“How to read her coldness: She is preoccupied. She is unhappy. She is unhappy with you. You did something and now she’s unhappy, and you need to find out what it is so she will stop being unhappy. You talk to her. You are clear. You think you are clear. You say what you are thinking and you say it af…”— Carmen Maria Machado, amazon.com
“You might initially mistake his devaluation as a normal cooling down phase from the honeymoon period of a new relationship. The difference is, this sudden Jekyll and Hyde character switch becomes a repeated pattern throughout your relationship and you continually bear witness to someone who disrespe…”— Shahida Arabi, thoughtcatalog.com
“I would try to sleep in as late as possible so my days were shorter. I stopped listening to music entirely. I ceased to be. I was an ex-person.”— Chloe Dykstra, medium.com
“In a gut-wrenching essay on Medium, actor Chloe Dykstra describes a years-long emotionally abusive relationship with a man 20 years her senior, who she supported as he went from 'a mildly successful podcaster to a powerhouse CEO of his own company.' Though she never mentions him by name in her piece…”— Madeleine Davies, jezebel.com
“And when your self-worth reaches such depths after years of being treated like you’re worthless, you might find you think you deserve that sort of treatment, and no one else will love you.”— Chloe Dykstra, medium.com
“This kind of relationship is so common, and so easy to slip into. Normalizing behavior happens incredibly quickly, and one can lose track of what is acceptable treatment.”— Chloe Dykstra, medium.com
“When cameras were on us? He was a prince. Turn them off, he was a nightmare.”— Chloe Dykstra, medium.com
“The ultimate manipulation is to kill someone, and sociopathy is murderous in a psychological sense—there’s a kind of soul-murder going on.”— Martha Stout, interviewmagazine.com
“Why are conscience-bound human beings so blind? And why are they so hesitant to defend themselves, and the ideals and people they care about, from the minority of human beings who possess no conscience at all? A large part of the answer has to do with the emotions and thought processes that occur in…”— Martha Stout, amazon.com
“The intense charm of people who have no conscience, a kind of inexplicable charisma, has been observed and commented on by countless victims, and by researchers who attempt to catalog the diagnostic signs of sociopathy. It is a potent characteristic.”— Martha Stout, amazon.com
“In general, how can any of us live, as we all do, among significant numbers of destructive liars and con artists and fail to confront them, or even notice them?”— Martha Stout, amazon.com
“Most people without conscience are more like Skip or Stamp Man, or the mother who uses her children as tools, or the therapist who deliberately disempowers vulnerable patients, or the seduce-and-manipulate lover, or the business partner who empties the bank account and vanishes, or the charming "fri…”— Martha Stout, amazon.com
“If anything, people without conscience tend to believe their way of being in the world is superior to ours. They often speak of the naïveté of other people and their ridiculous scruples, or of their curiosity about why so many people are unwilling to manipulate others, even in the service of their m…”— Martha Stout, amazon.com
“When sociopathy and blood lust come together in the same person, the result is a dramatic-even a cinematic-nightmare, a horror figure who seems larger than life. But most sociopaths are not mass murderers or serial killers. They are not Pol Pot or Ted Bundy. Instead, most are only life-size, like th…”— Martha Stout, amazon.com
“After all, violence is conspicuous, and unless performed against the utterly powerless, such as children or animals, it is likely to get the perpetrator caught.”— Martha Stout, amazon.com
“The methods sociopaths dream up to control others - the schemes contrived to ensure "wins" - are quite various, and only a few of them have to do with physical violence.”— Martha Stout, amazon.com
“About one in twenty-five individuals are sociopathic, meaning, essentially, that they do not have a conscience. It is not that this group fails to grasp the difference between good and bad; it is that the distinction fails to limit their behavior.”— Martha Stout, amazon.com
“Very few people, no matter how educated they are in other ways, know the meaning of the word sociopathic. Far less do they understand that, in all probability, the word could be properly applied to a handful of people they actually know.”— Martha Stout, amazon.com
“The high incidence of sociopathy in human society has a profound effect on the rest of us who must live on this planet, too, even those of us who have not been clinically traumatized. The individuals who constitute this 4 percent drain our relationships, our bank accounts, our accomplishments, our s…”— Martha Stout, amazon.com
“But after twenty-five years of treating trauma survivors, I have learned that getting hit is actually one of the more bearable ways a person can be assaulted.”— Martha Stout, amazon.com