ONLINE NARCISSISTS: CAN THEY HELP OR HARM
I am very active in following murder trials, particularly the murder of Travis Alexander by a woman named Jodi Arias. If you are not familiar with the trial this isn't the moment I want to explore the details but of importance is that Jodi Arias has been found guilty of the premeditated murder of her ex-boyfriend Mr. Alexander in the state of Arizona. She is currently awaiting a trial to tend to the issues of whether she will be given life without parole of given the death penalty. It is my opinion that she deserves the death penalty and I am not alone in my thoughts. This particular trial was salacious because Ms. Arias is by all intent and purposes a Narcissistic Sociopath. She has been identified by experts to have Borderline Personality Disorder and that certainly played into the immature and paranoid manner in which she engaged in relationships, however it is her over sense of entitlement that allowed her to do the things she did and the sociopath in her that felt pleasure in killing Mr. Alexander for it relieved her of facing total exposure for heinous acts of manipulation. The evidence in this case is extraordinary, over 2 dozen stab wounds, a stab to the chest, a sliced throat that almost decapitated him and then as a finally "damn you," she shot him while he was already dead. But we live in a world of Narcissists so nobody likes taking responsibility. Initially denying she was even there, she changed her defense to two masked intruders broke in. Two years later when the evidence so strong she would never escape, she changed her defense to "self defense" in a step that shocked America and the prosecutors. But Jodi Arias doesn't like people to think badly of her so in an effort to not take any responsibility she falsely claimed he was physically abusive and worse that he was a pedophile. I assure you he was neither. She was just a sociopath trying to manipulate the world.
That brings me to this posting. As you might imagine Jodi Arias captivated America not only because of her outrageous lies but because for all intent and purposes she was an attractive young woman and because of that several rather mentally unstable people came out of the woodwork to support her. Numerous articles have been written about this case as have numerous books, but what developed online had never occurred before in the history of the judicial system. Hundreds of people (the minority of course) came out in support of Jodi Arias claiming everything from that she was innocent to even accusing the state of framing her. The "Arias Supporters" as they known on the website and Facebook community boards are aggressive, delusional, unable to tolerate facts in evidence but mostly there have been a few very aggressive and dangerous supporters who in an attempt to "discuss" their opinions of the case transformed their lives with Hitler like determination to destroy any one who remotely displayed a higher intelligence or even a basic sense of reason. It was as if we were seeing true sociopaths engage in Malevolent acts in order to derive pleasure out of harming others. One particular one caught my eye, her name was Sandra Webber. I must emphasize that I have neither met Webber, we have never privately contacted one another, we do not interact on the same boards, nor do we engage on these boards. Out of all of the "Arias Supporters" she appeared to take true pleasure out of personally making it her mission to investigate "Travis Supporters" and do anything possible to defame them. As a clinician I truly wondered about her but had not given her much attention for most of the trial. All I knew about her was that at one point she seemed quite reasonable and even empathic, writing loving blogs about her mother's experience with Alzheimer's Disease and her eventual passing. She seemed to be an orphan lost who had become broken by the pain and channeled whatever was inside her into utter hate at the world. She became infamous not for her points on the case but for hacking I guess into people's Facebook profiles or searching maniacally online for photos and information about their life and publishing it online, on youtube and anywhere she could. Why, I wondered would she behave so hostile to people she didn't know? Why would she appear to take such pleasure in causing such aggravation? and why if she really believed that Arias was innocent didn't she spend her time focusing on trying to explain her actual beliefs? The answer in my opinion was that she somehow connected to Arias and through Arias she was able to develop an online presence that made her feel important, it gave her a voice of sorts that perhaps she never had. And one day, not too long ago I realized that I could use her rage to insure that the story I was hiding would not go unnoticed. See just like her and so many followers I too held a deep secret and was uncertain how best to deal with it.
I noticed Webber baiting me online indirectly, making small comments in an attempt to diminish mine. Now I hold a doctorate degree in psychology and numerous other certifications. I am by all means an expert in medical errors and have a keen ability to notice seemingly insignificant details, investigate them, and not only correct diagnoses but alter courses of care. I notice when medical care is not ethical and certainly when it is wrong. I understand investigations as all psychology and medicine is reliant on strong investigative skills. To fully comprehend the Jodi Arias murder trial you needed to be heavily advanced in my skill set so I imagine my postings about the case made Webber feel inferior and perhaps stupid. I did know there was likely instability and I did find myself secretly longing for the day when she would crack and finally start using my name. See I want to tell a secret and what better way to insure that the secret is known than by poking the person I perceive as the internet's biggest bully. Although she runs a blog and a Facebook page called Inconvenient Truths, I was well aware that her annoyance at me was becoming rather convenient.
