Here’s the big question after the horrible massacre in Las Vegas: Why?
Sunday night, Stephen Paddock, from his room on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Casino, started shooting at the 22,000 people attending a country music concert. From his elevation, and with automatic weapons, it was like shooting fish in a barrel. A total of 59 people were killed and more than 500 wounded. It is the worst mass shooting in recent American history.
Stephen Paddock, 64, is the son of Benjamin Hoskins Paddock who robbed two banks between 1959 and 1960. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 1961 — but escaped in 1968.
Benjamin Paddock, Las Vegas gunman’s father, robbed banks and fled FBI, on NYTimes.com.
With his escape, Benjamin Paddock ended up on the FBI’s most wanted list on March 18, 1969. The wanted poster actually says:
CAUTION
PADDOCK, DIAGNOSED AS PSYCHOPATHIC, HAS CARRIED FIREARMS IN COMMISSION OF BANK ROBBERIES. HE REPORTEDLY HAS SUICIDAL TENDENCIES AND SHOULD BE CONSIDERED ARMED AND VERY DANGEROUS.
The fact that Benjamin Paddock was diagnosed as psychopathic in 1969 is pretty amazing. At that time, there was no standard way of diagnosing psychopaths. In fact, about the only book on the topic was Hervey Cleckley’s Mask of Sanity.
Stephen Paddock was eight years old when his father was sent to prison. Benjamin Paddock was not in the lives of his sons as they were growing up.
Stephen Paddock attended college and worked for a predecessor company of Lockheed Martin. He eventually got into real estate and made a lot of money. In recent years, he was a professional gambler.
But he had no criminal record and was not violent. According to his brother, he had no political agenda and no religious affiliation.
Stephen Paddock, Las Vegas Suspect, was a gambler who drew little attention, on NYTimes.com.
So the question remains: Why did he do it? Was he a psychopath also?
From what’s been released so far, only one psychopathic trait fits — it looks like Stephen Paddock had a need for excitement. He lived his life by gambling. He had a pilot’s license and owned two airplanes. He also had hunting licenses.
After the shooting, we can say that Stephen Paddock must have had a lack of remorse, guilt or empathy — it’s the only way he could kill so many people in cold blood. But were there indications of this before Sunday?
I don’t know if Stephen Paddock was psychopathic or crazy. But if he was, in fact, a psychopath, here’s what I think happened: He kept a lid on his tendencies all his life. Then he couldn’t do it, or decided not to do it, any more.
Lovefraud’s research on senior sociopaths found that they either stay the same or get worse as they age. Several of our survey respondents said the sociopaths they knew lost the ability to keep the mask in place any longer, or couldn’t be bothered to try.
Maybe Stephen Paddock was like the school shooters who wanted to go out with a bang — except he waited until age 64 to do it.
I’m not sure we’ll ever know.
What I learned about trauma from my dog
There are billboards in Las Vegas asking you to call the FBI if you know anything about the killer’s motives. This would be a good opportunity for someone to call and give them the link to this site and explain the M.O. of a sociopath. You’d think they already know but who knows? 800-CALL-FBI
On Friday, 5 days after the Las Vegas shooting, court documents from the summer of 2016 have been unsealed & released with regards to 3 men arrested for terror plots in New York City.
From the Business Insider:
“Three men have pleaded guilty to terror charges related to a plot to carry out ISIS-inspired attacks in New York City, the US Department of Justice announced in a press release Friday afternoon.
The suspects, one of whom is Abdulrahman El Bahnasawy, a 19-year-old citizen of Canada who pleaded guilty to terrorism charges, had apparently viewed New York landmarks and its busy subway system as possible targets, the DOJ statement said.
Talha Haroon, a 19-year-old US citizen who lived in Pakistan and 37-year-old Russell Salic who is a citizen of the PHILIPPINES were also facing charges.
The men wanted to carry out shootings and bombings throughout heavily populated areas of New York City in summer 2016. Some of the targets included Times Square and “specific concert venues,” the Justice Department said. New York hosts several high-profile concert events each year, like the Governors Ball and the Meadows Festival, which typically draw thousands of attendees over several days.”.
