We have decided to provide this report for a two-year period in part because the time continues to fly by. Of course, as an all-volunteer organization, we find that there are more things that we want to do than there is time to do them! As a result, we have been a bit slow in summarizing all we have done. Our hope is that this two-year report allows you to get a sense for what we have been doing since our last annual report and brings you up to speed on where we stand today.

As in prior years, much of our recent effort has been directed at providing more accurate information about psychopathy to people who need that information. We continue to believe that an understanding of the nature of psychopathy provides the best way for you to protect yourself and those around you. We try to reach as many people as possible by continuing to develop our website in order to provide as much information as we can about important research on psychopathy. We try to present summaries of the most important parts of the studies in language that the lay-person can understand, and we spread the information to people all over the world by asking multi-lingual volunteers to translate resources into new languages.  During 2016 and 2017 we began to add resources translated into Hebrew, and we are always looking for people who speak other languages and who can translate resources to help us reach more people. At this point, some resources are available in English, Bahasa, Catalan, Dutch, French, German, Hebrew, Polish, Spanish, and Turkish.  We firmly believe that because people with psychopathic traits appear to exist wherever studies are conducted in the world, it is important that people all over the world learn from these studies in order to develop a better understanding of psychopathic individuals.

We also continue to believe most professionals do not understand enough about psychopathy. We know that even many mental health professionals do not understand psychopathy. The problem is even greater outside of psychology and psychiatry and social work. Most attorneys, judges, doctors, clergy, teachers, members of the armed services, and people who run most businesses do not understand psychopathy. They have heard of psychopaths. In fact, we see them all the time in movies and in books. Unfortunately, Hollywood and the sensationalist media outlets focus on a wide variety of weird, disturbing, and entertaining characters described as psychopaths who often bear slight or no resemblance to the actual syndrome of psychopathy. In short, we are misinformed on a regular basis by films and books and even the real news media, at times, when people who do things that we consider horrific are labeled “psychopaths,” regardless of their actual personality traits or motives. To help ameliorate this lack of understanding, we have conducted workshops to help educate professionals. During the past two years, we provided one additional workshop for psychologists (and other mental health professionals). To begin to reach out to a wider subset of people, we also provided one workshop during this period that was open to the general public.

However, we have become convinced that, to reach many more people, we need to put more information for professionals online. For this reason, we have worked hard to develop an online course based on our live workshops. During 2016 and 2017, two of our committees worked on setting up the first such course. Our first online course is designed to provide valuable information to psychologists who are pursuing continuing education.  We also developed a plan to use crowd-funding , through Kickstarter, to raise money to set up this online course. As a result of these efforts, we hope to launch the Kickstarter campaign to help us build the course later this year (or early next year)!

During 2016, we also improved our mailing lists that many of you have joined. These allow us to alert you periodically when new resources and worthy projects are posted on the Aftermath: Surviving Psychopathy website. For example, we will be sending out email messages to our subscribers when the Kickstarter campaign launches and we hope those of you who are interested will subscribe to these mailings. We also began using mailing lists to send out our newsletter to our members.

One of our biggest projects of 2016 and 2017 was continuing to bring our website up to speed. In this case, we mean that (almost) literally:   one major focus was the successful migration of the website in 2017 to a new host offering improved website speed and service. Although we did not get many complaints (thank you for your patience!), we hope you now find it easier to navigate the website. As part of this move, we simplified the organization of some of our website pages and made changes to improve website security. As you may know, we take privacy very seriously, and we continue to take all the steps we can to ensure that participants’ posts on our forums remain private.

However, the biggest (and most time-consuming) change to the website in the past two years was the upgrade to our Forums for survivors. We are very excited that the forums are functioning again and that they are providing an outlet for many people to speak securely with others who appear to have had somewhat similar experiences. We recognize that people with psychopathic traits, like everyone else, are unique, and, because every one of us is unique, the harm they do to us and our way of recovering from a traumatic relationship is also unique. This is all the more reason for all of us to communicate constructively with other survivors who may offer us unique insights for recovery.

There is another reason for us to communicate with others who have had traumatic relationships with psychopathic individuals, and it is something I look forward to discussing more in a separate post or video. There is evidence that talking about our own traumatic experiences can be helpful in our own healing. But for some conversations, we need a supportive place to feel comfortable sharing. It is our view that the Aftermath: Surviving Psychopathy Forums can provide a relatively unique place, an online support group unlike any other.  We hope they continue to provide the venue for these healing interactions to take place.

Although, as noted above, we have taken many steps to ensure that your privacy on the Forums is protected, we urge you to let us know if someone is trying to contact you in an unsecure way or if you have concerns that someone’s privacy is not protected. We have no knowledge of anyone using our forums for nefarious purposes, but we always urge you to be careful with people you meet online and to also help yourself by maintaining your privacy on our website. We need to help keep this online community safe because a safe and supportive community is one important ingredient in recovery.

