What would make you commit murder?

[Judy2]

wives poisoning their husbands used to be a lot more common when divorce wasn't an option yet and women had minimal rights, i.e., there was no other escape if a marriage was abusive.

same with infanticide (=mothers killing their own children), which used to be more common some 150 years ago due to social structures that condemned unmarried single mothers rather than supporting them. 

nowadays, when these things happen, it is likely (not always) due to pathologies of the individual. although, apparently, there are still a lot of women in prison who killed their abusers in self-defense and had to go to jail for it.

 

Edited Wednesday at 05:43 PM by Judy2

[trenton]

@Judy2 nice historical examples. It is good to know that wives murdering husbands has become less common due to allowing them the freedom to divorce a husband. It sounds like although abusive relationships are still awful the ability to divorce is better than forcing people to stay together. Society must allow these relationships to end when they don't work even if divorce court is its own nightmare. It is still preferable to not being able to go to divorce court.

[trenton]

8 hours ago, Elliott said:

Cptsd causes irrational fear and intrusive thoughts like this

I'm not sure why these fears are irrational. Can you define what an irrational fear is versus a rational fear? Which fears do you think are irrational and how do you know?

Also I definitely agree on intrusive thoughts. I have those all the time and I can't help it. It includes intrusive thoughts of harming others. I was told it was either OCD or ADHD. The actual diagnosis is likely multiple, but I still want to feel safe and acceptable.

I also did discuss this with my therapists and psychiatrists too. Some say PTSD, others say CPTSD it more accurate. I tried therapy, but I am now thinking I need to stop trying to change myself under constant existential stakes.

I don't know what I would actually need, but finding a therapist that would be good for me is hard. There are insurance barriers and rare specialties required for me that I can't access. This is why the mental health system is broken and can't necessarily help people in my position. 

[Heaven]

You’re obviously highly intelligent and educated but I feel from the things you write that you lack spiritual wisdom.

When you are highly spiritual you feel like you’re everything and thus compassionate towards others. You can’t murder someone that is you. Not recommending you psychedelics but it can really show you some lessons that you need to learn.

[trenton]

2 hours ago, Heaven said:

You’re obviously highly intelligent and educated but I feel from the things you write that you lack spiritual wisdom.

When you are highly spiritual you feel like you’re everything and thus compassionate towards others. You can’t murder someone that is you. Not recommending you psychedelics but it can really show you some lessons that you need to learn.

I'd love to do psychedelics, but I'm unable to at this time. The most I have ever done were some cannabis gummies which make me sound spiritual when talking. There is a Ketamine treatment center for depression if that counts, but I need to be at least two years since being hospitalized with depression.

I would like to verify whatever spiritual wisdom I can, but for now many of these positions are unfalsifiable from my standpoint. For example, Leo claimed that my father is literally looking through my eyes right now. I'm not sure how I can murder an imaginary other if the other doesn't actually exist, but is merely an imaginary construct. In terms of murdering someone who is me, there is still jumping off of a bridge for example. It can be done, but it isn't fun.

Concerning spiritual wisdom, I believed it overlapped with having compassion for people who do evil things and people who harmed me. Therefore, criminology was a means of studying evil and noticing the similarities in myself. It is ultimately part of a broader project of deconstructing the illusion of evil which doesn't actually exist. I have learned not to judge myself for having homicidal thoughts toward others. I have been hurt badly, but I won't be carrying out any murders any time soon. I can give you a couple of other threads in which I explored compassion for evil people as it was part of my impression of spiritual wisdom translated into criminological studies.

I am now attempting to address what I would consider a shadow. It is unresolved hatred directed at myself and others. This is part of why I ask these questions. Ultimately, I am trying to learn self love, but it is hard for me to do. I have been struggling my whole life to do this, so I apply the compassion to myself when applying it to evil people.

I think we need to be careful with how we define spiritual wisdom. The problem is that unfalsifiable positions can define wisdom in an endless number of ways unless we know what is true. There were some people in this thread claiming the Ten Commandments were spiritual wisdom. There are also spiritual teachers claiming that morality is relative and judgment can be transcended. In my case, my goal is to love myself even though I have unresolved hatred that festers into the desire to harm myself or others. The limitation of compassion for relative evil is that it doesn't logically get you to metaphysical oneness which is a separate claim regarding the nature of love. My present metaphysical framework is "I don't know."

[Emotionalmosquito]

If I finally worked up the courage to ask out a girl I liked, but unbeknownst to me she was the mean girl type. So then she acts into it just to bait me in close enough to do a malicious knee strike. 
 

That just might do it. Well I wouldn’t now, but had I gone through that back in high school, I probably could’ve gone through with it. 

[trenton]

9 hours ago, Emotionalmosquito said:

If I finally worked up the courage to ask out a girl I liked, but unbeknownst to me she was the mean girl type. So then she acts into it just to bait me in close enough to do a malicious knee strike. 
 

That just might do it. Well I wouldn’t now, but had I gone through that back in high school, I probably could’ve gone through with it. 

This is an interesting idea.

I recall that religion used to value the virgin archetype because of what it symbolically represented about a person's character such as the virgin Mary. This is not sexually piety, but also humility, charity, honesty, and so forth.

A close opposite to the virgin archetype is the whore. The whore was not originally intended to just mean how many sexual partners a woman had. More importantly, the key characteristics of this archetype was its deceptive nature. It is a person who would offer you love in order to trick you and betray you. Cheating would be an example of a betrayal, but the archetype is much broader in terms of deception and betrayal under the guise of love.

In terms of why men murder intimate partners, it often involves the perception that this person is a whore and she betrayed you in some way.

Important not to overlook that the whore archetype applies just as easily to men. There can be men who love bomb a woman in order to decieve her and harm her in some way. This was documented in human trafficking cases of a woman entering a relationship that isolated her from her family. Obviously a rapist is a whore as well, and in that case whore is probably an understatement.

How common do you think it is for women to trick men like this and betray them?

[trenton]

@Emotionalmosquito I googled what mean girl refers to.

I have many different names for it. She could be a narcissist. She could be a devil. Basically the qualities men refer when calling a woman a "bitch" includes playing the victim, spreading lies and gossip, picking fights, enforcing loyalty, and so forth.

I don't want to be sexist by calling her a bitch. I don't want to be overly clinical by calling her a narcissist. So I just call her a devil and tell her to go to hell where she belongs. In your case you call her a mean girl.

I did have homicidal thoughts toward family members who treated me this way. My family had some mean girls in it. 

[trenton]

Were you guys thinking I was actually planning to murder someone?

I mentioned in the opening that this is obviously a bad idea and it should be avoided. Of course that would be insane. What matters for my purposes is understanding the perspective of violent people while integrating a shadow side from unresolved harm while my therapists repeatedly recommend I date.

I'm just really afraid of dating because I learned that intimacy was unsafe, but my therapists recommend it still. It is better to address these sorts of things now rather than in a relationship.

If I enter a romantic relationship, I still intend to ask a woman, "would you murder me if I cheated on you? I know some would. Personally, I wouldn't like it if you cheated on me, but I won't murder you for it. I just want to know what your standards are like in a relationship. I'm not trying to threaten you or anything."

I thought this was a fair and normal question for dating.