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Murder on the Couch: When "I Did It For You" Is a Lie · The Virtual Couch

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Hey, everybody.
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Welcome to a bonus episode of , you may be listening to The
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Virtual Couch, maybe Waking Up to Narcissism, maybe even Love ADHD.
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However you arrived, first and foremost, thank you.
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I am Tony Overbay.
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I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist and host of the, the
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aforementioned podcast, and I'm really glad that you are here today
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because I wanna share something a little different with you.
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Some of you may remember, if you've been around for a little while, that back
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in twenty-twenty two and twenty-twenty three, my daughter Sydney and I started
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a podcast called Murder on the Couch.
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, The concept , was pretty simple: take true crime cases and run them through
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a therapist lens, or maybe even more specifically, I like true crime a lot.
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I listen to podcasts, I watch documentaries and interrogation videos,
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and I find myself continually wondering and wishing that I had that person or
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that couple on my couch, so I could really try and understand not just
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what happened, , but really the why.
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W-what was going on psychologically?
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What was the runway or the ramp that led up to why the person did what they did?
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Because I think there are so many variables that go into why
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people do the things that they do.
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What does it say about shame, or their attachment, or their family system?
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Did they have a, a hole in their need-for-validation bucket, so that
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bucket was never gonna be filled, or did they have such deep dad issues that it
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wasn't gonna matter who they interacted with in their personal lives, , there
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was eventually gonna be a breaking point.
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And my daughter Sid is one of the funniest and most clever and truly enjoyable humans
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that I have spent time with, so honestly, , it was a fun experience to record those.
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And then what was wild was the reception to those first five
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episodes was phenomenal, and I don't think that Sid or I even realized
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where that podcast was potentially heading from a growth standpoint.
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But then life happened, and other projects got in the way, and Sid decided to take
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a step back, and the last episode went out in October of twenty twenty-three.
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So it's been a minute, as I don't think the kids are still saying.
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But I've realized that I never stopped doing the thing that started
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or at least my involvement in that project in the first place.
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, I'm still watching true crime documentaries and interrogation
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videos and catching myself forty-five minutes deep into a psychological case
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conceptualization and wondering what the subject of that case , would think
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about, , emotional immaturity concepts or my latest fixation, co-regulation, or the
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dance of two people's nervous systems, or I'm noticing that person sure seemed to
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display an incredible presentation of an anxiously attached, , attachment style.
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So no wonder their partner would withdraw even more, causing their anxiety to ramp
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up more to the point of, uh, true crime.
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So I decided to bring Murder on the Couch back , and I think I have some
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exciting news that I'll share inside the episode about my search for, let's say,
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a temporary co-host , or maybe a few co-hosts, , all while still keeping the
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seat warm for Syd because whenever and if ever she's ready, that chair is hers.
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So before we jump in, I do wanna give you a heads-up, especially if you are
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not a regular true crime listener.
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This is probably not one to just all of a sudden say, "Well, you know, what's
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this true crime stuff all about?" , Not one to cut your teeth on because this
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episode opens with a pretty intense case.
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, it
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involves a familicide, , a man who killed his wife, his mother, and then
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their teenage children, and he claimed that God was perfectly fine with his
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decision the details are pretty disturbing and, and I don't sugarcoat them.
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If that's not something that you are in a place to hear right now,
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honestly, I completely understand.
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, Take care of yourself first.
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, This episode will be here if and whenever you're ready.
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But if you do stay, then here's , what I want you to know about where this goes.
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I'm not just covering the crime.
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I, I decided to use this case to dig into some concepts that I think are
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gonna feel pretty familiar to a lot of my listeners, whether it's Virtual
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Couch or Waking Up to Narcissism.
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Things like, uh, compartmentalization or, or what happens when we seal off the
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parts of ourselves that we don't want anybody else to see, or the difference
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between shame and guilt and how shame gets installed in childhood before we really
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have tools to understand what's happening.
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And I talk about something called, , the altruistic defense, which is when somebody
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reframes a-an act of self-protection that can be pretty, pretty intense as an act
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of love, and then why that dynamic or how that dynamic shows up in my office
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regularly, minus the true crime part.
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, I talk about emotional immaturity and rigidity and cognitive
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fusion and, , differentiation.
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And then a concept out of, uh, my beloved acceptance and commitment therapy that
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I think is, , one of the most hopeful things in psychology, which is this
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difference between the story that you've been telling yourself and then
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the part of you that's been observing or watching the story the whole time.
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And, , just to be clear, I'm not saying that anybody listening is
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heading toward a life of crime.
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, But many of the concepts that, that we explore today, the shame, the rigidity,
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the performing a version of yourself for other people, the sealing off of things
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that you don't want anybody to know, I think those exist in most all of us at…
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in some form, , a far, far less intense form.
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And so I think that's what makes a case like this worth sitting with, not because
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the behavior is anywhere near relatable.
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It's horrific.
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But I think the psychology underneath it is a big part of the human experience.
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And then I, I often think that understanding it at this extreme level
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or magnification can actually help us see things in our own lives that
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are a lot harder to spot up close.
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'Cause one of the things I think is the most helpful to do is
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to learn how to look inward, , introspection, self-confrontation.
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So that's what you're getting today.
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Definitely heavier than a normal Virtual Couch or Waking Up to Narcissism episode.
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, But I think it's worth it, and I genuinely am excited to share this with you.
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And if you like it, please do me a huge favor and go subscribe to Murder on the
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Couch wherever you listen to podcasts.
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That would mean a lot.
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, Not to spoil the surprise inside, but maybe I'll be talking with you, the
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listener, about a case in the future.
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Okay.
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Let's get into it.
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Here is Murder on the Couch and the case of John List, who was a Sunday school
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teacher, and the psychology of shame
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So picture this.
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It's December nineteen seventy-one.
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A postal worker in Westfield, New Jersey, starts noticing something
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odd about the big Victorian mansion at the end of Hillside Avenue.
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The lights are on, all of them, every single night.
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The mail is piling up, and there's this faint sound coming from inside.
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It's classical music, and it's playing very softly, like the house itself is
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humming, but to nobody in particular.
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Neighbors mention it to each other.
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There's a lot of talk in the neighborhood.
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And then finally, somebody goes up and knocks on the door, but nobody answers.
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This goes on for over a month, a teacher calls the police.
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Two officers eventually show up.
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They step inside, and they find in a house with the thermostat turned down to
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near freezing the bodies of five people: a wife, a mother, three teenagers,
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each one of them shot in the head.
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Carefully laid out on sleeping bags in the mansion's grand ballroom.
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The mother was in the kitchen where she'd fallen.
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There was no sign of a break-in, no struggle, no robbery.
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But what there was, sitting neatly on the desk of the family patriarch, a
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five-page handwritten letter addressed to his pastor, and in it, the man explained
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exactly what he had done and why God would understand and why he was confident
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that his family was now safe in heaven.
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And then that man, John List, forty-six years old, devout Lutheran, Sunday
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school teacher, former army officer, apparently a devoted family man, walked
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out of that house, got in his car, and disappeared so completely that it
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would take eighteen years to find him.
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This is one of the cases that stopped me in my tracks because the question
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that I just can't seem to shake, the one that I want to spend this episode
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sitting with is: how does it happen?
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Not the logistics, but let's talk about the psychology.
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How does a man get to a place where killing the five people that he
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supposedly loved the most in the world becomes, in his mind, the
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most loving thing that he could do?
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And how does somebody's internal world become so sealed off, so
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rigid, so fused with shame and fear that this is the exit ramp?
