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Feeling strong-armed by your loved one?
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<blockquote data-quote="mrsammler" data-source="post: 409430"><p>Stars,</p><p></p><p>Thank you for your kind and thoughtful response. And I must say that I admire you enormously for having survived your time with your ex and for having found a way to steer your son away from what must've seemed like a certain outcome for a while there. That's very good work, and you should be proud.</p><p></p><p>I'll contemplate what you've advised me regarding my sister and nephew. It's not my desire to convince anyone here that I'm right or to defend my view of that situation, but I will say that, for the sake of brevity, I excluded a ton of incidents and details which would've, had I been so inclined, further supported my estimation of my nephew's problems. But I have no investment in being certain that he's a sociopath, and as I told his mother a handful of times, I'd love to be wrong about this. I'm very aware that only a trained clinician can make that sort of diagnosis, at the same time that I'm also aware that one can use the Hare PCL as objectively as possible, via lengthy observation and knowing the whole story from "door to door," and arrive at a fairly reliable estimation of things, especially if the checklist's outcome is a very emphatic score rather than vague midpoint between clinical categories/boundaries and/or a judgment call.</p><p></p><p>I worried very much about bringing up the issue of psychopathy in this forum because a) this is a parent's forum and everyone has a very understandable investment in a parent's fondest hope that things will eventually turn out OK for their kids, and b) the term has become SO negatively loaded with emphatic connotations of "irredeemable, nakedly grotesque and lethally dangerous evil" via its portrayal in movies and mass media, when in fact the actual experience of observing or living with a psychopath (which Hervey Cleckley delineates so clearly and emphatically in his landmark book on the subject, The Mask of Sanity) is much more marked by great tedium--they live the same day over and over and over again, as in the movie Groundhog Day--and the constant, low-level frustration and annoyance of living with what is behaviorally, as a psychologist friend of mine once accurately said about psychopaths, "a complete and utter a**hole." The vast majority of Ps aren't Hannibal Lector, not by a long shot: they're just incorrigibly selfish, amoral, very immature jerks who are additionally very inclined toward addictions and criminality/antisocial behavior, with a few additional behavioral spices thrown in for good measure. I never saw my nephew as evil (although one is tempted at times); I saw him as pitiably stunted and immature and incapable of learning or making productive or useful decisions. That's how one typically regards and experiences a P. In my experience, unfortunately, towering rages and violence were a frequent part of the picture as well, and that really changes and darkens one's perception of *any* person, not just Ps. You avoid. You begin to dislike, and then loathe. You bear a constant grudge, even as you know you shouldn't (this is the real downside of being assaulted by someone, especially if he's never punished and he never apologizes: it's very very hard to forgive or to stop feeling angry).</p><p></p><p>I know that many of you--maybe most--deal with many of the same behaviors in your difficult children that I've described here, and sometimes all of them at once. And I know that not all, or even most, or even a notable percentage, of your difficult children are psychopaths. And I know that a very headstrong adolescence + anger + some developmental issues, especially when an addiction is added to the mix, can really present very similarly to psychopathy. And as far as I'm concerned, whether it's outright psychopathy or just a bad mixture of causative influences that effectively & closely simulate psychopathy, either way--if there's violence in the mix--they might as well be one and the same, and should be responded to with equal wariness and very keen concern for one's safety and that of one's other family members. A kid who's not a P but who's in such a state of fury and dysfunction that, for 30 minutes, he's acting exactly like a P *might as well be a P* for that period of time. Which means that you need to protect yourself and your loved ones just as if he were a P.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="mrsammler, post: 409430"] Stars, Thank you for your kind and thoughtful response. And I must say that I admire you enormously for having survived your time with your ex and for having found a way to steer your son away from what must've seemed like a certain outcome for a while there. That's very good work, and you should be proud. I'll contemplate what you've advised me regarding my sister and nephew. It's not my desire to convince anyone here that I'm right or to defend my view of that situation, but I will say that, for the sake of brevity, I excluded a ton of incidents and details which would've, had I been so inclined, further supported my estimation of my nephew's problems. But I have no investment in being certain that he's a sociopath, and as I told his mother a handful of times, I'd love to be wrong about this. I'm very aware that only a trained clinician can make that sort of diagnosis, at the same time that I'm also aware that one can use the Hare PCL as objectively as possible, via lengthy observation and knowing the whole story from "door to door," and arrive at a fairly reliable estimation of things, especially if the checklist's outcome is a very emphatic score rather than vague midpoint between clinical categories/boundaries and/or a judgment call. I worried very much about bringing up the issue of psychopathy in this forum because a) this is a parent's forum and everyone has a very understandable investment in a parent's fondest hope that things will eventually turn out OK for their kids, and b) the term has become SO negatively loaded with emphatic connotations of "irredeemable, nakedly grotesque and lethally dangerous evil" via its portrayal in movies and mass media, when in fact the actual experience of observing or living with a psychopath (which Hervey Cleckley delineates so clearly and emphatically in his landmark book on the subject, The Mask of Sanity) is much more marked by great tedium--they live the same day over and over and over again, as in the movie Groundhog Day--and the constant, low-level frustration and annoyance of living with what is behaviorally, as a psychologist friend of mine once accurately said about psychopaths, "a complete and utter a**hole." The vast majority of Ps aren't Hannibal Lector, not by a long shot: they're just incorrigibly selfish, amoral, very immature jerks who are additionally very inclined toward addictions and criminality/antisocial behavior, with a few additional behavioral spices thrown in for good measure. I never saw my nephew as evil (although one is tempted at times); I saw him as pitiably stunted and immature and incapable of learning or making productive or useful decisions. That's how one typically regards and experiences a P. In my experience, unfortunately, towering rages and violence were a frequent part of the picture as well, and that really changes and darkens one's perception of *any* person, not just Ps. You avoid. You begin to dislike, and then loathe. You bear a constant grudge, even as you know you shouldn't (this is the real downside of being assaulted by someone, especially if he's never punished and he never apologizes: it's very very hard to forgive or to stop feeling angry). I know that many of you--maybe most--deal with many of the same behaviors in your difficult children that I've described here, and sometimes all of them at once. And I know that not all, or even most, or even a notable percentage, of your difficult children are psychopaths. And I know that a very headstrong adolescence + anger + some developmental issues, especially when an addiction is added to the mix, can really present very similarly to psychopathy. And as far as I'm concerned, whether it's outright psychopathy or just a bad mixture of causative influences that effectively & closely simulate psychopathy, either way--if there's violence in the mix--they might as well be one and the same, and should be responded to with equal wariness and very keen concern for one's safety and that of one's other family members. A kid who's not a P but who's in such a state of fury and dysfunction that, for 30 minutes, he's acting exactly like a P *might as well be a P* for that period of time. Which means that you need to protect yourself and your loved ones just as if he were a P. [/QUOTE]
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