meowhahaha

Are you going to do an AMA? I would be very interested in (respectfully) learning about your uncommon experience. If you do schedule one, please let me know.

In my own experience (abused by a psychopath/sociopath/sibling with Anti-Social Personal Disorder - whatever), is that those people have to be smart and have to learn well from a very young age.

If he hadn't been able to manipulate others, his abuse of me would have probably been stopped sooner. Because he was brilliant at mimicking adults and catering to their (unacknowledged) desires, he was able to get them to believe/see what he wanted them to believe/see.

Those who lack that ability (or being in an environment where people just don't care or where that behavior is normalized) don't get very far. People recognize them as severely abnormal and TRY to intervene.

Even my parents tried to get him therapy (as young as age 8 or so) and he completely snowed at least 2 therapists. It wasn't until he was 13 or so that he ran into one who caught on to his bull-shit (and still my parents minimized it - I think he had to go to counseling because of something he did to a teacher).

Bottom line is that people like him can't be helped because they don't WANT help. He enjoyed everything he did, from hurting me in various ways, to killing animals, to conning adults into thinking he was sweet & innocent. It was fun! Other people aren't people to him, we're just realistic toys.

If we aren't smart enough/powerful enough to make him stop, then we aren't real. And like I side, he's fucking brilliant!

The few people who realized how crazy he was were powerless: I was a kid, my uncle was barely out of his teens and no one listened to him (and he didn't know but 1/10th of 1% what was happening), that one teacher..., that one psychiatrist...

I haven't had contact with my brother since my early 20s, but I know he's gone on to abuse many women. I don't know details. My father is in his 70s and still thinks we're being a little, "...too hard on 'Bud'."

I can surmise my brother is either choosing his victims more carefully, or perhaps being more sly or whatever. I do know that after he turned 18 he changed his game a little bit. Smart enough to know that his record would no longer be sealed.

Up until that point police reports had scrubbed his name because he was a minor.

How good at the toilets about keeping the smell down?

People are so underpaid and working to the point of exhaustion just to survive. One has to have enough hope and energy to even try.

Many people don’t.

I tried so hard to get through The Body Keeps the Score, but it was just too technical for me. Is there a similar book you’d recommend that is for a layperson?