Letter from the President 2022 Annual Report

2022 was another good year for the Aftermath: Surviving Psychopathy Foundation. You could say it was another year of providing accurate information about psychopathy, another year of helping people. But it was also a building year for us. As we suggested in the 2021 report, we had decided to try to launch a pilot support group for people who had survived traumatic relationships. In 2022, we took the steps to make that happen.

Several of our volunteers are also licensed mental health professionals, and we worked with them and with some brave volunteers to figure out how to find and screen potential support group members as well as working out the structure of the support group and how to run it virtually.

During 2022, we also purchased the professional version of Zoom. In fact, although we had raised money for the support group during Giving Tuesday of 2021, as we grew ready to launch the support group, we discovered that we had additional expenses to make that happen. Notably, we needed an additional insurance policy. This caused us to delay the start of the support group, and for a time we were not sure we would be able to pull it off. But thanks to some persevering volunteers and a great group of survivors, the pilot support group took place in 2023 (you will hear more about how it went in the 2023 report).

In 2022, we posted quite a bit of information about the nature and impact of people with psychopathic traits. This includes four new summaries of psychopathy and the way that people with psychopathic traits behave towards others, four new reports about psychopathy from experts in the field, and another couple of posts from two survivors about some of the experiences they have survived. (Of course, all entries in the Through the Eyes of Survivors represent personal experiences that survivors have shared in order to help others to recover and thrive.) We were especially excited that some of our experts began sending us video answers to questions about their work, and so, in 2022, we posted video responses by Dr. Michael Woodworth. We are now encouraging psychopathy experts to feel free to share their observations and knowledge via videos, and so we hope to see more of these video posts in the years to come.

In 2022, we also continued to post information about psychopathy in a variety of languages. For a time, we had several volunteers translating information about psychopathy into other languages. These translations have helped us to spread the word and contribute to why people are visiting the website from countries all over the world. (View a distribution of the website visitors in 2022.) We have also continued to make progress towards completing the two online courses on which we have been working. To make the courses especially useful, we have begun adding optional enrichment materials to some sections of the courses.

Finally, in 2022, we finalized our first partnership. We are now partners with עוגן הכשרות (or Ogen, which translates into Anchor in English), an Israeli organization dedicated to helping people who have been abused by individuals with psychopathy. Later this year, we hope to be providing more information about this valuable organization on our website.

Thank you again for your continued interest in the impact of psychopathy and for your support of the Aftermath: Surviving Psychopathy Foundation.

 

Dave Kosson

 

P.S. If you know a language other than English and would like to help, we are always looking for more translators!

 

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