ONE OF THE MEN WAS FROM THE PHILIPPINES. There has been countless Islamic terror attacks in the Philippines for years & years (30 plus years). The Las Vegas shooter has a connection to the Philippines his GF. He made several trips to the Philippines.
The Police chief of Las Vegas stated in a news conference last week that it was possible the shooter was “Radicalized”.
Since last summer there have been THREE Concert shootings: 1) French Theater 2) Manchester England Stadium Concert & now this Concert in Las Vegas.
I came here expecting to find this discussion, and I was not disappointed!
What’s more, the theory that Paddock simply “wanted to go out with a bang” was EXACTLY the phrase I had in my own mind, long before I saw this article! Unless there was some motive or circumstance we hadn’t heard about yet, it was the only explanation that seemed to make sense to me, as inadequate as it is.
Considering how well Paddock had done in life, financially at least, it’s hard to see how he could have a grudge against the world, like many others who “go postal,” though what was happening in his personal life is harder to know. Neighbors who knew him were describing him as “surly and uncommunicative,” so he wasn’t exactly a happy camper in recent weeks. His girlfriend too had begun to realize that was no longer stable, even if she wasn’t expecting a blowup of this kind.
Mind you, Donna, I also found your comment interesting about the mental health of these types deteriorating with age. If it does, that could also have much to do with Paddock’s behavior. It reminds me of a serial killer a long time ago—I don’t know if he was ever labeled a “psychopath,” but things were different back then, Freudian theories holding sway at the time—anyway this guy had killed two or three times before without being detected. Later, when he was 53 years old (which is “old” as serial killers go) his health and his attendant financial circumstances deteriorated, and he too seemed to “lose it.” First he did his wife in and buried her under the floorboards. Then he went on a murder binge. He killed three women in the space of three months and hid them in the house he was living in. Since he was only renting the place, when he finally ran out of money he was forced to leave, and he must have known discovery was inevitable. But psychopaths, being impulsive, often don’t look to the future, and some, being terminally bored anyway, don’t care if they die, as long as they get their gratification.
It would have been interesting to know if Paddock perceived that his health was deteriorating and he believed he hadn’t long to live. We may never know. But his psychopathic tendencies certainly showed through in his life. While he was successful as a gambler, I don’t doubt the excitement and addiction of gambling helped to relieve his chronic psychopathic boredom. And he was restless; he moved around a lot. He was married twice, but again, not for very long: once in 1977 at the age of 24, right out of college, and again in 1985 at the age of 32. The first marriage lasted only two years; the second for five years. It would be interesting to hear what his two ex-wives had to say about him, and why their marriages failed. I don’t know why we haven’t heard more from them
The press annoys me. Whenever there’s an unexpected murder, domestic or otherwise, they just love to trot out the same worn-out clichés about how “all the neighbors are asking why, why, WHY???“ As if the whole thing is a black mystery, and there’s no possible explanation for why some normal-seeming person would suddenly “blow up” and kill someone. Come on, guys, there is a reason, even if it’s one that nobody has perceived yet… or a reason that some people don’t want to accept! To start with, the neighbors usually had no idea what was going on in the killer’s personal life that very probably accounted for the killing. Even parents don’t know what’s going on in their own teenage children’s lives!—as they weren’t at Columbine. Apart from that, I always feel like saying “The killer is probably a psychopath, you dumb journalists! Or personality disordered in some way at least! Why are you ignoring the obvious explanation?” (Eric Harris was, for one, though Dylan Klebold’s role in their particular folie à deux was more complex.)
The press response was only slightly different after this latest tragedy. I think it was in Monday’s USA Today, which comes as a filler in our local newspaper, that one article claimed there was no obvious circumstance to explain why Paddock acted as he did. It went on to say (paraphrasing roughly from memory) that there was just one odd little detail (this was added as though it were an irrelevant afterthought): that Paddock’s father had been a bank robber who was diagnosed as a psychopath! Instantly I told myself “But of course, that’s it! That ‘detail’ is supremely relevant! It supplies a good part of the explanation! So why is it being relegated to a mere afterthought?”