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And that also that he is convinced that God is gonna be
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perfectly fine with what he did.
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That's what we're talking about today.
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My name is Tony Overbay.
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I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist, host of The Virtual
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Couch, Waking Up to Narcissism.
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But today, you're listening to Murder on the Couch.
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Let's get into it.
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Hey, everybody.
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Welcome to Murder on the Couch.
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I'm your host, Tony Overbay.
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I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist and somebody who cannot
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watch a true crime documentary Or a, an interrogation video
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without narrating this running psychological commentary in my head.
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Quite frankly, whether anybody wants to hear it or not.
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If you are a longtime listener and -- it needs to be pretty long
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ago, thanks for still being here.
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Thanks for showing up again.
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It's been a while.
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If you've been around from the beginning, you know that this podcast, Murder on
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the Couch, was initially a collaboration between my daughter Sydney and me, and
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those episodes with her are genuinely one of my favorite things that I've ever done.
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Meanwhile, I've done over four hundred and fifty episodes of a mental health
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podcast called The Virtual Couch.
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Throw in another one hundred and fifty plus of Waking Up to Narcissism,
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but this one is the thing that took off like a rocket ship and
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and then came to an abrupt halt.
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But she's taking a break right now, and I hope, I hope that she'll rejoin
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me in the not-too-distant future.
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But in the meantime, I've been doing what I do all the time.
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I watch a lot of true crime documentaries listen to some true crime podcasts.
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I have a YouTube feed absolutely full of interrogation videos, and I do the
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thing where I'm supposed to be just consuming content like a normal human
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person, but instead I'm forty-five minutes in with a full case conceptualization
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running in my head and wondering the psychological makeup and who hurt this
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person as a child and why wouldn't somebody just give this person validation?
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Could it have fixed this whole thing?
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And also, admittedly, there are times where I'm saying out loud, "I would
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really like to work with that person, just to get inside their head," because
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I love what I do as a therapist.
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But all of a sudden, I'll look around and, hey, there's my wife maybe an
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adult child or two looking at me a little strange, like I need a hobby
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that also isn't isn't my profession.
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So here we are because because true crime when you look at it through
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the therapeutic lens is not just disturbing or even just compelling.
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It's instructive.
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And I'm not talking about here's how you do it, but it shows you sometimes the
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most extreme magnification what happens inside human beings when things like
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shame go unexamined or when connection gets replaced by performance or when
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the interior life, what it feels like to be you on the inside, honest to
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goodness, never gets the attention that it needs, and maybe doesn't even know
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what it needs so that attention-seeking game was rigged to begin with.
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But before I get to the case, I want to make an offer, because I've spent a lot
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of time thinking about how I want to move this podcast forward, and I landed on
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something that felt more exciting to me than just picking up where we left off.
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I would like for you to be my co-host, and I mean that.
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And here's what I'm envisioning.
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If you are somebody who has ever gone down a A true crime rabbit hole.
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And I mean really down the rabbit hole, the kind where it's the middle
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of the night and you're reading the-- even chasing down the court documents
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and you're watching all kinds of hot takes by attorneys and other
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podcasters, and you found yourself thinking not just about what happened,
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but really the why about what was going on psychologically about the…
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Does the case talk about shame or attachment wounds or family systems
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or, or identify any of the things that that we talk about on this show
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or on any of my other podcasts, then I genuinely wanna hear from you.
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Reach out to me at contact@tonyoverbay.com and tell me about the case that
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you're interested in covering.
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Tell me a little bit about yourself, give me a sense of the angles
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that you would want to explore.
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What draws you to it, maybe even from a therapeutic lens or psychologically?
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What questions do you think that the case is really asking?
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Or what does it even bring up in you?
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Let's talk about a little transference maybe some projection.
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And it does not need to be polished.
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\ Doesn't have to be a formal pitch.
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Just tell me what's got you hooked and why.
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And if it feels like a fit, I'll reach out, and we will figure out
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how to make an episode together.
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Maybe it's one, maybe it's a few.
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And honestly, if the right person's out there and we click and no one
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else reaches out, maybe maybe it's something more ongoing than that.
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But let's get into today's case.
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And I do really think this one is going to stay with you, and I
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probably should have already given you a little bit of a trigger warning
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because that was quite the opening.
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But let's start with the facts.
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John Emil List was born in Bay City, Michigan in 1925.
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He was described as a quiet, serious kid, deeply shaped by his mother,
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Alma, who was intensely religious and intensely devoted to John.
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He served in World War II and Korea.
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He got a degree in business and then a master's degree in accounting.
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So on paper, he was doing everything just great, building the life
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that his faith and his upbringing told him that a good, God-fearing
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Christian man was supposed to build.
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He married Helen in 1951, she was already a widow with a daughter,
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Patricia, and they had two more children together, John Jr.
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and Frederick.
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And then they settled into a modest churchgoing life,
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and for a while it worked.
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It held.
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It held together nicely.
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Then in 1965, he got a VP of finance job at a bank in New Jersey, and the
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family moved into this enormous Victorian mansion in Westfield called Breeze Knoll.
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It had 19 rooms.
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It was built in 1896, and it was too big, and it was too expensive for
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what John List could actually afford.
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But he moved his family in anyway, and this is where the slow unraveling begins.
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, This bank job that he had fell through within a year List then bounced between
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positions, and then he began doing what people who can't tolerate the
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gap between who they believe they are and who they actually are often do.
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He started lying, a lot, about everything, impulsively, compulsively.
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He lied to his wife, his mom, his neighbors, his pastor.
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He started liquidating accounts.
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He stole from his elderly mother's bank account.
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She lived on the third floor of the mansion, and he would intercept mail
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so that Helen wouldn't see the bills.
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So for years, he kept up this performance.
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Years.
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That took a lot of work, but he looked and performed the role of
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this stable, successful, God-fearing patriarch, even as everything
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underneath him started to collapse.
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His teenagers were teenagers, and they did the things that teenagers do.
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His daughter, Patty, sixteen, was interested in theater, and she had
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friends, and she had opinions, and she was becoming her own person the
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way sixteen-year-olds are supposed to.
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He had a son, Johnny.
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At that point, he was fifteen.
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He had started pulling away from the rigid church-going
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structure of his dad's household.
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So the family was starting to crack open in honestly pretty completely normal,
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healthy ways that families do when children start to differentiate, when they
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start to try to figure out who they are and John List, a man who had spent his
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entire adult life managing appearances of trying to appear as a version o-of
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himself that he thought he was supposed to be, was also, as he's doing that,
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trying to seal off a lot of shame.
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But over time, he couldn't keep it up.
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So on November ninth, nineteen seventy-one, he got up and
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did what he'd apparently been planning for quite a while.
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He killed his wife, Helen, in the kitchen.
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Then he went upstairs, and he killed his mother, Alma.
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He called his children's schools, and he told them that the kids wouldn't be in.
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And then, one by one, as his children came home, he killed them, too.
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Patty first, then Frederick, then Johnny last because Johnny was coming home
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late because he had football practice.
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. He sat down and wrote his pastor that letter, five pages, very, very neat
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handwriting, explaining that he had done what a loving father had to do to
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protect his family from a world that would shame them, from immoral corruption
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creeping into his children's lives.
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He was confident that they were all in heaven, and he asked for prayers
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from the pastor and the community.
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And he noted almost administratively, that he didn't really think he'd be
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able to attend his own mother's funeral.
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Then he turned on the lights.
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He turned on the classical music station.
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He turned down the thermostat.
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He got in his car, and he drove to Denver.
