I went to the link and read the article. A lot of the words resonate with my spirit, as it does with yours.

Thanks for posting this.

Para

: I have an adoptive son. We adopted him as an infant from El
: Salvador. He is nearly 30 years old now. I also have a
: natural born daughter from a previous marriage, When my son
: was little there seemed to be something odd about his
: personality. At the time I just accepted it as being a
: different personality type from me or my wife. He was loved
: and I still think his adojptive mother and I did the best

: we could in raising him and trying to impart our values to
: him as he grew up. He was an extraordinarily difficult
: teen, and in truth the stress of living with him
: contributed to the eventual divorce of my wife at the time
: and I - though I did my best not to express this or show it
: to my son.

: Fast forward many years later and I am working in a company
: where I came to realize some of the management there were
: probably clinically sociopaths. I read the book
: "Snakes in Suits" about sociopaths in the
: workplace and I recognized those traits in the managers who
: had caused me and most of the people who dealt with them
: such grief.

: I also came to recognize that my son is also likely a
: sociopath. He has all the characteristics: A talented liar
: who manipulates the people around him for his benefit;
: strong sense of "entitlement" and seems to think
: he's special; inability to learn from experience that he
: needs to put in the time and effort on the job to become
: proficient and reap the rewards; and appears to lack
: empathy for those people closest to him - like his
: girlfriend who seems to gave been supporting him.

: It's comparatively easy to learn to avoid and put distance
: between you and the sociopaths you are not related to. It's
: another thing to recognize your son is a sociopath and only
: contacts you when he wants something from you of a material
: nature. I have often turned over in my mind the questions
: of "Can he be helped?" and "Why is he like
: this?" The only thing I have learned is that I cannot
: change him and my life is far better the less contact I
: have with him. We now live a couple of thousand miles apart
: which seems to work well for me.

: I read a posting about soulless people or spiritless people on
: RMN's main page. While I'm not buying into all the details
: of that posting - The concept that there are hunan beings
: around us who lack the something that makes us a whole
: person is one way of expressing what I have seen in some
: people around us. I find it hard to believe that anything
: like 50% of the people on this planet are like that based
: on my own experiences, but I do believe that there might be
: about 1/10 of that or about 1 in 20 based on my own life
: experiences and on the number of sociopaths n this world.

: At the link there is yet another but similar variation on the
: concept that some people lack that "spark" that
: makes the rest of us empathetic and caring. Again, I don't
: buy the whole theory posted there - but parts of it
: resonate with my own experiences.