I see. I thought I was talking to a male sadist. Never met a female one before. So, it just so happens that I can relate to inflicting emotional abuse. Making other people feel bad about themselves. That was a diffiult process to change as I more or less see the faults and vulnerabilities in people and register them, not necessarily with the conscious intent of hurting...but then it just slips out. It especially slips out if the person has done or said something that offended me.

In terms of talking someone into self-harm, I have made those efforts too. I was locked up next to an old guy who had killed two people and he was banking on everyone being afraid of him in order to get away with having no consequences for the words that came out of his mouth. I asked him politely to stop, and he ignored the request; I asked a second time, and he ignored me again, trying to scare me and screw with my head. I then warned him that if he did not stop talking s**t, I was going to give him a taste of my own s***t and it would not smell good and would not be fun to clean up. He ignored my warning. I took a giant crap into a milk carton, peed in it, mixed it up, then poured it into a clean, empty shampoo bottle; I hawked up phlem, I picked bugers, I even masterbated, and added these ingedients to the bottle. Then I let it ferment for a week. The gas had to be burped every day and just those little whiffs of gas was enough to make me gag and come close to vomitting. I knew the impact would be unforgetable. I took off the shampoo cap and made a plug or the top. Then one morning I came out for my shower. After I showered, I stopped by his cell door, put the bottle under his cell door, with the plug pointing toward him, and I stomped on the bottle as hard as I could then kicked it into his cell as far as I could. I then ran back to my cell and the cell door closed behind me. A few seconds later, I heard him shouting like an angry gorilla. He was murderously mad and demanded to know who did that to him. I confessed. So he promised to kill me, and made numerous threats to kill me. And that was the invitation that I needed to start becoming REALLY MEAN. First I stripped away his pride by pointing out that both of his murders were cowardly acts against defenseless people (one being a woman). I laughed at him, mocked him, and laughed at him some more. Everybody else laughed at him too. He had no friends in there: his mouth alienated him from everybody, inmates as well as guards, but especially guards. They had mics in every cell for two-way communication with the guard station so the entire thing became entertainment for guards and inmates alike. After stripping away his pride, I began dissecting his psyche all the way back to his childhood. I had heard him mentioning a few things to other people, heard other people mention things about his cases and his history in general population, and the rest was statistical probabilities. I knew he was paranoid and thought everyone was talking about him; I knew his mother used to beat him; I knew he killed a woman then went to prison; I knew he stabbed a guy to death in prison...but it was a victim who was not expecting it nor would he have been prepared to fight back as the victim was set to go home the very next day; I knew that before the second killing, this scary "murderer" had something straight up taken from him in full view of all the other inmates (and at this time period, him not doing anything about it was an invitation for everyone else to take, take, take). I had surmised he didn't have an active father in his life, due to some facts and stats and him omitting any mention of him in his conversations with other inmates. I also knew that he verbally assaulted the guards daily and they hated his guts, and I could get away with doing whatever I wanted to do to him, so it was game-on.

After taking away his pride, the next thing I took away from him was his sense of safety, and took away control. I told him he had a whole lot of people who didn't like him, a massive amount, people who think he should pay for what he has done. I told him that I heard maintenance guards saying that we would experiencing electrical problems with the doors that night. Also, I asked him how he liked the fact that the guards watched me do what I did and didn't write me up. In fact, one guard had eventually came into the pod with a clean up kit and he was laughing, and when he got to the guy's cell, he said "Why would you do this to yourself?" Coincidentally, this guy had verbally abused that guard in the past too. And while I was warning him about the electrical issues, his door began to open with me right in front of it, then closed just as suddenly. The guards were playing right along with this. "Sweet dreams," I said. The next day, I asked him how he slept. I also asked him what his favorite color was, and he asked me why. I told him I was trying to decide what color to use for my next painting, and then I told him "I was thinking about using the color...RED." Little things like that. Kept him scared and tense. One day I returned from a visit, and I stopped by his celldoor and told him I had just finished reading his prison file and mental health file and I was disgusted with him, then I locked down (inmates aren't supposed to see their own files, much less any other inmates' files). This made him feel powerless and at my mercy. I hadn't read his file, but the guards did ask me if I wouldn't mind doing what I did to him a second time; they loved it that much. I actually did ask them if they could arrange for the doors to open, to have a mechanical glitch, an accident. The only reason they said no is because they didn't want me to be in his situation (knowing you are going to die in that cell due to a life sentence). After telling him about his file, that was a perfect segway to begin picking his life apart.

