My son sent me a note the other day. Not a text, not a meme, but an actual piece of thinking, the kind of thing you write when an idea has been rattling around in your skull long enough that it needs to get out onto a page.
I've read it three times now, and I want to share it and chew on it a bit, because he's put his finger on something most of us have run into and very few of us have named. I've also lived it, from more than one direction, and I'll get to that.
He calls them unintentional victim monsters.
These are people who do real harm to others, but not out of malice. They do it because they see themselves as the victim. And when the people they've harmed push back, stand up for themselves, or simply point out what happened, the monster experiences that pushback as the original attack. The response becomes the crime. The consequence becomes the catalyst.
Read that again, because it's the whole thing in a nutshell.
The boss who didn't read the law
My son offers an example that anyone who has spent time in the working world will recognize.
An employee takes protected family leave. When they come back, the boss has cut their hours. The employee, who has a clean record and no documented discipline, points out that those hours are legally protected and can't simply be cut on return. Reasonable. Calm. Correct.
The boss hears this as a threat. I hear some narcissism rattling around there...
They'd been building a new scheduling system because money is tight. Of course, money is tight partly because of a lifestyle they consider non-negotiable, which sets a financial floor the business has to cover. They never looked up the leave laws. In their own mind, they were just adjusting a schedule, which is what bosses do.
So the boss lashes out. And here is the part that matters: the boss genuinely believes they are innocent. From inside their head, an employee they did nothing wrong to has suddenly started making legal threats out of nowhere.
That's the monster.
Not a cartoon villain twirling a mustache. A person riding the road to hell, pavement freshly laid with good intentions, who sees every objection as an obstacle and every objector as stupid, arrogant, lazy, deceitful, or plotting.
It's interesting that some of the stories in my Anthology of Evil series are not traditional horror but the horror of those things in life one might not perceive as evil, but they surely are.
The paranoid innocent
My son makes an observation here that I think is the sharpest in the piece.
Those reactions, the sense that everyone is scheming against you, that the people raising concerns are acting in bad faith, are not the reactions of a true innocent victim. They're the reactions of a paranoid mind. The monster is a victim, but a victim of the responses to their own corruption. A corruption they can't see, or worse, one they see as virtue. Necessary. Justified.
He calls this a kind of false light, and then he reaches for mythology, which is where I got interested. We're not religious people, but we are deeply steeped in the mythologies of cultures and religions. Having been raised old school Slovak Catholic myself, I grew up with, if not the religion, the fascination for the fundamentals of the ethereal. I guess I passed some of that on to my son.
The gaming universe picked up from there.
Lucifer, the light-bringer, didn't fall because he woke up wanting to be evil. In the old tellings he fell because he was so convinced of his own rightness, and so wounded by what he saw as injustice against himself, that resistance to his will looked like tyranny.
Milton gave him the line "Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav'n," and that's not a villain speaking. That's someone who believes he's the aggrieved party. The prince of this particular kind of monster.
Self-empathy, and the thing that beats it
This is where my son lands on something I haven't seen framed quite this way before: self-empathy.
The monster isn't empty of empathy.
They have plenty. It's just pointed inward. Even monsters who sacrifice for others, who think of themselves as givers, can have so much empathy for their own suffering that it outweighs the empathy they'd need to extend to the people they're hurting. The resentment, fear, and anger they feel toward their "attackers" grows naturally out of a lack of humility and a lack of remorse.
And remorse is the hinge of the whole essay.
He separates guilt from remorse, and he's right to. They get used interchangeably and they are not the same animal. Guilt is about me: I feel bad, I am bad, make the feeling stop. Remorse is about you: I see what my actions did to you, and I own it.
A person can be drowning in guilt and have no remorse at all.
He suggests this may come from being overpunished as a child, where guilt was so heavy and so dangerous that the only survival move was to reject it outright. In a healthy person, guilt ripens into remorse, and remorse opens the door to empathy and repair. In the unintentional monster, guilt gets thrown out at the door, and what's left is defensiveness wearing the mask of righteousness.
My mother
I didn't have to reach for mythology to understand this. I grew up with it, and I watched it harden over decades.
My mother, my son's grandmother, was addicted to painkillers, and the pain she was killing wasn't physical. It was emotional. When our youngest sibling died of liver cancer, it broke something in her that never mended. I don't say that to judge her grief. we all felt it. It was a horrible experience losing him as a brother.
