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Letter from the President 2023 Annual Report
2023 was a good year for the Aftermath Foundation. I will summarize a few of our key accomplishments during the year, but just to jump right to the most exciting news: during 2023, we ran a pilot support group. Thanks to a few talented volunteers, we were able to run a successful group including women who had survived relationships with people with psychopathic traits. The group met approximately every two weeks during 2023. The feedback we received suggested it was quite useful for those who attended. As a result, we made plans to do the same thing in 2024, and I look forward to being able to announce what happened in our next annual report.
Since the Foundation was formed in 2006, our mission has focused on helping to reduce the harm caused by people with psychopathic traits. We have done this largely by posting accurate information about psychopathy, which is our attempt to counter the distortions and false statements that sometimes appear on the internet. We wanted there to be at least one place where people can find trustworthy information about psychopathy. As our website report shows, people around the world are continuing to come to our website and to read our resources. More on that below. Translating the information into different languages was a priority because there appear to be people with psychopathy in every country, in every culture.
We have also tried to help people in other ways – by training professionals in various fields with how to tell when someone with psychopathic traits is abusing someone. We continue to believe we need to provide this training to more professionals around the world, and that is why we are developing a course that will be available for them as well as another course that will be free to anyone to learn about psychopathy. We made substantial progress on the courses in 2023.
But we have also tried to help people directly. Through our Help Committee, we have responded directly to requests for help from people all over the world. Some are as simple as answering questions or referring to recent research studies. Sometimes we are able to help people connect with mental health professionals who understand psychopathy. (We do not charge any fees for these referrals, and we do not receive any payment from healthcare professionals to whom we refer.) View the 2023 Help Committee report. Until 2023, this was as closely as we have been able to work with individuals.
And that is why it is so gratifying to be able to work directly with small groups of survivors in the support groups we have had. We know there are many people who have been hurt by people with psychopathic traits, and we cannot possibly help everyone, but it is exciting to be able to help some people more directly, even while most of our impact must be indirect.
A bit about our resources: our volunteers have placed several different kinds of resources on the website.
First, there are summaries of research that are written so that you can understand them without a specialized degree. Psychopathy is one disorder for which knowledge is really helpful, and everyone deserves access to that knowledge. During 2023, 5 new research summaries appeared on the website.
Second, there are reports from survivors about things that helped them to get through the awful situations that these kinds of abusive relationships produce. These first-hand accounts are written by real people with lived experience. Access the Through the Eyes of Survivors accounts. Many more accounts from survivors are in our Survivors Forum. We note that we take steps to protect people’s privacy on these forums, so we ask you not to use your real name or user names that would make it easy for someone to find you.
Third, we bring you the perspectives of psychopathy experts. Not all psychopathy experts agree about everything. There are important disagreements even about the importance of specific features of psychopathy, as well as about what appears to cause psychopathy, and what we can do to recognize and intervene to help people with psychopathic traits. We try to work with as many different psychopathy experts as we can to provide an accurate picture of what we know at this time. We have an Ask the Expert feature, where researchers summarize some of their key findings and the implications of their work for survivors. In addition, we periodically hold conversations with psychopathy experts. These converstations provide an in-depth look at some of the research that experts in this field have conducted and what it means.
We know that relationships with psychopathic people are often traumatic relationships. Sometimes people emerge from these kinds of relationships feeling that they are permanently changed by them. Our goal is to reduce the amount of trauma that people experience by making information available about psychopathy that can help someone understand what has been happening to them and to help others to learn to spot people with psychopathic traits even before they are manipulated by them, before their trust is violated, before they have been abused. For those of us who are already in relationships that are damaging our self-esteem, putting us in chronic stress, or even controlling our behavior in ways that feel wrong, knowledge about psychopathy can help us to make sense out of the ways we have been manipulated or exploited. It can help us to access the support and resources we need to limit or stop the abuse.
Thanks to all our volunteers for their efforts! Thanks to all our members for your support! And thanks to all the people who visit our website and all who refer their friends who are in difficult, confusing, and abusive relationships. With your help we will continue to spread knowledge about psychopathy and about what people can do to protect themselves and others.
Dave Kosson