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?