Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Why Must We "Overlook" Our Personal Violations?

By Patricia Lefave
Labelled, Delusional (Paranoid) Disorder

"Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards. "
Albert Camus
French existentialist author & philosopher (1913 - 1960)

We are trained to believe that "overlooking" personal violation is the right thing to do and that to complain about the violation is a fault in the victim.This is backwards.

It is supporting and enabling aggression. It is also traumatizing and frequently enraging to many victims who either remain trapped as victims, or sometimes end up identifying with the aggressor BECAUSE their legitimate anger was never validated when they were victims. These ones then act out on surrogates, and THEIR victims in turn, are told that they must 'overlook, excuse, or forgive' the next generation of unrepentant abuser....and so it goes in a chain reaction that is never broken. This is the essence of the ongoing cycle of dysfunction and abuse.

Further on the desirability of ‘overlooking’ abuse and the ‘forgiveness’ that always goes along with it, here is an anecdotal story for you to consider out of my own experience with another.

I know someone who once escaped an abusive relationship after may years of trying to ‘fix’ it. Her partner was verbally, emotionally, psychologically, and financially abusive. She was a classic co-dependent enabler. She left him when one day it escalated to the physical with one punch.
He said he was sorry later. They usually do. After he did, she was negotiating a return to the same relationship.

She was also getting counseling from university students because it was either really inexpensive or free and she was quite poor.

These professionals in training began to talk to her about ‘forgiveness’ about the same time I was talking to her about self direction and recognition of abuse. They started talking about this to her while she was complaining about her abuser. I felt that she had pushed their auto response buttons by doing so. They suggested to her books on ‘forgiveness’ They told her it was for her OWN sake. She then began to explain forgiveness to me as I had suggested frequently to her that his abuse of her was HIS problem and not HERS. Of course, I am not a highly trained professional like her counselor at the university, so though she thought I MEANT well, she felt she had to go with the pros on this one.

I often wonder if she is still alive.

I believe I always needed to shift our focus off of the victim’s reactions and back towards the aggressors’ behaviour, learning to blame appropriately but letting go of vengeance. In part, I still believe this is true. The appropriate emotional response however, when violated is anger. That should be obvious to anyone, yet it is not. Anger ( and the other side of that emotion, fear) helps us to form boundaries by defining what is our personal space and what is not. We can only "let go of it" by feeling what we feel, and having it validated by at least one other person based on identifying boundary violation only. Once understood in those terms, and validated, without stopping to consider the status of the people involved, the anger starts to go, as it normally would, if not suppressed.

(I believe that even the Devil can be redeemed if the Devil shows contrition. Some do not believe that is possible. I do. It takes co-operation though, and a God who forgives those who repent. ) I happen to believe in God though I don't actually care if anyone else does or not. If you want to think of this as a metaphor for a relationship between an ethical person and a sociopath, feel free to do so. What I DO care about is the lack of contrition, and the frequent attempts to justify the violation, from those who violate my boundaries as if they had a perfect right to do so. They DON'T; and that INCLUDES psychiatrists.

I See God sand the Devil as Adversarial opposites. What we need to relate well, and acknowledge, are the rights of all people, with an attitude of Complementary opposites. Only the God head has purity to me. The rest of us fall short of the mark.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu said recently in a CBC discussion, "God would prefer you freely went to Hell than be forced into Heaven." The Dali Lama laughed in agreement. I hear "the truth that sets us free" the "thing" we could not see even though it is right in front of us. "Hidden in plain sight" as some come (eventually) to see it.

This is the battle of two spirits...I encountered both of them in the Collective level of psychosis which is known by some as Spirit. There is only a very subtle difference between the two. The difference is motivation. One has a hidden agenda and wants power over others. The Other already has power over all and is giving his power away as a free gift. The Spirit who already has power and is giving it away, also knows that the attempt to control those 'others,' who must be considered to be 'less than' in order to justify the control, ends with the destruction of everything and everyone, including the controllers themselves. The controllers just don't get that.

We cannot create a split in the fabric of reality without expecting it to tear us all apart in the end. It is a premise of 'fixing' that does not work and we have ample proof of that by now. Still the majority persists in the attempt to control what it does not understand, and it is done out of FEAR, not wisdom.


"Schizogenesis" means "reproduction by fission." Isn't that interesting? The Big Bang. The Spirit Voices are, to me, the battle of good and evil which transcends space/time itself: Armageddon. Perhaps the Creationists and the Evolutionists are not as far apart as they might like to think.

Life seems more and more to me like watching two sides of the same coin trying to separate from each other, by force if necessary, in order to be 'free.' It is more of a Cosmic Joke than most people would ever believe and we are playing it on ourselves as a huge, planet wide, dysfunctional group, headed by 'experts' in madness. I tend to agree about what they believe they are experts about.

