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Feeling strong-armed by your loved one?
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<blockquote data-quote="mrsammler" data-source="post: 409115"><p>Very interesting and thoughtful posts here. I should add that I certainly wasn't arguing that all difficult children are sociopaths--I was asserting that, once a teen/young adult difficult child starts behaving violently toward family members, you've got to seriously consider getting him out of the house, because the threat of really disastrous mayhem is very real, and all the parental love in the world won't unplunge that butcher knife that's embedded in your chest. I should also add that I didn't "tell my sister what to do"--I knew better than that. I did tell her that, after a ton of reading on my part and a ton of sober observation of her difficult child, it sure looked like he'd score very high (way over 30, which is the cut-off) on the Hare Psychopathy Checklist, and that she needed to wake up and smell the coffee if she wanted to remain safe and to keep her younger son safe, as I couldn't stick around forever and, due to my dawning awareness of what difficult child was, I didn't see things likely to change any time soon, or at all. </p><p></p><p>If was a bit too emphatic in my first post, it's because her difficult child literally chased her out of the house, down the driveway, and out into the street with a knife when he was 15, and if the neighbors hadn't all rushed out of their houses to protect her and summon the police, god knows what would've happened. (This was long before I arrived there.) By the time I arrived on the scene a year or so later, that episode had been gradually sanitized in her memory, diminished in severity, and ultimately entirely paper-over, denied, and banned from discussion. This was, after all, her darling boy, and he needed help. Having seen this process (or its outcome, anyway) of selective memory and gradual dismissal of threatening facts, I can see how it might be the case in many homes with difficult children, and how that can pose a real threat--one that's easily seen from the outside but almost invisible to those in the family because they're so acclimated to terrible conditions, as my sister and younger nephew were. Hence my urgent counsel to act emphatically and decisively once the difficult child goes to violence. Violence, as I said earlier, changes *everything* in so many durable, possibly permanent ways: the harm it does, obviously, and the horrific, unthinkable harm it can do at its worst extremes. But also the terrible impact it has on family relations: I really loved my nephew before all of this happened, but after being assaulted a handful of times--well, there's nothing quite like the alteration of regard that you have for someone after he's assaulted you. Love quickly curdles into loathing--at least for me it did. And as you note, I wasn't his parent, so perhaps it was easier for me to write him off, to despise him. But that makes the threat to parents that much greater: because they're understandably unlikely or unable to develop that decisive, protective, get-him-out-of-the-house frame of mind when it's called for and necessary. So please--be safe. Some of these difficult child stories scare the dickens out of me--the threat or reality of violence is practically palpable. </p><p></p><p>My nephew, by the way, also spat on his mother, many times. Spat in her face. His *widowed* mother. My sense is that any kid who does *that* is a hair-trigger away from violence and, in my reckoning, deserves to be pitched headlong out the front door, never to return. YMMV, of course.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="mrsammler, post: 409115"] Very interesting and thoughtful posts here. I should add that I certainly wasn't arguing that all difficult children are sociopaths--I was asserting that, once a teen/young adult difficult child starts behaving violently toward family members, you've got to seriously consider getting him out of the house, because the threat of really disastrous mayhem is very real, and all the parental love in the world won't unplunge that butcher knife that's embedded in your chest. I should also add that I didn't "tell my sister what to do"--I knew better than that. I did tell her that, after a ton of reading on my part and a ton of sober observation of her difficult child, it sure looked like he'd score very high (way over 30, which is the cut-off) on the Hare Psychopathy Checklist, and that she needed to wake up and smell the coffee if she wanted to remain safe and to keep her younger son safe, as I couldn't stick around forever and, due to my dawning awareness of what difficult child was, I didn't see things likely to change any time soon, or at all. If was a bit too emphatic in my first post, it's because her difficult child literally chased her out of the house, down the driveway, and out into the street with a knife when he was 15, and if the neighbors hadn't all rushed out of their houses to protect her and summon the police, god knows what would've happened. (This was long before I arrived there.) By the time I arrived on the scene a year or so later, that episode had been gradually sanitized in her memory, diminished in severity, and ultimately entirely paper-over, denied, and banned from discussion. This was, after all, her darling boy, and he needed help. Having seen this process (or its outcome, anyway) of selective memory and gradual dismissal of threatening facts, I can see how it might be the case in many homes with difficult children, and how that can pose a real threat--one that's easily seen from the outside but almost invisible to those in the family because they're so acclimated to terrible conditions, as my sister and younger nephew were. Hence my urgent counsel to act emphatically and decisively once the difficult child goes to violence. Violence, as I said earlier, changes *everything* in so many durable, possibly permanent ways: the harm it does, obviously, and the horrific, unthinkable harm it can do at its worst extremes. But also the terrible impact it has on family relations: I really loved my nephew before all of this happened, but after being assaulted a handful of times--well, there's nothing quite like the alteration of regard that you have for someone after he's assaulted you. Love quickly curdles into loathing--at least for me it did. And as you note, I wasn't his parent, so perhaps it was easier for me to write him off, to despise him. But that makes the threat to parents that much greater: because they're understandably unlikely or unable to develop that decisive, protective, get-him-out-of-the-house frame of mind when it's called for and necessary. So please--be safe. Some of these difficult child stories scare the dickens out of me--the threat or reality of violence is practically palpable. My nephew, by the way, also spat on his mother, many times. Spat in her face. His *widowed* mother. My sense is that any kid who does *that* is a hair-trigger away from violence and, in my reckoning, deserves to be pitched headlong out the front door, never to return. YMMV, of course. [/QUOTE]
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