Child Abuse

How would it affect a psychopath...

Photo by Kat J on Unsplash

I have spoken about how the emotional experience of a psychopath works, and I have listed the emotions that a psychopath can and cannot feel. If you haven’t read that post and would like to, you can find it here:

Psychopathy And Emotional Experience

Psychopaths lack the ability to feel any emotion deeply, and several emotions are missing, many of which are marked on the neurotypical spreadsheet as negative in experience. This understanding has brought the question to many readers’ minds of what happens if a psychopath is raised in a bad environment, and that is what we are going to chat about today.

There are many negative outcomes that are begotten by a terrible childhood. You can see the physical and emotional scars still present in and on people that were effectively tortured while they were being raised. I have a friend that works with severely abused young people. I have known this person since I was fairly young, and he has done this work the entire time that I have known him. When I was much younger, I was with him one day and he stopped by a hospital where one of these young men was recovering.

I trailed behind him as any young person does, somewhat annoyed to be in a boring hospital and wishing we could go do something much more fun. We got to the room and we went in. There was a young man that was recovering from horrific injuries.

He really wasn’t opening up to anyone, and his ability to speak really wasn’t known beyond very basic words. Then my friend said he had to go speak to the doctor, and he left me there. Never being one for things like that bothering me, I started talking to him like he was anyone else. He was to me anyway, so why not?

After a bit, I teased him a little for not talking to me, and teasing him saying that I know when I am not wanted, he laughed. I teased him a little more, and he talked to me. I was the first person he spoke to, and for a while, I was the only person he would speak to.

My friend got into a rather amusing habit of depositing me in rooms with mostly young men who didn’t want to open up, and they always did with me. The things that he went through are beyond imagination, but when he talked about it it was so normal to him. The world that he was in now was the one that he couldn’t relate to. It was obvious that he would have a very long way to go.

The kids that my friend works with have been through abject horror shows and have lived to tell the tale, and will do so again and again through very intensive therapy. I tell you this so you understand that I have seen the fallout from situations like these, and I have seen many of the ways that they present in the world.

Many of them have severe emotional damage and that manifests in most of them directed at themselves, but not everyone. Some of the kids direct all of their emotional damage out into the world, and they can be extremely dangerous because of this. They have no reason to trust anyone around them, they have been used in terrible ways, and they are angry.

The abuse that they have gone through is the worst of the worst. The fact that any of them are still alive is quite frankly amazing. However, abuse doesn’t have to get to this level to dramatically impact the person or people that go through it. It should be remembered that things like borderline personality disorder, schizoid personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, are all created through childhood experiences. Often times this is forgotten or ignored, but the person that has this outcome didn’t come by it easily.

Add to this PTSD, anxiety, depression, suicidal ideations, among other things can manifest in someone that has been abused in their childhood. What you will find with all of these things is that a great deal of the emotional damage is directed inwards. These things are the aftermath of an emotional storm that the person now has to clean up the best that they can.

What does this have to do with psychopathy and how abuse affects a person with it? Psychopaths do not internalize things. We don’t have the mechanism in place that will create that feedback loop of emotions. You cannot traumatize a psychopath, but that doesn’t mean that abuse does not have a terrible outcome when the victim is psychopathic.

People have asked me why can’t a person be both a psychopath and a sociopath at the same time. For the very same reasons that a psychopath cannot develop PTSD, BPD, NPD, HPD, Schizoid personality disorder, anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation, or any of the other leftover nightmares from living through an abuse.

All of those things are due to damage to the relationship with the parent, such as the bond, and the trust, and negative emotions being directed inwards. As I said, psychopaths do not internalize things. Instead, we externalize them, and abusing a psychopath has a bad result for everyone, not just the abused.

There are three or four “levels” of functionality in psychopathy, depending on what measurement you are using. I am going to say four for this piece for the sake of being clear. First I will list them, and then I will tell you what the differences are between them.

The first type of psychopathic is a low functioning one. This is the type you will find in all the psychopathy studies because they are only done in prisons, and low functioning psychopaths tend to be dwelling within them. They don’t tend to be particularly good at masking, don’t have great cognitive empathy, and they also cycle in and out of prison.

Next, you have a moderate functioning psychopath. They can get along in society, but may not have a strong mask. They have some cognitive empathy, and can get along with people.

High-functioning psychopaths are those that have a strong mask, get along well in society, and people tend to really like being around.

