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SpontaneousH is now wrestling with the very unfortunate consequences of his behavior, and very much wishing he had listened to all the people that warned him off of continuing heroin. How long did this turn around take? Two weeks. You might think, two weeks from trying to devastation? Apparently. We only have his own retelling to rely on here, but it appears that his descent into the madness of addiction was extremely quick. Let’s get into it. Also, let’s not forget what he had to say about this after he was repeatedly warned on Reddit:

Update 2: I don’t regret this at all…

That… did not last…

2 weeks ago I tried heroin ‘once for fun’ and made an AMA, I have been using since and shot up for the first time today, AMA

Dude said that he would never shoot up, and then does exactly that within two weeks. That is a fast decline. Just a quick reminder, I will be correcting any mistakes in the original text so my spellcheck isn’t having an aneurysm every five seconds. Apparently people in withdrawal are not the best at typing.

Weds night update: fucking I’m still withdrawing throwing up and sweating out gallons of sweat. I really want to use and relapse right now, I know I shouldn’t. these urges are so strong and overpowering. Please help me if you can before I get the chance to.

I get that this is unpleasant, but it seems to me that unless you want this to be your life for, you know, ever… you might want to tough it out, admit that the folks on Reddit gave you good advice, and get it over with. No one wants to go to the dentist, but when the pain is bad enough, usually they do. If they don’t, they might die. This is a little higher stakes than that, but really, for your own good, just deal with the withdrawal.

1000 comment update: Fuck my life. I wish I was trolling and this was all some elaborate lie. I was doing everything right, have been clean, and somehow a rumor got out that I’ve been using and my girlfriend found out and she basically broke up with me last night but is now putting that decision on hold. I have some serious unrelated business/work I need to attend to in two hours and I don’t know if I’ll be in any state to be able to and be ready. I can’t stop crying. Fuck heroin. Fuck my life. I guess I don’t need to say that since heroin pretty much fucked my life for me in under two weeks, I just want to die.

This sounds like it sucks. I am not trying to be derisive to the guy. This sounds like a miserable existence. I will say that people tried to steer him away from this, and the need to do the opposite of what people suggested, his own desire to keep doing what felt good in the moment, his flawed belief that “it won’t happen to him”, all led him to this place.

Now, here’s the thing. If you read through the original post you will see that plenty of people gave him their personal stories of their slippery slope into hell, and he dismissed them out of hand. He couldn’t be bothered to consider what they had to say for even a minute because it contradicted what he wanted. Now, two weeks later he is looking desperately for those same people to basically tell him everything will be okay.

I do wonder if he had enough people tell him, this too shall pass, would that help him be able to power through the moment. I also think about how much emotion plays into pain for neurotypicals. Psychopaths lack the emotional experience of pain. I am not talking about emotional pain, I am talking about the emotional aspect of physical pain. I can see that it is a significant part of pain tolerance, and that we differ largely from the neurotypical experience in this regard.

When I am in pain, it is this moment. That’s it. I am in pain now. Because of my lack of forward thinking, the fact I can’t experience the worry about the future that neurotypicals often have, this also means that pain is a very immediate thing, and while that sucks, it is just that. Immediate. I am not thinking, “How will I live like this? How can I cope with this pain in an hour?” I am dealing with it now. That’s all there is, now. An hour from now will still be now. It won’t be plagued by the memory of an hour ago, nor an hour in the future. It’s just, right now.

Neurotypicals do not think as we do when it comes to pain. They tend to get caught up in the pain in the past, the present, and the future. SpontaneousH is not able to see how he is going to get through this particular torment, and the torment right now is terrible. Thinking that it will continue to be terrible, and not wanting to deal with any of it, is making him want to snuff it out right away, instead of taking the gondola ride through hell, and sail out the other side with a lot of bad memories, and hopefully a lot of reasons to not put himself back in this position.

NA UPDATE Went to NA, I shared my story and it seemed to hit a lot of people, I cried, I got a lot of support and numbers and feel like I’m in a good place and truly believe I never have to use again. I will be going back.

Oh… dude… that is what’s called denial. You can’t be that naive, right? You went to one meeting. That is not how any of this works. Now, don’t get me wrong, I am well aware of the statistics and criticisms of alcoholics anonymous and narcotics anonymous. If it helped you, great, if it failed for you, that sucks. However, regardless of your stance on the programs, I think we can all agree that being certain that you will never use again after going to one meeting is pretty ridiculous. What strategies has this guy implemented to make him make different choices? None. He shared, he cried, and came out with resolve, but nothing underpinning it. That is not going to work. It is the same thinking that got him into this position.

“I’ve got this”.

No dude, you don’t. That’s the whole point. This unearned self-assuredness is getting you deeper into trouble. That’s a big part of the problem picture here.

Update #whatever: I slept for about 30 hours, sweat out my entire body and now I feel ok. I also took a shit for the first time in like a week which was pretty awesome. I can stop this on my own, I don’t even think I need NA but I’m not ruling it out, I have no craving or desire to do heroin. I’m sure some of you will be quick to say I need real support and maybe you’re right, but right now I think I’ll be ok.

*Head on desk* Nope… not how any of this works.

Setting aside the party for his bowel evacuation, all of the rest of this is cope. Cope. Cope. Cope. Why does he even take to the internet to write all of this when he knows people are going to tell him, you don’t have this, you do need support, go back to the meetings? Is it so he can have the satisfaction of publicly dismissing them and self-preening about how positive he is that he is different from all those other addicts? I can’t think of why else he is going to keep coming back to the place that is going to tell him that he’s wrong, only to get defensive about being wrong, to then be proven wrong. What kind of self-humiliation ritual is this, anyway?

New update: I appreciate all the genuine concern and advice. I finished my stash (bad idea but too late), threw out my needles, and am too faded to respond to comments for now. When I sober up in a couple hours I’ll check out some NA meetings.

All right, is anyone reading this a former or current addict? If so, please do explain to me how he went through that entire miserable withdrawal, claims that he has no interest in doing heroin again… ever… he needs no meetings, because he is just so grounded in his sobriety without them, and then is like, hey, I have some left over. Might as well do it?

What the actual hell dude?

How does this make sense? Two seconds ago you were like, I don’t need it, I don’t want it, I’m good. Then you’re like, yeah, I’ll write after I get sober because I used up all the heroin I had in my possession. How does this make sense to you? How did you convince yourself in that short of a timeframe that you could do heroin again and not go through the withdrawal, again? Oh my good lord…

EDIT: I nodded off after taking another hit at 4AM and couldn’t be bothered to look at this anymore and just woke up sore with a headache. For those of you who think I’m a troll because I can do heroin and type well with good grammar, fuck off.

All right, a couple of things.

1. I don’t think you are a troll. I think you are stupid.

2. My spellcheck wants you hanged for crimes against punctuation, so your grammar is not convincing anyone of anything other than you are still delusional.

It’s not that hard if you type slowly and carefully without looking at the screen (the screen is a blur and too bright) and it’s challenging but I would rather post coherently than like an idiot, I know it’s hard to believe someone dumb enough to do heroin is ‘intelligent’ in other regards.

First of all, all screens have brightness adjustments, so you know, use it. Second, you do not post coherently. If you did, you wouldn’t come in at the middle of sentences and expect everyone to be in the same place as your thinking. Third, you are not intelligent. You just suffered through withdrawal, said, “That was awful and I want to die”, only for the second it is over you race back to the starting line and shout at the top of your lungs, “AGAIN!!!!!”

That is not intelligent. You are, however, truly delulu.

Comments disintegrated into mindless bandwagon accusations of being a troll, I wanted to engage in a discussion and know I need help and my mind isn’t exactly right. I’ll sift through the posts and respond to the genuine ones once I feel better.

If you can’t see why people would think that you are a troll, I don’t know what to tell you. The timeline that I laid out above makes it seem like you are one. How dumb do you have to be to think that you are remotely in control of any of this? And yet, you do. So either, you’re a troll, or follow me here, you’re insane. It’s one or the other. You might be insane through self-deception, but all the same, here we are.

The first sentence in the next part is a hyperlink to a photo providing proof that the guy is actually shooting up. I have included this image, and if that is something that bothers you, heads up, it is down below. If you don’t want to see it, but want to know why it proves anything, the guy took a photo of his works sitting on top of a screen showing his Reddit post. I mean, fair enough, I guess. We are just operating on the fact this is real, anyway, so to me it doesn’t matter. I

For people calling fake is this enough proof for you? Do you want to see my track marks too? They’re not pretty and this is under 24 hours after first shooting up..

Wait… how does that timeline work, exactly? Less than twenty-four hours since first shooting up? Does that mean he took a photo of his track marks during that timeframe, or is he indicating that we are in that timeframe. If we are in that timeframe, how did he:

1. Shoot up for the first time.

2. Go through withdrawal for some period of time, thirty hours that we know of.

3. Was clean but had a rumor go out that he was using again (he was definitely using again btw) and had his girlfriend almost leave him, but changed her mind.

4. Go to NA.

5. Come to the conclusion that NA held nothing for him, and that he can do this alone.

6. That night decide to use up the rest of his stash.

7. While high say that he did indeed need NA

8. Shoot up more?

How does that work? My guess is that he took the photo at the time, and is threatening to post it to show up the people that are doubting him, but if that isn’t the case… this timeline is a pretty long twenty-four hours, especially with that thirty hour withdrawal.

SpontaneousH is going to continue being stupid for a while longer, and I want to game now, so I will write more about his reckoning with reality in the next post.

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I swear to you, this is OP the entire Reddit post:

He is so convinced that he knows what he is doing, even though he has no idea. One Redditor even said to him:

[deleted]

This might sound odd, but definitely tell your closest friend. It’s very easy to start a drug addiction by keeping it separate from your real life. Tell your buddy, accept that it will freak him out, but know that him/her knowing will make it way less likely that you’ll fall prey to the addictive nature of this drug.

And without a hint of irony, he responded:

SpontaneousH

OP 17y ago

I actually told him before reading this post. He smokes a lot of pot and we had a mutual acquaintance that was a heroin addict and he watched him OD on his couch while his junkie friend had to run over and give him an injection of some opiate antagonist in his ass and then mouth to mouth to revive him, so he was a little concerned. After talking it through and explaining it he understands though. I can’t think of anyone else I could tell, but someone in my life now knows.

It’s like he doesn’t read what he types. Yeah, your friend is concerned. He literally had to watch one user to do mouth to mouth on a friend that almost died after giving him a reversal shot. I am sure that wasn’t traumatizing at all… I am also sure he is totally comfortable with your decision making process.

He spends an inordinate amount of time yelling at other people, discounting their criticisms, and basically only agreeing with the people that are cheering him on.

[deleted]

Not a question just a suggestion based on knowledge gained from years as a heroin addict. Don’t do it again. EVER. There is nothing so terrible in this world as heroin withdrawals. It takes doing heroin every day or every other day for about 2-3 months to get your first habit, but that time goes by real fast when you are high. Just leave it alone. Seriously.

SpontaneousH

OP 17y ago

I’m sure the addiction sucks. I’m glad someone here has some real experience (well not glad for your sake but in terms of setting things straight) with what it takes to have withdrawals unlike the first 20 comments asking me if I was withdrawing right now...

Above that, someone had said:

formfactor 17y ago

Yes, opioid molecules are the best on earth. It really is the greatest feeling life has to offer. Unfortunately once I got a taste for that feeling it was all over. Opioids are the most addictive drugs on the planet. Once your body gets addicted the withdrawal is pure hell. Be very very careful not to ingest the stuff everyday, because in a matter of a week you will be completely addicted. I was very surprised at how fast my tolerance went up and how fast I was craving the stuff.

I’m now clean of it and taking suboxone to minimize the withdrawal. It has helped, but I can never take another opioid without my body going completely crazy for it. Enjoy it, but save it for a rainy day. Opioid addiction nearly killed me.

Does he take this to heart? No.

He basically waves them away saying, “Good insightful post, thanks”, and nothing more.

There is a comment from a guy that got involved with cocaine and how it destroyed his life. SpontaneousH did appreciate his story because he didn’t include what he termed “obnoxious scare tactics” that other posters had apparently used.

Dude, the only reason that you think what other people are saying is “obnoxious” is because they are telling you what you don’t want to hear. They are telling you their own life experiences, and you are just pooh-poohing them because you don’t like what they have to say.

Another Redditor shared their own experience about the path SpontaneousH is on:

test450

17y ago

Just wanted to let you know you sound exactly like I did when I first did dope. Same optimistic and sense of self control that us thrill seekers have. Smart enough to rationalize and study exactly what was going on. That was over $500,000 ago. I was a CIO and built a very successful company while hiding track marks. Eventually it all fell apart. I od’d several times and now I steal from my best friend and hate myself.

And you know you are coping when you think that this story is somehow a troll:

SpontaneousH

OP

No offense here but I can’t tell if this post is trolling or sincere. If it is sincere, my heart goes out to you....

At this point, my thoughts toward this guy is that he’s an idiot, and is going to have to deal with some nasty consequences. Weirdly, this is also another reason why I think that people who think that they are, or pretend to be psychopathic, are playing with fire.

You might be wondering how I factored those types into my reasoning here, but it is actually pretty simple. There are a ton of people that will claim that they are psychopathic, and either are just wrong, or lying to the world. However, they also might be lying to themselves, and are telling people the same lie to reinforce it in their own minds.

These people might also then believe that they too are immune to addiction, and think that they can try whatever drug they want without consequences. Immunity to addiction is not one of the things that alerts a psychopath that they might be one if they don’t already know, but it certainly is something that we notice, regardless of knowing why it’s present. It’s an interesting aside, but that’s all.

People that are pretending or trying to create psychopathy out of thin air are not going to possess this immunity and thus are going to have a very unfortunate crash out with reality when they discover that they are not psychopathic. However, that can also go the other way, and they then believe that psychopaths can indeed become addicts, and either the science is wrong, or they’re just special, just not in a good way.

People that are looking for an identity in psychopathy tend to be the ones that have other things going on mentally, emotionally, things that make addiction an attractive avenue to self-medicate, and if there are people going into it thinking that they have some built in shield, they are setting themselves up for a head-on collision with disaster. Just like our friend is here. Not that he thinks he is a psychopath, but he definitely thinks that he understands how to play a game that he knows nothing about. It is a dangerous negotiation that he is undertaking.

It seems to me that this Redditor is just as naive when it comes to the problems looming.

miasma66

17y ago

Thanks for doing your best to combat the myth that you’ll be ZOMG ADDICTED HOMELESS JUNKIE after one hit; it doesn’t work that way.

I’ve never done street heroin but I’ve experimented with plenty of similar drugs (particularly Oramorph, which is seriously good shit if you can get hold of it) to know what it’d be like. I can easily see how people get addicted to it though, it’s one of the most intensely pleasurable experiences I’ve ever had I think, and I’ve tried a lot more than my fair share of drugs over the years.

Definitely one for infrequent special occasions, isn’t it!

1. I have never tried it

2. You won’t become addicted if you try it

How the hell do you know? You have never tried it. That is some sh*tposting right there. Also, almost immediately after saying you won’t become a junkie, I can see how people get addicted… Dude.

SpontaneousH

OP 17y ago

You’re welcome, I am not one to be easily brainwashed. As a teen I stayed away from cigarettes because of the myth that 5 cigs will make you an addict. Then one day I thought to myself that’s bullshit and tried a cig. I’ve probably smoked a couple hundred cigs in my life and never once felt addicted or the urge to smoke them, it was more while drinking or if someone offered me one in a social setting. I can’t stand the smell though.

I know heroin and cigs are quite different but I hear the habit is pretty damn hard to stop. I knew I wouldn’t get addicted to anything instantly which is why I decided to say fuck it and try Heroin. If I go back and buy like 20 more bags and do it every day I’ll probably get addicted, but once or once in a long while isn’t taking that much risk.

Anything to defend your position I see. Here’s a challenge. Don’t go back and buy any more, ever. Then you will know you aren’t addicted. It isn’t the physical addiction to begin with, it is the high that people chase. That is all I have ever heard about it. Not that people tried it once and were awash with withdrawal, but that they felt incredible and they wanted to feel that way again, but they couldn’t. After that, they are chasing that high forever, and as the high gets less, the addiction gets more entrenched, and to feel functional, one must be loaded. That is the process of addiction. Never have I ever heard, I tried it, and then immediately after coming down I was crawling up the walls with withdrawals.

The cope is strong with this one.

I have no idea what prompted this comment:

SpontaneousH OP 17y ago

Edited 17y ago

Do I have to fucking spell it out to you why I didn’t get a needle and IV a drug into my vein? You’re really trolling with your ‘correct usage’ bullshit, only an idiot looking to get addicted would shoot heroin, and I don’t know anyone who would try shooting it up the first time they try it or attempt injecting themselves without knowing what they are doing. I bought the stuff on a whim, I have said several times I will never IV a drug, it’s asking for problems and I wasn’t about to go looking for a needle for the reasons stated above. It doesn’t count if you don’t shoot it? Give it a fucking rest, everyone knows that’s bullshit and being an ‘elitist heroin addict’ like yourself is laughably pathetic.

Now you can go fuck off and I hope you are proud of your track marks.

But you can easily see that he is very defensive about his perspective and does not appreciate it when people give him fair warnings about what he is playing with. He also claims that he will never IV the drug, yet, as we will later learn, he absolutely does, but we will get to that in a bit. For now, his behavior prompts at least one user to say that he is behaving like a toddler, because he feels like this is an Ask Me Anything thread, not an Ask Reddit thread. He believes that people are offering him unsolicited advice against his chosen actions, and does not appreciate their weigh ins. They just made him double down:

SpontaneousH OP 17y ago

Well considering I made this IAMA, quite often. No negative effects, posting here and getting the responses I did has removed any mental guilt I had or doubts about the decision. It is really all the ignorant and dickish posts telling me I’m a fucking asshole for trying it that made me realize I didn’t make a decision I regret. So I thank them for that.

Why consider doing it again? The same reason you continued to use cocaine.

When you want to know how a psychopath thinks of addicts, this is a pretty good summation of it. For me, I consider this comment sort of descriptive of the whole mentality they appear to have.

I don’t regret it

Everyone that warned me is stupid

You can’t tell me what to do

You just proved to me that I’m right, you’re wrong, case close, go to hell

It is this childish emotional pursuance of feeling good that a psychopath will never understand. We see neurotypicals as slaves to their emotions, and addicts even more so. They want so desperately to not feel the bad things, and to only feel good things, that they will just wreck their lives, as well as everyone’s lives that happen to be around them, because they can’t handle their emotions.

To a psychopath, that makes no sense, and, to us, it seems weak.

Even SpontaneousH states that he used to judge heroin users, himself:

SpontaneousH OP 17y ago

Poverty and growing up in that environment in Baltimore in poverty is what got people hooked on heroin and the drug wars are what got people killed.

I always passed judgment on drug users, and almost everyone does, especially about Heroin. Why not try it first hand and get a better understanding of what causes it. One time will not make you an addict despite what your high school health teacher and society want you to believe.

“you are trying to submit too fast. try again in 4 minutes.” I thought they fixed that...

I’ll respond to an above post here:

You won’t go through withdrawal or have a physical dependence from doing it once. If you do it constantly for several days and definitely after a week you will have a physical addiction and maybe a little withdrawal, but the crazy withdrawals you see in movies are after weeks, months and years of use. I feel perfectly fine now, the only reason I would want to do it again is because it felt amazing, but I have no physical need.

Hmm… Something tells me it won’t be the song he is singing next week. Another Redditor responded quite appropriately to his flawed reasoning:

filenotfounderror 17y ago

i agree, we should murder, rape, and self mutilate before we pass judgments on these things as bad ideas.

Mind you, you can go through his posts and see all the times that he interacts on this post. It is a lot, over a hundred times. I could go through all of them, but really, it doesn’t matter how many times he justifies his actions, and tries to convince everyone that he is making the right choice, all the while reaffirming to himself that he is in control.

What matters is the mental negotiation that you can already see on full display here, and why I find addiction to be a series of bad decisions that do not need to be made. It is difficult for me to cognitively comprehend why there is any empathy or sympathy offered for people that jump into the valley of thorns and then cry piteously that they are getting stabbed. But, they don’t want to leave, they want you to assist them staying down there, and if you don’t, you’re somehow the bad guy.

Let’s say, for the sake of argument that SpontaneousH is correct, that he has no physical attachment to the drug… yet. However, he wants that high, and he is more than willing to forgo any logical or reasonable point that gets in the way of what he wants. He knows better, and he is going to do whatever.

That to me is a choice, and not one that I have to offer any understanding of. If you have emotional issues, get help with them, but going down the drug rabbit hole is not the way to do so. I don’t understand emotional suffering. I am the first to admit that, and I know that I am stating this without having personal experience. However, SpontaneousH is making my case for me. It isn’t because he is in so much emotional pain that he is seeking an out. He wasn’t introduced to it as a kid, before he had the wherewithal to make better decisions. He chose to do it because he simply wanted to, and didn’t want to listen when people tried to warn him away.

That is so childish in my mind, and not something that I really understand.

For context, I do understand that there are other addiction stories. I have mentioned that my friend works with people that suffered severe abuse, and addiction is a constant problem in this world. Either they were introduced to drugs as children to keep them in line, or they turned to drugs in order to cope with their emotional damage. I know that these stories exist as well. It is not entirely black and white, but those that chose this life, that is a different story in my mind. Next week we get to go into the update, where things have gone awry.

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Let’s get into this guy’s descent into addiction, shall we?

This originally was posted on Reddit seventeen years ago, but I heard it on a Southern Cannibal video. I will put up links to both, if you want to read it for yourself without my commentary, or you want to hear it narrated. Southern Cannibal has a great voice for scary stories, so that would be my recommendation. Also, for those of you that think that this is just a creation for the internet, the original poster provided photographic evidence to go along with his post.

Also, also, it is worth noting that Southern Cannibal did the work to grab all the relevant comments from after the initial posts to continue the story without having to hop around the comments to find them all. It will be that transcript this will be reacting to, because I am not wading through all that Reddit noise in order to do so. Southern already did it, so I thank him, and also piggyback on his work.

I will note Southern’s narration by name.

Also, it should be noted, he has been clean for several years now according to him.

Reddit Post:

I did Heroin yesterday. I am not a drug user and have never done anything besides pot back when I was a teen, AMA

Southern Cannibal’s narration cued to the timestamp:

The Dark World Of Reddit Confessions

I will be putting in commentary as we go. Like I said, if you want to read it, or listen to it yourself without that first, do so at the links. This is a long post with several updates, and won’t be covered in one article. It was a half hour narration, so that, along with my reactions, will make it even longer. I have no idea how many posts it will stretch. It might be two, it might be more. We shall see. Also, I did correct certain spelling errors from the original writing. I have only so much tolerance for the red underlining on my posts. It’s distracting.

(this is a little long) I have never been a drug user, I drink once in a while and smoked pot years ago back when I was a teen in high school a few times and that’s it. I’m 24 now, have a masters and a well paying full time job.

This guy is already starting off in a bad spot. He had a good setup, a nice job, and a good horizon in front of him. Look, if you want to try heroin, wait until you are nearing the end of your life and have little to lose. You would have already lived your best years, and at that point, if you really really need to try it, then you have less to destroy if you decide to do so.

Yesterday I was walking through Washington Square Park where I pass every day and there are always people there looking to sell drugs (not in the park anymore due to cameras, but it is well known you can meet a dealer than and do the transaction elsewhere these days). They usually don’t solicit drugs to you unless you stop to stand around near one of them for some reason or look like you’re looking for something.

Yesterday I happened to stop by a row of benches to check some messages on my phone when a dealer on the bench to my right asks me if I need anything. My life has been pretty boring the last few years and I feel like I haven’t really lived, taken any risks, or done anything crazy so I figured what the hell maybe I’ll buy some pot, it’s been a while.

I said yeah and after asking me several times if I’m a cop he gives me his number and tells me to meet him at a fast food place several blocks away and he will ‘hook me up.’ I say alright and nervously check to make sure I have cash and go meet this shady looking dude. We sit down and after hounding me asking if I’m a cop he asks what I need, I tell him I just want a dime bag and he says something like “Naw sorry man, I only sell half ounces, you can take that and I’ve got some coke and H.”

Walk away dude. Walk away. You wanted pot, not coke, not heroin. You aren’t taking a step down that slope, you are preparing a butter greased sled for a ride to the bottom.

At this point I didn’t want to buy half an ounce of pot, I probably never smoked more than an eighth in my life but then I started considering his last word, Heroin. I’ve heard so much about it and how crazy addictive it is and seen it in the movies and TV (I’m thinking The Wire here, one of my favorite shows) and it really started to intrigue me. I’ve always wondered what it would be like to do Heroin. Out of no where I say I’ll take the H and we do the deal there. I give him the cash under the table and he slides me a small order of fries with a little stamped wax baggie in it then he tells me to let him leave first.

I’m sorry, can you hand hold me through this argument please? You don’t want that much pot… so why not just try heroin? Am I reading that correctly? What? Tell me what flavor the windows were on your bus when you were a kid. Seriously dude.

I put it in my pocket then nervously race home my heart racing cannot believing what I just did. I held onto that bag in my pocket palms sweating the whole ride home. When I get home I open the bag and dump some golden flakes and powder on my glass coffee table. At this point I don’t even know what to do, I know you can snort heroin but it looked all flaky so I try to remember how they did it in the movies but they always seem to inject it in film so I start googling “how to snort Heroin’ like an idiot and do a little research on the stuff and how much to take.

At no point did you think to yourself, if I have no idea what I am doing, then maybe I shouldn’t be doing it? Not once? Really?

I used a card to get it into a fine powder and move a small ‘bump’ to the side which I inhaled through a dollar bill. I didn’t feel anything yet so I snorted a small line which was essentially half the bag (there was very little inside).

All right, I haven’t done hard drugs before, however, I assume that they aren’t selling like a non-useful amount to anyone, right? Meaning that they generally sell to addicts who are seeking enough product to get high. Which means, the amount, however much there was there, in that baggie, should have been enough for a person used to the drug to sufficiently get some kind of response out of. Maybe not euphoria, or anything like that, but enough to get back to baseline I would guess. It didn’t occur to this dude that he should be extremely cautious about the amount he is going to take?

I waited and in a few minutes I had the most pleasurable feeling of pure relaxation and bliss wash over me. I just sat there and everything felt amazing. I nodded off and it was great, I had the TV on but wasn’t paying attention, I must have sat around for 4 hours doing nothing but feel total pleasure. It was like a full body orgasm times 10 that kept going on and on.

Maybe it is because he snorted it, I don’t know, but I thought that heroin hit you with a hard wave of nausea first, then the high kicks in. Maybe this isn’t the case, or maybe it is because of how he used it. No idea.

When I would nod off it felt like I was in a pure conscious lucid dream like state, sometimes it felt like I was leaving my body. At this point I did the rest of it and stayed up all night and must have been high for 10 hours straight. I might have slept at one point, it’s hard to tell the difference when you nod off and everything feels good regardless, just the feeling of being under a blanket was amazing.

I was blown away by the power of this drug and just how orgasmic it felt. I never understood why people did drugs before and got so hooked on them but now I see why. I have the urge to do it again but I will resist and not do it, at least not for a long time. I understand the addiction potential and how someone could easily tear apart their lives with this stuff.

How does this description appeal to anyone? It sounds to me like he is disconnected from reality, doesn’t know what is going on around him, is totally out of it, has lost ten hours, and only can say that it feels amazing, but not why. Saying, it feels orgasmic, says nothing. Do you know what feels orgasmic? An orgasm. Go masturbate and get on with your day.

I don’t buy that an ongoing orgasm is remotely pleasurable. Actually, I know that it isn’t. If you have never heard of it, there is a condition called Persistent Genital Arousal Disorder, or PGAD, that essentially is exactly that, and the people with it (it’s pretty rare) hate it, so I am not buying the whole, it’s a ten hour orgasm.

Describe it better.

Heroin is pure powdered pleasure, I actually feel proud of myself for having the balls to do something this crazy and I feel like it was a valuable life experience and my window into another world and part of society. I will never forget the day I did heroin. Now, ask me anything.

Okay, why are you stupid?

This is not something to be proud of. You should be proud of accomplishments, things you do and have striven for. You went to a seedy bench, talked to a seedy guy, got an unknown substance in a bag that the guy told you was heroin but could have been cremation ashes for all you knew, and shoved them straight up your nose and into your brain. This is not an occasion to trot out the word, “proud”. More like, brain doner.

Also, the cope here. It was a valuable life experience? It gave you a window into another part of society? I mean, so could serial killing. Are you going to go out and murder a random stranger because you want insight into another world, and get “life experience”?

Weak, BS excuse.

Southern Cannibal:

After making the post, many Redditors obviously showed concern while others even applauded them for trying something new and being alive to tell the story, while others heavily related to the blissful experience.

One Redditor chimed in: “Yes, opioid molecules are the best on Earth. It really is the greatest feeling life has to offer. Unfortunately, once I got a taste for that feeling, it was all over. Opioids are the most addictive drugs on the planet. Once your body gets addicted, the withdrawal is pure hell. Be very, very careful not to ingest the stuff every day because in a matter of a week, you will be completely addicted.”

He gets this warning, and he’s like, “Nope, not me. I’m different!”

You’re not though. You’re really not.

Another Redditor stated: “Not a question, just a suggestion based on knowledge gained from years as a heroin addict. Don’t do it again, ever. There is nothing so terrible in this world as heroin withdrawals. It takes doing heroin every day or every other day for about 2 to 3 months to get your first habit, but that time goes by real fast when you are high. Just leave it alone. Seriously.”

Is he going to listen? No, no he is not…

Southern Cannibal:

At the end of the day, the general consensus was the same: this was a horrible and life-ruining decision and not something anyone should ever try to experience. But unfortunately, it was too late for Spontaneous H. The damage was done.

It wasn’t too late. He could have decided to listen, he chose to ignore the advice. Why? Because he’s the special exception to the rule.

Southern Cannibal

Spontaneous H didn’t take too kindly to some of the comments on their post…

Of course he didn’t. He wants people to tell him he’s brave and awesome for taking heroin.

Southern Cannibal:

…and followed up with an update:

Spontaneous H:

“Please, no more comments telling me I’m going to be a homeless addict dying of an overdose. Now, don’t lecture me with all your misconceptions and lack of any real knowledge or experience about the drug. I understand if you know someone who has been hurt by it. We all do. Any drug can ruin lives. Please ask me questions instead of trying to lecture me and do some research first before spewing lies.”

Sounds to me like someone sees what is likely his future and is in denial. What research would he like people to do about using heroin, I wonder?

Update two: “I don’t regret this at all and I see a lot of talk about how cocaine isn’t as bad as heroin and people telling anyone considering trying a hard drug to do coke instead. I’ve known and seen a lot of heavy coke users, many who have become addicted and ODed. And I find it disturbing that people think coke is acceptable because some higher class circles find it socially acceptable. I’m thanking the young Wall Street and college crowds here who associate it with money and being cool and is easily manageable to use for recreation. While society tells them that heroin is for the poor and the destitute and leads to automatic addiction and suffering. So, I plan to try cocaine the next chance I get and compare the two in terms of effects and experience.

Unfortunately, I cannot tell what the timeframe is between these two updates. However, it becomes rather obvious, very quickly, how defensive Spontaneous H becomes regarding his life choices. Also, Spon H, I don’t think the “coke is for the upper class” idea has been around for a minute now. Sure, in the eighties, but now? It isn’t exactly limited to any particular social circle.

Doing heroin was memorable and life-changing, and I know I can handle anything once. I’ve done my research on coke and know the risks. So, if anyone has any questions or opinions on that matter, feel free to chime in. Whether it is to tell me I’m a fucking idiot or to give me advice, whatever. This is an experiment and an adventure in life. I’ll report back once I try it.”

I love how he wants people to “chime in”, but the moment that they do with anything remotely negative about his life choices, he shoots them down with derision. Why even pretend that you are open to hearing their perspective, and perhaps consider why they might be giving you their own negative experiences.

There is an old adage. Life is too short to make all the mistakes there are to be made in the world, so instead of trying to make them all yourself, learn from some of mine.

This dude is like, that’s not happening! I’m going to do what I want. What do you recovering addicts know anyway? You ruined your lives, not heroin. Poor heroin, you all are so mean to it. Look, it’s sobbing in the corner because you’re so mean.

Dude… it has the rep for a reason.

After this, he tries to differentiate between heroin and meth, like they aren’t equal opportunity life destroyers:

SpontaneousH

OP•17y ago

I expected it, people have the preconceived notions and we are brought it to believe that Heroin is a big bad evil monster.

methamphetamine is something that disgusts me and I would be cautious about touching, but I will still try it (I wouldn’t smoke it, just snort) to see what the fuss is about that is taking over parts of America. I have taken Adderall before and plenty of it to study and once took a lot (120mg) to see what it would be like to be on speed (forgot to include that in the title as other drugs I’ve done, but it was prescribed). I would be curious to know how the methylated amphetamine form feels in comparison, and that is something I would only try once.

It disgusts him, but he would still try it. I don’t think our friend knows what the word “disgust” means. It means that it would make you turn away from it because you are repelled from it. Granted, I could make the argument that I am speaking about revulsion, and perhaps disgust can be overcome with… I don’t know, weird justification to try something that “disgusts” you? I find the notion of balut rather disgusting, and my form of disgust is not emotional. Mine is, no, I would rather not.” While his

Southern Cannibal:

Spontaneous H returned with an update two weeks later. This is where things begin to take a very disturbing turn. What was supposed to just be a thrilling first-time experience they lived through to talk about with strangers on the internet had now culminated into a deep, dark spiral that they couldn’t escape from.

The second post was titled, “Two weeks ago, I tried heroin once for fun and made an AMA. I have been using since and shot up for the first time today. Ask me anything.” It was posted on Sunday, September 27th, 2009 at nearly 2:00 a.m.

Two weeks, and everything is gone. Maybe, just maybe, you should have listened to the people telling you not to do the heroin to begin with? This is what kills me about addiction. I cannot understand why he is negotiating so hard for something that is well known to be a terrible idea. It’s not like he came to Reddit to ask about heroin because there is just no information about it out there. Literally all the people that have two brain cells holding hands can tell you, yeah, not a great plan. He, of course, knew better, and now is going to drag himself back here, tail between his legs going, “WHAT HAVE I DONE??!!!!”

Heroin dumbass. Heroin.

We will walk through his regret, and what he learned, next week.

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This will be the second part of the addiction series, where we discuss a person’s actual descent into addiction through a series of choices that they make, ignoring all of the urgent warnings along the way. We may or may not get to that narrative today, it depends on how well my writing brain feels like working at the moment. If it decides to crawl out of its slumbering hole, then this will be the preamble. If not, then we will dive into the piece pretty quickly, because reaction brain will cattle prod writing brain, and we will go from there.

I am going to preface this by saying this. The last two posts explained why psychopaths do not experience addiction. That, admittedly, leaves me without the real ability to understand what it must be like. I get that. I know that I am operating from a position of having no idea what I am talking about.

