On leaving the film maker she showed no sign of emotion on saying goodbye, no embarrassment at the antics of Sam to the film maker who really appears to be the one who is traumatised and impacted on….

The film maker tried to tell her what he was saying about her to camera, and she showed no shock, didn’t seem upset.

The only thing I can think of is betrayal bond. He has her in his grip and she dares not leave him.

the crumbs he dishes out are sufficient for her to stay? she said he shares with her and shows her intimacy, he allows her be very intimate with him? or he allows her think that he is very intimate with her, he knows how important that would be in keeping her….why would he want to keep her? he is fond of her? loves her in his psychopathic way? he actually said it
He said if you bully somone in tiny doses, they only need a tiny amount and they do the rest themselves….it’s so creepy.

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Libelle I agree with your story about the surgeon and what he did. I’ve seen the same thing in hospitals where incompetent practioners where responsible for the death of patients and yet because they were physicians nothing was ever done to them because of teh status of the people who were “whistle blowers” was lower than the physicians so the administration always took the part of defending the physician. The deaths were “covered up” as “natural causes” not from the wrong medication or an obvious but missed diagnosis because the physician was an “idiot.”

There is an old nurse’s joke “What do you call the physician who finished LAST IN HIS CLASS”—the answer is DOCTOR of course. As a lowly intern there was nothing you could have done, I suspect. There have been few times I was successful in confronting (even tactfully) a physican who was responsible for the deaths of patients by pure stupidity and poor skills, though I did get one jerked up to the ethics committee of the hospital because the medical director over my unit was also chairman of that committee and I could freely go to him with the truth. It didn’t happen often though.

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My father said to me that his PhD was also “substandard”, but he just did it, and so what! No big deal. That prompted me to set my own standards sky high, so I am still struggling with it, maybe my procrastination stems from there?

When I was in internship one of our surgeons once did an operation and put an anus praeter and led out the wrong part of the bowel, and the poor man died some day later, he was very ill anyway, but he could have been living some more time. I was present at the operation and wanted to ask the surgeon whether he could tell me why he was so sure of cutting the bowel in half and closing the one part and stitch the other part to the belly (it was the wrong part he closed so the man died of bowel obstruction). The surgeon was so ill tempered during the operation I just kept my mouth shot. In hindsight my question would have been very useful. From then on I kept asking and still keep asking, and I am not very much liked for it.

Fast forward some years: I am at a dinner table with said surgeon. He tells “funny stories about his wonderful life as a gifted physician”, and HE TELLS THIS VERY STORY as a fun thing!!! I really felt sick and had to leave early.

So twisted, we just can’t grasp their audacity, and I am glad I lack THIS hypertrophy of the part of the brain responsible for it.

As for the woman of Sam Vanking: I just felt pity for her. Specially when she said she gave up on love. She knows! But the same time this part of Europe where she comes from is one of the poorest in Europe, and there are lots and lots of beautiful young women trying to go “Gold digging”, and after all he is famous, has a video done on him, maybe he is also rich, he is AMERICAN, and she is not so young any more, and leaving him would mean falling back into poverty. I found this part of the film really cruel towards her, confronting her with his ugly statements towards her.

The neurologists in our hospital think not too well about this fMRI either! And it is not validated in repeated series, and we have to wait until it becomes a standard. Maybe our guts are more reliable in this perspective!?

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The funny thing is that the challenge to his diploma has been ongoing for years and the “rebuttal” Donna posted was way before the film ever came out. It is amusing that he spent so much energy trying to prove through clever word use that his Phd was legit and then to turn around and admit it wasn’t on tape.

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I think the BEHAVIOR and the answers to the tests were what showed for sure that he was a P.

I looked at the wife’s face as she watched those tapes of Sam insulting her and it was so filled with embarassment and pain I thought. Yea she is in denial or trauma bonded to him. Whatever, she sort of kinid of “knows” but she can’t leave him.

I think all or most of us here can identify with that stance of wanting him to love her back.

The “victim” woman just to me, and I can’t say why, seemed to be “walkign like she was defeated” or scared. That’s all I could pick up on.

