I'm honestly curious about whether or not this person has had some sort of traumatic experience or head injury or something.
I am far beyond the point of reasonable doubt that Bella experienced
severe childhood sexual, physical, and emotional abuse. She is an example of every worst case scenario rolled into one, as close to textbook as you can find outside of a maximum security prison;
Trauma and Recovery meets
The Handbook of Psychopathy, as it were. I know I have belabored this point before, but people
do not simply 'turn out' that way. If you are thinking of someone who did, I assure you, you are thinking of a person who never divulged the truth of their past*.
I would not be surprised if she suffered a head injury at some point, as head trauma
can produce dysfunction of the orbitofrontal cortex of the sort often observed in psychopaths, and damage to the prefrontal cortex can impair morality, but I am of the opinion that her upbringing would be
more than sufficient to create a monster of this kind.
Buried somewhere here was someone who claimed to have known her when she was younger and said she didn’t used to act like this. If that’s true, it’d fit with this hypothesis.
It's
possible, but I find it unlikely. For an abrupt, true change in behavior that extreme you would expect fairly severe head trauma. She would likely have visible scars from the incident, rather than from her hygiene and her substance abuse. It is not uncommon for a victim of childhood abuse to act differently when out of their victimizer's authority, and, indeed, not uncommon for children, in general, to act differently outside of parental authority. I find it likely that they remember a different attitude in part because of that (I am, for example, certain that her father forced her to maintain her hygiene) and in part simply because paraphilias always grow more extreme. A serial killer begins as a peeping tom, a thief, a rapist - only later, after growing more confident, do they act out their true desires.
* Ted Bundy is frequently cited as an example of someone 'born bad,' but it falls apart on inspection. Bundy believed his mother to be his sister, his grandparents to be his parents. The household in which he was raised was physically and emotionally abusive at the least, and there is reason to believe that Bundy was the product of incest. His mother
never revealed the name of his alleged father, and she was never consistent with details as to what sort of person he was, what job he held, where he lived, how they met, etc. It is believed my some, myself among them, that Bundy's grandfather was, also, his biological father. There is always a story. It is not infrequent that people who had unimaginable childhoods do not report it as trauma simply because they believe it to have been normal.
www.hopkinsmedicine.org
