Psychopaths (Adult and Otherwise)

holy crap, that guy sounds like both of my parents. they tried to turn me into a mindless slave growing up and waxed romantic about slavery in general. both came from established, well-respected upper middle class backgrounds. real swell sorts. everyone loved 'em! most perfect people in the world.

there are some truly fucked up people out there, and there's way more of 'em than you might think (cue spine chills).

Good god.

they were more like evil hippies from dragnet than tweedy professor wannabes. last birthday my dad tracked me down and sent me a copy of Steal This Book for my birthday, which pretty much sums up his philosophy on life. anywho.

The fact that he had to track you down suggests that you're not in regular contact with them, I hope? Phew. I'm sorry.

nah, now that i'm finally making sense of things i don't see how i could ever talk to my family again. or why i'd even want to. the whole relationship was built on lies and trickery, with nothing behind it all except their own screwed up, self-serving desires. none of which makes a lick of sense to me.

putting myself into contact with them gives them a chance to tinker around with my head again. so in short, no. might not ever talk to anyone in my family again for the sheer pointlessness of it, and for my own mental well-being. i made it this far in life alone, so it's not like i need a family like that hanging around.

A wise and excellent choice.

My mother and I are pretty sure at this point that my 47-year-old sister is an actual sociopath. Since she was about 10, she's always had a tendency to lie about basically everything, to blatantly deny wrongdoing when caught, to steal, to be superficially charming if it benefits her, to desire attention and approval, etc. Her behavior over the years has varied from the casually amoral to the outright bad, but I found something out this weekend that pretty much clinches it for me.

Three years ago my mother was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. Since mom doesn't make a lot of money and doesn't have the greatest insurance, we decided to hold a fundraiser for her. My sister organized it, and she got a local bar/restaurant to host it and provide food and drink, got people to donate literally dozens of raffle prizes, got tons and tons of people to attend, and we ended up raising several thousand dollars. People were amazingly generous, donating raffle items as expensive as new bicycles and a weeklong stay in a Florida condo. There was also a 50/50 raffle with a sizeable pot, and the winner donated it back.

I found out yesterday that my sister stole every single penny of that money.

After the fundraiser, an interest-bearing account was set up with four signatories: My mother, her boyfriend, my aunt and my sister. (She was handling a lot of the insurance interaction for my mom at the time.) Little by little, over the course of the next several months, my sister took out $250 at a time. When my mother called the bank to ask them something about the account, she was told there was only $750 in it. My mother's boyfriend called my sister, and she resorted to a tactic she's been using since she was 12 years old and has never worked: "I don't know what you're talking about." By the time he hung up the phone and went to the bank, she had taken the rest of the money.

A person who would stand there and collect praise for raising money for her sick mother, who would go sit at chemotherapy sessions with her, who would handle talking to her insurance company, who would take donations from friends (many of whom were needy themselves, esp. the 50/50 raffle winner), and then turn around and betray all their trust like that . . . how can they not be an actual sociopath? My mother decided to just let it go. She's resigned herself to never seeing or speaking to her daughter again, and said, "If I had pursued it, I'd have given her power over me again, and I'm never letting that happen again."

(I also found out that she put her soon-to-be-ex husband, on whom she walked out two years ago, abandoning her two minor children, in danger of losing their house. She apparently did not make a single payment on it for two years, and managed to intercept every bank statement and notification so that he would not know.)

What the fuuuuck
this is awful (obv). Has your mum not needed the money yet or was she able to use any of it? Such a betrayal at the worst time.

Has she any more history of weird money-related behaviour?

Tons. About 20 years ago there was an episode where she was stealing checks from my mother's boyfriend's checkbook, faking his signature and cashing them. She also stole some of my mother's jewelry and pawned it. Then she took a car from them, went to Florida, stayed several months and left the car behind.

Five years ago, she was (ostensibly) thinking of buying her husband an acoustic bass guitar, and asked if he could borrow mine to see if he likes it. (Mine was a Breedlove Acoustics and cost quite a bit, and was an anniversary gift from my wife.) I loaned it to her and never saw it again. I asked for it over and over, and after she left her husband I asked him if it was in the house, and he claimed to have no knowledge of it. I'm pretty sure now it went from my hands to hers to the pawn shop.

But no, my mother never got any use from the money. And she had knee replacement surgery last year, missing three weeks of work unpaid, and could have really used whatever was left.

That's ghastly. So sorry to hear about this Phil.

yeah Phil that's awful

fuck dude

My mother told me Saturday that as far as she is concerned I'm an only child. I mean . . . as a parent, how do you even?

What are your feelings on all this? Would you be willing to speak with your sister, or is that it?

At this point, no. I have tried with her over the years, but everyone in the family knows that any dealing with her, and especially any criticism, is met with any or all of three reactions. She will either deny (in the face of all evidence), lie, and/or turn on you like a rabid dog. There is literally nobody she won't attack with all guns blazing if she feels threatened, including her own kids.

I talked to my dad yesterday for Father's Day, and while his reactions aren't as severe as my mother's, he makes it a policy to keep her at arm's length. He told me they've spoken twice in the last year, and both times she asked for money. (And he told her no. Four years ago, he loaned her $300 ostensibly to have her furnace repaired. She promised to pay him back when she got her tax refund, and of course never did.)

