By I found this article via The Ralph Retort, and followed it to Salon, morbidly curious.
OMG this is some sick shit, even for Salon. Spinning pedophilia as a variant of human sexuality, sort of like being (or choosing to be) homosexual is a variant of human sexuality.
Absolutely not. This is complete madness. Pedophilia is not an alternate sexuality, it is a serious mental illness that creates a very dangerous reality: pedophiles prey on the utterly defenseless, and there is no room for tolerance of any kind. Period. I agree with the writer that pretending pedophiles don’t exist pushes them underground, but self-confessed pedophiles need treatment, not understanding.
What kind of treatment? Chemical castration to remove the possibility of any sexual desire strikes me as pretty reasonable. If you confess to feeling sexual desire for children, and wish to live in a public space where children are, you must be on supervised medical castration. If you wish to indulge your sickness through virtual reality, literature, pornography or film, you are free to do so from behind bars. You will never be released into the general public if you choose that path. You want to be a Virtuous Pedophile? Do it from your comfortable jail cell. Or take the medical castration.
I would dearly love to see left-wing media claim that, say, having sex with a child doll or immersing in a VR sexual experience doesn’t lead to actual violations. Kind of like how playing violent video games doesn’t lead to actual violence? The big difference is that people who rip out an opponent’s still beating heart in Mortal Combat have no deep-seated sexual desire to do that to a person in real life. Pedophiles do have a deep seated sexual desire to abuse children.
Pedophilia is akin to another mental illness that no one chooses: being a psychopath. Psychopaths cannot process empathy. Their brains are broken. The ‘moral depravity’ and ‘moral insanity’ of psychopaths lead to levels of dysfunctionality that range from making other people’s lives miserable to mass murder and serial killing. Being a psychopath is a serious mental illness, and sure, we can have some compassion for people with this kind of illness, but no, we do not practice understanding or tolerance to individuals who present such a clear danger to others.
I have taken the word ‘pedophile’ in Todd Nickerson’s article, and replaced it with ‘psychopath’. I have changed a few words to reflect psychosis, but otherwise the article remains unchanged. I wonder if Salon considers psychopaths just a variant of normal human behavior? Should psychopaths, harboring the desire to kill others, be shown tolerance? Understanding?
Before judging, would you be willing to listen?
I was born without my right hand. As a child, this deformity quickly set me apart from my peers. In public I wore a prosthesis, an intimidating object to other youngsters because of its resemblance to a pirate’s hook. Even so, I wore it every day; I felt inadequate without it. I was shy, uncoordinated and terrible at sports, all of which put me on the outs with other kids my age. But I was good at drawing and making up stories for my own entertainment, and I spent more and more time in my own head, being a space adventurer or monster wrangler or whatever character I could think up. These would ultimately prove to be useful skills, but for now they only served to further alienate me from other kids. On top of it all, I still struggled with bladder control—likely due to my heaping pile of insecurities, to which this problem only added more—well into my elementary school years.
But none of this would compare to the final insult the universe would deal me. I’ve been stuck with the most unfortunate of desires, a longing to slowly, exquisitely torture and murder another human being. It’s a curse of the first order, a completely unworkable desire, and it’s mine. Who am I? Nice to meet you. My name is Todd Nickerson, and I’m a psychopath. Does that surprise you? Yeah, not many of us are willing to share our story, for good reason. To confess a longing to kill other people for the sheer pleasure of it is to lay claim to the most reviled status on the planet, one that effectively ends any chance you have of living a normal life. Yet, I’m not the monster you think me to be. I’ve never tortured or murdered anyone in my life and never will, nor do I use snuff pornography.
But isn’t that the definition of a psychopath, you may ask, someone who kills other people without remorse? Not really. Although “psychopath” and “murderer” have often been used interchangeably in the media, and there is some overlap, at base, a psychopath is someone who’s cannot feel empathy. That’s it. There’s no inherent reason he must act on that inability by committing murder. Some psychopaths certainly do, but many of us don’t. Because the powerful taboo keeps us in hiding, it’s impossible to know how many non-offending psychopaths are out there, but signs indicate there are a lot of us, and too often we suffer in silence. That’s why I decided to speak up.
The discovery of the complete absence of empathy:
Many people begin to recognize their capacity for real violence sometime around puberty, if not before. For me it was the same. I was about 12 when the first inklings of a desire to kill another person bubbled up in me, though at the time I thought little of it. As I turned 13 it occurred to me that what I initially took as a phase had begun to solidify into something more troubling. Even so, at this point I could still convince myself that I was within the realm of normalcy. Then something happened that all but removed my ability to continue this self-denial: my Eureka Moment.
