VIDEO: Dr. James Garbarino on Connection Between Violent Men and Childhood Trauma
Watch an excerpt from PsychAlive’s exclusive interview with Dr. James Garbarino.
Dr. James Garbarino talks about how traumatic childhood experiences influence men’s actions as they grow.
Dr. James Garbarino: I do a lot of work with men on death row and murder cases and imprisoned men. I’ve come to see them mostly as untreated, traumatized children often inhabiting the bodies of very scary men. And one thing that makes them so scary is their unconsciousness about that wounded child. And the anger of that child and the fear of that child. And now, in a big body, they’re doing things on behalf of that child without even having an awareness of it. And sometimes, it’s almost hard to believe how unaware they are.
I mean, one example is a guy I was interviewing who had murdered a police officer. And like a lot of these guys, he had been abandoned by his mother as a child. And, you know, you can sort of make cultural sense of being abandoned by your father. It’s common enough. But to be abandoned by your mother, it’s pretty hard to see how you would swallow that. And he had been abandoned when he was about 3 or 4. His mother, very explicitly, left him behind, took his older brother and her drugs and left. And you look in the records and you see that he was thrown out of kindergarten for assaulting his woman kindergarten teacher and thrown out of first grade for assaulting his woman first grade teacher and in third grade, it was the woman bus driver and in fifth grade, it was the woman counselor.
So I knew all this from the record and I said to him, “You know, it sounds like you’ve had a lot of trouble dealing with women in any position of authority in relation to you.” He said, “Yeah.” And then I said to him as gently as I could, “Do you think it could have anything to do with your mother abandoning you when you were three?” And he said, “Man, I never thought of that before!” And in a sense, he probably never had because it’s such a big thing. How would you approach that on your own without support and without help?
I’ve really been struck by how many of these very violent men have maternal abandonment in their background. I was interviewing a guy recently. I’d been told, “This guy won’t talk to you. He doesn’t like to talk to people, certainly (not) professionals.” And I knew that his mother had died when he was 8. So when I went in, the first thing I said to him was, “I understand that your mother died when you were 8 and I’m really sorry. It must have been awful for you.” And you couldn’t shut him up. Because somebody had spoken about the biggest fact in his life that he couldn’t spontaneously talk about.
So I think it’s that kind of dynamic. Those are obviously very extreme, dramatic stories where parental influences are so powerful and often so hard to shake.
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It is interesting that violent people do not stop to question why they attack other people. Unfortunately recognising a link between abandonment and acting out is only the start of finding healthier ways to express your needs and desires. Maybe it is a bit simplistic to think that merely being aware of why a criminal attacks women may curb the problem. After all, the primary abuser in most households is the father and little boys grow up to mirror their father’s behaviour and do not tend to attack men for abandoning them or hurting them. Violent men tend to target nurturing women as partners to give them the nurturing they missed, whereas women tend to attract violent men if they endured a history of domestic violence. Violent men are drawn to vulnerable people as a source of acting out their aggression on a safe target.