The last group is the ‘A-Listers’, also known as ‘Above the Snowline’ psychopaths. These are the ones of legend. They are dangerous, they have no cognitive empathy, they have no regard for laws, and they are predators.

What separates the first three groups tends to come down to these things:

Intelligence

Impulse regulation ability

Ability to predict the consequences of one’s actions

Low-functioning psychopaths lack these things. They do not have any impulse control, thus why they cycle in and out of the justice system, and they don’t tend to be particularly smart. If a psychopath is not intelligent they will not be able to develop cognitive empathy. They will be very limited in the ability to predict the consequences of their actions, and because they are extremely impulsive, they will simply act on whatever impulse they have.

Moderate and high functioning psychopaths have the ability to predict consequences, are more intelligent, the more high functioning the smarter the individual likely is, and they can control impulses.

All three of these things also play into ‘A-Listers’, but there is one more factor that is involved, and that is epigenetics.

When you listen to experts lecture on psychopathy they will often say that it is fifty percent genetic, and fifty percent environmental. This contradicts what I say, but neither of us is wrong. Experts, as I mentioned above, only study psychopathy in prisons. This creates a different installation of psychopathy than that of regular psychopaths in public. The picture that they are considering psychopathy includes the antisocial nature that placed those particular psychopaths behind bars.

This creates the fifty-fifty paradigm that they are referring to. The psychopathy itself is genetic, but the antisocial behavior is created. This is factual, and brings us back to the point of this post. When you abuse a child that is wired to be a psychopath and has certain genetics in place, you can create a monster.

Now for epigenetics. These are genetic tags that are on your DNA like little switches. When they are flipped through environmental experiences in your young years, they affect what you are going to be like. In psychopathy, it is not unusual to have some epigenetic switches that relate to violence and aggression. This makes sense if you consider the role in human evolution that psychopathy fills. Provided nothing flips those switches, there is a good chance those traits never appear. However, abuse will flip the switches and that can turn on genetic coding for primary aggression and violent behavior.

Kevin Dutton explains epigenetics and their effect on psychopaths this way:

"I want to bring to your attention, a field, a new discipline emerging out of the field of genetics called epigenetics. Epigenetics is basically the study of how the environment turns on different genes that we have naturally. The analogy that I always use to help people understand this. Imagine a book on a library shelf. Imagine the text, the writing in that book is your genes, your genetic code. If that book remains closed then that writing, that information is not going to have any impact in the outside world. It's going to remain dormant.

However, if someone comes and picks up that book and opens it, and starts reading those words, then that information is going to have an impact. Now, that's exactly the way the environment interacts with our genes. We need an environmental trigger on some occasions to turn those genes on. In other words to make that information to become life and that, using the analogy, is the person coming over and opening the book.

Now, when it comes to psychopathy the general consensus at the moment is that psychopathy is about fifty percent genetic. There is a fifty percent genetic variation in psychopaths, but, in a lot of occasions, it's environmental triggers in early formative childhood years, for instance, a violent or traumatic childhood that is the equivalent of the person coming and opening that book and turning those genes on. And that kind of person generally becomes a violent criminal, a violent psychopathic criminal.

There is a new study called “neuro-law”. Neuro-law is a cross between forensic science and neuroscience and it’s been discovered that there is a gene, not to get too technical with you, it’s a genetic polymorphism, it’s called an MAOI inhibitor gene, that the media is calling the “warrior gene”.

Now, if you have the short version of this gene, there is an eighty-five percent chance that if you have a violent childhood, you will become violent. However, it’s a strange gene, this, because if you have the long version and you have a violent childhood, it protects you from becoming violent. So it depends on whether you’ve got the long or the short version, you can turn out to be very different.”

Children cannot be diagnosed as psychopathic, It is impossible. This can only be done after a person’s brain has finished developing. That being said, psychopaths are difficult children to raise. We are totally outside the understanding of what a neurotypical parent would know how to deal with.

We cannot be guilted.

We don’t feel remorse.

We see no problem with taking what we want.

We have no empathy.

We have no fear.

We are punishment immune.

We don’t care what people want from us.

We do not understand the attempts to teach us through emotion.

“How would you feel if that happened to you?'“

It’s a normal question to ask a child, but to a psychopathic child, you might as well be asking them to change out the radiator in your truck. They are not words that have any meaning to us. We don’t feel negative emotions, and trying to teach us through negative emotions, or telling us to try to understand a feeling we have never had is a dead end. We are very frustrating children.

