The Puppet Master and the Psychopath, Pt 3

Living with a Psychopath

Disclaimer: Please note, I’m not a clinical psychologist and therefore not qualified to make psychological assessments of individuals. This article (and this entire substack) consists of my personal opinions on this and other topics based on my personal experiences and related research.

I’ve been familiar with psychopaths and psychopathic methods since I was a child despite the fact that psychopaths were just beginning to be recognized by Psychiatry. Cleckly’s groundbreaking book on the topic, The Mask of Sanity, originally published in 1941 and updated several times, shed light on the issue for the first time:

“Many of these people, legally judged as competent, are more dangerous to themselves and to others than are some patients whose psychiatric disability will necessitate their spending their entire lives in the state hospital. Though certified automatically as sane by the verbal definitions of law and of medicine, their behavior demonstrates an irrationality and incompetence that are gross and obvious.”

Instinctively I knew that the behaviour I was seeing wasn’t normal but I didn’t have a name for it.  It was obvious to me that there was something seriously wrong with my younger brother who seemed to get a great deal of pleasure out of hurting me or seeing me hurt in a myriad of ways.

In my opinion, the behaviour he exhibited both as a child and an adult, fits the parameters of a psychopath. He’s almost textbook.

Psychopathic games he used to play:

-lie to my mother and blame me for things he did, resulting in me being punished for his misbehaviour. He’d stand by watching and smirking as I was being punished. This went on for years. My dad put an end to it when he finally discovered what was going on.

-catch bees in jars, shake the jar to anger the bee, then chase me with it, throwing the jar at me in an attempt to get the bee to sting me. He did this almost daily for an entire summer, after he got stung. Presumably it was my fault that he got stung, even though I wasn’t there when it happened.

If it had only occurred a few times, one could explain it as just brotherly teasing which was on the mean side. To do it daily for two months takes it out of that domain and into the domain of completely batshit, in my humble opinion.

My older brother engaged in friendly brotherly teasing and I understood it for what it was. I know the difference. His was normal.

-lie to my mother by claiming that I never played with my toys and games and asked her to give them to him. She did. It got to the point where I’d have a toy or a game for a day and then it would disappear before I even had a chance to open the packaging. Eventually, his closet was full of both my and his toys and games and mine was empty with the exception of my books and my Chatty Cathy doll. My dad solved the problem by duplicating everything he bought me and giving it to my brother as well instead of buying different ones for each of us. He had a lot of his own toys and games, he just wanted to take mine away from me, and he no longer had an excuse to do it.

-stole my bike after my dad had prohibited him from riding a bike because he rode like a lunatic and my dad was afraid he’d kill himself. My dad finally took the bike away after my brother stole it, rode it in front of a car and got hit. He told me, he knew I couldn’t stop my brother so it was safer not to have the bike anymore. Of course, my brother lied and claimed I pushed him in front of the car. I was trying to stop him. He knew that. So did my dad.

-Stalking and eavesdropping on my dad and me when we were talking about my personal concerns or problems, then giving the kids at school a misrepresented, out of context, spin of what I said in order to incite hostility and poison my relationships.

My dad and I started to go for walks together so that we could talk privately. My brother started stalking us on our walks. My dad finally caught him and ended that.

-Then he started stalking me regularly.

I used to use a short cut through the woods, to walk home from school and there was a paper shack on the trail (a hut where the newspaper delivery boys would pick up their morning and afternoon newspapers to deliver them to people’s homes). They were always friendly to me. I was eleven and too shy to stop and talk to them but we always exchanged a friendly “Hi”.

My brother complained to my dad that they were always harassing him. He knew that playing the victim was the most effective way to get my dad’s attention. So, my dad asked me to walk with him after school. I agreed but of course, he was nowhere in sight after school.

For some reason, my brother didn’t want them to see me with him. I can’t imagine why <sarcasm>. Did he have something to hide?

My dad asked me if the boys at the paper shack had given me any problems. Apparently, my brother had implied they were racists. They weren’t and I told him they were always nice to me.

