I have a story. I had a really bad fight with my mother once. She slapped me for saying something she didn’t like, I slapped her back, we didn’t say anything to each other. She went to the balcony and I went to the corridor. I was getting ready to leave when I heard that she was complaining about me supposedly to my another relative over the phone. I went to see, she was standing on the balcony and didn’t notice me. I got a thought, then another thought questioning if what I wanted to do was a good idea, the initial anger was wearing off, but too late, I went to the kitchen, took a glass bottle and hit her on the head from the back. It didn’t break, she gasped, turned around and I dropped the bottle and ran to the hallway. I wasn’t dangerous to her anymore and was actually actively trying to leave, but she didn’t let me. She didn’t call the police either. Instead we ended up fighting badly enough for the neighbors to call the police. I thought that she would kill me several times throughout the fight, fought as hard as I could and screamed and so did she. I have a plenty of such stories and while individual experience is not the best tool for measuring veracity of someone’s story, from experience you can learn that some things that seem possible in theory are at least very unlikely in reality.
I somewhat agree with what the other commenter said about point 5. There was no logical reason for beating him instead of calling the police, after he no longer posed a danger to them or their child. It was counterproductive actually, but I imagine you can’t really expect logical decisions from people in a heat of state, if she was in it. What they chose to do after was bizarre. Why not call the police, why letting the person that you are so afraid of stay in your house? You cannot “just let” another person “live or die on his own” in your house. You would still have to contact the police if he died during those weeks and what had happened would have be much harder to explain. The fact that they had enough of food there and basically everything you need to survive for several weeks was odd. What a coincidence.
Another interesting thing to add to point 6 is that from his description his son hardly fought back. He didn’t really react at first and when she was “systemically pounding him” he didn’t do anything. It’s very weird. There is initial confusion when you get hit all of a sudden but it lasts a second and as soon as it ends the fight or flight response is triggered which likely won’t allow you to just sit there while you are being aggressively beaten.
I agree with your conclusion. It is fiction. Its too neat; it has an arc like fiction.
About women fighting men:
Fox Fallon is not a good example since trans women take hormones which cause muscles to atrophy to near-cis levels. Articles calling what she did "skull fractures" are misleading. You wouldn't normally call a broken nose a skull injury.
But let's say she has all the same strength as a man. Well, she lost against a woman on her Seventh fight, so it seems that a female boxer can match a man's strength, even a trained one.
Do I actually believe that last part? No. Both trained, man easily wins. But I would not be surprised to see a trained athletic woman beat an untrained or unfit man in a fight, which is the case in the story. In a fist fight speed is what's most important. Whoever delivers the first blow is usually the winner. This I learned from listening to my father who had won many street fights. I can say from my own limited experience, people with less or no experience in a fight often lack confidence and slow up with fear/indecision, or don't seem to know what to do in a fight and this itself has been enough for me to best larger opponents.
I'd seen this on Reddit and pegged it as pure fantasy, probably about his fictional wife's physical prowess. As it happened I am told that I had colic for most of the first year of my life and was a miserable little baby
Ah, really interesting analysis you have here. I actually highlighted the same passages from the original text that you went on to skillfully scrutinize. Very nice.
I'd like to add another piece to this puzzle, by suggesting that though sociopathy has been shown to correlate strongly with child abuse - maybe enough light hasn't yet been shed on how certain aspects of old-fashioned education correlates it itself with child abuse.
Most specifically, there are some aspects of old-fashioned educators whose spirit was broken down that make them unwittingly abusive and outright crazy-making toward their progeny.
Such aspects are conducive to psychological splitting, which in practical terms can make a person be unwilling and unable to perceive their evil side, which they will instead tend to project elsewhere (especially their progeny) thus invariably setting up a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I fact, I would outright argue that certain concepts that were once regarded as culturally desirable - namely that of "breaking the child's spirit" (a presumable hallmark of boomer style education), are now proving to be psychopathological in nature, and prone to perpetuating psychopathologies either actively or reactively.
Simply put, this story comes across like a fictionized reality devised by a person whose condition may hinge on expunging their negativity into someone else. Someone who compulsively lies to themselves.
The father could very well be a malignant narcissist, since his attitude and narrative is very consistent with that exhibited by people having that condition - most notably the "son came out wrong" tidbit, and the writer's seeming inability to grasp his role in the human equation, or to even consider he could have one.
The story could therefore be a mixture of real and fictional elements. A pretense. A creative fabrication mean to support the ego of the storyteller.
It reminds of this pertinent case study from Scott M. Peck's "People of the Lie"; in this story, young Bobby had received from his parents, as a Christmas gift, the same handgun that his older brother had recently used to kill himself...