Educating the Public

We also added several new resources to the website. Our Research Committee volunteers read and wrote summaries of 4 recent scientific articles on psychopathy in 2016 and 2017 to help people understand what we are learning about people with many psychopathic traits as well as people with only some (or moderate levels of) psychopathic traits.  These articles describe recent studies focused on what is wrong with psychopathic people. [Click here to read the Research Committee report]

We also started a feature that we call “Ask the Expert” in 2016.  We wrote to two experts who responded to our questions in 2016. We hope that some of you will let us know what you think about this feature. It is something that we hope you enjoy. In fact, we have had a section of our Forums devoted to asking experts question for years now, but it is only in the past few years that we have focused volunteer effort on this project. If you have questions or comments about what the experts say, we hope you will let everyone know on the Ask the Expert pages of the Forums. And please get ready for more experts who will be appearing on the website this year!

We also continued our Web Conversations with Psychopathy Experts over the past two years. We spoke with Dr. Kasia Uzieblo of Thomas More College (Belgium), and Dr. Adelle Forth of Carleton University (Canada). Some of our Members joined us for these conversations, and we were able to send copies of our discussion with Dr. Uzieblo to our Members. We hope you found the material useful. If you missed it, it can now be found on our website here. We hope to have the discussion with Dr. Forth edited and available soon.

Celebrating Our Tenth Anniversary

During 2016, we also celebrated the 10th anniversary of our Foundation. Although it had not occurred to me that the Foundation might still be active in ten years when I first began it, we knew that this was something to celebrate. We celebrated in part by developing three short videos to thank those who have supported the Foundation and to provide useful information to people who are concerned that they may have a person with psychopathic features in their lives.

The third one, Psychopathy – Red Flags and Warning Signs – is the one with the most concrete suggestions for when people begin to become suspicious that something in their relationship may be “too good to be true” – or that there may be a good reason to be more careful to avoid being manipulated, abused, and traumatized. As a result of the popularity of these videos, we have begun to work on additional videos to provide further help.

Helping People in Traumatic Relationships

We constantly work to find psychopathy experts from around the world to help people who asked for help. In 2016, we received 69 requests for help. In 2017, we received 32 requests for help. Beginning in 2017, we also began to track outcomes in more detail and are happy to share that information with you. We were able to connect 12 people with experts and did outreach or provided other kind of help to another 8 people. For the other 12, although we had some communications, we did not ultimately complete a referral. Click here to view the results of our efforts to help people. Unfortunately, we are not always able to find therapists or psychologists who understand psychopathy near where those who need help are located, but we continue to work to expand our list of contacts with psychopathy experts around the world. We appreciate those who let us know if our referrals are helpful. And if there are psychopathy experts out there who are reading this report, please let us know if you are available for assessments, for consultation, and for psychotherapy.

Please note that we are NOT able to help anyone who is currently in an emergency situation.  Anyone who is experiencing a health emergency should contact their local law enforcement or emergency services resources.

Recognizing Noteworthy Contributions

In 2016, the Aftermath Graduate Student Research Award was given to two graduate students whose work is summarized on the website. There are not nearly enough scientists investigating the impact of people with psychopathic traits on others, so we are pleased to be able to highlight some of the important new research that is being carried out in this area. For more information about our awards and our prior award winners, please click here.  And if you know someone who is doing great work, please do let us know about it!

Growing the Organization

We continue to try to encourage more people to give of their time to help us make the world a safer place. We are NOT asking people to join us while they are still recovering as everyone should be encouraged to put their own life back together before they worry about assisting others.  But we are always looking for help. In 2017, five new people joined the Foundation during the Society for the Scientific Study of Psychopathy meeting in Antwerp, Belgium, and we are excited to welcome them to the fight to help protect and heal those who have had run-ins with people with psychopathic traits. During the past two years, we were also fortunate to have Dave Weiner join our Board. [More information about our Board members can be found on our website.]

We continue to be grateful for those who have contributed to the financial health of the Aftermath Foundation. On the new website, we now provide a revised Support Us page to suggest ways that you can help us. One of the newest ways to support us that finally began to make a difference in 2017 was the Amazon Smile program. For those who do not know about it, the only trick is to go to Smile.Amazon.Com before you start shopping, and then a small percentage of all shopping purchases is sent to us. We have some exciting new partnerships to tell you about as well, and we are cautiously optimistic that our new Membership program (SSSHHH – we can’t tell you about it yet) will tempt some people to join the Foundation at a higher level. But, because some of these programs only appeared on the website in 2018 or are not quite ready for prime time, we expect to be talking more about them later this year (and in next year’s report).

Thank you for your continued interest in and support of the Foundation!

Dave Kosson