Today’s New York Times Magazine has an excellent article on the signs of psychopathy in children. It presents a heartbreaking story of parents trying to cope with a “callous-unemotional” 9-year-old, and covers much of the current research on the disorder in children. Very well done.
Read Can a 9-year-old be a psychopath? on NYTimes.com.
Story suggested by a Lovefraud reader.
Kim Fredrick: LF somtimes is like a sounding board even when we are feeling upset….I didn’t take offense at all by your question as to how I really knew my grandson was lying….
BUT as strange as this sounds, after I wrote my post on that, later on that night I got to thinking. I had not read your post as of then, only now. But I got to thinking “Did he really lie?”….
The reason I started to think on this was I remembered that when I picked him up to go to school several times in the early morning, I had kissed him and smelled his breath. It didn’t have that toothpasty smell, only the morning breath….
Maybe, he was late and didnt’ have time and his mother said not to worry, you don’t need to brush your teeth….
But, he had time at my home, and he might have thought he didn’t have the time so he said his mother said he didn’t have to brush them….
But you are right….we shouldn’t be so quick to pounce on our kids, but really question them…I hate accusing kids or adults before we really know….
Assuming he lied…..I didn’t think it over at the time….
G1S……SO TRUE!!!!!!!!!!!!!
20years, they blame parent’s and choose not to hear the Truths because the alternative is too horrible to comprehend: a seemingly innocent child maintains malevolence by default.
I hold a newborn in my arms and feed him from my own breats. I shower him with love and expectations. He is breathtakingly beautiful to look upon – everyone takes notice of him. Lurking behind those sparkling eyes lies an abyss of violence and malice. It’s too horrible to contemplate.
You are right, G1S — must have blocked that one out of my memory for a moment, LOL. Worse abuse in the courts than at the hands of my spath ex-husband.
Truthspeak, because we dare to speak the ugly Truth — our voices must be discounted. We are saying something they don’t want to hear — so we must be idiots. Or making excuses because we don’t want to take our share of the responsibility.
Everyone is so wedded to this idea of “shared responsibility.” I look at it differently: I am responsible for how I view things, or my perspective, and the actions I take or the thoughts I think as a result of how I see things. Then, I take responsibility for noticing the impact I seem to have on the world and people around me. If I seem to have an unpleasant effect on others, I ask myself why, and if this is something I can accept or not, want to change about myself or not. Finally, as accepting my share of responsibility, I pay attention to my own feelings and the effects that others appear to have on me — and expect others to accept their share of responsibility in this shared relationship or interaction. And if they do not, then I do not accept it for them. I maintain boundaries, I point out that I will go only this far but no further. That part is theirs.
So that’s what it is… when I speak up and say, “this person is NOT accepting their share of the responsibility” that is NOT me “shifting blame.”
Shifting blame is what THEY do when they try to pin 100% of the blame onto me. And that’s not right.
It is such BS — yes, this was actually said to me when I said “my husband hit me — our marriage was physically abusive” — they said, “well, that’s your perspective.” I said, “Listen, he may not see it that way, or he may but he might be lying about it, but there is such a thing as objective truth here: he either hit me or he didn’t. And he did. I am telling the truth; he may be lying, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. It does not mean that the truth lies somewhere “in between our shared perspectives.”
I hate that “thank you for sharing your perspective” BS.
Even innocent (and malevolent) children have a shared responsibility for the interactions between themselves and their mothers/parents. The relationship IS co-created between the two. Pity the poor child who has a narcissistic mother/parent. And also, pity the normal mother/parent who has a narcissistic/budding sociopath child.
Kim,
wow. wow. thanks, that is so profound.
A good part of what I was trying to say is what was mentioned in your post G1S….In my own quest to find good therapy both for my son when he was in puberty and myself shortly after….The therapist my son had was an absolute JOKE. Except of course there was nothing funny about it.
I myself couldn’t find a decent therapist that could really help me in my situation either.
And so basically my position in this matter really is that until the professionals KNOW & get on the same page more about personality disorder in children they wouldn’t be able to properly Dx it.
Once I had to confront my sons therapist about how my son had manipulated him into believing that he had “turned himself around” and was passing all of his classes at school….And was having no behavior problems at school anymore…Or at home.
This was long AFTER I had signed a disclosure for the therapist to check both his grades and behavior issues with the school at his convienience…Therapist had been informed by me in the first initial visit that I had with my sons therapist before I brought my son was that my son was a compulsive liar. And a manipulator….
So the therapist never checked with the school, never checked back with me, just “believed” my sons stories. And the entire time things were escalating at home and at school and I am thinking it is time to have another one on one with him.
He was a younger guy had a son about 8 or 9 years old and his specialty was not kids or teenagers but actually court ordered alcoholics! Which I thought was extremly interesting when I later found out that my 15 yr old son had manipulated him so easily??? WTF. Court ordered alcoholics are a pretty manipulative bunch. Was this guy just plain stupid? No maybe not but he was certainly arrogant. And that arrogance was a good part of the problem.
When I asked the therapist what was going on and found that he thought that my son was doing so much better because that is what my son had been informing him….I told him that my son was informing him wrong. He was lying…That’s what liars do. They lie. I asked him why he didn’t double check with the school seeing as that is why I signed a release form so he could do that.
