We Are Not Alone - Finding Murder Suicide Help Online

Murder suicide is the kind of tragedy that leaves all of us asking why. That's what we're figuring out by talking to the people who've lived through it unlike the often-sensational coverage of True Crime in the media the aim of our podcast is to give our viewers and our listeners an up close and personal accurate account of murder suicide the risk factors the personal experience and the aftermath on our podcast the real expert is a person who's lived through it, the Survivor.

In our second episode, premiering April 8, Joni Johnston, a forensic psychologist and private investigator, and Jacquelyn Jamason, a mental health professional, are our hosts. 

Episode 2 - Mitch brings the President of MSLN in to discuss his losses, almost 35 years ago. Mitch suffered alone, in silence, for most of those years until finding murder suicide help online in the first of it's kind support group. He talks about why support is so important, and the power of forgiveness.

A note from Mitch:

My reasons for being public about my loss are very personal to me. My loss came at a time when there were almost zero resources to help with loss grief from a murder suicide.  

The internet was just a dream and social media was nonexistent. It was 1990. 

Now having the opportunity to speak out about my   loss is not only therapeutic to me but hopefully helpful to the others who have had a similar loss of a MS.  

My story is just one of a multitude of different scenarios how a Murder suicide can take place. Mine is the most common with a husband taking the wife then himself.  

When it happened to me, I was 33 yrs old. It still made me feel as though I had become an orphan at that moment. I immediately suffered from terrible anxiety and felt very isolated from the normal world.  I spent many years waiting and wondering when the pain was going to go away. Sadly, I now will say it doesn’t. I will say it changes and fades and becomes softer as time moves on.      

Around the 15-year mark, I began to realize I wanted to reach out to other loss survivors to share my story and maybe help them in their journey.  I have to say, I had never met another person who had lost anyone from a murder suicide.  I started to dream I could travel the country and speak to survivors and offer a beacon of hope to them. Our community of murder suicides is a very small one compared to suicide loss. Although the numbers may show this, it is still a fact we lose 1000 to 1200 people a year to murder suicide. This has a direct proportion to over 10,000 impacted family and friends from this type of tragedy.       

My point of this is, WE ARE NOT ALONE HERE!         

Speaking out after a huge loss is not the easiest thing to do. And it is not for everyone. I found it in me to be the next thing I needed to do.  

As I tell my story each time, it allows me to heal a bit more.  

My hope is to reach as many impacted people as possible and just convey a message of hope. Hope and assurance that it will get better. Slowly most likely but it will. We need this community to band together and offer support to let all of us know, we are not alone in our grief.  

Mitch’s Quotes from Episode 2: 

“My story is I think a little bit, like, you can equate it to vanilla ice cream. It's kind of bland, but it's delicious and everybody likes it. A lot of people can identify with it. But, you know, my early life was a good childhood. The only things that I could see, is I always knew I had, or was loved deeply by both my parents. However I'm not ashamed to admit their marriage was not a good marriage. My earliest memories, there was always fighting. And my father ended up being a workaholic to to support his family and was not around quite a bit. I had a tremendously close relationship with my mother but I always, always felt the disconnect from my dad. 

my father never raised the hand to the children. I think one time, my father gave me a smack, but I will tell you I was raised, I was spanked by my mom and, you know, that's a whole different issue on how we raise children today. I don't think I have any psychological side effects from it. But no. The, you know, the unloving dynamics of my parents caused a disconnect, possibly that has hurt me throughout my life, didn't have a good role model. But I believe it took over 40 years for my dad to develop… I'm not a psychologist, a psychosis, or at least to say he did in my opinion have a mental breakdown on that night from the culmination of everything he lived with. Where he lost the ability to see reality, and killed my mother and himself.” 

“Loneliness, I still get choked up it's the worst. You know, if it takes a team of people, civilized society to go through a tragedy like we suffer. And again, so many different possibilities of those tragedies. But if you don't have the support system you don't have a place to talk about it it's just going to be difficult it'll just fester, forever almost.” 

“The anxiety that I experienced, anxiety, the attacks, social debilitating. I was combination of embarrassed, my dad would do something like this, ashamed that my dad did something like this - put a black mark on my name, my family name. And it was such an overwhelming feeling of, you know, the world knows what happened. I brought this up in support meetings from almost the day I joined and people resonate with it. I felt like a rock star not a good one that, you know, I'm not Bon Jovi and I'm not Aerosmith. But I had to go into Manhattan and do business the week after, two weeks after, and I vividly remember being at the train station feeling that the hundreds of people around me knew my story and. of course they didn't. But I felt that way and I went through life being ashamed of what my father did.” 

Joni: What does that do the fact if you have somebody that you used to love, for example? And now this person has murdered somebody else that you love. I mean how does that affect do you think the healing process and going moving forward? 

Mitch: “It absolutely hinders the healing process. The amount of confusion that I suffered, and still suffer with today, I will be honest here I believed I can use the word “hate.” That I hated my father. I couldn't believe what he did, but compound it, that did he realize that that he screwed up my life? Because I spent so many years debilitated by PTSD that, you know, socially I couldn't do things. My health started to suffer, which to this day, I believe I have issues from PTSD. I was so angry at my father for doing what he did, and I'm not really sure if I could say to me, or to my mother, which I'm more mad at. But that that is a hard toll. I have a lot of people in group that, sometimes the other person, you know, the victim, is almost a stranger to the family. Girlfriend, somebody that the family didn't know very well, then the perpetrator ends up dying by suicide. To me it's a different dynamic. I support these people I let them, everybody that has murdered suicide in one way or another is welcome to come to my groups. And I don't judge. I try not to carry my feelings into a meeting. I do have a habit of doing that, so I like to let others share and talk. But that, nobody's ever asked me that question. And it took me 30 years to understand, you know, all you hear about is “If you don't forgive, you'll never move forward.” And I'm like, “There's no way I'm going to forgive.” So even to this day I do not forgive my father. However, I've learned to forgive myself for the anger that I've, that was manifested and carried throughout my adult life.”