KARL D. writes:

While this Elliot Rodgers character who went on a shooting spree in L.A. had numerous psychological issues, his parents’ divorce and then the coming and going of nannies affected him greatly if you read his manifesto.

As a child of divorce myself (an ugly one at that), I found myself nodding in agreement with what he had written about his experience, and how his life was radically changed. My father left when I was ten and I forever looked at my life since then as two different lives and myself having two different personalities: pre- divorce and post-divorce. The divorce was horribly traumatic for me.

Added was the fact that my father left just weeks after we had moved to a new neighborhood and I had been thrust into the New York City public school system after having been in private school up until that time. My grades plummeted and I developed a nervous tick. The solution was to send me from one shrink to the next. But what could a shrink do? We all knew what the problem was. I won’t even get into the absolute confusion that came with joint custody. I myself put a stop to it because I couldn’t take it anymore. To be honest, I think my father was secretly relieved. He felt he could now go on with his new life and move out of the neighborhood. I should add that he only stayed in the neighborhood at my mothers insistence!

— Comments —

Bert Perry writes:

Karl’s comment about his parents’ divorce rings true to me.  As a teen, I was put through counseling because….more or less I didn’t have security because my parents’ marriage was falling apart for various reasons attached to the ethos of the 1960s and such. The conclusion that counselor came up with was that I was feeling guilty about masturbation, and so they had a nice chat with me telling me emphatically how it was okay while I wondered what on earth they were talking about.  I still laugh about that one–not only was it not the problem, they didn’t even figure out I had no clue what they were talking about.

Took a while for me to be ready for family life as a result–my dad’s advice about relationships was actually OK, but I had to see other men show how to treat a woman before I could pursue a wife.

Laura writes:

That’s unbelievable!

So to help you feel better about your parents’ pending divorce, a “counselor” encouraged you to masturbate! Wow. Sin truly does beget sin.

Mr. Perry writes:

Sin definitely begets sin, but this wasn’t “exactly” counsel to deal with divorce with Onanism. Rather, it was that the counselor–who was also counseling at least one of my parents at the time for marital issues–did not make that connection, but rather blamed it on “self-pleasuring”.

One of a series of “missed diagnoses” I’ve noted with the mental health community, really, where a lot of other people (like my teachers at the time) were able to figure out what was really going on.

Laura writes:

Thanks for the clarification, but I got what you meant in the first reading. The counselor couldn’t see the obvious cause.

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