How My Aunt Marge Ended Up in the Deep Freeze . . .

[Cosmos]

Thanks Daenerys for that excerpt (from "In Search Of The Miraculous" I guess?).

I definitely think (feel would be more accurate) that some parts must apply to me in some way, but I'm not really able to grok what it exactly is and how it works.

I guess that you can see something in the way I write and interact here and elsewhere that I can not grasp at the moment?

"The energy of the sex center in the work of the thinking, emotional, and moving centers can be recognized by a particular 'taste,' by a particular fervor, by a vehemence which the nature of the affair concerned does not call for. "The thinking center writes books, but in making use of the energy of the sex center it does not simply occupy itself with philosophy, science, or politics — it is always fighting something, disputing, criticizing, creating new subjective theories.

As Laura said, argument for the sake of argument, missing the crux of the matter.

Yes. This is the part I would emphasize: "it is always fighting something, disputing, criticizing, creating new subjective theories".

In your hurry to declaim "OH NO! The movie had NOTHING to do with the real case... see, I read it here... TA DA!!! It's all wrong! Doesn't prove anything about BERNIE!" - you ended up sort of making a fool of yourself because the careful reading of the article on the crime website makes it pretty clear that the movie DID follow the facts rather closely; more closely than most movies of that type do.

So why was this? What made you in such a hurry fight, to dispute, to criticize, to declare YOUR SUBJECTIVE THEORY??!!

We both read the same article and I probably read it a lot faster than you did, almost skimmed it, and immediately saw how much like the real case the movie actually was. So why didn't YOU see that? What blocked that from your mind?

And it isn't the first time that you have come along in a discussion and introduced this same subjective, argumentative note.

So, what's up?

I don't know, maybe oppressed anger, dissatisfaction about myself and what I'm doing, Self Importance and not rightly channelled energy are playing a role here....?

Also I would think not enough solid theoretical knowledge and not enough experienced and applied knowledge are playing a raver big part too.?!

 

[EmeraldHope]

Fason testified that when Betty Gore shushed Candy 25 years later, it brought back a flood of repressed memory that touched off a violent "dissociative reaction." The Houston psychiatrist described that phenomenon as a form of neurosis that can prompt "out of body" experiences. Sufferers sometimes do things without knowing it during bouts of amnesia, sleepwalking or dream states.

Doesn't Martha Stout talk about this type pf dissociative reaction in Myth of Sanity? I seem to recall her saying that sometimes people were committing acts they would never otherwise commit in this type of dissociative states (and even in some cases, "pass on" the abuse from one generation when people had vowed to stop it). It's fascinating (and horrifying) because it does look like when a (karma-based?) scenario is supposed to play out, it finds a way to do so, no matter what... Maybe I'm reading this the wrong way, though.

I hear people say things like 'anybody can be a killer' and I think that this would typically be the psychopaths pushing that kind of ideas to muddy the waters about their kind but there could actually be some truth in that, then, even if the devil IS in the details...

We will watch the movie tonight.

IMHO, I think it may be more apt to say that some types of acts that are committed are state dependent, meaning that when that state is enabled and dissociation occurs, the acting out is involuntary. Anyone I think could be a killer, if prior dissociated trauma is stirred up under the right circumstances. I have seen a friend of mine fight like a ferocious tiger when she was on pain medication when she was being moved from the couch to the bed by a male friend of ours. She was out of it for the most part, and she's a teeny little thing, but was so strong in the resistance it took two of them to move her once that state was aroused. She had been raped and abused as a child, and evidently something got triggered.


I am not so sure karma has anything to do with it honestly.

Here is an example of what I was trying to say: http://www.trauma-pages.com/a/vanderk4.php

Traumatic memories are state dependent.

