Terrorism, the Sociopath, and Shame

Within hours of the Orlando killings, newscasters and commentators were asking the predictable and familiar question: was the shooter a terrorist radicalized by ISIS ideology or was he struggling with a mental illness?

As supposedly rational actors, terrorists pursue violence to further a political cause; sociopaths suffer from a severe personality disorder that makes them behave in antisocial, often violent ways. When it comes to understanding horrific acts of mayhem, we prefer to have one explanation or the other, but as psychologists and thoughtful commentators have repeatedly noted, terrorism and mental illness are not so easily distinguished and often overlap.

Jeet Herr noted in The New Yorker that conversion to Islam does not, in and of itself, explain the violence committed by lone wolf killers like Omar Mateen. “What seems to be the problem, rather, is the fusion of radical jihadist ideology with other personal problems, whether they be alienation, anomie, or various shades of mental illness.” Heather Hurlburtt of the Washington-based think tank New America believes that ISIS deliberately targets mentally unstable young men in the West. She told Herr that these “propagandists seem to understand the link between certain forms of mental illness and susceptibility to mass violence, even if we don’t.”

What exactly is that link? What do certain types of mental illness and ideological terrorism have in common?

Omar Mateen was described by one of his co-workers as racist, belligerent, and “toxic.” Mateen’s ex-wife told The Guardian that he was physically abusive. She said he struggled with mental health problems and was “obviously disturbed, deeply, and traumatised.” Signs of mental illness appeared early in Mateen’s life. A former classmate recalled Mateen fantasizing about a campus massacre when they were in the fifth grade. “He was going to bring a gun to school and threatened to kill everyone he didn't like." Many of his grade school teachers and fellow classmates describe him as a troublemaker, a loner, and a bully.

In my most recent book, THE NARCISSIST YOU KNOW, I describe bullying as a method for coping with a profound sense of personal defect, inferiority, or ugliness – what I refer to as core shame. This type of shame results from emotional or physical trauma involving failed attachment relationships between a young child and his or her caretakers during the earliest months and years of life. The person afflicted with core shame lives in constant fear of being exposed as ugly, defective, or inferior. When the pain and fear become unbearable, he or she will find unconscious ways to ward them off.

As described in Chapter Three of my book, the bully offloads (projects) his sense of defect or inferiority into his victims. She floods them with her own fear. Through violence and intimidation, bullies make themselves into social “winners” and turn their victims into contemptible “losers.” They often target minorities and the disempowered, asserting their superiority over people they view as contemptible, weak, or morally corrupt; bullies are often racists.

While we still know little of Omar Mateen’s earliest years of life, he certainly fits this profile. He was a childhood bully and later bullied and abused his wife. As early as fifth grade, he wanted to kill classmates who, he presumably felt, had slighted him. He was also racist and misogynistic. According to former colleague Daniel Gilroy, Mateen “didn’t like blacks, women, lesbians and Jews… He was always angry, swearing, just angry at the world.”

In a recent article for the New York Times, Amanda Taub links terrorism with domestic violence, highlighting the need for control and the desire to provoke fear that drive them both. Domestic abusers are bullies who assert dominance and superiority over their wives through emotional harassment, coercion, and physical violence. An abusive husband views any challenge to his authority as an insult to his manhood; he retaliates with intensified violence and intimidation to reassert his masculine superiority.

Taub also cites the research of Clark McCauley, an expert on the psychology of mass violence and terrorism at Bryn Mawr. McCauley “has found that a characteristic common to mass killers is a sense of grievance: a belief that someone, somewhere, had wronged them in a way that merited a violent response.” This sense of grievance results from what psychologists call a “narcissistic injury”; it is often perceived as a personal attack, which then provokes a retaliatory effort to shore up one’s self-esteem. Bullies, domestic abusers, and terrorists commonly display this tendency.

On the level of individual psychology, we’re in the realm of core shame and the psychological defenses against it (the subject of my next book). On a political and sociological level, we’re in the realm of honor, disgrace, and retribution. In announcing the establishment of its Caliphate, a spokesman for the Islamic State told Muslims everywhere:

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"The time has come for those generations that were drowning in oceans of disgrace, being nursed on the milk of humiliation, and being ruled by the vilest of all people … to rise. The time has come … to remove the garments of dishonor, and shake off the dust of humiliation and disgrace, for the era of lamenting and moaning has gone, and the dawn of honor has emerged anew. The sun of jihad has risen."

Shame/humiliation thus provides the link “between certain forms of mental illness and susceptibility to mass violence” identified by Heather Hurlburtt. Individuals who struggle with profound core shame often react with violence when their self-esteem is threatened; societies and cultures are prone to violent acts of terrorism when their members feel humiliated by other countries.

In the case of Omar Mateen, it may turn out that self-hatred arising from homosexual desire was the actual driver toward violence, and ISIS sympathies but a pretext. Even so, we see how an individual’s shame and a culture’s wounded sense of honor may converge in explosive ways, with tragic and traumatic results that reverberate throughout the world.