When your child is a psychopath

Seems pretty quiet in here, so I figure I&#x27;ll do a bit of spruiking. The article is definitely worth the read; I found it quite riveting.<p>The most interesting part is the suggestion that there might be effective methods of treating psychopathy&#x2F;sociopathy. This would be groundbreaking if true, as psychopathy is generally thought to be untreatable. In fact, it has been observed that treatment will often just teach psychopaths how to more effectively manipulate others.<p>Another interesting bit: brain scan studies show that psychopaths have smaller amygdalae compared to non-psychopaths. The amygdala is a part of the brain that processes emotions, particularly fear, and is implicated in &#x27;fear conditioning&#x27;. It&#x27;s basically your brain&#x27;s &quot;module&quot; for heuristic threat recognition. For example, the amygdala of an arachnophobe will light up and send the &quot;pump adrenaline&quot; signal if they are exposed to a spider. In contrast, psychopaths don&#x27;t seem to experience fear and have difficulty recognising this emotion in others:<p><i>&quot;I don’t know what you call this emotion,&quot; one psychopathic prisoner said, looking at a photo of a fearful face, &quot;but it’s what people look like just before you stab them.&quot;</i>

I have read somewhere that programmers are especially subject to sociopathy. Or rather, a lot of successful sociopaths grow up to be programmers. I believe the draw is the tiny rewards when program compiles and executes. At least for me personally.<p>I grew up a happy child in a middle class home and the symptoms didn&#x27;t manifest until when I was 17. Looking back, I started a pattern of petty crimes such as shoplifting, sabotaging school computer, spamming teachers&#x27; inboxes, stealing answers to exams. I had 3 ultimatums from school. Because nobody understood computers at the time, I did complete my high school and got into a relatively good college for CS.<p>Just before graduation, my friend whom I bullied emotionally for 4 months attempted commit suicide. This is when I started to realize what I have become. I consider myself lucky because of the latent manifestations of sociopathic behaviors, which exempts me from further punitive conditioning from society forces.

<i>&quot;Psychopaths have always been with us. Indeed, certain psychopathic traits have survived because they’re useful in small doses: the cool dispassion of a surgeon, the tunnel vision of an Olympic athlete, the ambitious narcissism of many a politician.&quot;</i><p><i>&quot;The condition can go unnoticed because many children with these traits—who can be charming and smart enough to mimic social cues—are able to mask them.&quot;</i><p>This claim comes interestingly close to that of Pieter Hintjens&#x27; in his blog and book: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hintjens.com&#x2F;blog:_psychopaths" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hintjens.com&#x2F;blog:_psychopaths</a>

&quot;No evidence of abuse&quot; Ha. So, some people just turn out this way, for no reason?<p>I think I know what &quot;no evidence of abuse&quot; means, having lived through it. It means everyone believes you deserve it, or that it doesn&#x27;t harm you, or that the people who are supposed to report and investigate abuse are at least not doing their jobs or are predators themselves. The kid shows up at school with a burnt hand, or bloodied and bruised. The kid describes watching pornography, being given drugs, and physical and sexual abuse in front of the teacher at age ten. The kid&#x27;s parents admit, in direct language, to social workers and law enforcement that they commit abuse. A teacher visits the house and witnesses drunken dad beating up on the kid. The kid turns in a writing assignment which is a recollection of sexual abuse. Police officers eyewitness the kid being assaulted, take reports of abuse from the kid after the fact, and the dispatchers document requests for assistance. These are just some of the things that can add up to &quot;no evidence of abuse.&quot;<p>I believe that it is no miracle that when I no longer experienced physical, sexual and drug abuse and psychological torture, that after some time I began to not hate, want to kill or harm, and be devoid of respect for anything, everything, and everyone. However, these experiences left me crippled because I was prevented from developing into a normal human being. Somehow, I managed to not physically harm or destroy anything more, and only caused emotional pain inadvertently (something that I feel shame and regret for - nB I did not experience these feelings at all during the first twenty years of my life.)<p>It was many years, only after I healed enough to begin processing my experiences and realized that these things should not have happened to me, and that many people should have acted differently, before I wanted to harm anything again. Nowadays, instead of anything and everything, I would like to cause harm, pain and suffering to some of the principals and accessories of the abuse I experienced. I have developed, despite tardily, a sense of morals that prevents me from committing crimes and doing evil, and a sense of justice that leaves me unable to forget that these people are still alive, not punished, and will die without paying for their crimes. The juvenile probation officer whose fat thighs flash before my eyes every time I try to be intimate with my wife, because her jowly privates were the first I&#x27;d smelled, decades ago. The principal who accused me of a petty theft from a class I never went to, who grabbed me and spread me open when I didn&#x27;t understand what he meant by &#x27;grab your buttocks.&#x27; The psychotherapist who listed and billed for me as a patient, despite primarily teaching my family members how to continue their abuse and remain undetected while manipulating me with shame to not speak of it. The Chesapeake Police officers who threw my reports away, and the Virginia State Police agents who threatened me with arrest should I not stop complaining about abuse. I want them to live long, and suffer in pain every day, and terrible as this is, to watch their innocent grandchildren be abused and know the ability to determine the terms of their first sexual experience was taken from them. I simply cannot stop fantasizing about harm coming to these people.<p>I want to stop thinking these things, and instead take care of my self and family. Instead of calling me a schizo or a psychopath, they now say I have PTSD and reassuredly tell me that I&#x27;m a victim and my thoughts are rational.