If anyone wants an answer to my own last “why?” question, it was in Wednesday’s edition of the same paper. (With apologies for digressing, I’ve never forgotten a business trip I was on years ago when a guy from Unisys couldn’t get his usual newspaper in the city we were meeting in, and he had to settle for USA Today instead. As we all sat down to breakfast in a McDonald’s, he waved this journal in the air and said “McPaper!” It was so deliciously appropriate, we couldn’t stop laughing.) This time I’m quoting verbatim:
I’m frankly surprised that “federal law enforcement officials” would downplay this connection when they ought to know better. Of course, there’s no telling how far some of the silly ideas that have been contaminating our culture for decades can rot the brains of the entire Establishment, including much of our Government. However, this may just be what the two journalists who wrote the article preferred to quote, after filtering “official” statements through the lens of their own biases. And the leftist bias of what we laughingly call our “mainstream” media is well-documented and notorious.
The particular “leftist bias” I’m talking about here is the excessive insistence on “social constructionism,” which frequently amounts to denial of biological realities. In short, an insistence on the exclusive role of “nurture” at the expense of denying Nature. It’s the same issue that got James Damore into hot water at Google, for daring, like Galileo, to write the truth, when the truth he wrote was seen as “heresy” by the priests of the leftist religion. In the context of psychopathy, the assumption of McPaper’s journalists was obvious: that Paddock’s criminal father had to be personally involved with his son to influence him in an evil direction. But he didn’t have to be! All he had to do was pass his bad genes on!
In saying this, of course I’m not suggesting the role of a father (or mother) in a child’s life is unimportant. Not at all! Inheritance too is a crapshoot. Plenty of psychopaths breed normal children—which is just as well! Conversely, normal parents can be unlucky enough to breed a psychopathic child, possibly due to traits unknowingly inherited from further back in the family tree. Then too, there is evidence that good or bad parenting may make even a psychopathic child turn our better—or worse!
However, I’m afraid there are cases where Nature, not “nurture,” has the last word, and a child turns out a “black sheep” in spite of all the parents’ best efforts. Sometimes—not always, but sometimes—“biology IS destiny.” We have to face the fact that some people are just born bad!
I was not surprised to hear that Paddock’s father was diagnosed as psychopathic back in 1969. Although Dr. Hare’s Psychopathy Checklist didn’t exist at the time, the nature of the condition itself had been recognized at least since the 19th century, when it was often referred to as “moral insanity”—as I expect you know. And it wouldn’t surprise me if people with psychopathic traits had been informally recognized as a “type” long before that. It’s also interesting to see, for instance, how often the type turns up in Agatha Christie’s novels, mostly written in the first half of the 20th century. She didn’t use the word “psychopath,” but the traits were obvious: slick, superficial charm, a charismatic personality—and a facile liar and deceiver with no morals! What’s more, Christie was well aware, like others of her generation who had not yet discarded the wisdom of the ages in favor of later twentieth century wishful thinking, that traits could be inherited, for better or for worse.
When it came to diagnosing psychopathy in a clinical setting, there had to be criteria that professionals were using long before the PCL—even if they didn’t always agree on those criteria. For instance, I recall a murder suspect who after an interview was classified as “an inadequate psychopath with schizoid traits.” This was way back in 1949.
Mind you, I can’t tell how the criteria used in that instance would stack up against today’s standards, or indeed whether the man in question was truly a psychopath, since this was a preliminary “seat of the pants” impression by the doctor concerned. It may be worth quoting how this doctor is said to have described the nature of a “psychopath”:
While it is true that psychopaths can be impulsive and reckless of consequences to themselves, this description must strike us as “missing the point,” the problem of paramount concern to most of us: that psychopaths want to get their own way regardless of consequences to OTHERS! Not to mention that they’re by no means lacking in “reasoning power.” Paddock for one showed no lack of “reasoning power.” On the contrary, he must have been a highly intelligent man to make a living at gambling as well as in business, and his planning skills showed through in the detailed way he plotted his massacre. Psychopaths can be devilishly cunning, as we know.