Now imagine that you are a parent that has a completely uncontrollable child. They do not listen to you, they don’t feel bad about the things that they do, they have no response to any punishment that you give them, and you are at the end of your rope with this child you cannot understand. Nothing you do reaches them, and you have no more tools left in the box. This is a dangerous place for the parent to be, and the effect of their decisions cannot be underplayed.

Intelligence plays a role, but not how people think. The assumption that psychopathy and brilliance are synonymous has been around since Hollywood tossed that along with the word psychopath and the kitchen sink and it all stuck. Intelligence can help a psychopath regulate their impulse issues. It comes in handy to have a better head on your shoulders and to be able to reason your way down a train of logic. This also helps with the prediction of consequences. The more intelligent, the more a psychopath can see reasons to keep themselves in line and not be ruled by the immediate here and now.

Impulse regulation, and the ability to predict one's actions are also a large part, and abuse can affect this. While abuse itself is rather dreadful, and should not be afflicted on any child, a psychopathic child has a bit of an advantage in this genetically. We don’t tend to dwell on things. You can say horrific things to us and we don’t care. You can beat us, but we won’t be traumatized by it. We might be angry in the moment, but no nightmares, flashbacks, PTSD, or anything like that will be the result.

Abuse however means that the psychopath has horrible parents, and when a psychopath is young, the installation of certain behavioral controls is rather key to success. If their environment is rubbish, then you won’t get those. Without them, there is a bit of a deck stacked against them. We have to learn why the delay of gratification is a good thing. We have to be shown that there are other ways of getting what we want other than taking it.

Now you may think, so does every child. Not in the way a psychopath does. We have no fear, no guilt, and no empathy. Our empathy is cognitive, which means we observe people to understand what they are feeling. If we don’t develop those skills early on, they are far more difficult to develop later and we will have a very hard time, which likely means they will never be developed because their value was never demonstrated to us. This in turn makes for us to be more inclined to easier paths. Like electricity completing a circuit, we take the easiest path.

So the abuse has taken away the ability to build in stop gaps for impulse control, it has not laid out the benefit of delay of gratification, and it has flipped violent switches in the DNA coding. Couple all of that with a lack of empathy, guilt, or any other pro-social emotion and you have created an extremely dangerous psychopath.

Some parents don’t have patience for a neurotypical child, now imagine them with one of us. The levels of anger I could get my parents to was extreme. They always kept it together, but believe me when I say that I am very lucky that I had the parents that I did. Someone else likely would have murdered me in my sleep or drowned me in the bathtub. I was an infuriating child.

If a child has the wiring for psychopathy, as well as having the short MAOI gene, and they have abusive parents, that is a recipe for an antisocial psychopath. The effect of the abuse will be the externalization of it out into the world. There will be no depression, anxiety, PTSD, BPD, NPD, or SPD, or anything of the sort. Instead, there will be an aggressive person that has absolutely nothing that prevents them from using violence as their way in the world.

No guilt, no remorse, no sense of personal responsibility, so reason to consider other people as remotely important, and violent tendencies. That is where the ‘A-Listers’ come from.

Not all abused psychopaths become ‘A-Listers’, and there are likely at least a few of them that become ‘A-Listers’ for other reasons. I would imagine that a significant head injury could have similar results, or perhaps an organic illness as well.

Knowing how I was as a child it would not surprise me in the slightest that psychopathic children would be more prone to being abused. The rage that a child like me can invoke is quite staggering. A parent losing their temper and trying to beat the child into submission is very possible. How it turns out in the end, that’s a gamble, isn’t it? They could be fine. They may shrug it off, walk away, and never see their family again. Or, they may become someone that has no compunction about utilizing the violence that they were taught.

No child should be abused. It has terrible results no matter how they are wired. Depending on the severity of the abuse, they may not only deal with the aftermath, but can also deal with lifelong injuries that are crippling. The psychological damage can also be unfathomable. Abuse is a consistent thing that is often found in the backgrounds of serial killers. When you harm a child, you change them, and sometimes you change them so significantly that the entire world is damaged by them.

A brighter follow-up for those of you that made it this far. The young man that I spoke about at the beginning is doing well in his life. He is a chef, and he has left a fair amount of that past behind him. There is still residual damage, and that will always be the case, but it didn’t define him.

He did that for himself.

Gerard Spong en Kevin Dutton bij Writers Unlimited 'The Series'