Gwen Adshead

it is ‘always ourselves that we find in the sea’

there is wisdom in that popular notion that hating someone else is like taking poison and waiting for them to die.

This reminded me of other serial killers I had read about, who would carefully compartmentalise their cruelty from their everyday lives, an internal split screen that acts as another kind of defence mechanism, which is sometimes known as ‘doubling’.

Later in my career, in my work with trauma survivors and through further study of the nature of traumatic memory, I would find that it was typical for many people (not only violent offenders) to slip into the present tense when describing painful events. The psychological explorer in me finds this fascinating: such a distortion to temporal reality is a way of unconsciously signalling how live their memories are for them, that they are not filed away somewhere in the past, where they belong.

If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it.’

In training, I’d learned by trial and error – and via a lot of feedback from my supervisors – that it was counterproductive to get into the topic of someone’s offence too early, even if they raised it. It was important to build a rapport first

It was possible he was building a ‘wall of words’ around him, as people sometimes do to buttress themselves against deep distress so that they don’t become overwhelmed.

Sometimes people are unlikeable because they don’t like themselves, a truism that extends well beyond forensic settings

I have seen how people with established risk factors for violence manifest painful feelings in the body, but they can also turn to causing other people pain because they are unable to articulate their own. It is only through action that they can express themselves.

People who are severely depressed and at high risk of suicide are more likely to describe themselves as feeling numb and emotionally disconnected, as opposed to having feelings of sadness.