We Could Fill in the Blanks

[Cornfield]

Today's paper reported that a woman shot her husband in Troy, Ohio in the parking lot of a center and drove off.
The police had a description of the car and caught up with the woman at a gas station where she shot herself in the chest and confessed to the murder of her husband before she died. The sheriff's department said they were aware of the couple in their records.

The woman left a suicide note.  The mental damage that is done to both people attempting to live in a harmful marriage is uncomprehensible.  I don't know if there will be further reports, but we can well imagine some of the events that led up to this point over the years.  I have decided that the "'till death do us part" doesn't apply to every marriage anymore, if it ever did. 

I have friends who have a troubled sister on drugs, not raising a child in a healthy environment, and not working regularly.  She is living in a rotten marriage, to say the least.  One sibling gives her checks to cover rent because she is afraid the child will be out on the street, and the other sibling tells her to go to the doctor when she calls.
There is no good solution to this messy situation. 

I never dreamed I would live in a community where people declined to such a low degree of functioning and didn't seek help when it is available.  And I am shocked that my friends enable such behavior.  They need to go to court on behalf of the child if they want to be helpful in this situation.  There are a number of safety issues here.

I am hoping this recession leads people to choose to discipling themselves on a straighter track to a decent life.
We were a little deprived during the World War in the '40's and I think it was a valuable learning tool for my adult years.  Conquering and struggling with challenges can end up being a good thing if it produces a feeling of achievement and power.  I am not sorry I was raised in physical denial because it produced beneficial results.

Sometimes we need a helping hand so long as it supports the right choices to a sane atmosphere.  I know that my neighbor walked me down the road and told me bluntly to "get a spine."  It woke me up and got me started in the right direction to survival.  I had the tools to get out of my misery and didn't have enough faith in myself to turn my direction towards what I personally needed to succeed. 

We need to be reminded to believe in ourselves and find our inner strength before we are destroyed by our poor choices.  Life must be a choice.  I don't really know because I have never been that low to not choose life.

Cornfield

[honeybearII]

Yes, sadly Corn, we CAN fill in the blanks, can't we?  Some of us might have been better off to have shot our husbands, LOL, but instead we chose to try to make a life with people who were incapable and unwilling to love us.  Each woman here knows that horrid, empty, hollow feeling at the center of her gut, that never goes away.  It is a horrible way to feel and a horrible life to live.

People make bad choices because they cannot see a way out or like many of US, we are stll holding on to beliefs about marrage (the whole "tl death do us part" shtick) that we need to jettison and realize we have a right to a life that is self-fulfilling and stop being so self-sacrificing that we come to the end of our days with years and years invested in a hopeless and unloving life.  I do NOT believe that the Creator EVER intended for his beautiful creatures to live like that regardless of WHAT some of our religious upbringings tell us.  I believe with all my heart that He wants us to be happy, content, and full of joy and most of us have been in marriages that are anything BUT that.

I vote for life.  I will NEVER again put myself in a position to be used, degraded and discarded by ANYONE.  I am worth much more than that, and I know that God expects me to live a life that I create and not give over my power to anyone who does not honor me, cherish me, and love me. 

Honey

[Hazel]

I am a strong proponent of marriage/family...death do us part BUT I agree life with a PSYCHO is not life and abusive.

I was in the position to out a psycho to his wife, they divorced. He has a child with her and another wife, he makes children just fails to care for them.

I did not hesitate to tell her. Sadly,while he's out-of-the-picture, she has moved on to another.

I suspect she's an N too- this will be her FOURTH marriage. This is becoming more common, not to mention commonlaw arrangements..add those ina nd

how many r/s do these psychos have? How many broken lives behind them? But what to do? I think it starts with us. I don'tput upwith abuse in any form anymore and I try to apply justice when I can.

[CZBZ]

"Sometimes we need a helping hand so long as it supports the right choices to a sane atmosphere.  I know that my neighbor walked me down the road and told me bluntly to "get a spine."  It woke me up and got me started in the right direction to survival.  I had the tools to get out of my misery and didn't have enough faith in myself to turn my direction towards what I personally needed to succeed."~Cornfield


My father is the one who bluntly told me to 'get a spine'. There's something about the family patriarch giving his daughter permission to fight back, that pushed me out of my NiceGirlNess into my full-on Warrior WomanNess. I will never be able to express enough gratitude nor repay my Dad for cutting through my gender programming and eliminating my guilt about being too aggressive and not-nice. Putting myself first has been a struggle and maybe other women, too. In fact, I cannot do it completely. I just can't.

I'm sure there's some really nice men out there who've had a hard time breaking free from their 'nice and selfless' code, too. I oughtened have worried about being the next Medusa though since my niceness goes all the way to the core. It just needed to be balanced with being NICE to myself, too.

My family also had the belief that Marriage was to be Forever. That two people were required by sacred law to work out their relationship problems and disciplining themselves. I grew up thinking that no matter what kind of guy I married, as long as we were committed to the marriage, we could work out anything. Even infidelity. Now if there are two dysfunctionally normal people in that marriage , even infidelity won't stop them from loving one another and working it through. BUT if there is one pathological person, or even two, there's no hope of reconciling the relationship. Disputes escalate when neither person is able to put on the brakes and stop themselves from reacting.