That said, when I see addicts, and I will make it a point here to differentiate between addicts and those that are dependent on pain medication due to long term injury or illness, when I see actual addicts, I find their choices weak. Granted, I can’t be addicted to things, and I should probably not have an opinion on the matter due to that, but, I do. The story that we are about to go through pretty much exemplifies why I have the opinion that I do, as well.

Interestingly, before I heard this narrative, I had already arrived at the conclusion that I was perhaps too mean when it comes to my criticism of addicts. However, this story pretty well laid out exactly how it looked from the outside to me. People that are chasing some feeling that they think is thrilling, and negotiating everything in their lives away to achieve it. When I see someone that is detrimentally harming themselves to chase some emotional BS, I am quite critical of that.

Psychopaths can’t feel what you feel, and no, we don’t emotionally suffer, but we can physically suffer, and still there is nothing in me that gets the draw to addiction. I understand cognitively that people emotionally suffer, and while I wouldn’t say this to them, as it is perceived as cruel, when I hear that they are using drugs as a coping mechanism, my internal voice says, that’s pathetic. They are avoiding what they are here to learn. Their whole reason to be on this planet, and they are running from it to chase some artificial pleasure.

After all:

This quote is often wrongly associated with Friedrich Nietzsche. The phrasing comes from the preface to Viktor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning, written by psychologist Gordon W. Allport. Allport summarized what he saw as the central theme of existentialism with roughly those words: “To live is to suffer, to survive is to find meaning in the suffering.” Frankl’s book details his search for the meaning behind his own suffering at the hands of the Nazi’s in concentration camps, and how he was able to work through all that he saw there.

Nietzsche did write about suffering, and has a quote that also goes with my thinking:

Suffering comes for us all, and it affects us to varying degrees, but a great deal of how it is dealt with comes from choices that we make. I know, this is loaded with quotes so far, but sometimes someone just says it better than you can, and in this case, there are three men that provided just the right words:

Words can never adequately convey the incredible impact of our attitude toward life.

The longer I live the more I am convinced I become that life is 10% what happens to us and 90% how we respond.

To sum this up, you are going to suffer, you are meant to figure out what the meaning behind this suffering is, and you are meant to grow through it. Running from it because you haven’t a strong enough spirit to cope is not an excuse. You grow a spirit through living, not avoiding living. Addiction is the avoidance of life, and in my mind, it is largely related to choices made by the person dealing with it.

I suppose another issue that I have with addicts is that people tend to make excuses for them, or label the things that they do as “psychopathic”. This annoys me because it is just another example of neurotypicals not taking responsibility for their own bad behavior. A person stole from their mother? They must be a psychopath. Some heinous crime was committed? Obviously a psychopath. Ignore the fact that they have been an addict for fifteen years, and have a whole host of sh*tty things that they have done all throughout that time because they are… an addict.

Addiction changes how people behave. I have people ask me all the time if this criminal, or that one, is a psychopath, because what they did was just so awful, they would have to be one, right? The moment I hear that they are an addict, number one, it tells me that they can’t be psychopathic, obviously. However, it also tells me that people really are not seeing what addiction permits in the addict’s mind. They get to do whatever they want in order to achieve what they think is necessary. Whatever they have to do to get high, totally acceptable.

What drugs do is create the worst kind of monster, in my mind. It wears away aspects of the neurotypical that stands in the way of their indulgence of darkness. Other things can do this too. Ideology is a huge driving force for this as well. You can willingly erode the aspects of yourself that are built in guard rails that keep you from doing awful things. You can choose to wear them down through barraging them with drugs, or with a belief system that allows you to consider those around you as “others”. Either way, these are choices that a person makes.

Drugs file away at these internal stopgaps to bad behavior. Those stopgaps are like training wheels in my estimation. They prevent people from tipping too far one way or another, without a lot of thought needed from the individual. They keep you from doing things that you definitely should not do. The problem with these as guardrails or stopgaps is that when they are broken down, you have nothing there in their place. There is no examination of who you want to be as a person.

There was an internal warning system, guilt, remorse, bonding, etc. that kept you on the right path. Now that those things have been washed away by the flood of drugs, you are left with the emotional person underneath that does not have anything standing in your way of doing whatever crosses your mind. This is the most dangerous kind of person in my mind. A person that has all of the emotions that neurotypicals do to their varying degrees, and now, nothing telling them that they will regret doing whatever has just crossed their minds.

Psychopaths are born without these guardrails. I have said in the past, life is like a video game difficulty setting.

A video game accounts for many lives, or in our understanding, reincarnation. If we are playing a god’s game, and the goal is to master the game to the best of our abilities, then it makes sense to me that there are different levels of play. Once you master one level, you move onto the next, ever changing as you move through the system as it was designed.

As your soul goes through this process, you adapt and change, or you stagnate. If you stagnate, you go through the same types of levels over and over again to find the shiny MacGuffin (quest item, or in this case the lesson you have to fully embrace) before you can move on. When you do, you are in a new set of levels.

Games often start with a tutorial stage. It usually just gets you through the first mission, and is designed to teach you game mechanics. Every game is different, just like every lesson is different, and you have to learn the rules of the one you are currently engaged in. This one lines up with the religion stage of life. It is where the rules are laid out, and all you have to do is comply.

Basically, you are following along without any fear of failure, because if you do fail, the stage just resets, and you try again until you get it right. If we are to apply this notion to the stages of a soul, you are just following what you are told, for instance in a holy book of some sort, and you act accordingly. No internal self reflection required, and hopefully you learn the basics of how to function in the world that you are in, get your needs met, not die, and advance to the next stage. It’s the easy mode, with infinite lives, and infinite respawn points. Basically it’s noob land for all the fresh souls. In this difficulty, the souls must learn how to exist within the construct of the game without perishing.

Next stage, or medium difficulty. This is where you have had some previous experiences with games, and feel relatively comfortable to go forward without the game holding you hand. You are ready to rely on your instincts. In most people’s case, this means relying on their internal voice, their emotions, and their empathy. These things dictate how they are going to interact with the world around them. The first stage primed them to be able to understand how the world functions.

You aren’t relying on a book to tell you what to do, you are figuring out as you go. You basically do what feels good, to you. My guess is with difficulty, the goal is to learn to start asking questions of oneself and for the souls to figure out what their definition of success is without being told. It is where the journey to self discovery starts, and with those paying attention, they lean a bit on the heart, a bit on the mind, and try to use common sense.

The third stage, better known as hard mode. Things are a bit more difficult in this stage, and there is going to be a lot of hardship to get through. This is meant to be this way. You are slogging through it to prove that you can. This mode might throw everything it can at your emotional brain so it is overwhelmed. Can you see above that, and struggle through rationally, or do the emotions eat you alive, and you stagnate again? If you can get through it, and learn to rely on the rational voice and recognize that the emotional voice is far louder than it needs to be, and you can step away from it, and soldier on, you move onto the last stage. Or, maybe the second to last stage, I’m not sure.

Now we are talking about the specialty stages. Those that you don’t take on unless you really like the game, and are a completionist like I am. Difficulties like these get special names, like Dante Must Die, 1999 Mode, Madhouse Playthrough, Village of Shadows, Insanity mode, Nightmare Difficulty, Professional, among others. There is a reason that they get their own titles, and the titles depict a sort of unthinkable way of existing. That is the difference between how psychopaths greet the world, versus the various versions of neurotypicals.

In psychopathy, you’ve got no directions, nothing is where it’s supposed to be, there are no infinite spawns, you can literally lose everything in an instant, there are almost no save points, no one prepares you for any of it, and GO!!!

Figure it out sweetheart, because the only way out of here is death. This is the difficulty where you are left with some of the aspects of your previous playthroughs. You understand the basic workings of the world, but the cues you relied on are now absent. Also, the prefrontal cortex, while not processing emotional information, it is processing “want” information. It doesn’t have anything in terms of internal restraint systems, and has a focus on rewards, and has no aversion to punishment.

In this difficulty, you can be ruled by impulse, or you can be ruled by reason attempting to constrain impulse. I think that the lesson in this life is to learn how to be the master of those impulses, and I admit that I often fail, but it is a journey, not a destination. Another lesson is to live to a better version of self that the wiring seems to want for you. If you simply went along with what your brain wants to do, you might find yourself in a fair bit of trouble, which brings us to enhanced end stage difficulty.

With all of that, the vast majority of us figure it out. We don’t get why everyone else has such a hard time with it. It took me a long time to realize that the automatic processes in the neurotypical brain, while good to have, are too much of a crutch. If they cease to exist for any reason there is no backup. There isn’t a person thinking in the background, I could do X, but X is against my moral compass. It isn’t that it makes me feel bad to even consider it, but rather I have considered it, and I accept that I am capable of it, and would do X if the situation propelled me to do so, but I am choosing not to do so because of this world of examination that I have built for myself.

Psychopaths come to the conclusion of what they should or shouldn’t do as we move through life. That is all that can be done. We rely a lot on what causes us inconvenience, and what does not, especially when we are younger. When we get older, and if we develop cognitive empathy, we then start to consider our actions in the world. However, this is still done through a rather selfish lens.

I create the world in which I want to live. I know that. I know that if I want to live a good life, I cannot be the paragon of chaos and still get that result. Actions have consequences, and all that jazz. My way of being in the world directly impacts me, and me is who I am concerned with.

However, and this is a big one, I know what I am capable of doing should it be pressed upon me to do so. This is not meant to be some cringy r/Iamsoverybadass nonsense, it is the actual evaluation of character that I think all of us are required to do, in order to understand who and what we are. I am a monster. We are all monsters to some degree or another, but I know that about myself, and I know when and where allowing myself to wrap myself in the garb of that monstrosity is acceptable, and when it is not. I do not have emotions in place to drive the monster out, nor do I have emotions in place to keep the monster in.

That is what you have as a neurotypical. You have the safety fences, and they are there for a reason. If you have not taken the time to embrace all of what you are, and then know that each part of you has a time and a place, you are required to keep those fences in place. You cannot be trusted with your monstrousness. Being able to live side by side with all of yourself requires you to place your own boundaries. It’s the difference between having a beagle and living with a pack of free roaming dire wolves. If you don’t have the correct relationship, you are setting your monster loose on the world.

I think that antisocial psychopaths are the ones that don’t have any sort of boundaries with their monsters. They haven’t learned that they are the arbiters of their own demise, and honestly, I doubt they care. A psychopathic monster is not the same as a neurotypical monster. There are a lot of differences, actually, probably more differences than similarities. For one, a psychopath isn’t going to be driven by some emotional reason to do whatever it is they are inclined to undertake. They will do so out of boredom, or just because it strikes them as interesting at the moment.

Hervey Cleckley had a brilliant insight in regards to the drive to do things in a psychopathic mind. He states as summarized by Professor Joseph Newman:

“Psychopaths are not driven by the things that lead to their behavior. It’s not that they’re driven to be especially violent or aggressive, it’s not like they’re so motivated to get money that they’re going to after it in that way, it’s not like they’re so turned on by sexual things that they do things that are sexually inappropriate,”

‘and he went on and on that and he explicitly notes’

“that if anything their drive towards those goals, maybe less that those of other people. The only thing is when they have a whim, just a thought that it might be interesting to try this or do this, they are more likely to act on it. So he talks about very weak urges breaking through even weaker restraints being a hallmark of psychopathy”.

Neurotypical monsters have strong emotional drivers behind them. They feel hatred, passion, rage, love, obsession, wrathfulness, all things that we lack. The things that are indulged in when neurotypicals unlock the monster’s cage is something that psychopaths can’t comprehend the motivations of. Psychopaths are very self-focused. We don’t have emotions toward others that make us want to cause them suffering because they “wronged” us somehow. We might, in extreme situations, teach them a lesson, but this is a calculated thing that is done. Not something that is so removed of reason and logic because emotion has clouded our ability to think.

Psychopaths have had our whole lives to decide what we are going to accept from ourselves and under what circumstances those actions are acceptable.

Neurotypicals, except the rare few that try to consider themselves outside of their immediate emotional responses, and try to see deeper in, have not done this work. Without doing so, it is the darkest of impulses with taboo emotional payoffs that are waiting. If we have learned anything from the advent of freely available pornography’s, it is that people will grow bored with what they see after time, and keep seeking more depraved things to watch or read. This is the same mechanism that we are talking about. Those deep felt emotions will be drivers of very negative behavior, and that is what addiction allows to happen.

I suppose I see it as an excuse to behave however a person wants, and have that shield to hide behind. You can’t be mad at them, they’re sick, they have a problem, they are addicted and wouldn’t do such things, but they can’t help themselves. I don’t believe that. Sure, it might make it easier to do terrible things, but those things are still choices, and ones that if they really wanted to, they could choose to do differently.

Well, it seems that writer brain was awake and present, so next post we will go into the narrative.

Until then.

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Now we return to the never ending research paper. All right, I have read far longer research paper than this one, but the use of citations is pretty significant in this one. It’s… a lot…

Materials and methods

Participants

These data were drawn from a National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA)-funded substance abuse treatment trial conducted at two adult correctional facilities in New Mexico. To be eligible, participants had to volunteer, meet DSM-IV (American Psychiatric Association, 1994) criteria for lifetime dependence on methamphetamine, heroin, or cocaine, and had to have used the drug within 3 months prior to their incarceration. Participants were given drug tests before each treatment session 2, but due to ethical considerations, were given the opportunity to continue treatment and study participation regardless of test results. Exclusion criteria included: estimated full-scale IQ less than 70, less than a sixth grade reading level, current antipsychotic medication use, psychotic disorder diagnosis for self or a first-degree relative, or past or current central nervous system disease. Five participants were excluded due to motion during scanning or poor image quality (e.g., deformations due to dental work). The final sample consisted of 137 individuals (mean age = 34.03, SD = 8.18; 93 females; see Table 1 for race/ethnicity). Participants gave written informed consent and were compensated $1 per hour, commensurate with the rate of pay for labor inside correctional facilities. Study materials and procedures were approved by the UNM HSC Institutional Review Board.

The DSMIV? All right…the DSM5 was out when this research paper was done, but okay, we can do a flashback I guess.

There are charts in the study, but you will have to link over to see them, as I cannot extract them. Maybe there is a way to do so, but I am not that dedicated.

Assessments

Psychopathy

Psychopathy was assessed using the Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (Hare, 2003) (PCL-R). Trained researchers reviewed institutional records and conducted semi-structured interviews regarding participants’ psychosocial histories and interpersonal and emotional skills. Individuals are rated on a 3-point scale for 20 items, with scores ranging from 0 to 40. Traditional factor analyses of the PCL-R have revealed a two-factor structure (Harpur et al., 1989; Hare, 2003), although other models have been developed (Cooke and Michie, 2001), including a four facet model (Hare, 2003). Factor 1 (potential range: 0–16) comprises interpersonal (e.g., grandiosity, deceitfulness; Facet 1) and affective traits (e.g., lack of empathy, shallow affect; Facet 2), and Factor 2 (potential range: 0–20) comprises lifestyle behavioral (e.g., impulsivity, stimulation-seeking; Facet 3) and antisocial traits (e.g., poor behavioral controls, early behavioral problems; Facet 4). Interviews were videotaped to conduct reliability assessments. Double ratings were conducted on 16.8% of the sample, selected randomly. The intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC1one-way random effects model) was 0.83.

I mean… it’s not great to construct a cohort with the PCL-R, but they are following up with fMRI, so I suppose I cannot complain too much. I still do not like it though.

Substance use

Substance use was assessed in two ways:

Number of Substance Dependence Diagnoses. Trained researchers interviewed participants using the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV disorders (First et al., 1997) (SCID) to assess lifetime dependence according to DSM-IV criteria. The total number of substances including alcohol for which an individual met lifetime dependence criteria was calculated (scale: 0–8).

Years of Regular Substance Use. A modified version of the Addiction Severity Index (McLellan et al., 1992) (ASI) was used to calculate the cumulative years of regular use (i.e., three or more times per week) for all substances (alcohol, heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, cannabis, hallucinogens, and inhalants) combined. The ASI is a brief interview that asks details about the duration, frequency, and amount of use of multiple types of drugs.

Still with the DSMIV… So weird.

Other measures

Vocabulary and Matrix Reasoning subtests of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (Wechsler, 1997) were used to estimate the full-scale IQ (Ryan et al., 1999). The Wide Range Achievement Test Word Reading subtest (Wilkinson, 1993) (WRAT-3) was used to assess reading level. The SCID was used to assess past and current Axis I disorders. Individuals self-reported their primary drug of choice (i.e., methamphetamine, cocaine, or heroin). See Table 1 for descriptive statistics on demographic and study variables.

Stimuli and task

Imaging data were collected prior to the participants’ initiating the study’s 12-week treatment program. Two types of pictures (32 drug-related and 32 neutral) were selected from the popular media. Drug-related pictures depicted drugs or drug paraphernalia related to cocaine, heroin, and/or methamphetamine (e.g., white powder with a razor blade, a hand holding a syringe, a pipe). Neutral pictures depicted non-drug objects and scenes (e.g., white fluffy clouds, folded hands, a pen). Participants were instructed that they would see a series of pictures presented one at a time for 6 s. For each picture they were told to determine if anything in the picture gave them a craving feeling or desire to use drugs. Then they were instructed to rate their intensity of drug craving (in the form of a growing red bar) on a scale from 1 (no craving) to 5 (extreme craving) based on their immediate level of desire, not how they think they should feel or would hope to feel. After the rating screen, a black screen with a white fixation cross was presented for 4 s. Twenty null fixation trials the same duration as picture trials (i.e., picture + rating + fixation = 14 s) were interspersed randomly. Each participant completed two runs of 52 trials (16 drug-cues, 16 neutral, and 20 null fixation stimuli per run).

All right, my Significant Other just described the looking at drug related images creating a physiological response, such as people who love animals seeing a picture of a cat and having a reaction, which reinforces my thought that addiction and oxytocin are related.

Grok had this to say:

Yes, oxytocin (often called the “love hormone” or “bonding hormone”) plays a significant role in addiction, both in the underlying neurobiology of substance use disorders (SUD) and as a potential therapeutic target.

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

How Oxytocin Interacts with Addiction

Oxytocin is a neuropeptide produced in the hypothalamus that influences:

• Social bonding and prosocial behavior

• Stress regulation (via the HPA axis)

• Reward processing (especially through interactions with dopamine in the mesolimbic pathway, including the nucleus accumbens and ventral tegmental area)

Addiction hijacks the brain’s natural reward system (dopamine surges from drugs/alcohol), while also dysregulating stress responses and social functioning. Chronic substance use often blunts the endogenous oxytocin system, leading to:

• Heightened stress and anxiety during withdrawal

• Reduced sensitivity to natural social rewards

• Increased vulnerability to cravings and relapse

Oxytocin counters these effects by:

• Modulating reward — It can dampen drug-induced dopamine release, reducing the reinforcing “high” from substances like alcohol, cocaine, methamphetamine, and opioids.

• Reducing stress and negative emotions — It helps normalize hyperactive stress responses and lowers withdrawal-related anxiety or dysphoria.

• Attenuating cravings — Especially cue-induced or stress-induced cravings.

• Promoting social salience — It may help restore interest in healthy social connections, which are often eroded in addiction.
  sponsored.chronicle.com

This involvement spans multiple stages of the addiction cycle (binge/intoxication, withdrawal/negative affect, and preoccupation/anticipation).Evidence from Research

• Preclinical (animal) studies — Strong and consistent. Oxytocin administration (central, systemic, or intranasal) reduces self-administration, consumption, withdrawal symptoms, and reinstatement/relapse-like behavior for alcohol, opioids, cocaine, methamphetamine, and other drugs. For example, it blocks alcohol’s effects in the brain’s reward centers and prevents escalated drinking in dependent animals.
  scripps.edu

• Human studies and clinical trials — More mixed but promising. A 2023 systematic review of randomized placebo-controlled trials found oxytocin showed benefits across SUDs, with the most consistent effect being reduced withdrawal symptoms (especially after opioid cessation). It also reduced negative emotional states, general cravings, cue-induced cravings, and consumption in some trials. Effects were seen for alcohol, opioids, stimulants, and others, though not uniformly across all studies or participants.
  sciencedirect.com

Gender differences, trauma history, and individual factors (e.g., baseline oxytocin levels or attachment style) can influence outcomes. For instance, oxytocin may reduce cocaine cue-induced cravings and amygdala activity more reliably in certain subgroups (e.g., men with trauma history).Potential as a Treatment

Intranasal oxytocin (a non-invasive delivery method) is the most studied form. It is generally well-tolerated and already used in other contexts (e.g., labor induction). Researchers are exploring it as an adjunct to existing therapies for:

• Reducing acute withdrawal

• Lowering relapse risk

• Enhancing psychosocial interventions by boosting social engagement

Ongoing or recent trials have tested it for alcohol use disorder, opioid dependence, stimulant use, and co-occurring conditions like PTSD. Results are encouraging but not yet definitive—larger, well-powered trials are needed.

sciencedirect.com

Limitations and Caveats

• Oxytocin’s effects can be context-dependent (sometimes prosocial, sometimes not) and person-dependent.

• It does not “cure” addiction on its own; it is best viewed as a potential adjunct that targets specific mechanisms (reward dysregulation, stress, social deficits).

• Not all studies show benefits, and more research is required on optimal dosing, duration, and who benefits most.

In summary, oxytocin is deeply involved in the neurobiology of addiction—primarily by opposing the hijacking of reward and stress systems—and shows real promise as a novel treatment approach, especially for withdrawal, cravings, and supporting recovery through social reconnection.

That goes back to the rat example from the first post, and makes sense to me, as psychopaths lack the ability to process oxytocin, so whatever effects that it has on neurotypicals, psychopaths totally lack. Add that to the differences in the structure and function of the brain.

MRI data acquisition and statistical analysis

Participants were scanned on the Mind Research Network 1.5T Siemens Avanto mobile MRI, stationed at the correctional facilities, using an EPI gradient-echo pulse sequence (TR 2000 ms, TE 39 ms, flip angle 75°, FOV 24 × 24 cm, 64 × 64 matrix, 3.8 × 3.8 mm in-plane resolution, 4 mm slice thickness with 1 mm gap, 27 slices).

Data were preprocessed and analyzed using Statistical Parametric Mapping software (SPM5; http://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/spm). The ArtRepair Toolbox (Mazaika et al., 2009) was used to detect and remove severe image artifacts. ArtRepair-detected artifactual images were replaced and a regressor was created to remove the effects of the outliers in the statistical analyses. Following ArtRepair each run was realigned using INRIAlign, a motion-correction algorithm that is unbiased by local signal changes (Freire et al., 2002). The six realignment parameters (three translations and three rotations) and second-order movement parameters were entered as covariates in the statistical models below in order to remove variance due to movement. Realigned images were spatially normalized to the Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI) template and smoothed with an 8 mm full-width at half-maximum (FWHM) Gaussian smoothing kernel. Low frequency noise was removed using a high pass filter (cutoff: 1/128 s). Pictures (drug-related and neutral), ratings, and null fixation trials were modeled separately. Pictures were modeled with the standard SPM hemodynamic response function. For each participant, images that represented the hemodynamic response associated with viewing drug-related vs. neutral pictures were computed.

I am not a neuroscientist, so make of this what you will. Seems like a pretty standard scanning procedure.

One-sample t-tests in SPM5 were used to detect differences in viewing drug-related pictures vs. neutral pictures (i.e., main effects), and multiple regression analyses were used to evaluate the relationship between psychopathy and the neural associates of drug craving. PCL-R Total score was the predictor of most interest. PCL-R factors and facets were also examined to observe the unique variance accounted for by each factor or facet.

This is similar to the fMRI that I did. They use emotive and non-emotive images, and see where your brain lights up. Pretty typical.

After going through this paper, I don’t see a point in responding to the brain scan parts, as I can’t really add much to it. Instead, I think I will address the conclusions, and one serious problem that I find with their methodology/conclusions.

Conclusions

Numerous functional imaging studies have associated psychopathy with dysfunction in limbic and paralimbic regions, many of which have also been implicated in drug craving. This study found a negative association between psychopathy scores and engagement of craving-related areas during the viewing of drug cues. Abnormal activity in limbic and paralimbic areas in psychopathy has been demonstrated in multiple domains, including moral decision-making (Harenski et al., 2010), fear conditioning (Birbaumer et al., 2005), emotional memory (Kiehl et al., 2001), and now responses to drug cues. It will be important to follow up on the present line of work in order to develop more effective and efficient drug abuse treatments by considering an individual’s level of psychopathy when determining the most effective treatment strategy. This work has the potential to reduce the extreme burden—both financial and otherwise—of drug use disorders.

There you go. Psychopathy mitigates addiction because of how the brain functions. Now, the issue with the study that is so obnoxious, but changes nothing about the conclusions. These researchers decided that factor one traits would automatically make psychopaths more reward seeking, therefore that will be a large driver in drug seeking behavior. Why? Because they say so. Not because there is any remote evidence of that, but rather they weighted the study to show this. In other words, they decided that this would be the case, and then upended the entirety of psychopathy in order to make their conclusion fit this assertion, despite it flying in the face of every neurobiological and genetic study done on psychopathy, ever.

Due to this frankly stupid decision, they concluded that factor two traits were what mitigated the drug craving and lack of withdrawal, but also that factor two traits are what are created by the difference in the brain, not factor one.

Let me explain why this is dumb as hell. Factor two traits are antisocial personality disorder. They have nothing to do with psychopathy. Psychopathy is related to all the brain differences, which has been demonstrated time and again through brain scans, on both antisocial and regular psychopaths. They have decided to ignore all of that research and shift the brain differences to factor two, rather than factor one. Let me clear this up real quick:

According to B. Karpman (1948), the primary psychopath can be described as:

The root disorder in patients diagnosed with it whereas secondary psychopathy was defined as an aspect of another psychiatric disorder or social circumstances. Today the primary psychopathy is considered to have mostly Factor 1 traits from the PCL-R (arrogance, callousness, manipulative, lying) whereas secondary psychopaths have a majority of Factor 2 traits (impulsivity, boredom proneness, irresponsibility, lack of long term goals).”(Karpman, 1948, p. 525) Other authors have noted that primary psychopathy is used “. . . to differentiate between psychopathy that is biological in origin and secondary psychopathy that results from a combination of genetic and environmental influences”

Furthermore:

According to Hare (1993), the distinguishing feature between a true psychopath and a sociopath is that psychopaths are born as psychopaths whereas sociopaths are the product of one’s developmental environment. G.E. Partridge (1930) used the term sociopathic personality to stress the importance of environmental influences. Partridge used this term“. . . to emphasis failure to conform to societal demands and pointed to the role of environmental or cultural factors in the etiology of behavioral deviance”(Sutker& Allain, 2001, p. 446).Hare notes that both personality disorders (psychopathy and sociopathy) are the result of an interaction between genetic predispositions and environmental factors, but psychopathy leans towards the hereditary whereas sociopathy tends toward the environmental.

In further distinguishing the difference between the terms psychopathy and sociopathy, Hare offers: The difference between sociopathy and psychopathy . . . often reflect the user’s views on the origins and determinants of the disorder. Most sociologists, criminologists and even some psychologists believe the disorder is caused by social conflicts and thus prefer the term sociopath. . . those who believe that a combination of psychological, biological, genetic and environmental factors all contribute to the disorder are more likely to use the term psychopath.(Hare,1993, p. 23)

Psychopathy, Antisocial Personality & Sociopathy: The Basics A History Review Paula M. MacKenzie, PsyD, MSEd

So… again you are making me defend Hare… seriously, stop it… Hare, who decided on the factor one versus factor two traits said, primary is genetic, and secondary (ASPD) is environmental, but may have genetic factors. Environment does not cause heritable changes in the brain, as primary psychopathy has. The changes in the brain are not related to factor two traits, but these researchers decided that was not the case, and turned the concept on its head to… I don’t know, redefine psychopathy? Make their conclusion fit their supposition instead of doing real science or read all the studies that directly contradict their presumptions? I have no idea what they are thinking here. Especially when you consider how rare psychopathy actually is, and how many people in prison qualify for a diagnosis of ASPD.

Psychopathy/antisocial personality disorder conundrum

As currently construed, the diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder grossly over-identifies people, particularly those with offence histories, as meeting the criteria for the diagnosis. For example, research shows that between 50% and 80% of prisoners meet the criteria for a diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder, yet only approximately 15% of prisoners would be expected to be psychopathic, as assessed by the PCL-R. As such, the characteristics and research findings drawn from the psychopathy research may not be relevant for those with antisocial or dissocial personality disorder.

By their argument, fifty to eighty percent of prisoners should be addiction immune, not fifteen percent (which is actually closer to 10-13%, but whatever). How is that an argument?

I can agree with the scientific conclusions. Psychopathy, specifically the changes in the brain and the difference in chemical processing, make psychopaths immune to addiction. This is backed up another neuroscientist that I had a conversation with over on Quora, which is relayed in two separate comments:

Unsurprisingly, the frontal lobe of psychopath functions differently than that of neurotypicals, subsequently causing psychopathic “cold-heartedness” etc. But it also is the reason why psychopaths are apparently immune to addiction - because the reduced frontal lobe involvement in the reward circuitry means that a psychopath in withdrawal from an addictive substance only feels it in the body, and not in the mind. Neurotypical addicts experience withdrawal symptoms with severe emotional suffering, which is indistinguishable from the physical pain/discomfort of withdrawal.

Meghan Hibicke

One characteristic of psychopathy is low frontal lobe activity. Coincidentally, the affected part of the brain is part of the reward pathway and heavily involved in addiction, and the subjective misery of withdrawal (from any addiction). So while a neurotypical person might experience heroin withdrawal as “I am dying; my life is over; even if I survive, I will be hopelessly in pain and misery forever,” psychopathic people might experience heroin withdrawal as “I feel sick, so will take some Zofran, drink some Pedialyte, and wait for this to be over.”

But like Athena Walker said, psychopaths don’t get much pleasure, reward, or feelings of contentment/safety from opiates due to their low frontal lobe activity. So psychopaths are unlikely to become physically dependent on heroin in the first place.

Meghan Hibicke

In the next post I will be going into how I see addiction based on a story of an active addict. I haven’t an interest in going through the rest of this one to have to sort out their decision to “control for” factor two, which effectively was, blame factor one, and redefine the causes of factor two, other than to debunk it, as it’s idiotic.

Next week should be interesting.

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Addiction is a serious issue in society, and it is one that can create a lot of conversations about what the causes are, and what the most effective strategies for dealing with it as well. However, these conversations are things that, for the longest time, I just thought were excuses. You see, psychopaths lack the ability to become addicted to anything. The part of the brain that is activated in addiction is underactive in psychopathy, making the end result a total lack of understanding of addiction as a concept. To us, it doesn’t exist.

This can create a lot of animosity when I speak about this. Everything from people outright telling me that this is BS, psychopaths are the most addicted people out there, despite the science demonstrating otherwise, to people assuming that because we can’t get addicted to things that trying something like heroin or meth would be appealing to me. Let me clear that one up now. The things that make heroin and meth supposedly enjoyable to neurotypicals don’t fire in our brains. There is nothing about it that would be enjoyable, it would just be introducing unnecessary toxic substances into my body for the lols. That is not something that interests me.

This will be a couple of posts, maybe more, depending on how long they end up being, that will address the physical differences that make psychopaths immune, but also our perception of addiction, as when I have discussed it with others wired like me, we seems to share a similar mentality, and that mentality may seem mean to those of you that can be affected by addiction. I will do this by addressing a personal account of a person in active addiction, and responding to it as I would internally. In other words, mask off.

First, let us address the reason that psychopaths do not have the same responses to addictive substances that neurotypicals do. This has to do with the regions of the brain that psychopathy is present in. I also suspect it has to do with our turned down emotions. Frankly, there is a big part of me that still believes that a great deal of addiction is emotional, not physical. There was an experiment done on rats:

“Put a rat in an empty cage with heroin-laced water and it will drink itself to death. Put the same rat in ‘Rat Park’ — full of friends, toys, tunnels, and cheese — and it barely touches the drug.”

Johann Hari shared this on TED Talks and it completely changed how I think about addiction.

Professor Bruce Alexander ran the experiment in the 1970s and flipped the old “chemical hooks” story on its head. Isolated rats became addicts. Happy, connected rats in Rat Park almost never did.

The same pattern showed up in humans during the Vietnam War: 20% of American troops were heavy heroin users, but when they came home to normal lives, 95% simply stopped — no rehab, no massive withdrawal.

Hari’s conclusion: addiction isn’t primarily about the drug. It’s about the cage — isolation, trauma, lack of connection. Humans have a deep need to bond. When we can’t bond with people, we bond with something that gives relief: drugs, gambling, porn, whatever fills the void.

What’s one “addiction” in your life (or someone you know) that might actually be a symptom of disconnection rather than just the substance itself?

To a psychopath, it appears to be more about the emotional aspects rather than the physical, and because that appears to be the case, I would imagine that it relates to oxytocin in some form or another. My argument for that is strictly based on observation, but what I have seen in people is that they can become addicted to the results that oxytocin gives them, such as love, or bonding, even jealousy. I think that people that are highly jealous are more interested in the feeling of jealousy and having control than they actually feel threatened. However, as I have never felt such things, I could be totally off the mark.

Let’s do the sciency part, then we can get back to me talking about something that I will never experience, like I know something about it.

Psychopathic traits modulate brain responses to drug cues in incarcerated offenders

Now, you all know that I enjoy tearing apart bad studies, and this one does have some issues, but less than most out there. First issue, the sample size is only 137. That is kind of low. Second, they assessed for psychopathic traits using the PCL-R, and we all know that I think that it is a garbage checklist. However, they do use brain scans for this one, so it gets some points restored there. Also on the good side, the cohort had an average age of mid-thirties of both male and female participants. So… for once this is not a bunch of eighteen-year-olds that they decided were psychopathic because an intern said so.

Onto the study.

Abstract

Recent neuroscientific evidence indicates that psychopathy is associated with abnormal function and structure in limbic and paralimbic areas.

This study is from 2014, but the way they word this makes it sound as though it is older. The neuroscientific evidence for psychopathy has been around for a minute, but whatever, there are always improvements in imaging, so fair enough.

Psychopathy and substance use disorders are highly comorbid, but clinical experience suggests that psychopaths abuse drugs for different reasons than non-psychopaths, and that psychopaths do not typically experience withdrawal and craving upon becoming incarcerated.

I have never known a psychopath that has used illicit substances before, but we are kind of rare, so this isn’t exactly surprising. I would imagine that certain environments are more conducive to this sort of lifestyle, so perhaps if you are a lower functioning psychopath that grew up in a largely negative environment, drug and alcohol use is more common, and perhaps even expected.

