How ‘unprocessed rage’ made a serial-killer speechless.

Until ‘Alec’ had ‘processed’ his rage – he could only talk with his fists.

This post follows an interesting discussion on the Critical Psychiatry Network of how difficulty in handling emotions gums up your mental life. It reinforces the Simple Science Of Sanity. The points made are applied to a serial-killer, here called ‘Alec’, who I first worked with in Parkhurst Prison when he was 24. He had decided to kill every two years and could see no reason why he should stop. A succinct background to his case is given by the Trauma Tetrad – a four-point summary of what had happened to him, and what he needed to do to put it right. Thus –

(1) Was Alec’s father wrong to throw his mother downstairs, when aged 4? YES.

(2) Can he tell his father this, aged 24? NO.

(3) Should he be able to? YES. And

(4) did he know that all his symptoms of serial-killing came from his inability to tell him? NO, but when he could – they went.

None of this was obvious to start with. Indeed, at first, Alec would fiercely deny it had anything to do with anything – that’s because as this discussion shows, it was all wrapped up with his survival emotions. Once these can be put into abeyance, i.e. he became convinced his father was not going to throw him downstairs ‘next’ – only then could his frontal lobes start ticking again, and his speechlessness evaporate – as it did – taking all need for any violence, with it. Prior to that point he had, he said, only been able to “talk with my fists” – not what he really wanted to do, nor very successful in his social and domestic life.

The discussion was initiated by a fellow writer in the Critical Psychiatry Network (CPN) who I’ll call ‘R’. To my surprise, he then revealed untamed emotions, and in particular, he mentioned “unprocessed rage”. I suppose this must be seen in action to really grasp how debilitating it can be. But it’s simple enough. Suppose something dreadful happened to you, as it did point (1) to Alec, and you became enraged. What would happen to that powerful negative emotion? Well it could overwhelm, as it did Alec. What he needed to do was to ‘process’ it, i.e. to see that it no longer applied in adult life, but had happened 20 years before, and was now therefore over, out-of-date. That is – his father could no longer damage him, however much Alec continued to fear that he might. The ‘processing’ requires the ‘simple’ bringing of Alec’s mental furniture up to date – i.e. into today’s adult world – simple, but far from easy. “I’m 24, not 4”.

In the CPN, I started by expressing my surprise. I wrote as follows –

I did not expect to see such a brilliant analysis of my favoured therapeutic approach expressed so clearly in this context. Thanks so much for drawing my attention to the wonderful portmanteau term ‘alexithymia’. Coming after my gratifying podcast with a surprisingly empathetic Shaun Attwood, this is the icing on my cake. It helps lance an irrational emotional abscess.

Would you believe that my favourite serial-killer, ‘Alec’, expressed precisely this inarticulate way of handling emotions – not by resorting to the Greek, but by recovering the use of his speech centre and voicing it as follows. He was 24 at the time,

“When I was 18, I was married, and had everything I wanted – BUT I could only talk with my fists.”

Of course, if you have a predilection for classics, then you could describe this remarkable term more elaborately. Such as –

“ALEXITHYMIA. The composite term “alexithymia” [‘R’ wrote], from the Greek, meaning “no words for emotions”, was coined in 1973 by the psychotherapist Peter Sifneos to describe patients with psychosomatic illnesses who had several symptoms in common, notably a marked difficulty in identifying their feelings, in finding appropriate words to describe them and in distinguishing feelings from bodily sensations of arousal. To some extent, it bespeaks some level of emotional illiteracy linked to lexical impoverishment. Furthermore, alexithymia was characterized by low imaginative capacities, a diminution of fantasy and a concrete and externally-oriented thinking style focussed on “objective” external events instead of focussing on inner experiences.”

Taking the points I’ve highlighted in reverse order – the ‘external events’ Alec indulged in were murders. His ‘impoverishment’ and ‘emotional illiteracy’ was as extreme, as his difficulty in ‘identifying feelings’. I find it exhilarating to align crime, violence and all antisocial behaviour as types of ‘psychosomatic illnesses’ – though in Alec’s case, not his own body, but those of his victims.

And of course, the very reason Alec became such an anti-social murderer in the first place could not be more clearly described than in the following paragraph –

“Overall, my own experience [‘R’ also wrote] of alexithymia suggests a link between unprocessed rage, social awkwardness, socially non-assertive communication, often a screen for passive aggression, in highly intelligent people whose fear of emotions was inversely related to their academic achievements; people in whom cognition trumped empathy, intuition and imagination. Reflecting on my own early alexithymia taught me that it is an instinctive, but maladaptive, way of demanding “privacy”, a code word for my own early maladaptive dodging of affect, a danger zone which makes survival sense among those seeking “safety” in an “official”, quasi-relational cocoon, remaining at a distance from their own emotions and those of others.”

Again, underneath it all is a question of ‘survival’, that could not be more ‘maladaptive’. And as this second paragraph shows, this is powered by fear, and basically arises from ‘unprocessed rage’. As it happens, Alec was also ‘highly intelligent’, so his series of killings were carefully planned, fully compliant with his life-sentence circumstances, and, especially from the point of view of his potential victims, such as I at one time became, maladaptive.

The crucial point is that Alec couldn’t talk. He couldn’t verbalise his unprocessed rage. Only heavily supportive input on my part, and that of the other prison community, began slowly to re-circulate both his frontal lobes and speech centre. It was a slow and delicate process, not easy to achieve in conventional circumstances. It demanded unimpeachable consent and empowerment. It was no good my knowing that there were better ways of unpacking ‘rage’ than letting fly in all directions with destructive assaults of either verbal violence, or of the ordinary variety. As with all educative processes, it required patience, skill at handling offensive, destructive reactions, and – fundamentally – a willingness on the part of the recipient, to modify their otherwise unskilled and socially maladaptive processes. 'Persuasion' undersells it.

That we were successful with Alec, is shown by his axiom ‘I could [then] only talk with my fists’. Because, obviously enough, until he could talk with his tongue, then this verbal level of insight was totally blanked off. His frontal blockages simply could not encompass it.

However, despite all signs indicating that he was a lost cause – patience, tolerance of verbal excoriations and a willingness to be flexible, allowed his inherent humanity to emerge.

Despite repeated setbacks, I still haven’t given up hope that this can also be achieved in the most unexpected of contexts. Tee hee.

Rock on

Bob