What's Wrong With These Kids? The DEEP Gap
Death is second nature in their world. Is it desperation, desensitization, or the destination of the world? ~jj2019
You hear about it every day. Today's youth pain for me was a story about a 24-year-old man that murdered 3 children. All of the girls were under the age of 10. One more day the country is shocked that someone could be so heartless and have such a blatant disregard for life. This happens far too often, and even once is one time too many.
Who are these heartless people? Strangers with psychological problems, relatives with psychological problems, parents...with psychological problems. The common thread with "these people" that society comes to see as monsters is that they have mental issues that they hide or refuse to professionally address, which take over their minds and hearts. The ability to relate to others as a human from another human is gone from their heart and mind. We say they are desensitized. We also know that they are not born that way, but only vaguely wonder at best what happened between birth and the first act of evil. Most often the murder is far from the evil.
As a society, we cannot cultivate negative mindsets and wonder why criminal minds grow. The
further we move away from basic standards of respectful communication, the more we can expect that the reality of humanity will move with it. Evil words, shade, pettiness, and hateful bully-styled dismissal of others feelings have become the norm. Just browse any social media comment section and you will see the language that provides the seeds. Add to the analogy the soil of socialization that separates race, religion, and economic status. Water that will blindness to human needs fueled by our need for wealth, power, and convenience. It's not just the events that end in a senseless physical death. Some children die early in life and live a doomed life until their body is laid to rest. All too often, their living obituary is never read.
Let me give you the highlights. My expertise is that I have lived through many of the things that have killed the spirit of other children. That is NOT a judgment. It is a position of understanding with a coating of gratefulness that I was given the gift of resilience and compassion.
Detachment: Whether physical or emotional, detachment can have a life long effect on the development of a person. One of the most obviously known proofs is the fact that children that have grown up in great adoptive homes often will still seek out their genetic parents. It isn't because of the lack of love or nurturing. It is not an intended reflection on anyone in the life. It is, though, an internal desire to understand their origins. Sometimes, they also seek to understand the reason that the first, most basic, human relationship was not successful. Understanding these things as an adult helps people to better understand themselves. On the side of emotional detachment, a child can spend their whole childhood trying to be good enough to earn their parent or caregivers love. An emotionally detached adult can cultivate a spirit of emotional neediness in a child that can cause them to become people pleasures (at-best) to isolated adults. Can you begin to see what that looks like in adults? Can you mentally envision their social adult behavior? These are often the adults that range in definition from criminals to social outcasts that society carries on one public service cost roll or another. The behaviors are often being acted out far before they reach legal adulthood. So one "what's wrong with these children" is that they were never allowed to develop appropriate attachments as children. Human attachment is the foundation of understanding caring, compassion, and empathy. A few years ago (about 10 now), I learned the correct names of my genetic parent's, courtesy of the Catholic church. I have never laid eyes on my mother to remember her and what I recall of my father is a story more deeply addressed in other blogs and writings. The next set of parents (by adoption) didn't have the emotional maturity to address the depth of emotional support that I needed as a child. In many ways, the academic background to understand the issues that caused my case to go to the foster system would have benefitted us as well. Two fold, where I needed what all children need, their parents, obvious