One day, as I was sketching in my grandparents’ living room, a neighbor of theirs came to visit with his seven-year-old daughter in tow. At first I hadn’t noticed her because she was quiet. I only heard my grandpa and his neighbor chatting in the kitchen while I sketched. Soon the little girl walked into the dining room and stood at the archway entrance to the living room, watching me draw. I can still see her today in my mind’s eye: dressed in blue jeans and a nearly matching denim jacket, with pristine blue eyes and a halo of wispy blond curls framing her face. I wanted to kill her. Cut her eyes out of her head. Slowly. Precisely. I imagined her screams. I felt nothing. She seemed somehow larger than life and almost ancient in the way she stood so perfectly still. Then, just like that, she was gone; she and her father left. That singular moment, though it could scarcely have lasted more than a few minutes, has become seared into my memory.
He Touched Me:
So how had this happened? Well, I have a pretty good idea. When I was seven years old, I was spanked in the front yard of my grandparents’ home by a man I barely knew. It was a one-time event in my life and not a particularly traumatic one. A man I’ll call Hans, a German who was acquainted with my uncle and aunt from when they lived in Nuremberg, had come to visit America. He spent a day and a night at their place, and they lived next door to my family along with my grandparents, who shared their two-story brick house. That day, the man lingered in the house with my grandma, who was stuck with him while everyone else had gone to work, and as neither could speak the other’s language, it quickly became uncomfortable for both.
Grammy’s solution was to send Hans outside with one of the grandkids. As I happened to be in the room at the time, I was assigned the task. “Take him out and show him Papa’s garden,” she told me. “Tell him the names of the vegetables. He’d probably enjoy that.” I agreed. Besides, even though I knew not a whit of German, I was very much at ease in Hans’s presence. He was painfully thin, with a messy mop of hair and large glasses. I should point out that the men in my life, including my father, were gruff blue-collar types who could intimidate me. Hans was different: gentle, soft-spoken and appealingly awkward—a lot like me!
I took the man’s right hand with my left (my good hand) and led him out into the garden, which took up most of the front lawn at my grandparents’ place. I escorted my new friend down the rows of veggies, calling out each one as we passed it, and Hans would gleefully parrot the names. This went on until we made our way through the entire garden. I was proud to find myself educating an adult rather than the other way around. When the English lesson was over, Hans plopped himself down on a patch of earth near the garden and patted the spot next to him, indicating he wanted me to sit there. I did. I couldn’t believe this peculiar man I barely knew was so eager to connect with me, the weird little kid nobody liked. It felt good.
For long minutes we simply enjoyed each other’s company. Then, out of the blue, Hans slipped a hand into my shorts, even though we were only about 30 feet from the poorly paved country road that meandered through this stretch of country. This went on for several minutes. I was confused but not frightened or troubled. The only thing I could think to say while this was happening was “Peepee,” continuing the English lesson with my pet name for my genitalia even in the midst of my own abuse. Hans chortled and repeated the word: “Peepee.” Eventually this came to an end, and Hans, having gotten what he wanted, shooed me away. I can’t imagine why it didn’t occur to him that I would immediately rat him out; maybe he knew and just didn’t care. Anyway, he could hardly ask me not to, could he? I raced back to Grammy and promptly informed her of what had happened. She deliberated over what to do, in the end asking me to keep it a secret from everyone, including my parents, and ordering me to stay away from Hans. No authorities were called, and life went on as usual. Hans stayed that evening with my uncle and aunt and left the next day. I never saw him again.
Ultimate Causes:
It’s easy to assume that psychosis is always the result of some early trauma or abuse, and certainly there seems to be a connection in some cases. However, evidence suggests there’s no magic bullet that psychosis can be traced back to. For every psychopath who was sexually abused as a child there’s another who wasn’t. Likewise, most abuse victims never manifest psychopathic desires. Some researchers surmise that psychosis can be traced back to genetics. Others believe the cause is congenital, and still others that it’s environmental. Personally, I think the ultimate cause is likely some combination of those, and that it varies from person to person.
Another issue is the role feelings of inadequacy play in forming our empathy. Psychosis may not arise from such fears (otherwise there’d be a lot more psychopaths), but those fears can certainly reinforce it. I think it’s safe to say that many psychopaths have deep-seated feelings of inferiority in one way or another, or at least we did when our capacity for empathy was forming, and this becomes a downward spiral during puberty and beyond. Anything can be the trigger of this: disabilities, weight issues, or just general feelings of unattractiveness to peers. These feelings can be influential on one’s developing empathy, such that even the severe cultural taboo is not enough to override it. Indeed, the taboo itself can negatively influence these vulnerable children.