Research has shown that, under ordinary conditions, many traumatized people, including rape victims (84), battered women (85) and abused children (86) have a fairly good psychosocial adjustment. However, they do not respond to stress the way other people do. Under pressure, they may feel, or act as if they were traumatized all over again. Thus, high states of arousal seem to selectively promote retrieval of traumatic memories, sensory information, or behaviors associated with prior traumatic experiences (9,10). The tendency of traumatized organisms to revert to irrelevant emergency behaviors in response to minor stress has been well documented in animals, as well. Studies at the Wisconsin primate laboratory have shown that rhesus monkeys with histories of severe early maternal deprivation display marked withdrawal or aggression in response to emotional or physical stimuli (such as exposure to loud noises, or the administration of amphetamines), even after a long period of good social adjustment (87). In experiments with mice, Mitchell and his colleagues (88) found that the relative degree of arousal interacts with prior exposure to high stress to determine how an animal will react to novel stimuli. In a state of low arousal, animals tend to be curious and seek novelty. During high arousal, they are frightened, avoid novelty, and perseverate in familiar behavior, regardless of the outcome. Under ordinary circumstances, an animal will choose the most pleasant of two alternatives. When hyperaroused, it will seek whatever is familiar, regardless of the intrinsic rewards. Thus, animals who have been locked in a box in which they were exposed to electric shocks and then released return to those boxes when they are subsequently stressed. Mitchell concluded that this perseveration is nonassociative, i.e. uncoupled from the usual reward systems.In people, analogous phenomena have been documented: memories (somatic or symbolic) related to the trauma are elicited by heightened arousal (89). Information acquired in an aroused, or otherwise altered state of mind is retrieved more readily when people are brought back to that particular state of mind (90,91). State dependent memory retrieval may also be involved in dissociative phenomena in which traumatized persons may be wholly or partially amnestic for memories or behaviors enacted while in altered states of mind (2,3,92).Contemporary biological researchers have shown that medications that stimulate autonomic arousal may precipitate visual images and affect states associated with prior traumatic experiences in people with PTSD, but not in controls. In patients with PTSD the injection of drugs such as lactate (93) and yohimbine (52) tends to precipitate panic attacks, flashbacks (exact reliving experiences) of earlier trauma, or both. In our own laboratory, approximately 20% of PTSD subjects responded with a flashback of a traumatic experience when they were presented with acoustic startle stimuli.

I myself recently went through this. I was reduced basically to my fifteen year old self due to limbic resonance induced by a psychopath and the perfect storm of other factor coming together. This forum caught the brunt of it sadly. Very humbling. I have seen it happen to many people, and the movies in this thread sure helps to maximize understanding.

 

[Keit]

IMHO, I think it may be more apt to say that some types of acts that are committed are state dependent, meaning that when that state is enabled and dissociation occurs, the acting out is involuntary. Anyone I think could be a killer, if prior dissociated trauma is stirred up under the right circumstances. I have seen a friend of mine fight like a ferocious tiger when she was on pain medication when she was being moved from the couch to the bed by a male friend of ours. She was out of it for the most part, and she's a teeny little thing, but was so strong in the resistance it took two of them to move her once that state was aroused. She had been raped and abused as a child, and evidently something got triggered.


I am not so sure karma has anything to do with it honestly.

Maybe it's a combination of the inner drive to reenact the past drama (perhaps also under the influence of system 1) and triggering of something that has karmic roots and still needs to be sorted out? Can be any or none of those possibilities, actually.

 

[Tigersoap]

Watch the Barbara Hershey movie. Don't delay. It really is important.

We watched it last night and it was really worth it.

I can understand now how the movie Bernie missed the mark on what happened.

It seems that there are striking parallells between Bernie & Candy, both very religious, wanting to help others but at the same time trying so hard to maintain a very positive image of themselves and bucket loads of repressed anger and emotions.

I guess it shows how we can all harbour such repressed emotions and how important it is to bring them to light one way or the other before they fester underneath whispering in the shadow, waiting for the right time to push us over the edge.

I am not sure we would all turn into killers because it seems to me that the social & religious upbringing plays a good part in this but we all have these buried emotions, maybe it's just the depth of hidding them that differs from one another.

That's my current attempt to understand this for the moment.

 

[Laura]

It seems that there are striking parallells between Bernie & Candy, both very religious, wanting to help others but at the same time trying so hard to maintain a very positive image of themselves and bucket loads of repressed anger and emotions.

And not to forget the triggers, either. In both cases, there were triggers set off by pathology in the murder victims. It's like some people are traumatized and thereby set up to HAVE triggers, and then other people are traumatizers who set off those triggers. If there is anything karmic in there, that's where it lies.

It also seems that it is people who have some great capacity for caring who are most easily traumatized and set up this way. In spite of their childhood experiences, they STILL wanted to care for other people.

 

[Cosmos]

Maybe I should tell you what was going through my mind while watching Bernie as well while watching "A Killing in a Small Town".

As I watched Bernie I constantly tried to not identify or feel with Bernie because I had the possibility in mind that he could have been a Psychopath. Because I knew that it was based on a real story this tendency was even stronger. I couldn't allow to feel for or with a possible Psychopath and therfore discredit the possible victim. I constantly thought "This is a movie, don't be fooled, important details could be missing or twisted and it might not reflect reality".