However, in fairness to that doctor, I must mention that he also characterized the suspect in question, an illiterate man of 25, as a “mental defective,” with a mental age estimated at 11 years and an IQ of 65. This suspect was in the bracket that used to be labeled “morons”—a formal clinical term at the time, not a term of opprobrium, describing those with an IQ between 50 and 70. So the suspect’s “reasoning power” wasn’t very good anyway. This is one of many examples of how psychopaths (and abusers in general) are not “all the same” by any means (a superficial claim I often tire of hearing). Aside from their disorder, they can be as diverse in character as any of us normal humans. The point with psychopaths, I dare say, is not that they “lack reasoning power” in general, but that their thought habits and their impulsiveness especially can at times sabotage what reasoning power they have.
In addition, the doctor’s remarks were addressed in response to a specific question: namely, whether the suspect might have made a false confession. So he was discussing the aspects of the psychopathic personality that could bear upon that question, not necessarily the psychopathic personality as a whole. I imagine if he were giving a lecture on psychopathy he would have rounded out the picture more fully.
The “inadequacy” he spoke of seemed typical of a number of the psychopaths Hervey Cleckley was describing in The Mask of Sanity, whose first edition was published in 1941. My first impression on starting to read Cleckley was that some of the subjects he was describing were a bigger problem to themselves than they were to the people around them! No doubt they were an annoyance by perpetrating petty thefts, getting into stupid fights and whatnot, but all that got them was a bad reputation, a mountain of debt, lost jobs or sent to jail or even a mental hospital. So mostly what they did was wreck their own lives. Stupid, stupid, stupid! This subclass of psychopaths is a far cry from the Machiavellian cunning of the villain who “plays” others for his or her own benefit—“sex,” “money,” “power” or whatever… and succeeds in getting away with it!
I find this particular suspect intriguing because there’s so much we can’t be sure about, and will probably never know after a lapse of 68 years: a lifetime, for practical purposes. And it bugs me when I can’t figure out a definite answer to a puzzle! Among other things, was he or was he not in fact a psychopath? There are reasons for thinking so, but alternative explanations are possible. He could be violent at times; but he had good cause to be frustrated, which were likely to make him “lash out.” He certainly was “inadequate.” But he had plenty of reasons to feel inadequate. One striking trait was that he was an inveterate liar. He lied, according to one chronicler, “fully, gloriously, nearly all the time. He would lie about almost anything and half the time he did not know he was lying.” He told people his father was an Italian count; that his brother owned a fleet of cars; that he’d taken a trip to Egypt. It is, certainly, a notable psychopathic trait to lie automatically, out of habit, even when there’s no obvious reason for lying. Yet some people feel the need to tell lies, not because they’re psychopaths, but simply to cover up feelings of guilt or to compensate for their own inadequacy. So that doctor’s snap diagnosis might be right or it might be wrong—especially if he was influenced by the assumption that this man was guilty of murder that he may or may not have committed.
Really though, that’s all so much waffle on my part, when the main point is that diagnoses of psychopathy were indeed being made at least as early as the 1940s. So it doesn’t surprise me at all that Stephen Paddock’s bankrobbing father was diagnosed as a psychopath twenty years later. What’s more, I’ll bet they got it right!
Astrology plays a big role in Paddock’s personality as well as everyone else. I looked up his astrological chart and he’s an Aries. Aries men have a propensity toward violence and anger. They like to fight. He also has a mars pluto square in his chart within 6 degrees. His mars is in taurus. MArs square pluto describes a violent hateful person who has the capacity to kill and the tendency toward a violent ending which we saw evidence of. Now not everyone with this violent aspect will act out they do however have the potential. I have met men with this aspect and they were cruel, mean people. Also, mars in taurus makes a person hard-nosed, rigid and stubborn. They tend to harbor anger as well. Which fits all of him that we have seen.