I have, however, been given the pharmaceutical grade versions of a lot of these products, and let’s just say, the result is not the one that is intended by the manufacturer. For instance, amphetamines have no effect on me at all, Opioids might slightly lessen pain, but whatever emotional/physical euphoria they apparently grant, that is not a thing for me. They might make me feel out of step with my body, if the dose is high enough, but that effect is quickly mitigated, and the pain relieving aspect also is quickly tolerated. Meaning that these medications have a very short effectiveness window with me before they are rendered useless to my body.

These neurobiological abnormalities may be related to psychopaths’ different motivations for—and symptoms of—drug use. This study examined the modulatory effect of psychopathic traits on the neurobiological craving response to pictorial drug stimuli.

I don’t know what the motivation would be for the use of such things. I would say boredom, but as there isn’t an effect from the drugs themselves, I don’t know why there would be an interest in wasting money and time on them. Perhaps it is a side effect of the mask. It is what the environment calls for, so they continue to use such things. Maybe someone else has a better hypothesis. Toss it in the comments if you do. I’m interested.

Drug-related pictures and neutral pictures were presented and rated by participants while hemodynamic activity was monitored using functional magnetic resonance imaging. These data were collected at two correctional facilities in New Mexico using the Mind Research Network mobile magnetic resonance imaging system. The sample comprised 137 incarcerated adult males and females (93 females) with histories of substance dependence.

Why does this sound like a Pavlov’s Dog’s experiment? People really respond to drug related images? That’s wild to me.

The outcome of interest was the relation between psychopathy scores (using the Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised) and hemodynamic activity associated with viewing drug-related pictures vs. neutral pictures. There was a negative association between psychopathy scores and hemodynamic activity for viewing drug-related cues in the anterior cingulate, posterior cingulate, hippocampus, amygdala, caudate, globus pallidus, and parts of the prefrontal cortex. Psychopathic traits modulate the neurobiological craving response and suggest that individual differences are important for understanding and treating substance abuse.

I mean… I guess score one for Hare. It looks like his blessed checklist actually was able to demonstrate psychopathy on some level that correlates with brain scans. It would be nice if they did a study that showed whether or not the PCL-R given by one set of psychological researchers could blindly stack up to the results of neuroscientific researchers without either group knowing who scored high on the PCL-R until after brain scans were done. I wonder if that has been done. Hopefully I remember to look it up after writing this. Afterall, it would be interesting to see if Hare got any of it right, or if he made a total mess like it appears he did.

Ooo… looky what I found:

Contributions of the PCL/-R to the Construct Validation and Mechanistic Understanding of the Cleckley Psychopath

It isn’t a brain scan comparison, but it is looking at Cleckley, the PCL-R, the current thoughts on psychopathy, and it is written by Dr. Joseph Newman who isn’t a dullard. Seems like fun for later. Also, it’s brand new. As in, published in March of 2026 brand new. Super fun.

Introduction

Substance abuse and psychopathy are two conditions strongly linked to criminal activity. The net annual burden of crime in the United States alone has been estimated to exceed $3.2 trillion (Anderson, 2011; Kiehl and Hoffman, 2011). Individuals with psychopathy are among the most dangerous and chronic offenders, as evidenced by high re-offense rates (Hemphill et al., 1998; Leistico et al., 2008).

All right, the only study out of those listed that is remotely useful is the last one, it is a meta-analysis, and it really didn’t show what they claim that it did. It basically said, well, we found certain results, but… those results aren’t really really accurate. They were trying to figure out how associated a high PCL-R score was with antisocial behavior, but then say, well… factor one traits really can’t be accurately measured like this, not because they didn’t show up as antisocial, but because the very traits of psychopathy mean that they can lie convincingly.

Researchers and clinicians should also be cautious when interpreting the limited predictive ability of F1 scores. High scores on F1 indicate interpersonal charm, exploitative manipulation, and self-advancing deceitfulness, which are likely associated with duping the system and escaping documentation of antisocial conduct. It is possible that some individuals scoring high on F1 engage in comparable amounts of antisocial behaviors, yet are interpersonally skilled, cunning, and manipulative enough to escape documentation. Future studies could examine this hypothesis by using outcome criteria such as dismissed charges, staff observations, and institutional notes.

Yeah, that is a round about way of saying, factor one traits, the only traits that associate with psychopathy did not have a high correlation with antisocial behavior, but the reason isn’t because there is a negative correlation, but rather, people high in factor one traits can lie and we believe them. So while we didn’t see the correlation, we will just pretend that it’s there because we are not qualified to do our job… apparently.

How do these people get funding for this nonsense?

Also, the results are weighted racially as well.

Our results suggest that predictions of antisocial conduct based on the Hare PCLs should be interpreted more cautiously for members of minority ethnic groups, males, and prisoners than for Caucasians, females, and psychiatric patients.

Why? Reasons. But not reasons they are going to tell us. So, as much as this part of the study has been oh so carefully cited, the citations are trash. Do better study. I expect more of you.

Moreover, the use of alcohol and drugs greatly increases the likelihood of psychopathic individuals engaging in serious and/or violent criminal activity. Indeed, a large scale study on aggression and offending found that the best predictor of violence was psychopathic traits in conjunction with alcohol and/or drug abuse (Steadman et al., 2000).

Are you freaking serious? I went through this citation looking for substantiation of this claim. What did I find? Psychopathy is mentioned nine times total, in the entirety of the paper.

One time in a table:

Table 1 displays the results of the logistic regression model. As shown, 18risk factors were selected using the forward stepwise procedure, each of which contributed significantly (p , 0.05) to the prediction of patient violence

However, this claim is based on factor two traits, not factor one. I had Grok look into this further for me:

Subsequent analyses from the same MacArthur dataset (not in this 2000 paper) provide important nuance:

• A 2001 paper by Skeem and Mulvey (directly using MacArthur data) found that the PCL:SV’s predictive power for community violence was driven primarily by Factor 2 (the antisocial/lifestyle deviance component). The unique contribution of Factor 1 (core affective/interpersonal traits) was limited or nonsignificant once Factor 2 and other covariates were accounted for.

• In other words, while the total score showed a robust main effect in Steadman et al.’s Table 1, the “psychopathy” signal was largely carried by the impulsive, irresponsible, and antisocial behavioral traits (Factor 2) rather than the emotional detachment or callous-unemotional features (Factor 1).

In other words, psychopathy does not have a high prediction of violence. Antisocial traits do, which is why they are called… antisocial traits. It’s like water=wet. It is so bizarre to me that researchers just refuse to acknowledge that factor one and factor two are very different things. They are making me defend Hare, which is annoying. He is pretty clear that there is a large difference between the two, and while he thinks that they magically meet in the middle and that is what creates a psychopath’s definition, he doesn’t try to claim that factor two traits exist in a bubble.

Oh yes, it is mentioned eight more times, twice in a footnote, three times in citations, once in a description of what the PCL-SV is (which is the wrong assessment form to be using in this situation, but what do I know), twice in the acknowledgement section, and that is all, so why this was a citation this study decided was useful is beyond me.

Anyway, back to it. That’s not what this is about. However, so far, their citations have been pretty bad.

Moreover, the use of alcohol and drugs greatly increases the likelihood of psychopathic individuals engaging in serious and/or violent criminal activity. Indeed, a large scale study on aggression and offending found that the best predictor of violence was psychopathic traits in conjunction with alcohol and/or drug abuse (Steadman et al., 2000).

Yeah, Grok already called you on that BS, so no. Again, that is factor two traits, which related to ASPD, which means that it is not significant in the slightest.

This is particularly disconcerting given the fact that individuals with psychopathy appear to have a propensity toward substance abuse (Smith and Newman, 1990; Walsh et al., 2007). One potentially effective way to decrease the economic burden of criminal activity in the U.S. would be to design effective substance use treatments for individuals with psychopathy.

Stop making me debunk your citations, it’s extremely time consuming.

In the 1990 study by Smith and Newman (”Alcohol and Drug Abuse-Dependence Disorders in Psychopathic and Nonpsychopathic Criminal Offenders,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 99(4), 430–439), the authors examined substance abuse/dependence in a sample of male criminal offenders using the Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R).They specifically analyzed the two-factor structure of psychopathy:

• Factor 1 — Core interpersonal/affective traits (e.g., superficial charm, grandiosity, lack of remorse, shallow affect).

• Factor 2 — Social deviance/antisocial lifestyle traits (e.g., impulsivity, poor behavioral controls, juvenile and adult criminal behavior, irresponsibility).

Key finding on substance abuse

Substance abuse (alcohol and drug abuse/dependence disorders) was significantly related to Factor 2 (general social deviance) but was unrelated to Factor 1 (core personality features of psychopathy).

• Psychopaths (high total PCL-R scores) showed higher rates of substance abuse/dependence than non-psychopaths.

• When the PCL-R factors were examined separately, the association with substance use disorders was driven almost entirely by Factor 2 traits. Factor 1 showed no positive relationship (and in some related analyses or citations, it has been noted as unrelated or even inversely related in certain contexts).

• This suggests that the impulsive, antisocial, and lifestyle deviance aspects of psychopathy (Factor 2), rather than the emotional detachment or callous-unemotional features (Factor 1), primarily account for the elevated comorbidity with substance abuse in this offender sample.

This pattern has been influential and frequently cited in later research on psychopathy and substance use. It aligns with broader findings that Factor 2 overlaps substantially with externalizing behaviors and disinhibition, which are strongly linked to substance misuse, while Factor 1 (the “core” of psychopathy in many theoretical models) does not show the same direct tie.

All right, so the claims thus far are, psychopaths use drugs more, and they are more violent on drugs than regular people, but what we are finding the actual results to be are that people with ASPD are more likely to use drugs and be violent.

Yup… great job there.

Well, let’s try to get to the actual science, shall we? The part where they used the machine that can actually tell a psychopath from a non-psychopath, instead of drowning in citations that either have nothing to do with the subject matter at hand or are entirely related to factor two traits, and not related to factor one.

Psychopathy is characterized by abnormal affective, interpersonal, and behavioral functioning. Psychopathic traits include emotional deficits such as a profound inability to experience empathy and remorse; behavioral problems such as impulsivity, stimulation-seeking, and instrumental aggression are also noted features (Cleckley, 1976; Hare, 2003). Given this behavioral propensity, it should not be surprising that the comorbidity of psychopathy and substance abuse is high.

You would think that at this point it would be obvious why psychopathy and ASPD have to be considered different things, but no, we are going to continue on this nonsense. For those of you that just got here, and are not familiar with the psychopathy and ASPD conundrum, you can find a full detailing here:

However, no, we can’t do that, because murky waters pay the bills.

Relative to non-psychopathic offenders, research has shown that psychopaths are more likely to have a diagnosis of drug abuse or dependence and are more likely to have a polysubstance diagnosis (Smith and Newman, 1990).

Smith and Newman did not demonstrate that. It showed that people with ASPD are more likely to have such issues. Would a psychopath use drugs? Imagine that the answer has to be yes, for some reason. Why eludes me, but I can imagine a world where this would be the case. I can also see those psychopaths being included in this study, and by some miracle of miracles that the PCL-R successfully found a couple of psychopaths that were later confirmed by brain scans, and those psychopaths used drugs for the aforementioned reasons that elude me.

An interesting paradox may exist, however. Though psychopaths are more likely to be diagnosed with drug use disorders than non-psychopaths, clinical observation suggests that psychopaths are less likely to experience symptoms such as withdrawal and craving when access to drugs is externally limited (e.g., during incarceration) (Cleckley, 1988).

I can tell you that when it comes to substances, as I mentioned above, pharmaceuticals have no effect on me in terms of feeling good. Alcohol also doesn’t have this effect, though I think a lot of people getting drunk is due to them wanting to be in that state. There is a good portion of drinking that has to do with the desire to be loose emotionally. That part doesn’t exist for us. We aren’t tight emotionally to begin with, so there is nothing to let loose of. The state that people are trying to get to is the state that we already exist in.

I could drink a bottle of wine every day for a year, more even if I was really putting the work in, and then someone could come and take it away, and I wouldn’t notice a thing. The idea that there would be some physical punishment for not drinking that wine is not something that exists in my world.

I can easily say the same about medications. Actually, with medications, any effect that they might have had the first two days will be gone by the third. If they gave me some kind of relief from pain that I am in, they will no longer do so by that third day. I either have to switch to something that works on a totally different mechanism in the brain, or I just stop taking them. If I were dumb enough to take these things all the time, firstly it wouldn’t have an effect, and secondly, if I had something happen and needed them to work, they wouldn’t. That would be cutting my nose off to spite my face.

I asked my Significant Other if he had any insight into why a psychopath would use drugs given what I have stated. You would think I would know being the psychopath, but no, I have no clue. He thought that perhaps there are other effects that might be considered fun. Perhaps a rapid heartbeat or that out of step feeling. I might not like it, but maybe it is different enough that a psychopath might think it was fun to be like that.

Drug craving is an intense desire or urge to use drugs, and plays a fundamental role in the maintenance of drug use problems. Craving has been associated with both repeated drug use and relapse after a period of abstinence (cf. Ehrman et al., 1998; Weiss, 2005). Cue-elicited craving paradigms, where drug cues are presented and brain activity is recorded using functional imaging techniques, have identified several cortical and subcortical brain regions related to craving1: anterior cingulate [Childress et al., 1999 (cocaine); Filbey et al., 2009 (marijuana); Garavan et al., 2000 (cocaine); Heinz et al., 2004 (alcohol); Wang et al., 2011 (heroin); Yin et al., 2012 (methamphetamine)], posterior cingulate (Wang et al., 2011), orbitofrontal cortex [Bonson et al., 2002 (cocaine); Sell et al., 2000 (opioids)], insula [Brody et al., 2002 (nicotine); Myrick et al., 2004 (alcohol); Wang et al., 1999 (cocaine)], ventral and dorsal striatum [David et al., 2005 (nicotine); Garavan et al., 2000; Myrick et al., 2004; Wang et al., 2011] (i.e., nucleus accumbens, caudate, and putamen), thalamus [Franklin et al., 2007 (nicotine); Wang et al., 2011], and amygdala (Childress et al., 1999; Bonson et al., 2002; Franklin et al., 2007). However, despite the strong tendency for individuals with psychopathy to abuse drugs, studies on the neurobiological correlates of craving have not yet examined the potential modulating effect of psychopathic traits.

Told you this was really wordy…

An examination of these two separate lines of research suggests there is striking overlap between regions implicated in drug craving and regions implicated in psychopathy. For instance, among individuals with psychopathy, reduced amygdala activity has been reported during aversive delay conditioning (Birbaumer et al., 2005), emotional memory (Kiehl et al., 2001), and moral decision-making (Harenski et al., 2010). The orbitofrontal cortex also has received considerable attention due to its role in impulse control. One study identified abnormalities in the orbitofrontal cortex in psychopathic adults during an attention-related task (Veit et al., 2002). Noting these abnormalities, Blair (2008) proposed that amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex/ventromedial prefrontal cortex dysfunction are fundamentally related to the development of psychopathy. Other regions have been shown to be under-reactive, including the anterior cingulate during negative picture viewing (Muller et al., 2003) and aversive conditioning (Veit et al., 2002), the insula during aversive conditioning (Veit et al., 2002; Birbaumer et al., 2005), the ventral striatum and posterior cingulate during an emotional memory task (Kiehl et al., 2001), and the posterior cingulate during emotional moral decision-making (Glenn et al., 2009). Taken together, these results lend support to the paralimbic hypothesis of psychopathy (Kiehl, 2006), which states that limbic (e.g., amygdala, hippocampus) and nearby paralimbic structures (e.g., anterior cingulate, insula, orbitofrontal cortex) are dysfunctional in response to emotional and other salient stimuli.

Notwithstanding years of behavioral, psychophysiological, and now neuroimaging research focusing on reward and punishment processing in psychopathy, the picture is not entirely clear. Despite clinical observation to the contrary, some studies have instead suggested a heightened sensitivity to (monetary) reward with higher psychopathic traits (Buckholtz et al., 2010; Bjork et al., 2012). Another study found a positive correlation between (monetary) gain vs. loss activity in the ventral striatum and psychopathy scores in those scoring 30 or above on the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R) (Hare, 2003; Pujara et al., 2013). Other studies of youth with disruptive behavior disorders (e.g., oppositional defiant disorder, conduct disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, psychopathic traits) suggest abnormal reward processing (Finger et al., 2008, 2011; White et al., 2013). The present study was undertaken in an effort to clarify how psychopathic traits in adults are related to neural responses to drug cues specifically, given increased drug use but decreased craving and withdrawal among psychopaths.

I have nothing to add to this other than… yeah. That.

Actually, that increased drug use part. I really wish they asked why though. Why use them if they do nothing for you. It makes me wonder if these people are more like borderline psychopaths, and that they are still getting some kind of physical and emotional entertainment from drug use, but also have the immunity to addiction? I guess if you are going to use drugs this would be the best case scenario. The other two sides would be, you get addicted and wreck your life, or, you have no response at all, so you are wasting your time and money. I have no evidence that this is the case, however. It is just me trying to sort this out so it makes sense to me.

Studies indicate that individuals with psychopathy start using substances at an earlier age (Corrado et al., 2004) and are more likely to develop polysubstance dependence (Smith and Newman, 1990; Mailloux et al., 1997), but clinical observation points to less craving and withdrawal (Cleckley, 1988).

That is not what that first study even looked at. Let’s set aside the fact you cannot assess anyone under the age of twenty-five for psychopathy, so the PCL-YV is hot garbage. There is no value there. The brain is not developed, so there is no ability to assess for something that requires that it is. Also, the study cited doesn’t look at substance abuse in youthful offenders. This paper focuses narrowly on rater effects in PCL:YV scoring and short-term recidivism prediction in Korean juveniles. Soooo… what… are they citing it for?

The present study utilized fMRI and a cue-elicited drug craving paradigm to examine the modulatory effect of psychopathic traits on the neurobiological craving response in a sample of 137 incarcerated offenders. Participants viewed drug-related and non-drug pictures, and indicated their level of craving for each picture. Since psychopaths tend not to experience withdrawal and craving and the regions engaged during drug craving overlap considerably with the regions implicated as being deficient in psychopathy, we expected to see reduced craving-related activity in paralimbic, limbic, and subcortical areas among participants with higher scores on the PCL-R. These areas included the anterior cingulate, insula, amygdala, dorsal and ventral striatum, thalamus, and orbitofrontal cortex.

Finally, relevant information. Unfortunately that’s it for this week. This was just the introduction, so remember when you are on post eight thousand about this study, you wanted the whole thing.

See you next week.

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Sigh… here we are again, for our voluntary torture session. Let’s get on with it.

In her consulting work, Ten Brinke was brought in by a financial advisory company to help assess which hedge fund managers it should trust with its money. “I was particularly looking for signs that they might be lying, which certainly the company would want to know before handing over millions of dollars.

Oh, let me help you with that. They are a financial advisory company, and you are looking at hedge fund managers. They’re lying. That wasn’t hard. Seriously, what did they pay you for? They wanted, what? Honest hedge fund managers. Ooo wait, I found one for you. Here is his picture:

If you don’t know, that is, The Rake. It is a creature from a creepy pasta, in other words, fictional, just like the honest hedge fund managers she was sent to find.

But we were also looking at the personality traits of these individuals.”

Why though? I can tell a money guy the minute I meet them. They have an air about them that says, money bro. They aren’t hard to find. You hire one, you know most of them. You don’t need someone to come in and look at their personalities. It sounds like this company just liked burning money while looking “responsible”. It also sounds like a joke.

Several stuck out. At one investor conference, Ten Brinke watched in fascination as one CEO demeaned colleagues and potential clients – which can be a sign of a dark personality.

Sigh… this need to label everyone. Let me help you, yet again. That’s called assholiest amungus. They are, unfortunately common, and not at all something to be labeled past their scientific name that I made us. She should know a thing or two about that practice.

“Everything had to revolve around him, all attention on him, no one else could get any praise.” He would constantly interrupt people. “What was so interesting is that the audience was actually really into that. His behaviour seemed to validate perceptions of what kind of personality would succeed in this role, even though our research suggests that these traits actually lead to decreased returns.”

Sooo assholiest amungus with the subcategory of d*ckbag. There, not hard. You don’t have to make things more complicated than they already are. Also, if this dude was such a problem, then the company should have handled that a long time ago. They didn’t, so that means they really didn’t see anything wrong with his behavior up until then.

It’s the same reason we think extreme confidence makes for good leaders – again, our willingness to conflate confidence with competence. A “strongman” type tends to think of themselves as a great leader, and they tell the rest of us that they are.

Buuut… you didn’t describe someone that has extreme confidence. You just described someone with the opposite of that. Is that what you think “extreme confidence” looks like? I already said you should have found a different job, but man, you really should have found a different job. That’s… just poor analysis skills right there. Really poor.

“We tend to believe them because we have a truth bias. Research suggests that we tend to just believe the things we are told, unless we’re given some very specific reason to be suspicious.”

Why is this so all over the place? Where is the cohesive article? Is this the interviewer, the interviewee, or the editor? Someone super sucks at their role here, and I am suspecting it might be all three. How did you go from the guy that was so weak in his own ego and he had to have everyone validate him every five seconds and felt the need to dress everyone down, then speak about how high confidence and the “strongman” effect makes people assume that those like that are more competent than they really are, and now we’re talking about what…? Exactly? Who are you referring to? What story is this article even trying to tell?

This is just bad writing. Good lord.

There is also what Ten Brinke describes as a “dark spiral”. At times of uncertainty and conflict, “we look for a ‘strong’ leader. Then, in position, they can create more chaos, more instability, which actually makes us more likely to vote, again, for someone with these traits. We can end up going round and round.”

LOL! Woman, just say you don’t like strong men. That’s all that statement was right there. Sorry to tell you, we do need strong men and we do not need weak ones. There is a saying.

Strong men make good times.

Good times make weak men.

Weak men make bad times.

This is a saying for a reason, and you are the type of person that makes for bad times. For those of us that like good times, men, “You should be a monster, an absolute monster, and then you should learn how to control it.” That’s how we get there.

In the next paragraph the reporter tries to get her to weigh in on Donald Trump and then other, unnamed politicians, and I am skipping it for a couple of reasons.

1. She has no idea about the man, or any other world leader, celebrity, or anyone else that she has not examined.

2. I do not allow politics on my writing. This goes for everyone. I see political anything, and it will be deleted. I have no time for that, and I am not interested in hearing anyone’s opinion about any of it. Keep it to yourself, or take it somewhere else. Those are your only options.

Recognising dark personalities can help us make more informed choices in many areas of life, says Ten Brinke.

You know what’s amazing? So far, she has said basically nothing on the subject. Her “examples”? A hedge fund manager that isn’t emotionally well regulated, and her opinions on people that she has never met. She talked about confidence, but not what that looks like, or why it’s a problem. She hasn’t just given a list of things that are troublesome, she has conflated everything into this notion of “dark territory” or whatever she called it, and basically is blah blah blahing away about nothing. What, exactly, are you supposed to recognize in your daily life? Where are her examples?

She won’t give them to you, because this is an ad for her book. A bad ad at that, as even if I was totally her target audience and believed her nonsense, she hasn’t told me anything that would make me think, sure, take my money. This interview is not going well for her endgame.

“It can be either a ‘detect and avoid’ or a ‘detect and manage’ type of situation, depending on the circumstances.” Research has found that job adverts that look for people who are “results-oriented” or who “think outside the box” attract more narcissists than adverts whose language highlights a desire for team players.

What research… precisely?

There is a link in the article, and it sends you to an abstract. The abstract literally starts with:

Prior research indicates that narcissistic executives engage in earnings management and other negative organizational behaviors, and many studies ponder why firms hire such individuals, especially into corporate accounting positions.

What the abstract fails to do, is point you to any of this “prior research”. Well done everyone…

The same could be said for dating profiles. How can someone avoid attracting a dark personality, or identify one from their profile? “They might use euphemisms to put a positive spin on some of these traits,” says Ten Brinke. “‘Thrill-seeking’ might indicate some impulsivity.” Power can be attractive, but “you might want to be discerning about whether that is achieved by earning people’s respect or by putting people in a fearful, submissive position”.

Who is putting “thrill seeking” in their dating profile? Also, “thrill seeking” is not “power”. How did one thing become the other, in the next sentence. Did she mean to say, if they are in a high position in a company, or a politician, that might be something to think about, as that kind of work might attract a certain kind of person? Otherwise, what “power” is she referring to? If that is what she meant, she should have said as much, but she didn’t. She just says things without context, or the context was cut out by the editor. I have no idea who is responsible for this mess, but they should be fired.

It’s important to remember that someone’s personality is a pattern, she says – “first impressions will only get you so far” – but there are broad behaviours to watch out for. “If someone interrupts often, but gets really angry if they are interrupted; if they ignore and push personal and professional boundaries.”

Why would anyone need this long ass article to tell them what should be common knowledge? Nothing about that person says anything about them being psychopathic. At all. None of those things are psychopathic in nature. This woman either has no idea what she is trying to convey, or she knows what she is trying to convey is so convoluted that it makes no sense, but she’s running with it anyway. I think that might be what she is doing. If I wanted to know for sure, I could pay her money and find out that not only can she not speak about her work coherently, but she also cannot write about it coherently, because nothing she has supposedly done for her work is coherent or remotely factual.

They can be charismatic, and charming. In romantic relationships, “love bombing” at the start is often a feature.

Firstly, “love bombing” is a trait of narcissistic personality disorder. Psychopaths do not do this. Secondly, it is called “Overvaluation”. As a person, with all the letters after your name, you should not be using internet slang. What’s next? Narcopath?

“I think that’s a good case for taking things relatively slowly. You need time and context to get a real sense of someone.”

If it seems too good to be true, it is. There. That wasn’t hard, was it? Just state the age old saying, and move on. You are not distributing new information from on high. This is a well known feature of relationships, and has been, forever.

People with dark personalities can be skilled at deception, but we tend to be quite bad at detecting this, says Ten Brinke.

Oh please. Everyone is skilled with deception. Honestly… this woman. Most of the people lying to you are neurotypical. That’s just the way it is.

Contrary to many people’s beliefs, you can’t reliably detect a lie by reading body language. “I think we really want it to work,” she says. “But we consistently find that those cues are pretty weak.”

True. Body language is pretty garbage. Nothing new there. Maybe people have yet to know this, but it’s true. You know why it’s garbage? Because no one has actually been able to find anything remotely past chance, 50/50 guesswork basically, that demonstrates deception is something that can be read in body language.

Instead, you need to pay attention to verbal cues, such as inconsistencies, but this is tiring and probably not something you want to be running in the background in every interaction. “But in some situations where I’m like, OK, this is a person who has a personality that is likely to manipulate, I might pay more attention to the words they’re saying. Ask good questions, ask follow-up questions.”

Could you just do that anyway without this lady blowing smoke up your behinds that the people lying to you are “dark personalities”? It will save you a lot of headaches. Just look for where people can’t keep their story straight, and don’t listen with your emotions, listen with your logic.

Those who lean towards narcissism can display “classic things such as showing off and talking about themselves a lot. They are always the expert on every topic of conversation.” Someone with psychopathic traits may be impulsive.

Lots of people are impulsive, and let me tell you, everyone wants to talk about themselves. I don’t want to talk about myself, pretty much ever, because I am an exceptionally private person. This means that everyone sees that as an opening to be heard, and they will talk endlessly about everything in their lives until I think I am going to know more about them than their kids or spouse. Maybe the showoff thing is a tell, because most of the time people are downloading their problems onto me, but the rest of it is generic nothingness.

“We also see emotional differences in the sense that they might be weirdly calm, showing no emotion.” Or their emotions might flare up but be short-lived, particularly in the case of anger.

You are never going to see a psychopath angry. Anger doesn’t last long enough for us to show, or direct any of our behavior. It is so quick it will pass, and you will never have a clue. Also, to piss off a psychopath, you have to be really pushing some buttons hard. So, quit that.

We can all experience moments of schadenfreude at others’ misfortune, but if someone routinely puts others down or seems to take pleasure in someone else’s failure or pain, “those can be important red flags.

I know you’re not talking about psychopathy here, because we don’t care about that nonsense. That would require us to care about other people. We don’t. If they succeed, it has nothing to do with us. If they fail, it has nothing to do with us. We will have the attitude of, whatever, to either event, and be perplexed as to why anyone shared that information with us. It’s irrelevant. Also, again, sadism and psychopathy do not go together.

You start to gain evidence for a lack of compassion or empathy for others.” Does Ten Brinke deploy this in her day-to-day life? It’s more that she clocks behaviour and files it away, she says.

No you don’t. You would have to be better at this than you are, and since you are so bad at it, whatever you are “clocking” is probably background noise, or you successfully finding one of the great assholiest amungus and slapping a label on him or her, thinking that you really did something.

You didn’t.

It’s unrealistic, she adds, to avoid everyone with dark personality traits. Instead, for those with lower levels of psychopathy and other negative traits, you can usually manage them.

Condescending much?

“We’re not changing someone’s personality, but we can approach our interactions with a harm-reduction mindset. One is having clear boundaries.” Having rules – and writing them down or saying them out loud – makes it harder for the person to break or test them, whether this is in a family or work setting.

You should just… you know… have boundaries with everyone. It’s good practice to not be a doormat. You do you, and all, but for everyone else, have boundaries, and stop being a people pleaser.

One study asked people showing various levels of psychopathy to distribute money between themselves and another person; those who were given no rules or instruction were more likely to keep the money. “Understand their motivations, and understand that it’s probably not the same as yours.”

Citation please.

Nope? Not going to give one, are you. Because that would allow the study, and its cohort, to be looked over and it likely doesn’t stand up to muster. Psychopaths are excellent at tit for tat. In other words:

Treat me well and I will treat you better.

Treat me poorly and I will treat you worse.

If there is a benefit for me to give the money, such as then I get more money, I will give it. But why would anyone just give the other person the money? Split it, maybe, but what would the point be to just hand it over?4

Rewards can be key. “I think we often forget about the power of rewarding people. Especially with these personalities, we think, ‘Oh, they’re a bad person – you should never reward them.’

I love how, again, she does not identify who she is speaking about. Also, that she has just decided that whoever it is, they are a “bad person”. Again, condescending much?

But if they do something good – if you see them acting fairly, kindly, being honest – provide some reward that they care about. We know that people, especially with psychopathic personalities, are very reward-motivated. Punishment really doesn’t hit them very hard. So you can help to shape their behaviour by rewarding when they do something good.”

Ohhhh, so you were talking about psychopaths. Well, rewards do work, if you’re someone that we would take that kind of behavior from. However, I am very suspicious of people that want to give me things. I do not have the ability to trust chemically, so if you try this move with me, and you aren’t in my inner circle, I am going to assume that you’re up to something. So, try that, and find out that it isn’t likely to pay you dividends as you might think.

In a work setting, if you are the manager of a dark personality, this reward may be a pay rise or a new title. But she would not recommend giving anyone displaying these traits a management position. “We know that people with these traits tend to bully their subordinates.”

This woman…

Psychopaths don’t bully people. We don’t care about them at all. We don’t want to deal with them, we don’t want to hang out with them, we don’t care if they do well, if their dog died, they had a car accident. We do not care. Sigh… you should not have a career where you are discussing something that you do not understand the first thing about.

When broaching a tricky conversation, finding something in common, however small, can get it off to a better start. “It can decrease the likelihood that they’ll respond aggressively whenever you give them some negative feedback.

Psychopaths are not violent or aggressive. Where are you getting this BS” from? Oh, right, your imagination. Well, going us back down here on earth. I am sure there are people that miss you. Negative feedback is one of two things to a psychopath.

1. A tool. It tells us what to change in order to get to where we want to go. We fail fast because we are not worried about doing so. We fail so we can move on to what works.

2. Not our problem. If we do not see anything of value in the feedback we ignore it, and the person giving it. Not our problem.

She would know this, if she had ever met an actual psychopath. Whoever these people are, they sound annoying, but they also sound very neurotypical to me, as all of these responses are quite emotional that she is trying to attribute to us.

This is particularly true for people with narcissistic traits, who tend to be very sensitive to any criticism, rejection or failure.

Stop.

Seriously. Stop. You can’t keep mixing these two things together. It is conflation, it is confusing for people, it is factually incorrect, and it is disinformation. It is also wildly unprofessional. If you want to discuss psychopathy, first please do learn about it before you come back to do so, but just discuss psychopathy. If you want to discuss narcissism, also learn about it, because I suspect that your academic endeavors on the subject are as mired in nonsense with this subject as they are with psychopathy, then do so. Stop using them in the same paragraph as though they are interchangeable. They aren’t, and they aren’t similar, either.

If negotiating, it can be useful to do it in writing, such as over email or text – in person, you’re more likely to be dazzled by the charm and confidence of a dark personality.

Oh the eye roll. Psychopaths want everything done through email as well, because that means you stay away from us, and we don’t have to deal with you. Also, because I have found that neurotypicals have a bad habit of saying one thing, then doing another, in order to get other people to do their jobs for them, I want everything in writing, and I can promise you, whatever it is, and whenever you said it, I can have it still. I keep everything.

It can be useful to frame requests in the form of a question, rather than a statement, says Ten Brinke. “For example, ‘What do you think of picking the kids up from school on Wednesday?’ instead of, ‘You need to pick the kids up.’ It’s just a little thing, but it can help to avoid shutting down the conversation before it even starts.”

What? Weren’t you talking about the workplace two seconds ago? Where did kids come from? Also, no, with a psychopath just say what you want done. This nonsensical emotional manipulation, and that is exactly what that BS is, does not work on us. When you say, “What do you think about X?” What you really mean is, I want X, but I also want you to think it was your idea so I don’t look like a selfish person. That does not fly with me. If you want something, ask. If not, my response is going to be:

“ I think you’re doing it Wednesday, and every other day until you can ask me like a grownup for what you want. You aren’t fifteen, stop trying to manipulate like a teenager. It will get you nowhere.”

Of course, if you are having to carefully manage these kinds of interactions with a partner, you may question if it’s a relationship you want to be in. Ten Brinke points out that the moment of leaving a potentially abusive relationship with someone with dark personality traits can be incredibly dangerous and you should seek support from specialist agencies.

If you think that was “careful management” you really don’t hear yourself, do you? I have no idea who that would work on, but it isn’t me. Also, psychopaths aren’t abusive. If you leave, whatever, go. We don’t care. With someone that actually is abusive, I have no idea how to handle that situation, so yes, involve professionals if you need to. However, if a psychopath came home and you moved out, all right, bye.

When I took the assessment Ten Brinke includes in her book, aimed at detecting low levels of dark traits, I was alarmed to find I scored higher than I’d like.

1. Don’t worry about it. That’s like scoring poorly on a Buzzfeed quiz. It means nothing. You still aren’t the sorting hat from Harry Potter, right? Her test reflects the quality of her work, and the quality of her work that she is showing in the article is trash, so it has no bearing on anything.

2. What a pathetic attempt to sell her book. The only reason that this is included is so people want to know how they stack up on the test as well, and will buy the book. That’s just transparently poor advertising.

If someone is worried they’re a psychopath, what should they do? That worry is a good sign, she says. The usual problem for people with psychopathy is that “it can be quite difficult to motivate them to want to change”.