In the case of Bernie it is and was a lot easier for me to give credit to the possibility that Bernie was a nice guy, that at one point couldn't stand the evil woman and her controlling behaviour anymore. This has a lot to do with the fact, that a lot of people in that small town said that this woman was a very bad person. As well as the fact that even family members of her, spoke out how evil she was.

While watching "A Killing in a Small Town" I also constantly tried to not identify or feel with Candy because I had the possibility in mind that she could have been a Psychopath. Because I knew that it was also based on a real story this tendency was even stronger. I couldn't allow to feel for or with a possible Psychopath and therfore discredit the possible victim, who was killed with a ax that was smashed against her at least 41 times! I constantly thought "This is a movie, don't be fooled, important details could be missing or twisted and it might not reflect reality".

In the case of Candy it is and was a lot more difficult for me to give credit to the possibility that she isn't a Psychopath, and just a very wounded Person that got triggered. This has a lot to do with the fact, that she hit her at least 41 times with the ax and pretendet that all was normal even to the closest members of the victims family for several days after she killed her friend with an ax. And also because there are only the Words of Candy and the Victim itself who could tell us what really happened.

 

[Laura]

In the case of Candy it is and was a lot more difficult for me to give credit to the possibility that she isn't a Psychopath, and just a very wounded Person that got triggered. This has a lot to do with the fact, that she hit her at least 41 times with the ax and pretendet that all was normal even to the closest members of the victims family for several days after she killed her friend with an ax. And also because there are only the Words of Candy and the Victim itself who could tell us what really happened.

Then you don't have a very good understanding of psychopathy and the cold and efficient way they would murder someone, wasting no energy and having a well thought out entry and exit plan. Crimes that are obviously "emotional" are NOT psychopathic and hitting someone 40 whacks with an axe is pretty emotional. You need to spend a lot of time with psychopathology to understand these things.

 

[loreta]

Is all this related to the repression of anger? Both Candy and Bernie seems to me that they repress their anger. They are too gentle, to amiable, to good. We know all people like them: in their gentleness I mean. It disturb me very much to see this kind of people. I ask myself: are you sometimes anger? Impatient? mad? I know a girl that is like this, and one of my cousin was so gentle that people talk about her like she was a sort of saint. She died at the age of 43 from a cancer. So I think, tell me if I am wrong, that the repression of anger can do people like Candy, or Bernie, that at one moment loose themselves and kill someone or kill themselves like having a illness like cancer. In both situations is a anger so strong and coming from so deep that really is scary.

edit: correction of sentence.

 

[Laura]

Is all this related to the repression of anger? Both Candy and Bernie seems to me that they repress their anger. They are too gentle, to amiable, to good. We know all people like them: in their gentleness I mean. It disturb me very much to see this kind of people. I ask myself: are you sometimes anger? Impatient? mad? I know a girl that is like this, and one of my cousin was so gentle that people talk about her like she was a sort of saint. She died at the age of 43 from a cancer. So I think, tell me if I am wrong, that the repression of anger can do people like Candy, or Bernie, that at one moment loose themselves and kill someone or kill themselves like having a illness like cancer. In both situations is a anger so strong and coming from so deep that really is scary.

edit: correction of sentence.

I think that a very big part of it is repression of anger. But anger can come into play when one is afraid and not being supported by those who are supposed to give that support, such as parents. So it can be fear and anger not to forget the cementing/crystallizing effect of pain.

My grandmother died of cancer and she was another of those who never expressed her anger. She was taught that it was wrong and bad to do so, that nice girls didn't get angry.

 

[Psalehesost]

I guess it shows how we can all harbour such repressed emotions and how important it is to bring them to light one way or the other before they fester underneath whispering in the shadow, waiting for the right time to push us over the edge.

I am not sure we would all turn into killers because it seems to me that the social & religious upbringing plays a good part in this but we all have these buried emotions, maybe it's just the depth of hidding them that differs from one another.

That's my current attempt to understand this for the moment.

When a trauma response is triggered, it is not the higher brain regions that decide the response and the actions. If you've read, at least in part, the recommended neuroscience books, then they make this clear; there are several functional levels, "built" as it were on top of each other. And a more primitive level will override higher levels when something is triggered. Thus, the level of fight and flight, or even (a still more primitive level) freeze prevails - steered by raw, unreasoning emotion triggered according to conditioning; social capacity as well as the influence of our narrative/constructed personality goes out the window.

