anything and stand by his side no matter what. I’m rambling, but I can’t tell you how nice it is to finally recognize that it was him and not me and that he will never change. He isn’t gone yet though.
Holly, because psychopathy has nothing to do with education or a certain type of academic intelligence,
psychopaths can come from any social background and education, including Harvard of course. Psychopaths have low emotional intelligence,
however, which makes them unable to empathize with others. They just play games at others’ expense. And because of their boredom, they
also commonly seek power and diversion in sexual perversion, as your ex did. I’m glad you found useful information on this blog. Claudia
Something else I wanted to ask/point out, he would always accuse me of having a drinking problem, obsessed with sex, and how he felt like he was the pawn in my game. All of this was very confusing to me. Is this normal for them to accuse someone of their actual shortcoming? It was almost as if he did this before I had a chance to recognize these were all issues he had. I ended up convinced that I actually had these problems. It wasn’t until I left him that I realized everything he accused me of was something that was his own issue.
Also, you comment a lot about their total lack of emotions/connections. Are they able to fake it that well?? He sure would act like he cared and I’ve even seen him cry several times. Is it possible this was sincere?
Holly, yes, psychopaths fake emotions better than people who can feel deep emotions express them. They are great actors when they want to be. But sometimes they give themselves away through inappropriate behavior or being overly dramatic. As for the accusations you describe, psychopaths usually project their flaws onto others: partly as a smear campaign of their victims, partly because they don’t have any other frame of reference or normalcy. So they believe everyone is like them, only not as crafty and intelligent. That’s why they believe they can outsmart everyone else. Claudia
Dear Carol,
I was cheated by the man more than fifty thousand and stole my jewelleries. I was trying to chase my money back from him, but he wouldnt pay me back and he told me ‘so what you can call the police, and let’s see the police will catch you or catch me, as you are just a crazy woman and i will proof to the police that you are a crazy woman and put you in the jail.
It’s was my mistake i didnt let him sign any loan agreement when i was lending him money, and right now i really dont have any proof that i lent him money before. but i was getting humiliation and threaten from him.
Now i decided to just let this issue go, as i told myself i can earn this money back, i will heal my wound, and i have a good job now, i will work hard, and i will have a good future in the future. As long as i am still mentally healthy and live happily everyday, i can have chance to retrieve everything i lost before,
Dear Ling,
Thank you dear for your supportive words….they are most helpful. Isn’t is something how those of us who have been through these difficult (to say the least!) situations with these soulless people, do feel a comraderie with one another. We may not have ever met, and yet we are well aware of one another’s stories.
I am sorry that you too lost financially to a man without a conscience. And i can understand what you are telling me about not wanting to go to the police…the psychopaths set it up so brilliantly that we are made to look crazy…and after all, while under their spell, we did give money and love to these strange creatures. Ling, i found that while i was mesmerized by this dark entity, i literally couldn’t wait to give him money!! It is truly a strange phenomenon when we are under their manipulations.
I too realized that going to the police was not going to be beneficial to me. While masquerading as a veterinarian and being on best terms with the two vets who owned the practice, he also managed to befriend the ‘top cops’ in that town. I too, like you, found that the vilification that the psychopath perptrates on their discarded targets, makes life an additional hell of –as you said–humiliation and threats.
How odd that we are the ones who have given them our money to the point that –in my case– i am bankrupt and in foreclosure– and yet we fear reprisal from them. This is the trait that only a psychopath could manage! Normal people haven’t the ability to do this to one another.
I am very happy to hear that you made the decision to let it go. This is truly the wisest path that those of us who have suffered this hell can now take. Their will never be any reclaiming what is lost, but there are brighter days ahead, as we are now free from the nightmare of those days enmeshed in the pit of the psychopathic lair.
The fact that we survived the worst human encounter –if they reallly can be called ‘human’!– and know that we have emerged wiser and sstronger…and can be an intelligent voice to possibly educate others…and as you have said, Ling, to be mentally healthy and live happily every day….we certainly do have the ability to retrieve what was lost and to find joy and worth in our lives.
I truly do wish you all the best…. Ling, i am leaving for India in a week and half….where i have a wonderful adopted family….i will certainly be thinking of you…and should you see this and reply before i leave…and would like me email while in India, i would be very happy to share that with you.
Much love and all wonderful blessings of good and happiness to you,
Carol