Losing a child is the one wound nobody is built to survive intact. I understand that now even more than when it happened, when I was 19.
But she became addicted to something else, too: being the victim. Though, frankly, she'd always leaned into that a bit too heavily. Actually it was something that seemed to overtake her around the time I hit high school and it grew until my brother died a few years later.
Her grief became the center of the family's gravity, and everything else got pulled into it.
Those of us still living started to feel like we didn't exist to her anymore. We were alive, we were right there, and we were invisible. She couldn't see it.
Literally. We'd be standing in front of her telling here that, but she just didn't seem to hear us. We tried to get her professional help but that was when I learned about something else. Some people have a mental condition that needs professional help but they are functional enough that legally, nothing can be done. They become experts at survival. At not getting help. We have a president like that, today.
From inside her pain, any sign that her other children were hurting, or needed her, or resented being erased, looked like an attack on a grieving mother. Or, she'd just ignore it. Exactly the inversion my son describes. The response became the crime.
The turning point for me came in couples therapy with my wife. The therapist said something I'd never let myself think: sometimes when you have toxic people in your life, even if they are a parent, you have the right to cut them out.
I didn't do it right away. I gave her more chances after that. Then more. It got worse, not better, until it was bad enough that I cut her out of my life, and she stayed out until she died. It hurt. The mother I grew up with, whom I loved dearly, seemed to be gone now. I realized one day, she had died, but was still living. I just didn't recognize her anymore.
I'm not telling that story for sympathy, and I'm not telling it as a triumph. I'm telling it because it's the other half of my son's essay. He explains how the monster is made. What he doesn't say, and what I learned the hard way, is that you can't remorse someone else into remorse.
You can name the harm, you can offer the door, you can hold it open for years. If they won't walk through it, sometimes the only way to stop being their victim is to walk away yourself.
That isn't cruelty. It's triage.
Breaking out of the womb
There's another piece of this that's on my mind, because my son is standing, in his own way, in a spot I once stood in myself.
When he was born, I'd been working nights at a hospital for five years, alone on a mainframe. I loved it. No one around, I did what I wanted, I had total control of my little kingdom. The people there were good people, and they liked me. But there was no advancement, and I had a new kid and needed more money.
So I left. I took a daytime job in a busy office, the opposite of everything I'd enjoyed, specifically to get daytime office work on my resume. They understood at the hospital. They were sorry to see me go. Eighteen months later I landed a high-level, high-paying, prestige position, and it changed my life.
Here's what I've learned from that and from a lot of other turns since: the low points, once you act on them, often become the doorway to the best things that happen to you. But it's painful. Leaving the comfortable dark room where you have control, or leaving a situation where someone else's unacknowledged harm is slowly grinding you down, feels like being born.
You're breaking out of the womb into the world, and nobody does that without some screaming. And you have to do it, there simply is no want about it.
Impact over intention
My son closes his essay on this point, and I'll let him have the last word in substance if not in exact phrasing:
It isn't what you intended that matters. It's the impact your actions had.
We can't control everything. We don't know everything. Sometimes the effects of what we do will surprise us, and sometimes they'll land on someone else like a brick. Owning that impact, taking responsibility for the unintended effects, respecting them even more than our intentions: that's how you keep from becoming this kind of monster.
What unsettles me most about his idea is that it doesn't let any of us off the hook.
The boss in his example isn't evil. My mother wasn't evil. They were cornered, frightened, grieving, protecting something they couldn't let go of. Put almost anyone under enough pressure and the door to monsterhood swings open a crack.
But the action it visits upon others, I would argue, IS evil.
The only thing standing in that doorway is the willingness to say:
I didn't mean to, but I did, and I'm going to make it right.
And when someone else won't say it, the only thing standing between you and a lifetime as their victim is the willingness to leave.
My son figured out the first part on his own. I'm proud of him for writing it down. The second part, I had to learn from my mother.
Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!
JZ Murdock is a retired Senior Technical Writer/IT administrator, and an active award-winning author/ filmmaker, documentarian, and writer based in Bremerton, Washington.
He publishes commentary on the state of things at murdockinations.com and on his creative works over at Substack. He also posts on Slasher.com on the horror genre.
If this work means something to you, you can support it at Ko-fi. Tips are always welcome and go directly toward keeping independent documentary work possible.