I told him to stop me when I was wrong. His father wasn't a part of his life. He always wondered if that was his fault and could not resist blaming himself. He could not receive love and affection from his father, so he sought it from his mother. But she was a mean woman. She yelled at him all the time and beat him, and did not meet his emotional needs, made him feel unsafe, made him feel rejected. He had no choice but to endure it, still clinging onto the hope that she would someday love him. But as he got older, he realized that would not happen. Feeling rejected by both his mothe and his father gave him poor self esteem, and poor self-worth, and he did not know how to cope with the weight of this reality and did not want anyone else to recognize him for being the mental wreck that he was, so he began to alienate everybody, to keep everyone at bay. He also did not want anyone else to get close to him because he could not endure being rejected again. Alienating everyone also fueled his own paranoia; he projected his own rage. But this need to be loved and accepted prompted him to take the risk of rejection anyways. I asked him, "why did you the kill the girl?" "Shut up! Shut up!" He killed the girl because she saw him for what he was, and he feared she would reject him. The girl then became an object of transferrence in which she represented his mother, and he killed her to maintain control, and in an attempt to cope with the rejection burning inside of him. So he gets life in prison. And he leaves behind relatives, even children. He swore to himself he would not be like his dad, that he would be a part of his peoples' lives, but it just did not work out that way. He was now doing time with some very dangeous people. He tried to fit in, to have some fun with homosexuals, but his paranoia was driving him insane. When a dangerous man took his prison girlfriend away from him, he lost what was left of his face, and he feared that he would lose everything that he had, and become some man's girlfriend too. The fear and paranoia was too much to bear. So he stabbed a man to death who was set to go home to the free world the next day, over a pair of "tennis shoes." Like it was really over a pair of tennis shoes. He was too proud to check in to protective custody, and his fear and paranoia would not permit him to endure a snitch label for the rest of his life. Thus, he accomished the same thing as checking into protective custody by killing a defenseless man: he put himself into solitary confinement (administrative segregation) to finish his life sentence in peace. And that's where he was when he crossed my path. I asked him, "Am I incorrect?" He was breaking down, asking me why I was doing this to him. He was too proud to ask me to stop picking on him, but the distress in his voice told me I was correct about everything.

That's when I started planting the seeds of suicide. I sank my teeth into his childhood self-blame, and I pointed out how he made the choice to abandon his family knowing full well how it felt to be abandoned. I also pointed out that the guilt of doing this did not stop him from leaching money from his relatives so he could baloon his fat belly with chocolate candy bars. If he loved his people, I suggested, he should let them go. I reminded him of the girl he killed, whose only crime was reminding him of his mother. He ended her life so he could enjoy this wonderful life of his behind bars. Then he ended another life so he could enjoy solitary confinement because he was nothing but a coward. And now, he is going to die in that cell. He is never getting out alive, will never have a life again: he gave it up. His life was over: he was just waiting to be put in a box and buried. I asked him what it was about his cell that he loved so much.

Another person kept telling him not to talk to me, not to tell me anything about himself. That person wrote letters to his own people to call the warden and get him moved away from me. That, of course, trickled down to me. And I stopped by his cell and told him, "A little bird told me that another little bird has been singing..." He said, "a little bird?" Then he realized what I was saying, and he shouted "Damn it!" "Damn it!" I mocked, then I told him that if he needed help or needed anything at all, he needed to come talk to me.
I wore him down. I told him if he would just pass a razor under my door, and put his hand under my door, I would hold his hand, and he would not feel a thing, that I would talk to him about the happiest time in his life, and then he would go there. "Why would I want to do that?" he asked. "I don't see anyone else beating down your door to help you," I replied. "HELP?" he said. "Yeah! Do you seriously want to die in that cell of old age another 10 years from now, and continue losing your mind?" I told him I knew about the voice in his head too. "The voice?" he asked. "Yeah! The mean voice that criticizes everything you do and say. Do you really want to live with that voice? Listen, if you come to me, it will be painless; but if I have to come to you, it will be very painful."

He was transferred away from me. And mental health staff accused me of being a malignant narcissist. Some people in the pod even thought I was too hard on him. He is still alive, still in solitary, and it has been over 20 years (he's been in solitary for 30 years).

I was not successful in talking him into self-harm, but I did try. So I can relate. But he was not innocent, by my definition of innocent. No, he was killer, and he got on my bad side.