Hi, this is Against Everyone with Connor Habib, a podcast featuring my conversations with countercultural figures and presenting complex, spiritual, philosophical, and political ideas in an engaging and accessible way.

Well, friends, if you've been listening to the show lately, you've heard that most of the recent episodes have, well, all of the past three have been about love.

And this episode is no exception, but it goes to a very different place.

And that is love for people that we view as beyond love or people who might have given up the right, as we might see it,

to be loved, to receive love.

This episode is with Dr. Gwen Adzad, who is a forensic psychiatrist and co-author with

Eileen Horn of The Devil You Know, Stories of Human Cruelty and Compassion.

Gwen works with serial killers,

with sex offenders, with arsonists.

And she says,

I often describe my patients as survivors of a disaster

where they are the disaster.

And I know that many of the people in her book, the book starts off, for instance,

with someone who has murdered and decapitated multiple people.

I know that these people seem so outside

or maybe so undeserving,

they've given up their foothold

in this realm of love with us because of the acts of violence that

they've committed.

But when we look through the lens of Gwen's work and people who are as patient and as open and as understanding as she is, which is rare,

we might begin to see not just images of cruelty committed, but also images of despair and of pain when we look at and

consider violent offenders. How do we cope when we see more than just the violence?

...