Treating Evil Within and Without
Evil and Trauma are linked
Evil is everywhere, and like it or not, we will all experience evil. In fact, evil is within every person.
Have you ever felt yourself in the presence of evil or an evil force?
Most people would say, Yes. Why? Because, like I mentioned, evil is with us. There are times when you, yourself, experience evil urges or impulses. Perhaps, a fleeting thought of an evil act towards another (including yourself). This is true when certain situations arise. Like, when someone does you wrong, when you make an error, do something stupid, someone cuts in front of you on the freeway, and so on.
Evil is an artifact of our human culture, some might say it is the polar opposite of “good” and represents the full negative continuum of our moral values. I also contend that the capacity for evil or evil acts is an inherent part of each person, perhaps it has been created by cultural shaping of the individual, perhaps it is a permanent aspect of our genetic make-up. It’s hard to say. But either way, one reason that people abhor/hate/eschew evil is that, deep-down, we all sense that there is some aspect of this phenomenon that we are connected to. This doesn’t mean that everyone engages in evil acts. On the contrary, there are understandable internal and external prohibitions against this.
In the end, not to constrain evil is to invite personal and social annihilation.
Think of the principle of “Mutually Assured Destruction:” founded on the notion that a nuclear attack by one superpower would be met with an overwhelming nuclear counterattack such that both the attacker and the defender would be annihilated. This is what would happen, in my view, if the prohibitions of evil were completely removed. So, in our modern technologically sophisticated world where we have harnessed key elements of “cause and effect” having some prohibitions on evil makes sense from a survival perspective.
As a psychologist, How do I treat evil? First, evil is inexplicably linked to intrusion or invasion. Invasion of one’s privacy, intrusion into one’s space. Intrusion is the act of “entering without permission.” People who experience evil feel like they have been invaded or intruded upon. When you have an evil thought, but you view yourself as a “good” person, this is an “intrusion” of evil into your own psychic state.
There are consequences when one feels invaded or intruded upon. One is trauma. Trauma due to maliciousness, with the purpose of doing harm.
Let’s say your purse or your wallet is stolen (let’s say, it’s out of your car). You immediately feel invaded. Someone “broke-into your car.” A thief stole your things. If this wasn’t bad enough that the “thief” has taken your purse or wallet, the thief will not stop at the cash inside, but your credit cards and personal items like your driver’s license will be used to steal more of your money and take more resources. It’s happening fast. You must quickly close all of your accounts, report your stolen driver’s license to the DMV, and on and on. This must start right away because you are in a race with evil. But, it could take days or weeks to complete, all the while, the thief is working to steal more.
Someone might say that what happened to you wasn’t evil, but “greed.” Are the two words that much different, “evil or greed”?
Is Evil Different than Greed?
Is Evil different than Greed? I contend that the two are linked, but not exactly the same. Evil is an umbrella term for “bad” and Greed is just one motivation for an evil-doer to commit a bad act. We generally believe that evil doers (from a moral standpoint) have bad motivations and intentions. Evil wants what you have and has no regard for laws or moral values. Evil within you could, if not checked, destroy you. The evil impulse is a dangerous impulse, although to feel it is to feel potency.
The vigilante epitomizes the evil impulse gone awry.
Trust (or the loss of trust) is a another key principle in treating evil. Loss of trust in yourself or others. Sometimes, a client will say, Dr. I’ve lost trust in myself. What does this mean?
I contend that loss of trust in yourself is different than lacking confidence in yourself. To lose confidence means you still have good intentions, but you wonder whether you will fail at a task or tasks that are associated with an achievement or a goal. When you lose trust in yourself, you are not sure what you will do in the future. You might act in an untrustworthy way and then later, when you regain emotional control, you may regret what you have done. Confidence is based on capability, trust is based on moral values.
When you lose trust due to evil, the loss quickly generalizes to other things and people (even people whom you trust). When a person experiences the consequences of an evil act, the person immediately becomes disillusioned. Disillusionment is the third issue in treating evil. Disillusionment in others, “Dr., I feel like I’m surrounded by thieves,” disillusionment in one’s self (I should have been sure my car door was locked), in the world (I’ll never get ahead in life, I’ll never recover from this setback). It takes a lot to re-instate trust when a person has experienced loss of trust and then disillusionment due to evil.
Continuing with my car example, you report the theft to the local police, but you immediately think that “The police could care less about this event, they have bigger issues to deal with. I’m essentially an insignificant, overly emotional, frustrated complainer.”
And, this belief becomes a personal truth when, in fact, the police take your call, put you on hold, answer, ask a few obtuse questions, provide you with a case number, and that’s it. You never hear from the police again.
