On Why They Kill Themselves at the End

Almost every week now, there is a story of a mass killer that fires on many people, kills a few, then turns the gun on himself and commits suicide. Why do they do that? Why not just kill? Because then, the neurologic sequence would not be run off. Let me explain:

I use the sequence of my patients in their reliving as an example. First they feel amorphous pain and suffering, then they attach a scene to it such as "they don't love me. " "You bastards, why don't you love me (fury) ?!" Then the patient begs, "Please love me." And finally, "It is all hopeless." If we think of the gunman who seems to follow the same sequence. Often the wife has left and taken the kids who give him love. He is furious and wants to kill (in Primal) but actually does kill in real life. Then there is the ultimate hopelessness and giving up (in therapy the truth is finally felt and sets the patient free) but in life the gunman stops at hopelessness and kills himself. He has gotten rid of his anger but there is nothing left, nowhere to go with his feelings and no resolution. Life has lost its meaning.

Patients feel that way along the route to full feeling but they do not stop there, and if they do leave therapy too soon they will be stuck with those feelings forever. What gives the kick to those feelings is very early trauma that digs up rage plus a lifetime of no love from the parents and then finally, the loss of love in the present. The stalker cannot stand the feeling and checks up all of the time on his wife. The killer is more emerged in the feeling and kills. Both cannot stand the loss of love; the difference is, I assume, that the pre-birth and birth traumas add a layer of extreme feelings to the mix, which cracks the defense system and places the person out of control. And it is those early traumas that compromise the part of the cortex that controls feelings and create the out-of-control sequence. This happens very early on when the cortical cells are just being evolved and proliferating.

This analogy isn't theoretical; I have seen this run off in patients, and the more unloved and deprived they were earlier on, the more violent the tendencies. Happily in therapy it all remains internal and benign. Outside of therapy it is a catastrophe.