My Manson phases have the quality of a binge — lots of late nights on message boards, bleary mornings spent lying to my friends about how much I'm actually consuming. It's because I'm embarrassed. Sad middle school girls have their Wiccan spells and Tarot cards; their furious, zitty male counterparts revere Charlie for obvious sex/power reasons. Thirty-year-old women should have better ways to direct their darkness.
This isn't a constant obsession, but one that likes to crop up when things are going wrong. A good barometer of my mental state is the books on my nightstand; as of this morning, they included Family member Tex Watson's Would You Die For Me?; The Long Prison Journey of Leslie Van Houton; Susan Atkins's Child of Satan, Child of God; and a couple Jonestown memoirs for a bit of variety. Which is to say that things are not so great for me right now.
Most of these ex-Manson books are be bad in pretty much the same way. Read enough of them (preferably late at night, preferably while consuming enormous amounts of popcorn) and the story starts to feel like a parable: the small man says something about living in the now. He tells you you're pretty, tells you you're stupid, tells you you're his favorite. He would prefer if you grew your hair long, stopped wearing shoes, strapped this buck knife to your belt. When he gives you a new name, you feel for the first time as if you belong. He opens his dark eyes wide. It is as though he never blinks.
When you're depressed, or fifteen, reading about Charlie is strangely soothing. Pigs and nooses and speed and Death Valley and the Beach Boys, freckle-faced Squeaky Fromme and “Look at Your Game, Girl” (which I find myself accidentally humming all the time) and Doris Day's son: it's real life melodrama that confirms some dark truth you've always suspected the universe was hiding.
But my problem is, the more I read, the more I wonder — you know, that old infinitely regressing Why. The memoirs are not much help in finding answers (Susan “Sexy Sadie” Atkins blames the drugs; born-again Watkins thinks Charlie is probably a demon). They're full of mundane episodes and then, suddenly, horrifying episodes. Atkins meets Charlie (“the skinny little man”) in a San Francisco crash pad right before her drug-dealing boyfriend gets picked up by the cops; a couple years later, she carves an X in her forehead during her murder trial as a sign of eternal devotion. Charles (“Tex”) Watkins is depressed — his get-rich-quick wig selling scheme is going nowhere — until the day he picks up a long-haired hitchhiker who happens to be Dennis Wilson from the Beach Boys. Wilson invites Watkins into his mansion, where Charlie is hanging out with some googly-eyed hippie girls. A year earlier, Watkins was a Texas frat boy; a year later, he stabs eight people to death. Lynette (“Squeaky”) Fromme was sitting on a bench looking sad when Charlie happens to wander by and ask what was wrong; in 1975, she puts on a red robe and aims a Colt 45 at the president in order to get Charlie's attention. Afterward, life continues: Atkins found Jesus and died of brain cancer in prison; Watkins fathered four kids during conjugal visits; Leslie Van Houton is friends with John Waters; Squeaky lives in upstate New York, I've heard; Sandy Good may or may not be a Nazi. The whole thing echoes in my head with the cadences of a fairy tale, the kind with dark woods and wolves, and where the moral of the story is that good girls should probably stay inside.
Or maybe the moral is that the world is full of improbable happenings. Some people are in prison and some people are dead and some people are staying up too late, reading books that scare them. That last one's me, but the cumulative effect of too many Manson memoirs is seeing yourself in all of it. At two in the morning I read Atkins's chapter about tripping on acid when she was seven months pregnant (she goes into labor the next day; there aren't any clean razor blades, so Charlie has one of the other girls bite the umbilical cord off), and find myself thinking, “That could've been me!” But, no, it couldn't have. Or could it? In a dark room, sometimes it's hard to tell.
All I know is that I'm not the only one trying to get closer and closer to a thing that actually horrifies me. That doesn't make it any healthier, as habits go. Consider the Amazon reviewer, who found Tex Watson's Will You Die For Me? unsatisfying: “He describes flashes of color & movement to describe the killings. Is that it?” Of course it is, and it is (as always) both too much and not enough.
Rachel Monroe lives in Baltimore, but is in the market for a commune somewhere warmer. You can follow her on tumblr here.
Photo by kenkistler, via Shutterstock
All I know is that I'm not the only one trying to get closer and closer to a thing that actually horrifies me.
