Serial killers are, almost all of them, nice people — nice as far as anybody around them could see: the sort of man people describe as someone who “wouldn’t hurt a fly.” And here is the part people tend to miss: they do not start out wanting to kill. They were not born with it. The wish to kill was not sitting under the politeness all along, waiting.
So something carried a person from being the nice man everyone saw to being a killer. At a seminar, someone in the audience asked about exactly this, and it was the right question.
We in this room carry emotional wounds too. Everybody does. But being wounded doesn’t make a person kill, and not having been loved doesn’t make a person kill — and yet people who do it keep appearing. Is it how badly they went unloved? Is it the environment around them? What, above all, drives the ones who take their hurt out on other people?
I think the answer is all of those things together. But to see how they fit, you have to start further back, with what a wound actually is.
A wound means not being loved enough to grow up healthy
To be wounded is to have missed out on being loved: not necessarily to have had no love at all, but not enough of it to grow up healthy. And the wound does not stay the same size. It keeps growing, and what grows is the person’s sense that he was not loved.
Then a second thing forms on top of the wound, and it is what keeps the wound growing. The child may well have received some love, and even felt it. But when a child is frightened, neglected or humiliated again and again, a belief takes shape that is stronger than the love he did receive: I was not loved. From then on, everything new that happens is taken as more proof of it.
So he ends up like a man who owns a fortune but spends his whole life sure he is penniless. He lives not on the love he actually received but on his belief about it, and in that belief the love is smaller than it really was. The belief never checks the balance. It just keeps repeating the same verdict: that he was not loved.
A person who cannot love himself drifts toward destruction
A person who carries that wound, sure that he was not loved, cannot love himself. And a person who cannot love himself always heads toward destruction: the destruction of his own life, and sometimes of other people’s. If nothing gets in the way, that is where his life drifts.
Which is worth saying slowly, because it sounds like an accusation and is not one. Hardly anyone sets out to wreck his own life. What happens is this: a person carrying a great deal of pain will keep creating the very circumstances that bring him more of it, and end up sunk in what he created. A few do this knowingly. Most have no idea they are doing it.
So love, beginning with love for yourself, is not a nice extra to get round to some day. We have no choice but to love, because love is what keeps our lives from running toward destruction.
Then why do only some wounded people turn violent toward others?
First there is the degree of the wound. Wounds come in different sizes. The deeper the wound, the more a person keeps recreating the same painful circumstances, and so the more new hurt he takes on.
Then there is a second factor: he cannot handle the anger and hatred inside him. Handling them would mean admitting to himself that he is angry, being able to tell someone about it, and calming himself down afterwards. He cannot do any of this, because nothing around him ever taught him how. So each new hurt is never dealt with; it simply piles on top of the last one, like a gauge filling up. When some later stress finally breaks through his self-control, what bursts out is not only that day’s anger but everything that has piled up behind it.
Not inherited — environmental
Is that inability to handle anger and hatred something a person is born with? I don’t see it as genetic. It comes from the environment. He has never lived among people who dealt with anger and hatred in those ways, and has never even seen it done, so instead of being dealt with, his anger and hatred grow stronger. Nothing around him ever showed him what to do with what he felt.
The road to addiction: a wound around age two, and whatever is within reach
From the wound, a life can go down two different roads: one leads into addiction, the other turns against other people. Take addiction first. When those of us who treat addiction look at how someone became an addict, we look at what happened to him at one, two and three years old. A wound suffered after the first year, around age two, makes it more likely that his road will lead to addiction.
Later, as he grows up, the wound does its work. It leaves him anxious and frightened, and just when he is feeling that way, he is exposed to something that happens to be within his reach. Notice the order, because people often get it backwards. The wound comes first. The exposure comes second. The addiction does not start with the drug or the drink.
Say an older cousin of his sniffs glue, and the boy keeps ending up around it. Sooner or later he thinks: maybe I’ll try it too. Sex, alcohol and cigarettes can reach him the same way, through the people and places around him. He drifts toward one of them, and then the decisive thing happens: it relieves the anxiety underneath everything, the anxiety the wound left him with. After that he is quickly absorbed in it, because while he is doing it he does not feel the anxiety, or the depression, or the sadness.
So he sinks further in. And far enough in, one addiction leads to another — a second addiction on top of the first — and from then on the two are tangled together and keep going. Trace an addiction back far enough and you find a wound at its start.
The other road: fine in everyday life, until one hard day
The other road turns outward, against other people. The man on this road gets along fine from day to day. Nobody near him sees a problem; his everyday life goes on as normal, and the anger piled up inside him stays out of sight. Then life hits him with one heavy blow of stress — he loses his job, or a relationship ends — and that becomes the trigger that sets it all off.
At some point, as everything piled up inside him bursts out, he kills a person, and in the killing he feels relief. Killing gives him a sense of omnipotence, the feeling of being all-powerful. Once that feeling has kicked in, it drives him to kill again and again.
Which returns us to where we started. He was nice, and he was not hiding a wish to kill behind it. That urge was not in him at the beginning. What he had was a wound of a certain size, an environment that never let him learn to handle his anger and hatred, and then one hard day that set it all off.
The same wound does not weigh the same in two people
Two people can suffer an identical wound and feel it differently. One of them takes it harder. You could call it a kind of tolerance: some people can absorb more of a blow than others. So how big a wound becomes depends not only on the blow but on the person it lands on.
Every treatment for a wound comes down to love
Any treatment for a wound comes down, in the end, to love — to a person coming to feel, deep inside, “I am loved. I am respected. I am treated as someone precious.” Once that feeling is established in him, it gives him the strength to push away the negative things he carries, such as the belief that he was not loved, and they lose their grip.
Without that feeling, the negative things stay stuck to him and will not come away. And in that condition, even trying to love himself is enormously hard work.
So when someone who was nice to everyone ends up killing, what we need to look at is what lay between the nice man and the killing: a wound of a certain depth; no environment in which his anger and hatred could ever be handled; and no experience of being loved strong enough to push out the belief that he was not loved.
Related
- I Had to Be a Good Person, So I Never Expressed a Feeling
- Your Life Script: Why You Keep Repeating the Same Ending
- Fail to Love Yourself and It Goes Straight to Abuse. There Is No Middle Ground.
Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board