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 am inclined to think that it is fiction as well, but your story was very interesting, and something to take into consideration. I am about to post the second part of the evaluation.
Your story about your mother's continued rage even after you were no danger is an interesting phenomenon and quite familiar. I have even seen the same in animals. We once visited an ancient stonework in the middle of a field on a working farm that allowed public access. A rooster accompanied us out to the site (bear with me here!), lingered harmlessly for a while, then became increasingly restless and irritated, and as we were well on our way back afterwards, he took long running flapping pecks at our legs and saved his greatest displays of rage for when we were already getting back in the car. I guess he could tolerate intruders for only so long. I have not forgotten this incident because it was a reflection of such an illogical, but common human behaviour.
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.
The part about people slowing with lack of confidence and fear is really interesting. I know not all women will lose in a fight to a man. There is a great story about a woman whose husband hired a hit man to kill her with a hammer, and she beat the ever loving hell out of him. He died, she didn't. It was a fun one to listen to.
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."
"This was exemplified in the case of Bobby. Although he was seriously depressed and desperately in need of help, the source, the cause of his depression, lay not in him but in his parents' behavior toward him. Although depressed, there was nothing sick about his depression. Any fifteen-year-old boy would have been depressed in his circumstances. The essential sickness of the situation lay not in his depression but in the family environment to which his depression was a natural enough response.
To children—even adolescents—their parents are like gods. The way their parents do things seems the way they should be done. Children are seldom able to objectively compare their parents to other parents. They are not able to make realistic assessments of their parents' behavior. Treated badly by its parents, a child will usually assume that it is bad. If treated as an ugly, stupid second-class citizen, it will grow up with an image of itself as ugly, stupid and second-class. Raised without love, children come to believe themselves unlovable. We may express this as a general law of child development: Whenever there is a major deficit in parental love, the child will, in all likelihood, respond to that deficit by assuming itself to be the cause of the deficit, thereby developing an unrealistically negative self-image."
It seems I will have to read that book, because that left me with many questions.
I agree that the narrative from Reddit may include a MNPD individual, and actually touch on that in the second part which I just sent out. I didn't assign a diagnosis to the father, but there is a lot of self focus in the writing which left me wondering... that is, if it's real.
If it is fake, it certainly could still be exactly what you said. Unfortunately, I don't think we will ever know for certain.
I'm very much enjoying this 3-part feature, part 2 is in line with my speculations it seems, so I'm looking forward to the final act.
Some thoughts of my own regarding MNPD:
People tend think of MNPD far too simplistically.
It's not as simple as secretly being a bad person - it's about being a person over a lifetime unwittingly nurturing a veritable self monster that keeps running- and ruining - their own lives, by spreading emotional misery to the lives of those under their wings; misery that breeds misery and works both as the protector and punisher to the maladaptive ego: both shielding it from an evil world and perpetuating the evil of the world.
MNPD is a soul-wrenching disorder because it will turn the person against the world and everyone in it - including their children, who will inevitably get played against one another, and most particularly their spouses, whose abuse is second only to the one that the pwMNPD casts upon ... themselves, 24/7.
From this perspective, a person who has gone malignant becomes embedded within a layer of pure (objective) evil that orchestrates all their subjective cognitive affairs. This is almost akin to... *figuratively* speaking, demonic possession (more on that below).
The tragic aspect is how the disorder sets up a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If the person happens to hold objective power, they easily and naturally become tyrants who don't hesitate to trample the people, for the highest good of the people.
If the person's power is relative (such as the head of a family), the situation usually becomes emotionally abusive, since the family is likewise run by a tyrant. Such a person will inadvertedly become a toxic pillar that will sow chaos and pain in the hearts of those who lean closer to them and rely on their support and guidance; they do this despite their sometimes having only good intentions at the conscious level, which only adds to their distorted perception of the world.