Another example: A young woman, in childhood, is physically abused by a perpetrator. A prominent consequence in the young victim is the experience of a “loss of trust.” This might be a permanent loss. It certainly feels to the victim like a permanent loss. Before the incident, the victim saw the world one way, after the incident the victim perceives the world and others in a different way. After such an incident (or a horrifying invasion of the victim’s body), the victim may never be able to walk alone, even in a familiar neighborhood. Who does the victim trust now? The police? Family members? People at work? Everyone to the victim becomes a potential perpetrator. This victim is now surrounded and trapped by a sense that evil is everywhere.
What to do?
Treating Loss of Trust
Is it possible to treat someone who has lost trust?
In my example of the stolen purse, there are multiple ways that people respond to such an invasion. A starting point in treatment is to deal directly with the loss or with the intrusion, or with the direct consequence of the evil encounter. Too often, this feature of recovering trust get’s overlooked. For example, in the stolen wallet, someone might say:
I understand you lost your wallet. That’s tragic. But, you won’t get your wallet back, and this kind of thing happens. You got unlucky. By no fault of your own, you were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Take care of the issue, like you are doing, get your driver’s license re-instated, replace your credit cards, buy a new purse and move on. This response follows the adage, “Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, start all over again.”
What is helpful about this response?
It acknowledges the loss.
It is grounded in reality and rationality.
It is non-blaming of the victim.
It focuses on recovering by replacing what was physically lost.
What is missing in this response?
It avoids the central question of trust. That trust was lost in the victim, and just replacing the purse won’t necessarily restore trust.
It glosses over the emotional impact of the event. This was an encounter with evil. It was frightening to experience. It is now more frightening than ever to think about the future. This fear may not go away simply by the passage of time. In some instances, the passage of time might make things worse.
It does not affirm the victim. The victim is now suffering needlessly due to this evil act. The victim feels violated and vulnerable, possibly even thinks less of her or himself because of this event. Why me? The response is: “You were unlucky.” But, what does that mean? “I didn’t feel unlucky until now, I wasn’t trying to win something, I didn’t even think I was at risk until now. Am I a target for thieves and was this is a message from God that it will happen again? Was this a bad omen?” Failure to affirm the victim when the victim has been violated by evil can undermine the victim’s general sense of self in the world.
When a person experiences trauma, especially if it is a substantial trauma (perceived as substantial by the person experiencing the trauma), large features of the person’s psyche have been assaulted. The unconscious (or rather, aspects of our selves that we are not aware of - “the unawareness”) has been disrupted and this disruption in most people tends to persist until that unaware part of us feels like it’s OK. That things will be OK. This is why a person who experiences a trauma, but after, feels a residual anxiety that just won’t go away. This anxiety is the person’s unconscious (or the unaware part of the person) sending a message that things are not and never will be OK. That there is a present danger to the self. This is difficult for the therapist to address because the therapist must first make a substantial enough connection with the victim of the trauma to learn that the trauma occurred (which could be honestly denied or strategically forgotten by the victim). The therapist must then learn what happened, and why it is still unresolved. Hopefully, during this process, the victim will stay around.
Time after time, in my work with over a hundred traumatized victims, it is more often than not that the victim will prematurely stop therapy, disappear, you never see them again. The whole process was too anxiety provoking. They are unable to tolerate it, and they run away, escape, all with the hope of alleviating the growing anxiety, especially as the therapist gets closer to the ultimate act. Unfortunately, the victim may escape temporarily, but the anxiety still remains. It needs to be dealt with another day, another time, perhaps with another person.
It is this unaware part of the person that needs to connect with the therapist. In this case, with response #2: The therapist is attempting to connect to the person’s sense of disrupted (or fractured) self: Trust, safety, and intra-psychic stability have been lost in the individual because, as I’ve noted earlier, the person’s unconscious sense of the outside world is: “Evil remains out there.”
If a client continues in therapy, challenges this internal anxiety that is boiling within, and stays with a talented professional therapist, sensitive to trauma and its treatment, then it is my view that the anxiety will slowly diminish and a mild transformation starts to occur. There are more steps and stages to this process, but I will end my discussion of this component of trauma treatment here.
I should note that hypnosis may have a place in trauma treatment. It can create a state of consciousness more permeable to personal discovery, plus it is a gauge for the therapist that a certain threshold of trust in the therapy relationship has been reached, then the client can move towards stepping through the trauma and reframing the meaning of the trauma that will satisfy the needs of the unconscious state. I’ve seen this work many times in my own practice.