I had hoped to get this up sooner but a bad flu and some other matters have delayed my final draft but here is the situation I had wanted to get out. The rest will come soon along with documentation.
Two years ago my father Michael died. He was at The university of Pennsylvania medical center and under a fabricated clinical trial for cancer using engineered T-Cells. I say the trial was fabricated because there was no clinical trial approved for anyone using these particular type of cells for any other disease except Mesothelioma. My father became connected to Penn and a famous researcher named Dr. Carl June who frankly was pretty desperate to get himself a body for his personal trials but the FDA would not approve such. June, is the pioneer of T-Cells that use the virus that causes AIDS and alters it so that the cells attach and destroy a targeted protein. He certainly had success with Leukemia but a blood disorder is very different than a solid tumor cancer. All Cancer's these days are being examined by their protein and in fact in several years we may not even identify cancer by organs such as Ovarian or lung but rather by the proteins they originate from. The problem was my father dying with very advanced cancer that had spread into so many areas it was deemed completely inoperable. He had been diagnosed with several months prior and by the time he made it to Penn he had been debilitated by ineffective chemotherapy. Although it was indeed initially suspected that he might have Pancreatic Cancer, later special tests ultimately proved he didn't. Other studies such as whether he had a cancer that was Mesothelin positive or not had equally been shown to be negative --- and yet, there my dad was at Penn about to be enrolled in a Pancreatic Cancer trial that targeted Mesothelin. How he got there was rather simple, he paid a million dollars under the table with the promise from Carl June that this was the best treatment he could do. He paid because emu brother convinced him this was the best chance he would have. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Nothing. I will go into this entire story in my proper planned post but the point is the enrollment was spearheaded by my brother Jim who was definitely feeling shame that he had allowed a misdiagnosis of Pancreatic Cancer to occur and definitely ashamed that he had proclaimed online so publicly that he would save my father and cure Pancreatic Cancer forever. Delusions of Grandeur certainly as if there was a cure it wasn't hidden in an outhouse and the doctors too lazy to find it. But when Jim meet Carl June, there were two narcissistic opportunists and the results were deadly. Carl June has recently published an article discussing my father's case, ironic, as Penn denied he even existed for quite some time and certainly denied he received the precious T-Cells. There is no doubt that the doctor fabricated the disease as he identified my father as having Pancreatic Cancer. In research, vastly different than care by a practitioner, you cannot proclaim a disease unless there is absolute proof via a positive biopsy. My father had none. In the article about my father, the researchers lied about the extensive side effects that occurred, manipulated the Pet Scan results by omission of information of drugs given to alter the reading and even claimed they got cells from my father on a day he was already dead and his body prepared for transportation to another state. This was a terrible circumstance to begin with, nothing more painful than seeing your father & mother suffer unnecessarily. But there is more. The day after the funeral I had been the victim of a physical assault from my brother when he realized I fully understood what he participated and encouraged. I've never been assaulted. The physical damage was terrible and the PTSD even worse. I feared terribly what would Carl June or Penn or Novartis the big drug company who joined with Penn do if I exposed them all? Would they come after me too? Would they try to suppress my truth? Could I be harmed? Could my child?