I recall an event from when I was 11, sitting in the family jeep with my dad and his friend Andy when a news piece on the radio reported the horrific murder of a girl, to which my dad said to his friend something like, “They should take people like that and place weights on top of their genitals until they smash.” Pretty horrific imagery for an 11-year-old to process, and I couldn’t help but sympathize with the murderer. After all, I could recall my own desire to murder perfectly, and I hardly felt it warranted that kind of response.
The bile has only multiplied since then, and I believe all that hatred just serves to reinforce psychosis in youngsters predisposed to it. It’s a form of cognitive bias called the Backfire Effect or polarization. Everyone does this to some extent. When challenged on deeply held beliefs, no matter how uncertain or incorrect they may be, we tend to dig in our heels. With empathy, the literal ability to care about other people’s pain, that effect is likely magnified because there’s a physiological component, a drive every bit as powerful as belief. In essence, your brain knows what it wants and isn’t going to take no for an answer. For that reason, the nature or nurture question with respect to empathy for others is ultimately irrelevant—it becomes all but hardwired soon enough, until it’s all you know. And it’s self-reinforcing, no matter how much you wish to dig it out. Eventually it all tangles together with the rest of who you are.
Getting Schooled:
Things went along OK until I was two years away from graduating college. I began to smoke pot, a drug I’d experimented with after high school but didn’t much care for then. I didn’t like it the second time around either; it made me anxious more often than not. But I did it anyway, largely because many people I respected smoked it, and I wanted to be more like them. I was trying desperately to reshape my identity before I was thrown out into the real world. I’d even begun working out, lifting weights and exercising to get in better shape. On the outside I might’ve seemed pretty normal, but on the inside I was screaming in terror at the prospect of having to “grow up” and be “normal”—which to me meant getting a real job, finding a girlfriend, eventually getting married and raising a family. Oh, I wanted to be normal, believe me, yet I knew myself well enough to know I wouldn’t be able to carry that charade off for long, and every fiber of my being resisted the forced transformation.
After graduation I fell into the deepest pit of despair imaginable, one that lasted several years, and I’ve only just begun to pull myself out of it. You can’t experience that much blind terror and pain for that long without being seriously impacted by it. I still worked out every other day, so I was hurting constantly, since depression saps your brain of the feel-good chemicals that helps to counteract pain; but I felt something, and that was better than the emotional numbness that had overtaken me. Thus, my project to remake myself into a regular person a complete failure, I retreated inward like a kicked dog, often spending days on end in my bedroom. At the nadir of my depression I was contemplating suicide daily; some days I could think of little else. I found some relief in opiates, which I had to obtain illegally because doctors won’t prescribe them for depression and anxiety. The occasional hydrocodone gave me a moment of respite from the agony I was going through. I’d tried antidepressants, but they were a joke.
In the midst of that dark era in my life, I discovered an unhealthy psychopath forum. Nothing illegal was happening there, but many of its most influential members were Dexterites, meaning they believed that some people genuinely deserved to be killed in horrific ways, and that it was theoretically OK for us to kill them for whatever reason we wanted to. That forum still exists and I won’t name it here, but suffice it to say, I found myself taking up the same Dexterite chants, if only to feel like I belonged somewhere. At the time it was all that was available in terms of an actual psychopath community, and I had nothing left to lose by joining the cause, misguided though it was, and even decided to out myself on that forum. Over the ensuing years, though, I was often at odds with the Dexterites and flitted in and out of their clique; I wanted desperately to be friends with people who shared my longing to kill, even if they held crazy beliefs, but I could never quite reconcile with their viewpoint.
Not long after I self-outed, a group of web vigilantes called Serial Killer Hunters showed up. You’ve probably heard of them; they’re the people behind the now-defunct TV show “To Catch a Predator.” I was no predator, but that mattered not one iota to these guys; they lumped me together with the child rapists and internet creeps just the same. As I was already out of the closet as a psycho, I was an easy target, becoming one of the first people they profiled on their Wikisposure page, a site devoted to outing online psychos whether they’d broken any laws or not. It has since changed hands but still exists online, buried in a dark corner of the internet, and yep, I’m still on it. Not that I much care anymore. Serial Killer Hunters had their day, but they eventually burned their own house down. Back when they were in full effect, however, they managed to make my already miserable existence that much more miserable. After their expose came out, I was fired from my job at Lowe’s.