Pathological means: Of, relating to, or manifesting behavior that is habitual, maladaptive, and compulsive

About your other comment, Cornfield: "I never dreamed I would live in a community where people declined to such a low degree of functioning and didn't seek help when it is available."

This video explains what happens to people in pathological relationships when no matter what they do, the relationship never changes. I'd highly recommend watching this seven-minute video, even if uploading takes several minutes.

Learned Helplessness

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFmFOmprTt0[/youtube]

Charisse Nixon, Ph.D Developmental Psychologist at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College and Director of Research and Evaluation for The Ophelia Project discusses the phenomenon of learned helplessness.



Hugs,
CZBZ

[Julia]

Yet again, a murder-suicide in the news. The family from Long Island is a particularly obvious case of malignant Nism to me. The very wealthy, charming, and successful tax attorney with the perfect family. He planned and waited until they were all visiting his oldest daughter at college so that he could kill her too.

The friends and family are "shocked......, they were such a PERFECT family" (emphasis is mine of course.....)

The latest reports leave no doubt he bludgeoned and asphyxiated them one by one over a period of hours. No fit of depression or panic, just cold and calculated murder to avoid detection by other hotel guests. The reports say he was on the verge of being investigated for bilking  20 million dollars from partners in a shady high-interest loan business. I'm guessing THAT business was on the side, apart from his prestigious day job as an attorney.......

What I want to know is how to get MENTAL ILLNESS into these articles? When will journalists routinely  hint that the perfect facade was just a facade? Instead they repeat the quotes that he was "the perfect family man, that he obviously loved his wife and his girls, that the guy may have snapped because he was depressed about his finances".

Gibberish.

I want to hear the words Narcissism and Sociopath in these articles. I want people to hear about how charming and clever these manipulators are. How controlling, how selfish. I want Psychologists to be quoted in these articles. I want those interviews to explain that people with 'major depression' could not hide it from friends and family, that those people can barely get out of bed, and are rarely murderous (certainly not their own children). I want the psychologists to clearly explain that, in general, people who commit murder-suicide of their entire family are pathological and the pathology can be traced back through their entire lives although it is usually well-concealed. I especially want it made clear that the trouble didn't suddenly appear when the murderers "finances" got dicey.

I am so sick of Nism being hidden EVEN when it is so glaringly obvious. People seem willing to believe that a perfectly loving spouse/father would just do this one day because he was afraid he couldn't pay his mortgage the next month or some other nonsense. To believe, basically, that ANY of us are capable of this rather than acknowledge the presence of evil;  well-dressed, smiling, charm-your-socks-off evil.

OK that is my rant. But seriously, I would like to discuss what exactly it would take to change awareness and the practices of news and TV reporting of these cases (and cases like Madoff, OJ, others)

 Truth be told.... I want people to be given enough education (repeatedly in articles) to start to wonder about the slick operators that THEY know at work or at church and to be less ENVIOUS and enraptured by that kind of false, charming, bonhomie. 

Julia

[honeybearII]

 
Amen to everything you said, Julia.  My great dream is to yank the mask off narcissism and get it out of the closet - to finally have a working knowledge for the general public so they can look PAST the facade and see the sickness beneath.  We have so glorified the image of the charming, driven personality in this country, that we have a really hard time accepting that a lot of these types are Ns with an incredible nasty and dangerous streak in private.

Honey

[CZBZ]

"I want the psychologists to clearly explain that, in general, people who commit murder-suicide of their entire family are pathological and the pathology can be traced back through their entire lives although it is usually well-concealed. I especially want it made clear that the trouble didn't suddenly appear when the murderers "finances" got dicey."

FANTASTIC reply, Julia!!

I also get frustrated with people's ignorance about mental illness versus character disorders. But hey, I was just as ignorant myself so I can't get too upset. Most people don't seem to know there's any difference between someone with bipolar and someone with bipolar and NPD.

I suppose one of the problems is accurate diagnoses. We've spent years getting constant support for my nephew along with a second opinion and a third. How many folks have the energy OR the resources to do this?

I feel that the most important thing we can do as members of our society is to help people spot the RED FLAGS and increase their discernment between someone who's a jerk and someone who might be dangerous. A lot of new websites are going up and I'm hearing sociopath and narcissist in the media more than we used to---but I still think people miss the point that socios and narcs fit INTO our society. In fact, much of their behavior is idealized.

I appreciate both you and Honey's point about our culture, though. One of the parameters I had in selecting a spouse was for him to be ambitious and independent. I didn't even think about "Can he attach to his family?" Or here's another good question to consider: "How far would this person go to GET WHAT S/HE WANTS?" You can usually figure that out from their life history. But like most other cuties my age, i didn't think he'd ever mistreat his own family.

Hugs,
CZ

[Hazel]

I have made it a point to educate my children on bullying and esp. personality disorders. I was bullied for years- as a child and an adult. It is scary to know there's virtually no where to  turn, except to ones self. The problems is, is few realize people really do CHOOSE to be evil. And no one wants to deal with it.  I have learned the best way is avoidance and no contact in every situation. Even work and family.