FEST Writing Group

A mass murder takes place in Los Vegas and LeBron James takes to twitter asking the most provocative question – “What the hell is going on people!?!?” A world class team player, he understands the pain of ignorance, of being blindsided, of your team falling apart.

Would LeBron see how the family itself is one factor that is often minimalized, denied and overlooked in the effort to understand the pathway to violence? Can we know more about the pressure cooker called the family?

How do we understand the influence of the family life of a mass murder? How does anyone’s identity become twisted? How do relationships turn simple interactions, where one persons is dominant into a chain reaction of fear, aggression, cut off leading to revenge?

If we can see the social system, can you tell me how will it benefit us?

Yes, systems thinking did get us to the moon. It helps us predict hurricanes. LeBron might agree understanding the system of relationships, allows us to come together as an effective team and to develop strategies. Systems thinking allows us to adapt to multiple possibilities and to promote the ability of each person to do their best.

A family is like a team. Teams and families can focus on one player as the problem. And maybe the others get a free ride for a while. But the team is hurt by the one who is focused on as the problem. Team members cannot focus on his or her performance. Sometimes the “sick” one rules the team. Understanding how each member acts to pull the team up or down gives us insights into the nature of the relationships that surround us.

Some say forget systems. Just blame the killer, he is crazy. No thinking needed.
Forget about chain reactions and how “we the people” are programmed to react.

The relationships between family members constitute a system in the sense that a reaction in one family member is followed by a predictable reaction in another, and that reaction is followed by a predictable reaction in another and then another in a chain-reaction pattern.Murray Bowen

Are Bowen’s observations useless? From identity politics to quietly hating one’s mother, people systematically react and cannot cooperate. If you understand this you can win elections. You can manipulate the crowd. If you do not understand this you can innocently and fearfully give birth to violence.

Consider that all of society is like a family a team. People cannot hear the shots that ring out in Chicago. It takes only 28 days to murder as many people in Chicago as this mass murder did in about eleven minutes.

Now consider the family life of the shooter. He is growing up, as we all do, sensitive to our near and dear. We know precious little about what went on in his family life. The shooter is the oldest of four brothers. The shooter was in business with his youngest brother, Eric, and both became wealthy. But Eric, like all of us is confused. He feels like his brother shot his family in the back. He feels like Mars just landed on earth. How can this be? This person was not the brother he knew but he was the brother that he did not know. Was it because they were geographically thousands of miles apart?
Because people knew so little about this mystery man I consider that people have been hiding out from one another. There is often judgment, blame and fear when people cannot maintain relationships. They have reasons to pretend to back up to avoid one another. But those who study families know this is making the situation worse, encouraging fear.

“We have no idea. We’re horrified. We’re bewildered …… We have no idea in the world. This fell out of the sky…. The fact that he had those kinds of weapons is just … where the hell did he get automatic weapons? He has no military background or anything like that.”

What about the shooters father? The man was on the FBI’s most wanted list. Was the shooter reacting to his father? Was it Anna Freud who wrote about identification with the father? The father leaves the family when the shooter is 7.
After the father is arrested the mother keeps this a secret. The mother tells the children the father had died. But when one of the brothers joined the military he finds his father’s record: he was alive and unavailable. The shooter’s mother can make no more sense of this at 90 years of age than she could when she was a younger woman. Run, run for your life.
We know that a percentage of families have overt violence and children are threatened, beaten, or seduce. These children can then become violent towards others or they can become the opposite, a no self, an agreeable spouse.

The less emotional maturity in the family, the greater the need to force others “be like me, be the way I demand that you be.” But if one is forced to go along with another they can eventfully seek revenge. Did the shooter seek revenge, was he shooting his family in the back as Eric suggested?