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Now most coverage pivots here to the manhunt, the famous nineteen
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eighty-nine America's Most Wanted episode with the forensic sculptor who
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age progressed a bust of John List.
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And then there was a neighbor in Richmond, Virginia, who saw the broadcast- looked
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out her window at a quiet churchgoing accountant who lived next door named
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Bob Clark, and she made the call.
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He was arrested at his office, 63 years old, remarried.
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His new wife had no idea.
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He was eventually convicted in 1990, and he died in prison in 2008.
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But I don't even necessarily care to spend much time in the capture,
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but more so in the 18 years that he lived just a completely normal life.
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Because I think that's what tells us something that the manhunt never could.
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Because what John List did wasn't just a crime.
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It was the end product of a very specific psychological architecture
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that was built brick by brick by brick out of shame, out of being rigid, out
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of a fused identity, and about a faith tradition that he bent into something
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that could no longer hold any grace.
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So let's dive into that architecture.
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And before we do that, I want to start with a question, and I would love for
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you to just sit with this for a second.
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Have you ever had something going on in your life, something embarrassing
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or scary or very deeply shameful, and you just didn't want to tell anybody?
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So you continue to show up, you go to work, you smile at the right moments,
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you show up and perform at school.
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Maybe there's a school play, maybe there's a church potluck and you
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perform being fine so convincingly that you almost believe it yourself.
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Everything's okay.
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It's like you're just kicking the can down the road further and further.
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And I'm guessing that the answer is yes, because that is a human
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thing, not just a monster thing.
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And I'm not starting there to make you feel like John List.
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I'm starting there more because the most important thing that we
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can do on a podcast like this is resist the idea that the people
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that we talk about are simply other.
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The, at least I'm not that person.
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Because the truth is, and I think this is what makes cases like this
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genuinely unsettling, that John List was operating from a deeply catastrophically
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amplified version of something that I think a lot of people do, and that is
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something called compartmentalization.
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Because that's a defense mechanism, and I mean that quite literally.
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The mind defending itself, saying, "This information is incompatible with my
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ability to function, so I am going to seal it off and then continue operating and
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conducting my life as if this thing that I'm also doing or thinking doesn't exist."
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And in small doses, it's pretty adaptive.
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A surgeon sets aside any anxiety in an operating room, or you're going
19:05
through a divorce, but you have a presentation to deliver at work.
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That's human flexibility, and it's a form of compartmentalization.
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But compartmentalization becomes dangerous when it stops being a
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temporary tool and it becomes part of your permanent architecture of yourself.
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When this sealed-off room that you seal off these things that you don't want
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to deal with or maybe don't want to acknowledge or admit doesn't just hold,
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"Hey, I'm nervous about this surgery," but it holds, "I am a complete failure, and if
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anybody ever found out who I actually am, then my entire existence would collapse."
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Because at that point, that's not a tool anymore.
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That's a load-bearing wall, and then everything gets built on top
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of it, and everything is propping it up to, to try to keep it intact.
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Let's dive into shame versus guilt, one of the things that I think I could
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talk about on every podcast anytime that I speak to really distinguish
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or differentiate between the two.
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Because shame is what fills a sealed room like this, and I wanna be really
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intentional about this because shame and guilt get conflated constantly,
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and they are not the same thing.
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Guilt says, "I did something bad." Shame says, "I am bad." Guilt is
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more often about behavior, but shame is more about identity.
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And guilt can, at times, motivate repair.
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"I did something wrong," or, "I wanna make something right.
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I did something that I'm not really proud of, and now that I've done it,
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I wanna take ownership of it." So it comes from this feeling of guilt.
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Shame does not motivate repair, no matter how much that we
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like to think that it does.
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Shame motivates hiding, because if the problem isn't what I did,
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but it's who I am or who I think I am, then there's nothing to fix.
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There's only something to conceal.
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And shame does not arrive in adulthood.
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Shame gets installed early, before you have the cognitive architecture to
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even be aware of it or to process it.
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Because where did that shame come from?
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I don't think that it always starts in a church.
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I think it starts in a kitchen or in a living room or on a
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car ride home from school.
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I shared this on a podcast about sin and guilt and shame recently, so I'm
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gonna take an excerpt from there.
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But think about it.
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You're four years old, and you're doing what four-year-olds do.
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You're moving through the world impulsively, curiously, probably clumsily.
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Let's say you knock something over, or you say something that you were told not
21:29
to say, or you do something that your parent told you not to do, even though
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you honestly don't fully understand why you were told not to do it in
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the first place, because you're four.
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And now your parent's upset, and they need something from you.
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They need to see that you understand that what you did was wrong.
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They need the apology.
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They need you to hang your head down.
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They need the, they need to see the face.
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They need you to look sad or sorry or scared because, and I'm saying
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this with absolute compassion for the parent as well, because they're running
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their own inherited programming of what they think you need to do to be
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a good kid, to be a better parent.
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Because if you don't look like you feel bad, then what does
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that say about them as a parent?
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If the kid isn't showing remorse, are they, i- is the
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parent even doing their job?
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So the kid learns over time to perform the kid learns to read the room.
22:17
They figure out what expression makes this scary moment stop, and maybe at this
22:21
day and age gets me back to my tablet or lets me go play with my friends.
22:26
But here's where actually the damage happens, and it's so subtle
22:29
that people don't even notice it.
22:32
A four-year-old does not have the cognitive architecture to separate, "I
22:35
did a bad thing," from, "I am bad." And at that moment, those two concepts are fused.
22:41
They're one thing.
22:42
In that moment, shame gets installed, not guilt.
22:46
Guilt says, "I did something I wanna repair," but shame says, "I am
22:49
fundamentally broken." And that shame, in that moment, becomes the operating system.
22:55
And then what happens?
22:56
That kid grows up, and maybe now they do walk into a church
22:59
with the best of intentions.
23:01
And somebody says, "Hey, we're all sinners. You're a sinner."
23:04
And it doesn't actually feel new.
23:06
It feels familiar because it confirms what they believed about
23:09
themselves since they were small.
23:11
"Well, of course I am. I am a sinner, and I gotta confess things. A-and of course,
23:15
something's wrong with me." And then, unfortunately, the whole system reinforces
23:19
the wound instead of healing it.
23:23
This Franciscan priest, Richard Rohr, has some amazing content around
23:26
that, and that's where he says that we're getting to this place where
23:29
this is where it's intergenerational because it's not one person's sin.
23:33
In this scenario, it's a pattern.
23:34
It's inherited.
23:35
The parent who needed you to perform remorse, well, they learned it from
23:39
their parent, who learned it from theirs.
23:41
And somewhere along the way, we built entire institutions around the idea
23:45
that this cycle of shame and confession and judgment was the path to healing.
23:49
And you've got this Franciscan priest, Richard Rohr, who's operating from inside
23:53
one of those institutions, and I love that he says "I don't think that's it.
23:58
I think the path is recognizing brokenness and then requesting healing.
24:02
It's not about performing penance." And if you think of this example I'm laying out,
24:06
it's about performing the right behaviors to hopefully get your parent to buy in
24:11
that you get the fact that you're bad.
24:14
You did the bad thing.
24:16
So Rohr says it's not about performing penance.
24:18
It's not about trying to prove that you're sorry enough.
24:21
Healing, and I am a huge acceptance and commitment therapy fan.
24:25
That's my modality of choice as a therapist, in the ACT lens, this
24:29
is where it gets pretty clean because what is shame clinically?
24:33
Shame is this cognitive fusion.