More info from NY Times:
Who was Stephen Paddock? The mystery of a nondescript ‘numbers guy’
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/07/us/stephen-paddock-vegas.html
I have to comment on this, I have been in recovery for 3 years from a sociopath after a 10 year extremely abusive marriage. I have read all kinds of books, gone to therapy, read on here at LoveFraud but I never commented, my self esteem and my soul was so broken I could never muster up much to comment but with this horrific tragedy in Vegas I cannot help but feel chills watching any coverage and feeling this was my ex husband. My ex husband was a special kind of Sociopath, he was what I learned from lots of therapy a mother enmeshed sociopath. There is much out there to explain this type of sociopath but it is created in part by the genetic predisposition and then the environment they are raised in. I’ve learned from dealing with a mem(mother enmeshed men or emotional incest) the mother can be a huge factor in this problem with their sons(it can also happen with fathers and daughters as well)
Basically the idea is the father is usually absent or he may still be in children’s lives but he is emotionally distant, the mother uses the son’s usually the eldest as her surrogate husband, this creates a very narcissistic young adult, as long as they tend to all their mother’s emotional needs or physical needs like helping with man chores, the child is led by the mother to think they are very special, this creates narcissism. The mother will begin turning to her son to tell him all her struggles, her problems as a single mom, and the boy then becomes the ‘man’ to assist her and help her, these mothers than cycle through other siblings to get them pining for her, the mother is really a narcissist she does not see her children as individuals she sees them as belonging to her, they are not allowed to have their own emotions, if she is happy they are allowed to be happy when she’s miserable they have to be miserable. this creates a man that lacks empathy and compassion, he has to snuff out his emotions. His mother’s are the only emotions that matter. The mother will share information with the growing young man that is not appropriate to share with their children, things that should only be shared with her peer group. But the mother will not have a peer group, she will put her entire well being her emotional state in the responsibility of her sons. The problem really kicks into high gear as the child grows up, especially when he gets married, these mother’s will see the spouse as an issue, either the spouse has to be the mother’s best friend almost like the child of her and her son, or the mother will start very subtly insulting the wife or the mother will do everything to drive a wedge in the marriage such as dropping little hints to her very manipulated son that the spouse is bad. The marriage usually falls apart due to it being so abusive for the wife, the wife usually does not see it coming she just thinks he’s a mamma’s boy, but deep down the man hates his mother because she controls him and he feels helpless, so he takes all the hate for his mother out on his wife. So the wife is caught in a double whammy of abuse from him and the mother.
This is my ex, this was his mother, actually the entire families are all enmeshed, all siblings.
Now here is what I have seen from watching the stories and the interviews. It was reported that Stephen Paddock bought his mother a house, and so did his brother, he has two failed marriages, it was reported he texted his mom and sent her gifts often, his brother is even caught in an interview saying how their mom had it so hard, (from experience this is what narcissist mom’s thrive on to manipulate their kids, from an absent father to illness anything to make their sons feel guilty and obligated to constantly care for their mother)
the brother is seen saying in the interview everything their mother had was because of Stephen, but in almost fear he corrects it and says ‘well she did a lot for herself’. Almost as if they have to hide the help they give their mom, or she will be insulted
And after this horrible mass murder her son committed than killed himself, on the interview with the brother, he says he just got back from taking his mom to the doctors???? I’m sorry but if my son had just done what her son did, I don’t think I could leave my house, remember a doctor’s appointment or go out at all, your son just committed a mass murder! Even if it was an emergency, ya I don’t think I could go to the doctors, but this is so typical of a narcissistic mother, making her other son run her to the doctors, showing no concern for everyone, because in her mind she is all that matters.
My ex husband and his brother were the exact same way with their mother, I had a pulmonary embolism flying back from overseas from a business trip and he left me to be with his mom, he showed no emotion for me, but if his mom needed anything, bam he was mister do it all take care of everything, I only got the rage and the emotional/verbal abuse and silent treatments. The most annoying thing about these kinds of sociopaths is it goes so unnoticed because they tell everyone about how they did such and such for their mom, and everyone thinks they are sweet guy, but the wife is in a living hell with a completely abusive monster. I would love to hear from his first two ex wives on their view of him. There is even an article from the Starbucks he took his girlfriend too where they said he was abusive to her, but around the same time he had sent his mom a walker, oh what a sweet man? incapable of such horrendous acts? well after the 10 years of my life living with this family of sociopaths, I don’t get fooled by any of that garbage. When I first met my ex he told me his first wife left him because she said she was supposed to be his family now, he said she was upset and jealous about how much he did for his mom.
like paddock my ex had money but he gambled all the time, and only spent money to take his mom places, he was cheap with me, not to sound shallow but if this guy is gambling a million dollars a night as he stated to a neighbor and only gives his girlfriend 100,000 I think that is cheap, its a lot of money but really he knew what he was going to do and that’s all he does for her?
