Concerning family violence and attitudes once grown....?

Question

We've all heard the stories....... "oh, I was beaten as a child" or "I was sexually abused when young" being used as excuses as to why some people grow up with little value for life and those around them. I'm referring specifically to ones who grow up to maim, torture, or kill other humans, not just general violence that you see in families. I mean REAL, DEADLY violence.

How many out here actually believe that how we grow up can make that strong of an impression on a person, and how many think it's just an excuse for someone to try and get out of trouble for having no decency towards human life? Please give a reason for your answer.

I firmly believe that no amount of violence can give an excuse for that kind of debased attitude towards others. To me, there can be no excuse for harming another human, animal, or anything else. Talk to me folks........let me hear what you are thinking.................

To Bradley........

Thank you. You gave alot of insight into the workings of the human mind, and that IS what I'm after here.

Point of order tho.......Cho was NOT the reason I asked the question. Today, the actor/comedian Chevy Chase revealed that he, too, was severely abused as a child. Yet, look at what he's achieved in his life.

I was the victim of a severely abusive husband for 12 years, and an abusive father before that. Yes, I have anger issues, but I realized long ago that I can't blame what THEY did on anyone else, and taking my anger out on innocent people would not be acceptable. As you so eloquently put it.......I CHOSE not to act violently towards others.

That is the heart of my question....barring very real psychiatric breaks, can a person use earlier abuse as an excuse for killing? Ted Bundy was a suave, compelling person......yet he killed how many, simply by choice? He wasn't crazy....he knew what he was doing. That's what I want answered here.

Answer 1

This is a tougher question than it seems.

Yes, the "easy" way out is to just blurt what everyone else does and say "No, you are responsible no matter what happens to you," but the truth is....as someone who has survived more than his fair share of domestic violence, abuse, and molestation, I *know*, personally and intimately, how much of a struggle it is to contain things and to not lose it and snap on people (or yourself and committ suicide).

Still, the fact remains....I choose to contain things. I choose to hold it together. I choose every day to be non-violent and to not treat people as I did when I was a teenager, always looking at them as either threats or objects to be manipulated. Really, it took me until I turned 19 and realized I need to do something "different" with my attitude towards people if I wanted to have a life for myself and stay out of prison. But the fact remains, I did this.

And I know other people don't. Cho didn't. And I know this is implicitly *who* this question is about....that this is in some ways an attack on all those who have survived abuse in their lives by comparing us *all* to *him*. So....let's be clear on something, ok?

And when I say this, know I am not just pulling this out of my tail, ok? I was a co-leader of a support group for people with mood disorders for 2 years, and after that I co-managed a drop-in center for folks with mental health issues for 2 1/2 years. So I know some things, not just about my own struggles and mood disorders, but about how others can fall and snap as well.

And the thing you have to understand is twofold.

--Psychotic breaks are involuntary. Like many other signs of mental illness, when someone "loses it" and can no longer reality check and control their baser impulses, it really is something that *cannot* be controlled by the sufferer. A psychotic break is a failure to reality check versus the delusions and other things going on in his/her own head. A failure that is. Meaning the person suffering the break *cannot* reality check. Not will not, cannot.

Demanding that a person suffering a psychotic break to "Snap out of it!" is like trying to force someone with broken legs to walk. It is a fundamentally sadistic exercise that will fail, period. But....

--Psychotic breaks, like other failures of sanity, such as suicidal moods, desires to self-mutilate, hallucinations, and so on, are themselves temporary. They come and go. Eventually, barring the influence of alcohol or illicit drugs, the psychotic break *will end* sooner rather than later (think hours, not days). In time the person suffering the break *will* recover his or her wits.

This is an important consideration. It is critical in the Cho situation because there was a full *two hour* break between his first killing spree that day, and his second. In the first killing spree, one could rightly argue that he was having a psychotic break and no more knew what he was doing that what a rabid dog would.

But then he took a break. He recovered at least some of his wits, and at that point he really *should* have laid down his gun and turned himself in.

That I think is what makes the Virginia Tech shootings so tragic and disturbing. Not just that the shooter had a failure of sanity. He did...but then he recovered his wits. And then had a failure of *conscience* as he went on killing any damned way, spitting on any consideration others around him might have had....

And that I think is the issue.

We need to separate the debate. Because failures of sanity, great and small, violent and not, are *going* to happen with some folks who have survived abuse and not survived it well. That is just the nature of the beast....and the nature of how we *don't* treat mental illness in general, and post-traumatic stress in particular, in the United States. If the HMOs weren't in charge and people weren't so obsessively greedy and careerist about it all, and people actually focused on getting folks better, actually getting them *well* versus getting them *contained* and repressed (in denial), things would turn out better.

But....that is no excuse to be lax on issues of *conscience*. We need to approach this from a position of knowledge and realize that yes, even our worst mentally ill people need to learn how to have a conscience, and they *need* to be connected to other people, *and NOT isolated from them*, to do this. Why? Because if we isolate people, they then think they are *alone*, utterly so in their sufferings and *that* is the one thing that will forbid the learning of conscience faster than anything.

I chose to have a conscience. I chose to be non-violent, in time....because it wasn't just *my* suffering. WE, as in me and *all three of my sisters*, suffered together. So I got to see that I wasn't the only one on this earth who *hurt*, and that setting out from the Predator's Position, of hurting folks first, last and always....that has *consequences*. It ruins lives well beyond just the one victim's, because people want to connect and not isolate.

And I wanted no part of being the Predator and keeping that pain going. Because I knew that even if *I* never suffered the consequences for that, my sisters *would* courtesy of making different decisions than I did, and that wouldn't be honoring their survival *at all*, would it?

So yeah....we need to approach this from knowledge, and keep the breaches of sanity--which are tragic but are going to happen--a separate issue from deliberate abandonment of conscience.

And we need to understand that not all abuse survivors are like Cho, willfully isolated and bereft of conscience. Most of us are the opposite of that and have *too much* guilt and conscience of our own, and are in fact *our own* worst critics.

I hope this helps....sorry to go on so. Thanks for your time.

Answer 2

No, there is no excuse for violence of any nature, but there might be the "modeling" of parents and relatives that do seem to have a marked impression on siblings. In violent ways, the children see how others handle their frustrations, disappointments, etc, just as , if a parent ''raising the roof" everything he stubs his toe, then there is a good chance the children will catch a glimpse of that and model the same type of behavior themselves. If this same children has negative feeds from their type of reaction to a given situation, then it is possible they will redefine what the better reaction could be. And there is the spiritual reaction, as we can choose as human beings how to make better choices handling life's given frustrations and disappointments. And those who have never had the violent modeling can turn in that direction, where they approach life in some violent manner. This can be from a desire to be a part of another type of life, one that somehow makes them feel superior, or secure in some ways. They may take up violent habits from those they fall in love with. Humans have choices, as they are God given, and we make our own. No, excuses are just that...

Answer 3

Lots of people suffer abuse. It is no excuse for committing violence against others.