Editor’s note: Lovefraud received the following email from reader whom we’ll call “Grandma.” She would appreciate any advice to help her deal with her son and granddaughters.
My son is categorically a psychopathic personality. In my mind, I can remember the tendencies starting about his high school years. I wonder why nobody else recognized this.
Now he is the 29 year old father of 2 small girls. The youngest child, 3-1/2 years old, is telling stories of her father hurting her vagina. She is in counseling and the counselor is the one who reported this to law enforcement and to DSS. (The counselor believes it to be true.) However, because of my husband and my involvement in the lives of these girls (we have been raising them on and off their entire lives), we are labeled as habitual complainers and meddling grandparents. I am sure this is due to the lies he tells and lying is one of his strong points. He is deferring his blame by telling law enforcement that I have made up this story and taught it to my granddaughter. I would not, could not do this to her. I was molested as a child. I had no one to tell. This is not the way I want her to grow up, either of them. (The oldest—5 years old—was sexually molested by her mother’s friend 2 years ago ”¦ my husband and I reported it to DSS and were labeled then as making up the story because we are meddling grandparents. This story was found to be true.) If I would ever treat them this way, I would be no better than a person who physically hurts them. It is my job to protect them.
The problem is that his friends, ex girlfriends, etc., say they love the girls but they do not want to get involved. It is as if they are afraid of him. I do not know how to coax, coerce, whatever to encourage them that this is not for me or my husband, this is for 2 innocent lives and if he lies well enough, he will get away with all of it. The guardian has asked him to take 2 different psychological tests, but I fear he will pass these. He passed a lie detector test and I know he is lying. When his lips are moving, that is all that he knows.
Do you have any suggestions? Do you have any ideas? I am clueless at this point. The girls are safe with their aunt at the present time, but I am interested in them living with my husband and I full time. We have raised them since 3 months old and feel an obligation and love. We have been their security, their stability and their safety. We want to continue in that role
Thank you in advance. I hate that other women go through this in so much worse ways than me, but the girls are the ones that are suffering. Women need to know that if he seems to good to be true, he probably is. And I am saying this about my own son.
Dear Grandma,
First off, I am so sorry you are here…I also have a psychopathic son who is in prison since 1992 for cold blooded murder of a 17 year old girl (he was 20 at the time) I do understand how you feel about your son, but I can’t even imagine how It must feel to realize he is such a danger to your granddaughters…my son tried to have me killed in the summer of 2007, and I am afraid of him for myself, but I can’t imagine how horrifying and awful it must be to worry about those babies…God bless you for continuing to fight for them.
The “fence sitters” who KNOW and keep their mouths shut (out of fear or whatever emotion) have my UTTER CONTEMPT but I also experienced fence sitters when my son’s exconvict friend was trying to murder me and one of my other sons, and then DID try to kill the son whose wife he was having an affair with. Actually that was a good thing because both the ex convict and my son’s wife who was having an affair with him went to prison.
There are also other grandmothers here who are raising grandkids who are children of Psychopaths, so keep blogging here, there are people who have grandkids who are not out of the clutches of the P parents….so you have people here who do know first hand what you are experiencing.
REading here and learning about the psychopaths is your best avenue of strength and support. You also MUST, and I repeat MUST, take care of YOURSELF and your husband. You can’t take care of the babies if you are not healthy physically mentally and emotionally, so TAKE CARE OF YOU too! God bless!
Oxy:
Thank you for taking time to respond. These “fence sitters” as you call them (good name, by the way) anger me to no end, but I have to realize they have emotions invested like I do.
I am sorry for all that you have gone through as well as many women and men on this site. It is frightening once you realize what personality type you are dealing with and that nobody but you really understands. I try to educate people but they really don’t hear it.
My fear is what happens before he hits bottom. I pray for him, but mostly I pray that God will protect the girls. They are the innocent ones in this situation and do not deserve the deck they have been dealt. Thank you again. I hope to hear from more of your friends.
Grandma.
Dear Grandma,
It is bad enough when you are trying to protect YOURSELF from a psychopath but when you are trying to protect kids it is doubly frustrating when the courts, cops, and others will not listen or believe. UGH!!!!
Dear Oxy,
You are so right about that!! It is frustrating when people don’t listen. I was reading a story about a young girl with a daughter whose husband was messing with the electrical box outside her home. She lived with her Grandmother and her mother lived elsewhere. They had a video camera set up on one side of the home. Do you know what ever happened with her and her daughter? I became worried about her, but the story just ended and I keep wondering about her Thanks.
Grandma, here is an idea regarding the childrens information of sexual abuse.
Get the Aunty to give them some nice big bits of paper and some easy to use for their age, crayons or coloured pencils.
If possible set up a video camera to record the children as they draw, to prove they did the drawings.
Tell them that sometimes bad things happen that are yukky and it is scary and not nice, and sometimes you are too afraid to talk about the bad things.
Sometimes some people tell you, you are not allowed to talk about the bad things.
But if you draw pictures about the bad things it is not the same as talking about them.
Let them do drawings about anything that frfightens them or they are scared of.
Give them as much paper as they need.
Do not lead them into talking about sex abuse.
Do not even mention it (sex abuse)as it would be “leading” them, and will legally contaminate any evidence..
Let the children play at drawing pictures over several days or episodes of drawing time and record it each time if possible.
Write their names and the dates on top of each completed picture.
Then you can get a trusted therapist to discuss the pictures and ask what they represent with the children.
I did this with my children and they drew quite graphic pictures of sexual abuse and of seeing their sibling abused and tortured by being held underwater and also having shampoo put into their eyes.
The 3 year old did drawings showing his brother with big lines coming out of his mouth, and when asked what they(lines) represented, he said screaming.
There was very clear disclosures through drawings, that the children were TOO AFRAID to verbalise, before they drew the pictures of what they had seen and experienced.
Once they had drawn the pictures it seemed to free them from a lot of their anxiety and they were then able to tell a very skilled Therapist what the pictures represented and were not so afraid of their father being able to find them and hurt them as he had threatened.
It seems to me that that expressing the horror through artwork was a great release for them.
I had gently coaxed them to draw about the “yukky things and scary things” as I could sense something was wrong and they were afraid.
Their older half sister had disclosed sexual abuse ongoing for many years so I knew my little ones were most probably victims too, and felt that would be the reason why they had changed from bright bubbly confident children to shy withdrawn tearful, fearful children within a matter of months.
Hope this is of help to you.
GOD Bless.
I know the counselor has done some of this with the girls. They have drawn pictures of where they feel safe and when they feel scared. I will mention this to my daughter and see if she is willing. She is always hesitant to bring up the abuse with them because they act out after counseling and thankfully, she has never been though this but this also means she doesn’t understand the complexity of a child who has been abused. It really is a great idea, though. I wish I could do it myself, but then I take a chance of being labeled as the coach.
I am glad that this worked for you. I am so sorry for all that your children went through because of their father. I do not understand people who are cruel to children and I pray that God has a special place for them to suffer what they have perpetrated!!