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Q & A: A Villain's Atonement

Q:What would the process be like for a villain whose conscience has gotten to him, making him decide he wants to atone for his sins?

When my hero was 12, his family was murdered in front of him because his father was a spy. Though he doesn't know it, he is raised by the enemy as a soldier for the enemy's army. Years later, he is a powerful warlord, but something's been gnawing at him..he keeps a journal of his feelings that go from bloodlust to brooding and depressed..and finally self-damning. He decides to quit, just like that, and seeks shelter in a remote area. He has no family, no real friends, ane he has become so lonely, so splintered, that sometimes the only way he can feel is if he feels pain.

A:People often feel survivor guilt when someone close to them dies and they don't. "Why not me?" they think. "I'm not a good person, I deserve to die and they didn't."

They may engage in self-destructive behaviors.They may project their anger and self-hatred onto others, i.e. by hurting them or controlling them. Especially if they feel alone. We're pack animals, and we need other people in some way, even if it's in a way that hurts them.

How People Deal with Feeling Alone

Erich Fromm argued that we take one or more of three approaches to this:

To move away from this, something has to happen; for example, the person realizes he's actually displaying weakness with the behavior, finds a truly compelling reason to change (falls in love, for example), or is hit in the face (metaphorically) with his behavior. Once in a while someone asking, "Is this really how you want to live your life?" There are lots of examples of people snapping out of bad lifestyles thanks to a single powerful question or statement.

Phil Zimbardo, who was part of mistreating a bunch of students in a classic experiment, was snapped out of his behavior by a grad student (whom he later married) who said, "I think what you're doing to these boys is awful." Zimbardo just released a book called The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evilamazon on the experiment.

Conduct Disorder and Sociopathy

I keep thinking that in some ways your character sounds like a sociopath, but then he wouldn't really have guilt. (People are sociopaths because they literally never developed a conscience, and you have to develop it before a particular age...the brain becomes incapable of learning later on.) If he had a fairly good relationship with his folks, he wouldn't necessarily have a bad enough childhood to become a true sociopath.

Kids sometimes develop conduct disorder outside site (the childhood version of sociopathy that may or may not turn into full-blown antisocial personality disorder) without having been abused as kids. The really bad behaviors technically have to start before age 13, though, and since his family didn't die until he was 12, that would be pushing it. (Besides, I hate the cliché that every bad guy is a bad guy because he was abused.)

Post-traumatic Stress Disorder

PTSD can really change someone. It definitely changes brain chemistry, and could account for a lot of his behavior and would fit really well with the guilt. PTSD isn't really the hiding-under-the-table-swearing-you're-back-in-Vietnam stuff that was in movies when I was a kid, right after the Vietnam war, and some people just get hypervigilant (or even paranoid) and aggressive. They tend to abuse substances to try to numb the pain.

Other Ideas about Morality and Guilt

Let me think a bit more about the moral thing without throwing diagnoses at it, though, because I think that's more what you're asking for.

There are three major approaches to understanding this thata theorist might take, depending on the situation, so one might fit better for you than the others, or you can combine them (we do that all the time).

1. Object relations

The idea here is that you develop a blueprint for how the world works and then operate based on it from there forward. Something like what Quile experienced could push him away from the blueprint he developed during his first 12 years — anger, loneliness, confusion, hatred, or even being in training with the enemy.

The underlying morals he was originally taught would still be there, shoved into the unconscious, and over time could sort of come back to haunt him, building until he can't ignore them anymore. The unconscious has a nasty way of insisting you pay attention to it — a you can run but you can't hide kind of thing. :-)

Within the same theory there's the idea that everybody needs three things:

  1. feeling like they're special (or great, or powerful, or admired, etc. — this affects self-esteem)
  2. feeling like they can deal with what life throws at them (generally learned from parents or other authority figures who were able to cope — this affects something called self-efficacy, the sense that you can master challenges)
  3. feeling like they belong somewhere, that there are other people like them — family generally serves this purpose, and realizing that the family doesn't or wouldn't want one can have a profound effect on people. That is, if he realizes his family would have been horrified or ashamed, or that his father's whole purpose was to bring down the organization he's working for, that could really bother him.

So here the need for redemption would come from the conflict between his original beliefs and personality and what he's become, and his unconscious is nagging at him, and it's coming out through the journal. (Sometimes people literally don't see the truth or depth of what they've written until they read it later — the unconscious tends to show up if you write enough. Journaling is often assigned in therapy for that reason.)

People do this funny thing where they have to match their attitudes and/or attitudes and behaviors. If you act in a way that doesn't fit your beliefs, you have to adapt one or the other. We call this cognitive dissonance.

Your hero could have adapted his attitudes because he had to to survive while he was being trained (so the attitudes matched the behavior), but now his behavior and what he was taught to believe are in conflict (because for whatever reason the original beliefs are bubbling back up), and this time he's feeling like he needs to adapt his behavior, stop killing, for example...

Just to show how strong the need is...part of brainwashing is forcing someone to act in a way that is contradictory to their beliefs...this tends to force them to change their attitudes to match the ones the brainwasher wants them to have...

2. Cognitive behaviorism

The idea here is that you do something as long as you are reinforced for it (i.e. you get something from it) and that any reinforcement outweighs any punishment (in psych punishment doesn't mean what it does to most people — it's just anything that makes you not want to do the behavior, even if that's just not getting the attention you want from it).

If he was getting a lot of reinforcement for his behavior (he kept gaining power, people were incredibly deferential to him, he got something from hurting people, he was praised for moving up in the order) and his guilt started to bubble up, the guilt would act as a punisher and leave him trapped between the good (relatively speaking) and the bad aspects of what he's become. Under this theory, people tend to ruminate (think about things over and over and over) and stay stuck until they start to think or act differently, tipping the scales in one direction or the other.

3. Humanism

I call this warm and fuzzy psychology, mostly because I'm not much of a humanist. :-) Essentially the idea is that unmet personal needs and potentials create problems. If what you're "really meant to be," as it were, is being blocked, you realize it through unpleasant emotions. You have to figure out for yourself what your true needs are and then follow them to get over your issues.