In a way, all of the above could be applicable to just about any personality disorder All PD's have similar distortions and cause comparable effects on the psyche - what seems to set apart MNPD is how the person is malignant first and foremost to *themselves*, and by extension to others. It's almost as if the MNDP aspect is the central hub around which other PDs arise.
I sometimes wonder if this aspect could be what modern research has progressively been encapsulating within the ASPD construct.
Actually, the ASPD construct could be a natural reaction (or the tip of the iceberg) to the unseen presence of MNPD, and RAD (which you mention on part 2) could be the precursor to ASPD.
(By the way, Scott Peck is a fascinating author due to his own idiosyncrasies and the inner demons he too mush have quarreled with throughout his life; the course of his writing reflects his inner journey, and his subsequent books delve outright into issues of demonic possession and exorcism as seem from the perspective of a clinical psychologist who is also a devout Christian. The latter sections in "The People of the Lie" already touch the matter of exorcisms in a rather interesting take. His subsequent books explore those ideas in depth, but I haven't read them yet.)
Interesting thoughts you have. I have often wondered if MNPD is actually a far more realistic stand in for what is listed in most articles regarding psychopathy because of the rather toxic nature of the emotional substructure in the individual. This is often assigned to psychopaths, but that just isn't the case. I think that ASPD being still considered a reasonable diagnosis is likely doing a lot of damage to the understanding of all the things that tend to get stuffed underneath it's heading.
If psychological splitting were to work as a subconscious defensive mask/filter, what could happen when the person develops the malignant ASPD layer is akin to this protective mask getting reversed - so rather than filtering the surrounding air, it begins to contaminate it, so to speak...
---and the person wearing it not only gets fully exposed to the emotional toxicity in the environment, but effectively begins to actively compound on its venom while being fully immersed in it, ceaseless insults therefore ever piling upon injuries... misery that breeds misery, inevitably, yet fully unaware of the chain of repercussions, since the protective mask/filter works behind the curtains of their consciousness.
I was also thinking along those lines. This could be construed as a whole bunch of gaslighting and whitewashing, in which case, a lot of lying is being done about their "Kevin"
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.
Think about the amount of time he illustrates that the beating took place over.
He picks up his daughter, and takes her from the room.
He takes her into the kitchen.
He bathes her in the sink.
He takes the time to calm her down.
He examines her wounds.
He treats all of her wounds, and bandages them.
After he does all of those things he then listens to the beating. He states at this point, that it went on for a long time. Long enough for his daughter to fall asleep in his arms.
This is not an insignificant amount of time. It is a half an hour at least. A half an hour of sustained assault is physically unreal. Look at a boxing match, or an MMA fight, and see how quickly professional athletes tire. It they had to perform for a half an hour they would collapse.
Now add to that this woman is not a professional, and her son is certainly larger than her. He is physically more capable as he is described of capable of kicking down doors, thus they had to be replaced.
Something I didn't mention in the post was what his wife stated as well. The description of the assault extended long past adrenaline, as she told him that she;
"I know now that she had systematically beaten every part of his body, focusing heavily on his legs. She told me she kicked him in the groin repeatedly until her legs got tired, and had kept beating his body long after he had passed out."
That's not adrenaline, that is intention. Adrenaline means that you are wild, you aren't thinking, you are just striking. She "systematically" beat him. This means she lived out the adrenaline rush, the only credit that I would give her when it comes to ability, and was able to not only keep striking, but did so in a manner that was intended to apparently prevent him from ever reproducing.
