Psycho Killer/Caretaker and Relating through Shadow: Parts 4 and 5 of The Good People Will Destroy Us

Parts 4 and 5 of an essay series critiquing cancel culture, adapted from my zine "The Good People will Destroy Us: Social Incarceration, Trauma, and Moral Hierarchy."

Part 4: Psycho Killer/Caretaker

In this essay, I’ve described my experience doing parts work, a type of shadow work that comes from internal family systems. It involves explicit descriptions of violent thoughts and gore that could be triggering for some people. The violence described is complete fantasy, not real life actions, plans, or intentions that I have toward real people.

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When I was a child, many of my emotions had to be saved for when I was alone and felt safe enough to pay attention to my inner world. My father didn’t allow me to express sadness or anger in response to the abuse I experienced. If I was crying, he would demand that I stop. If I was angry, he would get angrier and tell me that I couldn’t treat him that way. Sometimes, my mother made a little space for my sadness, although my experience was often overshadowed by her own feelings of sadness and hopelessness. She was already routinely victimized by my father’s rage, so I didn’t want to subject her to my own expressions of anger as well. I was afraid of being like my father and of my mother seeing me that way. So, anger had to be reserved for my fantasies.

I would fantasize about becoming a demonic creature who was strong enough to overpower my father. In my mind, the demonic version of myself would jump on my father and claw at his face and body in a maniacal state, ripping him apart and pulverizing the pieces until they were just mush. I would imagine it over and over again, trying to create the perfect scene of his destruction so that I could feel a climactic release of my anger. But, the release never came. Each time I had the fantasy, my anger would intensify until I felt like I couldn’t bear it anymore. Instead of exploding out of me, it would subside back into the depths of my body where it just ached and threatened to bubble back up again. It was so deeply dissatisfying and insatiable.

When I got older, probably around my early teenage years, my father became less and less the target of the violence in my fantasies. I focused more on random imaginary people. My sense of myself in the fantasies also became less creature-like and more human, but still with immense physical and sometimes supernatural power. The fantasies became an intentional cathartic escape for me that I dedicated a significant amount of time to, because they made me feel energized and powerful, and I experienced a sense of okayness when I was done. I would go into my room, put on my headphones, and listen to music like Marilyn Manson, Tool, and Nine Inch Nails, to help intensify the anger and help create context and imagery.

Sometimes my character was a person whose violence was chaotic and frenzied, arising from a total loss of control. Other times, the character was acting out of a sense of justice, killing the leaders of an authoritarian regime that was enslaving, torturing, and killing people. I also fantasized about being a calculated torturer myself, or a psychopathic serial killer who derived pleasure from hunting people down and hurting them. There was always gore, because my character delighted in being drenched in the blood and guts of its victims. I feel an excited, rushing sensation in my body while writing about it right now. This part of me wants so badly to be witnessed. I want so badly for people to know this part of me, and to see me as worthy of care and love.

The fantasies continued into adulthood, and the character became more associated with a stereotype of psychopathy often portrayed in movies and shows about serial killers. The idea that this character didn’t have empathy for its victims became an important part of the fantasy. Part of me wanted to be psychopathic, even though in reality I am very empathetic, as well as a recovering people-pleaser or fawner. I’m often hypervigilant about other people’s emotional states, and have a desire to make everyone happy, which is also a trauma response. Existing like that has caused a lot of stress, anxiety, and fear throughout my life. I needed to have a space where I could shut all of those responses down, especially so that I could experience my own anger without having to worry about how it would affect other people. Making myself a psychopathic killer in my fantasies was a way of meeting that need.

That character, and all of the feelings associated with it, is what I now recognize as a defensive part of my psyche that developed as a response to the abuse I experienced in early childhood and into late adolescence, and that became burdened with mercilessly defending my inner child and carrying my rage. I like to call it either the “psycho killer” (which I know could be considered ableist toward other mentally ill people, but it feels appropriate for me to use it in this personal context) or the “killing rage.” This part of me had to be so powerful and threatening to other people in my mind, that I felt like it could defeat my father and anyone else who made me feel victimized. Even after my mother, brother, and I escaped the abuse when I was 18, the psycho killer persisted in trying to defend me from anyone who I felt was treating me in ways even slightly similar to how my father did.

