Serial killers are nice people. All of them. Nice as far as anybody could see — the sort of man people describe as someone who “could get along fine without any laws.” And here is the part that gets skipped: they do not start out holding the desire and the urge to kill. It was not issued to them at birth. It was not sitting under the politeness all along, waiting.
So something carried a person from the first place to the second. A question came from the floor at a seminar, and it was the right one to ask.
We were wounded too. Everybody was wounded. Being wounded doesn’t make a person do that, and not having been loved doesn’t make a person do that — and yet people who do it keep appearing. Is it the intensity of the love they didn’t get? Is it the environment outside them? What is the large factor in the ones who put it outward?
I think everything that question contains is in the answer. But to get at it you have to start further back, with what a wound actually is.
A wound is the shape of not having been loved
To be wounded is to have missed the experience that goes by the name of love. The wound is that shape — the shape of not having been loved — and it keeps growing in that shape, enlarging as evidence for the same conclusion. Not loved enough, in any case, to grow up healthily on what arrived.
Then a second thing attaches, and this is the one that does the long work. Some love may have been given and may even have reached the child. But repeated experiences of fear, neglect, or humiliation organise those memories around a stronger belief: I was not loved. From then on, new events are read as further evidence for the same conclusion.
From that point the person is no longer living off what he received. He is living off the belief about what he received, and the two are not the same size. You can hold a fortune and spend your life certain you are penniless — I have written about that elsewhere, in The Safe You Don’t Know You Own. The belief never checks the balance. It only keeps issuing the sentence.
Where a person cannot love himself, it runs destructive
Where there is a wound, the person cannot love himself. And where a person cannot love himself, it always goes destructive. Let it run and that is the direction it runs in.
Which is worth saying slowly, because it sounds like an accusation and is not one. Nobody sits down and decides to wreck his own life. This is what the slope does when nothing is put in its way. A person carrying a great deal of pain will, without knowing that he is doing it, keep arranging the environment that produces more of it, and end up sunk in the thing he arranged. Some do it knowingly. Most have no idea at all.
So loving is not a nice extra to get round to. We love in order not to go the other way. That is the whole of the argument for it.
Then why does only one of them go outward?
First there is the degree of the wound. A wound has a size, and not every wound is the same size. And the degree of the wound is itself what drives the person to repeat that environment.
Then a second element sits on top of the first. He cannot name anger, bring it to another person, or calm himself without denying it, because no environment taught him how. Each injury therefore joins the last one instead of being processed. When a later stress breaks the restraint, the response carries not only that day’s anger but everything that accumulated behind it.
Not inherited — environmental
Is that inability to handle anger and hatred something a person is born with? I don’t look at it as genetic. It is environment. He has not been in an environment where such things can be handled, has never been exposed to one, and so the anger and the hatred amplify instead. Nothing around him ever showed him what to do with what he had.
The wound at two, and whatever happens to be lying around
From here the road forks, and one fork is addiction. When we look at how somebody became an addict, we look at one, two, three years old. A wound taken past one, around two, raises the chance that the road runs toward addiction.
Then the wound does its work. The person is anxious, he is frightened, and at exactly those moments he gets exposed to something in his surroundings. Note the order, because people reverse it. The wound comes first. The exposure comes second. The substance did not go looking for him.
Say an older cousin is sniffing glue and the boy keeps finding himself around it. Sooner or later: shall I have a go. Sex, alcohol, cigarettes — he meets them the same way, lying about in the places he lives. He goes in that direction, and then the decisive thing happens. His basic anxiety is relieved by it. After that he concentrates on it at speed, because while the addictive act is running he does not feel the anxiety, or the depression, or the sadness (All I Could Talk About Was Last Night’s Episode).
So he keeps going further in. And far enough in, the addiction produces an addiction of its own — a second addiction laid over the first, the two mixed together and carrying on. Trace it back far enough and the addiction, too, began at a wound.
Ordinary, until the day it is not
The other fork goes outward. Day to day this man is fine. Nobody near him sees a problem and there is no problem to see; the ordinary life holds. Then life delivers one hard piece of stress, and that becomes the trigger. The job is gone. The relationship has ended.
And at some point he kills a person, and in the killing he feels the release. Killing produces a sense of omnipotence. That is what gets switched on, and from there he goes on killing.
Which returns us to where we started. He was nice. That was not a mask he was wearing. The urge was not in him at the beginning — what was in him was a wound of a certain size, no environment in which anger and hatred could ever be handled, and then a day that pulled the trigger.
The same wound does not weigh the same in two people
Two people can take an identical wound and receive it differently. One of them takes it larger. Call it a tolerance, if you like. The blow is not the whole story; what it lands on is the rest of the story.
Whatever the treatment is, it turns out to be love
Any treatment for a wound comes, in the end, to love. I am being loved. I am being respected. I am being held as something precious. Once that is established in a person, he can shove the negative thing off him — it loses its grip.
Without it, the negative stays stuck to him and will not come away. And in that condition, trying to love himself is enormously hard work.
So when somebody who was nice to everyone ends up there, the thing to look at is what stood in between. A wound of a certain degree. No environment in which the anger and the hatred could be handled. And nothing arriving that felt like being loved, to take up the room the belief was occupying.
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