Psychopaths (Adult and Otherwise)

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!