Suffice it to say that I’ve treated trauma and this approach seems to work. Why? Because, it engages the person’s inner sense of self, it pinpoints the issue and brings it into conscious awareness, and once it is amenable to conscious manipulation the victim can begin the process of communicating with the unaware features of the self. Essentially, the therapist be-friend’s and reassures this unaware or unconscious part of an individual’s nature, and that’s when lasting change and amelioration of real hurt begins. There is no better feeling than to be freed of chronic, existential anxiety due to trauma.
Am I Evil?
How would you answer this question? There are probably times you would say, Yes. But, then again, there are probably times you would say, No. If you are in a heated argument with a lot at stake, let’s say your marriage is breaking up and your spouse is extremely angry about things that happened in the past, the spouse might say, “My partner is evil.” But is that really true? You might say, “my spouse is evil.” Is that really a true statement that you believe? You might say, Yes, you might say, No. You might say, No my spouse isn’t truly evil, I actually love my spouse, but I’m so angry with my spouse that I don’t know what else to say. I like using this example between spouses because the line between intense love and hate can be pencil-thin.
If I pressed you a little and asked, “Really, Do you think you are an evil person?” Most people would say No because, as a society, we reserve the word evil for a small subgroup of people or groups that have exclusively bad motives and intentions. However, this doesn’t mean you don’t have evil thoughts. Sometimes it’s even fun to have an evil thought. Think of the phrase, “Evil Pleasures.”
Recall, in the definition of Evil (I bring the definition back here): (noun) profound immorality and wickedness, especially when regarded as a supernatural force.
I highlight, in the definition the word, “supernatural force”. OK, but What is supernatural? (adjective) A supernatural force, A supernatural being. Attributed to some force beyond scientific understanding or the laws of nature. (noun) manifestations or events considered to be of supernatural origin, such as ghosts.
The Source of Evil
“There are a lot of things we don’t understand.” I think most people would agree with this statement. It comes into relief as we observe an extreme evil act that makes absolutely no sense.
For instance, we might wonder why, in 1993, two ten-year-old boys, Robert Thompson and Jon Venerables, tortured and murdered two-year-old James Bulger when, in fact, other ten-year-old boys with similar genetic characteristics and upbringings cause little harm? Some philosophers argue that to call an action or a person evil is to say the action or person is a mystery or resulted from supernatural forces. In other words, Robert Thompson and Jon Venerables were possessed by an evil force, that caused them to act in this horrific way. (See https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/concept-evil/)
Is evil out of our control?
The act above meets every characteristic of evil, as an invasion, horrific act, just reading it challenges trust in humanity. If this happened in 1993, could it happen again? Who is to blame. The boys? The parents? Society? There are so many unanswered questions it becomes overwhelming to contemplate, and a person gets caught linking this event to every bad and evil act they know. To engage in self-reflection, almost anyone encountering this event would think that this is not part of nature. It is unnatural, not me, not comprehensible.
This is the supernatural. Science, cause and effect, logical positivism, reductionism, all terms of present day, “science” or what we think of as truth, or the process of getting at truth. Before “science” or what I call, the age of the archaic or primitive humanity, people didn’t believe in science or cause and effect. Most people didn’t even know what this was. In fact, to say we have a “mind” and a “body,” is a throwback to the supernatural. Do we really have a “mind” or “spirit”? Not just a body with a brain subsystem. True empiricists would vehemently challenge mind-body dualism. To think there are “ghosts” “spirits” “good and evil forces” that death is a change of existence. Not popular right now, especially not to be relied on.
This raises the question of “Trust.” What or who can you trust. If evil is in us we can’t even trust ourselves. This is a formative issue for the traumatized person. We have been taught to avoid evil or even the presence of evil, but evil is in us. What a paradox!
I get this question all the time in therapy. “Dr. I have these terrible impulses…If you really knew how I felt and thought you would refer me elsewhere.”
Our world and how we believe we manage ourselves in our world is frequently through a strict code of control. Control your thoughts, control your impulses, control your actions. So, when you violate this code of control (or you see the code violated) it causes you to shudder, to fear the future. Especially because in doing so it can occasionally feel empowering. Evil obliterates this code of control. Evil is not an out of control phenomenon (anarchy is out of control, chaos is out of control). Evil is a malicious strategic phenomenon that works to undermine control in favor of self-interest. Self-interest is the motivation of the evil doer. Self-interest in taking what the evil doer wants whether through power, seduction, sedition or any number of avenues. Evil has it’s own code, and that code is antithetical to the moral cultural code of collaborative cooperation.
BLOG ENTRY CONTINUING 6/19/202