Without training, most of us are blind to the interactive nature of the families’ relationships system. If we cannot see the brewing storm, we cannot prepare or cope. If we see the system then there are many more things we can do to alter the patterns of behavior that sustain the status quo. One can hypothesize that distance and the inability to relate is an automatic response to fear that must have been in this family for a long time. As fear increases people become paralyzed and are unable to comment on the nature of the relationships, and are less able to solve problems.

I could say to LeBron, see, this is all about the team, the family. This is the societal emotional process: people cannot be held accountable for their part in problems and they focus on others. With a great team, each person works on their part. In a losing team people blame one another.
It is as simple and as difficult as that.

People can learn to deal with the challenges if they can see them and reduce fear. This is often the coach’s role. They bring in the overview. They see how the team is working and they coach others to be able to acquire this talent. When the team is under pressure a few will lose the ability to maintain their humanness: the ability to throw the ball accurately, to care for others, to be able to face up to one’s part in problems, to talk over problems, to tolerate differences, to be respectfully and to hold others accountable. These more mature behaviors are the first to go as anxiety increases.

In general people have a hard time understand the emotional process in the family. They are blind to what goes on or to the consequences for the way people are treating each other. It is so easy to take sides, to lose your objectivity so that some are good (they agree with me) and others bad. Polarization in the team is the first step to losing the game. The coach can see someone struggle and step in to take over. In family systems description taking over is a form of fusion or confusion. People with little emotional maturity may say, “If you do not do it my way you will die and then I will die.”

As anxiety increases people look for the leader who will dominant. The others can appease the dominate one. But how long will this work? Not long if the dominant one loses a gamble, or a bluff or is criticized or threatened.

The intense need for the other to submit to give meaning and life to another is one reason a death, or even the threat of death by an aging mother or a divorce can trigger a psychotic event. The core of the dominate person can be totally empty unless others fill them up.

Although the early family interactions are shrouded in the memory of those who are not talking we can see a bit more about his family relationships in his relationship with his girlfriend, as some of this took place in public. Here is the way that the relationships between the shooter and his only close female companion played out.

Marilou Danley, the alleged girlfriend of Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock, was beaten and abused by her boyfriend when the two visited a local Starbucks shop, workers behind the counter at the coffee shop inside the Virgin River Casino in Mesquite, Nevada, recalled Tuesday, according to reports. The reason Mary Lou looks so plain in that picture they keep posting of her is because for him she would not wear perfumes or hair sprays or anything with scents in it because it affected him.” (Clearly dominance kept their relationship working.)
Federal agents — who are assisting the Las Vegas police in the investigation — have essentially two critical questions for Danley: Did she have any idea what motivated him, and did she have any knowledge of what was about to take place and not alert authorities? No, she maintains that he was a nice man. But Noor Salman, the wife of the Orlando gunman who killed 49 people last year was later arrested and charged with aiding and abetting terrorism and obstructing justice.
Eric Paddock told Reuters. Something broke in his head is the only thing possible. Did he have a stroke?” he said. I’m hoping they cut open his brain and find something. There’s a data point missing.”

There is more than one data point missing. If only we could know what the father said to his oldest son, what the mother said and what the son saw in his parent’s way of relating. Because of the lack of details about the family we do not know if there are family relationships. We do not know the kind of support the mother may have found in her own family, or if there was contact with grandparents, or what happened to the father’s family? Distance, conflict and cut off are automatic behaviors regulating the anxiety. They do not enable one to become a better observer of relationships dynamics.
What did we learn:
1. Not much as relationship functioning will continue to be ignored. No one will reach out to deeply interview and understand the family.

2. The old fight with the NRA will NOT change. Despite a great deal of evidence that strict gun control laws work to decrease deaths. But killing 59 people may not be enough people to scare congress into changing.

3. Chicago and other cities will continue to be the most popular places were shots are not heard.

4. As a joke someone could suggest a real useful law. To buy a gun or have more than three guns in your home you have to slip you hand in a lie detector device. Now we can read your physiology. Please answer the following questions: Do you love your mother? Respect your father? Have they ever asked you to kill someone, would you kill for them? Are you in good contact with your siblings, aunts, uncles and grandparents? Count backwards from ten and tell me if I have made you angry yet?