24:34
I am fusing to this story at its most destructive.
24:37
It's not, I'm having a thought or I'm noticing that I messed up.
24:40
It's I am messed up.
24:43
And so at that moment, the thought and the self become one thing.
24:47
And what does the traditional sin framework ask you to do?
24:49
It asks you now to walk into a room and declare you are a sinner.
24:53
It asks you to fuse with the most painful story that you can tell about
24:57
yourself, and then it tells you that doing this is the path to freedom.
25:02
That what healing requires, though, in my opinion, is defusion.
25:06
It's enough space to notice the thought and hold it out away from you, hold it
25:12
with curiosity instead of becoming it.
25:14
To be able to say, "I'm having the thought that something is wrong with me. I can
25:18
notice that this thought's been with me a long time, and in that moment, I can
25:22
choose with my adult brain instead of my four-year-old one to respond differently."
25:27
Because that is not avoiding accountability.
25:29
It's actually a deeper form of it.
25:31
You're not just owning a behavior, you're owning the whole pattern, and that's a
25:35
way to heal this intergenerational trauma.
25:39
Sure, it will be uncomfortable, but it's better than sealing this thing off and
25:44
then pretending that it doesn't exist.
25:47
So back to John List.
25:49
So he was one of, I think, in my opinion, looking back over this case,
25:52
one of the most shame-saturated people that you'll probably ever encounter
25:55
in a true crime case because his entire sense of self was constructed
25:59
on a really brittle foundation.
26:00
"I'm the provider.
26:02
I'm the patriarch.
26:02
I'm the man of God.
26:03
I am in control." That was the load-bearing wall.
26:07
And then he had a mother, Alma, who handed him a self before he was even
26:11
old enough to choose one, and that self was built on performance, on
26:14
duty, on being a certain thing for a parent who needed him to be that thing.
26:20
It was on being righteous, on being God-fearing, on being perfect.
26:24
And he carried that performed, shame-organized, rigid self into
26:28
his adulthood, into his marriage, into fatherhood, into his work,
26:33
into that 19-room Victorian house.
26:36
And so by 1971, his reality was dismantling it brick by brick.
26:41
Job gone, money gone, house about to be foreclosed, kids becoming actually real
26:46
complicated individual human beings who are not gonna just quietly perform the
26:51
roles that his architecture required.
26:54
And here's what shame does in that situation.
26:57
Shame doesn't say, "You know, things have gone a little bit south here.
27:01
I think I need some help." Shame says, "If anybody sees this, I will cease to
27:04
exist as the person I believe myself to be." That's actually how , the
27:09
shame-based psyche experiences any kind of i-internal or vulnerable
27:13
exposure, not as embarrassment, but as complete annihilation.
27:17
So the nervous system responds to it the way it responds to a physical
27:21
threat, to physical danger, because a-at the level of the psyche, oh, it is.
27:26
That is a tiger that is chasing you.
27:28
And there's a particular danger in shame that lives only in the dark, only in the
27:32
shadows, because shame that gets examined or brought into a room with another
27:37
person and witnessed, like a therapist not fixed, but just witnessed, it loses
27:42
power When you bring it from the shadows into the light, it isn't as scary.
27:47
It becomes more workable.
27:49
But shame that never gets examined just grows.
27:52
It fills every room, and it gets bigger and heavier and more defended
27:56
with every passing year until the gap between performance and then what's
28:00
happening in reality cannot hold.
28:03
It cannot exist.
28:05
So when John List's system could not hold anymore or anything
28:08
else, he did not reach out.
28:10
He didn't let anybody in.
28:12
He sealed that room one final time.
28:15
And then so he wouldn't have a complete collapse i-in his
28:18
psyche, he called it love.
28:21
I wanna start this next segment with something that might feel a
28:23
little bit uncomfortable as well.
28:24
Stay with me here.
28:25
The discomfort is the point.
28:26
There's growth from discomfort.
28:29
Think about a time in a relationship with a parent or a partner when somebody did
28:33
something that hurt you, and when you tried to say, "Hey, that that, that hurt.
28:37
That landed hard," and the response was some version of, "You know,
28:42
that was actually more difficult for me," or, "I did that for you.
28:45
I was trying to help.
28:46
I did it actually because I love you." And if you've ever had that experience, you're
28:50
left standing there with this bizarre double reality, the pain on one side
28:57
and trying to express it, and then this in-insistence that the person who caused
29:01
it was actually the hero of the story.
29:04
Now, I think most everybody has experienced some version of that, and
29:08
understanding the psychology underneath it is a really important thing that
29:12
I think I can offer today because what John List did is not separate
29:16
from that experience, although he did it in the most catastrophic possible
29:21
expression of that kind of experience or that mechanism, and that mechanism
29:25
is called an altruistic defense.
29:28
Let me even back up a little bit here, let's compare it
29:30
with a narcissistic injury.
29:31
So when most people hear narcissism, they picture the, the
29:34
loud, swaggering, grandiose type.
29:36
But there's another presentation I see far more often, and I think
29:40
the one that describes John List would fit into this category.
29:43
It's quieter, it-- but it's more rigid, and it often wraps itself in virtue
29:47
and duty and faith and self-sacrifice.
29:50
And this is sometimes called a covert or a vulnerable narcissist.
29:53
The core wound in both versions is the same.
29:56
It's a self that was never allowed to be real.
29:59
Somewhere in development, and in John List's case, I'd point right to his
30:03
mom, Alma, the message got delivered.
30:05
And by the way, that doesn't mean I'm blaming his mom because
30:08
h-his lack of a strong father figure played a role in this.
30:11
The church that Alma grew up and went to, which most likely gave
30:15
her a sense of security or maybe even peace, that these are just
30:19
all components that play into this.
30:21
But the message that got delivered was that who you actually are is not enough.
30:25
There's a version of you you need to be, and what that- That speaks
30:30
especially to a kid is that love is conditional on how you perform, that
30:33
your value is located entirely in what you produce and how you appear.
30:38
So when a child grows up with that message, they don't develop a real self.
30:42
They develop a performed self, and that performed self is extraordinarily fragile
30:46
because it has no interior foundation.
30:49
It's all basically this facade.
30:50
It's the masks that the person needs to wear.
30:53
Now, narcissistic injury is what happens when that facade gets threatened.
30:58
When reality intrudes in a way that can't be managed or it can't be
31:01
denied, then the internal experience of that person isn't embarrassment.
31:06
It goes back to this concept where John List felt like all
31:10
of these things were an attack.
31:12
And the nervous system responds to that like it is an attack to physical danger
31:17
because the only self that this person has ever had is under the threat of collapse.
31:22
They're gonna get discovered, and they're gonna be found out.
31:26
So the altruistic defense is exactly what it sounds like.
31:28
A person reframes an act of self-protection, even if it's aggressive,
31:32
as an act of love, of altruism, of they're being loving and caring.
31:37
And this often is not conscious.
31:40
It's the psyche that has to construct this narrative that preserves the self-image.
31:45
It allows that person to remain, in their own story, the good guy.
31:49
John List could not, absolutely could not be the man who failed his family.
31:54
That identity wasn't available to him.
31:56
So instead, he became the man who saved his family, the man who loved
32:00
his children so much he spared them the suffering of watching their father
32:03
fall apart, the man so devoted to God that he sent his family ahead to
32:07
heaven instead of let them be corrupted by what he was having to deal with.
32:13
He took an act entirely about protecting his own ego, and then he had to dress
32:17
it in the language of selfless love.
32:19
And then I'm guessing, he walked out of that house and then
32:23
genuinely inhabited that narrative.
