President's Report for 2020

Hello, again!

I hope you all have come through the pandemic of 2020 in good health and spirits. It has been difficult for all of us, for sure, but we have not lessened our commitment to support the Foundation’s core Vision and Mission and continue to provide valid and reliable education about psychopathy to all who visit us.

In my 2019 President’s Report I mentioned one of the biggest accomplishments coming in 2020: our successful Kickstarter campaign -- which ended early in 2020 -- to fund two online courses currently under development.

The first course is designed to educate everyone about the nature of psychopathy and to make clear how people with psychopathic traits hurt others. Our plan is to make this course available to everyone without cost because we continue to believe strongly that understanding psychopathy helps all of us to protect ourselves and those around us from harm.

The second course is designed specifically for therapists to increase their effectiveness in helping victims and survivors of traumatic relationships with psychopathic people to recover. And we do not mean just people in romantic relationships but also people in family relationships, work relationships, and friendships – if you use the term “friend” loosely.

For more information about the courses, check out what we said in our 2019 annual report here: https://aftermath-surviving-psychopathy.org/annual_reports/2019/letter-from-the-president.html

Throughout 2020, Dr. Jill Ricke, Dr. Paul Babiak and I met regularly to continue converting the content of our in-person workshops to an online course format. We also added a good deal of new content to the courses, based on our different perspectives on the experiences and problems that victims and survivors encounter. We are increasingly optimistic these courses will be very helpful to those who view the material.

Naturally, as I am writing this President’s Report in 2021, we have just finished updating the courses, so again this letter is a spoiler for the 2021 Annual Report. We are quickly moving to the next phase of the project, and we hope you will continue to follow our progress as we complete these valuable tools for educating everyone about how people with psychopathy hurt others.

During 2020, there are a few other activities I want to highlight.

In 2020, we continued to post relevant information about people with psychopathic traits, and some of this information was translated into a variety of languages again in our ongoing effort to reach the entire globe. Between our Research Committee and our European volunteers, another 8 major posts were added providing current and valuable information about research.

One paper I especially want to highlight was reported by one of our co-treasurers, Mary Ritchie, who summarized some research on a new therapeutic approach that has shown some preliminary promise in helping kids who display some signs of psychopathic (or Callous-Unemotional) traits. It is easy to be overly excited by an initial finding and then be overly disappointed if some of the benefits of a treatment are not consistent. Therefore, we need to see if this approach continues to look effective when it is tested with different samples of kids. But I suggest that the fact that researchers are demonstrating effective therapy in any samples at all is real progress. [click here for it]

As this kind of groundbreaking work develops, it suggests there may someday be interventions families can use to help kids who show signs of psychopathic traits to bond with their families, to repair rifts. Our dedicated volunteers will continue to scour the research literature and identify some of the most important and helpful findings. Also, we hope you will continue to contact us with questions about topics you want to better understand, so we can help share information about what is most relevant to you. (Keep in mind there may be no research in some areas---but we will keep our eyes open should it arise.)

For people who do not want to read summaries of what we know from the literature, there are also a few videos on the Aftermath website that may be both informative and useful to you. [You can find them if you just type the word “video” in the search bar on the left side of the Aftermath Foundation website or click here.]

Finally, I want to highlight one other especially exciting development during 2020: the launch of a new support feature on the website: Through the eyes of survivors: Tips for recovery [link to Through the Eyes of Survivors on website]. This is a place where some of our volunteers who have recovered from difficult situations share things that happened to them with the direct goal of providing help to others. It provides a place, right on the website, to get a victim’s personal opinion, about specific issues that come up during traumatic relationships with psychopathic people. As always we also welcome your opinions about this new website feature. To that end, we plan to open a new place in the Survivors’ forum for reactions to posts in Through the Eyes of Survivors [ click here ]

Our Survivors’ Forum is still a great place to find information about specific kinds of situations other people have faced and lived through---and engage in “conversation” with those who may have experiences similar to your own. Although you cannot assume someone else’s experience or advice will directly match your own or help you, we believe that it is wonderful to have such a repository of personal experience and, in some cases, wisdom available to survivors. I encourage everyone to contribute to the forum. Join in and make the conversations there more active; we will all benefit.

Thanks for your continued support of the Aftermath: Surviving Psychopathy Foundation. We truly appreciate all you have done to support us and we will continue to bring the word (based in science and fact) about psychopathy to the public arena.

Dave Kosson

President, Aftermath: Surviving Psychopathy Foundation