Isn’t it strange how the mind works? I read with approval Dr Leedom’s latest post. In it she manages to be at once hard-nosed, realistic, and still keep positve. There are very real differences in the brains of those with psychopathic traits, she writes, but the brain is plastic and therein lies just a sliver of hope.
For some reason the opening lines of Martin Amis‘ novel House of Meetings came back to me. It is set in the Soviet Union:
Dear Venus
If what they say is true, and my country is dying, then I think I may be able to tell them why. You see, kid, the conscience is a vital organ, and not an extra like the tonsils or the adenoids.
Amis has also written a stunning nonfiction book about Stalinism, Koba the Dread, which has its own staggering opening:
Here is the second sentence in Robert Conquest‘s The Harvest of Sorrow: Collectivization and the Terror-Famine:
We may perhaps put this in perspective in the present case by saying that in the actions here recorded about twenty human lives were lost for, not every word, but every letter of this book.
That sentence represents 3,020 lives. The book is 411 pages long.
And then I remembered that Amis’ cousin Lucy Partington was murdered by the infamous serial killer Fred West! How could I have forgotten? Amis wrote wrenchingly about it in Experience:
My family cannot understand the extraordinary collision that allowed him to touch our lives, and I have no wish to prolong that contact. But he is here now, in my head; I want him excised. And Frederick West is uncontrollable: he is uncontrollable. For now he will get from me a one-sentence verdict…. West was a sordid inadequate who was trained by his childhood to addict himself to the moment when impotence became prepotence.
Amis clearly knows a thing or two about psychopathy. Consider his compact ‘verdict’:
a sordid inadequate
-
- – this suggests ignoble actions and motives arousing moral distaste and contempt combined with a biological lack
trained by his childhood – dysfunctional modelling and upbringing by his family and surroundings
addict himself – this both highlights the central, pleasurable place wickedness played in his life and emphasises the crucial place of will (he didn’t become addicted he addicted himself)
to the moment when impotence became prepotence – here is the defining characteristic of the psychopath: he lives for the moments when his power or influence over others occur. Deep beneath this is a secret fear/knowledge of his utter unimportance/worthlessness.
Amis, through the imaginative power of the artist, has captured remarkably well the heart of the matter.
He is not an easy read, but it now occurs to me that in a way our theme has been one of his central themes. For example, Lovefraud readers have recently written worried letters about the perpetuation of psychopathy among the young via antisocial social environments and psychopathic genes. Time magazine’s recent cover story is about the phenomenon of youth delinquency in Britain. Amis was ahead of the curve when he wrote about it in his novel Yellow Dog.
His forthcoming book is a collection of essays on 9/11 called The Second Plane. (You can read one essay, ‘The Age of Horrorism’ , here.) The collection has received a lot of negative comment: Amis is a racist, etc. Well I’ve read a lot of Amis’ work and and can’t square with that judgement. (What he says is that Islamofascism produces awful racist feelings in him and he doesn’t know what to do with them.) I wonder whether some of the objections to his book are due to what we at Lovefraud encounter all the time: regular folks’ refusal to believe in human evil. These are the fortunate people who have not fully encountered evil – hope their luck holds out.
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Back to Dr. Leedom’s article – she makes it clear that the small candle of hope she holds out is not for the full-blown psychopaths Amis writes about, but for those with psychopathic traits.
What I don’t understand is that “Stolen Valor” is, indeed, a crime – a criminal offense. Sheeeeeeesh…..now, I’m just hitching and sniffling. Thank you so much for the support. Whew…….
Do you have any documents? proof….of what he’s claiming to others?
Is he collecting any ‘benefits’ fromt he govmnt?
Dear Buttons,
Have you ever considered that you might be suffering from PTSD? I was Dx with this many years ago when my husband suicided. And I had thought that I was “managing” these symptoms over the years, and evidentaly, I wasn’t. Now that the stress levels are high again in my life, I feel I am right back where I started.
What makes me think that you might be suffering from this is knowing what you have been through, and the “impending doom” that you suffer with. I DO understand this. And it is an impossible way to live after awile.
That impending doom feeling can steal your life away. It can be so consuming.
I still am not doing well with my PTSD symptoms. I am filled with anxiety. I have alot of fear about life in general. It holds me back most days from accomplishing so many things. Many days I still am waiting for the other shoe to fall. Because past experience has taught me well.
But waiting for the other shoe to fall and feeling that feeling of impending doom are two different things. One makes it difficult to breath (at all) and the other one your heart skips a beat when the phone rings. I can live with the second, but not the first.
Like you, but for different reasons I turned to “outside” resources for help with my son. EVERY single door I opened was slammed shut. I call it the valley of the closed doors. Because thats what it felt like.
I used every ounce of energy that I had to try and get my son help. Day after day on the phone, calling on ONE phone, leaving a different number (the house phone) for call back.
For fear I might miss a call.
I sought help from the school, (testing), I sought help from counselors, and the medical profession, I called the emergency room to see if they would admit him, when I feared he might be a danger to himself, I called teenage crisis centers, I called the health department, I called legal aide, to see if he could be court ordered because of his age to take the medications he refused to take, as it didn’t seem in his best interest to go off them. I tried to have him hospitalized, I tried to file incorigible teenager with the juvenile court system, when he was out of control. I filed a police report….Yadda, yadda.
And for everyone that tried to “pass the buck” and give me another telephone number….I called that number too, only to be refered back to another number. If I had a job outside the home I would have been fired. The ONLY way I was able to do this is because I work from home. It would have been impossible to run around from place to place and make these calls if I had worked 9-5. Of course my work from home suffered during this process as well.