If you are worried that you are a psychopath, you aren’t a psychopath. There. Fixed it for you. Good lord.

We can all turn our dark personality traits down, she says. Ten Brinke points to a study where people took “agreeableness challenges” over four months, such as showing gratitude to someone they interacted with during the day.

People need to stop being so agreeable. It has caused a lot of problems in the world.

“People who actively worked on these skills, to consider other people’s perspectives and to show compassion, reported lower dark traits at the end of that four-month period.”

Says the woman that labels psychopaths as “bad people” simply for the fact of existence. Your cognitive empathy is nonexistent, so you should not be telling others how to improve theirs. You have no idea.

It was self-reported, she says, “so I don’t know if people around them also felt the same way about these behavioural improvements, but research shows that our personalities are not chiselled in stone. They can shift.”

I don’t know if it works, but it works. Okay… right.

It may be wise to look at ourselves – the world does not need more people with psychopathic and narcissistic traits.

The world has the number of psychopaths that it is meant to as our population percentage has not changed over the thousands of years we have existed. If you want less people with NPD then teach parents how to not f*ck up their kids, as it comes from how they are raised. There may be some genetic components there, but most of it comes from how they are treated in childhood. So, you know… cut that nonsense out.

“I do think that recognising that we can all become a little bit less manipulative, a little bit more caring, and that all of these things will add up across people and across time, is a hopeful message.”

Holy lord woman, neurotypicals manipulate each other in every single interaction that they have. All interaction is to get your wants and needs met. Nothing more, nothing less. That is manipulation. You aren’t going to suddenly be less of that, you are going to be more as there is less and less human connection. The need for human connection isn’t going anywhere, but the access to it is fading significantly. That drives wild social behavior to get attention, and no, that isn’t from psychopaths. That is neurotypicals realizing on a subconscious level that they aren’t built for that kind of separation. Psychopaths, on the other hand, are.

The article is finally over, and I get to go eat food, so that is what I am going to do.

I am working on a series regarding psychopathy and addiction, and also how psychopaths view addiction from our vantage point. The first post will be about the science of psychopathy and addiction, and I have a study that I can go through all of, or only the subject matter, and discussion/conclusion.

I don’t mind doing either, but if I do the whole study it will span a couple of posts on it’s own, and it is pretty wordy. I like wordy, but won’t subject you guys to wordy if you aren’t interested.

Let me know.

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This article has been sent to me a number of times on different platforms to do a post on, so here we are. I haven’t read it, but I do know the quality of the Guardian’s journalistic integrity, so I have no faith whatsoever that this will be reasonable, balanced, fair, or remotely accurate. Just the line under the image that they used:

Psychologist Leanne ten Brinke has spent decades studying toxic personality traits. What are the red flags to look out for among workmates, politicians and potential partners?

Psychopathy has nothing to do with toxic traits, and already she sounds like someone that is chasing that mentality of, “everyone is mean to me, won’t the experts tell me why so I can be comforted in the fact it isn’t my fault, and it’s everyone else around me?” mentality. In other words, exhausting drama, but let’s get into this. The article link is here:

‘Charismatic and extremely confident’: how to recognise – and handle – a psychopath

I have to say, yes, psychopaths are charismatic and confident, but so are loads of other people. That is not a “psychopathy only” kind of deal. They make it sound like, if a person is like this, they are definitely a psychopath. No, they aren’t, and to make claims that insinuate that is ridiculous.

Coming face to face with a probable psychopath was enough to make Dr Leanne ten Brinke rethink her career choices.

All right, straight away it is obvious that she is not going to be remotely qualified to identify psychopathy. Also, the drama… Seriously? Coming face to face with a probable psychopath… Please spare us the histrionics. The person either was, or was not a psychopath. The fact that you said probable, means that they were not, but you either decided that someone, which will certainly be a male, will certainly be a criminal, and possibly not even really exist, is a given. Let’s see, shall we?

Early in her 20s, while studying forensic psychology in Halifax, in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, Ten Brinke was volunteering at a parole office, which would hold weekly group meetings for released sex offenders. “Most of the men showed contrition,” says Ten Brinke. “They really seemed to recognise the damage that they had done.” Except for one. The treatment programme seemed “like a game to him”, she says. One week, in a discussion about the impact their crimes had on victims, this rapist stared at Ten Brinke and, smiling slightly, started to say how much his victim looked like her, “and how I was ‘his type’. Clearly he was trying to scare me, and he did.”

None of them felt one iota of guilt for what they did. Do you not know what mandatory means? They have to be there until you sign their little paper thingy. Part of that is by appearing that they “feel bad”. Liars, the lot of them, and the dude that wanted to scare you, your imaginary psychopath, either didn’t exist and you made him up to tell a, what you believe to be, compelling story, or he’s a sadist who wants to see you squirm. If you knew anything at all about psychopathy or sadism, you would know that sadism requires emotional empathy, something that psychopaths lack entirely. If you knew that, you wouldn’t be saying that this is a probable psychopath.

The fact that you don’t know this goes back to your initial thinking being correct. You should have picked a different career. This one is not suited to you. Also, you’re gullible. If you actually believed those men, you are as dumb as they thought you were. I guarantee that a bunch of the “contrite” sex offenders have been rearrested, probably multiple times, and if they haven’t, it’s likely that they just got better at committing crimes.

Side note, and a bit of a tangent, I suppose. A while ago I listened to one of those videos where a question is asked on Reddit, and people write their replies, then this type of channel will read those replies as a narrative. One of them was a prison guard that had to accompany a prisoner to their therapy sessions, again, mandatory. This therapist bought every single thing the dude said and felt bad for him, because apparently rocks were given to her instead of a functional brain. The guard himself couldn’t tell her anything, he could only accompany the dude. She was five seconds away from writing him a recommendation for early parole, when he just couldn’t wait long enough and raped a dude in a wheel chair, I think ending his life in the process. It’s been a little bit since I heard this.

When I tell you that psychologist was shocked, shocked I say, about how wrong she read the situation, she didn’t know what to do with herself. She actually asked the guard why he didn’t tell her, but he literally couldn’t. He would be fired for doing so. She was so certain that this guy was really remorseful, when in reality he was playing her like a fiddle. Just like this chick. Dumb as the day is long. Yes, that might seem harsh, but the fact she actually thinks that one of these guys feels really really bad about what they did:

Let alone all of them except one, there is no hope for her. All right, going forward with the working knowledge that this woman probably needs assistance pouring cereal because the box is too complex for her, let’s move on.

It put her off a career working with convicted criminals, but she remained fascinated with “dark personalities” – psychopathy, mainly, but also narcissism, machiavellianism (manipulating and exploiting others) and sadism.

Nope, didn’t, because you have already demonstrated to not understand what any of those words mean, but go on…

From politics to business to the media, it wasn’t as if there was a shortage of people to study.

Oh, so you don’t actually do anything but speculate about people you will never meet, all the while violating the ethics code of not marking someone with a diagnosis that you yourself have not examined and have adequate information to state what you are claiming. Yeah, sounds like a totally legit way to be doing a job.

There were selfish, callous, impulsive and manipulative people everywhere, often presenting as gregarious and charming.

Now, you would think, because logic and reason would inform you of this, that if you see it everywhere, that it is a human trait that everyone has to some degree. But no, that’s not what is going to happen here. Instead of the logical reasonable approach, we are going to now claim that means that psychopaths, narcissists, Machiavellianism, and sadists are everywhere. Instead of going, as a species, we should work on this as a whole.

“It started to occur to me that these traits aren’t just confined to an underworld. These traits appear in all aspects of our lives,” she says.

In all people… right? Right? Come on, you can do it. Be reasonable. I don’t have faith in you, but I am willing to be surprised by you…

Now associate professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, Canada…

Oh, there it is, the cliff, and we are right off of it. For those of you unaware, that is where Hare teaches, or taught. He might be retired, but with that ego it is likely he is still hauling his ninety-two-year-old butt there. His Wiki says he’s currently active. Gotta make that money and be worshipped as the Psychopath dude, or whatever.

Ten Brinke says these people could be in our families, or living next door. They’re the trolls online. They’re at work, at school, leading our institutions and our countries

Who? All you have done is describe human behavior. All of those things exist, most of them are done by neurotypicals. What is the point you are trying to make? Was a significant part of this interview just scrapped so we are to draw inferences to what is being said without all the words being present? Amusingly, the only thing she listed as a negative action in that paragraph is, “trolls online” which people like her have tried to claim is a psychopathic behavior, but to be a troll you have to care what other people think and feel, which does not go with psychopathy at all. They just want a reason for trolls to be “other”, and unfixable. Then they don’t have to do anything to try and address the problem.

Instead of being specific conditions that one either has or hasn’t, psychopathy and other personality disorders are now thought to exist on a continuum, says Ten Brinke.

Mostly no, with a tiny bit of yes. Psychopathy is a spectrum, I would imagine that the rest are as well to a degree, but the fact is, all of them have diagnostic cut offs, so she is just lying here. She is trying to define things in her terms to claim ownership over them. Maybe she has aspirations to be the next Hare. I know I have mentioned this a lot, but I have seen as he ages, and gets further toward his goodbye to the field, either retirement or death, there is a bevy of people surging to get in his place. It’s making a mess of everything, and all of them present sensationalistic garbage, instead of real research that has value.

It is estimated that 1% of the general population have clinical levels of psychopathy…

Less than one percent, and she should know that.

…(scoring highly on the PCL-R, the psychopathy checklist assessment commonly used for diagnosis).

Did she claim that? Because that is not how it is used. The PCL-R is only used in prisons, and it is not supposed to be what is used for a diagnosis. It might be one part of a diagnosis, but it is certainly not capable of being the only thing. If that is how it is being used, toss out every single diagnosis reached with this methodology. They know better, she knows better, and no, the PCL-R is never used outside prisons and forensic hospitals. However, those are not the only places psychopathy is diagnosed.

Other studies have suggested that up to 18% have “elevated” levels – what we may call “dark territory”, as Ten Brinke puts it in her new book, Poisonous People: How to Resist Them and Improve Your Life.

I am not addressing the ludicrous idea of “dark territory. That is some made up BS for her book and yes, she is trying to get relevance in the space. This is kind of sad. Clearly she can’t stand on her merits so she is just making crap up and hiding behind her alphabet soup after her name. People like this should lose their credentials and be censored for doing harm to the field they are supposed to be improving.

Within the prison population, the instance of clinical psychopathy is about 20%.

Again, this is a lie. The actual number is just under thirteen percent, but that’s not dramatic enough, is it?

However, these dark personalities – who are potentially the most dangerous and likely to reoffend – are particularly good at convincing parole boards to release them, probably because they can be so persuasive.

People with antisocial personality disorder are those most likely to reoffend, not psychopaths, but of course she is going to blend them together, because she has nothing to say without that.

Although the vast majority of people do not have clinical levels of psychopathy, people with elevated dark traits cause an outsize harm to society, whether that’s in the criminal or political arena, or in the corporations they run. “

Oh my lord, I just scrolled. Do you have any idea how long this article is? It’s freaking long. There is nothing being said here that is factual, and no, it isn’t people with psychopathic traits harming the world. It is people that are just normative humans. Seriously. What is with this neurotypical need to not be the bad guy. It’s pathological at this point. “It’s not us, it’s THEM!!!!” As they wildly point to anything that they can determine as “other”. It’s really telling.

The research suggests that nature and nurture both play a role,” Ten Brinke says. “That’s promising in the sense that we know that affecting the environment can change people’s outcomes.” This is particularly true for children with “callous unemotional” traits and persistent aggressive behaviour. This can be measured, says Ten Brinke, “as early as two or three years old, and getting these kids into treatment as early as possible is important because there we can see changes to traits over time”.

No, it cannot be. Stop trying to label children. It is disgusting behavior. The fact that this woman knows that the brain is not developed at that age and that children are just mean and selfish by nature, but is still trying to sell this nonsense is very typical of these sorts. If a child is aggressive, sure, something might be up with them, but that is not indicative of psychopathy. Nothing about psychopathy denotes aggression. Emotional dysregulation goes along with aggression, and that might be what’s going on, but that has nothing to do with psychopathy. These so-called doctors are so desperate for their moment in the sun that they use the problems that families have with kids that have problems as the backs to step on to get up just a little higher in their careers.

With adults, treatment can only really change behaviour, not personality.

Even if you could identify psychopathy in children, you wouldn’t be able to change their personalities then, either. The idea that you are going to groom children to suit your little box is something that just isn’t going to happen.

“The best research that we have on treatment for adults is coming out of criminal justice settings – these are people who have shown very high clinical levels of these traits, and have committed some crime, often violent in nature.

Hate to break it to you lady, but it takes about three seconds to pull apart your so-called “best research”. Y’all are doing a real sh*t job with it. It’s not just pretty bad, it’s deplorably bad. Almost none of the studies done in prisons are worth the paper they get printed on, or the server space that they occupy. I would say to fix it, but it seems intentional to do studies that have no value. So no, you have no good research coming out of prisons, therefore any conclusions you have drawn on that information is trash. I suspect you know that, but who is going to fact check your methodology. People see the degree that you have and just assume you know what you’re talking about.

Too bad, you don’t. Or worse, you do, but you say what you have to say to keep that book money coming in.

The goal of those treatment programmes is usually to reduce the likelihood of recidivism, and especially violent recidivism, and the research shows that it can work. Individuals, even with high levels of psychopathy, who stay in treatment show lower levels of reoffence over time.”

If you have a high level psychopath in prison for a violent crime, what Kevin Dutton calls an A-Lister, or an Above the Snowline psychopath, keep them there. I mean that. Don’t let them out. They aren’t changing for you, and letting them out pretty much guarantees that they will go back to whatever they were doing before. You let them out, and I will call you dumb. Leave them in there. Forever.

Ten Brinke watched a documentary on psychopathy one day at school and was hooked.

*Groan* We do not want or need your psychopathy fangirling. Also, what documentary did you see, because I am guessing it is another example of people not knowing a damn thing about it, and selling you on a notion that doesn’t exist.

“I was just so intrigued by someone who had such a different experience of the world than I do.” She was fascinated by criminals. Her doctoral thesis was on whether it was possible, by watching the public appeals of parents whose children had gone missing, to detect those who had, in reality, killed them. By the end of her PhD, however, Ten Brinke was getting tired of murder. She went on to study business, “where my interest really broadened, to study dark personality traits across different contexts”.

What… kind of mess was that paragraph. Nothing had anything to do with anything else. You watched a documentary on psychopathy and somehow that morphs into missing kids, murder, criminals, and then “dark personality traits”. You sound like one of those people that just lump a bunch of unrelated things into a pot and think that you’re the greatest chef ever, but in reality the food is inedible and your neighbors are gagging from the smell.

There is, she says, a small but reasonable chance that your boss is a psychopath, given that people with dark personality traits are over-represented in senior management.

There is also a chance that your boss is a xenomorph, so there’s that…

“We certainly know that dark personalities are really interested in power and status,” says Ten Brinke.

Psychopaths literally aren’t though. Power and status are tools, sure, but they do nothing for our ego. It isn’t a pursuit unless there is a point, and the point cannot merely be to have them. That’s too easy. It’s more difficult to keep people from noticing us and wanting to be around us than it is to garner such things, and unless they lead to somewhere specific, there is nothing there for us.

“They also tend to come across as quite charismatic and extremely confident, and we tend to confuse confidence for competence. Also, they’re probably just putting themselves forward for these positions more than the average person.”

If a psychopath wants to advance somewhere, it’s assured that we will, easily at that. If the goal is to get to a specific place, sure, a psychopath will go for the promotion, or whatever. Psychopathy comes with ruthlessness, which for some reason neurotypicals tend to see as a negative trait. We also are very low in agreeableness. Frankly, I would almost say that we lack it all together, but recognize that the way to get what we want will entail a good amount of appearing to be otherwise. However, if there is something that is going to get us where we want to go, we aren’t going to be nice about getting there. Why would we?

This article is too long for one entry, so we will pick it up next week. In the next post we will finish this travesty of an article. I do not know why this was ever published, and I suspect this is just a puff piece to get this woman’s book more views. Maybe the people that own the Guardian also own that publishing company that put it out. I do not know why else it could be.

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Time to counter all the terrible information from the previous post. Not point by point, that was last week’s job, but rather, speaking about why psychopathy cannot coexist with childhood from a scientific standpoint. This is one of those foundational posts, like ASPD versus psychopathy, or the difference between psychopathy and sociopathy, or why NPD and psychopathy cannot coexist. I thought I had previously shared this information, but it apparently isn’t there. It is something I have spoken about at length over on Quora, so a great deal of this may seem redundant to you if you have read those posts. However, it is important.

There is a lot of interest in identifying psychopathy in children. The thought appears to be that psychopathy can somehow be “fixed” if they catch it early enough, and by “fixing it” they mean to train psychopaths more acceptable to neurotypical society, and if that’s not possible, we get this nonsense:

YES, PSYCHOPATHY IS TREATABLE.

And while there’s a variety of ways to improve symptoms, there’s still much to be done to develop more effective options.

The most successful approaches to treating psychopathy are multimodal. This means they include multiple approaches at once, including psychotherapy, behavioral skills training, and recognition of the important roles of family, school, peers, and the community. They may also incorporate medication.

Below, we provide more information about all of these treatment options.

1. INDIVIDUAL-FOCUSED THERAPIES
   There is nothing to treat in psychopathy. There is nothing wrong with us, we do not want treatment, and would prefer that these do-gooder neurotypicals take their ideas and ideals and bugger off. Stop trying to make us into you. We aren’t, we have no interest in being so, and those of you that want to change how we are naturally are no better than eugenicists.

2. FAMILY-FOCUSED THERAPIES
   Why would they ever expect an adult to go to therapy with their mommy and daddy? That’s nonsensical, and again, there is nothing to treat.

3. RESIDENTIAL TREATMENT
   Oh… I see, they think therapeutic prison is acceptable. Nope, and back again to the eugenics thing. We have no interest in being anyone other than ourselves. It is very unfortunate that the people that run this site think that being neurotypical is such a great thing and that they should mold us into one, but none of us agree with them. Be neurotypical. Like it, love it, but don’t think that it is the only way to be.

4. MEDICATION
   Nope, and that’s an atrocious suggestion. They want to try and force us through medication to not be ourselves. This is amazing from a site that claims that they want to:

This is always the way. Make the person fit, or put them somewhere until they do. If they don’t, just keep them there. No one with this sort of thinking should be looking to identify psychopathy in children, and because so many do have this attitude, and they also are in positions of power, no one else should be seeking to do so either, as that just becomes blended into this way of thinking. You can have good intentions, but those with bad intentions, or worse, those that have no ability to see the harm their “cure” would bring to the world, will likely be the ones shaping the outcome.

Psychopathy in children is a difficult subject. The main reason for this is that,

1. Psychopathy is born. You are a psychopath at birth, or you are not a psychopath.

2. You cannot diagnose psychopathy until the brain is fully developed, around twenty-five, though I have seen that number getting older and older. My thought is that this has to do with the raised by screens generation showing a slowing of maturity, but I digress, and I also have no proof of that so it’s beyond the point I am making.

We can first discuss the brain. The brain forms back to front. The back of the brain matures first, the front finishes around the time you hit that magic number that also allows you to rent a car. Until the front of the brain finishes growing, you can see all kinds of callous behavior, but none of it means anything at that age. Let’s be real, children are kind of jerks. Maybe not all children, but this is not the, define the group by the outlier kind of situation. Everyone has stories about how they did something really mean when they were a kid because frankly, there was no way to know better. Trying to label that behavior as anything other than, a kid being a kid, or looking at the child’s circumstances, are errors in my opinion.

There is also the habit of labeling Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder (DMDD) that can be apparent in children as psychopathic, not to mention Reactive Attachment Disorder. I have discussed RAD in a couple of posts, so here are those links:

Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder (DMDD) can be extremely difficult to deal with, and RAD can be a total nightmare. I believe that DMDD can be caused by chemical exposure in the womb, such as drug use and alcoholism, while RAD is due to abuse. Sociopathy also is formed in childhood, and we all know the habit of conflating that with psychopathy. None of the things listed here are similar, but they get mixed together quite a bit.

Recently I got a message from someone wanting to know if they were psychopathic, because when they were children they thought they had several of the traits. The traits listed? The MacDonald Triad. Animal abuse, bed wetting, and fire starting. I have written about the debunking of this concept by the guy that came up with it back in the sixties, but it persists in people’s minds as having something to do with psychopathy. What he actually concluded was that it was indicative of a child being abused, and projecting that abuse out into the world because they had no other outlet. The person who messaged me? They were abused.

Things like this make the diagnostics of psychopathy impossible, but also immoral. Not only are the assumptions wrong, but they have been wrong for so long that the myths from the sixties are still informing people’s opinions about what psychopathy looks like, while overlooking the cries for help from a child being tormented. It seems lazy, and outright cruel if we take it to the logical conclusion. It is blaming the abuse victim for their reaction to their abuse, and not helping them, but rather, labeling them and making it about the label, not assistance.

Another little fact that I think has a place here. Very few children will ever be suspected of being a psychopath. Less than one third of those children will end up with a diagnosis of any kind. Not just psychopathy, anything. That is a small number of a small number that will qualify for being something other than neurotypical, and probably none of them will be psychopathic.

Back to the brain.

The last aspect to develop is also the part of the brain that deals with consequences of your actions. Without that in place, people can behave in very impulsive ways. That, as well as behavior laced with several aspects of narcissism, is just part of being young. These traits can easily be mistaken for ASPD or psychopathic traits. Think of basically any teenager, and the stupid things that they do. In fact, you can think of teenagers that commit awful crimes and seem to have no remorse for those acts.

Like this guy:

This guy literally murdered his stepmother and his three brothers, and tried to burn the house down to cover his crimes when he was fifteen.

Guess what?

He doesn’t have anything like ASPD. He was a teenager that had a brain that wasn’t developed yet. He lacked impulse control, anger control, and the ability to predict the consequences of his actions. He even planned the murders and admitted as much.

He’s not a psychopath.

He’s not a sociopath.

He doesn’t have ASPD.

They’ve tested him several times.

He feels remorse now for what he did. Go figure, his brain is fully developed now, so he can.

My point in bringing him up is this. Until your brain is fully developed, there is no way to know what you are.

The brain of the psychopath will be psychopathic. You cannot change that; nothing fixes that. What you cannot do is determine psychopathic brains from a normal brain until both brains have completed growth. This is crucial, and it is also why it is so important to disregard this impulse to slap the label of psychopathy onto anyone that does something that most people cannot understand. It is also why I write the Human Darkness series. I know it is very unpleasant to learn about the horrible things that happen in this world, but my detailing them in posts is meant to hold a light over what dwells within us all, and to remind us what we are capable of as humans.

There are plenty of people that claim psychopathy because they did things when they were young, or teenagers, and get very annoyed when I state that those actions mean nothing. Until that time, the brain is lacking in development in areas of the brain not only necessary for the diagnosis of psychopathy, but also to inform a neurotypical of the role the executive suite plays in their emotive development. You would not believe the number of writers that were under the age of twenty-five, who wrote about psychopathy with an air of authority, only to hit those maturation numbers and find, oh my, I am a totally different person, and I am not remotely a psychopath.

When you are dealing with two people under the age of twenty-five, they may have similar appearances. They may be impulsive, they may be fearless, they may have trouble predicting the consequences of their actions, they may have no empathy, and they may be quite ruthless, but it isn’t until the brains of both are mature, that is when the differences are actually observable. Until that point, you can easily mistake a developing neurotypical brain or its behavior as psychopathic, as due to the lack of neural maturity, their brains can both look psychopathic in a scanner, and their behavior can appear psychopathic when it is just a child or teenager working within the wiring that they currently have.

People have made the argument that some people have fully mature brains by the time they are eighteen, however this does not make psychopathy determinable at that age, or younger. For the vast majority of people their brain finishes maturing in their mid twenties. Also, that argument does not hold up to scrutiny, at all. There is, as far as I have seen, no tangible evidence that anyone has a fully developed brain at eighteen, and as I mentioned above, that number keeps creeping up, not down. I think that this is an attempt to justify labeling people that have no business being labeled.

Not only that, there is also the impact that this sort of thinking has on how we consider those that are still growing the emotional regulation centers of the brain. It still comes down to justification, but for other needs.

James Fallon was a neuroscientist. In being such, he obviously had a great deal of knowledge behind the brain, its development, and when it is ready for certain actions. One that he mentioned was war and when we should be sending people into battles neurologically. He made the argument that due to the level of development of the brain in these years, the earliest that a person should be sent into war is twenty-two. In his book The Psychopath Inside that was published in 2013, he states;

Stressful stretches of a young person’s life such as college, first marriage, and especially military combat couldn’t come at a worse time for the developing prefrontal cortex.

This is a big deal for the armed forces. A freshman and a senior in college are very different human beings. Sending kids to war at eighteen is ridiculous, as they’re still in the active state of frontal lobe development. The military uses psychological tests to make sure recruits aren’t crazy, but that won’t tell you how they’ll be in two years. If we’re going to have war, we shouldn’t let soldiers fight until they’re twenty-two or twenty-three.

However, Fallon was just one guy. What does the rest of science say about the development of the brain? Well, fortunately this has been an area of great interest, so a good amount of research has gone into it.

A cooperative project at MIT is dedicated to examining the brains of young people and their development, the link can be found below.

Young Adult Development Project

It is a project with over five hundred reference materials, and is being conducted by one of the most respected and advanced universities in the world. They state the following;

Responding to increasing awareness and concerns, the MIT Young Adult Development Project was created in 2005 to analyze, distill, and disseminate key findings about young adult development, findings that shed light on the unique strengths and dramatic challenges for this extraordinary period.

Defining young adulthood as the years between 18 and 25, the project focused on identifying research conclusions about which there is widespread agreement across disciplines and researchers, as well as practical relevance for universities, employers, parents, human service practitioners, and young adults themselves.

Their determination thus far;

• Prefrontal cortex: The most widely studied changes in young adulthood are in the prefrontal cortex, the area behind the forehead associated with planning, problem-solving, and related tasks. At least two things affect the efficiency in its functioning: myelination: the nerve fibers are more extensively covered with myelin, a substance that insulates them so that signals can be transmitted more efficiently, and synaptic pruning: the “briar patch” of connections resulting from nerve growth are pruned back, allowing the remaining ones to transmit signals more efficiently.

• Connections among regions: At the same time, the prefrontal cortex communicates more fully and effectively with other parts of the brain, including those that are particularly associated with emotion and impulses, so that all areas of the brain can be better involved in planning and problem-solving.

• “Executive suite”: The cluster of functions that center in the prefrontal cortex is sometimes called the “executive suite,” including calibration of risk and reward, problem-solving, prioritizing, thinking ahead, self-evaluation, long-term planning, and regulation of emotion. (See Merlin Donald, Daniel Keating, and others in References.) It is not that these tasks cannot be done before young adulthood, but rather that it takes less effort, and hence is more likely to happen.

20s and beyond
According to recent findings, the human brain does not reach full maturity until at least the mid-20s. (See J. Giedd in References.) The specific changes that follow young adulthood are not yet well studied, but it is known that they involve increased myelination and continued adding and pruning of neurons. As a number of researchers have put it, “the rental car companies have it right.” The brain isn’t fully mature at 16, when we are allowed to drive, or at 18, when we are allowed to vote, or at 21, when we are allowed to drink, but closer to 25, when we are allowed to rent a car.

Despite all the information that we have that clearly shows why children cannot, and should not ever, be labeled psychopathic, this idea persists that it should still somehow be on the table for discussion. It shouldn’t be now, and even if, magically, we could suddenly identify it in the genetics and the brain at an early age, it simply shouldn’t be. If you are a parent, I get it, psychopathic children are a challenge, and that is putting it nicely. You get through it, however, and you do so by meeting that child where they are currently, not where they will be when they are twenty-five.

Psychopath or not, that doesn’t matter. You are responsible for them understanding the world around them and how to interact with it in a way that will be positive for them, and for the world in which they are going to exist in. Even if you do, in a way, choose the child that you get (I’m adopted, so that is why I am acknowledging that this does sometimes happen) you don’t get to choose what sort of brain they will have, and having a neurotypical brain shouldn’t mean that you slip into assumptions about how to raise them. You still have to meet them where they are. You are their biggest influence.

The last thing that needs to be discussed about psychopathy and children is the effect a diagnosis like that can have on a child. This is not a diagnosis that is lightweight, regardless of when you get it. It comes preloaded with all kinds of hatred, assumptions, and accusations, even if you have lived a model life. People recoil from psychopaths because they have been fed a diet of that word meaning monster for their entire lives.

Seriously, count how many times in a week you hear that word, and in what context. It is everywhere, and pretty much never used correctly. It is a stand in for evil, and while trying to explain that to people sometimes works, it usually falls on deaf ears. If you think about how often you hear it in a week, then think about how old you are, and how many times it has passed along in the background every week of your life without you even considering it. More than you can possibly imagine. “Psychopath” as a term doesn’t show up suddenly when you’re thirty or some other mature age. It’s always been around, and always comes with that stigma.

Think about a child getting diagnosed with it in today’s world, and all the information around them is telling them that they are evil. They certainly won’t have friends, as other children’s parents aren’t going to allow the psychopath over for a playdate. They will be shunned in school, because “psychopathy isn’t treatable”. They will be alone, and they will have no reason to try to change that. As I mentioned above, the diagnosis will certainly be incorrect. The child won’t be a psychopath, they will be a neurotypical, or possibly some other neurodivergence, but they are extremely unlikely to be psychopathic. The harm that comes into their lives in no way is justifiable.

However, that isn’t the only possible outcome. You are also giving a child a free pass to not bother trying to do anything. Why should they? They can just live to the assumptions and wreak havoc all around them. It’s a free pass to a lifetime of, who the f*ck cares? I can do whatever I want. I’m a psychopath, after all.

I had a reader tell me about her brother who was diagnosed with psychopathy. It ruined his life because he behaved to the diagnosis, and I will close with that being the last bit of information I leave you with.

Michelle Moore

Aug 5 ·

My brother was diagnosed as being psychopathic when he was five years old. I’ve no doubt that my mother’s attempts to explain it to him (and the rest of the family) considerably hindered his development into a decent human being, as if being psychopathic was somehow a ticket to wilful anarchy and cruelty, ‘because he couldn’t help it.’I still don’t understand it (I was only a year older than him, so reliant on the information I was given, until I decided I didn’t want to be around him any more), but being able to read your responses to questions on the topic really help. Thank you.

Athena Walker

Aug 5 ·

Wow, whoever diagnosed him as psychopathic at five needs to have their license revoked. There is no way to make that determination in a five year old, you can’t until twenty years hence, and it labels a child in the parents’ minds. It’s a ridiculous move on their part. That’s really unfortunate for your brother. The results are partially why you never make that kind of diagnosis in a child. Unless he had a brain scan now to show that he is indeed psychopathic, assuming that he is finally twenty-five, it is far more likely that the label determined his fate. He saw no reason to try because “he’s a psychopath”. He’s just doing what’s in his nature to do in his mind. I can imagine that it is an inescapable self fulfilling prophecy. You’re welcome for the writings. It’s unfortunate that the reason you found them is the situation that you described.

Michelle Moore

Aug 7

Thank you. He’s now 53, although I haven’t seen him for about twenty years (safer that way). I think you’re right - it was indeed a self-fulfilling prophecy. But if this exchange helps even one family to think more deeply or differently about such diagnoses / issues affecting them, that’s something good to come out of it.

Athena Walker

Aug 7

That would be an excellent outcome, I agree

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This is the image that the article chose to use, and while I don’t know what it has to do with psychopathy, I think it’s a visually pleasing enough image, so why not?

While writing a post earlier I noticed that I couldn’t find one of what I would consider a foundational post regarding psychopathy, and that is psychopathy in children, or rather why that is a silly concept. I have mentioned it, but not to the degree that likely I should have, as this is an important topic. Instead of diving right into it, I thought we would start with this article about psychopathic signs that can supposedly be observed in children, debunk that, and go from there.

It is reasonable for people to make the argument that if you are born a psychopath, that clearly, there are psychopathic children. To that I say, “Oh, short answer, ‘yes’ with an ‘if.’ Long answer, ‘no’ with a ‘but.”

The short answer is, the brain of a child is not at all developed in the areas that psychopathy can be seen in, and until that child is of age that those areas of the brain are developed, they should be considered neurotypical. Long answer? Well, that’s this post.

First, the article.

Signs of Psychopathic Behavior in Childhood

Children may display precursors to psychopathic traits early in childhood.

So, first I looked at the name of the blog that this originated from, and it is called:

Surviving the Female Psychopath

Understanding women who have a serious personality disorder.

Already I am eyerolling, and know who I’m dealing with. It is either someone that had an abusive mother and decided that she is psychopathic, sort of like Love Fraud, but the crappy person is a parent, not a significant other, or she’s a grifter. Considering one of her other article titles is:

Are Parents The First Victims Of Psychopaths?

I’m going grifter with this one. The parents are not a victim of their child. That is a rather obscene way of looking at the world. I might do an article on that one, just because the notion of it is so ridiculous. Oh goody, guess what? This woman wrote a book too. It’s called, “Born to Destroy”, because of course it is.

Let’s get into this article, but I think this woman is going to be a treasure trove of cannon fodder.

Many of us find it hard to believe that a small child can already show symptoms of psychopathy. Yet preeminent psychopathy researcher Dr. Robert D. Hare has noted, “We have learned that elements of this personality disorder first become evident at a very early age.”

Wow… first paragraph and show that she’s a Hariot right away, not a great start. Also, psychopathy is not a personality disorder, it is a genetic difference.

Impulse-ridden or tension-discharge disorder

Labeling a child a psychopath is taboo since it is a social stigma with core features that brand a person as bad. As a result, The Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry has proposed that impulse-ridden personality or tension-discharge disorder be used in place of psychopathy. With young children, problems may be transitory as they grow, lending hope for change.

Psychopaths aren’t tense. That’s not what’s going on at all. Also, this is just another garbage diagnosis that describes behavior, not cause. It is like ASPD. Literally anyone can have it, and it means nothing. So long as you behave to criteria, you can be labeled with it, and nothing about the description so far demonstrates anything other than a child with impulse control issues. You know… a child. Good lord. There is no reason to be labeling a child with anything like this. That’s like saying, a young boy that won’t sit still when you have taken recess away from him clearly needs to be medicated.

Or, you could try letting him, oh, I don’t know, be a boy and run around. He has to burn off that energy. So do girls, by the way. This whole removing recess nonsense is ridiculous. Off topic, I know, but this is the mentality that they have with kids now. Make them be anything other than kids, and when they don’t conform, label and medicate them.

Some psychopathic traits can be evident in childhood

Nope. Can’t. A child behaving in a way that is “psychopathic” is behaving in a way that shows where their brain development is. The brain forms back to front, and the last part of the brain to develop is the executive suite and emotional reasoning center. All things necessary to be present in order to determine if the cause of any behavior might be psychopathy as an adult. Certainly this cannot and should not be done with a child.