Definitely not alone! Every couple months I "binge" on reading about serial killers on Wikipedia (and the websites Wikipedia links to), and it horrifies me and I get really upset... and then a couple months later I do it again. I think the reason we (people) keep returning to things like this is that wondering: what makes people do this? Could I ever be like those people? Could the people I know ever be like those people? How does a person go so wrong?
@SarahP I do the same thing with Holocaust literature, memoirs of survivors mostly. How does hate get to that level? How does anyone come out alive, and go on living? Would I?
@SarahP Yep. I do the same. There's some inescapable morbid curiosity we have.
I still maintain the best class I ever took in college was "Sociology of Murder," a wildly popular course at University of Washington. So it looks like a lot of people share this interest. We analyzed serial killers (especially the local favorite, the Green River Killer) so intensely and graphically that it kept me awake at night. But at the same time I couldn't stop my intense fascination and the drive to know MORE. Shivers.
(I've probably talked about this class before! It was almost life changing.)
@SarahP I do this with stuff about plagues and famines.
@SarahP Oh my GOD I do this all the time. I'm actually really proud of myself because I haven't gone on a serial killer wikispiral in about six months, ever since I read about this one guy who did this thing that is so disturbing I'm glad I can't remember his name because I don't want other people to look him up because I literally still have nightmares about it to this day, just from reading a few sentences about his MO. Whyyyy is this a thing that we do?
@SarahP Fascinated by the perverse, that's how I describe it. Extreme deviations from the norm, be they mass murderers, horrific incidents, or just obscure kinks, exert some intellectual pull on me. I'm never gonna do it, don't even want to, but I like learning and thinking about them.
@dokuchan I do this with terrifying stories of abuse in patriarchal fundamentalist Christian circles. Google "Hephzibah House" sometime. It's terrifying-- even more so because this place is somehow still open.
@acid burn Oh, you have piqued my morbid curiosity!
@Hellcat I knew somebody was going to ask :P I will tell you that his girlfriend was also involved, they would pick up prostitutes and do ultra-fucked up stuff to them (involving... things happening during... other things), and if you do go on these wikispirals I'm sure you'll stumble across his horrifying article sooner or later. But I really don't remember his name, sorry(?).
@acid burn Was it Bernardo and Homolka? I was horrified when I read about them. (There was a similar British couple, but I don't remember enough details about them to re-find their wiki article.)
@SarahP Aaaaah no, that couple is also terrifying but I think it was a different one! I'm pretty sure the one I'm thinking of was in the 50s-ish? It might be the British one you're talking about, but I have a feeling they were American because that particular spiral started from reading about the California State Penitentiary system. Ugh, must not google at work!
@SarahP Bernardo and Homolka (together, at least) didn't attack hookers, though I can't remember if that Paul Bernardo did without Karla's assistance. Ugh, those people, man.
@acid burn Yikes! It sounds vaguely familiar too... oooh, do I dare Wiki...?
@SarahP I IMMEDIATELY googled them then, so Im glad that acid burn hasn't told us of this person who induces nightmares with his crimes, I have enough zombie nightmares without needing a psate of serial killer ones, and I would HAVE to google compulsively if I knew who to look for.
Is the British couple Fred and Rosemary West perchance? Dominic West played him in a tv drama recently which was distressing because he's attractive, and yet playing someone so repugnant, but he's soooo attractive! I don't know how to feel about it...
@SarahP Brainbleach for the mesmerized: Martha Stout's "The Sociopath Next Door." There are great excerpts online, but I finally bought the book. I learned a boss of mine can be accurately described as a Covetous Psychopath, and I learned I am a Moral Exemplar. The book may be what you are looking to learn, too. It sure has helped me.
@werewolfbarmitzvah ME TOO!!!!! I have no idea why apocalyptic plague stories fascinate me so much. I actually took a college class about the Black Death. Seriously.
@SarahP I am addicted to Law & Order SVU & Investigation Discovery for that exact reason - seriously though, watch that channel, it's even better than Wikipedia. Of course, now I keep convincing myself that new people I meet are sociopaths.
@tortietabbie I'm writing a book (well, attempting to) on why people are interested in the Holocaust.
@travelmugs I had a Hephzibah House spiral not too long ago. It's too terrible, and so confusing...