32:25
Now, I'm not saying that John List was not responsible.
32:27
He absolutely was, one hundred percent.
32:29
Psychological understanding is not a psychological excuse.
32:33
Those aren't the same thing.
32:34
But the altruistic defense in its non-criminal expressions is probably
32:38
one of the most common and damaging dynamics that I see in my clinical work.
32:43
Because think about the parent who controls every aspect of their
32:45
kid's life and calls it protection.
32:47
I have worked with more than one parent who puts off when their kid drives or goes
32:52
to school or gets electronic devices as long as they possibly can, and they say
32:57
that it's because I'm protecting my kid.
32:59
But really, a lot of times it's more about the parent not recognizing that
33:03
I don't know how to help them manage what they're gonna experience because I
33:08
don't even know if I can manage my own.
33:09
So it becomes this form of projection the, the partner who monitors your
33:13
friendships and then frames it as care, I see that in my clinical work.
33:16
The person who makes a major decision that's gonna affect you without your input
33:20
and then explains with genuine sincerity that they did it to spare your pain.
33:25
In each one of these cases, an act that's fundamentally about the actor's needs, the
33:30
person's needs, their anxiety, their ego, their need for control, they repackage
33:34
it as love, and then the recipient is left trying to hold their own reality
33:38
against what is starting to feel like a very airtight counter-narrative.
33:42
So this is why on my Waking Up to Narcissism podcast, I spend so much
33:46
time talking about the confusion that partners and family members experience.
33:49
Because when the person causing harm is also the person most loudly proclaiming
33:53
their love and their sacrifice, it creates a psychological type of vertigo because
33:57
you start questioning your own perception.
33:59
You start wondering, "Wait, a-am I being ungrateful?" And your brain
34:02
ties itself into knots trying to reconcile the impact that you're
34:06
feeling with the intention that they're declaring, they don't fit together.
34:11
It can be a real challenge to learn to trust your own experience of impact,
34:14
even when somebody else insists that is not what's happening, and that's one of
34:18
the most important pieces of work that you can do in a therapist's office.
34:23
And then there's one more layer here.
34:24
John List's children were beginning to, to differentiate,
34:27
to individuate, and in healthy families, that's just what happens.
34:32
It's, it can actually be a bit of a celebration.
34:34
You watch your kid become a real person with opinions different from
34:37
yours, and you can even feel pride.
34:40
But in a narcissistically organized family, individuation or differentiation
34:43
is experienced as betrayal.
34:45
You are going against us.
34:46
It's that all or nothing, black or white mentality, 'cause if your child
34:49
becomes fully themselves, they stop being an extension of your performed
34:53
identity, and they start being a witness to it, a witness who can now
34:56
see the gap between who you claim to be and who you actually are.
35:00
David Schnarch is a psychologist who I go back to his work constantly.
35:04
He talks about differentiation, and it's this capacity to be a
35:07
fully separate self in the presence of another person, to tolerate
35:10
somebody else's separateness without feeling like it's gonna destroy you.
35:14
John List had e-essentially zero differentiation capabilities.
35:18
He had enmeshment and he masqueraded that as devotion, and when the people that he
35:23
was enmeshed with started to become real complex individuals, real humans, his
35:27
system had no idea what to do with it, so he ended them, and he called it love.
35:32
So here's what I would love for you to take from this segment alone.
35:35
Love, real love, requires the other person to actually exist
35:39
as a completely separate human.
35:41
It requires them to be separate from you, to have their own interior
35:44
world, their own trajectory, and you don't get to control it.
35:48
Real love tolerates that.
35:50
So this altruistic defense produces care as control.
35:54
It, it produces devotion as possession, and in its mildest
35:58
forms it erodes relationships really slowly One cut at a time, the
36:02
death by a thousand cuts scenario.
36:04
In its most extreme form, it destroys them in a most literal sense.
36:08
So the question that I challenge people with o-often is the relationship
36:11
in your life or are the, all the relationships in your life, are you
36:15
being loved for who you actually are, or are you being loved for the role
36:18
you play in somebody else's story?
36:21
'Cause those are not the same thing.
36:23
You can have love or control in an adult relationship, not both, and knowing
36:26
the difference might be one of the most important things that you can figure out.
36:29
, So for this next section, I want to start with a word that sounds almost
36:33
too mild for what we're talking about today, but it's, I think it's one
36:35
of the most clinically precise words that we can use to describe John List.
36:39
And I've said it a couple times in this episode, but let's dig in on it.
36:42
This word is rigid.
36:44
Not evil, not monstrous, but rigid.
36:47
But if we just land on monster and we call it done, I think
36:50
we miss the entire lesson.
36:52
And there is a lesson here, something in John List's psychology that if
36:55
we're, I think, being honest, maybe we can find traces of in our own
36:58
lives, our own relationships or the family systems that we grew up in.
37:01
So let me talk a little bit about what emotional immaturity actually looks like.
37:05
It's not just a grown-up throwing a tantrum, although
37:07
that certainly is a thing.
37:09
It can also look almost like stone-faced stoicism, this ironclad self-control.
37:14
You know, a man who never raises his voice, who follows every
37:17
rule, who shows up to church every Sunday and sits in the same pew
37:20
And never, not once, gives anybody visible reason to worry.
37:23
Because emotional immaturity isn't fundamentally about behavior,
37:26
it's about internal capacity.
37:28
So whether a person can actually experience their emotional life,
37:31
again, emotional immaturity.
37:33
Do they even know what emotions are there for?
37:36
Can they tolerate what's happening in their emotional life?
37:39
Can they feel it, tolerate it, process it, versus whether they learned early and
37:43
out of necessity to simply shut it down.
37:46
John List shut his emotions down so completely, so early, that by
37:51
adulthood, there really wasn't much emotional interior left to access.
37:56
What was there, , had been bricked over by performance and rigidity and a set of
38:00
rules that told him exactly who to be at all times and left no room for the messy
38:05
business of being a real human being.
38:08
Back to acceptance and commitment therapy, in ACT, psychological flexibility is
38:12
considered one of the cornerstones of the modality, and I think it's one of the
38:15
cornerstones of mental health in general.
38:17
Psychological flexibility.
38:19
It's the ability to be in contact with the present moment, including
38:22
difficult emotions, difficult realities, without being overwhelmed by them
38:27
or, or rigidly defending against them The opposite psychological
38:30
inflexibility shows up in a few ways that I think are easy to recognize.
38:34
One of them is called experiential avoidance, meaning I am, I'm avoiding,
38:38
I am avoiding whatever has happened and doing whatever it takes to
38:40
not feel the uncomfortable thing.
38:42
Staying busy, staying controlled, sealing off the room, not allowing
38:45
yourself to even think about things without having music or a podcast or
38:49
something blasting in the background.
38:52
So you've got that experiential avoidance.
38:53
I'm gonna do anything other than be here in the - in the present moment
38:56
because I don't even know how I feel, and I don't know what to do with
38:59
any of the emotions or feelings.
39:01
And then there's another term called cognitive fusion, merging
39:05
with a story so completely that you can't see it as a story anymore.
39:09
And I've got a couple other concepts and then we'll , make sense of these.
39:11
Another one's rule-governed rigidity, and this is the piece
39:15
most specific to John List.
39:17
Rule-governed rigidity is a way of moving through the world organized
39:20
almost entirely around rules, explicit rules, implicit rules, religious
39:25
rules, social rules, family rules.
39:27
And what's interesting is the psychological function of
39:29
those rules is it makes sense.