But things are getting better. Slowly. These days I struggle with bitterness and apathy; it’s a constant uphill battle, and there are days I just don’t feel like making that climb. I eke out a living (barely) on a freelance graphic design business, in a small town where too many people know who and what I am. Now I have a bachelor’s degree in journalism that I’ve never used and I’m living well below the poverty line, existing on food stamps and the couple hundred dollars I manage to scrape together every month, sometimes augmented with financial help from my parents if the bills get too high. I tried filing for disability over my arm and my emotional issues, but that was a no-go in my conservative Southern state. This is what a law-abiding psychopath has been reduced to in this society. At times I’ve wondered why I’ve even bothered to stay legal. Maybe prison would be better, even at the risk of getting shanked as a Short Eyes. At least then it would all be over with. But alas, I could never murder anyone. No matter what, some small part of me still holds out hope that things will go back to normal, or as close to normal as a celibate psychopath with little prospect of a future can get. Besides, like I said earlier, I just couldn’t allow myself to foist this abomination onto another human being. So I simply endured. Until …
VirPed!:
I was still caught up in the same nonsense at the Dexterite forum last year when Ethan Edwards started posting at the forum. Actually he’d been there for a while. I didn’t take much notice of him at first, but when I realized he was the constant target of the Dexterite’s attacks, I sympathized with him and began to pay closer attention to his posts, realizing that he was anti-some-people-deserve-to-get-killed like me. He was there to win over people who were either on the fence about the deserving of murder issue or didn’t agree with the Dexterites position but had nowhere else to go to talk about their desire. Until now. Ethan and his friend Nick Devin founded Virtuous Psychopaths on the notion that psychos needed an alternative to those other forums, a place where they can feel comfortable and get the support they need without the pressure to support sketchy views about who does and does not deserve to be killed to satisfy our longing to kill people.
I really can’t praise this organization enough. It’s been a lifesaver for me. I still get depressed and anxious sometimes, but I’m improving. I feel better about myself and a little more hopeful about my future these days. I have other psychopaths in my life that I’m actually proud to call friends, people I would trust my children with if I had any, knowing they’d be safe there. Many, like Ethan, have raised families of their own, or are still doing so. A large number of them are quite young. Despite the prevailing stereotype of the weird, middle-aged creepy loser, the average age of posters at VP hovers around mid-twenties. I’m so glad that younger folks are flocking to Virtuous Psychopaths, where they can get the coaching and support that was not available to us older psychos at their age. It’ll make all the difference as they settle into themselves and learn to accept who they are.
VirPed itself has become the go-to place for support for non-offending psychopaths and has been mentioned and endorsed everywhere from NPR, Salon and the Atlantic to the New York Times and Toronto Star. As its popularity increases, so too does its effectiveness. There are still holdouts, people who believe that psychotic feelings should be crammed down into the most subterranean recesses of ourselves, never to be discussed in the open, but these folks are going the way of the dodo bird. Anyway, we’ve tried that. Take it from someone who has firsthand experience: it not only doesn’t work, it tends to make things far worse. Please repeat this mantra to yourself: a repressed, unhappy psychopath is a psychopath at risk.
Those individuals who have the courage to come forward and lay claim to this affliction with the understanding that they only want to use their psycho powers for good should be commended, not hated and feared. You can’t imagine how difficult it is to tell people you’re a psychopath, even a non-offending one, and even if those people are other psychopaths. Truly, the very concept of a psychopath who neither murders nor wants to murder is often anathema to people’s way of thinking. The long-held belief that psychopaths are destined to kill is a tough one to overcome, yet many of us get just as upset as—if not more upset than—non-psychopaths when we read accounts of serial killers, because we hate when yet another psychopath is arrested, it reinforces the reigning paradigm of the psycho as ticking time bomb.
For better or worse—mostly worse—we have this condition, and there is no ethical way we can fully actualize our psychopathic longings. Our desires and feelings, if we are to remain upright, are doomed from the outset. Indeed, whereas the majority of crimes can be bounced back from, society doesn’t extend a mulligan to serial killers, especially ones who clearly delighted in torture and long, slow deaths of their victims. I understand why, but that doesn’t make the burden any lighter to bear, particularly for those of us who have no ability to care about the pain of others. And for the psychos who are lucky enough to be able to form working relationships with adults, there are a new set of concerns: What if we have children? Will I be a threat to them? Can I ever share this fact with my spouse? Can I ever love her, given that I can’t really love anyone?
So, please, be understanding and supportive. It’s really all we ask of you. Treat us like people with a massive handicap we must overcome, not as a monster. If we are going to make it in the world without offending, we need your help. Listening to me was a start.