To this day, I still take pleasure in extremely violent fantasies. Having a mental space where I can experience having power over other people feels incredibly liberating to me, even though dominating and intentionally hurting people in real life is in direct conflict with my values. But, part of shadow work is acknowledging that I have antisocial desires, and that those desires also drive some of my behavior. To be clear, my killing rage doesn’t motivate me to physically harm people. I’m too afraid of doing that, because I know I would feel a lot of guilt afterwards, I would scare people away from being in community with me, and I would go to prison. I also don’t want to be part of creating a world in which we are all hurting each other out of anger.

However, I do sometimes act out my rage verbally, mostly when I’m venting to close friends who I know won’t take the violent things I say seriously. It’s also been expressed the couple of times that I’ve ostracized people from my community and, specifically, when I cancelled M. Even though those behaviors are anti-social and sometimes harmful to others, I don’t view the defensive part underlying them as bad. Parts of our psyche that exist to help us survive and protect our sense of self can become antisocial when we aren’t given the love and care that we needed as children. So, one of the ways we can work with these parts is to begin recognizing them for who they are and why they came into being, showing them compassion, and listening to what they have to say to us.

A few months ago, I tried a somatic parts work meditation right after I became triggered by someone who spoke down to me. Instead of lashing out at them, I went into my basement and sat in the darkness. That rageful, psychopathic part of me was already at the surface, telling me it was so angry that it wanted to kill that person. I let the rushing, sharp energy of the rage fill my body, rocking back and forth to keep the feelings moving, and I repeated over and over again that I wanted to kill them. I didn’t try to stop, suppress, or rush this process. I just moved, let myself feel the sensations, and made space for the angry part of me to speak.

Eventually, my thoughts became less occupied by the person who had spoken down to me, and memories of how my father treated me took up the space. It seemed like my feelings were more connected to that relationship in the past than to anything happening in the present. It felt like my anger was a thick, magma crust floating on top of a deep sea that swelled in my chest and head, drowning me in sadness. I began to ask someone, I’m not sure who, why my father did those things to me. Maybe I was asking my father, myself, or just the universe. The previously angry part of me told me over and over again that I didn’t deserve to be treated that way, and I still kept asking why it happened. I believe the latter part is my inner child who doesn’t understand what she did wrong or how the people who were supposed to care for her could have hurt her so much.

My defensive, raging part is deeply connected to my inner child, and so I gave them both the space to grieve what happened to us. Part of the grief was for my inability to protect myself from my abusive father. I notice that my rage arises in situations where I didn’t protect myself from being hurt, because I couldn’t predict what was going to happen, but I still want to defend myself from the feelings of inferiority and worthlessness by imagining myself as more dominant than the people I’m hurt by. I chose to interpret that as a form of inherent care that I have for myself all of the time, kind of like an instinct for self-preservation when in competition with others.

I also realized that no part of me could have protected me from the abuse I experienced, because I was still just a child, and it never should have been my job to defend myself from physical and emotional violence at that age. That was my parents’ job, and they didn’t do it, which was a whole additional level of sadness. But, in the midst of that grief, I also felt so much love for myself, love from and for my defensive part and love for my inner child. It became this warm feedback loop of gratitude, care, and comfort that just kept growing, and that took the place of my anger. Sappy, I know. I apologized to myself for not being able to protect myself, and I also thanked myself for helping me get through the abuse.

I realized that the part of me that becomes defensive and violent has the desire to nurture. It can be a caretaker and a lover as much as a sadistic killer, but I told it that because the abuse is over, I don’t need it to defend me so violently anymore. I felt like I had surrendered something in my body. Eventually, my defensive/caretaker part said back to me, “I can’t keep you from getting hurt in the future, because that’s just part of life, but I will always be here for you after it happens to care for you and show you that you are worthy of love.” Those words have come back to me several times since then when I’ve had trauma reactions, and they help to keep me a little more focused on caring for myself rather than trying to control other people.

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Part 5: Relating through Shadow

Doing parts work has helped me see how other people’s violent and abusive behavior is often motivated by their own defensive parts that are inherently self-loving. Sometimes, I can feel love for those parts of other people, just like I love those parts of myself, even if they’re coming out in antisocial ways. My desire is for us all to develop more love for the parts of ourselves and of other people that we fear, so that maybe we can learn to transform them into nurturing, connective forces that come together to create a less violent and abusive world.

