Category Archives: Victimization

The Intoxication of Lunacy!

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Colorado has a group of people who are apparently serious about the notion of a flat earth.  When I started reading this I suspected it was a spoof but the more I read I realize that these people are serious.  They really do believe the earth is flat and they have “proof” that this notion is valid!  )  I have often in my “career” as a blogger used the flat earth notion to illustrate complete lunacy, a private world view for people who have lost contact with reality and created their own little imaginary world which, at the extreme, is collective psychosis.  Ideas can carry us away and because of their intoxicating effect on our mind-set we can lose all critical capacity, believing our pet “idea” even when all evidence suggests it is self-delusion. (See Denver Post story at following link:  (http://www.denverpost.com/2017/07/07/colorado-earth-flat-gravity-hoax/)

I have my own personal spoof of this lunacy in which I facetiously and sarcastically postulate a world in which “the moon is made out of cheese.” Yes, suppose during the night I am the victim of a neurological convulsion in my brain and awakened the next morning to know, with great passion, that “the moon is made out of cheese.”  If this should happen, I might take this very seriously and suddenly realize that it is the truth, that the darkness I’ve lived in has finally lifted, and I see clearly that, yes, “the moon is made out of cheese.”  Furthermore, some friends might try to intervene and set me straight but they would make no progress because, “when you know the truth, you just kinda know the truth” and no one is going to dissuade you.  Of course, finding truth always requires that others be convinced so I would start evangelizing and before long I would have a congregation of like-minded souls and we would then have the solace of validation, a solace which would be enhanced by the realization that only we saw the truth and that any “truth” is always rejected by those who are enlightened.  This insight would give us the comfort of borrowing a theme from fundamentalists of every stripe and sadly and piously understand that “we are being persecuted for His sake.”

I am here addressing one of my pet themes, best described as a toxic version of group-think, a private referential system in which validation is found only in those who have found our view of the world amenable to theirs.  When this toxicity infects any idea, ideas which might otherwise have value to others is immediately rejected by these “others” as they have no meaning to them whatsoever.  The resulting ideology, a passionate belief system that has become delusional becomes a private prison guaranteed to repel anyone who looks on from the outside.  But the rejection itself is perversely rewarding as it leaves the “true believers” with the smug satisfaction of owning “truth” which only they have apprehended.  What has happened is that very unhappy people have crafted a belief system which isolates them even further than they were to begin with and they slowly die from the suffocation that always comes from what Paul Tillich called “an empty world of self-relatedness.”  Emily Dickinson described it as “a mind too near itself to see distinctly.”

In my clinical career this phenomena was known as “insanity,” succinctly capsulized in a clinical bromide, “Mental illness is a reference problem.”  The individual who is completely mad…and we are all mad to some degree…has cut himself off from all external reference and finds great comfort in his delusional system.  For the intoxication of self-delusion resists any sobering-up that critical thinking would afford. It is easy for an out-sider, i.e. a non-believer, to quickly isolate the premise of a delusional system but just dare try to challenge that premises and you will meet great resistance.  For this “premise” represents an emotional investment the person/persons have made which cannot be relinquished without great pain.  Hypothetically, if one could reach into the heart of these people and surgically extirpate the premise, one would witness a complete melt-down.  For this premise is an existential anchor which holds its victims prisoners in a fortress from which they dare not escape.

I conclude with, still again, my favorite bumper-sticker, “Don’t believe everything you think.”

Systemic Trauma in our Culture

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When living in England briefly after the turn of the century, I had the honor of hearing a distinguished psychoanalyst,  Dr. Juliet Mitchell, speak in London on the subject of trauma.   One point she made etched itself deeply in my heart and mind— that a victim of trauma has suffered “the perforation of a membrane around their soul” which then allows a cascade of old brain fears and anxieties to cascade forth.  And with some trauma, such as sexual abuse, the real psychic pain is spiritual as down in the depths of the child’s heart, he/she is realizing that the person who purported to love him/her is stating with action, “I don’t give a shit about you.  I want what I want and I’m gonna get it regardless of how much damage it does to you.”  This trauma tells the child that he/she has no value to the perpetrator as a person.  And trauma never goes away.  The clinical task in my past life was to facilitate the grieving process and teaching adaptive responses to the anguish which would always lurk in the depths of the client’s heart.

But trauma can also be institutional and cultural.  This systemic traumatization is even more challenging as it teaches its victims on some level, “This is the norm.  Get used to it…and possibly learn to like it.”  Dr. Bruce Perry, the chief of psychiatry at the Texas Children’s Institute in Houston, has spent his career working with trauma victims and in the current edition of the literary journal, The Sun, he is interviewed and shares about the neurological wounds that take place, particularly when the victim is too young to even begin to process what is happening/has happened in “rational” terms.  He also explained how the systemic trauma inflicted upon the lower socio-economic classes is very real and creates a core identity of deprivation, giving them problems like addiction, learned helplessness, and aggressive behavior.

Trauma usually comes at the hands of those in power who are always tempted to be seduced with the prerogatives of their power and the tyranny of their assumptions.  For example, in some families I worked with in my clinical practice, the sexual abuse was multi-generational, in some sense a “family tradition” and men, when but young boys, learned that women were property, “things”, and that by virtue of their masculinity they were entitled to use “things” as desired, even if they were your own children.  And this does not mean these men have no redeeming human values but their sense of prerogative and entitlement is so pervasive that when sexual desire is on the table it over rides little niceties like “the teachings of Jesus” which they are “devoted” to most of the time.  The real issues in life, individually and collectively, are always unconscious.