In that first paragraph, she starts off stating that the reason that they don’t label children as psychopathic is because of the stigma of the label, but that is the smallest part of the equation. You don’t do it because it cannot be done. You cannot label something that requires the brain to be mature in order to know whether or not it is present. This isn’t about social stigma.

She then goes on to say that this is thankfully changing due to the adoption of this new diagnosis. That is not something to be thankful for. Finding a new category to shove a child into stops them from progressing. It is the elephant and the chain.

When an elephant is a baby at the circus, they are staked by a chain to the ground so they can’t wander off. When they are an adult, they still don’t despite the fact the chain is no longer effective. It’s an elephant, it could pull that thing out without any issue. They don’t, because they have been conditioned not to. This is the same result with children when you put labels on them that they can’t get off their shoulders later.

Some psychopathic traits are observed in childhood, including the emotional impairment known as callous-unemotional (CU) traits. They are related to a lack of empathy, guilt, or remorse, and are reported to be a developmental precursor to psychopathy. The CU traits can produce behaviors that are extremely concerning to caregivers. Normal interactions with siblings and playmates can be disrupted. In extreme cases, the CU-displaying child may cause physical harm to others or animals.

The MacDonald Triad has entered the chat early but not unexpectedly on this one. Of course, they have to bring up the “abusing animals” trope, despite that being debunked literally decades ago (think in the sixties) by the dude that came up with it to begin with. The conclusion that he ended up reaching was that the three traits that he identified correlated more closely with childhood abuse victims acting out in the world than it did psychopathy. We can’t leave the myths alone, though, now can we.

The rest of it means nothing. Children are mean, selfish, callous, and think about only what they want. This isn’t news, it’s normal. People need to stop pathologizing this, because it helps no one.

Lack of eye contact at an early age may be a sign of CU traits

Nooo, that is a sign of autism numb nuts. Psychopaths have no problem with prolonged, unblinking eye contact. It unnerves people, so much so they have studied our blink rates and found that it is significantly lower than average, thus giving the appearance of staring/piercing eyes. Why are these people so dumb? Seriously, it’s like they want psychopathy to fit in their little box so they can make a name for themselves as a so-called expert, the next Robert Hare, because he’s in his nineties and not going to be around forever, so they just make crap up. And they suck at it.

Studies have shown that “compared with other children with disruptive behaviors, those with high levels of callous-unemotional traits were less prone to establish eye contact with their mothers.” Other research shows, “Eye contact occurs during interaction with a parent or caregiver and forms a critical component of an infant’s early social communication, influencing the development of the social brain.”

I simply do not believe this one. Why? Because this requires self-reporting. They have no idea if a child fits their criteria of “callous unemotional traits” until that kid is of a certain age, so they have to ask mommy, and mommy is going to just agree with the experts.

“Did they lack eye contact with you as an infant?”

“Now that you mention it, I think they did!”

Sure, and they also had horns and a tail. Could we please stop with the nonsense. There are a lot of reasons why kids don’t look at you, and again, I am directing you back to autism, because this is a known aspect of it. Let me guess, in their little world, someone with autism probably is a psychopath, so it all checks out in their minds.

I’m adopted, and I was fine with eye contact. However, I did have no emotional empathy, and all the other bells and whistles that accompany psychopathy. You still could not identify me as a psychopathic child, because at that age, I couldn’t be thought of that way.

My sister displayed psychopathic traits at an early age as her behavioral characteristics and personality became more evident.

Ah! There it is. The relative that was supposedly a psychopath. I would bet real money that if you talked to this woman’s sister you would get a vastly different story. However, let’s entertain her for now. I will guess there is a whole article about her sister’s “psychopathy” which of course, the author herself was so skilled that she is the one that recognized the problem when no one else did. Damn, I have to go look to see if I’m right.

Be right back.

It took some digging, but a couple of things.

1. There is no diagnosis of psychopathy for this woman’s sister. I had AI look for me, because I couldn’t find it, and it is because Winifred Rule says so. This is what Grok had to say:
   
   Winifred Rule describes her sister as exhibiting psychopathic traits in her memoir Born to Destroy and in related articles on Psychology Today, such as
   
   “The Danger of Life with a Psychopathic Sibling.”
   These descriptions are based on Rule’s personal observations of her sister’s behaviors starting from early childhood, including manipulation of family members, lying convincingly to turn others against Rule, a lack of empathy (e.g., watching Rule choke on game pieces as a toddler without intervening), a strong sense of entitlement, and efforts to remain the center of attention at the expense of others.
   Rule notes that she didn’t initially recognize these as signs of psychopathy but observed her sister as “vastly different” from peers, and later connected the behaviors to psychopathic characteristics through her own research and understanding.
   
   There is no evidence in Rule’s writings, book descriptions, endorsements, or related sources of a formal clinical diagnosis for her sister (e.g., by a psychiatrist or psychologist using tools like the Hare Psychopathy Checklist).
   Instead, the identification appears to stem from Rule’s experiences as a sibling and survivor, informed by her involvement with the Society for the Scientific Study of Psychopathy and references to experts like Robert Hare.
   The book and articles frame it as Rule’s personal account and analysis rather than a professional medical evaluation.

2. She also claims her mother is psychopathic. Good lord lady. Why do people even listen to you?

3. Told you that she was the one that figured it out. She is the hero of her own story, and the villain of her sisters.

I am going to continue with this article, but it is evident that this woman is entirely full of garbage.

All too often we remain blinded to those closest to us, failing to see the true personality of loved ones. In his later years, my father revealed his own troublesome thoughts that my sister never looked at him from when she was a young age. He had never uttered such profound and honest feelings before. When parents have a psychopathic child, some may blame themselves, wondering if they did something wrong. However, research suggests that “psychopathy may be innate.”

My word, what drek. All right, Wini, let me be clear, your father didn’t say squat to you, because nothing is wrong with your sister. There are probably some whispers about you, but the way you describe her, “manipulation of family members, lying convincingly to turn others against Rule, a lack of empathy (e.g., watching Rule choke on game pieces as a toddler without intervening), a strong sense of entitlement, and efforts to remain the center of attention at the expense of others” screams jealous sibling to me.

Let me guess, she was the favorite, and you didn’t like it, did you? She turned everyone against you? If she was a psychopath, you wouldn’t have even registered on her radar. A strong sense of entitlement has nothing to do with psychopathy, nor does wanting to be the center of attention. However, I think you wanted to be the center of attention, but she was first born, and that made you wish you were her, or at the very least, that people paid attention to you like they did her. Labeling people you don’t like as psychopathic is a terrible tell. Nice try though.

Childhood displays of psychopathic behavior

As my sister grew older, her recalcitrance and boldness grew worse, catching the eye of her first teacher in her new school. I can remember my mother was called in to speak to my sister’s fifth-grade teacher who was also the mother of five children. She had told my mother then that there was something different about my sister that she could not put her finger on, and that she had never seen a child before who boldly defied directions. My sister’s indifference and defiance of school rules baffled her teacher.

What the…? Is this whole article about your sister? Woman. Get over it. Seriously. Grow the hell up, what is your problem? This is… alot. You decided that your sister is psychopathic, without evidence, with no diagnosis or even evaluation on the table, and without knowing what psychopathy is, and then you are basing your whole argument about psychopathy in children on your own fictional story? That’s freaking bold. You talk about bold in your paragraph about your sister, which again, I do not believe and I will get to why in a moment. When I say bold in this context, I don’t mean the type that gets noticed and praised. I mean the type that makes people wonder if we should have closed the institutions. It’s not a good bold.

This is some serious main character syndrome we have going on here. Why do I not believe the teacher story? I was that student too. I didn’t care, didn’t follow the expectations or rules, had to have meetings and progress reports, the whole nine, but never once did any teacher say that I was the worst that they had seen. Please. Spare us the theatrics. You apparently have no idea what school teachers deal with, and for you to try and sell your sister as the worst? The lie is too big to be believable. It’s pretty ridiculous, frankly.

Armed with a glib tongue, my sister could spin believable lies that often went unnoticed, and, at a young age, she was headstrong and manipulated people to always get what she wanted. No one could dissuade her. She could charm or bully, depending on her target and what she was trying to accomplish.

Oh my good lord, you are still prattling on about your sister. This is cringe lady. So what? She was headstrong, that’s a good thing. She manipulated people? Welcome to being a kid. You’re trying to manipulate people with this article and doing so badly I might add, and you are an adult. If anyone should be shamed for it, it’s you. No one could dissuade her? Again, this is not a bad trait. This is what gets people through really hard trials and tribulations in life. I doubt she bullied anyone. You couldn’t be her, so you felt inferior, so this is your revenge. Sad.

In his popular book on psychopathy, Without Conscience, Dr. Hare talks about a girl named Susan whose mother caught her in the act of flushing her kitten down the toilet. Unconcerned by her actions, she was angry about being found out, and afterwards, even denied the story. Moreover, Susan’s parents claimed: “We were never able to get close to her, even when she was an infant, and she was always trying to have her own way, if not by being sweet then by throwing a tantrum.”

Oh my god, she remembered that other people exist in this world outside of herself and her sister. Shocking, right? As for the story in Hare’s book. I would be very suspicious that the girl was an abuse victim, but Hare never considered that, because that would mean that he would have to maybe accept being wrong, and Hare is none too keen an such a thing. He will sue you to shut you up, instead of allowing you to prove him wrong. He is the biggest right fighter in the space, so I wouldn’t take his word, or evaluations about anything seriously, especially when psychiatrist John Macdonald has outright said, animal abuse being correlated with psychopathy is incorrect. Look at child abuse, not psychopathy.

He was saying this since the sixties, it’s his Triad, and no one wanted to listen. They like the myth over the truth. Susan is probably a normal kid that was abused by someone, and rather than get her help, labeling her a psychopath was the route chosen.

While physical abuse of animals is often an early sign of psychopathic tendencies, neglect can also be a harbinger. My sister was given a puppy after begging our parents. The novelty wore off almost immediately. She stopped walking it, and simply let it loose. Very soon thereafter, the puppy was abandoned at the dog kennel. When it was learned a short time later that the dog died of distemper at the kennel, my sister was indifferent — not caring about the death of the dog.

This is why you don’t just get kids animals and expect them to know how to take care of them. YOU get the dog, and YOU have the child do the care WITH you. This is the parent’s fault, if it happened at all, which of course, I wouldn’t believe this woman if her keyboard and her tongue came notarized.

Get this, that is the end of the article. It blah blah blahs for several paragraphs as an obsessive toxic love letter to her sister’s shadow, gives no information regarding psychopathy, and then just f*cks off in the end.

How does this woman have any sort of following? No one else thinks the sister fixation is weird, and no one questions why this woman makes claims about someone that isn’t around to defend themselves? It’s not like this sister is in prison, and her diagnosis is of public record. There is no diagnosis. That is the craziest thing. She also just claims her mother is psychopathic, and we’re all supposed to nod in agreement with whatever claim that she wants to make about people that, for all we know, don’t even exist. Or, worse yet, they did exist, and they are no longer alive, so she felt like, well I can just trash them. Who’s going to stop me? I gotta get that bag.

In the next post I am going to go over exactly why psychopathy and children do not ever go together, and the information about brain development. I know that many of you have already read the information I have on this subject over on Quora. The reason I am redoing it here is that it is necessary for people new to psychopathy to have available to them so they can understand why people like this lady are insane.

I think I will be doing more of her posts, however. I don’t think that I can ignore some of the titles I see over there. They look too amusing to me. That is enough of her for today, though. I can imagine that she is furiously typing away another fan fiction of her villainess sister as I write this.

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I am listening to a podcast between Graham Hancock and Randall Carlson. If you haven’t listened to either, they are both really interesting. They both explore the mythologies of the world and how they may actually be deeper lessons from humans’ past, and how those myths may lend to our understanding of possible future catastrophes. In other words, right up my alley.

Anyway, they are having a discussion at the forty or so minute mark about the gatekeepers in the world of archeology, and it brings to mind that these people seem to be everywhere and wrecking human advancement for the placation of their own egos.

Look, I get it, they went to school, and got handed their big boy/girl trophies that told them that they are now the “expert”, and that should mean something to the rest of us, and then they are just shocked, shocked I tell you, when anyone deems their ideas subject to being challenged, but man, it is time for them to get a reality check. Or, it is time for them to stop protecting what they consider more important than the truth, which is their so-called, “legacy”. If your legacy is BS, that is not something to protect.

Now, in fairness, I am not specifically referring to the archeological community here. Rather, they are getting roped into a larger problem, of which I definitely see them contributing. However, I am going to say this. We are all fellow humans, and that includes you, “expert”, and as such, you should understand that we, like you, have working eyeballs and ear holes, and both of those connect to a brain. Some brains, they don’t work very well. In fact, they barely work at all. I am not saying that you have to take the notions of those brains into account. All the same, there are plenty of brains that do work well, and when they see something that blatantly doesn’t make sense, and your argument in return is, I’m the expert so

I also get it. Sometimes this is like tier five memeory, and they aren’t even at tier one. For those of you that think I meant to write “memory” there, like my spell check keeps insisting, no, no I did not. I mean memeory, and what I mean by that is a meme built on a meme built on a meme, and so forth. You have to know the tier one through four memes in order to understand the fifth tier, and when someone doesn’t know any of it, the explanation process is so tedious that it feels insurmountable.

When that comes about when it comes to complex ideas, like explaining why there are water erosion lines around the Sphinx, simply dismissing the person and deciding that answering is beneath you because doing otherwise would take up your whole day, believe me when I say, I get it.

I get this sort of thing all the time, where I have explained the deep intricacies of how psychopathy and sociopathy are very different things, and the detailed information of how and why that is the case. Then I get someone that is just so far away on the knowledge scale from where I would need to get them in order for them to even consider challenging what they believe, along with a very emotional perspective that is not going anywhere anytime soon, that I simply decide that it isn’t worth my time to bother trying.

It’s common, but also, I didn’t decide to become an expert in psychopathy. I didn’t go to school to proclaim myself as such, and while I will talk to people and explain things that they otherwise wouldn’t know, I am not the person staking my life and reputation on being the person. I am more a disrupter than anything. I am the one that comes along and throws a spoke of critical thinking into the academic spinning machine that has proclaimed itself decided. If you decide that you want to be an expert at something, and someone else comes alone and points to an obvious and glaring issue with your royal decrees about a matter, you decide, with that “mantle of truth” that you have to actually be able to do one of four things.

1. You have to be able to clearly explain why they’re incorrect about something. Do so in language that is understandable, not incredibly pedantic words that make people want to roll their eyes and tune you out. Y’all do this because you are either so far up your own rear end that you think that you sound impressive, or you just want to chase off people you think are less than you.

2. Be able to consider what they are saying and not respond right away. This one takes actual intelligence, and consideration. It is something that only critical thinkers can do, and I have seen a lot of the expert class shockingly illiterate in critical thinking skills. Even if you go away from the person, and five minutes later your brain comes up with the reason why their idea is not a valid one. It isn’t about being right, it’s about challenging the idea against what you know, not what you feel. If your ego is the first thing that comes out of your mouth, you aren’t an expert, you’re an ideologue.

3. Engage with the idea. Turn it over, explore it, consider it, allow it to take shape as you think about the background that you already have. Does the person make a valid observation? Could it be possible? Why or why not? What happens if they are correct? What does it mean for your field of study? Are you more interested in a legacy of royal rightness, or actual science? Even if they are wrong, is there anything to the idea that makes you reconsider something else?

4. Patiently and clearly say, I don’t know. It’s a scary phrase, or at least it seems to be. It seems like it is more terrifying to the expert class than it is that they might be misleading an entire field of study down a primrose path of BS, but really, it’s not anything at all. There is plenty that you don’t know. So, so much that no one knows. If anything, when you delve into an area of information, you shouldn’t be walking away thinking smugly that you understand that area now. You should be absolutely humbled by what you don’t know, and how that lack of information unfolds in front of you like a black void for which you have no light.

That is what learning is. It is the understanding that we have a tiny corner or a much larger piece of knowledge. That knowledge is not something that you will ever grasp, be even close to comprehending, or even understanding its vastness. You are awarded a tiny sliver of information, and how that information is treated going forward, that is your legacy. If you get that sliver, and proceed into the world arrogantly and assured, you will either live to see yourself a fool, or die, and become one later. If you go forward with an inquisitive mind that seeks out information that is as accurate as possible, and will change your mind when you see new information, that can be commendable, but here is the caveat, and it seems many people miss this one. You must seek out that information for the purpose of growth and challenging your mindset.

I’m psychopathic. Everyone reading this knows that already. What psychopathy is, or rather, what it should be, is an agreement. An understanding that is brought about by evidence, rigorous study, and the challenging of ideas, regardless of who they belong to. If tomorrow there were a concerted effort to define psychopathy through these methods, and through them a different understanding of what it meant was decided upon, and I didn’t meet that criteria, then I would no longer be psychopathic, despite all my writings on the subject. I would, however, still be me, and I know that how I work, and how others work, tends to differ quite a bit. What that would mean in terms of how I define myself? Nothing would really change. When I write, I am explaining how my brain works, regardless of the label attached to it.

What I disagree with is this need for words to be held in purgatory, never descending or ascending in understanding. We get caught on the particulars, and don’t think about how those particulars contradict one another. Psychopathy is just one of those areas, but it exists everywhere. There are reasons for some of it. Such as the phrase, when you hear hoofbeats think horses, not zebras.

This is something said in medicine, and what it is referring to is when you see a symptom, think about the common possibilities before your brain reverts back to med school days when you were learning about that disease that has occurred four times in all of human history. Chances are, it’s not that, but something more common. Look there first. That’s well and good for medicine, but then you have doctors that get incensed that their patient isn’t operating on their schedule.

I will give you a quick story. There was someone that I know that got Raynaud’s syndrome:

This is caused by blood vessel constriction and when it turns white like that, it means that there is no blood flow to the fingers, or toes. It starts off white, then turns blue, and then red, with the red being when the circulation is restored. This person thought it was weird, and mentioned it to their doctor. That doctor also thought it was interesting, and ran some tests. Mind you, Raynaud’s syndrome can happen without there being an underlying cause, but there are things that can cause it that are concerning.

So, tests are run, and tests are weird, so the primary doctor sends the person to a specialist who ran a lot of tests. The results became available on the patient portal, and the results were… concerning…, but the specialist? Ghosted the patient. Just did nothing. No follow-up appointment, no phone calls, no responses to messages, which left the patient with test results… and Google. What do you think the person did? They researched the results, and what did the specialist do when they finally crawled out of the woodwork? Got annoyed about the Googling.

This behavior never ceases to amaze me. The specialist left the patient without contact for over a month and a half, and then was put off by the fact that the patient wanted to know what was going on with their health. The specialist created the problem, and then was irritated by the problem, and the problem’s hoofbeats were from a zebra, not a horse.

Sometimes experts are dumb, sometimes they lack critical thinking skills, sometimes they straight up ignore what is in front of them. All of these things are forgivable human traits, to some degree, but the ego attached to these things is incredible. If there was just a bit more humility in the so-called academic or expert class, the world would be a far better place. However, as it stands, with the absolute inability to be challenged that many of them demonstrate, and there being more of this entitled self-indulgent behavior coming up in young people, I don’t imagine this getting better.

Stop getting hung up on specifics, and start considering things on a broader scale. Understand that someone without your honorific alphabet soup might actually be smarter than you, but they didn’t want to go to the eighty thousand dollar a year useless degree factory to prove to the rest of the world that they too has brain. Also, start seeing the world larger than the head of a pin. It is the only way to challenge what you think you know so well. It is people that get so caught up in the minutia that they miss the forest for the trees. There is a reason that saying exists, and this is one of them. It’s tiring to hear people pontificate from on high how so and so is wrong about something, when they clearly haven’t even considered the ideas.

A perfect example of this was an interview that James Fallon did with some host, and there was a psychologist that was also on the program that just disagreed that Fallon was a borderline psychopath. His argument? Well, he really didn’t have one, Fallon just didn’t suit the personality type he had decided signified a psychopath. Fallon, on the other hand, was a neuroscientist that had the literal brain scans showing what he claimed, was indeed, factual. The “psychologist”? Nope, because I say so.

I cannot recall who this guy was, but if someone in the comments has seen the interview and knows where to find it, link it please, and I will add it to this post. It was a masterclass of the expert poo pooing someone that was also an expert. The difference? Soft science versus hard science. It was embarrassing for the guy, but he clearly didn’t think so. He was just smugly dismissing anything that he felt didn’t align with his worldview of psychopathy, brain scans be damned.

Experts should be the pinnacle of those seeking information that might change how we see things, and my theory as to why they don’t is a couple of things.

1. If they are the expert, they will go down in history. Robert Hare is an excellent example of this. He will stop at nothing to protect his legacy as the “psychopathy expert”. He even wanted psychopathy to be listed in the DSM under the heading, “Hare syndrome”. Apparently legacies and being known throughout time is a thing that neurotypicals desire. There is an apparent fear of being forgotten, which literally makes no sense to me. Most people are forgotten, it’s fine. What might keep you bound up to this place as a restless spirit won’t be that you were forgotten, but rather your fear of being so.

2. It’s safe. Having hard boundaries of what the world is, and how it operates, even things like ancient history that we know very little about, and need to be putting a lot more work into with open minds and curious pursuits, feels better to most people. They need a narrative that they can rely on, otherwise they feel untethered. This, again, is something that humans apparently dislike a great deal, and again, I do not understand in the slightest.
   
   Do you remember like, a couple months ago… I think, that there was supposedly a spaceship on its way here, and a bunch of people were freaking out? I had a lot of people hit me up about that, and I’m like, and? I have the same response to people when they tell me that it’s possible that aliens live among us. And? Who the hell cares? If they do, they have obviously been here for a minute. Are you dead? No. Are you enslaved? Maybe, but if you are, you don’t know that, so chill. Nothing about your life has changed since you have come to consider that your neighbor might be an alien. They aren’t, they’re just super weird. My point is, there are tons of things you do not know.

There was this old show called Sightings. It was basically one of the OG paranormal type shows that did segments about various things. One of them was about a guy who used a Ouija board, or something like that, and he asked something like the question, Are there ghosts around a lot of the time? To which the board replied, “At all times, a sea of phantoms surround you”.

When I tell this story to people, you can see that it bothers some. Why though? It’s not like it changes anything. They are there, or they aren’t. Either way, so what? How does this affect your life? The fact is, it doesn’t, but it makes people feel unsafe, and to that I say, don’t hang around me, because I can pretty well promise you some things are going to happen that will leave you questioning, what the actual hell is going on with your energy. Safety shouldn’t be your deciding factor as to what to challenge in this world. However, I am knowledgeable enough to know that I may be wrong in that assertion. Maybe there are cases that it is the better point of valor to be safe instead of poking around in things we don’t understand.

Actually, the Ouija board. That is a prime example. I get it, it’s a kids game, or whatever, but don’t mess with them. You can invite a whole string of, I have no idea what I am dealing with, into your life, and no one needs that noise. See? An open mind leads you to seeing faults in your assertions even one paragraph, or one sentence after you made them. This should be the way of humans, but especially “experts”.

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I already spotted a psyop, and it is Mr. Hughes claiming that he knows about psychopaths. I cannot believe anyone interviews this guy for any reason, but especially about psychopathy. Though, in fairness, I don’t suppose the interviewer is really an active participant in this Ted Talk type lecture that we are all being subjected to, so there’s that. Let’s jump back in.

I wanted to readdress this passage here:

Chase Hughes: I’ve done research on this for 30,000 hours in real life on facial expressions. But skepticism squeezes this lower eyelid up here. The less skeptical someone has spent their lifetime, the more suggestible that person is.

As I mentioned last week, not seeing skepticism on someone’s face does not mean that it isn’t there, and seeing it might be playacting, but specifically in this passage, where he is stating that people without skepticism are more suggestable. Maybe, or perhaps they are more cunning than he is giving them credit. Not allowing people to read your face, not giving them an in to your internal thoughts about a matter is a power that is unmatched in many regards. It is just as possible that the person doesn’t want you to know that they doubt you. This is always something to keep in mind.

Chase Hughes: Let me put you in the mind of a psychopath really quick.

Oh… this should be good. Do you have your popcorn yet? You might want to get it.

So he is in his apartment in a city one day and he decides, you know, I’m going to go get some tacos. So he leaves his apartment. He walks down the street. He’s walking to a nearby place. As he’s walking down to this taco place, he sees a car accident. And a mom is screaming and crying and holding her baby that has passed away, maybe a 2-year-old, and there’s people on looking and crying and screaming with her. The police are there trying to help her and stuff like that. And as he’s staring at this incident unfolding inside of his head, here’s what you’re hearing. I think I want lettuce. I’m going to put lettuce on the tacos, maybe some sour cream. And then he turns and goes to get his tacos. And then walks back by the scene again, looks at it again, comes back home and eats.

Oh… well, all right, he got this one correct. Yes, this is true. The police are there, they have that situation handled. I have no reason to consider it to be anything other than that. Handled. What does it have to do with me? What else would I do but go get my tacos. Also, I already know what I want on my tacos before going to get them.

And then that night before he’s going to bed, he’s looking in his bathroom mirror going like this, just trying to mimic all of those facial expressions of people grieving and being sad by the car accident. Just rehearsing those facial expressions. It’s terrifying to understand that there’s no empathy in that person. That’s a pure psychopath.

Ah, there it is. The nonsense. No, we are not going home and practicing that in the mirror. What do you think this is, Silence of the Lambs? Dude, seriously, your imagination is cringy. By the age that we are going out to get tacos, we are well familiar with those emotions, and we can see them better in movies anyway. The car accident thing would be something that gets glanced at. Nothing more. It wouldn’t even register past, “Do I have to do anything? No? Excellent. Tacos.”

Also, don’t get your knickers all twisted up with an emotional empathy fetish. It isn’t what you think it is. You don’t feel what that woman is feeling. You have no idea what she is feeling. Even if you have been there, it means nothing. I will use my age old example. My sister committed suicide. People learn this and it makes them emotional, and they want to comfort me, especially if they lost someone to suicide.

I feel none of what they feel. They are not experiencing emotional empathy, they are experiencing projection. It is what you imagine that person is feeling. It isn’t you mirroring them, because you act the exact same way when there is nothing to mirror. It’s just you feeling your emotions and assuming they have anything to do with anyone else. I do wish people would stop enshrining empathy as though it is some magic word that has any real power.

If you have cognitive empathy, that is a bit different. It means that you are attempting to see the situation, and respond to it according to the information in front of you. Cognitive empathy is what supersedes the bystander effect. However, because most neurotypicals lack it, they stand around without taking action. Or worse, they film it for the views. I bet he would place that behavior on psychopaths as well, instead of owning that neurotypicals are responsible for a large portion of what we get blamed for.

Interviewer: What’s your advice on how to manage dealing with a sociopath and then how to manage dealing with somebody who you think might be a psychopath?

Let me answer this before he weighs in with a bunch of BS that he made up. You deal with them as a person. As an individual. If you are dealing with a label, why are you bothering? If they are a garbage person, don’t deal with them. It’s very simple. If you understand who they are as a person, then you will have a much easier time. Also, this does require you to develop cognitive empathy. This is the reason that neurotypicals rely on the label game so much.

When you cannot understand a person, because your understanding only extends to your experience of the world, when someone comes along that violates your norms, there is no category to place that person that will make sense to you. This means that no matter what, you cannot predict their behavior, nor their thinking, which translates to “danger” in the neurotypical mind. In some respects, like psychopathy, there is little that can be done to override this thinking. That is because the world around you tells you that “psychopaths” are inherently dangerous. Monsters, and nothing we say or do regarding that will change the mind of the masses.

On the other hand, there are large groups of people that can be shamed into disregarding their social programming, and lack of cognitive empathy, and accepting things into their lives that are really bad for them. Emotional empathy is extremely easy to weaponize. It is just a matter of knowing you better than you know yourself, and believe me, there are a lot of people that do have that exact knowledge. A great example is the dude that this post is on. I understand psychopathy because I am one. I can see through his crap because to me he comes across as straight as a dog’s hind leg. However, to most people, people that know nothing about psychopathy, he sounds super knowledgeable. His grift is to make you think that he understands us, and you will pay him to get the lowdown. The problem is, he doesn’t know anything, so he is selling you hot air.

This is a way to weaponize your emotional empathy. You are afraid of the outsider, and can’t understand the ways that outside works, and this guy pretends that he does understand and can tell you all about the outsider. In terms of psychopathy, the message is almost always, stay away, they’re dangerous, and I can tell you how to stay safe. In terms of going the other way, they can shame you for having reservations about things that are perfectly reasonable to have reservations about. They will make you feel bad about those reservations, play to the voice in your head that wants oh so very badly to be considered a “good person”, and will get you to act against your interest because to do otherwise would feel bad, regardless of any evidence to the contrary.

Anyway, back to how to deal with a psychopath or a sociopath. Let me guess, distance yourself, and understand that you are in the presence of danger.

Chase Hughes: It would be the same two things for both sociopath or psychopath when you’re dealing with a psychopath. But if you just get these two right, you’ll be good to go. So the first one is I’m going to be more calm than that person in every interaction. I will never escalate anything. And the second one is I will be non-reactive. So even if they say something shocking, my eyebrows aren’t going to go up. I’ll say, “Oh yeah, okay, that makes sense.” I will be as non-reactive as humanly possible.

Yeah, you are never going to be more calm than a psychopath. We literally don’t even want to be there, and are barely listening to you in the first place. Our minds are on what we are going to eat when we get out of whatever meaningless get together this is. Psychopaths also aren’t going to be trying to just shock you for no reason.

We tolerate your existence in our space. We don’t care about your emotional reactions, we don’t care about your opinion, we don’t care about you. Your shock, or lack thereof, is just something standing between us and the door. I have no idea who you are interacting with, my guess is some edgelord teenager, since the only “psychopath” you could be bothered to supposedly name, was a sixteen-year-old when she committed her crimes. Regardless, no psychopath is looking to get into a shockfest with you.

Chase Hughes: When you’re looking at any conversation, even if it’s not with a sociopath, the person reacting the least to the other person is in charge. And I encourage people all the time, never, ever, ever view the world in terms of hierarchy. It will make you fail every time because you’re constantly worried about external validation. So the mistake you make in dealing with sociopaths is, am I above them? Are they above me right now? Am I being subordinated? All of those, that’s all concerned for hierarchy, and we have to get rid of it. Am I the calmest person in the room? Am I non-reactive? This is all internal. I’m in control of me only, and I’m only worried about those two things. I’m non-reactive because they feed on those emotional reactions. So, they start to realize this fishing spot’s not working. They’re not going to bring their boat back there and keep fishing.

Do people really look at conversations this way? If so, dear lord, just stop. Are you so in need of a power fix that you consider who ranks above who? This is bizarre to a psychopath. Whatever this game is, we aren’t playing. We have the conversation, and that’s it. We aren’t comparing our power ranking with you, because you don’t matter to us. This isn’t a cage match.

For a sociopath, maybe this is different, but I have never experienced a conversation with a sociopath personally that was anything other than direct information exchange. There wasn’t an emotional bent to it, and no sense that someone was trying to throw their weight around. I would say that this goes back to that edgelord kind of person. Someone that needs that recognition. I consider that need to be weak, and very emotional at its core. It isn’t something that I can relate to, nor is it something that I have ever seen in a sociopath. In the interest of fairness, I haven’t had a lot of interactions with sociopaths, so maybe I am incorrect, but still, I have seen none of this social hierarchy stuff.

Interviewer: Can a psychopath be saved?

Saved from what, exactly? Not being neurotypical? That would be a curse, not a saving. None of us want to be like you. Don’t get me wrong, we don’t begrudge you for being who you are, but as this question so artfully illustrates, that is not the case coming the other direction. Why neurotypicals think that we want to be like them is beyond me. They think that they are so superior that there is an argument to be had to force us to either be like them, or to eliminate us from existence, and I’m thinking that’s a hard pass on both. The ego though… that is something else.

Now watch, his answer is going to be some statement about how we can’t be saved, and how dangerous that is. Social predators, and all that.

Chase Hughes: I don’t think so. When a psychopath goes to therapy, what the therapist works with them on is here’s how to ask better questions. Here’s how to make a face like you look like you’re interested in something. Someone saying it’s all just let me teach you how to fake your way in. So he’s a he’s a normal life and I think a lot of those positions to get to the top there’s a degree of psychopathy that you need to get up there in today’s world...

Unless we have to go to therapy for some external reason, we aren’t going. Like. Ever. If we had to go because a court ordered it, the goal is to get out as soon as possible. Learn the psychologist, say what needs to be said, and get the walking papers. Nothing more. We can learn how they think, but we can do that online now, so really this thinking that we would go in order to learn from them is pretty outdated. We know what the internet is.

Interviewer: There’s no way out. There’s no counseling. There’s no therapy. There’s no psychedelic journey that you can go on and like reverse some of that stuff.

Don’t you love when other people treat your life as though it’s a tragedy when in reality it’s great? That is the existence of psychopathy. Everyone telling you that it’s such a terrible thing, while you are just living life and finding ways to have fun. What do they think is really “living”? Having emotions that direct them into irrational decisions like buying timeshares because they are too frightened of being considered impolite to say no, and kindly f*ck all the way off.

Listen Mr. Interviewer. You were quiet up until now, let’s not have your input for the conversation be so generically unnecessary. If you have nothing interesting to say, say nothing. You were doing it so well up until now, we all thought you had left the room.

Chase Hughes: Interesting.

What? What’s interesting? Are you going to share with the rest of us? Because, if you don’t, no, nothing there was interesting. You actually have to have a meaningful contribution for something to be considered “interesting”. There was nothing.

Narrator: Hey, hope you found this one eye opening or maybe a little unsettling. The truth is, psychopaths aren’t hiding in dark corners. They’re out there blending in, studying you, mirroring your every move. You can’t spot them on site, but your gut can. That weird off feeling you get around someone, that’s your brain picking up what your eyes can’t. So, here’s the key. Don’t ignore it. Stay calm, stay non-reactive, and never let anyone pull you into their emotional game. Because the less you react, the more control you have. And in a world full of masks, your empathy, your humanity is your biggest edge. In a world that rewards charm over truth, empathy is your superpower. Protect it, trust it, and remember, monsters don’t always hide under the bed. Sometimes they shake your hand...

A. Your gut is not going to be picking up on any psychopaths. You might pick up on a bad person, don’t ignore that, it’s important, but you aren’t going to find a psychopath. That’s just nonsense.

B. Reactivity has nothing to do with interaction with a psychopath. If you don’t react to us, and leave up alone, yay for us. We aren’t looking to have a conversation with you, but you all don’t seem to be getting the message. We aren’t the ones seeking your audience, so there is nothing for you to be “reacting” to. They didn’t even try to put any of this into context, which is so ridiculous.

