Do you Believe in Monsters?
- Megan Haldane
- Feb 10, 2019
- 11 min read
I don't.
I have never met one yet. I never saw a monster. I have seen them in the movies. They can scare the hell out of me... very occasionally. Lucky me. I have never seen one in my dreams. I have followed the tale of the Loch Ness monster for 30 years. I hope they find him one day. I want to believe in monsters but I can't.
I was present at three hundred births. I never saw a monster born. However, I do believe in humans who do monstrous monster - like acts. They maim. They kill. They torture humans and other creatures. They cause truly unbearable suffering for people and beings of this earth. If you believe in monsters, please don't have a child. You may create and give birth to a monster. How grotesque but it follows that if you believe in monsters in the form of a human then you might just make one. Almost every human I have ever worked with who has made a monster like child has had no idea that they had played a big part in the creation of their own monster.
I have yet to see or hear of a baby being born a monster. Some babies are unfortunately born with so called alien or monster like features with bodily deformities that are hard to take in. These babies will never even harm a fly. So I ask the parents of truly disturbed 'badly' behaved children,
"What was he or she like at birth?" "Fine," they say.
"Did you get a chance to cuddle him or her straight away?" I ask
"Absolutely!" they say, "until they took him away to be bathed and weighed. Before that he looked into our eyes for ages, so beautiful, so amazing, so adorable, so quiet and peaceful."
"Oh," I say... so he or she was not born mean and nasty, brooding, cantankerous unfeeling and cruel?"
"No way," say the parents. "He was born perfectly normal."
"So, what happened?" I ask.
"Well, we noticed by about eighteen months or so after being quite an 'easy' baby he just started crying a lot. We could never settle him. He became very demanding and was always disturbed, agitated. It was so hard. He just would not sleep which meant we became sleep deprived ourselves. It was so hard not to get angry with him. We were so frustrated and we did not know what to do. Sometimes you would feel like just leaving him to cry and scream all alone but we just could not do that. I must admit on a few occasions I came close to just throwing him down on the bed. Actually, to tell you the truth, I did do that once. I have never admitted that to anybody before but it is the truth I am ashamed to say and I feel guilty about it even to this day."
Many scenarios unfold when I ask parents about how their babies were when they were born. Some will talk about how their baby was very quiet and how they noticed at around age eighteen months to three years their baby was not like other babies... not as advanced. We knew there was something not quite right but we never really got a diagnosis from the medical professionals. Others will talk about their perfect baby who until they hit age 'whatever' was perfect in every way, never cried much... not particularly angry, just fine in every way. Now he or she is totally out of control, rude, disobedient always angry and argumentative. They hate to think about what the teenage years will be like.
I have a long history of observing babies and children and I am one hundred percent sure of the fact that young adults and adults who commit atrocities, especially against humans, including themselves, they are formed, not born. Formed after being in the world for a while, growing and learning to make their way and make sense of their particular world dependent on their particular circumstances, their own unique particular propensities and especially the parenting they receive.
And here we come to the sticky part. I would love to ask the parents of the mass murderers John Ladue and Elliot Rodgers about their boys as babies... baby monsters? Of course not! So what happened?
This goes straight to the root cause of our problems. Many parents do not know what happened. They really do not know... and most of all they do not know what part their role as a parent played in the formation of the monster type acts their children commit or the angry, resistant behaviours they constantly display. We all end up putting the problem down to our child being born with, or maybe developing a 'mental illness.' We have to do that ... but to born with it? ... I do not think so!
Why do we do this, us parents, us commentators, us psychotherapists, us teachers, us!? It is because we collude together to protect ourselves. We must never cast a critical eye on our friend or ever mention a word to our friend when we notice they are causing their child to suffer, react and respond negatively in certain situations. We never want to blame and we ourselves avoid blame. We are correct ...blame is no good but the real problem is this. We do not want to be the one responsible for how our child turns out to be an angry mentally unstable young adult or older adult... and we do not want to upset others who are parents that they are doing something 'wrong'... wrong only in terms of how it is affecting their child.