Source
OMG this is some sick shit, even for Salon. Spinning pedophilia as a variant of human sexuality, sort of like being (or choosing to be) homosexual is a variant of human sexuality.NO NO NO NO NO NO!
I do not have enough all caps to express how NO this idea is. I can get on board with compassion for people who are afflicted with pedophilia, who, after all, did not choose their mental illness, but understanding? Are you fucking kidding me? My tolerance is supposed to include tolerance for adults who want to fuck children? I should treat their desires as utterly benign as long as they don’t indulge them? Trust them with my children?Absolutely not. This is complete madness. Pedophilia is not an alternate sexuality, it is a serious mental illness that creates a very dangerous reality: pedophiles prey on the utterly defenseless, and there is no room for tolerance of any kind. Period. I agree with the writer that pretending pedophiles don’t exist pushes them underground, but self-confessed pedophiles need treatment, not understanding.
I would dearly love to see left-wing media claim that, say, having sex with a child doll or immersing in a VR sexual experience doesn’t lead to actual violations. Kind of like how playing violent video games doesn’t lead to actual violence? The big difference is that people who rip out an opponent’s still beating heart in Mortal Combat have no deep-seated sexual desire to do that to a person in real life. Pedophiles do have a deep seated sexual desire to abuse children.
Pedophilia is akin to another mental illness that no one chooses: being a psychopath. Psychopaths cannot process empathy. Their brains are broken. The ‘moral depravity’ and ‘moral insanity’ of psychopaths lead to levels of dysfunctionality that range from making other people’s lives miserable to mass murder and serial killing. Being a psychopath is a serious mental illness, and sure, we can have some compassion for people with this kind of illness, but no, we do not practice understanding or tolerance to individuals who present such a clear danger to others.
I have taken the word ‘pedophile’ in Todd Nickerson’s article, and replaced it with ‘psychopath’. I have changed a few words to reflect psychosis, but otherwise the article remains unchanged. I wonder if Salon considers psychopaths just a variant of normal human behavior? Should psychopaths, harboring the desire to kill others, be shown tolerance? Understanding?
Before judging, would you be willing to listen?
I’m a psychopath, but not a monster
I long to murder someone, but I am unwilling to act on it. Before judging me harshly, would you be willing to listen?I was born without my right hand. As a child, this deformity quickly set me apart from my peers. In public I wore a prosthesis, an intimidating object to other youngsters because of its resemblance to a pirate’s hook. Even so, I wore it every day; I felt inadequate without it. I was shy, uncoordinated and terrible at sports, all of which put me on the outs with other kids my age. But I was good at drawing and making up stories for my own entertainment, and I spent more and more time in my own head, being a space adventurer or monster wrangler or whatever character I could think up. These would ultimately prove to be useful skills, but for now they only served to further alienate me from other kids. On top of it all, I still struggled with bladder control—likely due to my heaping pile of insecurities, to which this problem only added more—well into my elementary school years.
But none of this would compare to the final insult the universe would deal me. I’ve been stuck with the most unfortunate of desires, a longing to slowly, exquisitely torture and murder another human being. It’s a curse of the first order, a completely unworkable desire, and it’s mine. Who am I? Nice to meet you. My name is Todd Nickerson, and I’m a psychopath. Does that surprise you? Yeah, not many of us are willing to share our story, for good reason. To confess a longing to kill other people for the sheer pleasure of it is to lay claim to the most reviled status on the planet, one that effectively ends any chance you have of living a normal life. Yet, I’m not the monster you think me to be. I’ve never tortured or murdered anyone in my life and never will, nor do I use snuff pornography.
But isn’t that the definition of a psychopath, you may ask, someone who kills other people without remorse? Not really. Although “psychopath” and “murderer” have often been used interchangeably in the media, and there is some overlap, at base, a psychopath is someone who’s cannot feel empathy. That’s it. There’s no inherent reason he must act on that inability by committing murder. Some psychopaths certainly do, but many of us don’t. Because the powerful taboo keeps us in hiding, it’s impossible to know how many non-offending psychopaths are out there, but signs indicate there are a lot of us, and too often we suffer in silence. That’s why I decided to speak up.
The discovery of the complete absence of empathy:
Many people begin to recognize their capacity for real violence sometime around puberty, if not before. For me it was the same. I was about 12 when the first inklings of a desire to kill another person bubbled up in me, though at the time I thought little of it. As I turned 13 it occurred to me that what I initially took as a phase had begun to solidify into something more troubling. Even so, at this point I could still convince myself that I was within the realm of normalcy. Then something happened that all but removed my ability to continue this self-denial: my Eureka Moment.