Now, I would like you to use a concrete example as a way of looking at this and add a slight change to your experience of, let's say, being robbed.

Fact: You were robbed. (Just so there is no doubt about the premise here)

Imagine your best friend secretly believes there was no theft, and that she COVERTLY told your other friends, family, and a psychiatrist just that, even suggesting that you had staged the robbery yourself as a way of "seeking attention" because you were "mentally ill" or "schizophrenic". Now we will all look for 'signs and symbols' together. Don't worry. It won't be too hard to do.

To your face, your friend "humoured" you since she "knows" there is no point trying to reason with you, as everything you say is just a "disease" talking. Now everything you do or say after that, is going to be heard by everyone around you through the filter of THEIR beliefs about your experience of reality, much of that 'interpretation' supplied to them by your very good friend, who is only trying to 'help' you.

Take a look a the "symptoms" of schizophrenia in relation to this, using your own concrete experience as your example and think about that re-framed as a 'psychiatric' problem with an internal locus rather than the reality of your own experience with an external locus.

Signs, Symptoms, Causes and Effects

“Schizophrenia ... makes it difficult for a person (or a group of people, if you see this as a social problem )to tell the difference between real and unreal experiences, to think logically, to have appropriate emotional responses to others ( or emotionally appropriate responses to the individual the group is judging for no other reason than their 'beliefs') and to behave appropriately in social situations.(Or behave appropriately towards an individual who has been targeted for abuse. We might also ask what is the meaning of "appropriately," in relation to a specific scenario.)


[It] is one of the most common mental illnesses (or social sicknesses, depending upon your point of view)
About 1 percent of the world population will develop it.”


The additions to the official definition above, in red, and in brackets, are my own and are there to attempt to get you to look at this from the opposite point of view. This view is rarely heard or even considered.

Source of originally listed symptoms: Click on the Link in Title


Premise 1. Think of this vague, abstract statement above as being applied to you as an alternative explanation for the concrete event I have used in the example above; the event which has been denied by all of your family and friends.
If this were to become your new identity because of such an event, how do you think you would then feel about your friends, your family, your life and your supposedly 'inappropriate affects' (which is what your emotions like fear, anger, frustration, etc. have now been renamed ) What feelings would you have towards the people who have forced you into such a position; a paradoxical trap from which (you will soon discover ) is a closed system with no way out?
Having trouble imagining how it feels?
Then just ask one of many of us who have had the experience. We will be more than happy to enlighten you about it all. This is what happens to many, many people and is why they break down in the first place. Because everything they say is invalidated by others listening, in just this way.

Premise 2: Now think of it as applied to all the people who are denying your experience of being robbed for no other reason than because your friend suggested they should deny it, and you have no concrete proof to show them, or, at least, none which they will accept.

Now read the same definition again, connected to premise 2. Only this time, read it as if it were about the problem with the group instead of the psychiatrized individual.

Signs, Symptoms, Causes and Effects

Schizophrenia ... makes it difficult for a person (or a group of people, if you see this as a social problem )to tell the difference between real and unreal experiences, to think logically, to have appropriate emotional responses to others ( or emotionally appropriate responses to the individual the group is judging for no other reason than their 'beliefs') and to behave appropriately in social situations.(Or behave appropriately towards an individual who has been targeted for abuse. We might also ask what is the meaning of "appropriately," in relation to a specific scenario.)

[It] is one of the most common mental illnesses (or social sicknesses, depending upon your point of view)

My own view is that the whole world suffers from it, as a group, or social, phenomenon, NOT that an individual "has" an illness. The individual just breaks under what is often, often extreme social pressure because that is the where the focus of the problem has been placed.

Focusing on one person allows the others to deny any responsibility for the outcome. It is especially easy to do in groups, as individual responsibility is obscured and diminished by the number of people who get involved in the psychiatrization process of the individual.
If this were to become your new identity because of such an event, how do you think you would then feel about your friends, your family, your life and your supposedly 'inappropriate affects' (which is what your emotions like fear, anger, frustration, etc. have now been renamed ) What feelings would you have towards the people who have forced you into such a position; a paradoxical trap from which (you will soon discover ) is a closed system with no way out?
Having trouble imagining how it feels?


Then just ask one of many of us who have had the experience. We will be more than happy to enlighten you about it all.






1 comment:

Mark p.s.2 said...

Yes it is the magic of words. Noam Chomsky
from imperial ambitions: conversations on the post 911 world.

page 35
charles glass a middle east correspondant with tremendous experiance has an article in the london review of books in which he points out that the US must be the only country in the world where someone could be called a terrorist for defending his own country from attack.