Two young girls adopted by a loving British couple took after their criminal biological mother. For the adoptive parents, it was a disaster.
Read When Cherry adopted these ‘angelic’ sisters she thought a loving home would heal the wounds of their troubled past. how terrifyingly wrong she was, on DailyMail.co.uk.
Link supplied by a Lovefraud reader.
G1S:
If that little girl was doing stuff like that at six years old, she definitely has some psychiatric issues. She’s only eight years old now. Is she still just as bad?
this story is really something. Redwald said it all, actually. I really feel for the mom who apparently has not figured it out and is still at least partly blaming herself, thinking if only this child could have received “services” all would have turned out well.
I am very interested in learning what the research is at this time, on adoptions and twin studies… anyone have links to those?
I find myself wondering, what the world (U.S. and U.K. at least) would be like, if everyone realized and admitted 1) the genetic basis for psychopathy and 2) how untreatable this is.
(I was in a conversation with a friend today, coincidentally, about this very topic. He absolutely refused to believe that genetics had ANYTHING to do with a family we both know, who have (now adults) a bio daughter who is normal, and adopted boy-girl twins, who are sadistic — he thinks it is the trauma of their adoption from the orphanage when infants, or that the children’s father liked to play one child off against another. In other words — parenting or adoption “trauma” — no, genetics couldn’t possibly have anything to do with it — my friend still believes in a blank slate, apparently…) why do so many people persist in believing that?
I guess I mean — I would like to know how far we have come in figuring out how to tell, at how early of an age, that someone is a psychopath. I know that it is not politically correct to write children off as irredeemable.
I do think it is wishful thinking. All of it — the denial of it. Refusal to recognize evil. Always looking for someone to blame. The mother, the father, the parenting techniques, the failure of the social services system to intervene and support… sigh. Nope, genetics can’t possibly have anything to do with it.
There are many reasons children are given up for adoption. Certainly, there are many normal children who are adopted, and many adoptive families where all turns out well. But it is logical that the percentage of kids given up for adoption who have genes tending towards psychopathic traits would be higher. Why does this idea seem so far-fetched to so many people? (and what about sperm banks or egg donors?)
20 Years- I often find myself questioning if a baby can be born bad. As a society, we have been told either by the bible or by social norms that children are innocent and pure. It is hard to break this belief system because it is so ingrained in our society.
It seems so unfair and cruel that children would be inflicted by such evil through no fault of their own. It is something very difficult to wrap your head around.
I do agree, being an adopted child myself, that very early experiences even at infancy, can influence our mind set and maybe trigger the genetic component to all kids of disorders. I was neglected as a baby and even kidnapped and held at gunpoint by my biological psychopathic father when I was under a year old. I don’t “remember” these things consciously, but there is a sadness within me that I think comes from a very primitive place. I have always been “needy” of affection.
One and maybe even a few of my biological siblings have gotten the Psychopathy gene. One in particular is a flat out sociopath. I was the only one adopted, so maybe nurture does play a role in some of this.
Part of the problem too, is that professionals won’t agree on a NAME FOR PSYCHOPATHY, or the CRITERIA for psychopathy, and they say a person below age 18 can’t be diagnosed as a psychopath, and also you can’t diagnose someone over 18 as a psychopath unless he has had a diagnosis of conduct disorder prior to age 18…DUH…on the dark of the moon but only if it is thursday or you play tiddly winks first…..WTF??
When are professionals going to realize that there are kids who are “the bad seed”? Kids who start to show pathological signs and symptoms at an EARLY age.
I have worked with kids as young as age 10 in inpatient settings that there is NOW WAY I would have ever gone to sleep in the same house with those kids unless someone was watching over them.
That poor Nurse in Tennessee who sent the adopted kid back to russia had a case of that kind of a kid. There are some kids who by age 8 or 10 there is no way one couple can control them and work and sleep. The kids have a GLEE at destruction and being out of control that is blood chilling.
Of course not every child that is a “hand full” at age 8 or 10 grows up to be Ted Bundy or Charlie Manson, but many of them DO wind up in prison…repeatedly.
Yes, this story is sad, it is also bone chilling.
sisterhood,
My psychiatrist at least pointed out to me at the end of my in-take at the start of my therapy last year that I was to consider myself lucky for not having a child with my ex-spath, and stressing the genetic reason for it. She literally told me that I was saved from having a sword of Damocles hanging above my head regarding what my child otherwise may have inherited. So, she admitted the importance of genetics to me, and it’s the main reason why I knew she confirmed my suspicion about my ex: that he’s a psychopath.
