Lionel Desmond’s social worker says he would use anger to try to regain control when faced with his fear of abandonment or his emotional vulnerability.
Kama Hamilton appeared before the 11th day of the Desmond Fatality Inquiry in Port Hawkesbury Thursday, she treated Desmond at Ste Anne’s veterans’ hospital in Quebec.
Hamilton said Desmond would lash out in anger, trying to feel in control.
“Abandonment is a situation where you feel helpless, that you’ve been left on your own,” she said. “So that also would spur, I think, the need to find control in situations where he’s feeling a fear of abandonment.”
Judge Warren Zimmer asked the last question of the day: if Desmond’s wife had finally ended their marriage, which the inquiry heard was the case in previous testimony, could he have seen suicide as an act of control?
Hamilton responded.
“It’s possible, if a person is feeling that desperate, that yes, ending things permanently would be an ultimate sense of, ‘yes, I can control this situation,'” she said. “For someone who has lived with a chronic fear of being abandoned, if indeed that’s what we observed, if that was accurate that he had lived with that, then the actual imminent threat of being abandoned would have served as a tremendous trigger.”
Testimony resumes Friday.