I’m sorry I’m so worried to post anything online because I don’t want to come off offensive but this Vegas thing has completed affected me in the core of my soul, I cry every time I see anything about it. It makes me so sad, I feel like after I see the connection after the nightmare I lived I should have done something about my ex, I dropped all the battery charges against him, trying to save the marriage, my ex is 52, and I do not speak to him anymore, the last times I did even after I filed for divorce from him, he has got so much worse, so much more abusive and I believe it will continue. I had to share this with somebody, I see the connection so clearly to me, I’m not a professional and I could be way wrong but I had to say something to get the word out so just hopefully knowledge will help the world identify these monsters ahead of time before they do something so awful. The world will not move forward without real love in our hearts, we have to have better laws against narcissistic abuse
When I met my ex I believed his mother and him about how the father was such a monster and I felt sorry for her I bought her pity plays and I stood on my head trying to please them, I felt ‘bullied’ in their company, they would team up and pick on me for anything. I would take his mother dinner, and she would spend the next 3 weeks complaining about the service was bad, the food was terrible, it was all my fault for taking her there, so I would try harder and harder, I would sent her candy in the mail for surprises, found that strange when I read Stephen Paddock’s girlfriend sent the mom cookies
My husband had multiple affairs on me, his mom made friends with his one night stand on facebook at 89 years old! She would never stop with the things she would do to hurt me, and god forbid if I even slightly brought up with my Husband issues I had with his mother, from spending over 4000 dollars on her with my money in the first year I was married to him or her rude comments, he would rage, physically attack me, try to choke me or he would drive off and disappear for days giving me the silent treatment and I would desperately call him to make amends
I went to a fantastic therapist and that is where I went over all the abuse, it was my therapist that explained he was probably a sociopath and as I continued to go and tell what happened my therapist recommended the book ‘when he’s married to mom’
These guys are like Norman Bates sociopath’s
They are very dangerous but it goes unnoticed, they are usually womanizers because from a young age their mothers encouraged them to be this way, their mothers usually let their son’s do whatever they wanted from drugs/drinking and she would usually be in the house hanging with him and his friends. This gives these men a huge sense of entitlement like they are superior to anyone, they walk around knowing they can never get in trouble from mom as long as mom is right there along with them.
I am writing so much and I’m sorry I just cannot believe how much I have seen with this crazy gunman from the small interviews with neighbors and his brother that really point to Mother enmeshment or a narcissistic mother. I’m sure his father genetically had much to do with this also but with his father being out of the kids life since he was 8 the mother was really the main role model for him. The sad part about these ‘mem’ sociopaths, is deep down they are miserable, they are hateful and filled with angst. they lack the ability to bond with anyone outside their families and cannot empathize with ‘outsiders’
I’m sure the mother will never be interviewed, she will get to play the sweet old lady card who had no idea how this happened, I’ve seen that act with my ex 92 year old mother in law.
Sorry for rambling on, I had a dream prior to the shooting, a horrible nightmare, I had a dream that I was in a hotel room in Vegas, and I heard people running down the hall and yelling someone is shooting tracer rounds, I ran down the hall saw a man shooting from the window and I picked him up by his legs and threw him out the window. I was shaken awake by the nightmare and it startled me all day, I was staying in a hotel for business, this dream was on September 26. I shook it off because I was just hit by Irma and someone at work the previous day asked me why I stay in a hurricane zone after being hit by Hurricane Hermine, Matthew and Irma, and I said jokingly ‘maybe I should just move to Vegas they don’t get hurricanes there’. So I thought the dream was because of that day I had said about moving to Vegas and that I was staying in a hotel, but now I wonder if it was a spirit guide trying to warn me. thank you for listening I just wish there was a way to stop these monsters before they hurt anyone, either like this maniac did or how they destroy the lives of anyone whose had relationships with them.
And as always, I pray everyday to any greater power that will listen that all of us hurt and healing from sociopath abuse that we are being loved and guided to healing.
Tuesday – thank you so much for your comment. You’ve provided a lot of food for thought. Your dream sounds like a real premonition.
