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I was triggered watching the sentencing trial. I hurt for the victims/survivors – there are not enough words to describe how beautiful and brave Michelle Knight is as a person. He stole so much from these women. It’s hard to fully comprehend the sheer magnitude of their extreme trauma. A life sentence for them — sadly true from severe complex trauma. They are in good care, though, which is so important.
Hearing Castro talk his shit FELT very familiar. The victim blaming, excuses, delusions, lies, no empathy, no conscience… it triggered the hell out of me, because we have all heard similar craziness to that. The outside world would roll their eyes at this, but I could hear many of our SA’s in him. He used porn and sex addiction as an excuse to avoid taking responsibility for his behavior – “I’m sick” – once again, very familiar. Many of our husband’s do this, or would if they needed to defend themselves. It had me wondering how the SA industry and CSAT community would respond to all of this.
Help me get my head around this for a minute – not whether Castro is a sex addict or not – but more the response to it. My own PTSD makes me wonder if I’m seeing things correctly or picking up on things that aren’t really there.
Rob Weiss started posting on social media “Ariel Castro not a #sexaddict he’s a sex offender. It sounds a lot better to say “you’re an #addict” than to admit to offending.”
By that, he implied to all his followers that sex addicts cannot also be sex offenders. My head was spinning, thinking that’s a real dodgy way to explain it. Along with it carrying the notion that sex addicts never take the easiest selfish route, never blameshift or use excuses. I decided to ask Weiss to please clarify: “Explain more? Because some sex addicts actually are sex offenders, with NPD or APD, delusional & use all excuses to avoid responsibility. I mean are you implying sex addicts cannot also be sex offenders? Never escalate to predatory behaviors?” He didn’t respond.
Then he posted “Monster? Yes! #Sex #addict? No! My thoughts on Castro’s statement: Classic signs of a #narcissistic #sociopath.”
Then he was interviewed and published in a news article “He’s clearly using sex addiction as a way to make his horrendous behavior look better,” Weiss said. “Without remorse, without empathy, without a consistent pattern of compulsive and addictive behavior that involved different settings over time, not just these particular individuals, I don’t see a sex addict. I just see a psychopath and a sex offender.”
He outright said to everyone that sex addicts are not sociopathic or narcissistic. That the signature traits of sex addicts are empathy and remorse. This entirely flies in the face of most of our real life lived experiences.
It seems if it’s Tiger Woods or politicians, they pounce ASAP and adopt the person as a sex addict, yet if it’s someone purely hated and horrific like Castro they immediately don’t want their industry associated with him and are very quick to distance both themselves and sex addicts from evil, even if it means spreading dishonest information. To me, it feels like they don’t want the world to ever view sex addicts as bad, harmful, or dangerous people. They lie about the truth regarding their serious problematic traits and hide their real capabilities from the public — which as we know, they are capable of anything. It’s like they create a distinction: sex offenders “bad”, sex addicts “good” with no propensity for abuse or violence. No wonder nobody understands or believes we go through abuse, when it’s distorted and sugarcoated like this.
And imagine Weiss or Carnes trying to call Castro’s abused ex-wife a ‘co-addict’ and “sicker than him”, on the stand. Try make that fly in that courtroom. They would have sounded just as absurd and insane as him.
Do you see it, or is it just me?
Love Victoria
From what I remember reading about sex addiction, probably Carnes, is that he describes different stages of sex addiction and the last one was behavior that was illegal. He included prostitution in a lower stage, I don’t remember the rationale.
Final stage included rape, as I recall.Sorry, Victoria, I just can’t watch it. I saw a minute of it, and it was just way too triggering. Not to mention before the clip and ad came on for a new show where Julia Stiles plays an “escort” called “Blue”.
Man this is going to be a long day.
But your analysis sounds right on. I have heard that he did a lot of blame-shifting, gaslighting- “I am just a nice normal guy with an addiction.” Thank goodness there were 3 women to corroborate each other’s stories. If there was just one, it might have turned into a he said/ she said kind of thing. I haven’t really paid much attention to it, honestly, bc of the triggers.
Thanks Teri, yes the 3 levels is part of Carnes’ escalation model.
