Russell Williams was a colonel in the Canadian Forces, a pilot who flew dignitaries including Queen Elizabeth II, and commander of the largest airbase in Canada. That is, until he was arrested for breaking into women’s homes and stealing their underwear, sexual assault and murdering two young women.
Lovefraud has written about Williams before: For Halloween: A real monster who liked to dress up.
The question, of course, is how did such a predator achieve the rank of colonel? Should he have been flagged along the way? How was it that Williams received nothing but stellar reviews, and turned out to be a murderer?
The Canadian Forces, stunned by what happened, launched an inquiry into how candidates are selected for senior command positions. Could enhanced psychological testing have revealed Williams’ true nature? Here’s what Macleans reported:
The answer, sadly, is no. Among hundreds of pages of internal military documents, obtained by Maclean’s under the Access to Information Act, is a draft version of that review. It confirms what leading experts have long maintained: there is no off-the-shelf exam that employers, armed forces or otherwise, can use to detect sociopathic killers. “Given the recent events in CFB Trenton, it is natural for the CF to question whether or not the organization could have identified a sexual sadist or predicted that an individual would become a serial sexual murderer,” the report says. But that “would be unrealistic to expect.”
Read There’s no way to spot another Russell Williams on Yahoo.com.
It’s probably true that no one could have spotted Williams. His case, however, is highly unusual. As I wrote in Sudden psychopath: The horrifying yet strange case of Col. Russell Williams, this case is unique in that Williams showed no signs of disorder before he suddenly became a sexual pervert and predator. Unlike most sociopaths, he didn’t have a history of lying, cheating and abusing. That’s why his case is so weird.
Judged by behavior
Although I don’t know much about the various psychological tests that are available, I doubt that any self-report inventory, where the subject answers questions about himself or herself, would work. After all, sociopaths lie. They lie about everything, so of course they’re going to lie on a personality test. Even if the test is designed to spot inconsistencies, how would anyone know which part is true?
To diagnose sociopaths, you need to know about their behavior. Most sociopaths leave a lifelong trail of destruction, ranging from overt crime to subtle emotional and psychological abuse. Dr. Robert Hare developed the Psychopathy Checklist Revised (PCL-R), and it has become the gold standard for diagnosing psychopaths (the term he uses). The PCL-R has two parts—a semi-structured interview, and a “file review.” This means that the individual’s criminal and psychological records are included in the evaluation. In other words, the psychopaths are identified by their behavior, not by their answers on a test.
The Gift of Fear
We, of course, don’t want to experience a sociopath’s behavior. We want to avoid them, so they don’t have an opportunity to inflict any damage of any kind. Can we do it?
I believe the answer is yes. The way to avoid a sociopath is to listen to our intuition.
Several people on Lovefraud have posted about a book called The Gift of Fear, by Gavin de Becker. Oprah Winfrey called de Becker the nation’s leading expert on violent behavior, and his company helps hundreds of people, including celebrities, stay away from stalkers and other predators.
De Becker’s whole point in The Gift of Fear is this: Your intuition will tell you about danger. Listen to it.
I can back this assertion up with data. In the Lovefraud Romantic Partner Survey, conducted earlier this year, I asked the following question: “In the beginning of the involvement, did you have a gut feeling or intuition that something wasn’t right about the person or the relationship?”
Seventy-one percent of respondents said yes. Let me repeat that: 71% of people who became involved with sociopaths knew early on that something was wrong. Unfortunately, most of them stayed in the relationship anyway.
Trust your intuition
I think it’s unlikely that an accurate paper-and-pencil test for spotting sociopaths will ever be developed. However, we all have a built-in early warning system. The system isn’t designed to identify sociopaths in an abstract sense; it’s designed to warn us when we are in the presence of danger.
Here are the three steps to protecting yourself from sociopaths:
- Know that sociopaths exist.
- Know the warning signs of sociopathic behavior.
- Trust your intuition.
The key is to pay attention to the warning signals that we receive. But often we don’t. We doubt ourselves. We give the person another chance. We wait for hard evidence. In the end, we are damaged and filled with regrets.
Would listening to their intuition have saved Russell Williams’ victims? We’ll never know. But Gavin de Becker did relate a story about a woman who was assaulted in her apartment. The assailant told her to be quiet, promised he wouldn’t hurt her, and left the room. The woman, filled with fear, didn’t listen to him. She listened to her intuition and slipped away. The guy returned with a kitchen knife, intending to kill her. But she was gone.
Phoenix, what I meant about “winning one battle” is that you are still in a BATTLE versus NO BATTLE, NC. Even if you win EVERY battle with them, there is still NO PEACE. There is still the “Mexican Standoff” there is still the “Israeli versus the Palestinians” hatred going on.