"The next day I saw Bobby's parents. They were, they told me, hard-working people. He was a tool-and-die maker, an expert machinist who took pride in the great precision of his craft. She had a job as a secretary in an insurance company, and took pride in the neatness of their home. They went to the Lutheran church every Sunday. He drank beer in moderation on the weekends. She belonged to a Thursday-night women's bowling league. Of average stature, neither handsome nor ugly, they were the upper crust of the blue-collar class—quiet, orderly, solid. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to the tragedy that had befallen them. First Stuart and now Bobby.
"I've cried myself out, Doctor," the mother said.
"Stuart's suicide was a surprise to you?" I asked.
"Totally. A complete shock," the father answered. "He was such a well-adjusted boy. He did well in school. He was into scouting. He liked to hunt woodchucks in the fields behind the house. He was a quiet boy, but everyone liked him.
"Had he seemed depressed before he killed himself?"
"No, not at all. He seemed just like his old self. Of course, he was quiet and didn't tell us much of what was on his mind."
I have little to add here, you have analysed the improbability of this story thoroughly. But I do query your point 5, that you think it unlikely that a parent at that point would have the urge or motivation to savagely beat the teenager. I see no obstacle here. IF this story were true, I can myself imagine so many years of pent up rage just coming out in that way. Yes, in those circumstances, I could do that. Also, for all their conflicted feelings, including love and loyalty for criminal offspring, parents have historically not needed much in the way of excuse to beat a child. The rationalisation around this, whether religious, academic, psychological etc are whole subjects in themselves! But it seems to me strange that you think it strange that a parent in this situation would necessarily be violent rather than empathetic. My own experience tells me otherwise. Fiction though this almost certainly is, there's nothing surprising about this part.
Sideline- something that makes me wonder. New mothers of my mother's generation were separated in hospital from their babies at birth, and only given contact during regular feeding times. That was the prevailing medical wisdom, and the hospital protocol. And I just think, how??? What kind of social norms/awe of authority/ I dunno could make a new mother give anyone her child even for a moment let alone be parted from it for hours. It's so utterly unnatural. Did they not primally scream and resist this? Seemingly not. Ask elephants, ask the animal kingdom generally, it's NOT HAPPENING, and yet humans could be so easily swayed to do something so unnatural.
I mention this because its part of the human cultural maleabilty thing. It tells us that things aren't predictable and we can draw no conclusions, even about whether a parent may savagely beat their dreadfully behaved child. Your looking for some kind of natural parent empathy to prevent this doesn't ring true for me.
Another thought on the fiction is the tone of the comment vs the tone of the story. Additionally, for our narrator to have had a child in 1971, they would be at least close to 70, if not over 70, at this point. No 70 year old is writing a sentence with this syntax: “I sure do know his name, I gave it to him haha." That "haha" in particular should tip us off that this person is probably less than 40 years old, which means they would not even have been alive when this story supposedly occurred.
I saw this reddit post and didn't read it because it was too long. Now I've read it, and I'm leaning all the way towards fiction. I've dealt with my share of nightmare children, and they ALL have some kind of goal. No one is evil incarnate for no reason. If it's real, maybe he wanted attention because I'm guessing based on how this was written, there was zero attention given to the child. Like, it's a child. You can overpower them. You don't need locks and thick doors on your house unless you're really trying extra hard to neglect them. Time to make my way through the rest of the parts.
Jun 2, 2022·edited Jun 3, 2022Liked by Athena Walker
It's called a "hysterical reaction". The mothers' one.
But it changes nothing. I do believe the author had used real-life examples of their main characters, but I also agree that the children were the product of pure splitting, which is weird as fuck.
If it's not fiction, my bet is on a whole cluster B of personality disorders spread between the parents, in which case, the motivation for typing the story would be to receive validation, release some of the guilt (subconscious) and get attention (for the most part).
But the story is interesting, it cannot be denied, so I guess the author's flaws/weaknesses come with an upside :D
Interesting analysis. I'd totally bought that guy's story until I read your thoughts about it and it made sense... I felt like I was inside the story and emotions can really blind judgement! Reading your thoughts gave me a slight idea of why it's impossible for someone to make you feel angry or sad, because you are never swayed by the words. It would be a lame attempt.
