What Drives a Person to Murder
Mark Jenson and his son were seen laughing and hi-fiving each other the afrernoon following his wife's death. Either the man and his son are cold hearted, perhaps even psychopaths, or there is more here than meets the eye. When a person commits violence against a (previously) loved one, there has to be some history that perhaps has not been revealed, perhaps never will be, about the nature oftheir intimate relationship.
Turning Conflict into Compassion
When we can move into a place of deeper understanding of what happens in our brains when we percieve each other, then we have a chance of seeing conflict from a new perspective. In the extreme case of murder, there certainly has to be some things that went very wrong in the intimate relationshps of the family for this to have occurred.
What we know about how our brains work is that certain kind of rections occur in the brain, often without our conscious awareness that trigger a sense of threat. When the people around us are not aware of or sensitive to our primative reactions to that perceived threat, we can get pretty determined to protect ourselves. Our behavior may appear outrageous or even crazy to those around us if they don't know or understand why we feel so threatened.
Empathy and Ownership can Parlay Conflict
When someone we love or even just care about, reacts in a way that seems unreasonable or outside of what we percieve to make sense, there is more going on inside that person than we know. Paying attention to and responding to that persons pain can go a long way to transforming the conflict.
Then, if we can find something in what the other person has expressed that we can own as our part, the other person then can see that we are not blaming them. When we can say (for instance) "I can see that something I did upset you, can you tell me what it was"' We move out of the blame game and eeper into understanding.
What was really going on?
I am fairly certain we will never know what happened to trigger Ms Jenson's death. But what we can be fairly certain of is that someone felt really threatened and someone else failed to notice. When this happens violence is much more likely to occur.
What About You?
Have you ever been in a situation where you felt really threatned and no one noticed or cared? How did you respond? Or, have you seen someone behave really crazy and not understood the threat they were experiening? Tell me what you have experiened.