There is actually a very interesting reason that they used to separate mothers and babies at birth;
Separation at birth -- the role of anaesthesia
The evolution of our large brains set humans apart from other primates in many ways. One notable difference was that - compared to all other primates and all other animals - childbirth became a hazardous activity, often requiring assistance (Trevathan 2010) and leading to high death rates for both mothers and babies. By the Victorian era ways of easing the fear and pain of childbirth had been developed (Loudon 1992). The anaesthetic of the day - chloroform - could only be accessed in a hospital setting, so women who would previously birthed at home assisted by a local midwife or family, increasingly chose to have their babies in hospitals. A major side-effect of chloroform was that it made mothers incapable of looking after their babies following birth. Some early anaesthetics also affected the babies making them very sleepy after birth. In some cases their breathing was affected and they had to be closely monitored. For this reason babies were removed from their mothers after birth to be cared for in a nursery by hospital staff (Ball 2008). Because the drugs also affected sucking ability many babies were force fed formula in the nursery. From this point on, and through the development of new anaesthetics such as Twilight Sleep and barbiturates, separation of baby from mother immediately following birth became the norm due to the mother's incapacitation.
... and infection control
Even when the heavy use of anaesthetics fell from fashion during the psychoprophylaxis era in the seventies, babies were still routinely removed to the hospital nursery at night despite their mother no longer being incapacitated. Now separation was justified by infection control -- babies were removed from their mothers to a 'safe place' and only returned for scheduled feeds (Ball 2008). It was only recently that the importance of early and prolonged mother-infant contact began to be realised, and 'rooming-in' (baby sleeping in a cot in the same room as the mother, rather than being removed to a nursery) became the norm in UK hospitals.
The separation of mother from baby after birth - for the reasons of mother's incapacity, need for rest, effect of anaesthesia on the baby or infection control, all of which were consequences of a hospital birth and the birthing environment - meant that for much of the last 100 years in Britain separation of mother and baby after birth was routine. From the 1940s the development of aseptic practices and antibiotics meant that the death rate for mothers giving birth in hospital dropped dramatically, and ever more mothers chose to give birth in hospital. In America by 1973, 99% of all births took place in hospital.
Oh yes, I am not disagreeing with your thorough and probably watertight analysis of why the post is fiction. Just that I see no impediment to someone wanting to beat their child so badly under those circumstances.
I was aware of the twilight sleep of Victorian births and the necessity of it, but did not realise that that was part of a continuum on to my lifetime so thanks for pointing that out. Gosh, there are lags in protocols, but I didnt connect 'olden days' with 'recent past'! And yet, that lag still astounds me, not because the establishment were stuck in the old ways, (that's all too familiar). But because I imagined new mothers who were unanaesthetised
, without any need for reference to medical studies on early contact, would sooner claw the nurse's eyes out than surrender her baby. The things you can make people do huh......
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.
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 do have a rather annoying gift of devil's advocate, much to the chagrin of those that know me and are emotionally invested in whatever has them upset. It can be very annoying to find that their righteous anger might not be so well considered.
Psychology today has its issues, but really it comes down the writer and their citations, also being able to find the same information from multiple unrelated sources, which the MacDonald Triad certainly has.
I don't know if I would say that a character necessarily has to to be sympathetic, but the story has to be interesting and make the person want to know what happens next. I have a main character that I don't like at all, but it's her story, so, she is who she is.
You should give insight to the characters themselves however. Unless you are doing literal writing, like Hemmingway did. Hills Like White Elephants, is an excellent example of this. There is no internal thought process presented, there is no background given, the story is about the here and now. You get details about the environment, the conversation of the characters, and that's about it. I find the writing rather dry and tedious, but other people quite like it.
I can understand that. Righteous anger seem to be a common theme that I deal with.
Writing characters that I don't like isn't a difficulty for me as I have never looked at their story as having anything to do with me. I just tell it the way it is supposed to be told.
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 am inclined to think that it is fiction as well, but your story was very interesting, and something to take into consideration. I am about to post the second part of the evaluation.
Your story about your mother's continued rage even after you were no danger is an interesting phenomenon and quite familiar. I have even seen the same in animals. We once visited an ancient stonework in the middle of a field on a working farm that allowed public access. A rooster accompanied us out to the site (bear with me here!), lingered harmlessly for a while, then became increasingly restless and irritated, and as we were well on our way back afterwards, he took long running flapping pecks at our legs and saved his greatest displays of rage for when we were already getting back in the car. I guess he could tolerate intruders for only so long. I have not forgotten this incident because it was a reflection of such an illogical, but common human behaviour.
