Comment by flatt
2 years ago
Heh, okay, there's a lot to unpack there. It's a lot of facts but lacking in wisdom.
The fact that you equate a person warning you about the dangers of toxic people with barely being better than one themselves means you personally need this knowledge more than anyone. You are very much at risk and certainly not from me, I can assure you. Calling out your naivete on the matter is not aggression. Far, far from. I suppose I'm guilty as charged in not having much empathy left for the Cluster B individuals of the world. Virtually everyone who has had their lives ruined, their (often overflowing) empathy weaponized against them, and their belief that people are fundamentally good destroyed, tend to end up that way. And that's one of the hardest things in recovery: most people simply can't understand it until they've had it happen to themselves personally. After all, perhaps the psychopath is the real victim here. They certainly play the part very well. Believe whatever you want about me, an internet stranger, but this is coming from a genuine place of empathy and (hard) love. So, lets try something a little different.
There's a certain catharsis in some Cluster B abuse recovery circles in passing around stories of the well-meaning idiots that go to dog rescues centers to adopt trained fighting pitbulls. They believe all the dogs need is a good, loving home and all will be well. Often, this is actually the case... right up until the moment that it isn't. Suddenly, somehow, the owner's face is inside of the pitbull's stomach, their tracea is in the neighbor's yard, or their child is lifeless on the floor in a pool of blood with the dog "smiling" at them. Everyone is shocked, SHOCKED, I tell you. How could this have happened?
Your empathy is not going to fix psychopaths. Not at a personal level or a societal level. No amount of love is going to give them a functioning conscience. Whatever happened to create them (no matter how awful) never justifies what they do to others. Personally, I don't give a damn about Reiser and wouldn't trust a single word that comes out of his mouth about anything. I used his filesystem once back in ~2004 and that's the most positive thing I have to say about him.
Oh, cool, so you just go on ignoring what I say and responding to a strawman of things I did not say (like empathy fixing ASPD or victimhood justifying harm against others or that therapy will always be successful and everyone can be a free member of society to the fullest extent).
> (hard) love
Yeah, there's my concern. That's literally a concept only abusers use to justify their abuse as "love". You may think you have empathy (after all you feel strongly about ASPD individuals so you can't be that) but I question to what extent you do genuinely love if you have internalized the idea that "hard love" is a thing.
> There's a certain catharsis in some Cluster B abuse recovery circles in passing around stories of the well-meaning idiots that go to dog rescues centers to adopt trained fighting pitbulls. They believe all the dogs need is a good, loving home and all will be well. Often, this is actually the case... right up until the moment that it isn't.
It says a lot when your path to what you see as healing is paved with schadenfreude. That's not a story of the folly of being a good person. That's a story of ignoring past trauma. Trained fighting pitbulls are traumatized. You wouldn't hand a gun to a Vietnam vet with PTSD. Dogs have natural lethal weapons. Handling an animal that can kill you must be deliberate. You can not reason with a dog so you must treat a traumatized dog as the loose canon it is. When people die to trained attack dogs, they die either because they didn't know about its past or because they (no longer) took it into account in their interactions.
I'm not concerned with psychokillers who want to wear my child's skin as a costume only because I'm far more concerned with the equally unempathetic billionaires, politicians, lobbyists and investors who don't even consider my child as their actions threaten their health and future. Our economic system encourages "sociopathic" behavior. The psychokiller (or the far more likely abusive partner) is just too impotent or incompetent to acquire a position of real power and their behavior is far more likely to get them in trouble.
The thread has rightfully been killed so I'll just say this: kiss your children good night. And maybe think about why you feel the need to frame those deepities as "hard truths" instead of considering that if you're a victim, you're traumatized and you're coming from a place of hurt and your pre-existing beliefs cloud how you can make sense of it all. If you find catharsis in the suffering of others, that should give you pause.