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.

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! 

The Spawn of the Sociopath

"Spawn" is a terrible way to think of any precious child, but it is a good representation of how the sociopath looks upon the children he "brings into this world".  (I can't bear to write "fathers" in reference to sociopaths.)  Spawn usually refers to offspring in great numbers, and that is what the sociopath tends to produce since they are rarely if ever monogamous and they are incredible risk takers.   They tend to sow their seeds everywhere they go.


A recent comment left on this site stated:


"Unfortunately I fell in love with a sociopath, and am now pregnant by him, only to realize he is married with 5 children, and is denying he's the father of my child. He lied about everything about himself, even went so far as to make up a story about his daughter dying. The man shed tears in my presence. Now I'm heartbroken, single, emotionally shattered, and wondering if I have the strength to terminate this pregnancy (I don't believe in abortion). I'm praying I don't have an incurable disease as a result of my interaction with him. My biggest fear is if I have this child, if it will turn out to be a sociopath, because sociopathy is highly genetic."
My reply to her follows:

I'm so sorry to hear this.  You have some difficult decisions ahead of you, but thankfully, you've taken that all important first step of recognizing him for what he is. 

Yes, there is a chance that the child could inherit it, but there is also a chance that it might not.  In our case, only one of our five got the unlucky genes. 

I cannot imagine dealing with a conduct disordered child as a single parent though. My husband changed careers once our boy went south because I had to have the mental, spiritual and even physical support at home.

Please, please, please consider the adoption option.  Adoptive parents know that just like birth parents, they are taking a chance on what issues the child may have.  But they have waited and prayed  and prepared for years to have a child and they are equipped to deal with what ever comes their way. 
More importantly, if you put the child up for adoption, the sociopath can never return to wreak havoc in his/her life.  If you keep the baby, the sociopath is almost certain to never support it financially, and he can return at anytime and haunt both you and the child all your days. 

The night our son was arrested, his girlfriend called to tell us and informed us in the same call that she was pregnant.  Unfortunately she had already told him.  She was a smart, educated girl and my advice to her was to adopt it out, but if not, to at least get him to sign away his rights rather than going for financial support.  He'll never pay anyway. 

I love, love, love children, but I would sacrifice my relationship with a grandchild anyday if it meant that the child would have a chance at life free of a sociopathic father with two people who are so very prepared and anxious to be parents.

As our son stood trial, the rumor mill spewed out different tales about the now ex-girlfriend.  She was pregnant.  She wasn't.  She'd had a miscarriage.  She hadn't.  The other girls in "his harem" were mean and nasty about it and we distanced ourselves from all of it as much as we could.  The girl had left the state and I suspect that she followed our advice.  I pray for her and the child where ever they are and hope that they will remain free of our son's destructive influences. 

Trust me when I say that the child will be used as a pawn in the sociopath's game of life.  Our son has one child nearby and I've witnessed it repeated over and over in our grandchild's short life as contact with the child was used to try to control myself and others.

It breaks our hearts when this child talks about dad and how he's in prison, but even more, we dread the day our son will get out and return to this child's life.  The child is a clone of him, and yet one time he claims the kid and the next time he is denying paternity and wanting us to get DNA testing done.  We were there at the birth, we've been there for birthdays and Christmases and mom and dad going in and out of jail and prison.  We will not deny this child nor be a part of our son doing so.

I will keep you and your health and the well-being of the child in my prayers.  Remember that the most self-less, loving thing you can do is to give this child up.  It would be the very hardest thing you would ever do, but you would bring incredible joy to not just the baby, but two parents, four grandparents and countless aunts, uncles and cousins in the new family that you would help create.  God bless!

"Meetup" with Other Survivors of Sociopaths

I learned something new today!

Meetup is the world's largest network of local groups. Meetup makes it easy for anyone to organize a local group or find one of the thousands already meeting up face-to-face. 

Meetup's mission is to revitalize local community and help people around the world self-organize. Meetup believes that people can change their personal world, or the whole world, by organizing themselves into groups that are powerful enough to make a difference.
Learn more on the Meetup HQ Blog.

And guess what?  There are listings under Sociopath! 

If you live in Arizona, this group may be for you.

In Florida, they have a group that meets via telephone for safety reasons.

There is also a group for New Yorkers.

And of course, Texas is also represented by a group.

If you know of a support group for survivors of sociopaths anywhere in the english speaking world, let us know about it!  We must help each other heal and remember so that we are never sucked back in again.

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?

The Best Revenge Against a Sociopath

What do you think is the best revenge against a sociopath? 

One can lay awake nights plotting and planning the ultimate revenge, coming up with many creative versions of delicious fantasies, but in the end there would be no satisfaction in bringing the plan to fruition.  Instead, one would only find themselves reduced to being on the sociopath's level, and that is a place none of us want to go!

Revenge won't bring closure.  Revenge keeps you stewing in your juices and that is right where the sociopath wants you!  Why drag it out?  Why continue to be a victim by letting the sociopath remain in your thoughts?

It would be so much sweeter to make a clean break and move forward, but you cannot move ahead if you are busy getting even.
When I worked with a group of girls that had recently been removed from an abusive home, I repeatedly counseled them as to the best method of revenge.
As Arthur Schopenhauer said, "We can come to look upon deaths of our enemies with as much regret as we feel for those of our friends, namely, when we miss their existence as witnesses to our success." 
The best revenge against someone who has worked so hard to derail you and destroy you?  A life well lived.  There are few things they hate more than to see someone happy and that is just what you'll be if you put all of your energies into living your best life. 

How have you moved ahead and lived your best life?

Sociopath, Psychopath or Anti Social Personality Disorder? Which is it?

So is he/she a "sociopath", "psychopath" or do they have "Anti Social Personality Disorder" (ASPD)?  You pick, because basically, they're the same thing, particularly since few are ever officially  diagnosed.

Calling someone a "Psychopath" tends to instill undue terror of those with this condition.  This term usually instills thoughts of  psychotic serial killers and so in the 1930's, authorities changed the term to sociopath.

"Sociopath" still carries weight and forewarns those who could be victimized, for even if the terror they inflict is merely emotional, it is terrorizing none-the-less.  Once again, the term became synonymous with serial killers though, so the powers-that-be changed the name of the condition to ASPD.

Not only is the term "Anti Social Personality Disorder" long and ungainly, but it is too light and too benign or  innocent sounding to protect the innocents that these people run across.  All need to understand the gravity of the condition.

You will find that most people who write about the condition prefer the term sociopath, while those still caught in the midst of the terror lean towards psychopath.  I prefer the weight of the name "sociopath" and will use it in my writings.

Somewhere, I heard that there are no degrees of sociopathy, that all are equally dangerous and that the difference between a sociopath and a psychopath is merely opportunity.  Chilling. 

In my experience, there are "higher functioning" sociopaths that maintain jobs and at least the facade of a marriage and family. 

My son would be an example of a "lower functioning" sociopath.  He couch surfs when not incarcerated, because he can't hold onto a job for long, and therefore a place to live. He simply cannot hold onto any relationship for long due to his inability to remain faithful and non-violent.   He abuses substances and lives a life of crime. 

Call it what you want, but learn and protect yourself.  If you have anything else to add that would help others protect themselves and move on, please share.