I have a story. I had a really bad fight with my mother once. She slapped me for saying something she didn’t like, I slapped her back, we didn’t say anything to each other. She went to the balcony and I went to the corridor. I was getting ready to leave when I heard that she was complaining about me supposedly to my another relative over the phone. I went to see, she was standing on the balcony and didn’t notice me. I got a thought, then another thought questioning if what I wanted to do was a good idea, the initial anger was wearing off, but too late, I went to the kitchen, took a glass bottle and hit her on the head from the back. It didn’t break, she gasped, turned around and I dropped the bottle and ran to the hallway. I wasn’t dangerous to her anymore and was actually actively trying to leave, but she didn’t let me. She didn’t call the police either. Instead we ended up fighting badly enough for the neighbors to call the police. I thought that she would kill me several times throughout the fight, fought as hard as I could and screamed and so did she. I have a plenty of such stories and while individual experience is not the best tool for measuring veracity of someone’s story, from experience you can learn that some things that seem possible in theory are at least very unlikely in reality.
I somewhat agree with what the other commenter said about point 5. There was no logical reason for beating him instead of calling the police, after he no longer posed a danger to them or their child. It was counterproductive actually, but I imagine you can’t really expect logical decisions from people in a heat of state, if she was in it. What they chose to do after was bizarre. Why not call the police, why letting the person that you are so afraid of stay in your house? You cannot “just let” another person “live or die on his own” in your house. You would still have to contact the police if he died during those weeks and what had happened would have be much harder to explain. The fact that they had enough of food there and basically everything you need to survive for several weeks was odd. What a coincidence.
Another interesting thing to add to point 6 is that from his description his son hardly fought back. He didn’t really react at first and when she was “systemically pounding him” he didn’t do anything. It’s very weird. There is initial confusion when you get hit all of a sudden but it lasts a second and as soon as it ends the fight or flight response is triggered which likely won’t allow you to just sit there while you are being aggressively beaten.
I think it’s fiction.
I agree with your conclusion. It is fiction. Its too neat; it has an arc like fiction.
About women fighting men:
Fox Fallon is not a good example since trans women take hormones which cause muscles to atrophy to near-cis levels. Articles calling what she did "skull fractures" are misleading. You wouldn't normally call a broken nose a skull injury.
But let's say she has all the same strength as a man. Well, she lost against a woman on her Seventh fight, so it seems that a female boxer can match a man's strength, even a trained one.
Do I actually believe that last part? No. Both trained, man easily wins. But I would not be surprised to see a trained athletic woman beat an untrained or unfit man in a fight, which is the case in the story. In a fist fight speed is what's most important. Whoever delivers the first blow is usually the winner. This I learned from listening to my father who had won many street fights. I can say from my own limited experience, people with less or no experience in a fight often lack confidence and slow up with fear/indecision, or don't seem to know what to do in a fight and this itself has been enough for me to best larger opponents.
Anyway, this wasn't hard to find: https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.abc.net.au/article/10697010
I'd seen this on Reddit and pegged it as pure fantasy, probably about his fictional wife's physical prowess. As it happened I am told that I had colic for most of the first year of my life and was a miserable little baby
Ah, really interesting analysis you have here. I actually highlighted the same passages from the original text that you went on to skillfully scrutinize. Very nice.
I'd like to add another piece to this puzzle, by suggesting that though sociopathy has been shown to correlate strongly with child abuse - maybe enough light hasn't yet been shed on how certain aspects of old-fashioned education correlates it itself with child abuse.
Most specifically, there are some aspects of old-fashioned educators whose spirit was broken down that make them unwittingly abusive and outright crazy-making toward their progeny.
Such aspects are conducive to psychological splitting, which in practical terms can make a person be unwilling and unable to perceive their evil side, which they will instead tend to project elsewhere (especially their progeny) thus invariably setting up a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I fact, I would outright argue that certain concepts that were once regarded as culturally desirable - namely that of "breaking the child's spirit" (a presumable hallmark of boomer style education), are now proving to be psychopathological in nature, and prone to perpetuating psychopathologies either actively or reactively.
Simply put, this story comes across like a fictionized reality devised by a person whose condition may hinge on expunging their negativity into someone else. Someone who compulsively lies to themselves.
The father could very well be a malignant narcissist, since his attitude and narrative is very consistent with that exhibited by people having that condition - most notably the "son came out wrong" tidbit, and the writer's seeming inability to grasp his role in the human equation, or to even consider he could have one.
The story could therefore be a mixture of real and fictional elements. A pretense. A creative fabrication mean to support the ego of the storyteller.
It reminds of this pertinent case study from Scott M. Peck's "People of the Lie"; in this story, young Bobby had received from his parents, as a Christmas gift, the same handgun that his older brother had recently used to kill himself...
