What Keeps Us Human?

Serial killers, childhood adversity, and the mystery of resilience

I have a guilty pleasure.

I watch serial-killer shows. A lot of them.

I am especially drawn to the ones involving FBI profilers—the investigators who study crime scenes, victim patterns, language, behavior, and seemingly insignificant details until a picture of the unknown offender begins to emerge.

Give me a Behavioral Analysis Unit gathered around a conference table, studying photographs and announcing that the killer is an organized white male between the ages of 30 and 45 who drives an unremarkable vehicle and has recently experienced a significant loss of control, and I am fully bought in.

At this point, I have watched enough of these shows that I sometimes feel I should be allowed to sit quietly in the corner of the briefing room. I would not interfere. I would simply nod thoughtfully when someone mentions escalation, ritual, or geographic comfort zones.

I have also developed opinions.

I become impatient when investigators ignore an obvious pattern, suspicious when a seemingly helpful neighbor appears too early in the episode, and deeply concerned whenever someone who is home alone hears a noise in the basement and decides to investigate with a flashlight.

No.

Do not go into the basement.

Leave the house. Call the police. Go sit in your locked car across the street. This is not the moment to prove that you are a superhero.

And if the lights suddenly stop working, that is not an invitation to keep exploring.

My husband, Tony, says that considering how many of these programs I watch, he occasionally wonders whether he should sleep with one eye open.

For the record, he remains quite safe.

Probably.

What interests me is not the violence itself. I do not enjoy watching people suffer, and I am often relieved when a program does not linger unnecessarily over the gruesome details.

What fascinates me is the mind behind the behavior.

How does a human being become capable of treating another person as an object? How does someone learn to imitate warmth without actually experiencing concern? What happens inside a person when the ordinary restraints of attachment, conscience, empathy, guilt, and remorse fail to develop—or become profoundly distorted?

And perhaps the even more interesting question is this:

Why do most people who experience terrible things never become terrible people?

There Is No Single Recipe

We naturally want a clear explanation for profoundly deviant behavior.

Perhaps the person was abused. Perhaps he was neglected. Perhaps his mother was cold, his father was violent, or he was humiliated by other children. Perhaps he suffered a head injury, witnessed violence, tortured animals, or showed disturbing behavior from an early age.

Some offenders do have histories containing several of these factors. Others do not.

There is no single childhood experience, personality trait, neurological difference, or family dynamic that reliably produces a serial killer.

Severe antisocial behavior appears to develop through complicated interactions among biology, temperament, early attachment, family environment, social learning, impulse control, opportunity, reinforcement, and choices made over time.

One vulnerability may intensify another.

A child with poor impulse control may be raised in a chaotic home where aggression is modeled rather than contained. He may have difficulty reading social cues, struggle at school, experience rejection, become increasingly angry, and find belonging among others who reinforce his hostility. Every step affects the next.

Development can become a kind of snowball rolling downhill, gathering speed and mass as it goes.

But even that does not explain everything.

Many children grow up amid neglect, violence, instability, humiliation, and loss. Most do not become predatory. Most do not become violent criminals. Many become caring parents, teachers, artists, nurses, therapists, neighbors, and friends.

Many people who have known suffering become especially sensitive to the suffering of others.

Trauma may help us understand a person’s development, but it does not determine that person’s morality.

The Children of Kauai

One of the studies that changed how psychologists understood resilience began on the Hawaiian island of Kauai in 1955.

Psychologist Emmy Werner and her colleagues followed nearly 700 children from before birth into adulthood. Some of the children grew up facing significant adversity, including poverty, family conflict, parental mental illness, substance misuse, and complications around birth.

Researchers expected many of the highest-risk children to struggle, and many did.

But a substantial group did not.

About one-third of the children considered at high risk grew into competent, caring, capable adults despite the difficulties surrounding their early lives.

They were not untouched by what happened to them. Resilience does not mean emerging from adversity without bruises, grief, fear, or complicated adaptations.

It means that difficulty did not become the entirety of their identity or determine the whole course of their lives.

The resilient children often had certain protections. Some had an easier temperament or stronger problem-solving abilities. Many found at least one dependable relationship with a caring adult—a grandparent, teacher, older sibling, neighbor, minister, coach, or someone else who took an interest in them.

One person may not erase the harm a child experiences.

But one trustworthy person can become evidence that the entire world is not dangerous.

One relationship can offer a child a different reflection of themselves:

You matter.

You are worth knowing.

You are capable.

Your life could become something more than what is happening here.

That is not a small thing.

The Ordinary Magic of Resilience

Psychologist Ann Masten later used the phrase ordinary magic to describe resilience.

Her point was that resilience usually does not come from rare, superhuman toughness. It grows through ordinary human systems: secure relationships, developing self-regulation, cognitive skills, schools, families, communities, opportunities for mastery, and a sense of belonging.

I love that phrase: ordinary magic.

We often describe resilient people as exceptionally strong, as though they possess some internal armor the rest of us were not issued.

Sometimes they are strong.

But often they also had something—or someone—that helped their natural capacities survive.

A child may discover that she is good at drawing. A teacher may notice that she has a gift for writing. A grandfather may listen to her seriously. A friend’s family may show her that people can disagree without terrifying one another. A coach may expect something from her and then remain present long enough to help her achieve it.