The total hatred between various sects of the Muslims/Christians and other sects, and the hatred of the various Muslim sects versus Christians or Jews is never going to END because they are never going to come to terms with the fact that they do not think alike and they do not value the other person’s point of view.
Psychopaths do not value the point of view of anyone else and there is no way to HAVE PEACE WITH THEM, there is only a STAND OFF.
No Contact, not living in a BATTLE ZONE allows a measure of PEACE, but having contact, living with them, allows no peace.
That was my point.
Almost forgot- Darwinsmom- Funny thing is, I tried walking away from him like you do. He is a control freak and follows me.
He asks the same question several times, getting the same answer, but hoping I will slip up somehow, somewhere, some small detail… The third time he asks? I tell him to go away and figure it out himself. He’s not listening- he doesn’t CARE what the answer is, so why waste my breath?
Crap! Maybe he learned that one from me? LOL!
There was another time he asked me some stupid question. I knew he had already made up in his mind what the answer was. Nothing I could say would change his mind so I told him exactly that. “Sorry, I’ve played that game before, thanks! I’m going to sit this one out and watch. Whatever answer you have already concocted- we’ll just go with that.” The look on his face was priceless!
Got it Oxy. I may win them all but he doesn’t care and nothing will change until I am out of there for good. BINGO!
Do I get to yell BINGO???
I totally hear you Phoenix. But I am wondering something: why are you with him when you know what he is? I’m so glad I don’t have the arguments anymore, no more worrying what trouble he’d get himself and thus ultimately myself into, no more shock at his abominable behaviour at other people and myself. I have PEACE. Don’t you want peace?
Phoenix, you get to yell TOWANDA!!!!! AND BINGO!!!! Or anything else you please!~
Constantine,
It’s a dichotomy that I am a kick ass kind of person when I see the need to be out in the big bad world, BUT as soon as a person makes it into my inner circle they become ROYALTY. I can’t do enough for them. Making them happy is like an addiction for me. I LOVE doing things for my loved ones. It’s really overboard. I’m quite conscious of it now but that doesn’t make the addiction any less. I really really love making my loved ones happy. That’s why I called myself a pathological giver.
So what makes these people ROYALTY? My own narcissism. I hold them in high regard because they are MINE, therefore they must be GREAT!! Right? Spaths zoom in on narcissism. Whatever it is about you that you hold in high regard, they will find a way to use it against you.
You said your spath never showed a clue about what she was until her cheating came out. I have not heard of any spath that had not waved red flags, in hindsight. Is it possible that you are also one of us who holds two standards for how you treat people you love versus the rest of the world and that’s why you didn’t see her red flags?
Finding out about the spath was devastating to me, but over the last 2 years, I’ve benefited immensely in learning about myself. If there is any upside to an encounter with the spaths, it is that they point out our vulnerabilities and force us patch that hole.
Sky,
True enough – there were red flags in hindsight. But never anything big like catching her in a lie or something of that nature. More of a vague feeling I used to get that something just wasn’t right about her – but even that only from time to time.
However, my subconscious must have been processing something, because as soon as I found everything out (in one phone call and e-mail), I immediately wrote her a letter and called her a “sociopath.” (This was before I’d read all the books about this stuff.) But my earlier point was simply that once I LEARNED the truth, it would have been utterly unthinkable that I’d ever have taken her back under ANY circumstances. Which is what I meant by saying that it was never a matter of weakness or a “failure of will.” Stupidity, perhaps, but that’s another matter!
Anyhow, I still say you’re too hard on yourself with the narcissism stuff. I don’t agree that you’re narcissistic, but I won’t force the issue because you seem pretty dead set on believing that you are! (Ha ha) However, if YOU’RE narcissistic, then I think we need to coin a new word for the Kim Kardashians of the world!
Oh, and don’t forget, Sky, character isn’t someting that’s indelibly written in stone. No doubt, it’s difficult to change who we are, but I do think that we can do it to a good extent – at least over the long haul. However, that’s the danger of always saying “I am this way” or “I am that way” – as though it were a primal and unalterable fact of existence. In fact, I think that part of changing how we THINK about things, is first changing how we TALK about them.
Constantine, I have the same responses against such negative labels upon ourselves. People who give a lot, often feel uncomfortable with accepting what is given to them. People who naturally focus more on the positive in others, also tend to blame themselves more… I call it stinking thinking (got that from Flylady I think). We did it while being with the spath “What am I doing wrong?” and then continue to do it afterwards, and for many of us it’s not empowering, but cutting our wings off.