I see this as a form of collective or relational shadow work that entails recognizing when our own defensive parts become threatened in response to other people’s defensive parts, and our urge to demonize whole people who reflect the demonized parts of ourselves. We often want to protect ourselves (our identities, sense of social belonging, and relationships with caregivers) from parts of our own psyches that we’re afraid or ashamed of, and that’s what causes us to exile them into the subconscious. I believe that this drive to exile, which is simultaneously self-protective and ultimately self-destructive, can be projected onto other people who we then try to exile from our societies and communities.

For instance, I see a part of myself in some cruel desires and behaviors that a friend of mine has, and that scares me. It’s made me take a long pause from our friendship in the past, and even to feel suspicious of other people who are friends with them. But, completely banishing this person from my life only allows me to keep ignoring and demonizing that part of myself, and it also cuts me off from the many other wonderful parts of my friend that form one complex human being. With all of that said, I am not healed and I don’t know if I will ever be able to completely unburden my defensive/caretaker part from the rage it’s been carrying. My goal is not to eradicate my rage and violent fantasies, to feel love for everyone all of the time, and to never sever a relationship out of self-protection.

I don’t hold other people to those standards either, because it’s not morally superior to exist in a state of equanimity, non-reactivity, and self-control. We’re human animals, not Vulcans. We will experience nervous system activation, trauma responses, rage, and sometimes a desire to act out in hurtful or destructive ways. Those aren’t signs of being a morally inferior person. Demonizing rage, violent fantasies, and even hostile expressions of anger won’t reduce violence and abuse. It will only cause people to exile those feelings and cover them in shame, making it harder to move through the nervous system response and work with our defensive parts therapeutically.

My father often advised me not to be angry like him, because it would hurt other people and cause me to suffer as well. As a chronically angry person, he was trying to protect me from what he was going through, but it wasn’t something he could prevent by just telling me not to be angry. Maybe my trauma and the stress my nervous system has been under for decades will eventually develop into a cancer or a heart attack that kills me. But, I know that just trying not to feel what I feel won’t be any help. My anger needs to move through me. It needs to be expressed and witnessed with empathy, including my desire to sometimes punish people. I don’t demonize myself or anyone else for wanting retribution.

As leftists, anarchists, and abolitionists, we have many feelings and thoughts that don’t reflect our overarching values of community care and liberation from unjust hierarchies. That is to be expected, and I think we should build our relationships upon that expectation. In an interview called “Moving Past Punishment” from the book We Do This ‘Til We Free Us, Mariame Kaba wrote, “we’re supposed to have a community that can hold us when these things are happening so that our feelings don’t end up governing how we’re going to live in the world, for everybody, how all of us are going to be governed together.” So, what does that look like?

My own vision includes accessible education about the way trauma responses limit our cognition and our ability to approach each other with curiosity and empathy, how to know when our nervous systems are activated, and how to process emotions as sensations in the body. It also includes collective practices for embodied mindfulness (becoming aware of what’s going on in our own bodies and minds) and depolarizing our perception of ourselves through shadow work. I think it’s important not to approach the problem of punitive justice and social incarceration from a purely individualist lens. Sure, we can all try to go to therapy to work on ourselves. But, one-on-one therapy is also not enough.

Instead, we need to look at the feelings, ideology, and behaviors that perpetuate cycles of oppression as part of a collective struggle that requires collective care to move through. I believe that we learn and embody relational skills best while in relationships with other people who have something at stake, like their own need for connection, belongingness, and positive self-identity. We desperately need each other, and we are also always at risk of hurting each other. There is no escape from that, no matter how many people we exile for the sake of safety and justice. So, we need to practice holding conflict and processing its emotional impacts regularly with the people we know in our social networks, and with all of the risks inherent to socializing with other complicated, traumatized, and morally ambiguous people.

List of essays in this series:

Part 1: Demanding Accountability

Part 2: Desert and the Danger of “Good People”

Part 3: Ancestral Wounds and Abusive Trauma Responses

Part 4: Psycho Killer/Caretaker [You are here]

Part 5: Relating through Shadow [And here]