Dealing With Sociopaths - Best of Coast to Coast AM - 2/5/23

way she married one. Donna is the author of a number of books and the most recent, of course, Senior Sociopaths. Co author of a couple of scientific studies, she founded Love Fraud Education, which offers webinars for survivors and professionals, and has shared her expertise on numerous television, radio and online programs. Donna, welcome back. I'm looking forward to this tonight. I'm so glad to be here. George, thank you so much for having me. And how have you been? I've

been great, absolutely great. So how long were you married to the sociopath? Before were you realized he was one? I was actually only married to him for about two and a half years. That was the entire time that we were together, and I didn't figure out even after we left that he was associate. After I left him that he was associate path What he did was he took a quarter million dollars from me. He was cheating

with all kinds of women, sixtheme. I found during our marriage he had a child with one of those women. And then ten days after I left him, I found out that he had married somebody else while still married to me. Yes, which was the second time he committed bigamy. And even though I found all that out, it wasn't until I started investigating the other women that I really found out what was going on because a letter came to my mailbox which was essentially a bill of voicemail

account that I didn't know that he had. This was after I left him, and I found all these phone numbers. So I called this woman and I said, I'm Donna Anderson and I'm James Montgomery's wife, and I suggest that you don't give him any more money, and she said it's too late. I already gave him ninety two thousand dollars, So that was when I realized that my entire marriage was a financial scam. And in the first couple of weeks,

you didn't know that, didn't you. Well, I knew he was taking money from me, but he was really slick about it because he never asked for it himself. He always said that we were investing in our future. We're investing in these in his plans for building a new type of entertainment facility or a new TV station or something like that, and so it was never a hand out to him. But the whole thing was he was just using me in order to mill moved for his

grandiose dreams. And you know, once you get hooked into this situation, it becomes very difficult to get out because you've got so much invested. And from my line of thought, it was like, well, you know, the only way I'm going to get my money back is if I keep supporting him, and he just kept draining and draining and draining until there was nothing left. In your opinion, what creates the sociopath in the individual? Experts now understand that

the condition is highly genetic. It's about fifty percent genetic. So what happens is that a child can be born with a predisposition, a genetic predisposition to become disordered, and then there is the interaction of nature and nurture. So typically what happens is that the parents of a sociopath are often disordered themselves. I mean, that's how they get

the genes, and sociopaths make terrible parents. So what happens is the child gets this genetic insult, and that's the technical term for it, and then they have this terrible parenting and then you know, after you know, ten or fifteen or seventeen years, you've got another sociopath on your hands. Interesting take on all that. In what percent do you think,

Donna of sociopath that are out there right now? When I look at the research, it depends which studies you look at, but there is an average of approximately twelve percent of the population have some kind of exploitative personality disorder. And I should clarify that when I use the term sociopath, which essentially is someone who is a manipulator and exploiter and takes advantage of other people. Technically that term has no clinical meaning. The word is not an actual clinical

diagnosis anymore. But when it originally coined Essentially, what it meant was someone who has pathology in their social relationships. So I used the word sociopath as an umbrella term for people who could be diagnosed with antisocial, narcissistic, borderline, histrionic,

or psychopathic personality disorders. And the reason that I do that is because I want to warn people about all of them, you know, I mean, there are differences among these disorders, but what they have in common is that these folks do not have the ability to authentically love like the rest of us. Still, how come you didn't see this early? Well, my ex husband was slick, you know. As I said, he presented everything as investing in our future.

But besides that, he was magnetic, he was charismatic, and I certainly wasn't the only one that he was manipulating. He actually one of the things that he did in order to establish his credibility was that he claimed that he had been in the Australian military because he was originally from Australia. Although it certainly wasn't along distance relationship. He lived right down the street for me. But he claimed that he was in the Australian military and he

had served three tours of Vietnam. And while he was there, he had won the Victoria Cross, which is like the equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor. It's Australia's highest military honor. So he didn't just tell it to me. I mean, he told everybody around here. And he became active in the Vietnam's Veterans Association. He actually did presentations