Did anyone else read that letter that Manson wrote in reply to the fake-5-year-old, Billy? It was all "A HILLBILLY that can type—FAR OUT." and "JUST to forgit I didn't take your money when I had ALL your credit cards locked up in my dreams." AHHHH MANSON.
@yeah-elle
"You want to talk to Mrs. Wilson? Why don't you want to talk to Charlie? You think if you don't talk to me, I'll go away, but I can't go away because I'm not even here! I'm a ghost of a phantom of a shadow in the heart of your children!"
"...bite the umbilical cord off." ::shudders::
@becky@twitter Now we know where Stephenie Meyer got the idea...
@LaFabuliste i know not what you speak of.
@becky@twitter You're probably better off.
Is it weird that whenever MSNBC randomly decides to air a whole day of Manson stuff (and random is used correctly here, sometimes it happens on days that don't correspond to any anniversaries at all) I get huffy and competitive as well as disgusted? As in, "Hmmph. I bet if I tried I could have slavish followers too. I'm cuter, at least when I clean up. And several of my high school teachers described me as charming in my recommendations. I could do this. If I wanted to. :Dorito crunch:"
his get-rich-quick wig selling scheme is going nowhere
Well, I guess we now know why the Sunsphere is full of 'em.
@JessicaLovejoy YES, that is weird!
@SarahP Not that I'm judging.
@SarahP Ha! But you know, I'd have to put down the chips and step away from Google Images to amass followers, and it's clear that's not happening.
@JessicaLovejoy This is good for both of us, since I'd probably end up being one of your followers.
Sounds like the majority of my book piles (and the contents of my DVR for that matter).
i go through these phases too and i am in one RIGHT NOW. it is so odd/amazing that this article popped up today... i am in the middle of reading a book about jack the ripper, and the other night i stayed up way too late watching mason documentaries. then i spent most of my workday falling into a local serial-killer wiki hole (santa cruz has a lot of serial killers!!)
thanks for letting me know i'm not alone.
@honeybadger I'm from Wisconsin, and I go on local serial killer wikipedia/netflix/book binges ALL the time, we have so fucking many!
ETA: Sometimes I even get defensive/proud of my state. Not only do we have several serial killers, we have several of the most famous/most grisly serial killers. What a horrific and shameful point of pride to have. I feel very ambivalent about it all.
@DullHypothesis Me too :/ ... But we do have cheese. But we also have Joseph McCarthy. Does that count as a tie?
@DullHypothesis Yes, you guys really do. But perhaps the cheese makes up for that part of your state's history.
What is it that's so fascinating about wondering whether it could have been you? And why is that question so impossible to answer the more honest and brutal you get with it?
Gah! I just caught myself in a wikipedia black hole spiral of Lynette Fromme --> John Hinkley, Jr. --> Jodie Foster stalkers!
Also, Helter Skelter is one of my favorite books. I still can't believe how lacking the Police Department was during the Manson killing spree.
@Happy Daiz Even better than Helter Skelter is THE FAMILY by Ed Sanders -- way less prosecutorial fervor, way more satanic conspiracy weirdness. if you like that kind of thing.
@Happy Daiz I've still got my mom's battered paperback copy from when I was really little. I remember always pulling it off the shelf to stare at it, and, even at age three or four, knowing that this book was about A Bad Thing. I can't even imagine my mom reading it either, judging on what she reads now. I don't even know how many times I've read it at this point. It remains, to me, one of the best-written true crime books; so many others are so editorially sloppy and sensational and movie-of-the weekish. I think Helter Skelter is the book that launched me face-first into a lifelong interest in crime.
@Happy Daiz @Rachel Monroe@facevook Thanks! I'll give that one a try but I really did like the prosecutorial (that's not a real word is it? I'm going to go ahead and use it because if two of us use it, it IS a real word!)aspect of it but I'm all for reading about the conspiracy side!
@Happy Daiz FYI: http://bookforum.com/booklist/4235
I sometimes get sucked into the Youtube hole of watching video footage of the Manson trials, especially any of the "girls" singing or talking. They just seem so gone? Like there is nothing behind their eyes.
@OhShesArtsy OMG, I had a night with friends where we watched the "Are you mad?" one about 50 times. Still gives me the shivers.
You guys, the latest episode of RadioLab: http://www.radiolab.org/2012/jan/09/
Listen to the whole thing.
@Whitmans Sampler I just listened to that today! All parts of it are really interesting and disturbing.