This is very understandable . We have nowhere to go with all of this and that is because we have very little idea about what is going on inside our children, all of the children who are being negatively affected in their development. We are blind. We cannot see at all. The best way we can enable ourselves to see inside our children is to see inside ourselves.
We have all experienced less than ideal parenting in our own developmental years. No parents are perfectly adjusted, perfectly equipped or trained for the job of parenting and guiding the young.
When we take the extraordinary journey to unravel and own the childhood experiences which made us into who we are, we develop an X ray like vision into our own children... mind to mind, mental but not necessarily visual. We are more knowledgeable and instinctual about our children... about what they are thinking, what sense or 'no sense' they are making of the world around them. In a later part of an article, the would be mass murderer John LaDue boasted that his Father could not see anything of what was going on inside his son's mind. It is not about reading thoughts. It is about reading the child's mind from and within your own mind. John LaDue had more than just thoughts. He had intentions. He had feelings of inferiority. He had longings to be seen as great. His Father could not see that John had made major moves to go about killing many people, including him, his own Father standing right there in front of him and his wife and his daughter and this very own son of theirs himself! One of his guns, loaded and ready to fire was sitting right on his bed, he told the Police Officer in an interview before they had even gone to search his house. His Father had no idea of anything wrong?... facing his own son as his would be killer? The primary requirement to build a base for a healthy mind is to have had a healthy base when we were infants. The first contact is our Mother and that is the person we feel a need to make our primary, primal, enveloping, protective safe and sure connection with... that is until we do not need it as strongly any more. If the focus shifts to a Father a little later then that can work but for the child, he or she needs a decent amount of time with the affection and love of their Mother first. It certainly does not need to exclude the Father. Although there is now a huge dispute regarding this fact, I will put it simply and say that until the guys are giving birth to their offspring (and I do not doubt that an artificial mechanised womb will be implanted in men one day) we must endeavour to keep the primary and primal connection with the Mother for as many years as possible. I am talking as many as three years. These days I am cutting it back to three hours, three weeks, three months but three years is optimal.
There is a big movement in parts of the world where parents are saying a child's behaviours, demands and unhappiness are not causal. In other words how the parents be in any and every moment with their child does not matter so much. This is a very dangerous sign to me and I do not doubt that the mind itself of the developing human will, one day not be there enough to contact. This contact is much needed for improvement and change and so called mental health practitioners like me will cease to exist. Those days are coming fast unfortunately. And for anyone worried that they are not doing the right thing... you are probably correct. The way forward is to hold two of my mottos in your mind. One is 'Cause without Blame' and the other is 'No shame, No Blame.'
Opposite to the non-causal belief, I know only too well. For a child, something happens and then there is a result. If we deal with our mistakes without shame and do not blame ourselves or anybody else then with increased understanding we can help our children become and remain mind healthy not 'mentally ill'
JOHN LADUE
John LaDue, a seventeen year old honor student planned to bomb and shoot his way through a Minnesota High School to commemorate the 15th anniversary of the Columbine massacre.
During a five hour Police interview after being intercepted he said, 'No one knows what I think'. He knew that to be true. He was proud of it and it was his intention to have it remain that way until... he was discovered entering a self storage unit where he had been working for many months collecting and storing an arsenal of guns. There were also bombs along with the equipment to make many more. Those who discovered him were none other than Police Officers called by a woman who lived across the road from the storage units who felt suspicious of him when he passed very close by her house.
He faces twelve separate counts, including four charges of premeditated murder for planning to kill his family prior to going on the rampage. He had already set off several small bombs around the small town of Waseca about 80 miles south of Minneapolis.
During the interviews, freely available on the internet, he finally tells the interviewing officers of the thoughts he had been having. He felt, he said, that he was probably mentally ill and he wanted help to find out why he was the way he was. He was very clear, very articulate. Despite the articulate delivery of his story during the interview he became emotional a few times in that he began to feel and he began to cry.
