It’s so good to see that there is now actual terminology out there to describe these feelings!
❤️
I remember years ago, I was in the Brutus Club at Carradine College, Oxford. That’s how I got into this industry: we each had to do an assassination as part of our initiation, so that we’d all have some dirt on each other in future. The initiation was a nice black tie dinner with lots of wine and cocaine, and then the freshers all had to do a hit together while the seniors watched and helped.
Anyway, when I was in my fourth year (MA Politics, Philosophy and Economics, if you’re interested), I was getting to be quite an old hand at the game, and was looking after some freshers on their first hit. We bumped off this elderly homeless local man: I drugged him and then passed the clawhammer round the freshies, so they could each get a few licks in and wouldn’t know which one had actually done him in.
So this one poor little chap, Hector, he was a bit nervous about the whole thing, so we all gave him some encouragement and moral support (“go on, do it, we all swore we’d do it, none of us can go back from this”) and he managed to get a good crack on the target’s skull.
Afterwards, he was having a classic “subspace”, just as Buzzfeed described! ^_^ He was pale and shaking, and he kept choking and stuttering and babbling “this can’t be happening, this isn’t really me, oh god there’s so much blood, I can’t feel my hands” over and over again. He wasn’t making any sense, and he was my responsibility as the senior!
😫
Fortunately, even though we didn’t know the word for it at the time, we gave Hector lots of “aftercare”. We shepherded him away from the “scene” (coincidentally, we called it a scene even back in those days: the police still call it a “crime scene” but we’ve reclaimed that word for our community) and we gave him lots more wine and cocaine and put him to bed in his dorm room with a bucket next to his bed. I guess it was a pretty intense scene, though I’m not sure he was taking time to come back to reality – it was more like he never left. You’ve got to have a certain detachment for this kind of work, otherwise you just don’t enjoy it.
And while Hector ended up dropping out of university and drinking himself to death at 30, the rest of us went on to have successful careers in the assassination, organised crime and financial services industries! ^_^ So I’d say, nine times out of ten, aftercare for subspace really works!