@Whitmans Sampler You beat me to it! the whole green river killer interview segment chilled me to the bone, especially his father's reaction.
OH! I have to share this with you guys! It has become a never-ending source of cackling at my house:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhE-F8Zw-3o
@Hellcat
Whaaaat.
What? What.
Everyone seriously, I need to hear opinions on this.
@Inkcrafter I have no idea. All I know is someone made it, and now I laugh and laugh -- especially at that little hands-on-the-hips gesture he makes.
I'm so not fascinated by Charles Manson, but I am utterly fascinated by the stuff that fascinates other people—like you. Charles Manson, eh? Random! (Except apparently not that random, since a bunch of other commenters are confessing to the same morbid curiosity.)
People in general are endlessly fascinating. Especially 'Pinners.
@Kivrin Me too! I have Wikied serial killers etc and sometimes I read a couple, but my reaction is always more "hmm, okay" and then I do something else? But it's so interesting that so many people find it fascinating.
My dark place obsession is dictators and opressive regimes, the terrible things they do to their people, and what it's like to live under them. Charles Taylor, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Kim Jong Il, Mugabe, etc. If someone writes a book or article, makes a documentary about, sets a novel in one of these places, I will read/watch/devour/obsess over it.
This is totally me, except with Scientology. Definitely stayed up until 4am one night last week reading testimonials of people who escaped, AAAAHHHH SO SCARY
@Sarah H. I definitely had about a week long obsession reading about Scientology. Very scary.
I totally go through these phases. I do try to temper the true crime books and serial killer documentaries with Jane Austen and BBC costume dramas so it evens out I guess? I am a big fan of Ann Rule. Her books about Ted Bundy (she knew him!), The Green River Killer and Diane Downs are awesome.
@akapocalypse I love her books. True story: my mom met Ted Bundy when she was in college. Technically she had dinner with him - her and her roommate. It's this long bizarre story involving weird religious cults and bad timing, etc.
I have an unusual last name, virtually impossible to spell for someone who has not encountered it before. If I call a resto to make reservations -- especially during a busy time when the hubbub in the background is deafening -- I discard my last name and shout that I want to make a reservation for the easily-spellable "MANSON, PARTY OF FOUR!" In the scores of times I have done this and then presented at the hostess's for dinner, no one has EVER asked if I am related to, well, you know.
Zachary Lazar's Sway is a phenomenal novel about the Manson era and follows around Kenneth Anger, Keith Richards, and Bobby Beausoleil. Highly recommended Rachel!
@bridgealidget@twitter Read it! (what can I say, I'm a completist.) I also enjoyed Madison Smartt Bell's The Color of Night, though it's a bit overwrought. But if ever there was a subject to be overwrought about, I guess this is it.
@Rachel Monroe@facebook I read Susan Atkins' book when I was around that age too, and I think as soon as I finished it I started it again. Why is reading about something so repulsive so addictive!
I do this with cults, especially when they result in mass murders/suicides - Charles Manson, David Koresh, Jim Jones. Part of it is that I am such a non-believer that how people can be so entranced by pseudo-religious leaders is completely foreign to me, and I am trying to understand it. I will also go on these binges, but then I read some horrific fact that I didn't know before and I have to stop. I'm in a "have to stop" stage now, but of course I still read this article because it had the words "Charles Manson" in it.
@Bebe One of the few "famous" people who went to my tiny, liberal arts college was Marshall Applewhite of the Heaven's Gate Cult fame!
@Bebe me too! I wrote my senior thesis on Jonestown and the Branch Davidians and I still devour whatever I find about cults. I've been into fundamentalist Mormon groups of late, but the newish book "a thousand lives" retells the Jonestown story using all of the recently released FBI files and I couldn't put it down. recommend.
@Bebe I think The History Channel (I think) had a whole run of cult-related stuff on all last week. I remember wondering if there was a specific reason for it.
This sort of thing is also why there are... how many shows on about Hoarders? The abnormal psychology is almost a palate cleanser for, um, "us."
@SheFightsLikeAGirl Oh, definitely there is something in all that. I watch the hoarder shows like crazy even though they sometimes elicit a horrible, visceral response from me. The less I can get my head around it all, the more I try to read and watch, no matter how grossed out I get.
