When Men Can’t Handle Losing Control
I’ve Seen This Before
While the story of what happened to that family in Louisiana was shocking, it isn’t surprising. I’ve seen it before. I know someone who did almost the exact same thing.
Years ago, I served on staff with a guy I’ll call Daniel. We were young, married, trying to figure out ministry and life at the same time. We bonded fast. We both loved The Office, talked sports constantly, and spent a lot of time comparing notes on what it meant to raise kids while carrying the weight of church expectations. There’s a very specific kind of pressure that comes with being a young pastor with a family. You’re supposed to hold everything together. And somehow you’re supposed to do that in a season when your life feels like it’s barely staying above water.
Daniel was my daughter’s kids pastor. I trusted him completely. Our families were tangled up in each other’s lives. Even after we went different directions, we’d check in every once in a while. Nothing deep, just enough to stay in touch.
So when I saw his name attached to what happened that night… shocked isn’t the right word. It was more along the lines of earth shattering.
In the middle of the night, while his family was asleep, he started stabbing them. His wife. His kids. One of his children called 911 while running from him. Another told police their dad just came into the room and started attacking everyone. Afterward, he set the house on fire. He later told investigators he had been hiding how bad things had gotten financially. They were about to be evicted. His family had no idea. He said he thought it would be better if they all died than for them to live through the fallout of what he had done.
I remember reading all that and not being able to make it make sense. I mean… I understood stress. I understood fear or shame or feeling like things are about to collapse. I get all of that.
What I couldn’t understand was how someone crosses that line. How do you go from “I’m in over my head” to “I’m going to take everyone with me?”
The Pattern Ignored
And now… here we are again.
A man in Louisiana, overwhelmed, coming apart over a divorce, kills eight children. Seven of them his own. Shoots his wife. Shoots another woman. It ends in a police chase. He’s dead. And we all do the same thing we always do… shake our heads, call it evil, call it unthinkable, try to push it into a category that makes it feel like an exception instead of something that we all need to be grappling with.
It is not one story. It keeps happening. Different names, same pattern. A relationship breaking down. A man losing his grip on something. The people closest to him paying the price.
The numbers on this aren’t complicated. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, about a third of women murdered in the U.S. were killed by a current or former partner. For men, that figure is around 6%. Most women who are killed know the person who killed them and far more often than men, that person is someone they were in a relationship with.
The timing isn’t random either. The most dangerous moment in an abusive relationship isn’t during… it’s when she tries to leave. Separation, divorce, custody fights that’s when the risk goes up, not down. Half of women killed by an intimate partner are murdered as or after they try to leave, or while family court proceedings are already underway.
This isn’t a string of unrelated tragedies. There is a pattern here, even if we don’t want to admit it.
What We’re Actually Watching
We keep wanting to treat these like isolated incidents. Like something just snapped. Like it came out of nowhere.
It didn’t.
There’s a thread running through all of this, and I think we avoid pulling on it because it gets uncomfortably close to home.
What we’re watching is the end result of a system that has spent generations telling men that they are in control, that their role is to lead, that their identity is tied to being the one who holds everything together and that losing that control is a kind of death.
For some men, that runs so deep they don’t feel the loss as metaphorical.
So when a marriage ends, it’s not just a relationship ending. It’s identity collapsing. When a wife leaves, it’s not just grief. It’s humiliation and/or failure. If you’ve been raised to believe that your worth is tied to control, then losing it doesn’t register as hurt. It’s more like annihilation.
And some men would rather destroy everything than sit in that feeling.
That’s what we’re seeing play out, over and over again. Researchers who study domestic homicide describe perpetrators as carrying “anger, revenge, resentment” and note that during a divorce, men driven by possession and control “see even more things disappearing” and have “even less control over what happens.”
You can call it a mental health issue, and that’s part of it. You can point to stress, financial pressure, unprocessed trauma. All of that matters. But stopping there only misses the bigger issue.
There are plenty of people under serious stress who don’t pick up a weapon and turn on their family. What makes the difference is the framework underneath… the story a man has been told about who he is and what he’s entitled to.