If you want people to learn to not “react” to someone, then you need to give examples of what the hell you are talking about. There was literally nothing. What are these fake psychopaths doing that warrants such nonreaction? It’s all just a created story without anything tangible in it. There, of course, wouldn’t be, because there is nothing to what is being said, but they could have just made something up, and at least that would have had a little meat to it.

Your empathy is not a superpower, and it can be easily used against you. Stop assuming that it can do anything to protect you. Learn the world around you, and actually have a pair of eyes, logical thinking, and the ability to understand someone other than yourself. That is how you protect yourself against bad people. There is nothing here to give you an edge over psychopathy, or anyone else for that matter. Also, the notion that “your humanity is your biggest edge” indicates that they don’t think psychopaths belong to the category of humanity, and have the hubris to be speaking about empathy. Wow. The lack of insight here is insane.

I hadn’t read down to the point where they actually said your empathy is a superpower when I wrote that it isn’t. How ridiculous to make that claim. If you think you have a superpower in your empathy, someone wired just like you will understand your pressure points and bend you to their will easily. The people manipulating you for their own gain are almost always neurotypical. Blaming psychopaths while claiming an elevated platform made of “empathy and humanity” is beyond egotistical.

Well, that is that interview, and I am glad to be done with it. Now for the part about Mr. Hughes. Over on Reddit someone responding to an interview of him about his supposed cult extractions had a fair bit to say about his “expertise” in that field as well, and they found him to be woefully lacking. Now, I don’t know this Redditor from Adam, but I don’t know Mr. Hughes from Adam either, so I see no reason to give him the benefit of the doubt. In fact, as he is trying to make a bunch of money off of this sideshow of his, he gets less of the benefit of the doubt from me. In fact, it makes me outright skeptical. Here is what the Redditor had to say:

“THE world expert” in brainwashing? Not so much. Please beware of unqualified “therapists”, “cult recovery specialists” and grifters trawling for clients on this subreddit. Calling on the mods for action.

Earlier today a post titled “I interviewed the world expert in brainwashing to learn how he extracts members of fundamentalist cults” was created that has gotten some attention, and it is currently the #1 post on this subreddit.

As disclosed by the OP in the post comments, the man who is claimed to be “world expert in brainwashing” is Chase Hughes (www.chasehughes.com), a self-proclaimed “behavior expert” with some very questionable qualifications. So who is Chase Hughes?

Chase Hughes is who CEOweekly.com lists as #15 of 20 “Top CEOs of 2020”, which sounds impressive until you realize that CEOweekly is a pay-to-post website and that nearly everyone on the list besides Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are “consultants” and “life coaches” that no one has ever heard of and whose accomplishments and qualifications are, like Mr. Hughes, largely self declared. It’s a paid advertisement for credibility. https://ceoweekly.com/the-top-20-ceos-of-2020/

Chase Hughes, whose (now deleted) LinkedIn page at one point listed a degree in Psychology from Harvard University, which sounds impressive until I checked it and noticed that it was in fact a continuing education certificate for that one’s name would be printed on a piece of paper for a small fee. Chase Hughes was never, in fact, enrolled at Harvard University for any degree program.

Chase Hughes, whose FAQ notes that “Chase’s CV and résumé are confidential.” https://www.chasehughes.com/faq

Chase Hughes, who in addition to “business consulting” offers “The Black Course”, a $19,987 four day course for “the elite-level training that I consider to be dangerous” and are too powerful to be shared with just anyone: https://training.chasehughes.com/black-2022

Chase Hughes, the author of the book “The Passport”, about using NLP and hypnosis techniques to seduce women and promises to give incels the ability to:

LIVE ABOVE OTHER MEN WHAT IF... There were secret techniques to get any woman you wanted? You’re holding all of it... Have your pick of women when you walk into a room Get phone numbers in three minutes flat Kiss gorgeous women within fifteen minutes Get women chasing you today n Have women trying to impress YOU Be the guy women leave their boyfriends for Make everyone wonder if you are a celebrity Never be put into the “friends” zone again WELCOME TO THE PASSPORT PREPARE FOR LAUNCH...

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9243098-the-passport

Chase Hughes, who as far as I can tell has never mentioned deprogramming current or former cult members.

Chase Hughes, the owner of the company Applied Behavior Research and creator of “6MX”, a “6 Minute X-Ray” course that anyone can take for the bargain price of $297.00.

One of the people who is qualified to teach that class? u/wilderenegade, aka Jonam Ross, the original poster and Chase Hughes’ protégé.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonamross/details/experience/

What are Jonam Ross’ qualifications? Well according to his website:

(https://www.religionrehab.co.uk/), Jonam Ross is a: Hypnotherapist Behavioural Intelligence Trainer NLP Master Practitioner (a more sciencey sounding term for hypnosis, and largely discredited as pseudoscience (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuro-linguistic_programming).

Mr. Ross is also, based on his post history here, an exJW. In the past, Jonam Ross has posted on r/exJW under the guise of surveys and “exJW recovery programs” to drive traffic to his site where he can pick you https://www.reddit.com/r/exjw/comments/hx8tcn/please_help_exjws_have_undergone_some_of_the_most/ https://www.reddit.com/r/exjw/comments/m7qrzu/do_you_have_symptoms_of_religious_trauma/

https://www.reddit.com/r/exjw/comments/ms4d0m/your_vote_matters/

https://www.reddit.com/r/exjw/comments/o90gl3/religion_rehab_webinar_to_help_members_of_high/

Jonam Ross makes a lot of unsupported claims about the efficacy of his programs but lacks the qualifications that one would expect from a licensed psychotherapist or cult recovery counselor.

THIS IS DANGEROUS AND WRONG.

It breaks my heart to see the emotionally vulnerable and traumatized community here targeted by people who, like our former cult leaders, claim to be able to erase decades of trauma overnight whilst being wholly unprepared to actually do so. This is why I want everyone who responded due to false pretenses to be aware of what they are really getting into.

Given what we’ve been through, nearly all exJWs would most likely benefit from therapy: qualified, licensed, specialized therapy. But this ain’t it.

Wow, he’s worse than I assumed. Well done, Mr. Hughes, you outdid Robert Hare with your weekend seminars. Twenty grand? Wow, anyone that pays you that is in need of some serious intervention and cannot be trusted with their wallet alone.

Well, there you go, Chase Hughes and his pretend psychopathy expertise. He is worse than many, but not quite Love Fraud level bad. Close, but not quite.

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This is a response to a video of Chase Hughes, who says that he has researched psychopaths for thirty years… or something like that. Let me be clear, I have no idea who this guy is. I have never heard him speak, and I tend to not give a lot of credit to people that are desperate to place themselves in the shaft of light that is the so-called “expert” class. We shall see if he has anything of value to add to the conversation.

The video can be found here:

The Sign of a Psychopath Everyone Misses | Chase Hughes

in case you prefer to listen over reading. However, we will be also using a transcript. Again, and as usual, I have no prewatched, or preread this, so I have no idea how good or ridiculous it will be. Time to find out.

Chase Hughes: I’ve done research on this for 30,000 hours in real life settings with actual psychopaths. If anyone tells you they’re like, “Here’s the way to spot a psychopath,” they’re full of it.

*Squints at screen… checks notes… looks at the title of the video*:

The Sign of a Psychopath Everyone Misses | Chase Hughes

What? Dude is not starting off strong here. Also, I wonder who these “real psychopaths” are. What do you want to bet? These are criminals that have been assessed with the PCL-R, so whether they are psychopathic or not is totally unknown, to everyone, including Mr. Hughes. Actually, what is this guy’s background? I should have Googled him, but frankly I didn’t think to care. I will check now.

Oh my good lord… seriously? This guy has literally no reason to be gum flapping about anything having to do with psychopathy. He is not a neurologist, and he is not a psychologist. He’s literally nothing. Granted, so am I, but at least I am what we are discussing here, an actual psychopath. Not only is he not, but when you go to his own website looking for anything that would give him validity, there is nothing there.

https://nci.university/404

It’s a 404 error. Are you freaking serious right now dude? Your whole schtick is to sell people on this notion that you are an expert in reading people, and your pedigree is, trust me bro? I don’t think so. Already, this is a really bad start by Mr. Hughes, who I am inclined to start referring to as pants of fire, but we will see if that inclination is overreaching.

According to Google, this is his so-called expertise:

Key educational and professional details include:

Military Background: Served 20 years in the U.S. Navy (1998–2019), working in correctional, prisoner management, and intelligence roles.

Behavioral Expertise: He is a certified master of clinical hypnotherapy and specializes in interrogation, body language, and non-verbal communication.

Academic Studies: He studied at Harvard University for neuroscience and neuroendocrinology and attended Duke University for medical neuroscience.

Author & Founder: Founder of Ellipsis Behavior Laboratories and author of best-selling books including The Ellipsis Manual and The Behavior Operations Manual.

Training & Certification: He developed the NCI (Neuro-Cognitive Intelligence) system for intelligence agencies and provides training on hostage survival, violence prediction, and persuasion.

Controversy: While recognized as a top expert in the field, some sources note debates regarding the nature of his academic qualifications, distinguishing them from traditional, long-term university degrees.

I am not a big, you have to have a degree to understand something and even be an expert in it, but this dude is basically cosplaying as an expert. He calls himself a lowercase neuroscientist. With all that on his sheet, I am going to say no to that. He is slightly more well read than the average person. He worked for the military, not exactly known for thinking about things in an unrigid manner, so I doubt the understanding of psychopathy is not really up to date. Well, dude that claims that you can’t identify a psychopath, who is in a video about identifying psychopaths, let’s keep going.

Interviewer: What’s the most fascinating or chilling case that you remember that you analyzed?

Oh good, cue the drama.

Chase Hughes: Erin Caffey. I’ve studied psychopathy for a long time, but I never felt it until that video where you could just feel that that’s not a human being—almost like there’s no human in there. That’s a wild creature that views a human being the same as throwing away a paper cup.

Dude… Erin Caffey cannot be considered psychopathic unless she has been evaluated since she turned twenty-five. She was sixteen when the murders of her family were committed, and there is no evidence that she is remotely psychopathic. She planned the murders, sure, but that means nothing, especially at that age. I am not seeing a great deal of understanding of the function of the human brain here, just someone that sees awful crime and then assumes, “psychopath”. Still not looking good, and it’s the answer to the first question.

Chase Hughes: The horrifying truth is that you can’t spot a psychopath until after they’ve done something like that. You could have the 50 best behavior profilers in the world, the top 50, and 99% we would be inaccurate in predicting who is a psychopath and who’s not. They’re so hard to spot.

Yes, we are, and you are clearly no better, so maybe don’t throw shade when you are covered in it.

Chase Hughes: I teach a course for women on how to spot narcissists on a first date, and that’s a lot easier.

Oh god, of course you do. You are the type that thinks he’s an expert in everything. I bet you wouldn’t know a narcissist if they bit you like a zombie, but go on with your bad self. Tell us all about how you can spot one, *just like that*

Where if you ask them about an ex-relationship, everything is someone else’s fault. They’re always the victim.

I hate to break this to you, but if they are remotely good at roping someone into their little world of narcissism, they more likely, on the first date anyway, not tell you anything about past relationships. They are too busy being focused on the other person, and getting them to feel the vibes that they want them to feel. Narcissists aren’t looking to trash their past relationships until there is an emotional need to do so, and the first date is about the magic. It’s about the experience. It’s about wanting that person to want more. Thus the term love bombing, or the more accurate term, overvaluation.

Narcissists will never have friends that are local. They’re always out of town. I’ve got my friends in another city. They have a hard time maintaining relationships. So, you’ll see a lot of that and that’s like the number one trend.

That might be true, but you aren’t getting that information on the first date.

You’ll see very similar things with psychopaths. And psychopaths are attracted to large cities. In my analysis, I think that cities are not just attracting psychopaths. I think that cities are helping to manufacture them.

Nope. I don’t like big cities at all, neither does the other psychopath I know. Too many needy people that want to attach to us for reasons that we do not understand, nor do we like. It’s like being around a bunch of leeches. No thank you. So a cohort of two psychopaths, two more than you have ever met, disagree with your assertion that we “are attracted to big cities”. Goes to show that your analysis needs a lot of work, but please don’t. You aren’t contributing anything to the world with this nonsense, and I have no thoughts that more work at it will improve the situation.

Chase Hughes: Let’s talk about one thing that’ll make sense right away. You’ve heard of the bystander effect. What this means is if I’m in a big city like New York or something like that and I get hurt and I’m laid on the ground and I’m wounded and I’m begging for help, the more people that are around me, the less likely I am to get help. Like people will take pictures, they’ll take videos, they all assume that somebody else is going to call 911, but they’ll stand there and watch. So if I took this behavior in isolation and I told you a story about a person watching another person get stabbed and they stand there and watch in interest, you would call that person a psychopath. When you get into a large city, that behavior is common. That is the bystander effect is the behavior of psychopaths.

*Head on desk*

Why is this guy not only full of himself, wrong, but also stupid? Why?

Let me carefully walk you through this Mr. I can spot a psychopath but you can’t, man. You described a behavior, something that you supposedly are an expert in, that large groups of people participate in, and then say, that’s the mentality of psychopaths. No, and I am doing everything I can to not call you a dumbass, though it is very much earned in that statement. You are observing a behavior that is very neurotypical in nature, thus why the LARGE GROUP OF PEOPLE participated in it. They did so, because that is in their nature.

Psychopaths tend to be the ones that stay calm, and do things that need to be done. This is something that actual researchers in psychopathy have found to be the case, and you would know that, if you knew anything about psychopathy at all. No wonder I have never heard of you. You are no one of consequence. You don’t understand narcissism, and you do not understand psychopathy either. I would not suggest anyone read anything you have to say about either subject, and to also spare their ears your prattling.

Chase Hughes: So, us not relying on reputation. And we’re not in a tribe anymore, our brains are not wired to handle millions of people. They’re wired to handle a tribe of about 150. So, when we get to a big city, we have no capacity for empathy for that many people. So, it gets shut off. Our brains say, “I can’t do that.” And empathy goes away. People are bad drivers because there’s no reputation. You’re never going to see those people again. I don’t have to rely on reputation. That means I don’t care what other people think. So more psychopathy.

Nope. I don’t even know what to say about this. It is such midwit nonsense. No, very special case of dumbness, no. That is not what that is at all. That is people living in cities, as they have done for thousands of years. Cities are not new. Not even remotely. Rome had around a million people living there, and that was a couple thousand years ago, but no no, go ahead and try to make your case that this is somehow related to psychopathy.

For those of you with functioning brain cells, but not yet introduced to the science of psychopathy. It is genetic. It is never formed. You are born a psychopath, or you are not a psychopath. It does not become induced by living in big cities. All he is describing is normative human behavior, and attempting to make himself sound smart. It’s rather obnoxious, so let’s get back to it so I can be rid of this dude’s interview.

Also, I can’t help but notice that the interviewer has said one thing so far. One. This guy won’t shut up, and it’s all garbage.

Chase Hughes: I think psychopathy is a spectrum. And some people view it as a diagnosis of you have to hit this checklist of all these things to be a psychopath. You can get close, right? Which means that there’s a line. There’s some kind of a spectrum there. Sociopaths have no concern for human feelings. Psychopaths have no concern for human life.

Psychopathy is a spectrum. Your opinion on that matter has nothing to do with its reality. You don’t need to frame it as though your thoughts on the matter lend the latter credibility. They don’t. An actual neuroscientist, who specifically worked in the realm of psychopathy, you know, an expert, was a borderline psychopath. Also, why are you mentioning sociopathy? It has nothing to do with psychopathy. They aren’t related, they aren’t similar, and they aren’t on a spectrum together. It just increases the evidence that you don’t have a clue as to what you are talking about.

Chase Hughes: We have been dealing as a species with psychopaths and sociopaths for a long time. There’s nothing new. We have evolved an instinct when we get around those people to not say that, oh, that’s a psychopath. Not even I can spot a psychopath like we would in a couple hours. Just can’t do it. But we all have this little feeling of something’s off. Something doesn’t add up. Something’s not right. So, we get those little feelings and a lot of people ignore them because the psychopath created so much dopamine in their brain.

You… you just made the argument that cities make psychopaths, and now you’re saying we’ve been around all along. I mean, well done for finally getting something, anything right, because at this stage I was beginning to doubt you would be able to get your name correct if asked, but you also contradicted yourself, and also, also, why do you keep talking? Why is there even an interviewer there in the first place? Clearly he has nothing to do.

I wonder how many more paragraphs we are going to have before we hear from this interviewer guy again. Maybe Mr. Hughes murdered him and stuffed him in a car trunk, and now he’s just interviewing himself… Probably not though… right?

Chase Hughes: So for anybody out there, like any conversation you have where it feels absolutely fantastic and then right afterward you don’t feel good anymore, you would need to return to that to feel good again. You may have been dealing with a psychopath. So if you have a great conversation with a grounded person who is humble and kind and honest, you’re going to feel good after that conversation. The good feeling is going to linger for a while.

What… are you even talking about? This definitely has nothing to do with psychopathy, and hell, I don’t think it has anything to do with anyone other than you my guy. People love talking to me. I am not saying that as a brag, it is a fact, and an annoying one at that. People look for me, seek me out, pester me, if I make myself available. This is one of the reasons that I do not like big cities. Strangers have a penchant for bothering me and downloading all their life’s woes while standing in line. I have many weird stories about things like this that are so off the wall, unless you were there, you are unlikely to believe that they happened.

People like talking to psychopaths, and what’s more, they like talking to us so much that they act like we’re a drug. They aren’t leaving and feeling negatively about us. If they did, that would be great. That would mean they would be less inclined in the future to tell me about taking their father off life support that afternoon, or tell me, a total stranger, about the affair that they are having, or whatever other dark secret that they have literally never told anyone, but they just had to tell me. Right then, without knowing my name. Afterwards, you would think, oh, they told me about things that they don’t like talking about, so they will avoid me in the future.

Nope. Wrong. They will see me across a building full of people, and just have to talk to me. I don’t know who they are, but they sure know me, and of course, they remind me who they are by saying, I don’t know why I told you all of that. Yeah, I don’t either. I really, really don’t. In other words, your pretend observation is totally false.

Chase Hughes: So that’s one of the key indicators our ancestor part of our brain is sensing something and trying to say, “Hey, something’s not right.”

That has literally never happened unless I intentionally drop the mask. If I do, they don’t have some niggling sensation that something is off, they outright know it, and want to depart immediately, which is the point. Maybe a psychopath that sucks at masking, but those usually aren’t getting along too well in public anyway. Let’s simplify this, and state it the way it should have been stated.

If someone gives you bad vibes, leave. They aren’t the person to be around. Don’t put on the detective hat you got out of one of those stuffed animal fishing games at the arcade like this dude does. Just don’t deal with them. You have instincts, utilize them. To hell with being polite, just go the other way. The person is 99.50% more likely to be neurotypical over psychopathic, but that in no way means you are safe, and that they mean you no harm.

Chase Hughes: One of the best ways to start, and I’m never gonna say like here’s the list on how to do that. If anyone tells you they’re like, “Here’s the way to spot a psychopath.” They’re full of it. But you can start spotting a psychopath by looking at a person’s face and seeing if they mirror your expressions.

No you can’t. We learn the ins and outs of correct facial cues in conversations when we are really young. You would have to be literally incapable of reading facial expressions to not be able to mimic the right ones and the right times. We don’t want to do this. It’s a chore, but we do it and trust me, you aren’t going to pick up a psychopath this way.

Interviewer: Yeah.

Holy crap! He’s alive. Is anyone else shocked? Good job of getting out of the trunk my man.

Chase Hughes: If I’m saying something exciting and it’s cool, see how your eyebrows just went up, right? If I’m saying something sad like, “My aunt just got put in the hospital,” or something like that, and you see somebody’s face kind of fall a little bit, you’re seeing a mirrored emotion in other people’s face. Sometimes psychopaths don’t know how to react. So you’ll either see a lack of affect where their face has no reaction to it or you’re going to see an inappropriate response. So they’ll smile on accident cuz they’re trying to fake an expression.

We know how to react, we just don’t want to. Sorry, we don’t care about your aunt. We don’t care if it’s our aunt. We will do what is necessary for us for familial obligations if we maintain that relationship with them, but it isn’t because we have feelings about it. It’s just what we are obliged to do. You aren’t going to trip a psychopath up like this. We are going to have the right response, we know what is expected of us in society. Try harder, dude. Try again.

Interviewer: That’s why I have the lines on my forehead.

Nope, you have lines on your forehead from worrying about your own problems way more than worrying about others. It’s all those subconscious expressions that you put on without knowing it. As psychopaths, we watch you guys all the time, and when you are in your own heads, thinking about something that stresses you out, you wrinkle up parts of your faces. Pain shows in different parts, same with happiness. Very few are stoic faced. That’s why you get lines. Psychopaths don’t do this, and yes, we have less lined faces.

Back awhile ago, over on Quora, there was a doctor that I interacted with. She sent me some photos of CEOs and wanted to know if I could tell which ones were high in psychopathic traits. There was an article that the image was from about this thing exactly. I nailed it, and she was shocked.

“HOW??!!” She wanted to know.

“Less wrinkles,” I replied plainly. These were all older men, so some facial wrinkles were going to be present, but it was easy to tell who worried, and who didn’t. See, there you go, an actual tip of picking up on someone that is psychopathic. Not that it’s particularly useful. Lots of people age well, so it doesn’t really demonstrate anything. You all get wrinkly because you’re stressed.

Chase Hughes: Yeah, because I’m seeing a social person. You see a psychopath blank forehead. It looks like Botox in a psychopath. You see a person that spent their whole life super happy and in full enjoyment. You’re going to see these crows feet here from smiling all the time. You see somebody who’s been depressed or angry, you’re going to see this muscle right here forms these two wrinkles. This is called the glabella. So, you’ll see lifetimes of behavioral patterns etched onto the face. I call this facial etching

No, you don’t. You call it what you have heard a lot of other people call it. This is not your invention. This guy really needs everything to be about him and how he is the expert. It’s kind of strange. You can almost hear the opera singer warming up in the background.

Me Me ME ME

As I mentioned in the previous response, there are a lot of people that have flat facial lines that are not psychopathic. I wouldn’t be remotely surprised if this was also seen regularly in people with autism, as well as just low emotional people. I have known tons of them. They look young forever. It doesn’t mean they are psychopathic.

Chase Hughes: I’ve done research on this for 30,000 hours in real life on facial expressions. But skepticism squeezes this lower eyelid up here. The less skeptical someone has spent their lifetime, the more suggestible that person is.

You spent thirty thousand hours wasting your time, my dude. There are a ton of people, neurotypicals included and not in small numbers, that aren’t playing by your microexpression rules. I would say that I don’t mean to demean your expertise, here, but I literally do mean to do exactly that. I have watched faces my entire life reading facial expressions, the micro ones included, of course, and what I can tell you is this. There is no hard and fast rule that applies to everyone. So long as that’s the case, there is no science here.

Also, and let me be very clear here, as I mentioned, I have spent my whole life reading those expressions, as has every other psychopath alive. Why? Because creating that emotional world for the neurotypicals around us is pretty crucial to our survival. We learn to mimic. The reason why the mimicry doesn’t etch our face as it does others, is because we aren’t doing it all the time, as those emotions only have to be created in the moment that they are necessary for display. They aren’t happening when we are alone, and we don’t have the deep emotional experience to drive those emotions hard into the skin. Squeezing a lower eyelid to demonstrate skepticism, is a simple enough matter, and I certainly will enact that when I have to. However, I am never going to feel the grief that grabs every facial fold and crumples them like a used tissue. It’s not within my capability.

You won’t catch onto a psychopath because the emotions are missing. A psychopath can mimic those emotions, and lots of people who are not psychopathic may not have those emotions, or they do not feel them as deeply. Or, they simply do not show their emotions. They are stoic in nature. There are a lot of reasons this is a bad “tool” in the psychopath spotting kit.

All right, this is long, and will continue next week. I found some really interesting information about Mr. Hughes that I will be also including in the next post.

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Last time we went over the basis for this post, in the story of Laura and her sister Carrie. What impressed me about this story is that it takes place over just a few pages, and yet, there is aggressive responsibility happening. In the first part, Laura wants to dodge her responsibility of not keeping her sun bonnet nice, but when she is reminded that she has made the choice not to, she accepts that she is the one to blame. In the last part, there is real danger involved, and real emotions like fear of death, and in the end, both girls see themselves as the ones to be held to account.

In both of these examples, it is evident to me the emotions that are going on., When Laura wants to wear Mary’s sunbonnet, it is because going to town is something that frightens her, but also something that is rare for her. Looking your best in those days, that was basically part of life’s job description. You represented your family and, by extension, your upbringing. If you looked unkempt, that would be a bad mark against your parents. Even if you were financially not well off, and Laura’s family certainly wasn’t, you still needed to put effort into your appearance, and your manners. Thus why they both changed dresses before leaving. The dresses weren’t nicer dresses, but they were fresh, and would make a better impression on the townspeople.

In the second part, all the emotional aspects are on clear display, and yet in the end, it is still a matter of fact. X happened, and Y was the result. X doesn’t care about their emotions, neither does Y. They exist, regardless of how anyone feels about it. In fact, Laura even says as much in her prose. There was no reason to bother speaking about it if they were lost. It would change nothing. Now, I don’t necessarily agree with not speaking at all, because someone might come up with a plan on how to remedy the situation that wouldn’t otherwise be heard or maybe even thought of, but not complaining about it is what she is trying to convey here, and that I agree with. There is a clear separation between the emotions, and the responsibility aspect, and I appreciate that.

I think somewhere along the road, there was this scrapping away of the boundaries between I feel bad, and feeling bad is bad, and I don’t have to, so I refuse to deal with anything that makes me feel that way. A great deal of what makes people feel bad are things that they are responsible for, and they don’t like the emotions that accompany that responsibility. If they were lost in the slough, and got out, they would be pointing at one another, stating with clarity that it is indeed the other person’s fault, and they would be racing each other to get to Ma and Pa to throw the other one under the bus.

In the Christopher Scholtes case, neither one of the parents wanted to take responsibility for that girl’s death. The mother sure wanted to act like she had been wronged somehow, but all the sympathy in the world for her dead child can never erase:

“How many times have I told you to stop leaving them in the car?”

Right there, all the hand-wringing for her pain should have ended with such abruptness that the silence feels alive. A responsible person has this happen with her child once, and maybe forgives, but lays down some heavy ground rules. Probably an ultimatum, but definitely doesn’t look the other way. Twice? Bye, dude. That’s it, and that’s all. No further chances. The fact he did this with all of the children, multiple times each, that should have been the end of the marriage, but she didn’t want that burden of having to act for the safety of her children. She just wanted to wag her finger and continue to allow the abusive deadbeat to take care of them. It was easier, after all, and divorce is a lot of trouble.

I think that there is a weird thought process when it comes to the notion of psychopaths and responsibility. On the one hand, it is expected that we are unable to predict the consequences of our actions, and on the other, we will lie pathologically to avoid the consequences of our actions, and I’m like, wait… you can’t have both. Either we can’t predict them, or we lie to avoid them, but we aren’t able to live in two dimensions at the same time.

In reality, what’s happening is this. We often don’t think about consequences, but if we do, then it’s, meh, that’s pretty unlikely… I can get away with this. When we don’t, it’s hmm, who can be blamed for this while I sneak out the back? When that doesn’t work, it is the response of, okay, and? It isn’t that we can’t, we simply don’t think that the chances are high that we will see those consequences, and if we do, there is likely a way to sidestep them. If both fail, all right, let’s get this over with.

However, I think that there is something to be said about the emotional aspects of responsibility that are making lessons for psychopathic children a bit difficult. If you tie emotions with the idea of taking ownership of something, then you end up with a construct that psychopaths are going to ignore. If one and the other are the same thing, and we only see the transactional side of it, but can’t relate to the emotional side, then we are going to disregard the whole thing. It’s the same thing with people that trespass against us. We see this in others, and it is a whole emotional affair. Someone does something terrible, and it creates all these emotions. They may or may not cut the other person off, but the emotions tend to dictate the outcome.

For us? Trespass against one of us, you’re gone. We don’t have the emotional aspects, and to us, this means that we see your transgression as one of transaction. I put in this amount of effort into knowing you and keeping you around in my life. That is repaid with betrayal, so you can leave, right now, and forever. No second chances. People do not understand the finality of it for us. They usually have a way back in. They can guilt-trip, manipulate, they can play on the long-standing friendship or relationship. It can’t be over, not that easily. It never is with anyone else, so clearly that isn’t the case here either. This creates an unwinnable dynamic, and one that puts them in an even deeper hole in our book. You cannot guilt-trip a psychopath, as we cannot feel guilt, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t understand what you’re trying to do. We do understand it, and we don’t appreciate the effort.

Back to teaching psychopathic children. I was going to put a hyperlink here to my post about why you cannot call a child a psychopath, with all of the nifty information about children’s brain development, and I cannot find one. Have I not written about this? If you remember a Substack post about that, can you let me know? If not, I apparently have a post to write. Anyway…

Neurotypicals tend to only think of things in terms of the whole experience, instead of breaking them down into parts. I went over this in my fear post, and why the definition of fear encompasses the emotional aspect, as well as the physical aspect of adrenaline. This makes a difference. Psychopaths can feel an adrenaline dump, but, oh my, I just thought of something while writing.

Psychopaths metabolize drugs differently, very differently, which is why we lack the ability to become addicted to things. However, this also applies to other medications. You can script out something for me, expecting one result and getting a totally paradoxical result instead. Something that should make me tired, gives me energy, something that should give me energy has no effect at all, etc.

I think part of the reason why psychopaths are so calm in bad situations is twofold. One, we have no emotional experience of fear, and two, we metabolize adrenaline either differently, or faster, or both. That is why we have the initial experience of adrenaline, but then are very calm. The adrenaline, just like painkillers, is metabolized probably faster, and differently, so the effect is short-acting and not overwhelming for our systems. I don’t know this for certain, but it makes sense to me.

Anyway, back to the combining of emotions and actions, and why that sucks. Back in the day, when people really thought about things, and not all people, the philosophers who had time for this sort of thing, they would teach lessons about separating your emotions from your actions. These thoughts laid down the groundwork for self-actualized adults. People who could see their emotions and decide how they would react to them, and also push on to do what needed to be done in the face of a lot of adversity. Can you imagine having twelve kids and only three survive? Now? People lose one, and that’s all she wrote. Their whole lives fall apart. Back then?

Going to get a photograph with the deceased was the only thing that they would have to remember them by. There are a ton of memento moris with children. People knew that a child living to adulthood was hardly a given, so they dealt with the loss, when they could they got a memento, prior to memento moris, they did death masks, and they got on with their lives.

Laura Ingalls had a brother who died in childhood that isn’t well known about, and she herself lost her baby boy to unknown causes. She had one surviving child named Rose. Her sister Mary almost died due to what is now thought to be viral meningoencephalitis, but in the books is described as scarlet fever. She didn’t die, but she did go blind from it, and never regained her sight. In the show, the blindness happens all at once, but in reality it was a slow, progressive thing that Mary never once complained about. She lost her sight with dignity and grace, because that was all there was to do. Did that mean she didn’t feel awful about it inside? No. It means that she understood that these are the cards at hand, and her choice was to play them, or quit.

People now quit way too easily. They both stirred together the quagmire of actions versus emotions into a vile stew, but then condemned that stew as unpalatable, and now refuse to partake. When a child does something wrong, they are usually taught through some sort of emotional communication why what they did is wrong. It makes so-and-so feel a certain way. It makes us disappointed in you. That’s dangerous, and you should be scared of that danger. Regardless of the actions, it is pretty much always met with an emotional reason why that action is a bad thing.

That doesn’t work for a psychopath. You might as well be speaking in gobbledygook to us. You have to be able to say X equals Y, and this is the logical reason to avoid that. For example, don’t wander off in public. There are people that can take you, and do terrible things to you. That I can understand. They won’t tell a kid that because it might scare them, but psychopathic children cannot be frightened, and not telling us ends with one of us just f*cking off somewhere and not telling you about it. I used to do this, and it wasn’t that I was unaware that it upset my parents, I just didn’t care.

“It scares us” is not a thing for a psychopath. It’s dangerous, and there are bad people in the world might not do it either. You need to be specific. It cannot be an emotional plea, it needs to be a logical one.

“Don’t steal. You can earn things you want this way,” and then give a clear path by which that thing can be obtained. Also, with a psychopathic child, you have to be honest. You can’t play that parent game of getting the kid to do what you want, then decide that you won’t live up to your end of the bargain. We don’t feel trust. We either see you do what you say, or we don’t. If you don’t, and you are trying to make agreements with us, we have no reason to believe you, or honor our end of the bargain. You won’t, so why bother? Negotiations are agreements.

When it comes to responsibility, if you have all this emotion tied up in it, and because of that emotion, people don’t want to accept ownership, so they avoid it, why should we do any different? One of the reasons my parents were successful with me, and trust me, it was a series of acting grace on their part, was because they didn’t mix emotion with action. These were separate things. Maybe it is because that is just who they are, I don’t know. You might think, you had a sister, how did they raise her? Was it different? I have no idea. I never paid attention. She had nothing to do with me. She existed, but how they interacted with her wouldn’t have registered. It’s just not how my brain works.

However, I do have an example with my niece, because they raised her for a time, and while I don’t really know how they interacted with her, I did see some of the results. When I was a kid, the housework was my responsibility. This was really good for me, because it would not have occurred to me to undertake those chores without expectation. It was my job to vacuum, dust, mop, sweep outside, clean the bathrooms, do the dishes, and sometimes cook, among other things. When I say that instilling this responsibility into me was one of the best things they could have done for me, I am not exaggerating. I needed that to be part of my upbringing. They understood that rewards were far more effective than punishment, and I was rewarded for this, but that didn’t mean I was some angel. I was not. Despite all of that, I was still a little nightmare.

When I was older, my mother was telling me that my niece had the responsibility of cleaning her bathroom. That’s it. One bathroom… and I’m like… wait. I literally had the whole house to deal with, and she has her bathroom, as I glance at it, and see it clearly hasn’t been cleaned in quite a while. Granted, this difference could be because they were meeting me where I was as a kid, and knowing them, that is a large part of it. Or, it could be that because they were older, and my mother had employed a weekly housekeeper, the rest of the house was taken care of, and there wasn’t anything else to do. Either way, there was a stark contrast.

You can’t mix emotion and action and then reject the whole lot. One is separate from the other, and that separation gives you room to decide how that emotion is going to affect you. What actions will you take because of how you’re feeling? Are you going to just wallow in the emotion of it all? Lay down in the proverbial slough and give up, or are you going to decide that it doesn’t matter how you feel? You know what must be done, and will do it.

A friend of mine, who is very sage-like, has a saying. Well, he has lots of sayings, but this is one of them.

What you fear most is what you should do next.

As usual, I have a psychopathic version of it, because the fear part doesn’t apply. What you don’t want to do most is what you do next. I never want to vacuum my house. I would rather be doing something fun. However, the vacuuming has to be done, and around here, it has to be done every day. That is the joy of having animals, but not enjoying animal fur on everything, so vacuuming must be done.