This is one of the main reasons my therapist has always refused to use any label on me. She only once admitted I had an ID crisis when I was 24, and that only because I had put myself into a role play situation in my last master year to play at going on a job application. At the end, the guy said I came off depressed, and that while all my other fellow students were watching us. My therapist was mad as hell over that and said that I wasn’t depressed at all, but had an identity crisis. She explained once why I should refrain from labeling myself with disordered behaviour labels.
As a child I was always an outsider in school, up until my 15-16. I kinda put myself at the rim by watching the kids play, rather than play myself, but later they kinda ignored me, a very few times pestered me. So, I came home with questions… how was I unable to make classmates? And my parents wanted to empower me by telling me that “there is nothing wrong with you: you’re a nice person, a good person, joyful, etc.” But none of that resolved my practical problem with my peers, and I developed a negative attitude to my anger, upsets… reinforcing the positive image my parents were reflecting at me. My ID crisis ended when I was able to look into the mirror and told myself, “You know what! I love the bitchy part of myself. Sometimes that bitch needs to come out. I have the right to be a bitch!”
Another reason in my youth was the fact that my mother went along with the thinking during my teen years when I was upset. Sometimes I felt so upset and annoyed and angry without any apparent cause that I would hurl whatever in my own room at the walls, or slam my fists against the wall. I didn’t understand these fits of rage I could have. And my mother didn’t either. While of course it was just very normal for a teen to feel enraged over nothing because of the hormonal changes when growing up. So, my mother and I went to the doctor who prescribed me some homeopathic medicine to calm me down when I felt the need for it.
So, my therapist told me that I (and my mom) had the tendency to label something as abnormal when it wasn’t and then sought the solution in medication.
In the therapy I’ve had these past months, my therapist has refused to use the term PSTD for me, though I’ve mentioned it. I didn’t expect her to either. When I tell her of a severe trigger event or moment, she will say that it’s normal I’m being triggered and that it will happen again in the future, for a long or short time. So she does admit to the symptoms, but she’ll not use the label for me. Why? Because she wants me to rephrase it in normal, everyday language terms, and regard the situation as extreme. Once I did that here, while posting a couple of weeks ago, I made an important breakthrough, and my failure feelings dropped from my shoulders instantly, and it empowered me to look at and change the things and behaviour within my power to avoid not functioning under stress. Is it any less of PSTD? Nope. But that label would just have reinforced the feeling that I couldn’t help myself and couldn’t do anymore what I used to. While now I’m changing my lifestyle so I aid my memory as well as lessen stress levels, exactly what is advizable to deal and live with PSTD.
There’s egoism, there’s egocentrism and there’s narcism. Of those three, the latter is the abnormal, the disordered label. Whereas the first two fall within a normal range and depending on the situation can be necessary. But we’re not pathologically disordered. We’re normal people who have been in extreme life situations, some of us in VERY EXTREME life circumstances. And the way we responded and still respond to them is VERY NORMAL for US.
Perhaps some of us get empowered by labeling some of our behaviours into the disordered range. I don’t know. But it’s something I know from my therapist that does not enable me to deal with the issues.
Constantine,
some of this boils down to our definition of different words.
Narcissism has so many definitions. According to Freud there is healthy and unhealthy (primary and secondary) narcissism.
For me the unhealthy type is where we are using survival mechanisms that we learned as children when we were hurt and fearful and trying to make sense of the world. Or some unhealthy role model showed us this type of behavior. Pretty much any type of behavior that is less mature and could use some fine tuning, I call narcissism.
I like to look at my flaws because that is the beginning of changing them. It doesn’t mean I’ve labeled myself bad or have a permanent attachment to the label. I remember a time, as a young person, when I was much more narcissistic and that worked for me at the time. Feeling entitled can be part of a good narcissism.
BF says I’m very “entitled” when I go shopping because I look for bargains and DEMAND that the stores honor my coupons/price matching/rebates! Poor BF used to pay full price for everything! 🙁
Anyway, as much as I enjoy being entitled sometimes, I have come to realize that spaths cannot use someone who is filled with humility. Since their agenda is to humiliate us, we can beat them to the punch by accepting humility and being happy with it. It bums them out worse than gray rock.
So that is why I keep an eye out for any sign of narcissism in myself. Not because I’m self-loathing, but because I know that’s what THEY are looking for, and I’m all about not letting them have anything to hook onto.
When you think about it, the love-bomb appeals to our ego and the pity ploy appeals to the “rescuer” in us (our super-power). The spaths use these tricks because when employed, It’s a direct hit to the ego and our intuition gets dulled.
So anyway, Constantine, I’m not putting myself down, I’m being very very vigilant.