-These are just a few of things he did. There were many more, along with the fact that he had all of the traits associated with children who become diagnosed as psychopaths when they’re adults: bedwetting; nervous habits; sleep walking; and stuttering. As an adult he was a big fan of Scientology and still likely is. Psychopaths and cults seem to walk hand in hand.

-As a rule, he was careful not to let my dad or my older brother see what he was doing to me or others but my dad was starting to catch on to his scams. My mother always gave him whatever he wanted and believed all of his lies, so he felt free to do all of this in front of her. My older brother was very popular and always out with his friends so he never saw what was going on and had no idea what his younger brother was doing and what he was really like.

Unfortunately, my dad died before he had a chance to address what he finally realized was a serious problem. Not that anything he might have done would have succeeded. Psychopaths can’t be fixed. It would have broken his heart.

-Things escalated after my dad’s death and after my older brother moved out of the house. My younger brother was no longer restrained. He became open about his activities. Frequently bragging about them to anyone who would listen. Things like: Setting fires in the park next door; Bullying vulnerable kids at school; Manipulating his friends with lies in order to incite them into targeting those kids with smear and harassment campaigns; Breaking and entering; Pushing drugs; Allowing pedophiles entry to our home: I caught 2 of his buddies in my younger sisters room and threw them out. She was just a little kid at the time; Getting his teenage girlfriend pregnant, blaming me for her getting an abortion (she decided on her own and had already arranged it by the time I found out – I was just being supportive); stalking her until her father stepped in and told him to leave her alone. The family finally moved; They weren’t the only family driven out of the community by him and his harassment campaigns against some of the other kids; Intentionally picking fights with me daily; If I ignored him, he’d stalk me and yell at me or physically push me around, until he got a response. Then run to my mother claiming I was always fighting with him.

Despite all of this, when he and another kid got into a fight at school, and the other kids father threatened to sue, I still stepped up and spoke to the School Counselor on his behalf and at my mother’s request. The family didn’t pursue the lawsuit.

That didn’t stop him or get him to back off.

He was an expert at making mine and others lives miserable. He seemed to enjoy it, even live for it, given that he wasn’t doing much else other than pushing drugs out of my mother’s basement and breaking and entering into his friends homes.

I know that poverty can drive good people to do what they need to do to survive. I understand that and I’m sympathetic to it. Jose Rivera was a good example of that and his book, American Wetback depicts it beautifully.

However, we weren’t poor. There was no excuse for my younger brother to be doing the things he did other than laziness, greed and the fact that he’s a psychopath and enjoys it.

I finally moved as well. Across the country from Vancouver to Toronto. Just to get away from him and his lunacy.

I managed to get a job as a Library Clerk and settled in, applying to attend college the next year. Life was still a bit crazy but not as bad as it had been in Vancouver. I managed to attract another stalker who claimed to be in love with me despite the fact that we had barely said two words to each other. I just ignored his persistent demands for attention. He moved on after a year.

Going into my second year in college, my younger brother appeared in Toronto. He had been arrested for pushing drugs in Vancouver. Some deal was made somewhere so he didn’t do jail time but did manage to make a move to Toronto.

Oddly, when the police raided my mothers’ home, they had a warrant to search my room as well despite the fact that I had never been involved with his drug business and there wouldn’t have been anything in my room that would indicate I had been unless it had been planted there. As far as I know they didn’t find anything after they did a thorough snoop.

Six months later, me, my older brother and younger brother were living together. During this period, I suddenly stopped receiving my monthly cheques from my mother and had to work to earn spending money. She insisted she was sending them but they were addressed to my aunt’s home and my aunt claimed she wasn’t receiving them.

Then, out of the blue, a woman who worked at the college appeared and asked me if I was interested in doing some hostess work for college events. Of course, I agreed. I needed money for bus fare and other expenses. The timing was such an amazing coincidence <sarcasm>.

As soon as I graduated and found a job I moved out and that’s when my younger brother decided to move back to Vancouver. Go figure.

Note that the above occurred during the Operation Checkmate period when I was a target of the RCMP Security Service. John Kennett Starnes was the Director of the SS and Ron Yaworski, the Director of Operations and destroyer of the Operation Checkmate files.

