Women Who Love Psychopaths

An interview with Sandra Brown, and a note on prevention

Back in May the MindMatters guys and I interviewed Sandra Brown about the latest edition (2018) of her book, Women Who Love Psychopaths, co-authored with Jennifer Young. I had read the second edition over ten years ago so was eager to hear what new research she had done on the topic. Here is our discussion:

Psychotherapist, educator, researcher, and author of the books Women Who Live Psychopaths, How to Spot a Dangerous Man, and many others, Sandra L. Brown’s insights have helped many face—and heal from—the damage inflicted by psychopaths and the personality disordered. Expanding on her work as a therapist and author, Sandra Brown has developed the training for thousands of therapists who now understand, and are better able to treat, cognitive dissonance, PTSD, and the neurocognitive damage to executive brain function that many victims suffer.

Join us this week on MindMatters as we look back at Sandra Brown’s influential writings, what she’s been working on since the release of her books, and how her views and perspectives since then might affect what she’d focus on if she were writing these books today—more than 18 years later.

• Safe Relationships Magazine

• Association for NPD/Psychopathy Survivor Treatment, Research & Education

In the book and interview, Sandra references an article that will go to press eventually in collaboration with Douglas B. Samuel of the Department of Psychology at Purdue University. You can read a draft of it on Sandra’s website here. The abstract reads:

Relationships involving people with antisocial (ASPD), borderline (BPD), and narcissistic (NPD) personality disorders are known to be distressing to partners. There is a relative dearth of research, however, into the personalities of the partners of people with ASPD, BPD, and NPD. The current study examines the personalities of women in relationships with men with ASPD, BPD, or NPD.

Participants completed a battery of online questionnaires, including measures of normal range personality traits for both the participant and their partner, extreme ends of personality traits for both the participant and their partner, and partners’ personality disorder features.

We found that our sample of women was significantly more conscientious and agreeable than a normative sample on both personality scales given. We also conducted a latent profile analysis to account for multiple, conflicting personality profiles that may skew the whole sample comparisons. We found 4 personality profiles for each personality measure that are consistently high on agreeableness and conscientiousness but vary on neuroticism and extraversion.

Our results suggest that that there are several distinct personality profiles of women who find themselves in a relationship with men perceived as high in maladaptive personality features. This information can be used in testing interventions addressing the maladaptive personality features in the men, as the interaction between both partners’ personalities can negate successful interventions aimed at personality. In addition, future research on this topic can determine if these deviations in personality are a result of the relationship or could indicate a vulnerability to entering these maladaptive relationships.

Lobaczewski thought that there should be public education about personality disorders, with a focus on educating women about psychopathy and how to avoid psychopathic partners. Sandra and her team’s work is especially helpful in this regard, allowing women to discover if they have a personality profile that potentially puts them more at risk of staying in a “pathological love relationship.” As we put it in the show, agreeableness gets them into the relationship, conscientious makes them stay there.

Preventive Measures

Lobaczewski also thought that if women knew the red flags, and avoided psychopathic men as a result, fewer psychopathic children would be born of such unions, eventually lowering the incidence of psychopathy in the general population.

While not an aspect of the paper above, I’ve been thinking about this question lately while working on Logocracy. Actively taking steps to avoid psychopathic partners requires a degree of conscientiousness (i.e. self-control). Luckily the women with the above profile(s) have that. Conscientiousness combined with a degree of intelligence should be enough either to convince these women to avoid such men, or to give them the understanding they need to get out of such relationships.

But these are the women in relationships with such men, not necessarily those with children resulting from a short or very brief relationship with them. In other words, what about the women who aren’t very conscientious? How effective would education be in those cases? And what are the statistics for the number of children such relationships produce compared to the long-term relationships? I doubt there are many, if any, such studies, but it would be nice to know.

