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The
Pathology of Evil
IT WASN'T until my 30s that I saw that evil
does exist. Yes, there really are people, often charming and
intelligent, who thrive on destroying the hopes and lives of others.
It's their mother's milk, their oxygen.
More and more today we see horrific acts
where the young are the perpetrators - the evidence has been right
before our eyes, in our own community.
So where does a propensity for evil come
from? Are there actually bad seeds among us?
Of course not. Hell could freeze over, and
no one will ever find an ethics, compassion, sensitivity or
sincerity gene. Or one that determines the appropriate use of
assertion and aggression.
What can be found, however, are children who
have suffered consistently, often invisibly, and whose cries for
help have been unrecognized or ignored. Children often suffer most
because of an absent parent, not the one who's present.
In fact, feelings of abandonment may be so
great that they overpower everything else.
Most parents try do the best they know how,
but they act or react to ways they've been treated. A child who
grows up with an overpowering parent may pick a distant partner,
finding pleasure in the space that's offered, until loneliness sets
in. Then, to fight the isolation, that person may well become a
hovering and smothering parent.
In many families, there are invisible,
repetitive cycles of emotional abuse, often involving physical and
sexual abuse - but not always, that dominate the lives of millions
of children.
As I see them, these separate cycles are
rage, abandonment/rejection, enmeshment (where the family is one big
blob and a child can't think independently), complete neglect
(absolutely no one cares about the child) and extreme overprotection
and overindulgence (producing angry spoiled brats).
Take the case of the 9-year-old whose
parents finally had the money to move to a rich neighborhood. After
a heavy snow storm, the child spends hours of hard work, proudly
going from house to house shoveling pathways, earning over 25
dollars.
Yet his parents were furious. "Do you want
everyone to think we need money?" bellows his mother. Neither parent
spoke to him for days.
Abused children always cry out in some way
for help. But someone must hear them, or they can go beyond a point
of being reached. With every passing generation without intervention
the cycles of abuse intensify, often turning into physical or sexual
violence, or sexual perversion.
Take the child described earlier. He grew
into an adult seething with buried rage, unable to find pleasure in
work or relationships. He tormented his wife with his compulsive
womanizing. Her anguish did not appease him. On the contrary, he
found it both satisfying and arousing.
When she finally told him she was leaving,
he beat her to a pulp and almost killed her.
My work has taught me that kids who find
pleasure in expressions of chilling cruelty probably have endured at
least one of the cycles, as have at least one of their parents. What
about the kids who go through this pain and grow up in a decent way?
I believe that, somewhere in their lives, at
least one parent or caretaker, a teacher, a religious figure, a
neighbor, a relative - "someone" really cared deeply for them,
reached them and connected. Sometimes this person appears at such a
young age that he or she is not even remembered.
There is but one healing magic for this:
love. A child who has experienced it can't find joy and release in
plotting murder, or any of the other cruelties that we see so often
in our community.
It is uninterrupted pathology that turns
human beings into monsters. These savages have lost their hope and
thus their minds, becoming the terrifying perpetrators of evil.
SaraKay Smullens
Philadelphia
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