After watching the first two seasons of “You” on Netflix I am speechless. There’s not enough time or space to analyse the whole series. I would love to focus my attention on the main character, however. Joe Goldberg is the best example of a person that has countless mental health issues but aren’t visible at first sight. He reminds me of Ted Bundy, but Joe’s story has a different specialty.
Most people would call Joe a psychopath, or even a sociopath. However, I think his mental health is much more complicated than that. For starters, he constantly has the need to be obsessed over someone. He craves to be involved in someone’s life and make them love him. Being independent is unknown to Joe, because he can’t deal with himself if he is not sharing his self with someone. He wants to feel valued, respected, honored, loved. Joe is severely co-dependent of his partner, which is why he is always in control of the women he’s dating. He feels insecure not knowing what his partner is doing, not because of lack of trust, but because of lack of independence.
Now, why was he a murderer? Or wasn’t he? Does killing make you a killer necessarily? After every murder he committed he would say “This is not me. I am not a killer” and then he would go and kill again. This is a clear sign of split personality disorder, as Dr. Nicky mentioned in the series. There is a part of Joe that is loving and caring and seeks good for others, but there’s also a part of Joe that seeks revenge through murder. Revenge for everything that went wrong in his childhood and isn’t his fault. Here is where Joe’s childhood PTSD steps in and shows that it’s the main reason Joe is capable of killing.
He grew up with an abusive father and a completely unstable mother. After leaving his father with his mom, he had to watch his mother being beaten many times by her boyfriends. Hiding in a closet every day, all he could feel was abandonment. He was never loved and never taken care of. All he knew was that he had to protect himself and his mom cause that was all he had. That’s when he committed his first crime, to protect the one person he craved care from. Once he pulled that bullet at the age of nine there was no coming back. That was now his way of defending his ground.
Later on his adolescence, it was no better when he lived with that bookstore guy. He was too strict on Joe, locked him up in a cage for hours, beat him, and burned him with his cigarettes. This is not exactly an image of a good childhood. Joe never in his life was loved by someone else. He felt as his existence was something random, that it would make no difference to anyone if he hadn’t been alive.
It turns out that the way this person was raised influenced his whole life. Had he been born in another environment with better circumstances he most probably wouldn’t have committed all those murders. It was all a reaction to his disturbed past.
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