Entitlement is a core issue in any tribe.  Those who have climbed to the top of the heap, i.e. the “patriarchy” in contemporary vernacular, see the world through the template of their own unexamined values and wishes and feel perfectly comfortable manipulating individuals, and even the whole tribe, to accomplish their end.  And, once again, I’m not going to say these power mongers are necessarily “bad” people but they are unconscious and have a built-in resistance to even considering the phenomena of an unconscious.  It would be too troubling.  And out of the unacknowledged dark recesses of our heart always flows “bad.”

Perry’s observations accentuated for me the importance of the economic divide that is egregiously apparent in my country today.  The wealthy “One per cent” are so trapped in their own narcissism that they cannot see the harm they are doing to the whole country, even to themselves, by not giving due attention to the middle and lower socio economic classes.  And now my country has a president elect who could be the poster boy for Narcissists Anonymous as his disregard for “otherness” and the attending “self-reflectiveness” is sorely lacking.  The trauma has already been inflicted on the dispossessed classes but now an administration is being set up which appears to be designed to further their alienation and hidden despair, leaving them with nothing to do but “cling to their guns and religion.”

So often Bible verses come to my mind at this pivotal time in history.  “Where there is no vision, the people perish” just flashed on my radar.  When I approached life literally, I never really understood the meaning of this though, of course, I thought I did!  The lack of “vision” that the Psalmist had in mind is the dilemma of the narcissist as he/she cannot see beyond the end of his/her nose.  They see things only in terms of their own immediate interests and have no understanding about the long term effects of what they are doing.  And I don’t think Trump has any interest or capacity to ever venture into the “dark” when he is so comfortable in the glorious light of his own narcissistic splendor.  Nor do his devotees.

( Link to Dr. Perry’s interview in The Sun—http://thesunmagazine.org/issues/491/the_long_shadow)

 

 

The Pleasure of Being a Victim

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In my country there currently a rise of “victimhood,” best illustrated by the current standoff in Burns, Oregon by right-wing armed extremists.  These men have succumbed to the siren call of politicians on the far right who routinely appeal to a profound sense of alienation and despair in the hearts of the disenfranchised often who happen to be “low-information voters.”  One of the most popular pieces of red-meat these politicians toss out there is, “President Obama is coming to take your guns.”  And related to this fear is the fear of “government/Presidential over reach” which is the suspicion that the government is intruding too far into individual freedoms.

I grew up in this madness, though the version I lived through never led to anything like we are witnessing today.  My father was the patriarch in my early life and he often brought home right-wing fears that evoked fears that were already in my youthful heart as I was discovering that life was capricious all too often.  But dad never would have participated in an armed insurrection.  And another factor in my life was hyper-conservative fundamentalist Christianity which presented me with a “loving” God who was always ready to pinch the heads off of any miscreant and that the world was a really bad place, merely a temporary abode we must endure before we go to heaven and pluck on harps and fawn over Jesus for quatrillions of years.  In my study of religious history, this style of religion is termed “the religion of the dispossessed.”  And my family roots, as well as denominational roots, stemmed from the post-Civil War era when Southerners were first dealing with the alienation that comes from having one’s life wrenched from them by some invading force.

But fear is just a fundamental dimension of human experience.  Human culture is a contrivance that has evolved to help us deal with this fear…usually by completely avoiding it…but also by providing adaptations that allow us to invest in the common good and realize that in spite of the fact that life is transitory and capricious it is a worthwhile and important endeavor.  And I think that religion, and other expressions of faith, can provide a helpful accommodation, but only if we can avoid the challenge of using our accommodation only to escape of the vulnerability that is intrinsic to the human experience.

I have fear, often a lot of it, usually in the form of anxiety.  But for some reason, I can now cope with it more effectively than when I was a child and so without the need for stockpiles of guns and ammunition, belief in an absent Despotic Deity, or even bowing before my country’s true God—consumerism.  So, what does this get me?  Well, if I take it down to MacDonald’s in the morning and lie about my age, and given them a dollar, they will give me a senior cup of coffee.  I don’t think there is anything to “get” other than the simple pleasure of life, the beauty of this world and being here to experience it and be able to handle my frustration that it will not last long enough to satisfy the demands of my ego.

But, this approach denies me the great delight and satisfaction of victim hood, knowing that “they” are always out there to get me, mistreat me, and shame me.  It was so ego-rewarding back then to know that my tribe was a “band of brothers” beleaguered by forces greater than I/we could control but that “we” were together in our faith and knew firmly that we were believing and doing the right thing.  And if anyone should challenge our belief system, we would merely rely on the comforting premise, “We are right, and they are wrong.”  And we knew this because God was leading us.  And armed men in Oregon have the same comfort today, knowing they are “right” and they are willing even to die and to kill because if their convictions.

But this emphasis on “being right” and certainty of having acquired this status always stems from a deep-seated lack of security and feeling of “wrongness”.  This existential doubt is buried deep in the unconscious and, of course, those driven by those subterranean forces never will consider its influence in the choices they make.  To consider these “influences” that are beyond the grasp of consciousness would require a knowledge of the mystery of life, feelings of not being as much in control as once thought, existential doubt all of which lead ultimately to a need of faith.

These feelings of powerlessness often evoke an expression of physical power often in the form of overt aggression.  The pain felt within has to find expression and inevitably leads to acting out, a phenomena vividly illustrated by anthropologist Rene Girard in his classic book, “Violence and the Sacred.”

(New York Times article related to the above:  The delight of victimhood—http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/27/opinion/sunday/the-real-victims-of-victimhood.html)