By icc.philippines on Skatehive
The absent parents, the horsewhip, the crucifix, and the child-abusing priest; the paramilitary bodyguards, the disciplinarian Mayor Liaños, and the simple fact that he was the governor’s son, proved a volatile combination of precursors for the explosive character of Rodrigo Roa Duterte. These days, psychotherapists would speak in terms of childhood trauma and how the absence of positive male role models would have distorted the teenaged Duterte’s notion of masculinity. But in those days there were no psychotherapists in Davao. By the time he’d left school, Duterte was adrift, unsure of who he was, and when he went in search of himself, no matter how noble his instincts might have been, he had a worrying set of tools at his disposal. This was a young man cut off from his own humanity; desensitised to suffering. Many years later, in 1998, when his then wife, Elizabeth Zimmerman, a former Philippine Airlines flight attendant, was seeking annulment of their marriage, a clinical psychologi