Add on top of that the wider problem of sociopathy, which psychologist David T. Lykken defines as “the larger fraction [of the population] who have grown up unsocialized primarily because of environmental rather than genetic reasons.” If the incidence of psychopathy is around 1%, that of sociopathy is at least 3 to 4 times that. And the primary cause: single motherhood. Simply growing up without a father increases the likelihood of sociopathy 7 times, and by pretty much any indicator of childhood deviance (theft, arson, violence, murder, teenage pregnancy, etc.), 70% of such kids live in a single-parent (overwhelmingly single-mother) home.

In his chapter for Theodore Millon et al.’s 1998 handbook on psychopathy,¹ Lykken quotes Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who wrote in 1969:

From the wild Irish slums of the 19th Century Eastern seaboard to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles, there is one unmistakable lesson in American history: a community that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future—that community asks for and gets chaos. Crime, violence, unrest, unrestrained lashing out at the whole social structure—that is not only to be expected; it is very near to inevitable.

Over the past couple generations, the rate of sociopathy has grown faster than the population. Lykken chalks this up to the social contagion effect of sociopathy. For example, kids with average parents in urban or suburban neighborhoods are more likely to be influenced by their worst peers in the absence of a strong and healthy community such as one finds in traditional societies or small towns and villages. Not only do sociopathic parents tend to produce sociopathic children, but such kids manage to corrupt the socialization of kids who might otherwise avoid such a fate.

Lykken proposes three preventive measures. First is parental guidance programs (perhaps like the Fast Track Project). Second is alternative rearing environments like professionalized foster homes and single-sex boarding schools. Both are expensive, but not as expensive as the combined economic and social costs of unrestrained sociopathy. And when done right, both are effective. But on their own, these first two measures are mostly bandaids, which leads to the third and perhaps the most controversial: parental licensure. Horrified? Well, up until recently, with the advent of no-fault divorce and the sexual revolution, we had something that was in essence the same thing. It was called a marriage license.

The taboo against out-of-wedlock children was strong prior to WWII. It was understood that one must get married in order to have children, and getting married required a license. As recently as 1960, only 5% of American children were born out of wedlock. Today that number is 40%. (For African Americans, that number was consistently 20% from 1890 to 1960; now it is over 70%.) Lykken’s conclusion is stark: “In the United States today, it can be said that we are operating a veritable factory of crime.”

He writes:

What we shall find upstream [of the socialization problem] is increasing numbers of immature, indifferent, unsocialized, or incompetent people, most of them unmarried and many economically dependent, who are having children whom they cannot or will not competently rear. The licensure of parenthood is the only real solution to the problem of sociopathy and crime.

In most jurisdictions, children are given for adoption only to mature married couples who are self-supporting and neither criminal nor incapacitated by psychiatric illness. If only these minimal requirements were made of persons wishing to retain custody of a child they have produced biologically, millions of American children would be saved each year…, and hundreds of billions of tax dollars would be saved … No average couple would be discommoded by a statute that required biological parents to meet the criteria demanded of persons who wish to adopt a child.

Millions of indifferent or incompetent mothers hold parental rights over millions of fatherless children. Not all of these, perhaps, but millions still are growing up like wild things, in environments of filth, chaos, violence, substance abuse, child abuse, and crime. Juvenile corrections agencies, child protection agencies, probation and parole officers, the adult prison system—all are overwhelmed.

Now factor in that the fathers of such children are more likely to be psychopathic and/or sociopathic. With each generation, the numbers of psychopaths will steadily increase, and that of sociopaths will increase even faster.

Whether or not parental licensure could or ever would be implemented is an open question. At the very least it would be difficult. But popularizing information about dangerous personality disorders and pathological love relationships is clearly a place to start, and relatively easier to implement. So check out the interview and get yourself a copy of Sandra and Jennifer’s book. Maybe get another copy to give to a friend or family member, too.

1. Lykken, David. “The Case for Parental Licensure.” In: Theodore Millon, Erik Simonsen, Morten Birket-Smith, and Roger D. Davis (eds.), Psychopathy: Antisocial, Criminal, and Violent Behavior (New York: Guildford Press, 1998): 122–143.