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
The part about people slowing with lack of confidence and fear is really interesting. I know not all women will lose in a fight to a man. There is a great story about a woman whose husband hired a hit man to kill her with a hammer, and she beat the ever loving hell out of him. He died, she didn't. It was a fun one to listen to.
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
Wait... so a baby crying doesn't mean that they are Satan reborn? I have been so mislead.
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 )
"This was exemplified in the case of Bobby. Although he was seriously depressed and desperately in need of help, the source, the cause of his depression, lay not in him but in his parents' behavior toward him. Although depressed, there was nothing sick about his depression. Any fifteen-year-old boy would have been depressed in his circumstances. The essential sickness of the situation lay not in his depression but in the family environment to which his depression was a natural enough response.
To children—even adolescents—their parents are like gods. The way their parents do things seems the way they should be done. Children are seldom able to objectively compare their parents to other parents. They are not able to make realistic assessments of their parents' behavior. Treated badly by its parents, a child will usually assume that it is bad. If treated as an ugly, stupid second-class citizen, it will grow up with an image of itself as ugly, stupid and second-class. Raised without love, children come to believe themselves unlovable. We may express this as a general law of child development: Whenever there is a major deficit in parental love, the child will, in all likelihood, respond to that deficit by assuming itself to be the cause of the deficit, thereby developing an unrealistically negative self-image."
It seems I will have to read that book, because that left me with many questions.
I agree that the narrative from Reddit may include a MNPD individual, and actually touch on that in the second part which I just sent out. I didn't assign a diagnosis to the father, but there is a lot of self focus in the writing which left me wondering... that is, if it's real.
If it is fake, it certainly could still be exactly what you said. Unfortunately, I don't think we will ever know for certain.
I'm very much enjoying this 3-part feature, part 2 is in line with my speculations it seems, so I'm looking forward to the final act.
Some thoughts of my own regarding MNPD:
People tend think of MNPD far too simplistically.
It's not as simple as secretly being a bad person - it's about being a person over a lifetime unwittingly nurturing a veritable self monster that keeps running- and ruining - their own lives, by spreading emotional misery to the lives of those under their wings; misery that breeds misery and works both as the protector and punisher to the maladaptive ego: both shielding it from an evil world and perpetuating the evil of the world.
MNPD is a soul-wrenching disorder because it will turn the person against the world and everyone in it - including their children, who will inevitably get played against one another, and most particularly their spouses, whose abuse is second only to the one that the pwMNPD casts upon ... themselves, 24/7.
From this perspective, a person who has gone malignant becomes embedded within a layer of pure (objective) evil that orchestrates all their subjective cognitive affairs. This is almost akin to... *figuratively* speaking, demonic possession (more on that below).
The tragic aspect is how the disorder sets up a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If the person happens to hold objective power, they easily and naturally become tyrants who don't hesitate to trample the people, for the highest good of the people.
If the person's power is relative (such as the head of a family), the situation usually becomes emotionally abusive, since the family is likewise run by a tyrant. Such a person will inadvertedly become a toxic pillar that will sow chaos and pain in the hearts of those who lean closer to them and rely on their support and guidance; they do this despite their sometimes having only good intentions at the conscious level, which only adds to their distorted perception of the world.
In a way, all of the above could be applicable to just about any personality disorder All PD's have similar distortions and cause comparable effects on the psyche - what seems to set apart MNPD is how the person is malignant first and foremost to *themselves*, and by extension to others. It's almost as if the MNDP aspect is the central hub around which other PDs arise.
I sometimes wonder if this aspect could be what modern research has progressively been encapsulating within the ASPD construct.
Actually, the ASPD construct could be a natural reaction (or the tip of the iceberg) to the unseen presence of MNPD, and RAD (which you mention on part 2) could be the precursor to ASPD.
