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.
Witty,
I wish you could hear the recording of my spath crying. Talk about over the top! It astounds me to know that I fell for it at one time. Not because he was believable but simply because I couldn’t imagine that people like that existed. That’s despite having lived with them all my life.
I trusted that school would teach me everything I needed to know. Instead, a spath did.
😡
Sky,
I learned more from life experience than I ever did at school!
However, I think I have alot more to learn (unfortunately) when it comes to my son.
Have that awful “gut feeling” of doom and gloom in the near future. Giving me lots of anxiety at the moment. I HATE to worry about something that hasn’t happened yet…..However those gut feelings are hard to shake.
I hope that my gut is wrong this time. And maybe I am having the doom and gloom feeling but it is more attributed to him being MIA so often lately?
Witty, the “over the top, unbelievable lies” are the bi-polar part kicking in. It is difficult to tell when a psychopath is manic but this will do it.
When he is not manic, he is able to be more calculating and tell better lies. The mania keeps him from intellectually processing as well.
Hope that helps.
The mania may also be part of why he disappears. He may be off on a manic high I can’t remember but didn’t you once say he is a “rapid cycler?”
“I think it’s better not to let them know.”
I agree. Once the P knows that you know, it could lead to all out war. Based on what I’ve read the worst thing one can do to a P or N is to let them know that their mask has slipped and that you see the truth of what they are. If possible, I think it’s best to maneuver around them and cut them out that way.
Oxy,
Yes he is rapid cycler. Of course his manic phase & his cycling was much easier to read when he lived at home.
Now I can only keep track by his behaviors. And MIA for days on end is definately something he does when manic.
And predicably he crashes when he returns.
Sleeps and sleeps… Only to wake up and go off again! Last time he wasn’t even home for 3 days and he was gone again.
Sounds like he is really sick right now 🙁
Witty, see my post to you on the “do not marry a murderer” thread.
Sigh, I wish I could wrap my arms around you and pat your head and say “there, there, it will be okay” but I can’t say that because I don’t have foresight.
You know that I think about you and pray for you and that is all I can do. God bless. I know it hurts.
Since the child is already nine, he is already doomed…or we are, however way you want to look at it. I’ve lived their life. Looking to professionals for answers, and getting the wrong diagnosis or strategies. As a parent of a “tornado child”, I was constantly modifying whatever behavioral modification techniques I was using at the time. Nothing worked perfectly with each situation, so I had to switch it up or change techniques at a moments notice. My child was ALWAYS five steps ahead of me.
Unrelated, but have a son now 15 years old with a terrible man. The son seems normal now, but worried how he will turn out to be. Exposed to so much manipulation, violence and mess through his childhood. That alone will be enough to make him abnormal if not the genes. Feel guilty for having allowed that exposure but I did not know anything about Path till 18 months back..trying to compensate now by being gentle with the son… meanwhile, intuitively understanding that I have seen thru him spath has changed gears and instead of violence has shifted to cold deception (a torrid affair with his student for over a year) and loadful of lies… my reaction to this when I discovered the affair has been one of shock and caught off-balance; this has again scathed the child…he has even asked me why I produced him when there were already so many problems with the spath.. but I DID NOT KNOW! I just thought somehow something was wrong with me, and if I did this or did that, spath would be OK…(and spath was not letting me go, kept me hooked with threats of dying without me); also, because I was in total despair and felt having a child would change things for the better.. never knew spath would never change..he was actually beating me for just working as a doctor, abusing me and linking me with all my teachers! And himself actually having an affair with his student at the first opportunity..
Stronger, are you still with this person? How about your son? Is he seemingly normal? Your post wasn’t really clear on these points.
Tria, I can relate to your problem..mine didn’t start acting out badly til puberty but by then he was WILD, he is in prison now for murder. I hope I can help keep him there.
Stronger,
Having a 19-year-old son myself, I understand your concerns.
What you said about your son is true for mine – they have feelings. They are very hurt over the situation. That means that they are normal!!
A P wouldn’t care.
I never felt that I was struggling with my son. I never felt that he was five steps ahead of me. I was his rock and his buffer. I protected him against the Ps. I provided sanity to their insanity.
It’s important to put you into perspective for him, to let him know that you never chose this for you either. Only recently have I let him know everything that I have been through. When he was younger, it wasn’t his business. He was too young to understand and I didn’t want to scare him. I just wanted him to grow up. I could take care of the adults.
Now that he is legally an adult, I have been letting him know little by little what they have done and what they are capable of doing. He needs to know so he can protect himself. I would be doing him a disservice if I left him alone to figure out things alone, and the last thing he needs to be doing to trying to figure out anything if he is under attack from the P.
I’m glad that I don’t have a P child, but I imagine that a P child would be gloating and glad over any problems a non-P parent is having with the P parent.
My son knows how bad his father is, as well as his maternal grandmother and aunt. He also knows that he needs to be very careful with the girls he becomes involved with.
I have apologized to him for not providing better, but like you, I had no idea. If I had, I would have made sure that we both had a better life. I think it’s important that he realizes that his mother is human, too, and I have been wounded. I don’t want him to feel sorry for me; I just want him to realize that the battle takes a severe toll so don’t go there if it can be avoided.
I caution him about his choices in life. I told him that he is at high risk for a lot of stuff, because of genetics, but unlike most people, we KNOW what these risks are, we can identify them, and if need be, we can nip them in the bud before they ruin us entirely.
I told him to view this legacy as a handicap, something that we are born with. Of course it would have been better to have been born without a handicap, but that’s not how it worked out for us. We can’t change that either. We will never be able to go through life with ease, but there is much that we can do to take care of ourselves.
Our big plus is that we’ve put up the barrier (no contact) and will not let these people into our lives.
On his own, he decided to study criminology. He’s been leaning towards that ever since he was a little boy. (Never got over that six-year-old “I want to be a policeman when I grow up.”)
He just got back from his first year in school. He told me that he is thinking of getting a minor in psychology. Thank you, Jesus!
He also pointed out to me last night that there was another article about P children on Yahoo.
Whatever he learned this past year at school, it was enough that he realized that the things I’ve been saying are true. I was very impressed by his change in attitude. Before, it was Mom doing a lot of talking, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Not any more. On our three-hour drive home from his school last Friday, he hung on my every word when I talked about things that I’ve read on LF and elsewhere.
He gets it.
Keep talking to your son.
Provide him with the explanations. Make certain you show him how important decisions are and let him know the consequences of making the right or wrong ones.