I had already spoken with the FDA and knew that they did not approve my father's trial even though that is what my parents were told. I had already spoke to the Pennsylvania Medical Board who equally begged me for information. Ive know this for a while but the recent article had solidified exactly what I needed to do and why. I had saved all the records, all the emails, all the text messages, all of Jim's blogs and I took photographs and video of my father to document what state he was in and what they did. My parents were scammed. My heart has been broken. As I watched my father dying I knew that one day Penn might come around and use him further and I decided in spite of my fears that if that day came, I would be ready. If you return to my blog within the next two weeks or so you will get to know the whole story. You will see documents, you will read truths, you will know all the details of this cancer scandal and the impact cancer and narcissism has had on my family. You'll hear about how almost a year after his death, investors who gave great money to Penn swore to me they thought my father was alive based on what they'd been told. You'll hear how my family divided and that almost all couldn't face the feelings that they might have contributed to this tragedy. In truth people frequently undergo experiences of severe medical misconduct, they just don't usually know it. Sometimes this occurs because illness makes people desperate, some ignorant and some simply naive. I've come to recognize that it is intolerable for most people (thankfully) to think they could have caused harm to another and terrifying to think they may be surrounded or close to someone who could. As a result, they became venomous to me as I held up the mirror and didn't want to put it down. In the meantime, before I disclose my personal family cruelty, I want to save lives (including my own) and I want to put it online so that no medical or institution board can suppress the information. I do not want money paid off to keep this quiet and just in case something bad happens to me I want an alibi. This blog will be my alibi because there is a medical patent in place on that treatment, millions if not billions of dollars to be made and reputations about to be destroyed. Bu the simple truth is people will die if they have this treatment. They already have and not just my father. If this goes broad, patients will suffer and they will die long before anyone truly realizes this is all a fraud. They say it takes somewhere about seven years after treatments start clinical trials for the medical community to recognize that the original data relied upon was flawed. About 2/3rds of all studies that initially claim success are, at some point later on, found to be unsafe, deadly, and/or simply ineffective. With the truth on my side and the records in my hands, it sounds like the odds are in my favor.
Cue the Online Narcissist.
Sandra Webber has grown angry with me. She doesn't like how I speak about science, the case, psychology or medicine. She doesn't like when people like my posts or when I engage in discussion and make friends. She's learned I am happily married with a beautiful young daughter, that I live in Los Angeles in likely a nice home. She doesn't like who I am in part because she is not me and in part because I am not her. We are different and yet we are similar. Both "orphans" with family gone or estranged I actually connected to her pain and genuinely wished her well. As I struggled daily to keep my misery suppressed so that I could focus on helping others, I too found her intolerable as she was taking her misery and turning it into hate and harm. What better person to inflame that Sandra Webber? When you include her presence online, manic postings and throw in the Arias trial, with my name being linked I felt more and more confident every day that I would be able to expose what I needed to help others and keep myself safe. In an unusual series of events, I corresponded with someone about how medical reports were generated and they, an established blogger, happened to include my name in an article. Sandra Webber responded to this blog about medical reports in a manner she usually does, not stating facts but judging character and deflecting. She speaks just to speak and I confess not in judgment but that I frequently do not know what she is stating because it is usually off topic or filled with incongruent statements. Amongst many of the responses, I wrote one response to her that was extracted from the actual trial we were all following, it said, "When truth is on one's side, one argues the truth. When truth isn't on their side, one just argues." The lead prosecutor in Jodi Arias Death Penalty case said that. It's true. When you actually have the truth on your side you can actually discuss, you are free to present facts and discuss them, you don't really care about what others say or do when you have truth on your side because, well.. you have truth. There is no need for anger or fear. I didn't see it but apparently she went off on a narcissistic rage not remotely discussing the subject but devaluing me, criticism me and basically behaving like a child having a tantrum. The posts were removed before I saw anything but the discussion and whispers amongst the trial folks roared. I said nothing back. I don't know the woman. Never met her, not interested in doing so. Narcissistic rage makes me nervous. Narcissists are one lane over from the sociopaths on the Highway of entitlement.
Then almost like clockwork, she wrote a blog about me and a post about Jodi Arias. The blog about me started rather silly and benign but as her inner anxiety appeared to grow it evolved almost hourly into a heinous masturbation of her broken ego. With each manic search for crumbs online and with each disorganized word, she attempted to break apart my character. But without the ability to filter, her broken ego shined through and she ended up appearing fair more disturbed than I had ever actually imaged. Her responses don't make me look silly or deceptive, they made her seem angry, uneducated and utterly entitled. This made my understanding of what an online Narcissist could really be and it was dangerous but ultimately sad and pathetic. Who even has time for such effort into an utter stranger? Wouldn't time be better spent researching a person one claims is innocent? The problem was Jodi Arias wasn't innocent, she was fully guilty of the premeditated murder she was convicted of and so much more. So what's a gal to do when there isn't evidence on their side? Divert, derail, distract, defend, disgust. The online communities are actually a very enjoyable experience when you find something you have a passion for. And yet, as a participant in an online community, we have no obligations to one another. These are moderately sensible groups of people each with enormous things to add and a place for discussion or even healthy debate. They are not for violating other people, except with Ms. Webber. She is one of the only people if not the only people in the entire trial experience who uses the computer in a truly malevolent manner. Our responsibility as an online community is to attempt to be civil and if the subject postings become heated we actually do have a choice whether to engage or walk away. This was impossible for Sandra Webber. It truly seemed utterly impossible. Her preference was not only to engage but to attempt to annihilate. The more I examined her behavior and read her messages, I began to truly understand that the abnormality was potentially uncontrollable.