to school children on Veterans Day. Oh yeah, yeah, and and and he talked a good game, and they thought that he was the real deal and he was good to come up with all these businesses that were going to make all kinds of money. He had other people investing with him, you know, besides me, and so he was just really slit and plus at the same time, he was telling me how much he loved me the whole time. And this is what they do, is that they love bomb you. They shower you with attention, they

tell you how wonderful you are. How he claimed I was the woman he was waiting for all his life. And essentially it was just to keep me hooked so that my ATM machine was still operating for him. Is that his motivation? Is it the money in this case? Yes, I mean that's not always the case. Many sociopaths go after people for things besides money. A big thing is a sex. Of course, you know, a lot of them

are just looking for a sexual fling. But also people who are sociopathic aren't looking for maybe a place to live, maybe they're looking for somebody who take care of their kids, maybe they're looking for business connections. So it's not always money. In fact, I get calls from people who are like, well, this person is you know, doing this, this and this, but he's not asking me for money, so I guess

he's not a sociopath. And that's not necessarily the truth, because essentially a sociopath, when they meet you, they figure out if you have anything that they want, and then if you do, they figure out what your vulnerabilities are, and then they use your vulnerabilities to take from you what it is that they want. Do you eventually see a change in personality from going from a nice person to a mean person for example, Well yes, although it can also go back and forth, so that makes it

even more confusing. So what typically happens almost like their bipolar I'm sorry, almost like their bipolar you know, And actually about twelve percent of people who are psychopathic or probably bipolar also because you can have both disorders, which gets really interesting, you know. But what they do is that essentially, when you meet somebody like this and they're being wonderful and they're telling you how wonderful you are, well,

essentially it's a charade. It's a mask. It's an an act that they put on in order to reel you in. And what will happen is that at some point you'll see something where the mask slips. I mean all of a sudden, you know. There there you have this flash of anger or rage or something like that, and you're like, whoa, you know, what was that? And it goes away. So you say, well, I guess he was just having a bad day or she was having a bad day, because

there are both male and female sociopaths. But then eventually, when once they get their hooks into you, they dropped the act and there they treat you like dirt. But if they're out in public in front of other people, then they put the act on again. So that's where you have the situation where somebody is, you know, wonderful in public, but behind closed doors they could actually be physically assaulting you, But they're certainly emotionally, in psychologically tormenting you.

And and you can't convince anybody that they're doing this because when they're out in public, they're wonderful exactly. That happens a lot, yes, you know, people find themselves trying to, you know, defend what's happening to them, and they just get no support because of how the sociopath is with others. How often did they fight with the sociopath? How often did you? Oh, gosh, we argued about money all the time,

you know, because I knew that things weren't working. I knew that I was paying for all the bills, I was paying all or living expenses. Did he not work, No, No, he was. He was an entrepreneur, you know. He claimed that he was working to get his businesses going. I mean, some entrepreneurs make money, this is true. Yes, And there are certainly people who are sociopathic or psychopathic who ran big corporations. I mean, for examples, the people who ran

Enron or World Colm. I mean I read those stories and the guys at the top was like, oh my goodness, that person's disordered. And so yeah, I mean, it's certainly possible for people to be successful and still be psychopathic, how do they get along with people of their own sex? Two guys for example, Well, they have friends relationships with each other, you know, because that's one of the things about sex with sociopaths. Essentially, sociopaths, especially psychopaths, want three things.

They want power, control, and sex. And of the three of them, the mostly what they want is the power, and sometimes they use the sex as a means to control people. Well, mean, do they have friends, Well, they not real friends. I mean essentially everybody that's involved in their life as someone who is useful to them. So they don't have people that they're loyal to, you know, on a friendly basis, because they simply don't have the

ability to make an honest connection with people. Interesting take on all of this, and I wouldn't guess that number could be even higher. I actually think it is because the twelve percent figure is those who could be clinically diagnosed as being disordered, whereas there are also people who have some of the traits but not all of them, and you don't want to mess with them either. And there's absolutely no estimate on how many of them there are.

But maybe there's the same amount, So we could be talking about twelve percent of the people who could be clinically diagnosed as disordered, plus maybe another twelve percent who are partially disordered, so you might be talking about a quarter of the population have some level of disorder. How can you figure out if somebody's a sociopath before you get involved with them, Well, the key is three things.