Alas a lot of professionals are not convinced that genetics may never be overrun by nurturing. They believe in the exception myth, even though they’d otherwise admit that temperamental identity is what you were born with and that it never will alter, even that it’s unhealthy to alter it.
I guess it’s the same mythical belief as our beliefs that we thought that our love could make a difference in the spath we loved. We thought that someone, the right person with the right attitude, can make a difference.
As for those who belief a newborn baby is a clean slate… those are often people who in my experience have little contact with toddlers. It’s clear as day imo that if you spend some time with a toddler (especially if they are siblings) over an extended period that they have their own unique personality they were born with and you can almost predict what they most probably will be pursuing for say a career as an adult.
sisterhood,
Reading what you wrote about your childhood’s first year makes me feel sad with you. Thanks for having the courage to write that, and I’m sorry your start in life was so difficult.
I think it was in Scott Peck’s book “The Road Less Travelled” or “People of the Lie” he states that we are all born being natural liars and theifs. It’s amazing(Grace of God) any of us turn out ‘good’ at all.
Yes, when you ask the toddler who has crumbs all over his mouth and clothes ‘did you eat that cookie’ He’ll deny it evern tho the evidence it right there..
I have a number of friends about my age who were adopted. One of them has a sister who is the biological offspring of her parents, and a brother who was also adopted. The brother is a bi-polar malignant narcissist, the sister is a full-blown socipath, and the friend has a number of emotional issues that she’s trying to manage. The parents are both gone. The mother was nurturing and very protective of all of the children. The father was a heartless spath that played very nasty head games.
When we’re conversing about her siblings, it is always disturbing to me that the sister seems (by all descriptions) to be a female carboned copy of the father.
I think that knowing that Ted Bundy and other noted psychopaths were once children does not help to understand spathy/psychopathy, at all. Whether it’s nature or nurture, children who demonstrate obvious symptoms of spathy/psychopathy are truly terrifying. I think that, because they are “CHILDREN,” it is much easier to live in denial of that fact than to “do something” about it. What could possibly “be done” to intervene?
This, I believe, is the bottom line: even if a clear diagnosis of spathy/psychopathy could be rendered, what good would it possibly do for any child? Anyone ever seen the movie, “Bad Seed?” There were clear indications that the9-year old character, “Rhoda,” was a psychopath. The mother recognized this and took a desperate step to end her daughter’s life (and, her own) to prevent Rhoda from murdering, again. “Bad Seed” is, IMHO, the first and BEST screened depiction of a child psychopath, to date. I highly recommend this movie to everyone who has had exposure to a sociopath, and to everyone who has not.
The characters interact in precisely the same manner as people do in Real Life. The mother suspects that something is amiss with her daughter when Rhoda says, “I don’t feel any way, at all,” when her mother tries to comfort her after hearing the news about the drowning death of one of Rhoda’s classmates. The well-meaning neighbor dismisses Rhoda’s glib remarks, demands, and comments as coming from a “girl who knows what she wants and isn’t afraid to ask for it.” The absentee father is seduced and manipulated by his beautiful daughter’s parroted response to what she would give for a basketful of hugs, “I’ll give YOU a basket of kisses.” Or, vice versa.
There is no “cure” or treatment for sociopathy. There is no litmus strip that turns blue to conclusively diagnose sociopathy. And, the greater majority of socipaths never commit murder but they certainly leave a wake of emotional, physical, and financial carnage.
There is no clearcut answer to child sociopathy. Some indications are that they can learn to mimic “normal” social interactions, successfully, but only if they are raised in a strictly specific environment. “Good intentions” and unconditional love do not factor into this – since spaths do not “feel” either shame, remorse, or empathy, they do not respond to good intentions or love.
What a sad, sad story I gather this article is – it wouldn’t load, but Rewald’s initial comment rather gave the gist. How very, very sad.
Louise, I haven’t been in touch with my friend on the subject of her granddaughter. She doesn’t want to talk about it. That happened soon after we had that discussion. I respect her boundary.
Darwinsmom, I’m a bit worried about the children that my son might have given the Ps in my family and that his father is a P. My son is fine, but we know how genetics work.
Ana, there is a theory that children lie when caught red-handed because even though they know that they did something wrong, they feel guilty. They lie not to get away with something, but to re-set things back to what they wished they had done.
G1S, the lying theory does make some sense – typically, when a child is caught in a lie, they experience harsh consequences. But, what I find interesting about adult spaths is that they’ve discovered how to circumnavigate the outright “lie” and they will find a grain of truth and build an elaborate hoax on that one grain of truth. Therefore, they avoid being guilty of lying (per se) and are, in their warped universe, telling the “truth.”