Stepfamily loners

When Dakota read the 1,518-page manifesto and personal details of the Norwegian spree murderer, Anders Behring Breivik, she couldn’t help seeing the similarities between his stepfamily childhood and hers – wondering if being an only child whose parents divorced and then married others, bringing other children into the mix, had any bearing on both of them becoming loners in adulthood.

“Breivik starts off his manifesto with an introduction on how cultural Marxism began and in it was a telling statement that summed up, I think, what his problem was,” says Dakota. “He wrote: back in the 1950s ‘children grew up in two-parent households, and the mother was there to meet the child when he came home from school’. Note that he used child rather than children (when in the 1950s an only child was rare) and a he-child rather than a she-child.”

“I think he was telling us that his parents fell foul of the cultural Marxist philosophy about the irrelevance of marriage and stay-at-home-moms and that he suffered because his parents had split up when he was a baby, found new partners, and nobody was there to meet him when he came home from school because mom was working.”

“That was exactly how my life started off,” says Dakota, “and while it may be true also for many late Gen-X / early Gen-Y kids, only sensitive souls would suffer from it – and because I did, I think Breivik did, too.”

“His mother, Wenche Behring, a nurse, had a daughter from a previous relationship and his father, Jens Breivik, a diplomat, brought three children with him,” says Dakota. “When Jens took up with a work colleague, Tove, he moved to France, and Wenche later married Tore, an army officer, and settled in Norway.”

“There was a bitter custody case – apparently Jens and Tove thought they would make better parents than Wenche and Tore – but they lost and Breivik’s primary male role model was defaulted to his stepfather, a likable goat, who infected Wenche with genital herpes and ended up spending his time in Thailand with prostitutes.”

“Breivik visited Jens and Tove regularly in France until they split up when he was 12, and while Jens isolated himself from his son from the age of 15 (when the boy got busted for graffiti), Tove remained friendly with the boy – as did his half-siblings.”

“He maintains that as a result of his super-liberal, totally undisciplined, matriarchal upbringing he had been feminized to a certain degree – and he disapproved of that,” says Dakota. “He obviously lacked a strong father figure – as I did – and because we both grew up with far too much freedom to do our own thing, without boundaries and without a proper family structure, we tended towards being loners in adulthood.”

“We both liked our stepfathers – and stepmothers – but very clearly there was an antagonism between Breivik and his mother (he was ashamed that contracting genital herpes affected her brain, giving her a mental age of a 10 year old), as well as an antagonism between Breivik and his natural father, Jens (perhaps for a similar reason).”

“Girls grow up a lot faster than boys so I would imagine his being shunned by his father at the age of 15 – when he needed stern guidance most - would have impacted him,” says Dakokta, “probably making him turn inward, become self-reliant and self-absorbed – far more than any normal boy of 15 would be.”

“I would have liked to have been a child of the 1950s growing up in a two-parent household with my mother there to meet me when I came home from school,” says Dakota, “and I think if Breivik had had this upbringing, one that he obviously yearned for, maybe he would have had a better relationship with his parents and a good grounding for marriage and children of his own – as I would, too.”

“Instead, we turned out to be loners with a jaundiced view of family life – and perhaps society as a whole,” sighs Dakota. “But the path he followed with his lone-wolf ways was so different to mine that something else must have triggered him to do what he did – drugs, violent computer games or a mental illness – who knows?”

Read more by Dakota:

Was Breivik a secret Israeli operative?
The ethics of politicizing children
Breivik’s online fantasy world
Dating psychos like Breivik
Breivik’s social contract betrayal
Breivik’s July 22 Sarajevo Code
Breivik the white knight
Breivik, Christ’s Knight
be proud of your race!
immigration promotes white shame?

See also:

Breivik’s Aquarian Humanity?
Age Secrets of Anders Behring Breivik