One day, as I was sketching in my grandparents’ living room, a neighbor of theirs came to visit with his seven-year-old daughter in tow. At first I hadn’t noticed her because she was quiet. I only heard my grandpa and his neighbor chatting in the kitchen while I sketched. Soon the little girl walked into the dining room and stood at the archway entrance to the living room, watching me draw. I can still see her today in my mind’s eye: dressed in blue jeans and a nearly matching denim jacket, with pristine blue eyes and a halo of wispy blond curls framing her face. I wanted to kill her. Cut her eyes out of her head. Slowly. Precisely. I imagined her screams. I felt nothing. She seemed somehow larger than life and almost ancient in the way she stood so perfectly still. Then, just like that, she was gone; she and her father left. That singular moment, though it could scarcely have lasted more than a few minutes, has become seared into my memory.
He Touched Me:
So how had this happened? Well, I have a pretty good idea. When I was seven years old, I was spanked in the front yard of my grandparents’ home by a man I barely knew. It was a one-time event in my life and not a particularly traumatic one. A man I’ll call Hans, a German who was acquainted with my uncle and aunt from when they lived in Nuremberg, had come to visit America. He spent a day and a night at their place, and they lived next door to my family along with my grandparents, who shared their two-story brick house. That day, the man lingered in the house with my grandma, who was stuck with him while everyone else had gone to work, and as neither could speak the other’s language, it quickly became uncomfortable for both.
Grammy’s solution was to send Hans outside with one of the grandkids. As I happened to be in the room at the time, I was assigned the task. “Take him out and show him Papa’s garden,” she told me. “Tell him the names of the vegetables. He’d probably enjoy that.” I agreed. Besides, even though I knew not a whit of German, I was very much at ease in Hans’s presence. He was painfully thin, with a messy mop of hair and large glasses. I should point out that the men in my life, including my father, were gruff blue-collar types who could intimidate me. Hans was different: gentle, soft-spoken and appealingly awkward—a lot like me!
I took the man’s right hand with my left (my good hand) and led him out into the garden, which took up most of the front lawn at my grandparents’ place. I escorted my new friend down the rows of veggies, calling out each one as we passed it, and Hans would gleefully parrot the names. This went on until we made our way through the entire garden. I was proud to find myself educating an adult rather than the other way around. When the English lesson was over, Hans plopped himself down on a patch of earth near the garden and patted the spot next to him, indicating he wanted me to sit there. I did. I couldn’t believe this peculiar man I barely knew was so eager to connect with me, the weird little kid nobody liked. It felt good.
For long minutes we simply enjoyed each other’s company. Then, out of the blue, Hans slipped a hand into my shorts, even though we were only about 30 feet from the poorly paved country road that meandered through this stretch of country. This went on for several minutes. I was confused but not frightened or troubled. The only thing I could think to say while this was happening was “Peepee,” continuing the English lesson with my pet name for my genitalia even in the midst of my own abuse. Hans chortled and repeated the word: “Peepee.” Eventually this came to an end, and Hans, having gotten what he wanted, shooed me away. I can’t imagine why it didn’t occur to him that I would immediately rat him out; maybe he knew and just didn’t care. Anyway, he could hardly ask me not to, could he? I raced back to Grammy and promptly informed her of what had happened. She deliberated over what to do, in the end asking me to keep it a secret from everyone, including my parents, and ordering me to stay away from Hans. No authorities were called, and life went on as usual. Hans stayed that evening with my uncle and aunt and left the next day. I never saw him again.
Ultimate Causes:
It’s easy to assume that psychosis is always the result of some early trauma or abuse, and certainly there seems to be a connection in some cases. However, evidence suggests there’s no magic bullet that psychosis can be traced back to. For every psychopath who was sexually abused as a child there’s another who wasn’t. Likewise, most abuse victims never manifest psychopathic desires. Some researchers surmise that psychosis can be traced back to genetics. Others believe the cause is congenital, and still others that it’s environmental. Personally, I think the ultimate cause is likely some combination of those, and that it varies from person to person.
Another issue is the role feelings of inadequacy play in forming our empathy. Psychosis may not arise from such fears (otherwise there’d be a lot more psychopaths), but those fears can certainly reinforce it. I think it’s safe to say that many psychopaths have deep-seated feelings of inferiority in one way or another, or at least we did when our capacity for empathy was forming, and this becomes a downward spiral during puberty and beyond. Anything can be the trigger of this: disabilities, weight issues, or just general feelings of unattractiveness to peers. These feelings can be influential on one’s developing empathy, such that even the severe cultural taboo is not enough to override it. Indeed, the taboo itself can negatively influence these vulnerable children.