Please note, I’m not asking anyone to see the video of his statement – I put the news link simply to source the article Rob Weiss was quoted in. I didn’t notice the video was on the site too. What he said was vile victim blaming and deeply disturbing. As I said, triggering, so please don’t feel you need to watch if you haven’t already seen it on TV. Gosh, I felt so awful for Michelle Knight being there for that, sitting and hearing it.
Victoria,
You are right, you didn’t ask us to watch his statement. I just tend to go to primary source rather than listen to analysis. Don’t think I can do either in this case. I wish I could to bear witness to what those women went through, but I can’t. It makes me sad that I can’t, though.Wow Victoria, unbelievable.
Yes, you are right on IMO. I think Weiss is making an extraordinary blunder. There are two Weiss’s who are csats, and I think this is the one who is a Carnes trained guy, and “recovered” sex addict. Also gay, I think.
I’m mentioning that because it sounds a very personal need to defend sex addicts and limit their awfullness in our minds.
But we all know they escalate, many of their penis activities are criminal and dangerous to women in particular. And don’t even get me started on the narcissism.
Good catch, Victoria. I, think we have to have an eye on this stuff.I read it and had the completely opposite reaction. My take was that Weiss and the other “experts” were saying that Castro is a sociopathic narcissistic whatever who is trying to excuse his horrifying behavior by saying he couldn’t help it, he’s a sex addict. He’s using the ol’ “pity me, I’m an addict” ploy as an excuse for the inexcusable. I didn’t see anything in the article that made generalized statements that SAs can’t be sex offenders or aren’t sociopaths or narcissists. The point was only that CASTRO is trying to use sex addiction as an excuse for the fact that he is a sex offender, a baby murderer, a kidnapper, a wife beater and a whole host of other things.
“Without remorse, without empathy, without a consistent pattern of compulsive and addictive behavior that involved different settings over time, not just these particular individuals, I don’t see a sex addict. I just see a psychopath and a sex offender.”
I think this is the quote in question. It implies that sex addicts have empathy and remorse.
It states that Castro does not have remorse or empathy and that lack is the hallmark of a sociopathic personality. He’s narcissistic in that he seems to have this overwhelming need to try to bolster his own image which, of course, is a losing proposition. I understand the triggers, but I really believe you are reading too much into what is being said. It is specific to this particular man trying to claim addiction as an excuse for what he did. I don’t see that they are trying to generalize or condone beyond that. My reading of “not just these particular individuals” is that he is referring to the women victims. In order words, Castro does not have a consistent pattern of compulsive and addictive behavior in different settings over time with women other than these particular victims. So he is not showing an addictive pattern of behavior toward sex and women in general, just a horrific indifference to the suffering of these particular women which again is indicative of a sociopath or psychopath, whichever label they are using and they seem to have used both.
Kudos to all of you that can still turn on the TV and have the fortitude to discuss the latest sex addiction story. Between Anthony Weiner texting his dick all over cyber space, Ariel Castro kidnapping, raping and torturing those three girls for a decade and now Simon Cowell screwing his buddy’s wife and getting her pregnant – I can not turn on the TV. I have unplugged before my head explodes. I am moving backwards lately and the news stories these last few weeks just added to my despair. What little energy I have left is being saved for the disclosure on Friday.
I hadn’t heard about Simon Cowell. Sometimes it just seems like all men are jerks.
Maybe someday they will have brain scans that they can diagnosis all this stuff with, and we won’t need to debate what’s wrong with them, at least.
Same here Victoria. I never saw once sincere remorse from my xh. I never saw shame either. The only times he ever expressed remorse was for himself.
no kidding,
It was like dday gave him permission to feel sorry for himself and talk about his difficult life being loved and cherished, trusted and respected, by his wife and two sons. Really–there should be a shelter for these abused men.This is a difficult topic, Victoria, thanks for posting and your thoughts. i don’t watch or read anything, so I found it very interesting.
Diane, I laughed out loud at your post. Amen.Thanks for helping me — I’m glad you could see what I noticed.
The number one agenda is to protect sex addicts. They do not want them to been seen as abusers. The cover up of such, extends to misinforming the addicts about themselves, lying to partners who are actually abuse victims, and using the media to misinform the world at large.
It’s much easier to frame us as nasty angry bitter villains with our own sickness, rather than traumatized victims of abuse — if all sex addicts are always remorseful and empathetic to us. Right?
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