...Breaking The Chains and Ending the Cycle
 
 
 
 
0002300


On Scapegoating

 

Dysfunctional groups of all types employ scapegoating as a means of blowing off suppressed emotions. Socially sanctioned targets are selected and used by a usually non verbal, but sometimes verbal, agreement.  This is a very effective method for releasing emotional pressure, for the whole group especially since the reason for it is denied. Better still is the tautology created which keeps it all going when the scapegoating itself is denied to exist and claimed by the group to be a perception/reaction problem the scapegoat is having which justifies the treatment of the group.

Nothing keeps a dysfunctional system going like keeping it closed to external interference or examination. The scapegoat can then be 'fixed' for complaining about his/her artificially constructed and imposed social position which has now been denied to even exist. Fixing the complainer for complaining is now socially sanctioned as well.

All escape routes are then successfully blocked.

 


When Does Con-fidentiality or Privacy
 Become Secrecy?

 

When the people keeping it all Con-fidential are doing so to protect themselves, and their own interests, while allowing their victim(s) to pay the ongoing price for it.



Ontario Provincial Police
Warns Public About Website 
 March 2010
                                  

Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) in cooperation with the Ontario Corrections Intelligence Unit are warning the public about certain criminal websites possibly being used by thieves to break into your home when you are away. These websites used by criminals are linked to popular social networking websites. On these social networking websites (which are legitimate) you can update your profile to inform your friends as to when you are away from your residence and for how long. Certain criminal websites extracts this information and posts it on its pages and informs their users in any part of the world which houses are empty and at what times. When you consider how many millions of people use social networking websites around the world, the effects can be huge. The public is reminded that items posted on social networking websites are available to all on the web and not all persons on the web are “friends”. Please restrict what you put on your networking page(s) including photos of your residence/address, photos of vehicles including plate numbers and any up to the minute information as to your whereabouts, keep that for your local friends/people you know personally.

 



The Most Common Inappropriate Affect?

 

I believe that would be the laughter of the presumably ‘normal’ and sane folk as they treat the destruction of an individual’s life, mind and all around well being, as if it was entertainment.'

It is the favourite reality show for the mindless masses who consider themselves to be representational of mental ‘health.’

 

 
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We Regret to Announce the Death of:
Alice Miller, Psychoanalyst, Dies at 87;  

 

 

Related Many Problems to Parental Acts
Alice Miller, a psychoanalyst who repositioned the family as a locus of dysfunction with her theory that parental power and punishment lay at the root of many human problems, died at her home in Provence on April 14. She was 87.

For full article click on the link in her name

 
 

Covert Rush 07/09/2010

The Covert Rush
By Patricia Lefave, self diagnosed monophrenic

We who are abused in a variety of ways; physical, sexual, psychological, verbal, are routinely told by our abusers and by their supporters and enablers, who buy into the abusers' wide eyed, mystified act, that we must deny the reality of our experience so that THEY can deny our awareness of it. Our awareness threatens their 'covert' thinking style and behaviour upon which the feelings of power and control over us depends. Without the self delusion of the abuser, there is no rush to make them FEEL better, and this is all about how they FEEL and not about the reality of the situation or the actual relationship at all.


Abusers deny that abuse is abuse since if they recognized it for what it was, they would have to stop, and then they would have no way to FEEL better. If you think of it in terms of addiction you will be able to make better sense of it. It is like an addiction to power and control over someone else. Just like when talking to an alcoholic or an addict who is using, you are talking to the alcohol or to the drugs and not the person, when talking to an abuser or a bully, you are talking to the power rush and not a reasoning individual. Your focus may be on solving the problem for obvious reasons, but his or her focus is on denying there is any problem with them (like alcoholics deny the drinking problem and tell you that seeing them as drunks is YOUR problem) and on getting their 'fix' in the form of the self delusion and power rush.


Abusers are addicted to their warped thinking patterns. You cannot reason with that because it is not reason based; it is emotion based.


We who are targeted are often those who are quiet or non competitive so we don't understand the thinking style of the abuser. It makes nos sense to us and for good reason, but the abuser hears 'makes no sense' as a flaw in US and not as a simple statement of our awareness of his or her senselessness. Ironically it is because we are, the way we are, more self contained with BETTER boundaries, which often makes us targets for those who see life as a 'contest' against others which they must 'win' by invalidating the other point of view.


When we look at an abuser seemingly 'confused' by their thinking, the abuser sees our 'confusion' and assesses that as the sign of an 'inferior' mind. Of course he or she is keeping that assessment to him/herself since communicating directly with an 'inferior' would ruin everything.


That is why when we ask them what they think they re doing or what is going on in them, they don't tell us. Telling us about what is in fact, already perfectly obvious to us, would ruin their self delusion. So they work to keep the world divided into the split reality of 'them and us.' The root of this thinking is in ALL dysfunctional families but it is more a matter of degree than substance. No one can ever 'make something of themselves' unless they first have something, or someone, to whom they can compare themselves, who is 'less than' they.

