According to the National Institutes of Mental Health, “anxiety is a normal reaction to stress. It helps one deal with a tense situation in the office, study harder for an exam, keep focused on an important speech. In general, it helps one cope. But when anxiety becomes an excessive, irrational dread of everyday situations, it has become a disabling disorder.” Put another way anxiety is supposed to help us. The parts of the brain that produce feelings of anxiety are similar to the parts of the brain that process pain, another negative emotion. Anxiety and its cousin pain help us by signaling danger and causing us to avoid. Their job is to inhibit behavior. The part of the brain that processes pain and anxiety is called the Behavioral Inhibition System or BIS.

Why is it that in the popular media super-psychopaths like serial killers are portrayed has having such rich inner lives? (Consider the highly cultured Hannibal Lecter.) That’s not right at all.

Anthony Lane, film reviewer for the New Yorker, makes the point well:

There was a time when, as a God-fearing member of the community, you could commit a single murder, drop a couple of clues, and wait to be unmasked. Now it’s all serial slayers, stacking up bodies like air miles. Filmgoers are supposed to find this multiplicity enticing, and we are constantly being invited to enter into the “mind” of the serial killer, but in truth there is no drabber place to be, and the idea that there might be an artfulness, even a style, to the act of homicide is one of the more pernicious fantasies that movies like to hawk.

Editor’s note: Lovefraud recently learned of a survey being conducted by Mothers of Lost Children. This organization says, “We group of mothers whose children are forced to visit unsupervised or live with their identified perpetrators through failures in the family and juvenile courts. Our children have disclosed abuse, and have not been protected or believed. The agencies designed to protect children have not helped, and in many cases have done harm. We have done everything we, as individuals, could do to protect them, yet have been unable to keep them safe.”

If you are facing this situation, Lovefraud encourages you to contribute to the research. Following is a description of the effort.

Protective Parent Survey

You are invited to participate in a study of “protective parents,” that is, parents who have encountered difficulties in child custody cases after attempting to protect their children from abuse.

Last week Dr. Liane Leedom wrote about the tragic case Dr. Amy Castillo, whose children were murdered by their psychopathic father after several judges issued rulings that failed to protect them. I hope this terrible and extreme case will be a wake-up call for family courts.

Lovefraud frequently receives e-mail from men and women involved in child custody disputes with sociopaths, who hopefully, are not murderers. Here is one of them:

I am involved in a custody case with a sociopath, however, my case is being fought in Europe where I recently relocated to (I am American, he is European). After being the sole caregiver of my children for five years, I had no choice but to leave them with their father and return to the States. When we separated he took their passports and left the country for a year. It was NOT possible to obtain new passports for children without BOTH parents’ signatures.

It has been almost five years since the sociopath was arrested and I was given the miracle of getting my life back free from his abuse. It is amazing to me to know that once upon a time, I was abused. I was downtrodden. I was completely broken. The walking, breathing dead. At the time of his arrest, I had given myself up for dead. I dreamt about dying, yearned for my life to end. And then, the police walked in and arrested him and in that moment, everything changed. Life began again.

It was not life as I knew it. Life as it was. It was new life, with a whole new perspective and outlook. A whole new appreciation for what it means to live within my human condition, what it means to be free.

Here we go again, another three children murdered after the family courts allowed a psychopathic parent unfettered access them. This is the story of doctor Amy Castillo (a pediatrician) as was told last night on Larry King Live. Dr. Castillo’s problems with her husband began in full force about two years ago when he began “staying out all night.” The couple had decided that he would stay home with the children and that she would practice. However, she was unable to go to work because he could not function in the caretaker role. Due to his behavior, she left him. After threatening to kill himself he was hospitalized.

Editor’s note: This article was submitted by Steve Becker, LCSW, CH.T, who has a private psychotherapy, hypnotherapy, and clinical consulting practice in New Jersey, USA. For more information, visit his website, powercommunicating.com.

In my work with clients involved with exploitative personalities, it’s not unusual to learn, together, that detectable, early warning signals went unrecognized, minimized, or both.

This isn’t to blame the subsequent victims of abusive partners; there are many instances where such clues were lacking (and even when not, blame is inappropriate). But it’s to appreciate, undefensively, that the honeymoon phase of a relationship is almost, by definition, one that invites a level of denial. The denial helps protect our fantasy that we’ve finally met our perfect love partner. It’s in the honeymoon phase, especially, that our need to idealize a prospective partner is at its strongest, correspondingly leaving our objectivity—and sobriety—at its weakest. This makes for a worrisome combination, specifically encouraging the ignoring of ominous signals that, even if subtle, are no less invaluable and critical.

By now everyone knows about the astounding case of incest, etc. in Austria. The abominable story can be read here. No doubt some are going to excuse Josef Fritzl by suggesting that he must be a mad man. Others (for instance here) will find fault with society.

These rationalisations are because for regular people the immensity of the crimes are blinding. But there are enough clues already that what Fritzl is is a psychopath and as such is responsible for his actions.

Take one small detail - the alleged role of drugs in the case.

Franz Polzer, the Austrian police chief leading the investigation, said Fritzl had given the impression, during protracted interrogations, that after 24 years he now actually believed the web of lies he had constructed to keep his incest a secret from his own family, the police and the public.

“A victim of crime shall be treated with fairness, compassion and respect by the criminal justice system.” So states the Crime Victims Constitutional Amendment, added to the state of New Jersey constitution in 1991.

New Jersey also has a 14-point Crime Victims Bill of Rights (NJS 52:4B-36), which expands upon the constitutional amendment. Among its provisions, crime victims and witnesses are entitled to:

• Be treated with dignity and compassion by the criminal justice system.
• Be informed about the criminal justice process.
• Have inconveniences associated with participation in the criminal justice process minimized to the fullest extent possible.

The Bill of Rights sounds good, but it hasn’t done much for Trish Rynn, formerly of Ocean City, New Jersey. She was scammed by a seasoned con artist, Dennis SanSeverino, and now feels she is being further victimized by the New Jersey courts. It is a classic case of Legal Abuse Syndrome.

This week we received the following email. I am sharing it with you because what she reports is very common on a number of levels that I will discuss.

I was married to a sociopath for 25 years. They were horrible years because most of that time I had no idea I was married to a sociopath. I was deeply in love when we met. He told me everything I wanted to hear. Knowing all my weaknesses and fears he fed them, made me totally emotionally dependent on him. He helped me get great jobs, pumped me up so I would keep making more money, while of course he lived off me. But at the same time kept telling me I was ugly, fat, sickly. He had affairs. All of this and I still kept hoping he would change and someday really love me. He even encouraged me to do some illegal stuff – which I did – just to make him happy.