What do your parents say about her before she was 10? or when they first started to notice

I'm having some family issues currently - that are nowhere near on this level but I can see some commonalities. I believe something happened to my father around the age of 10 and he changed into something.- it was also something that i think was seemingly innocuous (but patently not). I never met my grandparents so its only going on what he has said, that has led me to think this

My dad actually thinks her bad behavior started when she was about 7 years old. That's when he remembers her developing a consistent pattern of lying and manipulation, as well as associating with people she could easily dominate.

God, the stories I could tell. There was also the time that she took her two younger kids (I believe they were 3 and 5 at the time) with her and a bunch of people unknown to my family to Niagara Falls, NY, where she was arrested for possession of marijuana and had to spend the night in jail there until my mother came and bailed her out. Which she might not have done if not for the fact that the kids were being held at the jail as well.

A few years back she was fired from her job at a doctor's office because prescription pads with her signature were being used to fill fake Oxycontin prescriptions. She claims that a co-worker duped her into signing fakes, but I seriously doubt that was the case.

holy fuck Phil. i feel so lucky that i have never had to deal w/anything like this.

i have known a couple people like this and they are genuinely scary
i'm sorry phil, sounds like major rough times

sorry to be crass, but is there a treatment for this type of personality disorder? is there something that can be done other than excommunication/harm reduction? honest question, no disrespect meant whatsoever.

have read that talking therapy tends to just be deception training for these people and idk if we understand anything enough to make a drug (which would be :/ anyway cuz ludovico). i'm sorry phil this kind of thing must be insanely emotionally destructive.

i've heard it's basically incurable, unless the individual genuinely wants to change. "psychopath" is just a label anyway, so everything is on an individual basis.

my parents, grandfather, aunts, uncles, and brothers are like this, unfortunately, and they've had 0 personal growth since i've known them. only thing that changes is they get better at manipulating, or change their tactics based on new circumstances. favorite new one is that since my dad can't beat the shit out of me anymore, and no longer has legal authority over me, he tells me I'm the "most important person in the world to him." which is funny considering he's never once acted like i wasn't completely worthless to him. but he knows he fucked my head up by tormenting and neglecting me growing up, so he'll throw shit out like that to twist my head so I give him money or whatever, and if I confront him on it he'll go totally ballistic, which works since he almost killed me a bunch of times when I was a kid. fortunately I was able to pull it together enough to jump off that train.

anyway, some people like this never change, because maybe the "default" we assume people should be is just our own default, and maybe a default shared by a large number of people. compassion, empathy, desiring relationships, fairness, an aversion to hurting people, not everyone thinks like that or aspires to be like that, and there's no outside, objective reason anyone "should" think like that other than the fact that we'd prefer it that way. there are lots of different types of people out there, and some of them are pretty damn wretched.

talking therapy tends to just be deception training for these people

Ohhhhh man, Phil - can I ever sympathise with your plight. My sister is a wrong'un in many of the same ways and the only way to make it stop is for my mother to press charges. Guess what: my mother is too embarrassed to press charges.

Yeah, I can't imagine talking therapy or anything being remotely useful for her. I don't even think it's something she thinks about - it's instinctive for her to lie every time she opens her mouth, and has been for as long as I can remember.

The sad thing is that, except for her oldest son (who just turned 25), the kids know she can be a handful but don't anything about any of this other stuff. (They're 18 and 16.) They're probably going to find out the hard way one day.

xxp Thanks, suzy. My mom just basically wants her out of her life. If that means letting the money go, that's what it means.

I just remembered that four years ago she told everyone she had MS. (This was at a time when my wife and I were doing charity fundraising and bike riding for the National MS Society.) We have never heard another word about this diagnosis, which is almost certainly a lie.

I hope karma gives her fast-onset motor-neuron disease for lying about MS. Bonus: she wouldn't be able to move or speak, which would cut down on the interactive lying.

My mom flip-flops on wanting to take action on my sister but ultimately sees herself as the failure if anything goes public, rather than the wronged party. I just want my mom to have the happy retirement she planned and worked for, and for my sister to take her equally shiftless and over-entitled husband and get the fuck out of my mother's house. She's caused enough interfamily bullshit.

obv all this is horrible but your guitar, jeez, so infuriating

your sister sounds just awful, phil, and the worst part is she has kids - how incredibly hard it must be having someone like that as a parent. i hope their father is a good man.

Fathers, plural. Three different fathers, one of whom we don't even know who it is. As to how good they are . . . it varies. The oldest is trying to have a relationship with his dad, but pretty much knows his mom is poison and wants nothing to do with her.

Damn man

oh maaaan :/

are you close with the kids? i hope they can cut her off permanently. ppl like bring nothing but bad things and harm into the lives of those around them.

otm

Unfortunately I'm not as close as I should be, because I spent a number of years when they were younger living away, but I do try to be in their lives and communicate with them. They all have a good relationship with their various grandparents, the oldest is very close to his two sisters (one of them my sister's daughter, the other his father's daughter by his second wife), and my sister's most recent ex is actually who my niece lives with.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/06/when-your-child-is-a-psychopath/524502/

I read that last week. Never really thought about child psychopaths before!