He said he needed to “trust” his client…
I about lost it at this point….And told him that he had been manipulated by a 15 year old and there was no reason for this because he had full ACCESS to talk to the school counselor & see his grades on edline any time he needed to. And if he had done his JOB properly he would have known that my son was failing every single class & having more issues both at school and at home.
He arrogantly waved his arm to “point to” his bookshelf filled with his many volumes of medical books…..As if to “inform” me (without saying a word) that he was, after all the professional in the room? He is lucky I didn’t go right for his throat…Because I don’t “do” arrogance well. And I was really at my wits end.
After this incident my son was FINALLY able to see the psyciatrist, which incidentally in order to see the p-doc I NEEDED the request form from the arrogant therapist. Something I had been asking for but now I insisted.
Once my son saw the p-doc a few times he wasn’t so easily manipulated. He nailed all of the things that the therapist overlooked and guess what? My son would no longer go to the appointments.
As others here have said….It is my belief now that my sons therapist was “blaming me” as the mother because of course I am sure that part of my sons manipulation with him included him telling his therapist that I was a “terrible mother”…Because that is something my son told me himself.
It is a good part of the reason I had signed the release form for the school so that the therapist could check with a “third party” other than myself or my son to hear another perspective of my sons behavior.
This “terrible mother” did after all bring her son to a therapist because I KNEW I needed help, and he needed help, and I was in way over my head at the time.
A good therapist is worth their weight in gold….But a bad one also can do more damage than good.
The last thing I needed at this time in my life was to be beaten down more than I already was, and misdirected….
Kim your post above where you mentioned you are “not one of the lucky few without psych issues”—OKAY, NAME ONE PERSON WHO POSTS HERE ON LOVE FRAUD DOES NOT HAVE PSYCH ISSUES?
Everyone with psych issueS raise their hand:
WAVE WAVE! THAT’S ME! WAVING MY HAND. I HAVE ENABLING ISSUES, PTSD, DEPRESSION, BOUNDARY SETTING ISSUES…I could go on but you guys know I have MANY PSYCH ISSUES.
I am FOR THE MOST PART, handling these issues, but from time to time I lose it and don’t handle them as well,, or I get sucked into something because I have an issue I am not aware of or one of the old issues (enabling mostly) crop up again and I take on something that is not my business.
Kimmie go back and read my article about comparing ourselves, our losses and our assets to others. Baby if ever there was anyone who was a GREAT comfort to me on Love Fraud it was YOU and I could look up to you.
Truthspeak,
You said : “Let’s take some information from parents of children who exhibit glaring sociopathic traits ”“ let’s hear what THEY have to say about their experiences in attempting to manage and teach these children. Let’s hear THEIR take on how effective rules and boundaries are. Better yet, let the researchers take these kids into their own homes for a year without ANY safety/security and talk about their experiences at a later date. ”
No truer words have ever been spoken. The research on these children/teenagers should BEGIN with the parents who are struggling to raise them.
And I have to admit that when the smug, arrogant therapist that my son saw, was “judging me” I thought more than once…Buddy, if you could walk in my shoes for ONE MONTH, take my kid home with you for just 4 weeks…..I’ll bet you would burn those friggin books on your damn bookshelf.
Because those books you read wouldn’t prepare you for the “real deal”….
Thanks, Oxy. I was a little angry last night when I came home. And lonely, I guess. I got on line and decided I would be very opinionated, and when I do that I always feel bad and have to aplogize.
I don’t know where the line in the sand should be drawn. I don’t know where one problem crosses the line into hopelessness. This is the great question, I think. I can’t SEE into the brains of people snd see what areas light up, and which areas are like great black caves.
Coming from the back-ground I do, I have a strong resistance to giving up on anybody…I am well aware that there is a point when we must, and that real psychopaths are an incurable lot…And, I am not saying that any of our mother’s here on LF were bad, or negligent or abusive in anyway…That is to say that I’m sure there is such a thing as a fledgling psychopath, but how do we know for sure which child is and which child isn’t? At what point do we give up? And when we do give up, what do we do with them? At least, if we keep the uestion open, we can study different approaches. If we don’t foreclose on them too soon, we might learn about something that can help. I don’t know. I just remain hopeful.
Kim,
You always have the voice of reason here on LF. And once more you always recognize when you are triggered. I have heard you say that more than once. That something was triggering you and you had to re-group before you respond. I still sometimes need to identify what triggers me and stick my foot in my mouth…..When I should have stepped back and regrouped!
Don’t be so hard on yourself 🙂 Progress not perfection.
Towanda to you!
Kim,
the problem also remains that parents have been known to scapegoat their kids. Mine did. Grace’s mom has. Oxy’s mom has.
Their is story in “people of the lie” in which the parents (fine upstanding citizens) take their boy in for therapy. He is depressed. His brother committed suicide a couple of years earlier. They don’t know what is wrong.
Well it turns out that they gave him the shotgun that his brother had used to kill himself, for the younger son’s birthday that year.
Dr. Peck figured out who was the real source of the problem, but they had tried to make the kid look like the problem.
Spaths do everything in hiding. None of them announce their evil intent. They flip everything 180 degrees and switch places with their victims. So it is really hard to know who the problem is, unless you have insight into their home lives. Like a hidden camera.