I had crappy insurance and no money. So I couldn’t just “pick” out of the phone book the therapist of my choice. I had to jump through lots of “hoops”. And it was all pretty much a waste of time and energy. I heard the same three STUPID questions over and over again.
1) Has he tried to kill/hurt himself
2) Is he on drugs?
3) Has he broken the law?
This was all very depressing…Looking for interventions when there were none.
And so I went there, to that impending doom, place…..Fearing the worst.
Now that has changed over to anger. Excuse my French, but F**k these people.
No one listens in the system, when you try to tell them that a person needs help.
GOD help me if I am ever sitting in a courtroom and my son HAS commited a crime and a judge looks over at me and ask me why my son is so out of control and why I didn’t do anything about it…….I would have to be HELD back by physical force, not to go straight for his throat.
Maybe this anger isn’t healthy, but for now it takes the place of the impending doom I used to be filled with. Long term, I hope I am not always filled with this anger. But for now it is there. I didn’t even realize HOW angry I was at the “system” until I read your post and then wrote mine.
I hope you are able to get to another place as well. Until something happens, NO one will listen. It’s just the way the system works.
But don’t live every day with that dread in your heart.
DID ANYONE CATCH DR>PHIL TODAY?
It was on a judge in San Bernadino Co. in Ca. who denied a woman 4 attempts at a restaining order…..she was lying, he said!
She had proof of threats and his hacking into her phone/text/computers and an email he sent her threatening to kill thier baby along with himself…..
DENIED/…
Guess where the baby is now…….DEAD!
There is a DA in SBCounty running against this judge Robert Lemkau….DA’s name is James Hosking.
I say we all send his campaign an email providing info on Cluster B personality disorders….Sociopaths etc….and how he can effectively deal with perps from the bench!!
He’s got some passion folks…..check out the below website.
http://justice.posterous.com/justice-endorses-james-hosking-for-judge-san
Hi Witty. Thanks for your advise, earlier. All good.
You should write a book about your experience with the system, and trying to get your son some help.
I think it’s an excellant time for it, because , it seems to me that people are finally, at least taking notice that there ARE kids that are so troubled that they commit unthinkable crimes.
Have you read,”We Need To Talk About Keven?” A very chilling fictional tale of a dangerous child.
I think your story would be an excellent way of educating the public that the help just wasn’t there….and it should have been.
I’m sorry your having to deal with the unknown, and it’s causing you anxiety. I don’t think I know much about PTSD, but I am sending you calming peacefull wishes.
Hi Kim!
Hope you are well. Good to see you!
Hi, Silver. How you feeling today?
Witty I do understand your dilema. Its awful how everybody thinks there is all this HELP out there and there is nothing but a never ending chain of phone calls that goes nowhere.
Been there. I get it.
I know that the endless cycle of hope and disapointment it creates is enough to make it really hard to get out of bed in the mornings too.
The cycle perpetuates the anxiety. And somehow every silver thread of hope seems to break over somebody else’s policies and practices and at the end of the day, its all about money, not results. And it sucks.
The BEST resources I have EVER found are the Bill Wilson Center in Santa Clara, CA and Steve Becker right here on LF. Another resource I know of is Dr. Adam Cox who is now in Rhode Island. He is awesome too.
I don’t know what they will tell you. Have you asked?
One thing that has helped me a lot and I’ve talked about it before is EMDR therapy. It is successful in treating PTSD and I have found it to not be horribly expensive.
Boy do I get the anger that burns like BRIMSTONE and how it provides and energy that can be channeled if it doesn’t burn you into a state of renewal- llike a Firebird and sometimes, that isn’t all bad either.
If I can offer nothing else, I give my ear and my empathy to someone who has given much of the same to me.
I’ll be right here.
EB,
Your Dr. Phil Story really hits a raw nerve tonight.
yesterday I spoke to my attny and he said to me that prosecuting bigamy probrably is impractical because most people on a jury would think that a man with two wives has probrably been punished enough.
I respect the practicallity of his advice relative to the cost of the effort which would be mine, but I deplore the sentiment and general understanding it conveys.
Educating the legal profession is an absolute GOAL. Educating women and men everywhere is an absolute GOAL.
Yes. solid grassroots campaigns are effective and your ide is as solid as a rock.
I wonder if all the wonderful writers here would not make an amazing contribution if we put up a list of publications to write to to get the word out by telling our stories and doing it over and over again.
Until the Larry the Cable Guy mentality about relationships in general changes, what is true won’t. And the idea that an innocent child paid the price for that kind of uneducated, unaware stupidity suggest that the man who made that decision be held up in the world as a person who not only should not have the job he did when he made the decision, but that someone competent should review every other decision he made.
Until people say NO to the nonsense that envelopes the world of the abused and enforce it, it will go on.
Its our job to say NO. And to say it over and over and over again. Its our job to speak the truth because WE know it.
No matter how many there are, there are more of us and the longer THEY are out there, the more of us there will be. There are not many armies who seek a diminishing population, but if I were the last victim left, I would see that as a triumph of good over evil.
And it begins NOW.
Hey Kim!
I just am tonight.
I was doing well until the third wife came up. That has thrown me for a loop.
Every camel has its straw.
What I found out yesterday scared the S*.* out of me. And today I guess I’m in that numb place that you go to when you move into the dealing with it phase.
I feel very angry about the world that doesn’t get the BS that people who have had these relationships have been put through.
I feel very angry that there is an illusion of help like what Witty was describing.
There has to be a better way to run the airline- ya know?