39:31
It's there, the rules are there to eliminate uncertainty, to make
39:35
the world so predictable that nothing unexpected can get in.
39:38
And the theory is that that will make me feel better, and
39:41
then I can go through life.
39:43
But there's a, a fundamental difference between somebody who holds their
39:45
rules lightly, who can adjust when the situation calls for it, and then
39:49
somebody who holds them as though their very survival depends on them.
39:52
John List held his rules as though his survival depended on them
39:55
because a- as we've identified, at the level of his psyche, it did.
39:59
His rules told him who he was, the good provider, the faithful
40:01
husband, the church elder.
40:03
Th-those aren't values.
40:04
They were the architecture of his self, the only thing standing
40:07
between him and the terrifying void of not knowing who he was at all.
40:12
And what's fascinating about this is you are going through life for
40:15
the very first time as you, and you are the only version of you that's
40:18
ever existed on the planet Earth.
40:19
And you are this unique combination of your nature and nurture and
40:22
birth order and abandonment and DNA and hopes and dreams and fears.
40:25
So you're actually reacting to things the way you are because
40:28
that's how you're reacting to them.
40:30
And if you don't feel comfortable in your own skin or as you are, then it
40:34
would make sense that you're turning to someone else to say, "Hey, how
40:37
should I feel about this thing?
40:38
How should I think about this thing?
40:39
What should I do?" And you rely so, so inherently on, on the validation
40:44
of others, on external validation, that at some point, just what it feels
40:47
like to be you is I need to be told what to do in every situation because
40:52
then I don't have to take ownership or accountability of if my life didn't
40:56
go the way that I thought it would.
40:57
I can say, "Well, the pastor said," or, "My parents said," or, "God said," instead
41:01
of just being and doing and existing and figuring things out on your own.
41:06
And then what rigidity does to a family, so if a parent organizes
41:09
their interior world around these rigid rules, then the family stops
41:13
being a living, dynamic system, and it starts being all about performance.
41:16
Kids learn early that their job is not to be themselves.
41:19
Their job is to maintain this performance , don't rock the boat.
41:23
Don't bring anything into the room that might destabilize this very
41:25
fragile architecture that the most immature person in the room, often
41:30
the most emotionally immature narcissistic parent, has constructed.
41:34
And the cruel irony is that the most inflexible person in
41:37
the room is the most fragile.
41:40
The rigidity is not a strength.
41:42
It's a symptom of how much internal terror is being held at bay.
41:45
So John List's iron control was the behavior of a person one crack away
41:49
from internal collapse at almost any given moment until that crack appeared.
41:53
So I would imagine, I was gonna say guarantee, but I can't go
41:55
back in time, that his kids, his wife, his mom felt that.
41:59
It was the, "Oh man, which version of John do we have walking in
42:01
today? Just something seems off. He seems a little bit tense." Let's
42:04
talk about the 18-year period.
42:06
After November 9th, 1971, then John List drove to Denver.
42:10
He became Bob Clark.
42:11
He got a job.
42:12
He joined another church.
42:13
He became a church elder.
42:14
He married a woman, Dolores, who described him as gentle and kind,
42:18
and I cannot even imagine what that would be like for Dolores whenever
42:21
she discovered what had happened.
42:24
But he lived this completely normal life for 18 years.
42:28
How?
42:29
Because John List had been living exactly like this his entire life,
42:33
the capacity to seal off an interior reality and just continue to perform.
42:37
He had been doing that since childhood.
42:40
November 9th wasn't a rupture in his psychological functioning.
42:43
It was, in a deeply disturbing way, pretty consistent with it.
42:48
He didn't flee and rebuild because he was resilient.
42:50
He fled and rebuilt because he had never actually built
42:52
anything in the first place.
42:53
He'd only performed.
42:55
And performing, that's portable.
42:57
You can do it as John List in New Jersey and as Bob Clark in
43:00
Virginia, and the machinery works pretty much the same because it was
43:04
never connected to anything real.
43:05
I see this when people divorce a, a true narcissistic person, and then that person
43:10
moves into a different relationship, and all of a sudden they're doing everything
43:14
that they said they would never do in the relationship with the person
43:17
that I'm now working with post-divorce because they just pick up the sense of
43:21
self of whatever they need to be in that moment., Never connected to anything real.
43:25
Emotional immaturity is not a nothing.
43:27
It's an active, ongoing, energy-consuming process of keeping reality at bay,
43:32
and that process has costs, not always for the person doing it, because for
43:35
them that, that's just what they do.
43:38
But it has a cost for the people around them because you cannot be in a genuine
43:42
relationship with a performance.
43:44
You can't actually be loved by somebody who has never developed
43:47
the capacity to see you as a real, separate, complex human being
43:50
because they don't know who they are.
43:52
I work with a lot of people who grew up w-with someone like this, not a
43:56
murderer obviously, but somebody with the same emotional architecture, the
43:59
rigidity, the rules, the complete unavailability of a genuine interior life.
44:04
And the thing that I hear over and over is, "I always felt like I was
44:06
supposed to be something for him.
44:08
I, you know, I never felt like I could just be me." And so I have the
44:11
people in my office now trying to even figure out at thirty, forty, fifty
44:14
somebody in their seventies trying to say, "I don't even know who I
44:17
am," but now is the time to find out.
44:20
I sometimes call this the legacy of emotional immaturity.
44:22
Not always dramatic, not always even visible from the outside, but deeply
44:26
and quietly kind of persistently shaping what children believe love
44:30
is supposed to feel like, what they believe they are allowed to be.
44:33
The work of undoing that, that's probably some of the most important therapeutic
44:36
work there is, but it does start with naming what happened, understanding that
44:41
the unavailability wasn't your fault.
44:43
It's not a reflection of your worth as a kid, not something you
44:46
could have fixed by being smaller or quieter or performing better.
44:51
You couldn't have fixed it because as much as it feels like it was
44:54
about us, it never was about you.
44:56
It was always entirely about them.
44:58
A client asked me a question a few years ago that I think about often.
45:01
We were deep in a session, somebody who had spent the better part of their
45:04
adult life performing a version of themselves built by other people, going
45:08
through a nice faith deconstruction, a faith crisis, and at one point
45:11
they looked over at me and said, "What if there's nothing underneath?
45:14
What if I've been performing so long that there's actually nobody in here?
45:18
, This is just who I am.
45:19
What if I am the chameleon?" Sit there with that one for a second
45:22
before you connect it to John List, because I hear this one often, and I
45:26
think it's one of the most important questions that you can ask yourself.
45:29
The answer is the beginning of something genuinely hopeful, but John
45:33
List is, in a terrible way, a case study in what happens when somebody
45:36
asks a version of that question and they get the worst possible answer.
45:40
In ACT there's a distinction between the conceptualized
45:42
self and the observing self.
45:45
The conceptualized self is the story.
45:47
It's the collection of roles and labels and narratives.
45:49
"I am provider.
45:50
I am a good father.
45:51
I am devout.
45:52
I am in control." It's the content of your identity.
45:55
It's the what of who you are.
45:57
Now, the observing self is different.
46:00
It's the part that notices the story, that can step back and watch
46:03
your own thoughts and patterns without being consumed by them.
46:07
It's the awareness itself instead of what's being observed.
46:10
It's, , a beautiful concept called self as context instead of yourself as content.
46:16
John List had the conceptualized self that was extraordinarily elaborate
46:21
and extraordinarily brittle, and he had, I'd argue, no observing self
46:25
or the abi-ability to step back and see himself in these moments.