Considering that I dressed as Susan Atkins for halloween this year, I can completely relate. One of the reasons the story is so compelling I think is that the most of the people in the family were pretty sane. I can look at Leslie Van Houten and really like her now, even though she was a monster at the time.
@Tropical Iceland RIght? What happened? How did they change so much? Normal teen girls to killers to normal middle aged women.
When I was in college, I studied the uncertainty reduction theory, which asserts that the things we don't understand can cause us anxiety and fear. One way to assuage those fears and anxieties, according to the theory, is to learn more about the unknown, thus reducing our uncertainty and helping us understand.
I think that's why I find myself on reading binges, consuming longform.org articles about murders. I'm just so curious about how and why awful events happen.
@I'm Right on Top of that, Rose Although, I think sometimes that approach can backfire. Primo Levi tried w/ all his might to understand the horrors of the Holocaust, to frame it so it made some kind of sense...and when he couldn't, he killed himself.
Fact is, I think the macabre fascination that many of us are describing (I have it too) stems from the privileged position of never having had to experience any horror of our own. At this safe distance, we are merely voyeurs, mentally rubbernecking at the scene of someone else's crime.
Agreed. In my job, I do face murder and its aftermath (though thankfully not every day), and I'm constantly marveling at how ugly humans can be to one another. I find it perplexing.
I think there has to be that layer of protection from the crime (reading about it, or not being directly involved) or else we'd likely end up like Primo.
Just FYI, for the people who like -- well, "like" is an odd word to use, I suppose, so, rather, are interested in -- these things, Discovery ID will be airing a show called Dark Minds starting on January 25.
http://press.discovery.com/us/id/programs/dark-minds/
Let me feel fire,
Let me drink poison,
Tell me to tear my heart in two,
If that's what you want me to do...
The 150th anniversary of the Civil War did this to me all of a sudden. I thought it was some boring stupid thing and now I'm youtubing David Blight lectures and buying myself The Battle Cry of Freedom for a reward once finals are over?
I don't know why, but the whole slavery and emancipation thing and all of the soldiers' letters and junk are just INTENSE. It has nothing to do with regular ways that people are usually "Civil War buffs", I'm just like, GUYS WE HAD SLAVERY AND THIS CRAZY WAR and it isn't even that long ago!
@Emmanuelle Cunt The David Blight stuff is amazing! It did the same thing to me. It's insane how little of this we actually learned in school.
RACHEL! First let me say that I am so honored to have such a famous friend who writes for The Hairpin! Then let me say that I once spent a weekend in Wheeling, West Virginia. Have you been? Bo-ring! But nearby Moundsville is fascinating, with an Indian burial ground, a Palace of Gold, and the original state prison. They do tours and apparently Manson grew up in or near Wheeling? There's a tiny one room museum at the end of the tour, and they have correspondence from Manson to the warden in which he begs to be transferred. I don't know, worth a field trip if you're into that kind of thing!
Have fun on your trip!
do this this, too. I can't tell you how many hours I've spent 'net reading and re-reading Mansonia. It's that soothing feeling you mention, though I've never known why. And here's a confession: Charlie always made perfect sense to me.
I have a similar Jones for Charlie Starkweather, who went on his rampage when I was in 8th grade. I stayed awake the night he was executed ,thinking about him. Not that I wanted to kill my parents ,but thee was something. I dunno, liberating about the whole thing. I've even done a little poetry performance piece about him.
Deploring the crime and death is quite different than the "obsession." For men ,Charlie and Charlie are in part about the disruption of bourgeois society. Public panic. The National Guard was called out on Starkweather, for pete's sake. But three's also a much darker side that'ts idifficult to articulate.
I also know two fellas who wiped out their families. One was in prison with a my friend. He "accidentally" killed his father on Christmas Day, when dad's head got in the way of a baseball bat. He "had" to kill his mother then to hide it. He went on to killed his little brother later, who was at the neighbor's at the time of the murders, because he didn't want him to be upset with the bodies Then he blew up the house and headed back to college. The guy's family (what was left with of them) stood by him . They said his father was an SOB and deserved it.
