Psychopaths (Adult and Otherwise)

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!