(By the way, Scott Peck is a fascinating author due to his own idiosyncrasies and the inner demons he too mush have quarreled with throughout his life; the course of his writing reflects his inner journey, and his subsequent books delve outright into issues of demonic possession and exorcism as seem from the perspective of a clinical psychologist who is also a devout Christian. The latter sections in "The People of the Lie" already touch the matter of exorcisms in a rather interesting take. His subsequent books explore those ideas in depth, but I haven't read them yet.)
Interesting thoughts you have. I have often wondered if MNPD is actually a far more realistic stand in for what is listed in most articles regarding psychopathy because of the rather toxic nature of the emotional substructure in the individual. This is often assigned to psychopaths, but that just isn't the case. I think that ASPD being still considered a reasonable diagnosis is likely doing a lot of damage to the understanding of all the things that tend to get stuffed underneath it's heading.
In line with the mask metaphor from Quora:
If psychological splitting were to work as a subconscious defensive mask/filter, what could happen when the person develops the malignant ASPD layer is akin to this protective mask getting reversed - so rather than filtering the surrounding air, it begins to contaminate it, so to speak...
---and the person wearing it not only gets fully exposed to the emotional toxicity in the environment, but effectively begins to actively compound on its venom while being fully immersed in it, ceaseless insults therefore ever piling upon injuries... misery that breeds misery, inevitably, yet fully unaware of the chain of repercussions, since the protective mask/filter works behind the curtains of their consciousness.
I was also thinking along those lines. This could be construed as a whole bunch of gaslighting and whitewashing, in which case, a lot of lying is being done about their "Kevin"
I agree that's it sounds like a fiction that has some real basis.
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.
Think about the amount of time he illustrates that the beating took place over.
He picks up his daughter, and takes her from the room.
He takes her into the kitchen.
He bathes her in the sink.
He takes the time to calm her down.
He examines her wounds.
He treats all of her wounds, and bandages them.
After he does all of those things he then listens to the beating. He states at this point, that it went on for a long time. Long enough for his daughter to fall asleep in his arms.
This is not an insignificant amount of time. It is a half an hour at least. A half an hour of sustained assault is physically unreal. Look at a boxing match, or an MMA fight, and see how quickly professional athletes tire. It they had to perform for a half an hour they would collapse.
Now add to that this woman is not a professional, and her son is certainly larger than her. He is physically more capable as he is described of capable of kicking down doors, thus they had to be replaced.
Something I didn't mention in the post was what his wife stated as well. The description of the assault extended long past adrenaline, as she told him that she;
"I know now that she had systematically beaten every part of his body, focusing heavily on his legs. She told me she kicked him in the groin repeatedly until her legs got tired, and had kept beating his body long after he had passed out."
That's not adrenaline, that is intention. Adrenaline means that you are wild, you aren't thinking, you are just striking. She "systematically" beat him. This means she lived out the adrenaline rush, the only credit that I would give her when it comes to ability, and was able to not only keep striking, but did so in a manner that was intended to apparently prevent him from ever reproducing.
There is actually a very interesting reason that they used to separate mothers and babies at birth;
Separation at birth -- the role of anaesthesia
The evolution of our large brains set humans apart from other primates in many ways. One notable difference was that - compared to all other primates and all other animals - childbirth became a hazardous activity, often requiring assistance (Trevathan 2010) and leading to high death rates for both mothers and babies. By the Victorian era ways of easing the fear and pain of childbirth had been developed (Loudon 1992). The anaesthetic of the day - chloroform - could only be accessed in a hospital setting, so women who would previously birthed at home assisted by a local midwife or family, increasingly chose to have their babies in hospitals. A major side-effect of chloroform was that it made mothers incapable of looking after their babies following birth. Some early anaesthetics also affected the babies making them very sleepy after birth. In some cases their breathing was affected and they had to be closely monitored. For this reason babies were removed from their mothers after birth to be cared for in a nursery by hospital staff (Ball 2008). Because the drugs also affected sucking ability many babies were force fed formula in the nursery. From this point on, and through the development of new anaesthetics such as Twilight Sleep and barbiturates, separation of baby from mother immediately following birth became the norm due to the mother's incapacitation.
