Who Exactly is it Who is Being ‘Fooled’?

By Patricia Lefave, Labelled, D.D. (P)

I once asked my own protagonist and his group of supporters and enablers this very question:
“Since I know what you’re doing and you know what you’re doing, who exactly is it that is being ‘fooled’ here?”

I was looking for a logical answer from them all for an illogical act, based on illogical thought and action. “Logic” has nothing to do with this. Dysfunctional programmed relating has a whole lot to do with it though. It was probably the most difficult point I have ever had to try to bend my own mind around. In fact, resolving the chaos and confusion in myself DEPENDED upon my being able to do it and to be able to do it, I had to fist be able to see it. If that description sounds impossible, imagine the act of doing it! It was tremendously difficult, made more so by the insistence of everyone around me that I ACCEPT their interpretation of both the event (which none of them could even see) and MYSELF, on THEIR terms. The pressure applied to me to get me to ‘look away’’ from the truth the others could not, or would not, see, was unrelenting and another problem ADDED to what I was already experiencing.

I now know however, WHO it is who is being fooled, and also how, and why. Since these questions no longer need to be answered in my case, I am no longer confused by the thinking and behaviour of the others involved.

Once I knew that and just got away from them physically, for enough time every day, I re-integrated and got myself back. So the answer to the question is: Those who are being fooled in their attempt to fool me, (assigned the role of their ‘inferior’) are the people who are attempting to do the fooling. Zen-like isn’t it? It’s like negative Zen instead of positive Zen. Like an infinite loop of the dark side or ‘Shadow.’ That’s the answer.
It starts with a protagonist whose goal is really to fool himself into believing he is superior to all other and that his targeted victim won’t understand anything about him, even though a great deal of what he says and does is perfectly obvious. He does not know that, and does not WANT to know that, no mater how obvious it all is to me. After this starting point, everything he says and does AFTER that is a combination of self appointed tasks used in an attempt to prove to himself how smart he is which he does by means of deceit or by trying to cover his own tracks after dong the deceiving. Basically, he is only in a relationship with his own deluded mind. I am just a prop in his mental movie.

The others he involves are deceived by him too but he does a better job of deceiving them than he does with me. I did not understand that either until I figured out what was going on with him. They, however, also believe they are my ‘superiors’ in this and that THEY understand what is going on between me and my protagonist far BETTER than I do. They don’t. That is their ‘delusional’ belief. I understand it far better that they do and have even said so, but they don’t want to believe that so they decided to be offended by it instead.

All of them re-invent my reality and the reality of the situation as a whole, in their own terms, including who they need ME to be, and what they need me to know or NOT know. To this end, the ‘interpret’ everything I say as though I were speaking a foreign language, and they do this in a way that allows them to make it fit in with their own erroneous beliefs so they can keep themselves fooled and believing they are right. They split cause and effect as though they had no relation to each other at all. They don’t want to believe that what they are doing is the cause of anything and that it is having a very specific and frequently very predictable effect on me and my life. So they deny that I have any awareness of them and their motivations and behaviour. They then ‘observe the effects of their own behaviour in me, ‘as though’ it had nothing at all to do with them, and was taking place in a relationship vacuum. They see the effects of what they do as totally contained within me, without any relationship to them at all.
Since that is the case, in THEIR minds, they then look for some OTHER cause for the effect on me, preferably something originating in me so that their will be no risk to their own deluded state which they define for themselves as ‘normal.’
It doesn’t take an Einstein to figure out that for as long as this problem is denied, as what it is, and then redefined as what it isn’t, it is not ever going to be resolved. It’s quite impossible to resolve any problem that does not get acknowledged as existing.