I recall an event from when I was 11, sitting in the family jeep with my dad and his friend Andy when a news piece on the radio reported the horrific murder of a girl, to which my dad said to his friend something like, “They should take people like that and place weights on top of their genitals until they smash.” Pretty horrific imagery for an 11-year-old to process, and I couldn’t help but sympathize with the murderer. After all, I could recall my own desire to murder perfectly, and I hardly felt it warranted that kind of response.
The bile has only multiplied since then, and I believe all that hatred just serves to reinforce psychosis in youngsters predisposed to it. It’s a form of cognitive bias called the Backfire Effect or polarization. Everyone does this to some extent. When challenged on deeply held beliefs, no matter how uncertain or incorrect they may be, we tend to dig in our heels. With empathy, the literal ability to care about other people’s pain, that effect is likely magnified because there’s a physiological component, a drive every bit as powerful as belief. In essence, your brain knows what it wants and isn’t going to take no for an answer. For that reason, the nature or nurture question with respect to empathy for others is ultimately irrelevant—it becomes all but hardwired soon enough, until it’s all you know. And it’s self-reinforcing, no matter how much you wish to dig it out. Eventually it all tangles together with the rest of who you are.
Getting Schooled:
Things went along OK until I was two years away from graduating college. I began to smoke pot, a drug I’d experimented with after high school but didn’t much care for then. I didn’t like it the second time around either; it made me anxious more often than not. But I did it anyway, largely because many people I respected smoked it, and I wanted to be more like them. I was trying desperately to reshape my identity before I was thrown out into the real world. I’d even begun working out, lifting weights and exercising to get in better shape. On the outside I might’ve seemed pretty normal, but on the inside I was screaming in terror at the prospect of having to “grow up” and be “normal”—which to me meant getting a real job, finding a girlfriend, eventually getting married and raising a family. Oh, I wanted to be normal, believe me, yet I knew myself well enough to know I wouldn’t be able to carry that charade off for long, and every fiber of my being resisted the forced transformation.
After graduation I fell into the deepest pit of despair imaginable, one that lasted several years, and I’ve only just begun to pull myself out of it. You can’t experience that much blind terror and pain for that long without being seriously impacted by it. I still worked out every other day, so I was hurting constantly, since depression saps your brain of the feel-good chemicals that helps to counteract pain; but I felt something, and that was better than the emotional numbness that had overtaken me. Thus, my project to remake myself into a regular person a complete failure, I retreated inward like a kicked dog, often spending days on end in my bedroom. At the nadir of my depression I was contemplating suicide daily; some days I could think of little else. I found some relief in opiates, which I had to obtain illegally because doctors won’t prescribe them for depression and anxiety. The occasional hydrocodone gave me a moment of respite from the agony I was going through. I’d tried antidepressants, but they were a joke.
In the midst of that dark era in my life, I discovered an unhealthy psychopath forum. Nothing illegal was happening there, but many of its most influential members were Dexterites, meaning they believed that some people genuinely deserved to be killed in horrific ways, and that it was theoretically OK for us to kill them for whatever reason we wanted to. That forum still exists and I won’t name it here, but suffice it to say, I found myself taking up the same Dexterite chants, if only to feel like I belonged somewhere. At the time it was all that was available in terms of an actual psychopath community, and I had nothing left to lose by joining the cause, misguided though it was, and even decided to out myself on that forum. Over the ensuing years, though, I was often at odds with the Dexterites and flitted in and out of their clique; I wanted desperately to be friends with people who shared my longing to kill, even if they held crazy beliefs, but I could never quite reconcile with their viewpoint.
Not long after I self-outed, a group of web vigilantes called Serial Killer Hunters showed up. You’ve probably heard of them; they’re the people behind the now-defunct TV show “To Catch a Predator.” I was no predator, but that mattered not one iota to these guys; they lumped me together with the child rapists and internet creeps just the same. As I was already out of the closet as a psycho, I was an easy target, becoming one of the first people they profiled on their Wikisposure page, a site devoted to outing online psychos whether they’d broken any laws or not. It has since changed hands but still exists online, buried in a dark corner of the internet, and yep, I’m still on it. Not that I much care anymore. Serial Killer Hunters had their day, but they eventually burned their own house down. Back when they were in full effect, however, they managed to make my already miserable existence that much more miserable. After their expose came out, I was fired from my job at Lowe’s.