"The next day I saw Bobby's parents. They were, they told me, hard-working people. He was a tool-and-die maker, an expert machinist who took pride in the great precision of his craft. She had a job as a secretary in an insurance company, and took pride in the neatness of their home. They went to the Lutheran church every Sunday. He drank beer in moderation on the weekends. She belonged to a Thursday-night women's bowling league. Of average stature, neither handsome nor ugly, they were the upper crust of the blue-collar class—quiet, orderly, solid. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to the tragedy that had befallen them. First Stuart and now Bobby.
"I've cried myself out, Doctor," the mother said.
"Stuart's suicide was a surprise to you?" I asked.
"Totally. A complete shock," the father answered. "He was such a well-adjusted boy. He did well in school. He was into scouting. He liked to hunt woodchucks in the fields behind the house. He was a quiet boy, but everyone liked him.
"Had he seemed depressed before he killed himself?"
"No, not at all. He seemed just like his old self. Of course, he was quiet and didn't tell us much of what was on his mind."
"Did he leave a note?"
"No.""
(This is the opening of the story; you can find it along with the rest in this full-text of the aforementioned book: http://www.journeytoforever.org/farm_library/ppl-lie.html )
I have little to add here, you have analysed the improbability of this story thoroughly. But I do query your point 5, that you think it unlikely that a parent at that point would have the urge or motivation to savagely beat the teenager. I see no obstacle here. IF this story were true, I can myself imagine so many years of pent up rage just coming out in that way. Yes, in those circumstances, I could do that. Also, for all their conflicted feelings, including love and loyalty for criminal offspring, parents have historically not needed much in the way of excuse to beat a child. The rationalisation around this, whether religious, academic, psychological etc are whole subjects in themselves! But it seems to me strange that you think it strange that a parent in this situation would necessarily be violent rather than empathetic. My own experience tells me otherwise. Fiction though this almost certainly is, there's nothing surprising about this part.
Sideline- something that makes me wonder. New mothers of my mother's generation were separated in hospital from their babies at birth, and only given contact during regular feeding times. That was the prevailing medical wisdom, and the hospital protocol. And I just think, how??? What kind of social norms/awe of authority/ I dunno could make a new mother give anyone her child even for a moment let alone be parted from it for hours. It's so utterly unnatural. Did they not primally scream and resist this? Seemingly not. Ask elephants, ask the animal kingdom generally, it's NOT HAPPENING, and yet humans could be so easily swayed to do something so unnatural.
I mention this because its part of the human cultural maleabilty thing. It tells us that things aren't predictable and we can draw no conclusions, even about whether a parent may savagely beat their dreadfully behaved child. Your looking for some kind of natural parent empathy to prevent this doesn't ring true for me.
There's a guy on Youtube called MrBallen I think you'd like.
Another thought on the fiction is the tone of the comment vs the tone of the story. Additionally, for our narrator to have had a child in 1971, they would be at least close to 70, if not over 70, at this point. No 70 year old is writing a sentence with this syntax: “I sure do know his name, I gave it to him haha." That "haha" in particular should tip us off that this person is probably less than 40 years old, which means they would not even have been alive when this story supposedly occurred.
I saw this reddit post and didn't read it because it was too long. Now I've read it, and I'm leaning all the way towards fiction. I've dealt with my share of nightmare children, and they ALL have some kind of goal. No one is evil incarnate for no reason. If it's real, maybe he wanted attention because I'm guessing based on how this was written, there was zero attention given to the child. Like, it's a child. You can overpower them. You don't need locks and thick doors on your house unless you're really trying extra hard to neglect them. Time to make my way through the rest of the parts.
I mostly get the impression that he was watching We Need To Talk About Kevin.
It's called a "hysterical reaction". The mothers' one.
But it changes nothing. I do believe the author had used real-life examples of their main characters, but I also agree that the children were the product of pure splitting, which is weird as fuck.
If it's not fiction, my bet is on a whole cluster B of personality disorders spread between the parents, in which case, the motivation for typing the story would be to receive validation, release some of the guilt (subconscious) and get attention (for the most part).
But the story is interesting, it cannot be denied, so I guess the author's flaws/weaknesses come with an upside :D
To a logical mind, it's enigmatic.
To an emotional mind, it's expressive.
To an empirical mind, it's...terrifying xD
Interesting analysis. I'd totally bought that guy's story until I read your thoughts about it and it made sense... I felt like I was inside the story and emotions can really blind judgement! Reading your thoughts gave me a slight idea of why it's impossible for someone to make you feel angry or sad, because you are never swayed by the words. It would be a lame attempt.
I read the first one a while ago and forgot all about it! Thanks for sharing!
An interesting story to hear about and think you've made some good points on this Athena. Thanks for the share.
This was entertaining