Hope and concrete solutions for those who are currently dealing with a sociopath
OUTSMARTING THE SOCIOPATH NEXT DOOR: How to Protect Yourself Against a Ruthless Manipulator
by Martha Stout’s
Crown/Harmony Avril 2020
Stout’s 2005 bestseller The Sociopath Next Door (534,000 copies sold to date) showed readers how to identify a sociopath. In this new work, she takes a step further by examining the personal and global implications of sociopathy, providing hope and concrete solutions for those who are currently dealing with a sociopath.Bringing together the countless e-mails, phone calls, and letters that she has collected from readers since the publication of The Sociopath Next Door, Martha Stout mines these accounts for their inherent instruction and fascination, and makes the issue of conscience, or the lack thereof, riveting and relevant to a wide audience.
Organized around categories such as destructive narcissism, violent sociopaths, sociopathic coworkers, and the sociopath in your family, each chapter contains representative stories from « everyday people, » as well as Stout’s detailed explanation and commentary on how best to react in these situations to keep the sociopath at bay. Uniting these categories is Stout’s discussion of changing psychological theories of personality and sociopathy and the enduring triumph of conscience over those who operate without empathy or concern for others. With Outsmarting the Sociopath Next Door, Stout aims to help readers navigate their interactions with the ruthless people in their personal lives and to inform society’s broader interest in character and conceptions of normality.
MARTHA STOUT, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist in private practice, served on the faculty in psychology in the department of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School for 25 years. She is the author of The Sociopath Next Door and The Myth of Sanity.
Empathy is in short supply. Isolation and tribalism are rampant. We struggle to understand people who aren’t like us, but find it easy to hate them. Studies show that we are less caring than we were even thirty years ago. In 2006, Barack Obama said that the United States is suffering from an “empathy deficit.” Since then, things only seem to have gotten worse. It doesn’t have to be this way. In this groundbreaking book, Jamil Zaki argues that empathy is not a fixed trait—something we’re born with or not—but rather a skill that we can all strengthen through effort. Drawing on both classic and cutting-edge research, including experiments from his own lab, Zaki shows how we can harness this new mindset to overcome toxic cultural divisions. He also tells the stories of people who are living these principles—fighting for kindness in the most difficult of circumstances. We meet a former neo-Nazi who is now helping extract people from hate groups, ex-prisoners discussing novels with the judge who sentenced them, Washington police officers changing their culture to decrease violence among their ranks, and NICU nurses fine-tuning their empathy so that they don’t succumb to burnout. Written with clarity and passion, The War for Kindness is an inspiring call to action. The future may depend on whether we accept the challenge.