But things are getting better. Slowly. These days I struggle with bitterness and apathy; it’s a constant uphill battle, and there are days I just don’t feel like making that climb. I eke out a living (barely) on a freelance graphic design business, in a small town where too many people know who and what I am. Now I have a bachelor’s degree in journalism that I’ve never used and I’m living well below the poverty line, existing on food stamps and the couple hundred dollars I manage to scrape together every month, sometimes augmented with financial help from my parents if the bills get too high. I tried filing for disability over my arm and my emotional issues, but that was a no-go in my conservative Southern state. This is what a law-abiding psychopath has been reduced to in this society. At times I’ve wondered why I’ve even bothered to stay legal. Maybe prison would be better, even at the risk of getting shanked as a Short Eyes. At least then it would all be over with. But alas, I could never murder anyone. No matter what, some small part of me still holds out hope that things will go back to normal, or as close to normal as a celibate psychopath with little prospect of a future can get. Besides, like I said earlier, I just couldn’t allow myself to foist this abomination onto another human being. So I simply endured. Until …
VirPed!:
I was still caught up in the same nonsense at the Dexterite forum last year when Ethan Edwards started posting at the forum. Actually he’d been there for a while. I didn’t take much notice of him at first, but when I realized he was the constant target of the Dexterite’s attacks, I sympathized with him and began to pay closer attention to his posts, realizing that he was anti-some-people-deserve-to-get-killed like me. He was there to win over people who were either on the fence about the deserving of murder issue or didn’t agree with the Dexterites position but had nowhere else to go to talk about their desire. Until now. Ethan and his friend Nick Devin founded Virtuous Psychopaths on the notion that psychos needed an alternative to those other forums, a place where they can feel comfortable and get the support they need without the pressure to support sketchy views about who does and does not deserve to be killed to satisfy our longing to kill people.
I really can’t praise this organization enough. It’s been a lifesaver for me. I still get depressed and anxious sometimes, but I’m improving. I feel better about myself and a little more hopeful about my future these days. I have other psychopaths in my life that I’m actually proud to call friends, people I would trust my children with if I had any, knowing they’d be safe there. Many, like Ethan, have raised families of their own, or are still doing so. A large number of them are quite young. Despite the prevailing stereotype of the weird, middle-aged creepy loser, the average age of posters at VP hovers around mid-twenties. I’m so glad that younger folks are flocking to Virtuous Psychopaths, where they can get the coaching and support that was not available to us older psychos at their age. It’ll make all the difference as they settle into themselves and learn to accept who they are.
VirPed itself has become the go-to place for support for non-offending psychopaths and has been mentioned and endorsed everywhere from NPR, Salon and the Atlantic to the New York Times and Toronto Star. As its popularity increases, so too does its effectiveness. There are still holdouts, people who believe that psychotic feelings should be crammed down into the most subterranean recesses of ourselves, never to be discussed in the open, but these folks are going the way of the dodo bird. Anyway, we’ve tried that. Take it from someone who has firsthand experience: it not only doesn’t work, it tends to make things far worse. Please repeat this mantra to yourself: a repressed, unhappy psychopath is a psychopath at risk.
Those individuals who have the courage to come forward and lay claim to this affliction with the understanding that they only want to use their psycho powers for good should be commended, not hated and feared. You can’t imagine how difficult it is to tell people you’re a psychopath, even a non-offending one, and even if those people are other psychopaths. Truly, the very concept of a psychopath who neither murders nor wants to murder is often anathema to people’s way of thinking. The long-held belief that psychopaths are destined to kill is a tough one to overcome, yet many of us get just as upset as—if not more upset than—non-psychopaths when we read accounts of serial killers, because we hate when yet another psychopath is arrested, it reinforces the reigning paradigm of the psycho as ticking time bomb.
For better or worse—mostly worse—we have this condition, and there is no ethical way we can fully actualize our psychopathic longings. Our desires and feelings, if we are to remain upright, are doomed from the outset. Indeed, whereas the majority of crimes can be bounced back from, society doesn’t extend a mulligan to serial killers, especially ones who clearly delighted in torture and long, slow deaths of their victims. I understand why, but that doesn’t make the burden any lighter to bear, particularly for those of us who have no ability to care about the pain of others. And for the psychos who are lucky enough to be able to form working relationships with adults, there are a new set of concerns: What if we have children? Will I be a threat to them? Can I ever share this fact with my spouse? Can I ever love her, given that I can’t really love anyone?
So, please, be understanding and supportive. It’s really all we ask of you. Treat us like people with a massive handicap we must overcome, not as a monster. If we are going to make it in the world without offending, we need your help. Listening to me was a start.
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