5. Unanswered questions: Is it our responsibility to take care of one another, to learn how to support those who are troubled and to relate to them with greater awareness and knowledge?

Summery:
Because of the intensity of the media coverage I needed to understand the family of the shooter. This takes away the blame game thinking. I come away with the ideas that the need for dominance in relationships is associated with a decrease in emotional functioning in both families and in society. Whatever we can do to encourage people to have a backbone and work on self the safer we will all be.

While doing this research I found two surprising things. One was that that the greatest numbers of deaths using guns come from suicides. The other the numbers of deaths in our larger cities.
Yes, the erosion of responsibility for self and others is coming our way.
In so far as man is a cause-and-effect thinker, which is most of the time in calm periods and all of the time in tense periods, he is still as inaccurate, unrealistic, irrational, and overly righteous in his assignment of causality for his problems as were his ancestors who pursued a different kind of evil influence, who eliminated different kinds of witches and dragons, and who built different kinds of temples to influence benevolent spirits.

Interesting Research on terrorists:

Historically, researchers have not found a strong connection between mental illness and terrorist behavior. Having a mental disorder doesn’t necessarily prevent a person from planning and executing an attack. And several studies of attack perpetrators have shown that people who attack alone are perhaps 13 times more likely to have significant psychological problems than those who conduct attacks as part of a group. In one study, nearly one-third of 119 lone-actor terrorists investigated appeared to have a mental disorder. Studies of lone attackers of public figures have similarly found that severe mental health problems are common.

Among 24 attackers on European politicians between 1990 and 2004, 10 were judged to be ‘psychotic.’ And among 83 individuals known to have attacked, or approached to attack, a prominent public official or public figure in the United States since 1949, 43 percent were experiencing delusions at the time of the incident. That said, it remains important to understand that, as with any other potential factor, mental illness on its own rarely provides an overarching single-cause explanation for any attack or behavior. Attackers – including lone attackers – often communicate about their intent prior to their attacks, although they may not threaten the target directly. A study examining public information about lone-actor terrorists found that in nearly two-thirds of the cases the perpetrators told family or friends about their intent to attack. In more than half of the cases, people other than friends and family knew about the actor’s ‘research, planning and/or preparation prior to the event itself. Finding ways to encourage concerned people to come forward and to facilitate reporting will be critical to long-term prevention efforts.

Katherine W. Schweit, a former senior F.B.I. official, co-wrote a lengthy 2013 F.B.I. study that looked at 160 mass shootings in the United States. The study did not specifically examine motivation, but Ms. Schweit said many of the underlying reasons for the shootings were apparent to investigators. “A jilted lover, race or religion, someone who was fired,” she said. “Other times the motive is more elusive. This isn’t the first guy who seemed to have found a target for his anger who we can’t understand where the anger came from. Anger manifests itself in a lot of different ways.” In F.B.I. speak, they want to understand his “pathway to violence.”

Investigators never found a convincing motive behind a 1966 massacre at the University of Texas, often described as the first modern mass shooting, in which a sniper, Charles Whitman, fatally shot 14 people from a clock tower after killing his family.

• Suicides: 102,002 between 2002 and 2007
• Homicides: 73,148 between 2002 and 2007
• Accidental: 4,185 between 2002 and 2007
• Legal shootings: 1,999 between 2002 and 2007
• Undetermined: 1,427 between 2002 and 2007

An extreme risk protection order is a legislative and legal vehicle that allows family members and police if they see someone in crisis, someone who’s exhibiting behaviors that indicate they’re a danger to themselves or others to get a court order and remove guns temporarily from that person’s home.

PunditFact, “‘Americans are 20 times as likely to die from gun violence as citizens of other civilized countries,’ says author Lisa Bloom,” Jan. 17, 2014