Avoiding the Domino Effect - safe guarding your children and others'

To the reader who wrote: "Pretty ironic this is also my first child, huh? Of course I've learned a great deal of patience and my other 3 children are not like him at all, quite the opposite actually."

I reply: It is even scarier when it is your oldest child.  Misery loves company and our son did everything in his power to entice his younger siblings (and the neighbor children) to join him. He provided them with substances and other things that would curl your toes.  He also constantly undermined our parenting.  Whatever we told our children, he'd pull them aside and tell them how awful and unfair and twisted our rules and standards were.  His younger brother was very lost for years and we nearly lost him physically because of it.  He is finding it a long, uphill climb to get out of the hole his brother drug him into at a very tender age.

It was horrifying to watch the domino effect taking place in our family.  We did everything we could, but it wasn't enough.  We learned to take a harder line with the first two and have been able to save the younger ones from falling in line.  Here are some of  the things we learned:

I would recommend that you limit the influence this child has on the others as much as possible.  It is not a good idea for him to be sharing a bedroom with a younger siblings where there is too much privacy and opportunity to "indoctrinate" them and share his substances if he is into them. I would recommend a very firm rule about him not being in their bedrooms and vice-versa, especially if you have a daughter!  You don't know at this point what his potential for wrong doing is, so better safe than sorry.  I wish I had learned that earlier, but I kept trying to give him the benefit of the doubt. 
There is much you can do to protect the younger ones without sending your son a message of complete distrust.  Rely on your parenting instincts.

I would recommend eliminating sleep overs.  Just like with measles, you do not want to be responsible for your sick child infecting your friends' otherwise healthy children, and  your sick child will try!

If you have good grandparents in the picture, enlist them to help you.  They can reassure the younger ones that big brother is temporarily lost and that mom and dad are not over-the-top in their discipline, etc. 

People kept telling us that sending the problem child away wouldn't help because he'd get into trouble where ever he was.  This is true, and we didn't have any place to send him anyway, but in retrospect, I know that it would have saved the younger one if we had sent the older child elsewhere to live.  We felt like he was our problem though, and that we shouldn't push our responsibilities off on anyone else, but hind sight is 20/20...

If your child has conduct disorder and you can afford it, boot camp or one of the other options for troubled teens is the best place if you have younger children.

On the News- Parents find little help in dealing with psychopathic, sociopathic children

When a local reporter was doing a story on mental illness in prisons, I followed with interest and then  suggested a follow-up on Sociopathy.  I was surprised when they wanted to interview me, and agreed only on the condition that it, like this blog, be done anonymously.  It was a scary undertaking for my family and I very nearly backed out, but I truly feel that this information needs to get out there to more people because knowledge is power to protect oneself and one's family.

http://www.ksl.com/index.php?nid=148&sid=15518791

I suggest you also check out the link she shared on sociopath vs. psychopath. This was new information to me, though sadly, not very comforting.

http://helpingpsychology.com/sociopath-vs-psychopath-whats-the-difference

Take Time to Mourn the Sociopath

Grieving and mourning aren't just for those that have lost a loved one to death.  There are other ways to lose a loved one and the pain is just as real and possibly even more complicated.

For us, we lost our sweet little boy to sociopathy.  It's not so different than losing a child to cancer, and yet it is, because the child is still around, but in a different form and causing trouble.  We don't recognize or like the man he has become.  We truly grieve that lost son.

Taking the time to mourn is absolutely essential when you are dealing with a family member that is a sociopath.  They are self-destructing and likely trying to destroy the entire family.  Much is lost.

As a mother, my grief would build up as I tried to take care of the rest of my family despite what our son was putting us through.  I would eventually come to a point where I knew I had to let it out or bust.

I found that the best method for me was to get my husband off to work, my children off to school and take the phone off the hook.  Then I would take the time to write, cry and pray and get some mourning done.  By the time the family returned in the afternoon, I would have showered, applied make up and I'd be ready to "be there" for them. 

Grief is work and must be worked through.  Avoiding it or masking it with alcohol or drugs doesn't make it go away, it only postpones it.  Grief postponed is grief that is magnified.  Get it done as you go.  It can't be avoided.  You may think you can hold it in, but you can't.  It will manifest itself phsically and it won't be pleasant. 

More on that next time and in the interim, be good to yourself! 

Held Hostage by a Sociopathic Child!

The first time I shared this blog with friends, I got a reply back almost immediately from an old friend who lives in another state.

"Your son is MY daughter. I am not just saying that. Between her domestic violence charges for attacks on me, to her being picked up smoking drugs. It is soooooo hard to deal with. I am to the point where I am literally counting the days until she turns 18. In fact, there are 118 days for me to remain hostage in my own house with this terror."

I'm sure that my friend, like me, had no idea when she held her sweet little baby in her arms of the utter turmoil that child would eventually throw the entire family into.  That is the nature of this disease.

I think that it is important for others to realize the horrors of being held hostage in your own home by your own child.  This girl has threatened to kill her mother while she sleeps!  If anybody else in the world had done that, there would be serious repercussions.  If older, it would qualify as punishable under Elder Abuse laws.  But when it is your own child, you are legally required to  keep them in your home. 

I'm a pretty stoic person, but I remember hours spent sobbing on the phone, with various social workers and agencies trying to no avail to find help protecting my other children from our son. 

We well remember a time when our son had been a runaway and then we got the call in the middle of the night that the police had picked him up for urinating on a playground.  We had no desire to pick him up and bring him back into our home, but we also didn't want to face charges ourselves or risk having our other children removed, so we put him in the van and headed for a local youth facility that gives parents and kids a time out from each other after a counseling session. 

Of course, once away from the police, he was vicious and belligerent.  I remember the ride there vividly and the fear that he would either grab the wheel from my husband and cause us to crash or that he would use the seat belt to strangle me. My husband later confessed to the exact same fears running through his mind.  I kept thinking about us leaving the other children orphaned in our attempts to appease the law with this child.

But guess what?  The facility didn't take him because we didn't say that we were within an inch of strangling him.  It didn't matter that we feared for our lives. 

My friend is still a few months from her daughter's birthday and I worry and fear for her daily.  I know the nightmare she is living.  We can only pray that the child will run away for the remainder of that time.

I know we are not alone in this!  There are other parents out there in our shoes!  Where is the logic?  Should there not be laws in place that protect parents from their dangerously mentally ill children?

Sociopaths in the Prison System

I appreciated the KSL news story last night on the mentally ill in the prison system.  It is a sad situation and something must be done.

Along the same lines, and yet not so much along the same lines…

I'd really like to see the media tackle the issue of sociopathy.

Anti-Social Personality Disorder is a mental illness, but there is no cure and no treatment and they are a danger to their families and everybody else.  Our son held his own brother up at gunpoint. 

His incarceration has allowed us greater peace and we dread the day he is released.

I would love to hear the experts weigh in on this issue.  When a sociopath’s time is served, everyone knows they are a danger to society, but they are released anyway.  We are blessed to live in America where everyone is innocent until proven guilty of a crime, but where does public safety come in to play? 

I am always searching for answers on this, but so far what I find always boils down to this:  Just get the toxic person out of your life.  

That’s easy to say when it’s a boyfriend, but we know that if it’s your own child or the father of your children, it’s just not that simple.   Even NAMI has no support groups for Anti-Social Personality Disorder.  Of course it’s not the sociopaths that need this group, but us, the families and victims of them! 

I wonder if maybe sociopathy was the real reason that the British shipped their criminals off to Australia back then…

What are your thoughts on this?