... and infection control
Even when the heavy use of anaesthetics fell from fashion during the psychoprophylaxis era in the seventies, babies were still routinely removed to the hospital nursery at night despite their mother no longer being incapacitated. Now separation was justified by infection control -- babies were removed from their mothers to a 'safe place' and only returned for scheduled feeds (Ball 2008). It was only recently that the importance of early and prolonged mother-infant contact began to be realised, and 'rooming-in' (baby sleeping in a cot in the same room as the mother, rather than being removed to a nursery) became the norm in UK hospitals.
The separation of mother from baby after birth - for the reasons of mother's incapacity, need for rest, effect of anaesthesia on the baby or infection control, all of which were consequences of a hospital birth and the birthing environment - meant that for much of the last 100 years in Britain separation of mother and baby after birth was routine. From the 1940s the development of aseptic practices and antibiotics meant that the death rate for mothers giving birth in hospital dropped dramatically, and ever more mothers chose to give birth in hospital. In America by 1973, 99% of all births took place in hospital.
All stuff I didn't know
Oh yes, I am not disagreeing with your thorough and probably watertight analysis of why the post is fiction. Just that I see no impediment to someone wanting to beat their child so badly under those circumstances.
I was aware of the twilight sleep of Victorian births and the necessity of it, but did not realise that that was part of a continuum on to my lifetime so thanks for pointing that out. Gosh, there are lags in protocols, but I didnt connect 'olden days' with 'recent past'! And yet, that lag still astounds me, not because the establishment were stuck in the old ways, (that's all too familiar). But because I imagined new mothers who were unanaesthetised
, without any need for reference to medical studies on early contact, would sooner claw the nurse's eyes out than surrender her baby. The things you can make people do huh......
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.
Yes, that sentence did strike me as odd, I agree.
I am 73 and I have used haha in sentences but normally it is in writing that is much less formal than the style of the author.
Good to know.
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.
There's a guy on Youtube called MrBallen I think you'd like.
I do like him. One of his videos is the basis for the true crime post that I will be writing after finishing th Reddit series.
I mostly get the impression that he was watching We Need To Talk About Kevin.
Possibly. Terrible unrealistic movie, terrible unrealistic "confession".
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.
Indeed, it falls on deaf ears.
I read the first one a while ago and forgot all about it! Thanks for sharing!
Thank you for reading, Julia
An interesting story to hear about and think you've made some good points on this Athena. Thanks for the share.
Thank you for reading Emma
This was entertaining
Excellent
I do have a rather annoying gift of devil's advocate, much to the chagrin of those that know me and are emotionally invested in whatever has them upset. It can be very annoying to find that their righteous anger might not be so well considered.
Psychology today has its issues, but really it comes down the writer and their citations, also being able to find the same information from multiple unrelated sources, which the MacDonald Triad certainly has.
I don't know if I would say that a character necessarily has to to be sympathetic, but the story has to be interesting and make the person want to know what happens next. I have a main character that I don't like at all, but it's her story, so, she is who she is.
You should give insight to the characters themselves however. Unless you are doing literal writing, like Hemmingway did. Hills Like White Elephants, is an excellent example of this. There is no internal thought process presented, there is no background given, the story is about the here and now. You get details about the environment, the conversation of the characters, and that's about it. I find the writing rather dry and tedious, but other people quite like it.
It really depends on what sort of writer you are.
I can understand that. Righteous anger seem to be a common theme that I deal with.
Writing characters that I don't like isn't a difficulty for me as I have never looked at their story as having anything to do with me. I just tell it the way it is supposed to be told.