46:29
No capacity to step back and say, "Oh, this, this story is in trouble, and
46:33
I need to take a look at that." When reality dismantled the story, all of a
46:37
sudden he's losing his job, his home, he can't go, "Well, check that out.
46:41
This version of me that I thought that this is how things would
46:43
play out, that's not happening."
46:45
And so now I can look and say, "What's the story my brain , tells me?
46:47
That I needed to be perfect.
46:48
Oh, it's the old I need to be perfect story.
46:50
I'm noticing that.
46:51
I can step away from it." When reality dismantled the story, there was nothing
46:55
underneath to catch him, no grounded awareness that could say, "Oh, this
46:58
story's falling apart, but I'm still here.
47:00
The world's still spinning.
47:01
I can survive this." Just the story, and with the story falling apart and him
47:06
making The most catastrophic possible attempt to hold it together because
47:10
he , didn't change, he relocated.
47:13
, It's kinda haunting that after everything, John List built a new conceptualized self,
47:18
new story, new roles, gentle husband, reliable employee, devoted church elder,
47:22
and by all accounts, he then inhabited it with exactly the same completeness, the
47:27
same apparent conviction, the same absence of internal conflict as the old one.
47:31
He didn't rebuild himself.
47:32
He just picked up a new story and put it on, kinda like changing clothes.
47:36
Genuine change doesn't happen at the level of the story.
47:38
You can't swap out one narrative for another and then call it transformation.
47:42
The self you're running from comes with you until you turn around and face it.
47:46
You get into a relationship with your own interior experience, your own
47:50
history, your own capacity for harm.
47:53
The new story in his scenario is just a new facade over the
47:56
same unexamined foundation.
47:58
I see people do versions of this often.
48:00
They leave a marriage and immediately enter a new relationship and
48:02
wonder, "Why did, why on earth did the same pattern show up?
48:04
I left the bad relationship, and this one seems so good." Or they move to a new
48:07
city, and they reinvent their wardrobe and change their friend group and slowly
48:10
find themselves feeling exactly the same, stuck, unseen, performing, and
48:14
afraid because they changed the story, but they didn't do the work of examining
48:17
the storyteller, and the storyteller comes with you every single time.
48:21
Now, there are examples of this where you do go to a new place, and you have
48:24
this opportunity to reinvent yourself, to become the new version of you, but
48:29
that is successful when you've done the work internally to figure out why it is
48:32
that you show up the way that you do.
48:34
So that's the real work.
48:35
What does that excavation look like?
48:37
And I, I wanna resist making it sound easier and tidier than it
48:41
is 'cause it's not just a weekend workshop or a journaling exercise
48:44
or just taking a few deep breaths.
48:46
It's the slow, nonlinear, frequently uncomfortable process of learning to be
48:52
in genuine contact with your own internal experience, developing the capacity to
48:57
feel what you actually feel instead of what you think you're supposed to feel.
49:01
It's building enough psychological safety inside yourself first that
49:05
you can look at the most painful, most shameful, most sealed-off parts
49:08
of your history and be with them.
49:11
It's gonna sound like nothing but woo-woo at first.
49:15
It's the feel the feelings, and it doesn't make a lot of sense until it
49:20
does, I've had to go through it myself as a therapist working with my own
49:24
therapist, that at first we even have to know where do we feel the things that we
49:28
feel, and we need to allow them to be.
49:31
It gets, so ethereal and all the words I've heard,
49:35
hippy-dippy, woo-woo, you name it.
49:37
But you have to allow yourself to feel.
49:39
You breathe into the feelings, you thank the feelings for being there, you give
49:42
them time, and sometimes you don't do anything with them, and the world spins,
49:46
and the feelings eventually dissipate.
49:48
At some point then, you're gonna listen to them, and they're gonna
49:50
tell you stories, and most likely your first reaction is gonna be to want to
49:53
get rid of them, to intellectualize them, to try to make sense of them.
49:57
And often the way you're trying to make sense of them is still gonna
49:59
be of something, a blame yourself thing, and that goes back to that,
50:02
programming that got inherited as a kid that, "Well, it must be my fault.
50:06
It must be something I'm doing wrong," versus, "Oh, this feeling could be
50:10
providing me a roadmap that this, I this situation doesn't feel safe.
50:14
This doesn't feel like the right thing for me to do right now." So learning
50:18
to look at these most painful, , most shameful, most sealed off parts of
50:21
your history and be with them and not fix them, and sit with them and
50:24
acknowledge them, not perform a new story about them, just be with them.
50:27
And eventually, they actually do start telling you stories.
50:30
It's your own intuition.
50:31
It's your gut.
50:32
, This is acceptance.
50:34
It's not approval.
50:35
It- it's more of a willingness to make contact with your
50:37
experience as it actually is.
50:40
And here's what that acceptance makes possible.
50:43
When you can learn to actually be with your own experience, you free up an
50:46
enormous amount of interior resources, your emotional calories being burnt on
50:50
trying to ruminate and beat yourself up and figure out what's going on.
50:54
You'll recognize how much time you spend on that, and those are resources that
50:58
are now available to go toward genuine connection, toward actually showing up
51:01
as a full, present, complex human being instead of this curated performance of
51:05
who you think you're supposed to be.
51:07
You become somebody who can be known, and being known, genuinely known,
51:12
in all your complexity and all your messiness, is the only foundation that
51:17
real, real intimacy can be built on.
51:19
Takes a lot of courage , to be known, and it takes a lot of courage to
51:22
genuinely know somebody and realize that we're two wonderfully flawed
51:28
human beings going through life for the first time experiencing things.
51:32
John List was never known, not by his first wife, not by his children,
51:37
not by his mom, not by his second wife, because the real self was
51:41
locked in a room he refused to open for anybody, including himself.
51:45
His second wife, Dolores, said after the arrest she had no idea that the man
51:49
that she married was gentle and warm and that she had felt genuine love.
51:53
And I believe her, because within the limits of his architecture, he probably
51:57
was a reasonably attentive partner, but it just wasn't enough, because the
52:01
intimacy was constructed on a total false foundation on concealment The man
52:09
that she was married to did not exist.
52:11
Real intimacy cannot be built on concealment.
52:13
Real love can't survive the fundamental unavailability of the
52:16
person that you believe you love.
52:19
That question that my client asked earlier, "What if there's
52:21
nothing underneath?" Here's what I've come to believe.
52:23
There's always something underneath.
52:26
Always.
52:27
The observing self doesn't disappear just because it's been buried
52:29
under decades of performance.
52:31
It doesn't go away because nobody ever made it safe to come out.
52:34
It's there.
52:35
It's always been there.
52:36
So the work isn't about constructing a self.
52:39
The work is about excavating a self.
52:43
One that was already there.
52:45
John List never did that work.
52:47
He didn't even know that work existed.
52:49
He died in prison at 82, having been genuinely unknown even to
52:53
himself for his entire life.
52:56
So let's bring this thing home.
52:58
Why does a story like this reach inside of us and grab something?
53:02
Why can't we just file it under disturbed individual, next case, and move on?
53:06
Because the cases that stay with us are touching something, making contact
53:09
with some part of our own interior landscape that recognizes, even if
53:12
it doesn't want to admit it, that sometimes the distance between us and
53:16
the person that we're reading about isn't always as vast as we'd like.
53:20
Now, not in behavior.
53:20
The behavior is horrific, absolutely.
53:23
But the psychology underneath, the shame, the rigidity, the performance,
53:27
the terror of being truly known, that psychology isn't alien.
53:31
That psychology is human, and that's what true crime at its best does for us.