Not satisfied with just her blog, Ms. Webber seeked attention for her wounded ego through a post she she wrote on her Facebook page, a public forum where she deletes any posts she does not want to appear. Within the Facebook page she proudly directed her hundred odd followers to read about her obsession with me. Perhaps the power of an Online Narcissist isn't in what they actually say it's that they can indeed manipulate their presentation of self within their small domains. What these followers thought of me, I do not know or care but what she followed with impacted me differently. In response I think to a statement I made somewhere that asked why does she (Webber) do what she does? Why she is so hostile that she'd attack cookie makers in middle america and people who have nothing but innocence and a search for justice on their mind? Why does she seemingly spend 23 hours a day searching the internet for tidbits of nothing or to find that one comment she feels she can respond with a winger? Who does that and why do they need so much power. I found the answer in the note she wrote. In an unusually expressive message to her fans, she expressed that the reason she does what she does is because Jodi Arias is in pain. Jodi Arias, through a set of convoluted circumstances found herself guilty of a crime she didn't commit. Jodi Arias is sitting in her small cramped space - day after day - experiencing intense feelings of loneliness and injustice because one truly understands her, that she, Webber, needs to be her voice so to speak and stand up for the terrible tragedy of people like Jodi Arias.
As a therapist, I knew this wasn't accurate. I knew this screamed of projection. No one behaves the way they do and then blames their actions on a convicted murderer. It has dawned on me she is more broken inside than I realized and I feel ashamed and realize I don't want to be that person who mocks her or feels anger towards her. I don't want to be the person who knows with certainty that she is severely in distress and then use her for my own needs. I don't want to use her lack of empathy for others as a means to illuminate my abundance of empathy. I don't want people to die. I don't want people to suffer. I don't want anyone to feel pain. Now I will tell you honestly these aspirations are not easy. Her behavior is abomidible and I and others probably should pursue legal action and I will certainly monitor a decide if I need to do so but until that moment I am going to remember she is just a broken bird who feels invisible because she doesn't know how to fly off into the happy horizon that so many of us have been able to do. And somewhere in the past day or so, I decided to root for her in spite of her cruelty. I decided I want her to rise up and be the person I think she can be and to stop using the trial for bad and evil acts and use her feelings for good. I want her to stop her nonsense and write about things of significance that make her look like a good person and not make her appear envious and unstable. She and I both lost someone we loved, parents. We both must have at some time and place felt tremendous pain and loss and voids. We simply chose a different path to deal with our feelings. We chose a different path.
So Ms. Webber, since I understand you continue to obsessively read this, I release you. Do whatever you want, blog away if you must, get it out so it doesn't stay inside but for god sake, reconsider where you put your attention. Do you want to be that person people say you are? because you alone are creating this maligned reputation. I like people more I suppose. I appreciate people and I believe in others and their ability to be empathic even if it's been tarnished and rusted by hate. We may have limitations, some may premeditate killing online reputations of people who didn't love them, others premeditate killing lovers who didn't love them. But for me, I am going to be better than that and I will do anything I can to not let my own anger be misdirected nor wasted. I need to help save some people from a very dangerous cancer treatment, I need to do what I must to protect myself, set a good example for my daughter about how to look after others and I think I need to find a way to protect my mother from further manipulation. Those seem like the goals of a person I am really starting to appreciate.
I will post again soon.
Thank you,
Cheryl
(All rights reserved. February 22, 2014)
All items
within personal blog The Narcissism of Violence by Cheryl Prevor Psy.D. is
licensed under a Creative
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Based on
a work at http://thenarcissismofviolence.blogspot.com.
|
Update: Please note that as of today's update (2/24/14) there appears to have been an attempt made from an outside source to hack into this account. For whomever attempts this, if you are found out, I will not take this aspect of activity lightly. You will be prosecuted.