Since the sexual torture/murder/kidnap attempt on me failed, it was the jobs, this woman, Devi and her boss, Alvin Curling, Director of Student Affairs at that time, that were used as the means to set me up to be drugged, sexually assaulted, publicly humiliated sexually (all orchestrated by the Reitman perverts and their cohorts), as well as drugged and interrogated at the end of my college work placement.

My book, Persecution Games gives the details of these stories. The experiences of the Rita character in the book are true and are my experiences.

Things just got worse as my younger brother got older. He had my older brother completely conned to the point that my older brother had no idea the younger one, now a lawyer, disbarred and reinstated with my older brothers help, had spent 20+ years living off his wife and not practising law.

During this early period, he had done a small handful of cases, some pro-bono for his drug buddies, and two which resulted in complaints leading to his disbarment. He blamed what I would describe as outright fraud on his cocaine habit and went into rehab. The rest of the time he was basically a bum with a law degree. My brothers lived 30 minutes away from each other and saw each other regularly.

I lived in Ontario, avoided contact with my siblings, and I knew this.

My older brother didn’t have a clue. He found out when I told another relative then used his connections to get the younger one a job as a lawyer.

My younger brother, like a typical psychopath, never had to face the full consequences of his bad acts and his lies. He was always playing the poor victim, lying to gain sympathy, and conning other people into helping him get out of the messes he constantly created for himself. And, of course, he always made sure he had some bootlickers in tow to back up his lies. People like my opportunist, sell out of a cousin who I mentioned in previous articles.

Meanwhile, during the entire period I was in Ottawa and Toronto to date, he’s whined incessantly to everyone who will listen about what a meanie I was to him when we were kids and gossips to everyone about how I allegedly gossip and say mean things about everyone behind their backs.

I don’t. Like any normal human being I have opinions but I’ve never gone out of my way to hurt anyone.

I do stand up for myself when dealing with toxic abusive people who try to create problems for me and then I walk away and forget about them. I don’t care enough about this BS to pursue vendettas. I’d rather do productive and constructive things with my life which I am doing with my volunteer work.

The spins he fabricates relating to events that occurred are all full of lies designed to either make him look like a poor innocent victim and me, his persecutor or to poison my relationships with family and friends, including my children.

Psychopathic projection at it’s best.

The only time I mentioned him during the entire time I’ve been in the East was when I told a relative he was living off his wife. I was simply stating a relevant fact in the context of a conversation where she brought him up. I didn’t initiate the topic. I had moved on. What he did or didn’t do didn’t matter to me.

Now the story has to be told because he’s been messing with the family inheritance which he has control over, and I’ve discovered he’s trying to locate people I used to know, old friends of mine, so that he can spread his “shocking stories” about how evil I allegedly was to him when we were kids, generate hostility by lying to them about things he will claim I said or did to them. If he succeeds in poisoning the relationships he’ll use them to fabricate more narratives.

I haven’t named him or my older brother because, believe it or not, I’m not trying to ruin him by getting him fired (I don’t care that much) nor am I trying to deride my older brother because of his wilful ignorance.

My older brother (deceased 2008) was basically a good person who wanted family unity but his self-deception regarding my younger brother got in the way. That saddens me because we were close when we were kids and he always had my back at that time.

My younger brother, changed that with his cons and his lies, and he did so in collusion with others who consistently and to this date enabled, encouraged and supported his lies, knowing full well they were lies.

His strategy is to ride my older brothers coattails and use him to gain credibility. Since his cons worked on my older brother, he’s trying to claim that his BS about me must be true because my older brother believed his lies.

The target audience of this article is people who know me and knew me growing up. They know who I’m talking about. It’s a reminder to them of his history and that he hasn’t changed.

Frankly, anyone who gets conned by him, probably deserves to be conned by him but they do have my sympathy.

Coming next: The Puppet Master and the Psychopath, Pt 4: A Psychopathic Methodology of Deception, Deceit and Dirty Tricks