I wish you the best in your healing.
Yes. Wow. You have really poured your heart out, Tuesday. I appreciate it so very much. I can definitely see some similarities in my own husbands’ family dynamic with his mother. It’s weird how we see things all along the way, and completely discount them, because we really don’t know what they mean. We just figure that their family is simply different from our own family. We don’t see the harm nor sickness in it…
Then, we get older and wiser and happen upon a site like this one…(thank goodness for the help and insight that sites like this afford us)…and we can string everything together.
Thank you again, so much. What you have posted is very important for so many.
Thank you everyone for being so kind. I don’t know if this is the case with this maniac but my intuition alarm bells were going off from the information I was seeing and reading on the news. I just want people to be aware of this issue and to look out for this as a red flag. These types of family dynamics are very dangerous. I cannot talk to anyone about what I went through besides my therapist because I fear people do not understand the enmeshed families and the psychological damage it does to everyone in the family and all the unsuspecting outsiders. If I were to complain about my husband doing so much for his mother it would to anyone who does not understand this dynamic seem selfish of me. But unless someone has lived it, it does not make sense. Mothers are supposed to love their children and want them to be happy have relationships and extend the family. This is healthy mothers, narcissistic mothers want control of their children.
Things seemed off to me about the Paddock family, I don’t see it being a mystery of what his motive was, and I’m sure anyone who has had a relationship with a sociopath knows, there are many signs and red flags but good people overlook the signs and red flags. I now know to really look closely at family dynamics where before I would never even consider it. I worry about the Girlfriend of this gunman, her family lived far away, I was in the exact same position, my family lived very far away so I was very isolated with just the sociopath and his family so I was trying very hard to be liked and accepted by his family. Little did I realize this would never happen for this type of family, it does not happen for the son’s of these types of mothers, why would they ever accept an ‘outsider’. This type of family dynamic is very unhealthy its not based on love its based on fear obligation and guilt, it creates psychological problems in the children, there can be scapegoats and golden child’s, and this can rotate between different children for the mother so she gets exactly what she wants. I have learned so much about the topic that the red flags went off with this gunman, there is a brother he does not speak to in his family, usually the mother creates angst between the siblings, she enjoys the drama but the effects it can have on her son’s is total emasculation which can create a very deep set in rage, depression and angst in the son that he feels powerless against, so he in turn can take this out on any women he has a relationship with.
But abuse is abuse! Regardless of where it stems from these men are monsters too that are 100 % responsible for the abuse they are doing.
There are many people raised in these types of families that do not continue the abuse. So there is no excuse for Stephen Paddock, he was a grown man who should have pulled his own butt into counseling if this was the nightmare of his family. It is sociopaths that would never see their problems as problems. Its everyone else that is the problem never them.
I hate that the suffering he caused the families and friends of so many people will take their lifetimes to endure, its so wrong, it has to stop, personality disorders need to be identified early, we take drivers tests why don’t we have to take psychological tests?
My focus in my healing is to hope for change, to be knowledgeable about these types of people and have the courage to stand up to them which is walking away from them. I will send love to the families and friends of the victims. I will only look for stories that cover or talk about acts of kindness and courage from that horrible night, I need to see those images, and they are there, people are good. These monsters cannot kill the good in people.
Tuesday, I think you may be onto something with the mother complex. Your analysis sounds very insightful. As Donna says, your dream sounds like a premonition to me, too. I’ve had several dreams like that over the years, and it’s usually the day before some sort of shooting or fatal accident. Narcissism is a component of many types of abuse, and I believe it causes the worst kind of damage because the victim feels neglected. Damage from neglect is the hardest to recognize and heal from, in my experience. If you were the target of a narcissist for many years, the important thing to remember is that A) You have a right to exist; and B) Your feelings are valid, and you have a right to them. I have to remind myself of this often. Thanks for sharing your story. I see pieces of mine in yours.
Bruce Paddock, brother of the Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock, was arrested last week on child porn charges. He’d been eluding police for years, even setting up surveillance and booby traps.
http://www.tmz.com/2017/10/28/vegas-shooter-brother-dodged-cops-booby-traps/
Link provided by a Lovefraud reader.