mmmm, I agree with you. I read somewhere (have no source to confirm) that LL’s two half siblings from her father’s first marriage are estranged from him. I’d be quite interested to know their reasons.
I enjoyed your posts about ACEs and I found them very insightful. I mostly agree. Two points I would add to the discussion:
1. I do believe that some people are just born “bad”. Yes I agree it’s rare but it happens. I reckon it’s physical. Some brain chemical or brain synapse is just not firing right. I understand that some recent studies posit a physical cause for psychopathy. Some brain deformation. Having said that the brain is so plastic, so adaptable to life events, that such a deformation could equally be caused by childhood trauma. We still know so very little about the human brain. (I personally believe that Evil exists in the world and that a very few individuals are born evil. Although I appreciate that’s not a fashionable opinion these days.)
2. I agree that most (if not all) violent criminals have trauma in their past. But then others who have trauma don’t take it out on other people. They may well live dysfunctional lives with MH issues/addiction/ self harm etc. but there must be something that separates traumatised people who mainly harm themselves, from traumatised people who then go on to harm, maim or kill others.
I was brought up in religion, and so have always been pretty spiritual. My superstitious Irish grandmother believe that when you mistreated someone horrifically, they lost a part of their soul, and it left them open to evil or possession.
the spiritual part of me believes in evil in those terms.
the rational, logical part of me sees it as a preventable human condition. That if a child is stripped of their humanity they will develop maladaptive coping mechanisms that will diminish their empathy towards others and make them a risk to society.
I prefer to focus on the latter because… if we dismiss someone as “evil” then we attribute it to an other worldly entity or chance, with the implication that it’s out of our hands. Whereas I strongly believe it is firmly in our hands (collectively) to prevent these types of individuals from being turned into monsters.
I will say that some individuals I’ve met with PDs (some diagnosed, some not) just do give me the creeps and make my skin come out in goosebumps. They aren’t even upleasant or threatening. One guy I came into contact with… wasn’t violent or evil…he was involved in a crime and being charged… but it wasn’t an especially emotive or awful crime. there was something soulless about him that made my inner alarm bells freak out when I was in his presence.
it was like everything around him just… soured. The people he came into contact with, he just destroyed. It was like he was sucking the energy out of them. His wife, his step kids, buisness partners… they all got dragged into his nonsense. Like a black hole, bad things just seemed to happen all around him. (It’s making me shiver just thinking about him). It sounds crazy but it almost felt supernatural at times.
Others I’ve met seemed to do inexplicable well in life… one guy was corrupt and yet had gone through life like teflon. Dirt never seemed to cling to him. He always seemed to escape any sort of negative consequences for his actions (until of course he ended up in the criminal justice system, which is how I came into contact with him). It really felt like he’d made a literal deal with the devil. He’d amassed huge wealth but just seemed dead inside. It was a source of arrogance for him, not a source of happiness.
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I think with the Lucy Letby case, in my opinion, I am looking for answers because I find it so horrifying. I read that she shoved hard plastic tubes down new born babies throats?! I can’t get my head around why someone would do that. And I think part of it (again this is just what I feel) that makes it feel even harder to understand is because she’s a woman, it seems to go against nature that a woman working as a midwife could destroy something so precious as a newborn baby. I don’t know if that’s internalised misogyny on my part or what. I just find it so hard to make sense of and she hasn’t said why she did it and… well it’s just so utterly upsetting.
it goes against every natural normal instinct which is to care for babies.
