When there is an absence of self-love in a person the resultant feeling is one of shame. Such feelings can include humiliation, bitterness, and anger. Deep shame often results in the death of the self with a resultant inability to feel anything. The author believes that overt physical violence is not the only way to kill a child's soul. Words alone are capable of making a child feel and believe that he was worthless and rejected.
Violent criminals seem unfeeling because they actually are.
Many go to their execution with complete indifference, sometimes with relief. They cannot sympathize with others but neither can they sympathize with themselves. The person who was the receptacle of violence during his early life cannot give to others what he did not first receive. What lies underneath their rage and anger, Gilligan claims, is their early frustrated need to be loved. Ritualistic murder is an attempt to eliminate the triggered shame by the use of magical thinking.