When I worked at OSU, one of our students murdered his father, after he told the kid he wouldn't pay his tuition any more He had to kill his grandmother to shut her up. Unfortunately, two women who lived on the other side of the building heard the racket, so he had to kill them, too. You know how that goes. He came back to town and called our office and left messages with me to give to his professors that "something had come up" and he'd not be in class. See ya Monday. On Monday the cops and prosecutors were all over our department. They took a statement from me, and I said something to the effect that despite what they thought, it made sense. They weren't amused. The kid's mother came to talk to the chair later. Her son's big worry, despite facing 4 consecutive life sentences was that hed be kicked out of the program.
Evil really is banal, but not always the characters
I have one of the worst written Manson books of all time, I think. I'd have to go home and look at the name but it was both fascinating due to all these weird tidbits I had never heard before, and also VERY poorly written.
I do this as well, the horrifying stuff binges. True crime is kind of my personal minor. I started reading it very early because my mother was obsessed with it and had a ton of books laying around (Green River Killer, Ted Bundy, etc).
Sometimes I wonder what people think when they come to my house and see my bookshelves. I mean, there's some normal stuff on there too, I'm actually like a super nice person. It's not like I have piles of skulls laying about. Uh, where anyone can see them.
I remember being 13 with a broken leg, lying in hospital in Brussels. It was a sweltering summer and one of my visitors brought me a dog eared copy of "Helter Skelter". It scared the beejaysus out of me and in my drugged up state I became terrified that the remaining members of the family were going to come after me because I had read the book...so I got absolutely no sleep in hospital that night...odd times
I have no interest in Manson's psychopath side, but I do often think of his song "Old Ego is a Too Much Thing" (I think it was the B-side of "Look at Your Game, Girl"?). Because for me, ego is always a too much thing, thank you for the reminder Charlie.
I do this with mountain climbing/artic exploration horror stories--particularly the Franklin Expedition. For some reason, being left alone to die in a frozen wasteland seems like a perfect symbol for depression to me.
My friend is trying to get this film made called "Manson Girls" about the women who were involved. ET did a segment on it, and I think ti's cool that it focuses more on the women than Charles itself, but that may be why they are struggling to secure funding to get it all the way made. http://www.etonline.com/movies/116305_Behind_the_Scenes_with_the_Manson_Girls/index.html
Wow, this is your first post? Your writing is lovely. I look forward to reading more!
ZOMG I'm not alone. I do this with cults. Like @Bebe and @nealbledsoe. I'm fascinated by how people get caught up in cults! How do you go from troubled but typical person to a jungle-dwelling enforcer feeding cyanide to babies and yourself cause Jim Jones said so? Wow. And there are soooo many cults. So many. The one River Phoenix came out of as a kid is particularly sqicky. They advocated sex with children for the sake of God, even published books on how to do it, and sent women and girls out on the street to prostitute themselves for Jesus. Beware the dark wikispiral that will occur if you Google "flirty fishing." Aaack. So awful. And that group still exists. Where does this stuff come from? It seems like human history must have been riddled with cults.
I had a family member join a cult (Scientology, which is absolutely as bad as the escape stories say it is), and eventually get himself out of it, so I think that’s the reason for my fascination. I also had a near-brush in college. I briefly attended a ‘church’ and it took me about four weeks to figure out there was sickness and rot at their core. And then shame, so much shame for not seeing it sooner! Then everyone from my ‘bible study group’ blew my phone up for weeks trying to get me to come back to study group. Finally a girl tracked me down and told me to come back or I would go to hell, and if I was going to hell she would cut herself off from me and so would everyone else. It upset me so much I started shaking. I *knew* she was wrong and those people were pure grade-A crazytown bonkers, but it still affected me! I was supposed to believe I was going to hell because I didn’t want to submit to an evil ‘church’ where they publicly shamed little old ladies on welfare for not being able to make their monthly ‘contribution’ and made one woman cry in front of the whole church, while others approved and clapped and told her to ante up for Jesus. So scary! Group enforcement, shaming, withholding approval, love-bombing, everything. So sad. As soon as my eyes were opened and my ears heard, I got the hell away, but I was really disturbed and shaken up by the whole thing. Four weeks. Squicky!!!
So, yes. Cults. ALL the cults. I am fascinated by them. Mormon cults, space-ship cults, personal improvement cults, international cults, Scientology, Jonestown.
Thanks for this post. So much darkness in the human soul! I think it’s good to learn about it though. I learned terms like “love bombing” by researching cults, and now I know what that shit is called.
It empowers us to be able to put true names to dark things. No good comes out of pretending they don’t exist.