53:36
Not just to titillate, not to horrify, but it illuminates things.
53:41
Here's what I think the John List case is really about.
53:43
What happens when a person spends an entire lifetime refusing the fundamental
53:47
vulnerability of being a real human being?
53:49
Everything that we talked about today, the shame, the compartmentalization,
53:51
the narcissistic injury, the altruistic defense, the emotional immaturity,
53:55
the identity built on performance, all of it is downstream of that, that one
54:01
refusal, the refusal to be real, to be known, to let the gap between who you're
54:05
supposed to be and who you actually are, and then becoming that person
54:11
becoming something that you can sit with, grieve, and then eventually integrate.
54:15
But the refusal is not inevitable.
54:18
Patterns can be interrupted.
54:19
These architectures built on shame and performance can be slowly, painfully, with
54:25
the right tools and support, dismantled and rebuilt on something honest.
54:30
That's what therapy's for.
54:31
I deal with a lot of people that are navigating their faith journeys, their
54:33
faith deconstructions, and I wanna touch on that real quick here, the faith piece.
54:36
John List's Lutheran faith was not incidental to what he did.
54:40
It was central, and I'm not saying this from a blame standpoint.
54:44
I just think that it provided the language for the altruistic defense the
54:48
framework for his rigidity, and then the most painful irony at the heart of
54:51
the story because the tradition that he drew on, Christianity in its most
54:56
generous expression is built around the exact opposite message, - that you
55:00
are known fully and loved anyway, that the gap between who you are and who
55:03
you're supposed to be isn't something to conceal, but something to bring into
55:06
the light, to let your light so shine.
55:08
The message itself that grace is offered in the mess, not
55:12
earned through performance.
55:14
John List had access to that message his entire life.
55:16
He sat in church every Sunday, and it never sank in because
55:20
the shame was too thick.
55:21
The architecture was too rigid.
55:23
If you grew up in a religious environment where faith was a performance standard
55:26
instead of a refuge, where God was a scorekeeper instead of a presence, I
55:30
want to say something directly to you.
55:32
I think the version that you might have been handed isn't the only version.
55:35
You're allowed to renegotiate that relationship with, with the Almighty.
55:40
You're allowed to find a version that has room for your actual self, your
55:43
messy, complicated, entirely human self.
55:46
You're allowed to be known, and you are allowed to be loved in the knowing.
55:51
If I'm speaking fluent Christianity to someone of that faith, the concept of
55:56
God's the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow, and his love is unconditional
55:59
means that he loves you because he does.
56:02
And that means that he is probably the most differentiated
56:05
parental figure, literally or figuratively, that there could be.
56:09
So then when we mess up, and I am air quoting that, and we say, "Man,
56:13
God must be mad at me," that's a me thing, because if I'm turning back
56:18
to that God who's the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow and who loves me
56:21
then it's a me thing, and I would turn back to that person whenever I could.
56:27
And I deal often with people navigating faith journey, faith deconstruction, where
56:30
sometimes there's a really fascinating concept of where the more you begin
56:34
to love yourself, the more you realize your relationship with God changes.
56:39
That when you are a little kid and you don't like yourself, or if you are going
56:42
through and experiencing tremendous amounts of shame and guilt and fear,
56:46
you then project that out to God.
56:48
But when you love yourself it's funny.
56:50
It's almost ironic to see how your relationship with God changes.
56:54
So John List was handed a self before he was old enough to choose one.
56:57
He never developed the capacity to tolerate shame.
56:59
He never built the observing self that could stand outside of his story and
57:02
say, "Hey, this story is not working.
57:04
Let me look at that honestly.
57:05
Let me ask for help.
57:06
Let me grieve what I'm losing instead of destroy it before
57:08
anybody else can see me lose it."
57:10
He built this fortress instead, then he defended it in the most
57:13
devastating way imaginable.
57:15
Walked away, built another fortress, lived inside of it for 18 years until
57:19
a TV show and a woman looking out her window said, "I think I know who that
57:22
is." He maintained it to the end that what he had done was an act of love.
57:27
That fortress held even at the very end, because cracking it would have
57:30
meant becoming real, and becoming real was the one thing that he spent
57:33
his entire life refusing to do.
57:35
Now, before I let you go, I meant what I said at the top.
57:38
I'm looking for co-hosts.
57:39
If you followed this episode, you found yourself thinking about the psychological
57:42
underpinnings of what you were hearing.
57:43
If you have a case that's gotten under your skin and you know why,
57:46
maybe even you don't know why Email me at contact at tonyoverbay.com.
57:50
Tell me who you are, the case you want to cover, and anything else that you
57:54
think would be helpful, the therapeutic angles you think are worth exploring.
57:57
And I will share this on the virtual couch and waking up to narcissism too.
58:00
I look forward to hearing from hopefully a lot of you that might find this to
58:05
be a pretty interesting experience.
58:07
As directly as I know how, shame grows in concealment and it shrinks in connection.
58:13
The thing that you're most afraid for people to know about you, the failure, the
58:16
debt, the marriage that's falling apart, the identity that's starting to crack,
58:19
whether you like or don't like your job, if you feel very vulnerable as a parent,
58:23
or if you don't know, if you're struggling with your faith, having a good old faith
58:27
deconstruction, that thing does not become more manageable when you seal it off.
58:32
It doesn't get better eventually.
58:34
Be aware of magical thinking that, oh, it'll be better later.
58:38
It becomes more powerful, actually, the more that you don't
58:41
bring it out into the light.
58:42
It becomes this load-bearing wall.
58:44
But the antidote, and I know this sounds almost insultingly simple for everything
58:47
that we've been through today, but I mean it with everything I have, the
58:50
antidote is starting to tell the truth.
58:53
And that can be to somebody safe.
58:55
And sometimes it starts with telling the truth to yourself.
58:58
Not everybody's safe.
58:59
You don't owe your interior life to everybody.
59:01
But somebody, a therapist, a trusted friend, a partner who has earned the
59:05
right to the real you, Somebody who can receive who you actually are..
59:07
Because here's what happens over and over again in my office.
59:11
People finally do that when they bring the sealed-off thing into the room
59:15
and let another person witness it.
59:17
It does not destroy them.
59:19
It doesn't confirm the worst thing that they feared.
59:21
What happens is they feel less alone than they felt in years,
59:24
sometimes decades, sometimes ever.
59:26
The most threatening thing becomes, in the light of genuine human connection,
59:30
something that can actually be worked with, grieved, understood, integrated.
59:34
That's the exit ramp John List never took.
59:37
It was always there.
59:37
He drove past it every time.
59:39
But you don't have to.
59:41
Thanks for spending this time with me.
59:42
If you're sitting with something after listening, something personal, something
59:44
uncomfortable, stay with it for a second.
59:46
Don't seal it off.
59:47
That discomfort is information.
59:49
If this episode resonated, share it.
59:51
Go leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts.
59:53
Subscribe, like, all those wonderful things.
59:55
And if you want more of the therapeutic frameworks we talked about today,
59:58
ACT, differentiation, narcissistic injury, emotional immaturity, come
1:00:01
find me at The Virtual Couch or Waking Up to Narcissism or reach out
1:00:04
to me at contact at tonyoverbay.com.
1:00:06
Thank you so much for joining me.
1:00:08
This has been Murder on the Couch.
1:00:10
Have an amazing week.
1:00:11
next time that you see another episode come up, it will be with my first co-host.
1:00:16
Take care and have an amazing week.
1:00:18
We'll see you next time on Murder on the Couch.