 

[EmeraldHope]

In the case of Candy it is and was a lot more difficult for me to give credit to the possibility that she isn't a Psychopath, and just a very wounded Person that got triggered. This has a lot to do with the fact, that she hit her at least 41 times with the ax and pretendet that all was normal even to the closest members of the victims family for several days after she killed her friend with an ax. And also because there are only the Words of Candy and the Victim itself who could tell us what really happened.

Then you don't have a very good understanding of psychopathy and the cold and efficient way they would murder someone, wasting no energy and having a well thought out entry and exit plan. Crimes that are obviously "emotional" are NOT psychopathic and hitting someone 40 whacks with an axe is pretty emotional. You need to spend a lot of time with psychopathology to understand these things.

Laura, I really need to ask this and I hope it is ok to do so. In watching Candy's hyponsis I could not help but to think about my father. What he did seems as though it could be classified as emotional if I am understanding all of this correctly as a whole. He did beat my sister so bad that she had over 150 overlapping bruises. He had been drafted in Nam and had not been home very long.


My family ( grandparents and aunt and uncle) has always been the most upset and angry that he denied doing it and then laughed and joked with the other prisoners the whole time during the court martial.


The only thing that does not fit in what is benig said is that the victim in this case was a four year old child- so obviously no pathology to trigger.


Are you saying that he is probably not a psychopath? Does the victim's lack of pathology and being a child change anything? This post makes me feel as though my blood pressure is shooting to the roof, but the closest approximation of the truth that can be understood would be very helpful. The child victim is tripping me up and I do not want to make a wrong assumption one way or the other, thinking I am understanding when I am not.

 

[Hildegarda]

at one moment loose themselves and kill someone or kill themselves like having a illness like cancer. In both situations is a anger so strong and coming from so deep that really is scary.

I think that a very big part of it is repression of anger.

a book has been recommended on the forum, "When Body Says No", by Gabor Mate. It explores in depth the relation of repressing emotions such as anger, and physical illness.

 

[Laura]

Laura, I really need to ask this and I hope it is ok to do so. In watching Candy's hyponsis I could not help but to think about my father. What he did seems as though it could be classified as emotional if I am understanding all of this correctly as a whole. He did beat my sister so bad that she had over 150 overlapping bruises. He had been drafted in Nam and had not been home very long.


My family ( grandparents and aunt and uncle) has always been the most upset and angry that he denied doing it and then laughed and joked with the other prisoners the whole time during the court martial.


The only thing that does not fit in what is benig said is that the victim in this case was a four year old child- so obviously no pathology to trigger.


Are you saying that he is probably not a psychopath? Does the victim's lack of pathology and being a child change anything? This post makes me feel as though my blood pressure is shooting to the roof, but the closest approximation of the truth that can be understood would be very helpful. The child victim is tripping me up and I do not want to make a wrong assumption one way or the other, thinking I am understanding when I am not.

There are cold, genetic psychopaths and there are characteropaths that are made that way. Your father sounds like a "made" psychopath or sociopath. A big clue is lack of remorse and the fact that the victim was a child.

 

[EmeraldHope]

There are cold, genetic psychopaths and there are characteropaths that are made that way. Your father sounds like a "made" psychopath or sociopath. A big clue is lack of remorse and the fact that the victim was a child.

Thank you. I had always thought this, but, after watching that movie I wondered if maybe it was possible he had some type of flash back. Then, I wondered if maybe his being 20 years old at the time and acting like a tough guy to dissociate may have been a factor. I have never given him any slack at all, and feel a little guilty in perhaps trying to allow a small window of doubt. If it were true I would want to know though. Thank you again for the clarification.

 

[Laura]

There are cold, genetic psychopaths and there are characteropaths that are made that way. Your father sounds like a "made" psychopath or sociopath. A big clue is lack of remorse and the fact that the victim was a child.

Thank you. I had always thought this, but, after watching that movie I wondered if maybe it was possible he had some type of flash back. Then, I wondered if maybe his being 20 years old at the time and acting like a tough guy to dissociate may have been a factor. I have never given him any slack at all, and feel a little guilty in perhaps trying to allow a small window of doubt. If it were true I would want to know though. Thank you again for the clarification.

Well, I do think that you can leave a window of doubt there. A "made" psychopath AKA sociopath is really just an infant emotional structure inside a grown body. They don't comprehend what they do because they only feel for themselves. They also do a lot of projecting. Many, many parents tend to project adult motives onto children that just aren't there, but they think they are and they react to them as though they are intentional. The parent who beats a child for wetting their pants may think that it was done deliberately just to annoy the parent and react from an infantile emotional state. That sort of thing.