"The first thing I noticed was how quiet he was. Bryan didn't fidget or lean. He sat in the chair like someone who no longer expected to be seen. His hands rested gently in his lap, his spine relaxed, his eyes cast toward a corner of the room where nothing moved. This wasn't stillness for effect. It was the stillness of a body that learned not to flinch, even in childhood."
"He was 31 years old. He had killed people for money. We met in a prison in Medellín, Colombia, where the corridors were too wide and too quiet, like they were made to carry regret. He didn't look at me right away. He looked at the table between us. Then the wall. Then his own hands. "I don't remember their names," he said. "That's not the part that stays." There was no bravado in his voice."
"He hadn't been beaten. That was important to him, for some reason. "No one hit me," he said. "They just didn't talk to me." His mother worked long hours. His father was a name he'd only heard once. No one came to his school meetings. No one ever told him he was good at anything. There were no stories before bed, no arms reaching out to ask where it hurt."
Bryan, a 31-year-old who had killed people for money, displayed emotional flatness and stillness indicative of long-term neglect. His parents were absent; no one attended school meetings or offered affection, and he remembered no bedtime stories or comforting gestures. Emotional neglect left him feeling unseen rather than physically abused. The neglect impaired his emotional development and regulation. Research links poor emotion regulation in neglected children to later harm-doing. Violent behavior can emerge not from sudden rage but from a prolonged history of being ignored, where aggression becomes a means to obtain acknowledgment.
Read at Psychology Today
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