Let me give you a very specific example so I can show you what I mean.
Scenario:
A man doesn’t think his wife is living up to his expectations as a party host which is something he wants her to do every Saturday night and she does not want to do it.
As she continues to resist this desire of his, he feels frustrated with her and begins to tell her he thinks she just may have a personality disorder. (There is so much psychiatrized jargon out there that the public in general has begun to talk in those terms very frequently) The husband has a goal. He wants a party every Saturday night and he wants his wife to cook for it and to act like she wants to do it too. He tries to enlist the aid of many his potential guests by getting them to pressure her into it. He also suggests, mildly at first, and ‘covertly’ that he is ‘afraid’ there may be something wrong with her, something perhaps inherently defective about her (that she can’t help of course), which is evidenced by her failure to do what he is telling her she should WANT to be doing.
She starts to get angry as he starts to push.
He tells her she is angry for no reason.
She tells him HE’S the reason.
He tells her that ‘blaming others for your own feelings’ is a character flaw in her.
He then goes and tells others that his wife is angry all the time for no reason.
They suggest to him that she probably needs some medication; Prozac for instance or one of those other feel good drugs so popular now.
She hears about the opinions of her he is expressing to others and tells him angrily to stop suggesting she is mentally ill because she does not want to cook for his parties.
He responds by telling her that ‘mental illness’ is nothing to be ashamed of and it is thought to be a bio chemistry problem. He suggests her shame may be an inappropriate affect that is also caused by this imbalance.
She tells him she feels no shame in what she says, what she feels is anger and that is growing.
He tells her that being unable to feel shame is also a problem but that can be dealt with now too, along with her bio chemical anger. He also suggests he may be wrong and that she really DOES feel ashamed, that she is just denying it because she feels too ashamed to ask for ‘help.’
She denies she is in need of any ‘help’ other than finding someone to impress upon him that she does not want to cook for a party every Saturday night. She tells him he is invalidating and controlling and he needs to stop this.
He tells her she is in denial and realizing that his wife is getting ‘crazier’ by the day, goes out to find those potential party guests in order to convince them to help him with an ‘intervention”
When she finds out from one of the neighbours what he had been doing behind her back, she breaks down sobbing. The next day the intervention group shows up at her home and her husband invites them in. Looking very solemn he tells her they are there to try and help her.
She all but yells at him that she does not want any help and pleads with them to PLEASE just leave her alone and mind their own business.
They talk amongst themselves in the slightly hushed tone usually reserved for funerals or coma victims, and remark that together that the poor wife seems to have suffered a Change of Personality. (You could hear the way they capitalized it in their own minds) They agreed together that this could be serious.
They point out to her how ‘upset’ she is and suggest she should ‘admit’ to that for her own good.
She does ‘admit’ it.
They tell her that ‘wanting to withdraw from others’ is another ‘sign’ that she needs ‘help.’
At this point she is unhappy and so agrees to see a psychiatrist, believing she is finally going to get to talk about her real life problems to someone who will listen. When she sees the psychiatrist though, the first time she is there, the psychiatrist tells her she has a ‘mental illness’ and just needs medication and a short stay in the psychiatric hospital to ‘rest’ and to get her medication levels monitored to be sure they are at the correct dosage.
They never discuss the original problem as identified by the woman at all. The psychiatrist does not even see that there IS a problem and he tells the woman all about the chemical imbalance problem that he believes exists in her brain which is causing all of her distress. When finished with his prescription pad, he picks it up and takes it with him to talk to the next patient on his list.
The woman feels completely trapped now inside a circular argument that makes no sense at all, in relation to her real life and her real problems. Just then, her husband walks in the door. He walks right past her to have a few words with the doctor first. The doctor assures the husband that his wife will get better soon.

“Do you think she will want to host parties again soon doctor?” he asks him.
“I don’t see why not,” the doctor tells him. “She should be herself again in no time.'' (The doctor is quite favourably impressed by the husband’s concern for his poor, sick wife.)
End of story.

When the woman overhears this exchange, she then knows that NEITHER of them have any idea who she actually is as a person and they don’t really CARE either.
Her husband wants her to cook for a party for him every Saturday night If she doesn’t want to do that, then, as far as he is concerned, she must be ‘crazy.’
The psychiatrist apparently agrees.
Fortunately, we now have some really good drugs and diagnoses that allow those who like to control others to force them to be whoever those controllers WANT them to be. There is no longer any need to ‘waste our time’ talking about anything.

Once the cause of this woman’ problem (which was quite simple and obvious to start with) has been defined as her own ‘defective’ brain, she will be seen heard and understood in those terms by everyone around her. If she tries to protest this, she will most likely be ‘corrected’ for it by virtually everyone she knows, many of them having been trained to do just that by the system itself. They all accept the diagnosis of the experts in this.

This wife is no longer a person who does not want to have a party every Saturday night and who can choose to say, “No.” She is now a patient who is manifesting signs of illness by refusing to ‘socialize.’ Just saying no to anything is no longer an option; it’s a ‘sign.’
That folks is how reality gets ‘interpreted’ and redefined by others who want control and who have no sense of personal boundaries. This utter lack of boundaries, often furiously defended by those doing the violating, by blaming those they violate, is the essence of dysfunctional relating. They simply twist everything around and declare it to be its opposite. The violator is not demonstrating a behaviour problem; the violated is simply declared to be having a REACTION problem.

Dysfunctional relating is constantly promoted as the ‘norm’. Enmeshment is mistaken of intimacy. Those who disagree with those who believe they represent the ‘norm’ must be abnormal since they are different in their thinking. Dysfunctional people are usually very GOOD ‘team players.”

For as long as cause and effect are separated and never meet again, the chances of resolving any real problems of relationship are precisely zero. Beyond that, we will create more and more problems which are being born out of the strenuous attempt to just ignore them just as quickly and efficiently as a psychiatric label will allow us all to do so.

Those who cast themselves in the role of our ‘saviours’ and of our ‘superiors’ do not ever want to acknowledge that they are not who they pretend to be and that the error is their own. So they create a complex mess out of what is a relatively simple and obvious problem, and that problem is always about the ignoring or the blurring of personal boundaries between people in ways that impose, by force if necessary, someone’s personal views on another, or that some accept the views imposed upon them by others with little or no, questioning of those views or resistance to the imposition.

The people who most poorly ‘fit in’ with dysfunctional relating are generally those who are not interested in EITHER imposing their personal views and experience on others, nor having others impose their views and beliefs on them. Since these people represent the few, rather than the many, they are perceived as ‘odd’ and those who represent the many want to ‘fix’ us so ''we'' will be more like ''them,'' and less threatening to the status quo of the group belief system.

In this topsy-turvy way of thinking and relating, the ones LEAST interested in imposing the views on others, are also the ones MOST likely to be declared ‘mentally ill’ by those supposedly ‘normal’ others. It is often fighting against this tsunami of public opinion, vigorously defended by the many, that causes the ‘illness’ (psycho spiritually speaking) which is predicted by those who CREATE this self fulfilling prophecy.