My parents instilled in me a responsibility. Chores come before the things you want to do. I do the chores, then I get to do what I want. I utilize this value every day. I don’t get to do the things I want, until the things I need to do, get done. No excuses. It’s easy to hold myself to now, because they started with me when I was little, and they never put any emphasis on whether or not I wanted to do those chores. So what if I didn’t? It didn’t change the fact that they had to be done, so I might as well get to it.

Because people have decided that it is easier to give a place at the table of necessary action to their emotions that whine about the bargain, people have slipped into a sense of, I don’t want to, so I don’t have to. If my emotions say that it’s something that’s a burden to me, I don’t have to entertain it, for even a second.

Wrong. Life does not care about how you feel about anything. You can ignore your responsibilities, sure, and your life will be infinitely harder. Or, like Christopher Scholtes, you can be arrested for murdering your kid by baking her to death in a car, because being responsible doesn’t feel good. It’s funny to me, while his case is an extreme version of this, I see the more minor versions every day, and as a psychopathic person, which means I come hardwired with a desire to not do anything that doesn’t appeal to me, how do these people not get sick of their own whinging and bad outcomes from their terrible decision-making? It seems like such a waste of epic proportions.

Did you know that there are kindergarten teachers that have kids coming to their classes now, that are not potty trained, and the parents expect the teacher to do it? Seriously? What the actual hell are they on about? That is a parent’s job. No one else’s, and yet, teachers have been talking about this quite a bit lately. How about the ones that just stick their kid in front of a screen and then are shocked that they suck at school, have no discipline, and can’t read? How did you think those things came to be? Did you think they were magic and would just manifest in your child by the grace of God or something? People would rather do what they want, then complain about the results. They would rather not be responsible because that makes them feel bad, but then can’t understand why their lives are so hard.

It’s mind-numbing to watch, as well as baffling. When society is outdoing psychopaths on the whole, do what you want and see if it works out, that’s a problem.

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I am working on the series about Christopher Scholtes, and his daughter’s death in his car, and something occurred to me. That is, why do so many neurotypicals struggle with taking responsibility, and why it may be that psychopaths do as well.

If you think about the notion of responsibility, it is rather transactional. You do X and Y results. You may not intend for Y, but you could have reasonably foreseen Y as a consequence. This is an excellent example of cause and effect, and should be a straightforward thing to understand, and yet, it is something that people have fought with for the entirety of human history, it seems. In our current time, there seems to be a concerted effort to remove any sort of attachment to responsibility, and when that happens, you get D-bags like Christopher Scholtes.

I was telling my Significant Other about this case, and we were discussing responsibility. I have been rereading the Little House on the Prairie books, which are such great books, and there is a scene in one of them. No, you don’t have to know the books to understand this, but I will explain just a little bit of what they are about.

The books were written by Laura Ingalls Wilder about her life as a pioneer in the eighteen hundreds. She, along with her family, her mother, father, sister Mary, sister Carrie, and later on, baby Grace, crossed the Great Plains in a covered wagon, and settled in many different places, but their final place, where they built their forever house (not Laura’s, as she keeps moving later in her life), is in the Dakotas. In the part that comes to mind, her father, Pa, is mowing hay for the winter, and his mower breaks a tooth. He needs to replace it, but he doesn’t want to leave his work in order to make the walk to town to get a new part. Town is about a mile and a half away, and he asks Laura to go and get the mower tooth.

Laura grew up crisscrossing prairies, not around a lot of people. She hated being in town, or going to town, because it frightened her, but she knew that Pa needed this part, and she also knew not to complain. Complaining was not well looked upon. She goes to the house, tells her mother, Ma, that she has to go to town. Her younger sister Carrie offers to go with her, and gets permission from Ma to do so. She hopes that her mother will let her wear her hair ribbons, usually reserved for church, and also her sister Mary’s sunbonnet. The books are written from Laura’s third-person perspective, and the passage reads:

Quickly they changed to fresh dresses and put on their stockings and shoes. But Ma saw no reason for hair ribbons on a weekday, and said that Laura must wear her own bonnet.

“It would be fresher,” said Ma, “if you took care to keep it so.” Laura’s bonnet was limp from hanging down her back, and the strings were limp too. But that was Laura’s own fault.

Laura knew she was responsible, and had no one but herself to blame. Later on in the same chapter, after they have made the trip to town, and purchased the mower part, they are walking back. Her sister Carrie, who is ten in this part of the books, suggests walking through the slough to get back to Pa faster. For those of you unfamiliar with a slough, pronounced, sloo, this is what one, actually the exact one I am telling you about, looks like:

That image shows how tall the prairie grasses get, and here is how thick they can be:

It would be like walking into a cornfield, without the rows, which would make movement easier. They wouldn’t have been able to cross the slough at any other time, as it is normally bogged down with water, and has many marshy spots where you would just sink in, but it was a very hot time of year, which meant that the slough water had dried up, leaving behind tall grasses that are basically impossible to navigate. The big slough, the one that they decided to cross, is, indeed, big:

You can see on the map where the homestead was, and where the town was, so in their minds, or Carrie’s rather, cutting straight across would be faster than going around. Laura agrees to this plan, and they wade into those grasses, only to discover after a bit of hard going, they had no idea where they were. They couldn’t see anything to navigate, and they could just be going around and around in circles. They would have no way of being certain.

At first, it was fun. It was rather like going into the jungle-picture in Pa’s big green book. Laura pushed ahead between the thick clumps of grass-stems, that gave way, rustling, and closed again behind Carrie. The millions of coarse grass-stems and their slender, long leaves were greeny gold and golden green in their own shade. The earth was crackled with dryness underfoot, but a faint smell of damp lay under the hot smell of the grass. Just above Laura’s head the grass-tips swished in the wind, but down at their roots was a stillness, broken only where Laura and Carrie went wading through it.

“Where’s Pa?” Asked Carrie suddenly.

Laura looked around her. Carrie’s peaked little face was pale in the shade of the grass. Her eyes were almost frightened.

“Well, we can’t see him from here,” Laura said. They could only see the leaves of the thick grass waving, and the hot sky overhead. “He’s right in front of us. We’ll come to him in a minute.”

She said it confidently, but how could she know where pa was? She could not even be sure where she was taking Carrie. The smothering heat made sweat trickle down her throat and her backbone, but she felt cold inside. She remembered the children near Brookings, lost in the prairie grass. The slough was worse than the prairie. Ma was always afraid that Grace would be lost in this slough.

She listened for the whirr of the mowing machine, but the sound of grasses filled her ears. There was nothing in the flickering shadows of their thin leaves blowing and tossing higher than her eyes, to tell her where the sun was. The grasses bending and swaying did not even tell the direction of the wind. Those clumps of grass would hold up to no weight at all. There was nothing, nothing anywhere that she could climb to look out above them, to see beyond them, and know where she was.

“Come along, Carrie,” she said cheerfully. She must not frighten Carrie. Carrie followed trustfully, but Laura did not know where she was going. She could not even be sure that she was walking straight. Always a clump of grass was in her way; she must go right or left. Even if she went to the right of one clump of grass and to the left of the next clump, that did not mean that she was not going in a circle. Lost people go in circles and many of them never find their way home.

The slough went on for a mile or more of bending, swaying grasses, too tall to see beyond, too yielding to climb. It was wide. Unless Laura walked straight ahead they might never get out of it.

“We’ve gone so far, Laura,” Carrie panted. “Why don’t we come to Pa?”

“He ought to be around here somewhere,” Laura answered. She could not follow their own trail back to the safe road. Their shoes left almost no tracks on the heat baked mud, and the grasses, the endless swaying grasses with their low leaves hanging dried and broken, were all alike.

Carrie’s mouth opened a little. Her big eyes looked up at Laura, and they said, “I know. We’re lost.” Her mouth shut without a word. If they were lost, they were lost. There was nothing to say about it.

“We’d better go on,” Laura said.

“I guess so. As long as we can,” Carrie agreed.

They went on. They must surely have passed the place where Pa was mowing. But Laura could not be sure of anything. Perhaps if they thought they turned back, they would really be going further away. They could only go on. Now and then they stopped and wiped their sweating faces. They were terribly thirsty but there was no water. They were very tired from pushing through the grasses. Not one single push seemed hard, but going on was harder than trampling hay. Carrie’s thin little face was gray-white, she was so tired.

They continue on for a while longer, until they run across two men doing work on the edge of the slough, and they are able to get out, get directions from them, and get home. On their way home, this conversation is had:

“Were you scared, Laura?” Carrie asked.

“Well, some, but all’s well that ends well,” Laura said.

“It was my fault. I wanted to go that way,” said Carrie.

“It was my fault because I’m older,” Laura said. “But we’ve learned a lesson. I guess we’ll stay on the road after this.”

“Are you going to tell Ma and Pa?” Carrie timidly asked.

“We’ll have to if they ask us,” Laura said.

I conveyed to you that whole story for a point. When you read the narrative, which was written years after the event, you can see that the fear involved was still very alive and present for Laura. She could recall a lot of detail about how suffocating the slough was, disoriented she felt, the physical, but also emotional toll the entire thing took on her and her sister. She could relay this because it was a highly emotionally impactful event, and at the end, both sisters sought to take responsibility for the decisions made.

It was Carrie’s fault. She wanted to go that way. In Carrie’s mind, she made the suggestion, she should be the one held to account. It was Laura’s fault, because she was older, and in being older, her sister’s safety was in her hands. She was the one who decided to agree, and she should have known better. In the context provided, you can see that, indeed, she did know better. She knew about children that became lost in the prairie, and that the slough was worse.

In the previous book, there is a part where baby Grace goes missing when she is out of sight for a few seconds. On that occasion, Laura discovered that the prairie is not flat, as it appears to the eye. It is full of swells and dips that cannot be seen, but the real danger was that she had gone into the slough. Had that been the case, there likely would have been no recovery of her. Sound on the prairie can be muffled and lost, so hearing her cry out was not remotely guaranteed. Fortunately, Laura found her sitting in a buffalo wallow that had been grown over with violets like this one:

Laura was well familiar with the dangers of the slough and chose to go along with Carrie’s suggestion. Carrie was younger, and less inclined to understand that danger as well as Laura did, but they were both responsible, and willing to say as much.

The reason that I bring this story to your attention is the willingness to take ownership despite how negative the emotions of the event were. What I have noticed is that people tend to avoid responsibility due to a myriad of emotional reasons. Many times it is fear of something, but that isn’t always the case. Oftentimes the reasons that I see are:

Not wanting to be singled out, and possibly excised from the group. This one makes sense to me, as this would qualify for death in our evolutionary development. If you were removed from the group, chances are you would be quickly dead.

Fear of judgment and disappointing others. This is also about group survival.

Wanting to avoid negative consequences. This one is where psychopaths land, but there will be a bit more that I will explore with the psychopathic aspects in a moment. Psychopaths don’t want to deal with negative consequences. That’s not fun. We would rather do what we want, and then dodge responsibility later on if we have to do so. This is more of a convenience thing for us. It isn’t that consequences are dreadful, frightening, or unbearable, it’s that they are mildly disruptive to our lives, and mild disruption isn’t interesting to us.

With neurotypicals, the avoidance of negative consequences seems to be pretty strong with a lot of people. I have seen people burn their lives to ashes because they are so emotionally unable to deal with being responsible for things that they did. As I mentioned, psychopaths don’t really want to be inconvenienced with consequences, but we aren’t going to go to the extent of destroying everything else around us to avoid them. If we are caught, and there is no real way to get out of it, the response is, shrug, yeah, I did that. Now what?

That is not what I see in neurotypicals. I have seen, and often I might add, a full-grown adult look at evidence in front of them, and throw a toddler tantrum to get people to stop “being mean” to them, when all that’s happening is they are getting called out on the bullsh*t. Seriously? It’s… a lot, and it can stop now. The need to avoid what is clearly their mess is kind of amazing to watch. I really don’t know where they get the energy.

Now that I have laid the groundwork, in the next post we will be going through the relationship between emotions, responsibility, and why these two things are not the same. Why they should never have been considered the same, either. That was a grave mistake in my estimation. On to, next week.

On a side note, my spell check has this annoying habit of giving up when it thinks the text is too long, but mind you, only on Substack does it do this. If I copy and paste my posts into a word-processing program like Word, or something of the sort, all of a sudden it’s fine and can do the whole thing, so arbitrary length is arbitrary, apparently. Well, now the app has decided that they are going to be taking the free version away, and you have to pay for premium, and I’m like… that ain’t happening buddy, but I have noticed something. Now, it can do much longer documents, and it makes way more suggestions. It’s like it is trying to sell me on the “better version,” but from what I have seen, the “better version” is a pushy, annoying suggestion pusher of all things that make writing boring and bland. It makes suggestions that totally change the context of what I am writing, changes my wording to something that has no draw to it, tries to change wording and format to things that literally make no sense. Such as, it wants to throw a capital letter onto a word in the middle of a sentence. Imagine something Like this. Why would that be capitalized? It wouldn’t be, but the suggestions suddenly think it should be.

According to the new suggestions, the post you’re reading should look more like this:

This is Why I cannot suggest that you. Use this spell—checking program. It Has very little Understanding of how— to write anything;

…They are not doing a very good job of upselling their product. If that is what the “unlocked” and “premium” version is like, good god, no.

Another example. My sentence up above, …They are not doing a very good job of upselling their product.

“doing a very good job” change suggestions:

doing an impressive job

doing a fantastic job

doing an outstanding job

achieving impressive results

achieving fantastic results

No. No to all of it. I wanted to write what I wrote, and I do not want to sound like someone’s boring ass resume. Thank you, spellchecker, for demonstrating why paying for your garbage product would be a massive waste of my money. It has never made suggestions like this, and the only reason it is now, is because the devs think it makes their product look good. Nope, and wrong.

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So often when we are looking at crimes that people don’t understand, the word psychopath is what is immediately thrown out. Of course, we have talked about how that’s ridiculous, and we have also discussed the long list of why the “diagnostic gold standard” is not even in the ball park of a good checklist. On top of all of that, we have discussed those that self-diagnose by using tools like the PCL-R that is available online. That is not how the PPCL-R is meant to be used, and we will touch on that in a moment, but the purpose of this post is to look at Christopher Scholtes, and to a lesser degree his wife Ericka, against the “gold standard” checklist, to see how he stacks up. My guess? He will easily have enough points on the scale to be considered psychopathic, but he is the furthest thing from it.

Now, let me be clear about a few things.

1. This is not how the PCL-R is meant to be used. I am not, in any way pretending that this is an accurate representation of how it should be used, and I lack literally all of the credentials to do so. I will list below how the PCL-R is meant to be used, and who it supposed to be administering it.

2. Christopher Scholtes is not a psychopath. He is likely an addicted neurotypical, which means that many of the things that you will see in his behavior can be found on the PCL-R. Instead of this making him more likely to to be psychopathic, it is an excellent example of why the PCL-R is a worthless tool.

3. Ericka Scholtes is also not a psychopath. To be fair, there is little information about her in my reading when it comes to her overall behavior, as most of the articles about the murder of her daughter focus on Chris, not her, so I am not sure how many of the checklist points I can even go through on her.

4. This is for entertainment. Nothing more. This is not meant to be me stating I have expertise in the PCL-R. I know enough about it to know it is a garbage checklist, but I haven’t attended the proper training to give it, and as I mentioned, this isn’t how it is used anyway. This is not an endorsement to using it incorrectly. Even used perfectly it’s still trash, using it incorrectly does not improve it in any way.

Let me first speak about who is qualified to administer the checklist. It is not something that you can just be a psychologist and think, I got this, though that doesn’t stop a lot of people from doing just that. It is one of the contributing factors that make the checklist so terrible, but far from the most important. The people that are qualified to give this checklist are:

Professionals who administer the diagnostic examination should have advanced degrees (M.D., Ph.D., or D.Ed.) in a medical, behavioral or social science field; and registered with a reputable organization that oversees psychiatric or psychological testing and diagnostic procedures. Other recommendations include experience working with convicted or accused criminals or several years of some other related on-the-job training. Because the results are used so often in legal cases, those who administer it should be qualified to serve as expert witnesses in the courtroom. It is also a good idea, if possible, for two experts to test a subject independently with the PCL-R. The final rating would then be determined by averaging their scores.

Something missing from this list is that they also need to attend specialized training in administering the checklist. Robert Hare used to do this training himself, they were called “Psychopath spotting weekends” as it was a several days long seminar that was meant to make the attendees into psychopath spotting experts.

It was very expensive, think, $1238.66, and that was back in 2010. However, Robert Hare is ninety-two years old, so I have no idea whether or not he is still conducting these, or if he has someone else doing it. I am fairly certain that they are still going on, as they brought in a lot of money for Hare, so I am sure he has someone else running them, or he’s still managing. I would imagine that they have adjusted greatly in cost though.

As for how the checklist is administered, it is never something that someone should be giving themselves. It is not something that a clinician will go through point by point and just write numbers down after asking pointed questions. Instead it is administered like this:

The Hare PCL-R contains two parts, a semi-structured interview and a review of the subject’s file records and history.

After semi-structured interview is completed, and the results are checked against records, and history, the score is arrived at. The score is on a scale of zero through forty. Above a thirty is considered a “psychopath”, though there are significant issues with the checklist itself in regards to its accuracy, and over reliance on criminal traits.

The score is what determines whether or not the criminal or forensic patient is psychopathic, and how psychopathic they are according to Hare’s image of psychopathy.

Even Hare has lamented about how people misuse the PCL-R, even if they have attended training:

It was nearly midnight. We drank whisky, on the rocks. Other business travelers— those with the key card to the executive bar— typed away on laptops, stared out into the night. I was a little drunk.

“It’s quite a power you bestow upon people,” I said. “The power to spot psychopaths.” Bob shrugged. “But what if you’ve created armies of people who have gone power mad,” I said. “who spot psychopaths where there are none, Witchfinder Generals of the psychopath-spotting world.”

There was silence.

“I do worry about the PCL-R being misused,” Bob said. He let out a sigh, stirred the ice around in his drink.

“Who misuses it?” I asked.

“Over here you have your DSPD program,” he said.

“That’s where my friend Tony is,” I said. “The DSPD unit at Broadmoor.”

“If thirty is the cutoff point, who gives the score?” Bob said. “Who administers that? Actually there is a lot of diligence in the UK. But in the US. We have the Sexually Violent Predator Civil Commitment stuff. They can apply to have sexual offenders ‘civilly committed.’ That means forever…”

Bob was referring to mental hospitals like the one at Coalinga, a vast, pretty, 1.2 million square foot facility in central California. The place has 320 acres of manicured lawns, and gyms, and baseball fields, and music, and art rooms. Fifteen hundred of California’s 100,000 pedophiles are housed there in comfort, almost certainly until the day they die (only thirteen have been released since the place opened in 2005). These 1,500 men were told on their release from jail that they’d been deemed re-offending certainties and were being sent to Coalinga instead of being freed.

“The PCL-R plays a role in that,” Bob said. “I had to train some of the people that administer it. They were sitting around, twiddling their thumbs, rolling their eyes, doodling, cutting their fingernails—these were the people that were going to use it.”

A Coalinga psychiatrist, Michael Freer, told the Los Angeles Times, in 2007 that more than a third of Coalinga “individuals” (as the inmates there are called) had been misdiagnosed as violent predators and would in fact pose no threat to the public if released. “They did their time, and suddenly they are picked up again and shipped off to a state hospital for essentially an indeterminate period of time,” Freer said. “To get out they have to demonstrate that they are no longer a risk, which can be a very high standard. So, yeah, they do have grounds to be very upset.”

In the executive bar, Bob Hare continued, He told of an alarming world of globe trotting experts, forensic psychologists, criminal profilers, traveling the planet armed with nothing much more than a Certificate of Attendance, just like the one I had. These people might have influence inside parole hearings, death penalty hearings, serial-killer incidence rooms, and on and on. I think he saw his checklist as something pure—innocent as only science can be—but the humans who administered it as masses of weird prejudices and crazy predispositions.

Not that we got that out of the way, let’s see how many points Mr. Scholtes can rack up in our uneducated opinions, shall we?

Factor 1.

1. Glibness/superficial charm

With Christopher and Ericka’s, I am not sure I can award either one points on this one. It really isn’t a fair question, however. We are seeing them in a terrible time and in front of news cameras and through the eyes of article writers. There isn’t a lot that we can see from them in terms of normal behavior.

They both get a zero, because there just isn’t evidence to the contrary.

2. Grandiose sense of self-worth

In Chris’s case, yes I think that this is a problem that he had, as he was a very entitled individual, and seems to be very self-important. He couldn’t park in the garage because his Peloton was in there, because no one can ever move that to the side. He bought himself a new PlayStation right after being released from jail. He seemed to think that wanting to take a shower was a good enough reason for the police to leave his house after he murdered his daughter. He murdered his daughter because playing games, watching porn, and drinking took priority.

He gets a 1 on this trait.

Ericka is a little harder to suss out. I mean, we could always use the stereotype of a doctor having that ego, but I haven’t seen anything specific about her being that way. She did buy herself a million dollar home after her daughter died. I don’t think Chris had a lot to say about it, as he was going to prison. She most certainly had to have known that. Anyone could have figured it was going to happen, the only question was for what length of time. I also think that the hiring of the nanny was evidence of her knowing that. I wonder if she told him that it was to “help him out”, instead of being honest with him. “You’re going to prison, dearest.” I wonder if she was telling him that he was going to be fine, and everyone knew it was a mistake. That nothing bad would happen. Likely a question we will never have an answer to, it’s just interesting to me to consider.

She gets a zero.

3. Need for stimulation/proneness to boredom

Chris- I think it goes without saying that this applies to him completely. He drank, played video games, watched porn, drove drunk with a kid in the car, all in one afternoon. Add to this drug use, and total neglect of his responsibilities.

Full marks to Chris-2

Ericka- Not enough information is available to say whether this applied to her.

She gets a 0

4. Pathological lying

Chris- I don’t know if he ever did much other than lying. He lied about all the things, and then went on a quest to find more things to lie about. It was an epic quest, and one he returned from quite successful.

He, again, gets full marks. 2

Ericka- Her protecting Chris seems like it might qualify here. I looked up the definition of pathological lying:

A chronic, compulsive, and pervasive behavior pattern involving frequent, elaborate, and often unnecessary fabrications.

It might be a stretch to apply this to Ericka, and I am not looking to just try to make her fit a narrative. I do think that she lied to herself in this way. She was either in deep denial about Chris and his lack of caring for their children, and his overall addictive behavior, or she was lying to everyone around her in a truly pathological manner. I think I will give her a one. She either was lying to herself, or everyone around her, but either way, there is some deep deceit going on there.

5. Cunning/manipulative

Chris- This is an eye of the beholder thing, I think. He is cunning and manipulative I suppose to people that aren’t too keen on picking up on cues of not so great manipulation. I will say the intention is there, but to me he comes across as a pathetic pretender, not someone cunning or manipulative. However, he did have his wife on the hook, and he also apparently was having an affair with the neighbor, so he was believed by some people. He gets full marks on this as well. Not because he’s good at it, but because the intent was there.

He gets two points.

Ericka- She was a part of this toxic relationship, and I don’t think for a moment that she was so in love with Chris that she just forgave all his faults. I think that he was providing her a service. She had kids, and free “childcare”. It is clear to me that she was more interested in the body being present than the quality of the care. She knew that he was abusing the kids, and she did nothing. She was perfectly happy to have Chris home and “watching the children” knowing the condition that they were living in.

She gets one point.

6. Lack of remorse or guilt

Chris and Ericka both are summed up by this one statement

“How many times have I told you to stop leaving them in the car”.

They both get full points. Two a piece.

7. Shallow affect [i.e. superficial experience and expression of emotions

Chris definitely had this aspect. He didn’t feel bad about his daughter dying. He might have had an emotional response to his wife’s disapproval over the death of their daughter, but he didn’t have a real response to finding out she was dead. He had more of a response for the purpose of being performative than being real.

He gets two points, not just for this aspect, but for several examples that he showed. This was just the most egregious example. He clearly was emotionally deficient, but there is likely a good amount of this that can be attributed to his immaturity, and his active addictions.

Ericka- She couldn’t manage anything past what appeared to be annoyance with Chris when she was sure that Parker was dead. I get being angry, furious, or even wrathful over the death of your child, especially when the person responsible knew better and did what they knew better to do anyway, but she was disappointed like a mother that found out that the dishes weren’t done and now she has to do them after getting home from a long day at work.

Full points for Ericka. Two.

8. Callous/lack of empathy

“How many times have I told you to stop leaving them in the car”.

Full points. Both of them. Two each.

Factor 2.

9. Parasitic lifestyle

I would say they both are parasitic of the other. Chris for money, Ericka for house/childcare. They are codependent, but I don’t think that is an excuse for the parasitic way they interact with one another. I don’t think they get to hide behind emotional codependence. This is a relationship that they both seem to glean individual parasitic benefit from their relationship.

Full marks, maybe unwarranted by the standards of the checklist, but I get to remind you now, I am not trained for this, and this is for entertainment only. It might be a one for each of them, but I think it is a two, and I am the one writing the post, so I get to decide.

Two each.

10. Poor behavioural controls

Well… Chris certainly had this, and so did Ericka. That lawsuit made this very clear. Most abuse victims are not filing lawsuits over their abuse, though I think they should. The daughter/step-daughter did. Now, granted, she dismissed the lawsuit, but this appears to be due to Chris dying, not a lack of willingness to proceed against him.

Both of them get full marks due to the things alleged in the lawsuit. I have no evidence that everything that April (the pseudonym that I ascribed to her) said is real, but also, I have no evidence that it isn’t. All of it, as well as the actions surrounding Park’s death, show significant lack of behavioral controls.

Full marks for both. Two each.

11. Promiscuous sexual behaviour

Chris was addicted to porn, and apparently having an affair.

Two points.

There is no information on Ericka, so zero points.

12. Early behaviour problems

No information exists for either that I would say would make answering this possible. Zero points. Maybe some true crime channel will do a deep dive, and this will change in the future, but I am not one of those channels, and frankly don’t care that much.

13. Lack of realistic long-term goals

Chris did not seem to have any long-term goals, so he gets two points.

Ericka became an anesthesiologist, which stands against the long-term goals thing, so she gets zero points.

14. Impulsivity

Chris stole beer from a liquor store and drank it in their bathroom. He also left his daughter in the car so he could play around.

He gets two points.

It’s very difficult to know whether Ericka was impulsive. She certainly seemed to have a sadistic side if the lawsuit is truthful, but I don’t know if that translates to impulsive, so she is getting zero points.

15. Irresponsibility

Good lord yes, for both of them.

Two points, each.

16. Failure to accept responsibility for own actions

Yup, two points each. I refer back to the statement:

“How many times have I told you to stop leaving them in the car”.

He kept doing it, and she knew that. They are both responsible for that child’s death, but they are also not taking account for the abuse the other children went through. They were all left in the car, and somehow this is being ignored. Neither of them were stepping up and taking responsibility.

Full points, each, so two.

17. Many short term marital relationships

Chris had at least one alleged affair, so he can have one point. I would give him two, but we only know of the one accusation.

One point

Ericka- There is no information about her having affairs, so she gets zero points.

18. Juvenile delinquency

No points for either, as I don’t have this information.

19. Revocation of conditional release

I don’t know of this happening with Chris, or Ericka, so zero points.

20. Criminal versatility

Well, let’s see.

Murder.

Repeated accusations of child abuse.

Child neglect.

Lying to police.

Stealing.

Using drugs.

Those are Chris’s crimes that we know of. Likely there are others as well. Ericka is guilty of several of these as well. I would say on Chris’s side of the aisle, he gets two points.

Ericka gets one.

Let’s total them up for each one.

Chris-Thirty-two points

Factor one- Thirteen points

Factor 2- Nineteen points

Ericka-Nineteen points

Factor one- Eight points

Factor two-eleven points

How does that stack up in regard to the PCL-R scoring system?

A person who receives a score at or above 30 is considered a psychopath and will receive the psychopathy diagnosis.

The highest possible score a person can get is 40.

The average neurotypical (normal) person receives a score between 3 and 6 (4 being the average estimate).

The average non-psychopathic criminal receives a score between 16 and 22.

The average criminal Sociopath and/or Antisocial Personality Disordered individual receives a score between 22 and 26.

The serious criminal Sociopath and/or Antisocial Personality Disordered individual receives a score between 26 and 29.

Criminal Psychopaths receive a score between 30 and 40.

A non-criminal Psychopath receives a score between 30 and 34.

Approximately 1 in 45 receives a score of 40.

Chris would cross the supposed psychopath threshold, but he is not a psychopath.

Ericka wouldn’t get to the line, and also is not a psychopath.

Someone that didn’t understand the PCL-R would call Chris a psychopath, when in reality, he was likely neurotypical with an immature and addicted brain. What this post is meant to demonstrate is that the PCL-R is not particularly useful on its face, and isn’t much more useful when used as it is meant to be. People are very fixated on the idea of bad person means psychopath, and it isn’t particularly helpful when checklists like these are available online for people to play with, and convince themselves that they are experts. Over on Quora I have always made it a point to illustrate the long process that a person has to go through to be able to be remotely qualified to identify psychopathy, and it always details the educational process.

Once, I got a response from a person who was just incensed that I would be so bold as to disregard all of the people that they had deemed to be expert enough to do the job. In my answer I stated that they way to be able to identify psychopaths was to:

Go to four year college.

Get your Bachelors degree. Psychology or Psychiatry

Get a Masters degree Psychology

Get a PhD. Psychology

Get Medical Degree or a Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine. Psychiatry.

Do your residency in psychiatric diagnosis, psychopharmacology, medical care issues, and psychotherapies. Psychiatry.

Complete at least four post-graduate months of internal medicine or pediatrics, plus a minimum of two months of neurology during their first year of residency, referred to as an “internship”. Psychiatry.

Get board certified. Psychiatry.

Do your Fellowship in Forensic psychiatry so you can focus on personality disorders. Psychiatry.

Interview people suspected to be psychopathic.

Conduct personality testing on those people.

Diagnose those people that you evaluate.

Do not speculate about anyone that has not been evaluated in this way. Even with the alphabet soup, because while you can guess based on your training, you do not know.

You cannot call someone a psychopath just because you think you can. That’s not how it works. I do not care how special you think you are, or how much you “studied” the other person. How OBVIOUSLY psychopathic they are, none of that matters. You are not qualified. Would you like to know how I know you aren’t?

Because, and this is very very important, so lean in close and pay attention. The professionals, that have been through literally YEARS of schooling to get those coveted Masters degrees, PhDs, MDs, and all that fun alphabet soup that took A LOT of their time and effort to get? Yeah, those people? Also the ones that have specialized in conducting personality assessments in people? They can’t do it, and any professional worth their salt will outright tell you that they can’t without extensive evaluations. Anyone that says that they can, should not be practicing.

It isn’t something that can be done. What a person is, or isn’t, really isn’t your business. If they treat you poorly, remove them from your life. Otherwise, stop looking to label people when you are not remotely qualified to do so.

This is the response that I got:

I am appalled. Walker states the qualifications for diagnosing psychopathy in a manner that would lead one to construe that a medical degree is required.

In fact, there are quite a few people besides Psychiatrists who are qualified to diagnose mental health conditions and that includes Primary Care Physicians who have not done fellowships but can in fact diagnose mental illnesses. The others include:

Therapists

Psychologists

Counselors

Clinicians

Psychiatric Nurse Practioners

Clinical Social Workers

While Walker is correct that an “official” diagnosis of ASPD with Psychopathic Features can only be made by a trained professional based on the PCL-R or the DSM-5, I would have to interject that anyone who has ever dealt personally with a psychopath is as qualified as any professional to call them one.

My brother, after receiving an official diagnosis of psychopathy, was removed from his prison cell and incarcerated as an inmate in a mental institution.

This was years after a series of assaults, rapes, attempted murders and murders resulted in him going to prison.

However, I could have pronounced him a psychopath and been absolutely correct when I was five years old and was forced to watch him drive a metal spike through my dog’s ears.

It isn’t misguided labeling if it’s true!

Let me do a quick breakdown of this comment:

I am appalled.

Literally no one cares.

Walker states the qualifications for diagnosing psychopathy in a manner that would lead one to construe that a medical degree is required.

Hmm…

Professionals who administer the diagnostic examination should have advanced degrees (M.D., Ph.D., or D.Ed.) in a medical, behavioral or social science field; and registered with a reputable organization that oversees psychiatric or psychological testing and diagnostic procedures. Other recommendations include experience working with convicted or accused criminals or several years of some other related on-the-job training. Because the results are used so often in legal cases, those who administer it should be qualified to serve as expert witnesses in the courtroom. It is also a good idea, if possible, for two experts to test a subject independently with the PCL-R. The final rating would then be determined by averaging their scores.

I don’t even like the guy… but that’s Hare’s recommendation, not mine. Just because I don’t like him doesn’t mean that I don’t agree with him from time to time. Yes, you do need to have a highly advanced background in psychology to even attempt psychopathy diagnostics, and even then, you should have specialized training for that specifically.

In fact, there are quite a few people besides Psychiatrists who are qualified to diagnose mental health conditions and that includes Primary Care Physicians who have not done fellowships but can in fact diagnose mental illnesses.

Oh my good lord no. No primary care physician can diagnose psychopathy. That is not remotely their area of expertise, and if you have one that tries, fire them immediately. They are likely pronouncing other things they are not qualified to do so as well. Find someone else.

The others include:

Therapists

Psychologists

Counselors

Clinicians

Psychiatric Nurse Practitioners

Clinical Social Workers

Nope. Not a single one of those can diagnose psychopathy except a psychologist that has undergone very intensive training in it. The rest, absolutely not.

While Walker is correct that an “official” diagnosis of ASPD with Psychopathic Features can only be made by a trained professional based on the PCL-R or the DSM-5, I would have to interject that anyone who has ever dealt personally with a psychopath is as qualified as any professional to call them one.

Nope. This is their ego speaking. They want this to be true so they can proclaim who is psychopathic. This person would almost certainly call Chris a psychopath because the death involved a young child, and that just offends their sensibilities, therefore, psychopath. That’s not how any of this works, and people like this are nuisances.

My brother, after receiving an official diagnosis of psychopathy, was removed from his prison cell and incarcerated as an inmate in a mental institution.

I hate to be redundant, but nope, this never happened. First and foremost, they literally said in the previous paragraph that “psychopath” is not an official diagnosis, then goes on to say that their brother received an “official diagnosis of psychopathy”.

Being a psychopath is not something that gets you reassigned to a mental hospital and certainly, neither does ASPD, which is, again, the official diagnosis. The consensus in the psychological field is that psychopathy is untreatable, and basically there is no reason to bother trying. They don’t suddenly think, we should offer this person treatment. No, instead they would say, how can we tack years on to this person’s sentence and keep them in prison longer.