Just like a dog shows fright by his body language I think we do too, show our fear or our timidity or whatever. It was interesting though.

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But watching also gave me this insight: If you know from the start what you are dealing with (as thoroughly as many on LF do), and you refuse to personalize it or take it seriously, then his tantrums and tricks etc are like watching a two year old in a grown man’s body. As long as they truly don’t have anything you need or want and you don’t personalize it, doesn’t hurt much. Just rather boring and tiresome. But Sam could get to the filmmaker….the filmmaker needed him for the film!

And unfortunately in most cases we don’t know what we are dealing with right from the start.

I think I would have been more sickened by Sam had his victims shown THEIR hurt more graphically. But it almost was as if everyone in the film KNEW what Sam was, but were chosing to interact with him anyway, but weren’t under the spell, not very much. Except the wife. Is she in denial still? That seemed to be what that one woman who tested her was saying. Must be, to still be with him!

I don’t know what the arms out of sync means in psychological terms… that maybe she is a misfit, won’t have a lot of friends? I picked her too, but I thought she just looked too happy or carefree….and that would put her at risk.

On the test where Sam flatlined….do you think he faked that? Purposefully shut off his feelings? I guess not, based on the other tests. I thought they would do a brain scan while he reacted to words like rape, blood, etc. that draw forth emotions in most of us, but not P’s. I wonder, with both tests, can a normal person make it flatline by choosing to shut off their feelings, esp. someone who came from an abusive background and knows how to disassociate? It seemed if the person learned to use the feedback to score higher, they could also purposefully choose not to score. Sam? Or was he really trying.
?

Anyway, if he wasn’t faking, that is what impressed me the most. They are truly emotionally retarded and it is very comparable to mental retardation. They act age inappropriate and the retardation can’t be fixed. Even if they try real hard.

The filmmaker’s final point is don’t listen to Sam’s advice about how to live your life! Amen to that.

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“And sometimes it also offers us a gift of purpose. In my case and, in the case of several of us here on LoveFraud, our traumas have given us a clear sense of what we want to do with our lives.

I know I talk about God a lot here, and you probably know that my concept of God is not a traditional one. I depend much more on the God spark inside me than any idea of an big, external power. At the same time, I use my old Catholic upbringing to come up with some of the images I use in healing.

And one of those images is my soul standing at the door of life, giving God my laundry list of what I want to be born to. I wanted a family that was exceptionally smart, physically strong, good looking, born leaders and gifted in handling the materials of the world. And I got all that. It never occurred to me to ask that they were emotionally healthy and happy people.

But at the door, God said one thing to me as he sent me out to this life. It was that he had chosen something special for me, a big challenge and a chance to change the world for the better, if I could understand the meaning of that challenge. He said, “No matter what happens, you can always find the right path by asking yourself ‘what am I going to do with this?’ Everything you need is there. You just have to look at it all, and think about what good thing you can do with it.”

The more well I get, the more I realize that my whole life has been about that. And I think that’s true for everyone one of us. We just don’t see it that way when we feel overwhelmed by things that have happened to us. The sense of victimization is all about feeling like the world is big and strong, and we are small and weak. As we emerge from it into the simplicity of wounded innocence, we realize that we are simply learning and grasping again all that we have to work with.

And we go on, smarter and more resilient, to the next important “pleasure” in our lives and to meet the next learning experiences along the way. Because there is one more important thing about successful trauma processing, and that is our comfort and increasing speed with the process. The more we do this, the better we get, the faster we learn, the less it costs us, and the more quickly and effecting we can get back to setting our God sparks loose on creating more good in the world. ”

Have you all a peaceful sunday!

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But what can you expect from someone whose first words in a foreign language are shit and manure?

ty = thank you?

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One of the huge issues is that my house is actually toxic to me, and i have to move AGAIN. (i lived 7 years in the same place before i moved to this city and have just moved in july to get away from the smoke seeping into the last place). my home is not safe. so, being here is in no way calming and i cannot nest. and the longer i am in the house, the more muddled my thinking is and getting out the door is harder.

okay, I am going to get out of here. ty.

one step

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