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"You don't drown by falling in the water. You drown by staying there."
Edwin Louis Cole Excerpts from 'The Emptied Soul' - by Adolf Guggenbuhl-Craig "Another trait, important for everyone who deals with a psychopath, is their ability to evoke pity; the same kind of pity we feel towards invalids or experience for helpless and sick children. They seem completely helpless, lost in a world where they do not belong. Again and again they try to adjust and to cope, in a fashion that always falls a bit shy of the mark. They are eternal strangers, arousing in each of us a longing to help, a feeling we experience with helpless human beings. Often this pity creates difficulties, and many is the person who falls prey to it. We often try to be kind to these "poor" people, and they are "poor" people - our pity is justifiable. However the problem is that psychopaths readily manipulate those around them through just such pity. Women are often victimized: mothering instincts are aroused, or the Archetype of the Nurse is constellated. They want to protect and care for the poor, sick thing and understandably so, for psychopaths strike protective chords and speak to the desire to help and heal."
"[Therapists] who have to deal with psychopaths readily succumb to savior fantasies. Confronted by a phenomenon which simply should not be, which somehow must be changed, they set out to save these individuals.... We would like to believe that we can help anyone who comes, for whatever reasons, seeking our help. We would like to believe that no symptom, no complaint, no difficulty can withstand our talent, our ability, and our understanding. Here we get caught, as they say, between a rock and a hard place. Since psychopaths understand our weakness, our need to help them against our better judgment, they can use us, manipulating us to the point where we start defending them, writing letters of recommendation for them and the like. To take the situation one step further, we react to psychopaths as we react to all human beings. We feel pity and sympathy, savior fantasies are called forth, our feelings of mothering and fathering are awakened."
Question your tendency to pity too easily.
Respect should be reserved for the kind and the morally courageous. Pity is another socially valuable response, and should be reserved for innocent people who are in genuine pain or who have fallen on misfortune. If, instead, you find yourself often pitying someone who consistently hurts you or other people, and who actively campaigns for your sympathy, the chances are close to one hundred percent that you are dealing with a sociopath.
Related to this-- I recommend that you severely challenge your need to be polite in absolutely all situations. For normal adults in our culture, being what we think of as "civilized" is like a reflex, and often we find ourselves being automatically decorous even when someone has enraged us, repeatedly lied to us, or figuratively stabbed us in the back. Sociopaths take huge advantage of this automatic courtesy in exploitive situations.
Thirteen Rules for Dealing with Sociopaths in Everyday Life Martha Stout - Interview
Author: The Sociopath Next Door
http://www.bookbrowse.com/author_interviews/full/index.cfm?author_number=1097 From: Without Conscience, The Disturbing World of The Psychopaths Among Us by Dr. Robert Hare, Ph.D.
Set firm ground rules: Although power struggles with a psychopath are risky at best, you may be able to set up some clear ground rules, both for yourself and for the psychopath, to make your life easier and begin the difficult transition from victim to a person looking out for yourself. For example, this may mean that you will no longer bail him or her out of trouble, no matter what the circumstances. Helplessness and Neediness of Relationship Partners Maybe you get hooked by the neediness and helplessness of your relationship partners. You find yourself hooked when your partners get into self-pity, "poor me" and "how tough life has been." You find yourself weak when your relationship partners demonstrates an inability to solve personal problems.
10 Hooks that Keep you in Boundary-Less Relationships
http://www.coping.org/relations/boundar/alertb.htm
Why are narcissists so hard to leave?"Narcissism is also about feelings of sadness and depression. So the classic narcissistic partner has this 'look-at-me' quality, but also has this 'oh poor me, I really need help.' They draw you in with the sadness and the emptiness and you feel that somehow you can fill this void. And you tell yourself, he really loves me -- even though he's cheating on me every other night of the week."
Review of Help! I’m in Love With a Narcissist, by relationship authors Julia Sokol and Steven Carter. (M. Evans and Co. by Kristin Dizon for Seattle Post Intelligencer
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/lifestyle/219049_narcissist07.html But he does not need companionship, emotional support, let alone true partnership. There is no beast on earth more self-sufficient than a narcissist. Years of unpredictability in his relationships with meaningful others, early on abuse, sometimes decades of violence, aggression, instability and humiliation - have eroded the narcissist's trust in others to the point of disappearance. The narcissist knows that he can rely only on one stable, unconditional source of love: himself.
MALIGNANT SELF LOVE NARCISSISM RE-VISITED UNIQUENESS AND INTIMACY By: SAM VAKNIN, Ph.D.
http://samvak.tripod.com/msla2.html (song - turn on speakers!)
Cupid Works for the Devil
Be suspcious if he cries
I'm a magnet for the fixer-upper man!
http://www.minibite.com/send/mendont.htm 
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