The World They Were Promised Never Really Exited
Right now, that framework is being challenged in a way it hasn’t been before.
Women are leaving relationships at higher rates. They have more economic independence, more legal recourse, more social support. They don’t have to stay. They don’t have to get married. And for men whose entire sense of self was built on being needed, on being in charge, on being the one who is obeyed… that reality is an existential threat.
You can see it in how quickly some men run toward spaces that validate their rage. The manosphere (that loose sprawl of red pill forums, alpha male influencers, and incel communities) is not a fringe thing anymore. According to the Movember Foundation, two-thirds of young men regularly engage with masculinity influencers online. Research in the UK found that 80% of 16 and 17-year-old boys had consumed content created by Andrew Tate.
These spaces aren’t offering men tools to process grief or build healthier lives. They frame men’s experiences as loss (a loss of control, a loss of masculinity, a loss of meaning) and then offer to help men “take it back” from women. Manosphere influencers take the genuine sadness and confusion many young men feel and try to turn it into anger and aggression, offering conspiratorial explanations instead of real support.
Research has found that young men who actively engage with masculinity influencers report higher levels of worthlessness and nervousness, are less likely to prioritize their mental health, and place more value on dominance and status among peers.
In other words, it doesn’t actually help. It just redirects the wound.
All of that feeds directly into the same belief system that shows up in these tragedies: control equals worth, being challenged equals being disrespected, losing a relationship equals losing everything.
The American Church Helped Build This
This isn’t a fringe problem. It isn’t confined to online spaces or to men who’ve clearly gone off the rails. This has been baked into our culture for a long time. In our homes. In our churches. In the ways we’ve talked about marriage, authority, gender roles, and submission for decades.
We dressed it up in spiritual language. Called it God’s design. Told men they were the head. Told women their role was to support, to follow, to trust. And then we acted confused when some men couldn’t cope with a world where that is not the reality.
That dynamic I described with Daniel wasn’t unique to him. It’s common in ministry environments. Young men trained to be leaders, to be strong, to be the ones who hold everything together. Vulnerability is practically forbidden. Asking for help signals weakness. Admitting your marriage is struggling or your finances are a disaster while you’re standing behind a pulpit? That is not something the culture makes room for.
So the shame compounds quietly, behind closed doors, until it doesn’t.
The American church helped form this. And until it’s honest about that, nothing meaningfully changes.
What We Need From Each Other
This is not about politics, and it’s not about demonizing men. The reality is that the same rigid framework that pushes some men toward violence is also quietly destroying men who would never hurt anyone. Men today carry an increasing burden of mental illness, including depression and anxiety, and many young men are insecure and lonely but genuinely unsure how to ask for help or work through what they’re experiencing. Traditional masculine ideals leave men isolated and suffering in silence. That’s a real problem, and it deserves a real response.
But the response can’t be to hand them a language of entitlement and grievance. That helps no one, least of all them.
What would actually help is teaching boys from the start that being a man is not about control. That your worth doesn’t collapse when a relationship ends. That the people around you are not yours to own.That sitting with loss, asking for help, and grieving openly is not weakness… that’s how people actually survive hard things.
It sounds basic. But it cuts directly against what a lot of men have been taught, in church, at home, and now online.
So when something like Louisiana happens, and we all go through the familiar motions of shock and grief (or something resembling grief) and the move on… we must collectively decide to not do that again. We need to sit with this for a while.
Because the data tells us this will happen again. The pattern isn’t mysterious and the warning signs aren’t invisible. Those warning signs that precede intimate partner homicide are common but often misunderstood or dismissed as just a “messy divorce.”
It’s not a messy divorce. It’s a man who was never taught how to lose, in a culture that told him losing wasn’t allowed.
We know how this ends when nothing changes. We’ve seen it enough times.
If you or someone you know is in a dangerous situation, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is available 24/7 at 1-800-799-SAFE.
Keep this vital message circulating, please!
Also happened to two high profile Black families recently - see how women are responding to the news https://substack.com/@karenattiah/note/c-245381857