Dec
1
Recent Sex Offender Denials in the Media
There have been a number of sexual offender revealings in the media of late, and the details seem shocking when the offender is unconcealed. What is most remarkable is the level of persistent denial in the offender’s accounts of what happened. The deeper the pathology, the more defensiveness and denial required. For instance, when Jerry Sandusky says that it is true that he took showers with boys, in his rationale, this should explain away the multiple, detailed accounts of abuse that have been reported. Someone somewhere will believe this, he thinks.
In a more practical way of understanding this deviancy, the offender explains away behaviors that are known to be dangerous and wrong, by practicing lying and deceiving to account for decades of offending. Over time, they co-mingle truth and fantasy so much that both are expressed simultaneously in reality, splitting away from the impact offending causes on victims.
In thirty years of working with these sorts of distortions with offenders in psychotherapy, these justifications and rationalizations I have found to be true and consistently the same along a continuum of lesser to greater degree of pathology. Early onset, multiplicity and chronicity of experiences generally determine the depth and degree of sickness in the offender. And strangely enough, they are usually very compassionate and functional people in other areas of their life.
This conundrum creates such disbelief in the people around the offender that often, reports of their offending behaviors are dismissed as the victim wanting attention, or characterized as a character assassination. The skilled offender is savvy to this, and hides behind the suspension of disbelief that is cast around these accusations. For more information about consulting and treatment, please contact my office.