This is a problem that can also come along with the PCL-R. It is misused, people who are not psychopaths are labeled as such, and then, they are held in prison longer, sometimes even being put on death row because they are a “psychopath”, when others, in prison for the same crime, do not get such sentences.

This was years after a series of assaults, rapes, attempted murders and murders resulted in him going to prison.

This person literally sounds like a crazy person, so I am going to assume that this “brother” is not a real person. They sound like a figment of their imaginations that they have made up for attention, which would explain why the narrative is so unbelievable. It isn’t true, so they can make it as fantastical as they want to. No rapes, no attempted murders, no murders, because… no brother.

However, I could have pronounced him a psychopath and been absolutely correct when I was five years old and was forced to watch him drive a metal spike through my dog’s ears.

Wow… of all the things that never happened, this one never happened the most. I just do not believe you. I have known people that have been through literal hell on earth, and they have a certain tone to the retelling of events. What that tone lacks is what this one drips in, and that this over the top, emotive, desperate to be believed, exaggerated narration.

They are always this victim that could read the tea leaves and knew how dangerous the person was. I would bet if I had more examples of their writing about this so-called “brother”, they were the only one that saw the evil, and the parents ignored it or never saw it, until…dun dun dun… it was too late. So they, the sibling of this monster, suffered in silence, because no one else could see through his impenetrable mask of sanity.

This type of person is always surrounded by a sea of made up monsters, as well. I would be their entire family, all their romantic relationships, their friends, teachers, doctors, you name it, are all psychopaths, sociopaths, narcissists, malignant narcissists, or the dreaded, narcopath. They are always the only sane one, and they are always clingy, overly emotional, confrontational, and toxic.

Regardless, none of the people listed in the comment, except the psychologist provided that they did the work in order to be able to do so, can diagnose psychopathy. The comment is also the reason why so many people throw that word around like they are experts, when they clearly have no idea what they are talking about.

That concludes our exercise of, psychopath spotting. Fun, right?

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Here we are again, speaking about the nearly unprecedented lawsuit brought against Christopher Scholtes by his sixteen-year-old daughter, who chose not to be identified. We will call her April. Hopefully that is not actually her name. Sorry if it is.

April described life in the Scholtes household as a miserable place. In her lawsuit for emotional and physical distress, she describes how she was treated. She lived with Erika and Chris for four years, and they were a very long four years. She spoke about him locking her in the car, just as he had Parker, for hours on end. She also said that he fed her rarely. Usually he could be bothered with a single meal a day, but the problem with that is, she is diabetic, and must eat frequently, or she could… you know… die.

Chris didn’t care, and seemed to resent being responsible for a child to begin with. This begs the question. Why fight for her, then? Why go through the custody battle, why spend the money, why bother with any of it? It seems Chris was the type to think that it was better to have things on his side of the table, even if he didn’t care about them, or want them in any way, than it was to lose to someone else. It seems that his fight for his eldest daughter was not about being desperate to have her in his life, but rather to spite her mother, because he could. What a lovely person.

In the lawsuit, she details that Chris and Erika slapped her, threw her across the room, had her head shoved into walls, picked up and thrown to the ground, had her hair pulled, among other things. She attempted suicide at one point, and it was then that she was finally removed from the house by CPS and returned to her mother. Her mother, however, passed away a year later, but instead of going back to Chris and Erika’s house, she went to live with a family friend. She was torn up about what her half sister suffered through, when she heard about Parker’s passing.

Even more evidence of Chris’s neglect and poor parenting. When the police spoke with the neighbors, they described him as being a less than attentive father, whom they had to help on a number of occasions to relocate either a wandered off child or animal that had disappeared from his house while he was distracted by something else, likely video games or porn. The neighbor also mentioned that he was often sleeping instead of doing his job. She also wanted the police to understand this was wanton neglect, and all of it could have been prevented if he had simply been paying attention.

It is also alleged that there was an affair between him, and a neighbor. Not that it has any bearing on this aside from it speaks to character, but I mention it because a lot of these things would be considered evidence of his psychopathy, if you were going on Hare’s PCL-R. It isn’t evidence of anything other than a crap human being, but again, this goes back to my point at the beginning of this series. People tend to be very blind to what makes them the bad people they attempt to label others as.

Neurotypicals can, and often are, entitled, selfish, indulgent, immature, greedy individuals that seek to reward themselves rather than hold themselves to account. Nothing, so far, makes Chris remarkable in any way. He appears to be a person that is more interested in entertainment than he is responsibility. He isn’t even a stay-at-home dad. He is the resident adult that suits that law’s requirements, but certainly he is not a caregiver. What makes this super interesting to me is this, it seems to me, that they likely could have afforded a nanny of some sort, and frankly, they probably should have gone that route. Chris seems like he needs the responsibility of a job, and the kids needed a competent adult to be present in their lives.

It was pointed out to me in the first post that Chris was an addict of a rather high order sans actual drug use, from what we know. I admit, there is a lot about addiction that I do not understand. Psychopaths cannot be addicted to things or suffer withdrawal, and because of that, I tend to be rather judgy about addiction. I have to take people’s word for it that they are experiencing what they say that they are, and it isn’t something they can just get over and crack on with life. I also tend to think that makes them rather weak. Like I said, judgy, so when Chris is addicted to porn and video games, and addicted to alcohol, my internal reaction is, seriously dude? You have kids, grow the f*ck up. I have no room for the, he can’t help it, he’s addicted. Whatever, bro. You decided to have kids, time to man up and act like an adult. I just have to take people’s word that he can’t, and addiction is real.

Edit: According to Reddit, Chris admitted to cocaine use in the past, so I guess he was indeed, a full blown addict of all the vices. Here is the context of that information:

What more have we learned just from an article posted in another thread that we didn’t know? [I definitely have to try to FOIA the documents.] I thought I would move this to a separate post for discussion.

• At both stores, Parker was left in the car.

• Christopher stole beer from the grocery store and gas station.

• The only perishable item he had was lettuce. That doesn’t take 3 hours to put away.

• The porn issue.

• Who drives to their doctor’s office to make an appointment? Nobody!

• For about 30 minutes, he was online shopping, texting with his wife, and hit some porn.

• The two older daughters had something to eat. Possibly the tortilla chips. Why nobody wondered where Parker was (and I mean Christopher, not the girls)

• Christopher admits to previous cocaine addiction

• Neighbors state he had a problem with neglecting his children.

• Police were called before when a stranger saw the three girls locked in the car. Scholtes was allowed to leave with the children.

• Many of the neighbors had never met Erika.

• Erika Scholtes stated that Christopher’s DUI was 15 years ago and there have not been any issues. We know that’s a lie.

• Past physical abuse of oldest daughter.

• Both daughters were to say “Daddy did it on accident”.

After three days of investigation, Chris is charged with second degree murder. I think that should be first degree, as he had done this so many times prior. Oh, and did I mention why the car wasn’t in the garage, but instead was in the driveway? Because Chris had gotten a Peloton for a gift, and it was taking up alllllll the room in the garage, so the car wouldn’t fit. Guess we should leave it in direct sunlight. Frankly, I don’t see how this would matter much. That heat, in a garage, I think would have killed her as well, but I don’t know for sure. Either way, in the garage, in the driveway, he exposed that child to so much heat that she would have had lasting damage from it had she survived, I believe.

He’s arrested, and then they decide, the courts I mean, in all their benevolent glory, to let him out. Really? He has other children, and he doesn’t strike me as the most stable of people. Granted, all of his emotional displays come across as BS, and terribly done BS at that, but do we really let him out of prison? I mean, I guess. Seems totally responsible to me. On the video of him being arrested he starts hyperventilating, which is amazing because he suddenly cares very much about all this hullabaloo about his daughter, you know… dying.

Also, it’s weird, all the people around him are consoling him, and telling him that they love him. His mother is there, and says to the police that they “have no heart”. Lady, what? Your son baked his grandchild to death in a car, and it is just dumb luck that it didn’t happen way before this. They have no heart? You better start with the mirror, then look at your son, and his wife, before ever considering telling the cops that. Why do they “have no heart” because now Chris can’t go to Parker’s funeral. I don’t think he belongs there anyway. He made it a point to ignore her in life, why should he get to look like a decent person after causing her death through neglect?

Annoyingly, they did allow him to attend the funeral. I don’t see why he should have that as an option, but whatever.

You would expect that at some point Erika would pull her head out of her ass and realize that she has been married to at the very least, a total deadbeat, but no, she decides to stand by him, because she is more interested in her emotions than the death of her daughter. You might argue this is because she doesn’t want to abandon him in his time of need, but she was fine doing that to her children.

How many times have I told you to stop leaving them in the car?

It is because of Erika’s pleas that he is released on his own recognizance, and this is after her telling him for a very long time that his actions will have dire consequences. Now that they have, she can’t lose her man. He made a mistake, was her argument, and that is why the judge let him out.

Erika’s mother did not agree with Erika. She never liked Chris and stated:

I believe in my heart that this man needs prison time. He has gotten away with everything in his life with no consequences whatsoever. He is a sociopathic narcissist who will continue to make decisions that he feels will have zero repercussions. I am worried about my other granddaughters, redacted, being around that type of person and how it will affect them emotionally in the long term.

Cynthia, Erika’s mother, also indicated that she had other information regarding Chris’s behavior over the years. Also, she stated that at the funeral for Parker, Chris was having a really good time. At a funeral. He was having fun…

Dude, I’m a psychopath, and I know that’s totally out of line. Come on. How is he this stupid?

“I had such rage in my body, and even at the funeral, he was prancing around like it was a wedding, you know, like. After he did a fake eulogy, as far as I’m concerned, which pretty much surmised (name redated). So he copied what (name redacted) said because he doesn’t, you know, and he read this, you know, “crying.”

He apparently had a little flower in his hair as well, so that’s weird. After the funeral he went out and bought himself a new PlayStation, because of course that’s what you do. I think he was acting like this because, in his mind, it was already over. They let him out without bail, he got to go to the funeral, so clearly that meant that everyone had decided that the whole thing wasn’t important, which is exactly what message the judge sent in this situation.

Remember that I said I thought he deserved first degree murder charges? Apparently the DA agreed with me, and upped the charges to reflect that. He was also charged with child abuse, domestic violence, and crimes against children. He pleads not guilty, because of course he does.

Prior to trial, he and Erika petition the court to allow them to go on vacation to Hawaii. Are they serious with this? Yes, they were, and the judge allowed it. What? Also, he rejected a plea of second degree murder that would have netted him ten to twenty-five years. He really thinks he should be skating on these charges, and not having to serve any time at all for Parker’s death, and his wife is still standing by him. Look at how they were spending their time:

Chris is the one in the Barney suit. Just wow.

Then, wonders upon wonders, he actually did accept a plea for second degree murder, and intentional child abuse likely to cause death or serious injury . He was likely to be sentenced to about twenty-five years. This was literally the exact same plea deal he rejected several months before, but apparently it being days prior to the trial for first degree murder began created enough pressure that he decided to not risk it. Probably a better bet, but he wasn’t interested in prison. No, he didn’t run, he committed suicide.

He failed to show up for his custodial hearing, where he would have gone into sentencing. Instead, he decided to die by carbon monoxide poisoning with the car in the garage with a hose setup. Guess who found him? Erika, and their live-in nanny. Oh, now you have one? Now you see the need? So I was correct when I guessed that they could afford it? Go figure. It takes her daughter dying for her to finally figure out that maybe Chris is not the guy to take care of the children.

Chris also left behind a note, and a rope with a ladder nearby as well. He might have tried to hang himself, but I doubt it. In fact, I doubt he actually meant to kill himself. I bet this was a pity plea that he either lost control of, or figured out wouldn’t matter in the end. Feeling sorry for him was not going to save him from prison, but hanging is a pretty awful way to go, so he decided on the car. He either rationalized that he was more likely to be discovered before he died with the car, or that he would actually die, but it would be less terrible.

Did I mention where this took place? Not in the place where he used to leave Parker. Oh no, I am sure that had too many negative memories for Chris and Erika. So many bad memories that they had to move to a new 1,000,000.00 home. That’s where Chris took his life. It makes you wonder if there were life insurance policies on the children that just so happened to pay off to Parker’s mother. I don’t know, just what crossed my mind.

The next post will be the last in the series. I am interested in looking at Chris and how he stacks up against the PCL-R. I am not qualified in any way to evaluate people for anything, and I do not think he is remotely a psychopath. However, many people do, or they call him a sociopath, but I don’t see any evidence of that either. My point is to demonstrate that the PCL-R can make a psychopath out of almost anyone if you utilize it with that intention. So, next post, let’s make Chris and Erika psychopaths for fun.

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You might be wondering why I am writing about this. Why do I care about Christopher Scholtes, and his murdered daughter? I will tell you. That image above, those are Parker’s fingerprints, with flakes of salt imbedded into them, where her sweating hand touched the window, trying to seek help.

Wow, Athena, that is surprisingly empathetic of you. Nope, you read that wrong, and that is not my point. My point is this. Chris was not a psychopath, his wife is not a psychopath, and he still left her in a car to bake to death, and she still tried to get him off for the crime. This is a matter of giving people a clear understanding that neurotypicality and crime are not only well acquainted, but they are often boon companions on this journey called life.

Self-centeredness is not a market that psychopaths have some corner on. It is something that all humans are often entrenched in, in ways they cannot even see for themselves. It is through examining these things, pointing out the flaws in thinking, and seeing them for what they are, that we gain a better understanding of human nature.

Something that I have noticed along the way. Neurotypicals will study something with intentional blindness involved. Not only with how they weigh studies to get to the outcome that they prefer, but also when it comes to examining their own behavior that is pathological. It makes for a messy world that has no hope of being understood when its denizens are living in through denial. That’s a problem in my estimation. As a psychopath, I have many things that I understand to be different about me, and several places where I make people’s lives more difficult. I understand that I don’t understand many things, and that is simply how it is. No matter how much work I put in, I will never have a working understanding of chemical love, or bonding, for instance. No amount of listening to explanations, or accounts of what those words mean to people will ever get me past a cursory grasp of the subject.

There tends to be a broken link regarding this kind of understanding, when it comes to neurotypicals. This is a mental construction, of course, but that construct is upheld by things in the world around you. Things that tell you that abnormality is something that others have, and pathology is outside your reach. If you have it, you are suddenly in the “other” category, and no longer a normative human. This is to protect the identity of the group. This group is morally superior, and therefore what should be aspired to. Any deviation from that, and you get placed into some nebulous group with shady understandings, which will change as needed to suit the protective barrier around the “normal” humans.

And I’m thinking, that’s gotta stop.

Let’s get back to Christopher Scholtes, shall we? He never once went to go and check on his daughter, who was roasting alive in his car. Not one time. To give you an idea of what that was like for her, the police decided to run a test, to see how hot the inside of the car would get in those conditions, July, midday, Arizona. Now, a side note about this test.

Did you know that China, looked at the success that Top Gun Maverick had in the States, and thought to themselves, hey, we need to get us some of that. Let’s make our own version! It will be awesome! So they did, or they tried to… try being a very heavy lifter in that sentence.

What the actual hell, Athena. What does this have to do with Chris and his beer fueled, porn watching, murder afternoon? I’m getting there. Anyway, the reason you have never heard of Chinese Top Gun was because it was so bad, that the government disallowed it to be released. I mean… it was really comically bad. There are a couple of scenes in it where they are stress testing the plane. To do this, they expose the plane to extreme heat, and extreme cold. This arctic level cold, and oven hot. Let me show you what I mean:

Do you see that? There is a pilot… in the plane. There is a pilot in the plane for what reason, exactly? They don’t stress test planes with the dude inside that will later be flying the fighter. Do you know how much it costs to train up a proper fighter pilot? It’s like thirteen million dollars, per pilot. They are not going to be sticking that person into a freezer and an oven. It’s not a thing that is going to happen.

In my mind, there are little things called thermometers that you can place in a location, and remotely monitor them. I have them for my oven/grill, they’re great, and it seems like, if we normies have these things, surely the military has them as well. Likely they had them first, then we got them. It goes like that with a lot of our tech. Back to the test with the car.

They had cops sit in the car for this test. They had an ice chest and could douse themselves in cold water to make it through, and I’m like… why though? Why are you in that car? You couldn’t like, I don’t know, monitor that from inside the building with a steak probe? You had to be in the car? This isn’t a Chinese move. Come on… you have to work smarter, not harder, or in this case, die faster. So yeah, they literally, for some reason, had cops sit in the car while it got super hot. How hot? Well, apparently it topped out around 149°F, or 65°C. You can sous vide a medium roast at 140°F, so when it comes to a child, we are talking about catastrophic damage. I would imagine there is a reason that the police did this with live humans in the car, but I would have gone the, demonstrate with a sous vide method, myself, but that’s me.

Chris’s car was an Acura MDX, which will run its AC for about twenty minutes before it shuts off as a battery conservation mechanism. Assuming that he left the car running at all, and frankly I don’t know if I will lend him that bit of grace, she would have only had twenty minutes of AC, and nearly three to four hours without it. I would imagine that the car has logs that can be gone through to see whether or not he told the truth about that, but they never released that information as far as I am aware.

Prior to the police arriving, both parents instructed their two remaining daughters in what to say to the police. This clearly demonstrates that they knew there was, at the very least, culpability here. The children were told to tell them it was an accident, that it had never happened before, that he was a good dad. Basically, lie through your teeth, even though we have likely always told you to never ever do that.

Chris and Erika had a fair amount of contact with CPS regarding their older daughters. I found a report where they compiled all of the interactions that they had on record for this family, and it is not a short list:

There has been no prior DCS involvement regarding Parker Scholtes.

The child’s father, Christopher Scholtes, and his mother were involved in the following prior reports:

On June 28, 2014, a report was received alleging physical abuse to a child by their father,

Christopher Scholtes. The DCS investigation did not result in evidence to support the allegations. The allegations were unsubstantiated. The family was provided with information on services available in the community and the case was closed.

On January 23, 2017, a report was received alleging physical abuse to a child by their

father, Christopher Scholtes. The DCS investigation did not result in evidence to support the

allegations. The allegations were unsubstantiated. The family was provided with information

on services available in the community and the case was closed.

On September 26, 2017, a report was received alleging neglect, physical abuse, and

emotional abuse to a child by their father, Christopher Scholtes, and neglect to the child by

their stepmother. The DCS investigation did not result in evidence to support the

allegations. The allegations were unsubstantiated. The family was provided with information

on services available in the community and the case was closed.

On February 11, 2019, a report was received alleging neglect to a child by their father,

Christopher Scholtes. The DCS investigation did not result in evidence to support the

allegations. The allegations were unsubstantiated. The family was provided with information

on services available in the community and the case was closed.

On December 12, 2019, a report was received alleging emotional abuse to a child by their

father, Christopher Scholtes. The DCS investigation did not result in evidence to support the

allegations. The allegations were unsubstantiated. The family was provided with information

on services available in the community and the case was closed.

On April 21, 2020, a report was received alleging neglect to a child by their father, Christopher Scholtes, and their stepmother. The DCS investigation did not result in evidence to support the allegations. The allegations were unsubstantiated. The family was provided with information on services available in the community and the case was closed.

On September 15, 2020, a report was received alleging emotional abuse to a child by their father, Christopher Scholtes, and their stepmother. The allegations were unsubstantiated. This investigation was still in progress when the next report was received.

On November 30, 2020, a report was received alleging neglect and emotional abuse to a child by their father, Christopher Scholtes, and their stepmother. The allegations were unsubstantiated. This investigation was still in progress when the next report was received.

On December 1, 2020, a report was received alleging neglect to a child by their father, Christopher Scholtes. The DCS investigation did not find evidence to support the allegations. The allegations were unsubstantiated. The child transitioned to their mother’s care, the family was provided with in-home services, and the case was closed in April 2021.

Very strangely, the report that details all of this, which is available at an official .gov site, switches Chris’s name to a dude named Lance Savard in the description of the crime:

Any investigation pursuant to a report for investigation concerning the child, a member of the child’s family or the person suspected of the abuse or neglect or services provided to the child or the child’s family since the date of the incident involving the fatality: The report regarding the fatality resulted in the indictment of the child’s father, Lance Savard, on charges of first-degree murder and child abuse in relation to Parker’s death.

Following an assessment of child safety, the siblings in the home were assessed as safe in their mother’s care. The allegations of neglect to Parker by his father, Lance Savard, were substantiated. The family was provided with information on services available in the community and the case was closed.

A subsequent report was received on June 27, 2025, with allegations of neglect and physical abuse to a sibling by their father and stepmother. The report also includes an allegation of sexual abuse to the sibling by the father, Lance Savard, that was alleged to have occurred in 2020. The investigation resulted in the removal of one child from the father’s home, but the other siblings were determined to not be in present danger and remained in the home. The case remains open, and the Department is providing services to the child.

I thought, that’s super weird, so I looed that dud up, and he is also responsible for a child’s death. Different dude, but I can sort of see why they got confused. He has his own report, and also interesting, all of the allegations against him were found to be “unsubstantiated”. Go figure, neither of these guys did anything wrong, but both of them magically have a dead kid at the end of the day. Could it be that CPS is just, I don’t know, not doing their damn job? Because I don’t think that they are.

Erika is not better. When speaking to the police, you get a clear picture of what she’s actually like.

She stated, “This is a really terrible mistake, is what it comes down to.” She said she knew Chris was having a really hard time with it. She said he was feeling responsible and guilty about what happened.

She stated that he is a stay-at-home dad, and she knows he feels he has a lot on his plate: thee house, feeding the kids, and taking care of the dogs. Something like this has not happened before. This is a little strange, but knowing him, and how overwhelmed he can get, it does make a little sense to her. She stated that she does not forgive that, but she still understands him.

She stated things have been really good for her and Chris recently because he quit drinking alcohol three months ago. She stated that there was never any abuse, but if he would drink when they went on a vacation, it just was not a great time.

I have to break some of this down.

“This is a really terrible mistake, is what it comes down to.”

Nope, this is negligence.

Chris was having a really hard time with it. She said he was feeling responsible and guilty about what happened.

You literally ARE responsible for this. I am not going to say you have to feel any particular way about it, because that would be hypocritical. However, you are responsible.

She stated that he is a stay-at-home dad, and she knows he feels he has a lot on his plate: the house, feeding the kids, and taking care of the dogs.

Feeding the kids? That’s the extent of his responsibilities? Feeding them? That is not the degree of care that children need. I’m a psychopath and I know that they require more than that. Feed the kids… wow. Also, we will get into this “feeding of the kids” in a little bit, because he really couldn’t even be bothered with that aspect.

She stated things have been really good for her and Chris recently because he quit drinking alcohol three months ago.

Nope. Didn’t Lies.

Isn’t it nice that she still understands him? That he has a soft place to fall when he’s in trouble. Too bad her children didn’t have that. No, they have a mother that is willing to leave them in the care of someone that is apparently on a first name basis with all the CPS agents in town. Super fun.

She stated that there was never any abuse, but if he would drink when they went on a vacation, it just was not a great time.

First of all, the CPS reports, that she surely had to know would get dug up, totally contradict this information. Secondly, he was definitely drinking on more than just their vacations. This dude is downing stolen beer in a liquor store restroom, which I still don’t understand why they even have that available to customers. I mean, they are 100% going to steal booze and drink it in your restroom. This is not difficult to surmise. Thirdly, the daughters outright state that he drank all the time. Like, it was a real problem, and that is supported by his liquor store potty escapades.

Now, let’s get into the really icky part of this story. Chris had an older daughter from a previous relationship. She was sixteen when this murder happened, and wasn’t living with him at the time. However, that isn’t to say that she didn’t used to live with him. When he and her mother broke up, he got custody, much to the daughter’s chagrin, and she was forced to live with him, despite her being more interested in being dragged naked over rusty nails by a team of horses.

While living with Chris, she was subjected to significant abuse by both him, and Erika. She didn’t even meet Chris until she was five, and then, after a terrible custody battle, was expected to just live with him like he was a real part of her life. She also stated, he locked her in the car for hours on end, just like he did to Parker, however, that’s not all that happened to her.

How often do you hear about abuse victims suing their abusers in court for the emotional and physical damage that they inflict? it’s not all that common, and yet, that is exactly what she went on to do later in her life after she was able to get out of that house. We will go into that, next week.

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Imagine, if you will, you are a thirty-eight-year-old man, with four kids. One of which is already on their own, leaving you with three. Your wife is an anesthesiologist, and makes a great living, so you, being the great dad you are, stay home with the remaining children. One day, having errands to run, you load your youngest daughter, Parker, who was two at the time, into her car seat, and go off to get things done, like the responsible father that you are.

You do your errands, and you get back to the house a little after noon, but little Parker is asleep in her car seat. Not wanting to disturb her, you leave here there, with the air conditioning on full blast, so you can get some of the household chores done. It’s an electric car, so it’s nice a quiet, and she is sleeping so peacefully. What harm could come to her? It’s not like this is a parking lot, where someone could come along and snatch her from the car and make off with her as a thief in the night, right?

You go inside, you unload and put away the groceries, straighten up a bit, doing Dad stuff, and Parker slips your mind… just for a little while. This is the story of, Christopher Scholtes. A man who is not a psychopath, but many people are convinced that he is.

Let’s look at the claimed timeline of what happened, and then at the actual timeline, shall we?

Christopher Scholtes’ claimed timeline of events on July 9, 2024 (the day his 2-year-old daughter Parker died), as reported from his statements to police and body camera footage:

He took Parker with him to run some errands earlier in the day.

• They returned home, arriving around midday (he specifically claimed around 12:30 p.m. in some accounts).

• Upon arriving home, Parker was asleep in her car seat.

• He intentionally left her in the vehicle because he did not want to wake her.

• He believed (or claimed) he left the engine running with the air conditioning on.

• He went inside the house.

• He got distracted (by putting away food/groceries, and other activities).

• He estimated he left her in the car for only about 30–45 minutes (or “no more than 30 minutes” in some statements).

All right, that’s not too terrible. I mean, Parker still died, so it isn’t like we are talking about a good outcome, but maybe it could be understandable that he could have made a terrible mistake.

Time is funny. It matters in context. A few minutes in one scenario is nothing, while it is an eternity in another. In this case, as I mentioned, the car was an electric one, that has timers on it. Meaning that it will shut itself off after a period of time, when it detects it hasn’t moved. That also means that the air conditioner also shuts off. Chris didn’t just do a couple things in the house, forgetting Parker in the car for twenty minutes, he forgot her for hours. The car was parked in direct sunlight, in July… in Arizona, and he left her there until his wife returned home, around four thirty.

Chris also wasn’t just doing Dad of the year type chores. He was playing PlayStation, and watching porn. Also, also, this was not the first time he had left one of his daughters in the car. In fact, it was such a problem there are texts between him and his wife, where she admonished him:

“I told you to stop leaving them in the car, how many times have I told you.”

“Them”, not “her”, because he had done this with all of his daughters, and apparently just didn’t do it by mistake, he did it as a parenting strategy. This is a pattern, not an oopsie. As the investigation unfolds, and I do mean from the moment the police arrive in the house when they are doing CPR on Parker, Chris acts completely bizarrely. There is little about his behavior that makes sense. He will shift between acting totally fine, albeit mildly stressed, to overwhelmed with emotion. Now, one might expect him to be overwhelmed by emotions, as his daughter just died, but it is very performative. There isn’t anything behind it.

You might be thinking, “A-ha! He is a psychopath! He’s faking guilt”

No, that isn’t what that means. Neurotypicals do this all the time. Most of the time that you see weird responses to emotional situations, it isn’t because you are in the room with a psychopath. It’s simply someone that is emotionally immature, and in this case as an example, he is responding like a kid that got caught doing something wrong. In fact, a great deal of his behavior overall indicated a very immature person that has never had anything required of him.

Let’s look at the real timeline, now:

Reconstructed timeline of events on July 9, 2024, based on police investigation, neighbor surveillance video, vehicle data logs, store security footage, digital device records, witness statements (including from the couple’s older children), and court documents:Morning/early afternoon: Christopher Scholtes picked up his 2-year-old daughter Parker after running errands. His two older daughters (ages 5 and 9) were at a trampoline park with friends.

Earlier stops: Surveillance footage showed Scholtes leaving Parker alone in the running vehicle while he entered a gas station/convenience store and a grocery store. At these locations, he shoplifted beer (hiding cans and drinking some in store bathrooms).

Approximately 12:30–1:00 p.m.: Scholtes arrived home in his 2023 Acura MDX and parked in the driveway (in direct sunlight, as the garage was occupied). Parker was asleep in her rear-facing car seat. He intentionally left her in the vehicle, claiming he believed the engine and AC were running. (Vehicle data later confirmed the auto shut-off feature activated after about 30 minutes, as he knew it would.)

~1:00 p.m. to ~4:00 p.m. (over 3 hours): Scholtes went inside the air-conditioned house. Digital records showed he put away groceries, drank beer, played video games on his PlayStation, searched for men’s clothing online (e.g., Nordstrom), and viewed pornography (specifically from ~2:02 p.m. to 2:30 p.m.). Neighbor video confirmed he never returned to check on the vehicle during this period. The outdoor temperature reached 109°F; interior car temperature exceeded 108°F, and the car seat surface reached ~149°F.

~4:00 p.m.: Erika Scholtes (an anesthesiologist) arrived home from work, asked about Parker, realized she was still in the car, and discovered her unresponsive. She began CPR while Christopher called 911.

~4:16 p.m.: First responders arrived; Parker was rushed to Banner University Medical Center (where Erika worked).

~4:58 p.m.: Parker was pronounced dead from heat exposure.

This timeline contradicted Scholtes’ initial statements to police (that he arrived ~2:30–3:00 p.m., left her for only 30–45 minutes, and thought the AC remained on). Evidence from video, vehicle telemetry, and device logs established the prolonged duration and his activities inside.

Let’s talk about a couple of things from this list.

1. He left Parker in the car multiple times. No one has mentioned, as far as I can tell, whether he left the AC on during these stops, but judging by the outcome, I think it is reasonable to assume that he didn’t Also, in the past, there had been calls to the police from strangers that saw one or more of his children left alone in a parked car. Again, habit, not mistake.

2. The drinking. Apparently Chris, according to his wife, had stopped drinking three months prior. This is significant for a few reasons. A couple apply directly to his mentality and his way of thinking, and the other is in support of my argument that he is not psychopathic.
   
   Instead of buying the beer, even with cash, he chooses to steal it, and drink it in the restroom. This demonstrates to me a fear of getting caught. Likely his wife goes through bank statements and receipts, and I can’t imagine why she would do so with this immature douche for a husband, but let’s just say I am not surprised. (Don’t worry, I think the wife is a piece of work as well, and we will get there). So Chris, in all of his infinite wisdom, decided to steal it. He also then drove with his two-year-old daughter in the car after shotgunning at least three beers at one location in the matter of minutes. So… super responsible.
   
   Next, the fact that he is addicted in the first place. A psychopath wouldn’t be, and also, a psychopath wouldn’t hide drinking. There is simply no reason in a psychopath’s mind to hide something like that. It isn’t as though alcohol affects us the same, we can’t get addicted, and we don’t care what people think.
   
   The whole stealing of beer speaks to so much in this case. His fear of getting caught, his immaturity, his lack of responsibility, his acting out like he’s still fifteen and doing what he’s not supposed to be, and stealing it on top of it all. It really speaks to someone that has stopped emotionally maturing at a rather young age, and based on the interactions that I saw with the wife, and the words that she spoke about him in her statement, says that they had a very unhealthy relationship.

There is a point in the bodycam footage that shows Erika heading out with the first responders to go to the hospital with Parker’s body, and she very bluntly says:

“She’s dead, like, I need to be with her right now.”

Chris’s response was to throw his hands over his face and say, “Oh my God, nooooo….”

You can find this exchange in the video below, but I suggest watching the whole thing so you can see the relationship that Chris and Erika had. It’s super… weird.

What struck me here was the tone of their voices. Hers is like a disappointed mother who just found out her kid has been sneaking out at night, and also failing math. His response is like the worst dinner theater on the planet, but staffed with teenagers that are also scrolling on their smartphones. It’s terrible. It sounds to me like she is just angry that she has to clean up his mess, and it sounds like he’s just thinking, if I pretend hard enough, the cops will go away, and I can get back to whatever PS5 game I was playing earlier.

One of the strangest parts is a bit after this, when Chris tells the police, that have to stay with him at this point, there was a suspicious death after all, that he is going to… take a shower. What? What is he on about? He needs to take a shower… right now? And he’s insistent, too. The cops can’t let him do this, of course. He could do something to himself in there. The tell him that he doesn’t need to take a shower, that isn’t something that needs to happen, that his wife is at the hospital with his daughter.

His response? That he needs to take a shower, so he can go be with her… at the hospital. What, praytell, would he need a shower for in these circumstances. A lot of people have speculated that he had something that he wanted to wash off, but I doubt that. He had plenty of time all afternoon to take a shower, and if he were concerned about something like that, he would have been worried about his wife, not the cops. She gets home around the same time every day, so if that were the motivation, he would have showered before she arrived.

No, I think this was about getting rid of the police. If you follow the thinking of a kid, there is this immature view of circumstances, that if you go and do something private, like showering, that means that the police would have to leave. It’s stupid to think this way, but it does lend to what appeard to me to be a very immature mindset.

Well, we all know where this is going, don’t we? The police obviously think that his story is ridiculous, and check the timeline that he gave, which falls apart immediately, which leaves them constructing the real sequence of events, as we saw above. he’s definitely getting arrested, but even moreso because of the text exchanges between him and Erika on the day of Parker’s death. These texts were sent from the ambulance while Erika road with her daughter, to the hospital.

Erika: I told you to stop leaving them in the car.

How many times have I told you?

Chris: Babe. I’m sorry!

Oh my gof!

I can’t believe this

Erika: We’ve lost her

She was perfect

Chris: Babe!!!!!

Our family

How could I do this?

Detectives are coming for me. I’m going to prison

On our way. Anything?

Please god

Erika: No she was pronounced

Chris: I killed our baby

This can’t be real

It’s interesting reading those. I get that Erika is a doctor, but I also get that she is literally looking at her child’s lifeless body while writing those, and the person she is writing to is responsible for killing that child. The person that was supposed to love and protect her. The first thought in her head is, how many times have I told you to stop leaving them in the car.

This reminds me of someone the tripped over their own dirty laundry in the middle of the night, broke a toe, and now has their mother sitting next to them in the doctor’s office saying, How many times have I told you to clean up your room?

It’s a minor inconvenience, but also the chances to say, I told you so.

Neither of them thought for a second, say it and forget it, write it and regret it. No, they were just having this conversation like no one was going to read it later on. They apparently thought the world revolved around them and no one would have anything to say about the dead two-year-old that was laying there on a gurney waiting to be taken to the morgue. By all means, say whatever come to mind… in text… for all to see, for all time. That is some next level, it’s all about me, mindset.

I was going to try and finish this in one post, but I keep finding more and more information, so it really isn’t going to be possible. So, onto the next.