Unmasking the Mask: 69 Shocking Signs Psychopaths Use to Hide in Plain Sight
It really is that creepy, or even more. (After having read it again).
Not a psychologist but worked in a residential treatment facility for teen boys for a while during college. My biggest take away was that most criminals aren’t fundamentally bad, they’re broken in some way, and make bad choices sometimes. But there was also a degree of honor among them. We lived on a huge campus and the cabins of patients didn’t interact much. Because I was a young, small, woman I was obviously never going to be a physical match for my patients should they decide to attack me. It wasn’t scary though. I actually never felt safer than when we were transitioning to and from activities because I knew if one of the patients in another cabin so much as looked at me wrong, my boys were not going to put up with it. They bonded to me quickly – and other staff, typically because they didn’t have very many good examples of adults in their own lives.
That said there was one kid I will never forget as long as I live. This kid, let’s call him D, scared the s**t out of me. D had been inpatient for over four years (the average stay is 6 months). He had recently stepped down from the secured cabin to our cabin and his reputation preceded him. At first I was naive and figured he was just misunderstood (the last time I ever got white savior complex). It eventually became clear that Ds problems were deeper than I was remotely equipped to deal with. Apparently this had been the case over the 4 years he’d be there. He couldn’t be in a foster group home because he’d r**e the other children (typically younger boys but if he were mad enough he’d do it to anyone he could pin down.) He was essentially unadoptable and didn’t want to be adopted anyway because he thought his mom would be hurt. She wasn’t. She was just as scared of him as everyone else. I finally realized how bad it was when I realized he’d punish himself if in so doing he also got the satisfaction of hurting someone else. For example, he’d constantly talk s**t to the biggest guy on our cabin. The guy would ignore it until eventually D wore him down enough or said the right thing and then the big guy would kick Ds a*s. And D got hurt. But the other kid would get lockdown for putting hands on someone. It delayed his release. D got off on that. He didn’t care about physical pain if it meant someone else was made to suffer.
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