LaDue soon admitted that he had a 180 page journal at his home where he had documented his whole plan of destruction, a plan he was following carefully with the full intention to carry out the killings. In his home, he told the Officers, he had guns and ammunition and somewhere in the mix there were thousands of ball bearings and a couple pressure cookers.
He was very happy that he had fooled his parents whom he said he was able to have believe that he was a normal guy with no apparent problems. He had hidden all of his dark thoughts. To be sure his Father, in a later interview, said he had no idea his son was troubled.
When an Officer started asking LaDue about why he wanted to commit the atrocities, he jumped in very quickly and said, "First off, I was not bullied at all. I don't think I have been bullied in my life. I have good parents. I live in a good town. I think I am just mentally ill and nobody has noticed and I have been trying to hide it."
This was a stunning revelation to me. Very clearly he had learned about the connection between bullying and mental illness or bullying and needing to carry out acts of violence or in other words, bully others. He wanted to protect himself by declaring even before it was mentioned that he had never been bullied. Unfortunately he later contradicted one of his points by telling the Officer that he was not planning to still be alive after he had killed everybody. The Officer asked why he would end up killing himself. He had already declared and was critical of the weakness, failings and faults of both the Columbine and Boston mass murderers and he said that it would be his way of getting out of Waseca because he had never liked it there and he didn't know why... perhaps he was just mentally ill, he said.
If and when John LaDue goes to trial it will be a lot easier to understand what has caused his strong desire to kill others to build up in him. He claimed he did not want to be seen as weak and that is why he had to do better than the other guys... the Boston and Columbine guys.Does this leave John LaDue as a would-be Monster given that he was caught and unable to carry out his plan. How many other would-be Monsters are out there in bedrooms and garages and self storage units planning to kill as many people as they can in one mad rampage so that they can avenge their own feelings of the inner death they have already gone through. When a young guy feels so angry and enraged and no-one, not even the nice counsellors and therapists he has seen over the years, can meet him in that rage and be with him and show him and teach him until he has the understanding and knowledge that he is not 'mentally ill, then he will have to do something about it to release the tension in his mind. That is what is needed. What else can he do?... What? Lay down and die? No. That does not happen. Kill himself to end the pain? Yes, sometimes. The end game though is to pay back society for not helping him find happiness like everyone else seems to have and for making him suffer as he sees it. He has long lost hope and he has spent many years in anguish just trying to work out what to do. Often during those years from about age eight or younger, he has formed some perfect neurological pathways that at least will help him carry out the killings that will surely end it all. By age 20 or so, (...!!! Beware,politically incorrect ALERT)... particularly if he is a gamer or has had thousands of hours on screens he will have set up a mind full of familiarity with annihilating his foe. In his mind/body setup he has already extinguished millions of lives on a screen. The actual killing has not been real of course. It has been simulated, but his particular training in hours of killing or annihilating humans is perfectly in place, having been developed in the neural pathwaysas a pattern eventually affecting the mind itself.
Just like the pilot who has put a certain required number of hours into learning on a simulator as to what he or she might do when a catastrophic incident occurs mid-flight, these young boys, and increasingly young girls, are putting many more hours than these pilots ever did, into training on their simulators. When the catastrophic incidents of life keep piling up, these young people are well equipped to carry out mass killings. They have long passed the feeling stage. They are numbed by their own mind, mental and emotional demise. With their thousands of hours of training they are ready for the finale. With a little bit of planning and a little bit of experience at a firing range, or using some small explosives in a local park they are ready to cross over to the emergency of exacting their own and others exit from this world as was John LaDue... a real exit from a real world in which they could not find a real self or a real place except in their thoughts and imaginings. They are plagued by the suppressed rageful thoughts and feelings and play them out on their simulator in their homes, at their schools or jobs or out on the streets. It is easy for them after a lot of planning to cross over... too late for empathy, too long in the simulator.
Their mind cries, 'Let's make it real and get the hell outta here!'
We do not understand how it all happened and so we call them a monster... a born monster, mentally ill by nature, not stricken by lack of nurture. So hey, don't ask me to believe in monsters...
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