In the 1992 documentary “Child of Rage,” an abused child who was placed into foster care stated that she wanted to kill her family. She was depicted as a psychopath, who killed a nest full of baby birds, attacked her brother while he was asleep, tortured dogs, and indeed she did do these things.

Beth Thomas was a poster-child for psychopathy and perhaps a promotion for the state taking children away from parents, although Beth certainly deserved to be saved from her abusive father. She was taken into foster care at 19 months old, after being sexually abused for the first several months of her existence by her father after her mother died.

However, the 1992 National Committee for the Prevention of Child Abuse-sponsored film doesn’t fully distinguish between primary psychopathy and secondary psychopathy.

Primary psychopaths are a very small minority of the population who are born without emotion, born cold with psychopathy wired into them.

Secondary psychopaths are those who have been through some kind of trauma or upbringing that induced psychopathy via environmental factors.

Beth Thomas would qualify as a secondary psychopath, due to the abuse she suffered in the first formative months of her life and other things she’s experienced in life.

The good news is, today she is actually a nurse and helps others overcome the induced psychopathy she did, which is being called the term “reactive attachment disorder” (RAD). RAD is “a rare but serious condition where young children fail to make healthy attachments with parents or caregivers due to extreme abuse,” according to News.au.

A strange story lies in Connell Watkins, a therapist who gave Beth “intensive behavioral modification therapy.”

Connell put extreme restrictions on her, forcing her to ask permission for everything again and again, locking her in the room at night.

The girl reportedly developed empathy, stopped harming herself, and was able to share a room with her biological daughter.

According to News.au:

Today, Beth works as a nurse after studying for a degree and has authored a book called More Than A Thread Of Hope with her second adoptive mother, Nancy.

Their company, Families By Design, help other families dealing with a RAD child, and claims that Beth has grown up to be a “no longer a child of rage but an award winning registered nurse and an amazing speaker”

However the therapist who reportedly saved Beth was later involved with the murder of a child who had “RAD.”

She was incarcerated for 7 years after killing a child with an “illegal and controversial” attachment therapy procedure called re-birthing. It is essentially smothering a violent child with blankets and pillows for “70 minutes” to simulate being born, and force them to “struggle, fight, scream and release the rage that is stopping them from bonding with their caregivers.”

Her death was caught on tape, and she screamed “I’m going to die” a total of 11 times before being suffocated.

This is a strange, unsettling story of what chain events are set off by one abusive father: one abusive father is a tidal wave of chain reactions. A damaged person is born who will damage more people, without the resolution of the abused person’s internal conflict.

(Image credit: Pininterest)