My [35m] wife [35f] 8 yrs is very disturbed after our daughter [6F] accidentally injured our dog

When I was little I literally wanted to jump off cliffs into the "soft" forest below because it looked so beautiful...that and clouds. I don't mean I made up pretend stories that involved doing that...i mean I literally intended to do it when I grew up. Of course in both cases I would have died. I didn't think past the soft appearance to what literally might be below and hold my weight/stop my fall. I thought it would be like a big pillow. Even when I went to university I thought for some reason falling back into tall "soft" grass would be wonderful. I'll tell you noe it's not.

Your daughter knew your dog was soft and so was the bean bag...she probably only had a single train of thought "instead of the soft bean bag i could jump on the soft dog" not having any relative understanding of what the pain of being jumped on would be like. How could she show any remorse to that? When she grows up and understands, it will sink in hard. It'll be a delayed remorse.

She's not a sociopath. In essense sociopathy develops when exterior elements imposed on a brain cause it to interpret emotion as a source of inflicted pain and thus block it out. I.e. heavy emotional manipulation and emotional cycles of abuse reinforced with physical abuse or abandonment/isolation over time. Just as with OCD there are varying levels of sociopathy based on various levels of what really is emotional brain damage. I highly doubt by the tone of your post that you or your wife have caused that in your 6 year old daughter.

/r/relationships Thread