The Captivity of Elizabeth

Josef Fritzl shocked and surprised most of the world with the bizarre story of his enslavement of his now 42 year old daughter and her two sons.  Rocking Austria with the news, his daughter exposed the horrors she suffered to the police. For 24 years she was held captive by this man, unable to even see the light of day. Before that, she was also his captive slave as his sex slave since the age of 11.  Who knows how many more of her 6 surviving children have also been his sex slaves.  We know that pedophiles have no limits to the number of children they can and will use for their sexual pleasure.

One of the questions we will likely never know the answers to is who else was involved in helping him set up his mini-prison for his progeny.  Certainly others had to have been involved in building out this sound proof cellar that even his wife didn’t know existed. It would have been too difficult for him to do this himself, authorities say. 

Child captives

The horrors of what this man has done are shocking to most people.  Raping and holding his own children captive is unthinkable for most of us.  I thank God for that fact.  Yet, stories like this come to me every day.  Perhaps they were not held captive for 24 years, but they were certainly held captive for their entire childhoods.

This is often the reality of what survivors of childhood sexual abuse. They are in fact at the total control of their abusing parents.  Their position as children gives them no rights and no way to escape, they are totally dependant on their parents for their care and have no choice but to do whatever their parents tell them to do.  If they are in some type of cult, they are even more trapped because it involves all of the people in their world.

Or split off selves

The result is a type of psychic splitting that often becomes Dissociative Identity Disorder.  For some its merely Dissociative Disorder Not Otherwise Specified, where the splits are not clear cut and do not carry clearly separate identities, only moods or jobs and memories of what occurred that is blocked out by the host. Many of us are like this, whether we realize it or not. If you have blocks of your childhood you don’t recall it could be held by a ego-state split off from your conscious awareness.

This is what explains the bizarre and inexplicable behavior of people who seem “ordinary” to the outside world and who have alter identities that behave in sometimes horrific ways. That is not to say that all DID’s have horrific things they do or have done, mostly this is not true. But this is how this sort of thing occurs.

How the Cycle of Egocentrism starts inside

Because our psyches are set up to split off awareness of things to awful for our little minds to comprehend, we send this part of our awareness into the nether regions of our mind. This part of us has been a Victim of something awful. Then perhaps this part of us has to continue to participate in horrors and to survive, models themselves after the perpetrator of the abuse. This part of them becomes like their perpetrator in order to survive so they become a Self Protector.  In order to protect themselves, they align with their perpetrator.  Or they become the caretaker of their perpetrator to survive becoming a Rescuer.

It changes everything when you recognize how the splitting occurs in all of us at some level.  When it occurs to the degree it did for Josef Fritzl, it creates a monster that most of us cannot fathom.  Yes, even Josef Fritzl deserves empathy.  What could have happened to him to make him become the horrific nightmare of a human being he became?  To be really clear: this does not justify his behavior.  He is still responsible for what he did, even if we can recognize that at some point he was a Victim as well.

What do you think?

 Is it possible to find empathy for such a monster? Like Hitler, Josef Fritzl did horrid things. But at some level he, too, was just trying to survive in the only way he could figure out to survive based on how he saw his world. Let me know what you think. Comment below.