That is how life is turned into a contest of 'winners and losers' instead of a course of growing SELF awareness and individuation with good boundaries, which is the point of living and what it is all about for me and for many like me.


So in a way it IS like being from two different planets, or universes, and should not be all that surprising that when abuse victims break down, a common symbolic experience when in altered states is that of believing and/or expressing the idea that either we, or the others, are 'aliens.'

On a certain level of understanding that is a very true and accurate statement.
 
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I found this book VERY helpful and I think many of my readers will too. It is not new, but new enough that it may still be available in libraries.

A Few Words and Phrases From:

 

Emotional Blackmail

By Susan Forward, PhD.

 

 

“Why can’t I ever get my point across?...Blackmailers can skillfully mask the pressure they are applying to us, and often, we experience it in ways that make us question our perception of what’s happening…Yet, no matter how different they appear on the surface, they all have major traits in common…

…The people we are coming up against in these can’t-win situations are skilled manipulators.

 

Chapter 1:

Diagnosis: Emotional Blackmail

Sub section:  What’s the real motive?

If someone’s primary goal is ‘to win…’ There’s no balance of power…

 

Chapter 2:

The Four Faces of Blackmail:

Punishers, Self Punishers, Sufferers and Tantalizers.

 

3. Their Blind Spots—and Ours

“…They genuinely believe in the correctness of what they are doing and the rightness of what they want…They tend to fuse and enmesh themselves with those around them.

 

Chapter 4:

(My own favourite Chapter: I feel like I could also name this one “Psychiatric Blackmail: tools of the trade’, since it fits so well)

 

Tools of the Trade:

Sub headings

The Spin Doctor, Confusing Labels, Making us ‘Bad’, Pathologizing, What’s Wrong with YOU?, Dangerous secrets, Enlisting Allies, Bringing in Fresh Troops, Calling on a Hidden Authority, (God, psychiatrists etc.) Negative Comparisons (to others who are ‘better’ than you because they co-operate)

‘…The ‘spin involves applying adjectives—positive ones to the blackmailer and the compliant target; negative ones to the person who resists… The experience is disorienting…we begin to internalize the blackmailer’s questions about our perceptions, our character, our worth, our desirability, our values. We are trapped in a dense FOG…We buy into the spin because we want our friends, lovers, bosses and family members to be right and good, not mean unfeeling or oppressive…

 

Sub Heading

It’s All About Them

…‘All the blackmailers we’ve seen are focused almost totally on THEIR needs, THEIR desires; they don’t seem to be the least bit interested in OUR needs or how their pressure is affecting us. Blackmailers can be like steamrollers when we don’t satisfy them, becoming ruthless in their single minded pursuit of their goals…It is a strange kind of love that is so blind to the target’s feelings…

 

Making Mountains Out of Molehills

Sub heading

Teaching us a Lesson

 

…’Insults an infantilizing are similarly explained away with the, ‘it’s for your own good rationale… there are attractive payoffs to clinging to this erroneous idea of punishment as training. Blackmailers can live with almost anything if they can make targets seem like dunces…In this way they can avoid any introspection…’

 

 

Old Battles, New Victims

…’the blackmailer strikes out at a target who has become a stand-in for a figure from the past…’ (this is known as acting out on a surrogate)

 

The Blame- Taker

…’ In fact, they [blackmailers] demand that we buy into it. If they’re displeased, we’re the problem. And our compliance with them is the solution. Under pressure from her family to recant or face exile…She had become the family scapegoat… it is not uncommon for one person to become the repository of everything that goes wrong in the family…in order to keep everyone else in balance…It is especially tough to believe your own perceptions are valid when people you love are telling you how crazy, wrong or sick you are…

 

A Vicious Cycle

 ..”It was a totally no-win situation…Under pressure we do something that doesn’t fit with who we are…”

 

Rationalizing and Justifying

“Protecting our integrity can be frightening and lonely…She did what many blackmail targets do given a choice between being true to themselves and complying with what someone else wants: she rationalized.’

 

The Impact on Our Well Being

‘Emotional blackmail leaves us full of unexpressed smoldering feelings.’

The Impact on the Relationship

Shutting Down

Targets of emotional blackmail become so accustomed to negative judgments disapproval, pressure and overreactions that…they are reluctant to share major parts of their lives. We stop talking about… (listed)…Just below the artificial calm that surrounds a placated blackmailer and a target who has given in, is the widening chasm that is opening between them….In a blackmail tainted situation, relationships with friends , lovers and family members that once had real depth begins to get thinner as the roster of safe topics shrinks.’

A New Dance

Be prepared for even more pressure as blackmailers try to regain their position.

 



Alice Miller, child abuse and mistreatment
 
   
 
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