Title Image: PxHere Mother-Daughter_Public Domain is licensed under CC1.0

I chose the title image as it shows the relationship I think we all want with our daughters. The young daughter gives a gift of a pretty flower she picked just for her mom. The mom joyfully drops down to her daughter’s level to receive the flower. All is well with the world in this moment. Alas, those moments are distant memories for some of us.

In my “Part 1” blog post last time, I talked about the DSM-5 behaviors of antisocial personality disorder or ASPD, also called sociopathy and related them to what I had seen in my daughter over the years. I have continued to read a lot on the subject of sociopathy and psychopathy.

Hervey M. Cleckley, Psychiatrist

There is an earlier 1941 list of psychopathy traits put forth by American psychiatrist Hervey M. Cleckley which I have also found to be meaningful in relation to my daughter. He wrote a book called The Mask of Sanity, still in print. I did a Google search and saw that it can be purchased on Amazon.

The DSM-5 lists behaviors, however Cleckley lists traits. My understanding is that the DSM-5 moved to evaluating behaviors over traits as they were more easily observable. Internal traits are more difficult to evaluate when much of the trait is inside the mind rather than an outward behavior.

Since I have had 30 years of interacting with my daughter, I find the traits more compelling when I look at them in relation to her.

Cleckley’s Psychopathy Checklist

Here is Cleckley’s list:

16 traits: superficial charm, absence of delusions, absence of “nervousness”, unreliability, untruthfulness, lack of remorse and shame, antisocial behavior, poor judgement and failure to learn by experience, pathological egocentricity, poverty in affective reactions, loss of insight, unresponsiveness in interpersonal relations, fantastic and uninviting behavior, rare suicidal behavior, impersonal sex life, and failure to follow any life plan.

My daughter has displayed all of the above traits since her teen years and many/most of those traits since under the age of ten. I am both horrified and fascinated that a psychologist that compiled this list more than eighty years ago described my daughter so well.

I will pick a few traits and continue my comments concerning traits I saw in my daughter as she was growing up.

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Superficial Charm: In our annual Christmas letter, I used to write a description of each of the kids so that readers would have a sense of who they were at that point in time. One year I wrote that for my daughter, “strangers were just friends she hadn’t met yet”. She was under five years old when she would happily talk with perfect strangers while attending an older sibling’s soccer game. I would keep an eye on her as she played on the grass beside the line of parents ensconced in folding chairs, watching the game. I used to be amused at her lack of shyness in talking with strangers. I was a bashful kid myself and would never have initiated a conversation with someone I didn’t know. I look back now and see both charm and a lack of fear. How could I have known that those traits would become part of a larger picture that would not bode well for either her or our family?

Lack of Remorse and Shame: My daughter’s lack of shame at her actions drove me crazy. When I was young, I was the kid that didn’t want to get in trouble. When I was in third grade, I left an assignment at home. I was in such a panic over the thought I would be in trouble that I burst into uncontrollable tears, until my teacher finally persuaded me that the world had not ended, and I could bring the assignment in the next day. Yes, I struggled with anxiety even at that age.

I feel deep remorse if I think my actions have hurt someone and years later can have a hard time forgiving myself. I feel remorse even when intellectually I know I need to let something go. I’m pretty sure that on a continuum, I’m at the max end of overdoing remorse and shame.

My daughter, to my knowledge, does not worry about the future and has no remorse or shame about her actions in the past. She would be at the zero end of that continuum. It’s no wonder that I could never understand how she would be completely unfazed when faced with her bad behaviors. In her early teens I would try to get her to express feelings about her behaviors. I would ask, “Don’t you FEEL anything about what you did?” I never got a good answer. I now understand that it is as impossible for her to feel remorse as it is for me to NOT feel it. It’s like speaking a foreign language and expecting the other person to understand…never going to happen.

Failure to Learn by Experience: No consequence for behavior ever worked. In her early teens, when paying back double what she stole didn’t work, when facing her victim to apologize didn’t work, when extra chores didn’t work, my husband and I thought long and hard about what else we could do. Finally, we decided to take away the thing she loved most…soccer. Every time she stole, we took away a game from her. She was 12 or 13 years old at this point. We let the coach know what we were doing. Surely it would only take losing a game or two before her behavior would be curbed. Nope. Her behavior was not curbed by one iota. I look back now and realize what a gigantic red flag this was. What kid keeps doing behaviors that result in excruciating consequences? She did.

We Didn’t Know What We Didn’t Know

As parents to five kids, we thought we were experienced parents. Frankly, we thought we were awesome parents who could handle whatever kid issues life threw at us. We were so wrong.

No professional ever hinted to us during those tumultuous teen years that our daughter could be a sociopath/psychopath…until she reached the age of eighteen. I understand that the DSM does not allow that diagnosis prior to eighteen, however I would have liked to better understand what we were up against during those younger teen years.

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Now What?

The plain truth is that Cleckley’s traits listed above are fixed personality traits. From my perspective looking back in time, my daughter’s illegal behaviors stemming from those traits have been locked into a forward momentum that has never wavered from its destructive path. Even now, as my daughter sits in prison, her path forward after prison will be a continuation of the last seventeen years. Lie, scam, steal…get caught…more prison time…rinse and repeat. I have no delusions left as to what the rest of her life will be like.

These last two blogs may seem as though I am attacking my daughter though in actuality I am trying to understand her. As I write down my thoughts about this subject, it feels as if I am shining a light into a dark corner of my life. In trying to better understand who she is, I am trying to dispel the darkness that her behaviors have brought to our family.

My personal challenge is to live my life joyfully for however many years I have left, as if life is still as full of the rosy promise that I felt in my twenties. At times, I have felt like a broken shell of a person and parent because of all my daughter has done. I am fighting to be whole again.