These experiences may appear ordinary from the outside.

Inside a developing person, they can be transformative.

They create islands of safety.

And sometimes a child survives by swimming from one small island to the next.

What About Grit?

Angela Duckworth popularized the idea of grit—passion and perseverance directed toward long-term goals.

Grit certainly plays a role in many lives. Some people survive by becoming remarkably persistent.

They keep studying. They keep practicing. They keep imagining a future beyond the circumstances in which they were raised.

But grit and resilience are not quite the same.

Grit generally means continuing toward a goal. Resilience is broader and more flexible.

Sometimes resilience means persisting.

Sometimes it means changing course.

Sometimes it means leaving a relationship, surrendering an impossible expectation, asking for help, or admitting that the strategy that once protected us is now making our life smaller.

A person may be extremely persistent while repeatedly pursuing something destructive. We have probably all witnessed someone exhibit great determination while heading decisively in the wrong direction. Human beings are talented that way.

Resilience requires not only endurance but adaptation.

It asks:

What does this moment require now?

Reading Emotion Is Not the Same as Sharing It

One of the more unsettling things about people with pronounced psychopathic traits is that they may understand emotion quite well.

Some become remarkably good at reading other people.

They notice vulnerability. They recognize fear. They understand what someone longs to hear. They may know how to appear charming, attentive, trustworthy, or wounded.

What may be missing is the capacity to experience other people as fully human rather than as objects to be used, controlled, or discarded.

This distinction matters because we often assume that understanding another person automatically creates compassion. But accurately reading someone’s emotions is not the same as recognizing their humanity or caring about their suffering.

A skilled manipulator may understand your feelings quite accurately.

They simply use that knowledge differently.

They simply use that knowledge differently.

Perhaps this is partly why profilers are so compelling to watch. The offender studies people in order to exploit them. The profiler studies the offender in order to protect people.

Both are looking closely.

But they are looking in opposite moral directions.

Most Wounded People Do Not Become Predators

It is tempting to search a serial killer’s childhood for the moment when everything went wrong.

Sometimes the history does reveal horrifying abuse, neglect, abandonment, violence, or humiliation. Those experiences matter, and they may help explain how a person’s emotional world developed.

But millions of people experience childhood adversity without becoming cruel.

Some become anxious. Some become depressed. Some become controlling because control once created a sense of safety. Some become fiercely independent because depending upon others was dangerous. Some become caretakers, scanning every room for what everyone else needs. Some struggle with relationships, self-worth, anger, addiction, or chronic shame.

These are painful consequences.

They are not the same as becoming predatory.

Research on antisocial development suggests that a relatively small group exhibits persistent antisocial behavior beginning early in life, while a larger group may engage in problematic behavior during adolescence and later grow out of it. Persistent patterns seem to involve interacting developmental vulnerabilities and adverse environments rather than one single cause.

Risk accumulates.

But protection accumulates, too.

A caring adult matters. Early intervention matters. Consequences matter. Schools matter. Treatment matters. Belonging matters. Finding something one can do well matters. Learning to regulate anger, tolerate frustration, repair harm, and recognize another person as fully human all matter.

Chance matters more than we may like to admit.

Who notices the child?

Who dismisses him?

Who is frightened by his behavior and withdraws?

Who sees beneath it and intervenes?

Who provides limits without humiliation?

Who offers warmth without abandoning accountability?

No single adult can guarantee an outcome, but relationships can alter developmental trajectories.

Why We Keep Watching

Perhaps I watch profiler shows because they offer something real life rarely provides so neatly: the hope that even incomprehensible behavior contains a pattern.

The profilers enter a scene of terrible disorder and begin arranging the fragments. They look at what the offender did, what he did not do, what he wants others to see, and what he tried unsuccessfully to conceal.

Gradually, chaos becomes information.

The frightening stranger becomes a person with habits, vulnerabilities, routines, and a history.

And once he can be understood, perhaps he can be found.

There is something deeply reassuring in that.

We want to believe darkness leaves clues.

We want to believe someone is paying close attention.

We want to believe that intelligence, patience, and human insight can stand between vulnerability and harm.

Of course, television usually solves the case within the hour. Real investigations are not so considerate. Neither is the human psyche.

Still, the fascination remains.

What creates a person who can inflict suffering without remorse is a profound psychological mystery.

But perhaps an even greater mystery is what preserves tenderness.

What allows someone who has been neglected to become nurturing?

What allows someone who has witnessed violence to choose gentleness?

What allows a person who has been betrayed to remain capable of trust?

The absence of conscience may be grotesquely fascinating.

The persistence of conscience may be more remarkable.

A Closing Reflection

When you think about your own resilience, do not ask only what quality inside you helped you survive.

Consider who or what helped protect that quality.

Who saw you clearly?

Where did you experience belonging?

What gave you a sense of competence, meaning, humor, possibility, or hope?

Resilience is rarely a solitary achievement.

Very often, it is ordinary magic.

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Janet Nash, MSW, LISW-S, Yoga Therapist, CCTP, is a psychotherapist and the founder of Interiority Wellness. She writes about trauma, resilience, mental health, creativity, nature, and the complicated work of coming home to ourselves.