I'm new to this forum and am finding it so awesome! Thanks everyone. I spent weeks "diagnosing" my alcoholic ex by reading up on scores of personality disorders, to uncover what was *beneath* the alcoholism or like *in addition* to the alcoholism and it ultimately seemed like a pretty big waste of time because it seems like alcoholism is enough of a problem on its own and that there might not actually need to be some other additional thing which would account for his insane behaviours. When i asked my ex why he'd treated me so off-the-hook terribly he just told me that he was probably a sociopath. I feel like his self-diagnosis appealed to him in some way--like that he was proud of himself for it--probably because it enabled him to be totally unaccountable yet again.