This is my first post & its a doozy
This post sprung from a thread that I read earlier that concerned the slaughter on Friday. It was all about nature vs nurture and I wanted to post this there but once I got off work it was gone and I could not find it again. The reason I don't let it lie is that this incident will give me no peace. I keep seeing the faces of those beautiful children. Even though I got the mail after 10 posts saying I could start a thread and my first post should be an introduction I have chosen to ignore that. I have been a lurker member for years and the salmonenchantedevening incident brought me forth. Now, I feel blessed because the shooting of those babies has wounded me more than I want to handle alone and DU is here. I am hurting more than I ever thought possible for people I have never met. The children's sweet faces haunt me day and night and I just wanted to share. Below is what I wrote in response to the original post that now I cannot find. There is no one right now that understands, even my husband doesn't want to hear it and said tonight that he still wants our gun laws to say the same. I have no support (except my brother and mum who are far away) so I ask it of all of you, a faceless contingent of people who all seem to be so kind. Please don't be too hard on my ramblings... I am sharing a lot of myself.
I am finding this discussion fascinating and as I love to read and learn, I will pick up some books by Alice Miller from whence I can make my own decisions. But I have to agree with many posters that although nurture can be a big part of what makes a person a psychopath, nature is equally if not more important. I personally am of the opinion that people like this are born without a soul (that is the word I use; I know that there are many that don't believe we have such. I am not religious but I do believe in the soul) and it is a birth defect like being born blind or without a limb. I am by no means an expert but I can bring my own experiences to bear.
I was born to a young mother who had to marry a man she didn’t love because he got her pregnant with my brother and that is what you did then. She came from a violent and dysfunctional home wracked with extreme poverty, fighting and alcohol abuse with here 5 sisters and 1 brother, some of the stories she told me of growing up would curl your hair. My dad on the other hand, seemed to come from the perfect all American family, although they were Canadian. There were 3 well-behaved kids of parents who adored each other and a mom who stayed home while dad worked hard to earn the money for their solidly middle class life. My dad’s biggest trauma from that time was losing his beloved father to a heart attack when he was still in high school.
After I was born, mom started to have an affair with my father’s sister’s husband, a classic case of looking desperately for love in all the wrong places. You can imagine the horrible strife that was caused when that came out and both families were torn asunder. I was spared the worst because I was only a year old when my parents divorced but my brother was 3 and I think he carries that with him still even if only subconsciously. My brother often got into trouble as a child and he was cruel to me many times, while I was the good one never trying to rock the boat. Additionally, I was molested repeatedly by a boyfriend of one of my Aunt’s when I was 8 years old which I can still remember clearly to this day right down to his smell and that was 35 years ago. My father loved us but was distant and during the 70s my mom had to work many jobs to support us and became a bit of a partier so my brother and I spent a lot of time being raised by our Aunts who, happily, never let us forget that we were loved. Shuttling back and forth between parents was hard on us also. My mother had her own struggles with substance abuse (actually both parents are alcoholics) and she had many boyfriends plus, we were constantly moving. My brother and I had very little stability growing up. As we got older, my brother got involved in drugs, dropped out of school and was repeatedly arrested. For me, I waited into my 20s for the problems to present themselves and alcohol was a big part of that.
It wasn’t until I was a teenager that my brother and I started to become friends. Now, he is a diehard liberal, kind and soft spoken, but he still has many issues. He can be cruel at times to those he loves and he has never married or had children even though he wants to badly. He just can’t seem to make it work with anybody long term. I, on the other hand married a kind man who I respect but am not in love with and decided not to have kids as well. My brother and I both feel that we have lost the loves of our lives. This is my background and I went through many bouts where I thought that I was a shallow person who could not feel things deeply but I just think I shielded myself; we have both also dealt with deep wells of anger. I am gaining more empathy and peace as I get older and the state of the world today causes me so much physical and mental pain at times, that I have to step back from it. I work to make my world better in small ways so I deliver food to home-bound elderly in my city and have many shelter pets that I love as children.
Enough with the digression but once I started typing I couldn’t seem to stop. Back to the subject at hand, my mother even with all her trauma is one of the sweetest kindest people that you could ever be lucky enough to meet. She would do anything for anybody and I love her dearly. All of my mother’s sisters are the same way while her one brother is evil. He once brought over a bunch of his friends to molest his youngest sister when they were kids. My dad is a right-wing prejudiced rigid thinking conservative. He is the angriest bitterest person I know. If nurture was all there was to it that should be the opposite and all my Aunts would be like my one twisted Uncle. My brother and I would surely be more selfish and cruel people then we are. Example, my brother is a handy man. He fell off a ladder recently onto broken glass and nearly cut off his arm. His first thought was to the woman whose house he was working on and that he was getting blood everywhere. Nurture can make a naturally empathetic person even more so but people who have it have it no matter how they are raised. Those that don’t, don’t no matter how much you may love them. I’m so sorry for the length of this and I don’t know if it makes sense and it’s all over the place but it’s my 2 cents.
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people come from the most awful homes. I don't think there are any hard rules as to what makes a person what they are.
Welcome to DU, I am glad you are here! 
I'm impressed that you seem to have chosen to be positive-minded, rather than letting those hardships poison your perspective on life. You seem very strong. 
I'm glad you found DU!
It's pretty clear that you, as many of us, have been traumatized. I don't know if you have insurance or IEP, but there is nothing wrong with choosing to go to therapy for trauma, even if it seems like it has nothing to do with you. Surface trauma has a way of stirring up old trauma and I think that may be happening to you. I only base that on how long your post was. Once trauma has truly been healed, the personal trauma story becomes very short - the longer it is, the more the trauma still has you in it's grip.
Now, my advice is worth exactly what you just paid for it. My hugs, however, 
are priceless. Take care of yourself. You've had a hell of a rough life and this is a rough week for all of us.
Nice post.
