Dr. Cedric Wood creates a new model of understanding school shooters and other violent acts

16 Sub Areas of Four Precursors of Violence by Young Shooters
by Cedric Wood, Ph.D., L.P.C.

A. Abusive and Trauma-Creating Parenting; Anger and Authoritarian Parenting
1. Cold, angry verbally, emotional, demeaning putdowns “toxic”
2. Loud, physically (hitting, shoving, beating) and verbally abusive
3. Chaos: too much moving, conflicting between parents in environment
4. Sly, mind-bending, manipulative mystification communication (Laing, 1965)

B. Over-Involvement, Enmeshed Parenting, Helicopter Moms “Too much love”
1.Fearful, anxious parents who fail to push a child when they need to move to the next level of independence. They meet their own emotional needs by disenabling the child. They train them to be dependent.
2. Overly insistent on being involved in some pursuit such as athletic, aesthetic, or academic pursuit. Insisting on practicing harder and longer.
3. Overly involved in helping them by doing their chores, doing their homework, doing their dirty work, cleaning up their messes (Coddling, Enabling, Indulging.) 4. Overly involved with them in an emotional, sensual, or sexual way, ie emotional incest (spousification), sensual talk or exposure (crossing boundaries) or having sex with child (sexual abuse.)

C. Permissive or Passive Parenting.
1. Taking a laissez-faire attitude, fails to give structure: chores, rules, limits, boundaries, expectations, and consequences. Lacking in structure.
2. Always giving appropriate chores, expectations and consequence but failing at following through so inconsistency becomes a problem.
3. Parents fail to enforce the rules and when the child misbehaves the parents fail to exert control and enact consequences for the bad behavior.
4. Parents live a loose or hippie lifestyle so there is very little modeling of a mature and organized person “running the household.” Drugs or alcohol use disorder. (Dr. Phil from Jan. 2017)

D. Lack of Warmth, Loss of Warmth, Lack of Love, Loss of Love
1. A loving, warm, caring parent leaves suddenly. They die, go to prison, or are forced to move far away. The parent may have been loving during early childhood but now is gone. This sudden “loss of love” is oftentimes a precursor to egopathy, sociopathy, or psychopathy in the child.
2. The experience of having a loving and attentive parent who falls ill, either emotionally, psychologically or physically and is just unable to provide the warm involvement the child needs. “Loss of warmth and attention.” This may happen after a sibling begins misbehaving or if the parent is jealous of child’s IQ, attractiveness, or abilities and can no longer praise or be supportive of the child. This includes when the parent teeters on the edge of dying or feigns being on the edge of dying. (read “A Child Called ‘It’)
3. The experience of having a parent who never feels love for the child. She or he is too busy with their own lives, either running around with friends, doing volunteer work, or building a business.
Parents are there in the house but show very little emotional involvement with the child. They provide for the child in all ways but fail to give warm attention to the child and its needs. Fails to give “due consideration” to the child.
“Checked-out parenting.” Lack of warmth.
The child feels something is wrong but can’t quite put their finger on it since the parent is 1. There present in the house and bringing home groceries, and 2. The parent protests with excuses, explanations, and ego defenses when the child asks for more attention. (mystification: see Quadrant A:4)

4. Sub-area D4 The Ice Queen; Resentful Parent
This parent is cold to his or her child. They may not have gotten the parenting they needed as children so they do not feel any parental love for the child and wishes he or she would just go away. They consider parenting a burden to be endured not a pleasure to be enjoyed. The Child may have turned out badly in appearance in some way or may look like an abusing parent or ex-spouse. This unfortunate association with a distasteful person leaves the parent feeling completely cold toward the child.

The A and B Quadrants are the “Over-controlling and too involved” parenting styles.
The B and C Quadrants are the “Indulgent” and Enabling quadrants.
The C and D Quadrants are the “Neglect” quadrants.
The D and A Quadrants are the “Trauma” quadrants.

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