First of all, to know that they exist. And that's actually the hardest part because you know, we don't talk about this in our society, and people end up in all kinds of situations because it's not just in romance that they take advantage of you. It could be in business, it could be family members, but anyway, the first thing is to know that they exist, and then the second thing is to start to learn what the warning signs are.

And then the third is to trust your intuition, because we all have an intuition, and our intuition developed over millennia specifically to protect us from predators and from danger. So typically your intuition will tell you that something is off about somebody, but we don't listen to it because we don't know to look out for it. Are there some sociopaths that people like, well, people often like them at least for a while. You know, if you just encounter this person at a party, I mean they're the

life of the party. You know, they're telling jokes, they're energetic. But not every sociopath is the life of the party. Or let me rephrase that, not everybody who's the life of the party is a sociopath. Correct, correct, And that that's why it's important to understand that what these disorders are is a collection of traits. And you know, not

everybody who's sexy and charismatic is disordered. So it's important to understand that there is this whole matrix of traits that they can have, and in order for somebody to be disordered, you really need to have most or all of them in order to qualify what a sociopath. To give a homeless person money or would they try to take the pot away from it? Well, probably it would depend on whether or not they had an audience. You know, if they're walking down the street with somebody they wanted

to impress, they would give the money. If not, they might try to take it away. Interesting, would just ignore the person. Interesting And if you say it starts at an early age. Yeah, And you know, that's one of the things is that in some cases you can see

it in young children. I mean, I've had parents contact me who realized that they've that their partner is disordered and they have children with this person, and they start to see that even at three and four and five years old, this person, the kid is lying or doesn't have any empathy, you know, maybe with hurting animals or something like that. So it can sometimes manifest at a very young age, although typically it really chicks in with puberty.

So you see a lot of kids, you know, once they're thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years old, you really do start to see the symptoms. And then in some cases it doesn't you know, show up until seventeen or eighteen, but certainly you know, by the time they're a teenager, you usually start to see it. Well. With Dona Anderson, a couple of her books include Love Fraud, Senior Sociopaths, as

well serial Killers abuse animals when they're kids. Now, not every just abuser of an animal is a serial killer exactly, and there is some theory that some of the early signs are killing animals and bedwetting and setting fires. I mean that was discovered many many years ago that these kind of behaviors tend to show that a young person could be disordered. But there's plenty of people who are a disordered who don't do that. Like my ex husband

actually was reasonably good with animals. I mean he used to walk my dog every morning. Of course he was wearing his Special Forces beret, which was a lie, but he did that, and he would bring all these pets home, So he was good to animals. So they're not all the same. And that's the thing to understand what our really mentioning who he is. Is he still out there somewhere. No. Luckily my ex husband has passed on and I found that out over a year ago. Died. I'm sorry. How

old was he He was seventy eight, seventy nine. Okay, you're still doing the same thing before he died. Well, I know that he was fifty five when I left him, and I did hear from other people that he tried to hook up with them, so he was still, you know, going after women, and as far as what else was going on, I don't know. He went back to Australia, so I hadn't had any contact with him for like

you know, almost twenty years. But I imagine he was doing the same because as my research in the Senior socio Bok Book Senior Sociopath Book pointed out, they don't change and typically they get worse with age. Is there any good trait about a sociopath. Well, yeah, you know, when they're on their best behavior, I mean, they can be helpful, and usually they do that when they're trying to reel you in. They can sometimes show some courage.

So I mean there is this concept called successful sociopath or accessful psychopaths, and these typically are psychopaths who, as you know we mentioned before, could be business people or who you know, essentially don't get arrested is the criteria, so they can engage in it's called pro social behavior,

where they do good things. But the thing to understand about a sociopath is if they're doing it, it's because they have an agenda, and you know, they're either trying to butter you up to take advantage of you later on, or they're trying to create a reputation for themselves. I mean, I've heard of plenty who were you know, terribly being and brutal to their kids. But we're philanthropists, and we're given all their money away because they wanted to have

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