Punished by Helplessness

The plan is revealed, and it is more terrible than any chains: Simon was not going to torture or kill. He was going to die in front of the chained Jacob — to hand him, in concentrated form, everything he himself had lived: to watch and be unable to change anything. The punishment is not pain — it is helplessness: the very state Simon could not leave for years.

In psychology such a design is described as a message-suicide: a death planned as a final communication — “you will see, and you will understand”. What matters is what actually stands behind such designs: not a wish to die, but a desperate need to be finally seen and heard — the need that found no other road. If that need is familiar to you from the inside — please, give it another road: say it to a living person. It works. Even now.