Transcription
What you see with young people who are violent, often at least in our experience, is that they experience anything that aimed at the self-esteem in a mood we have called a "psyche equivalent mode," but basically as if it was for real. They don't have the capacity.
If I look at myself in the mirror in the morning and I think, "Look at the person in the mirror," and I see, "Foggy, you look ugly, you know, oh god, you got all your ugly gray," you know, then I can think to myself, "That's just a thought; that's not for real." Imagine if I believed it, if I really thought I was ugly, if I just couldn't get away because I didn't have the capacity to, as it was symbolized, that experience doing well, "That's just a thought."
So, if you have a young person who is being insulted, who somebody says, "You know, you smell," you know, if you can mentalize, you can just think, "Now, just this person just saying it's just a servicer." But if you are vulnerable to losing this capacity, but it means in moments of high arousal, actually what happens is you feel it in a way that really destroys you. We've called this "ego-destructive shame," that, you know, when somebody makes you feel bad, it actually really gets through to you. It's really because you don't have that protective layer around your mind that mentalization, thinking about thoughts and feelings, can give you.
So, you know, these are, I think, the major components of what makes a person Harlan: the early neglect, the trauma, and the disruption of the system of regulating affect, potential for loss of that aggression, but also trauma turning your way from the minds of other people. And all that, I think, is in combination with an experience of others that's extremely concrete. I think it makes you a dangerous person for others to be with at times.
To put it kind of very simply, I would say that it's like missing a skin, or, you know, you are after a burn, you know, but your epidermis is gone. Your enormous is sensitive because your nerves are exposed very close to the surface. That's the kind of psychological environment a lot of these young people live in, that, you know, the tiniest things can happen, and they don't have the defenses, if you like, the protection that thinking about other people in terms of mental states provides.