Friday, February 08, 2008

The Method

Used by Dysfunctional People for Sustaining and Protecting Dysfunction

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

Dysfunctional people do not like to question long held beliefs, whether such beliefs are mutually beneficial or mutually destructive. Despite the desire to see this in terms of ‘them’ and ‘us,’ this is an illusion and any abstractly held beliefs are either beneficial to all, or they are destructive to all of us. This ‘split’ reality with the illusion of ‘sides’ obscures the fact. They also dislike spending much time on introspection, preferring to externalize all of their own traits, primarily through the defense mechanism of projection. Often they refer to those who do spend time on introspection as ‘naval gazers’ or using other derogatory terms.
What dysfunctional people do best is defend their own position, right or wrong, evidence based or not, no matter what the outcome may be for themselves or others, as a result of doing so.

Since defending their position is the top priority, they frequently become god-like in their own eyes, or the dysfunctional followers among them see their dysfunctional leaders as god-like.
Anyone functioning at a higher level amidst such a group may well find him/herself as the target of group control for no other reason than he or she has challenged the dysfunctional belief system thereby threatening it. Dysfunctional people are so entrenched in this system that they automatically invalidate the perception and or reactions of anyone, or anything, which threatens the status quo. This is why those who are overwhelmed by such groups often talk about the auto-response system which is quite easily perceived by the one on the receiving end of their robot’-like responses. There is no thought or reason which goes into that at all, which is why many who end up getting psychiatrized for resisting this style of non-think ‘reasoning’ are confused by it and can’t ‘make any sense’ of what is happening. You see as far as the dysfunctional participants are concerned, there is nothing out of the ordinary happening at all!

What is happening is not based on ‘sense’ or ‘reasoning’. It is based on the protection and maintenance of the dysfunctional way; period. Arguing with the dysfunctional doesn’t work. They have no interest in debating anything. They want reality to be defined as it is and to remain the same. That is the goal of dysfunction; to maintain ITSELF. “reasoning’ about it doesn’t work either. The dysfunctional have no interest in defining personal boundaries. They are only interested in imposing their own beliefs on those who don’t currently share them and they see this imposition of beliefs as for the OTHER person’s own 'good' and NOT as a boundary violating behaviour of their own.

The only thing that will ‘cure’ group dysfunction is the full understanding of it as an all inclusive phenomenon, followed by the full public exposure of that, and all the dysfunctional head games that have been invented in the attempt to reserve it. In other words, we must all fully expose the GAME itself.

If you want to understand it, then try playing the ‘game’ yourself playing all the roles but do so OPENLY not ‘covertly’ as the dysfunctional want it to be done. Decide to define ‘reality’ for someone else as you want it to be, no matter how wild it may seem. Your target’s role in the game is to try to tell you his own truth while your job, as the dysfunctional ‘superior’ one is to resist hearing it with everything trick you have at your disposal. Remember to rely heavily on platitudes and aphorisms as means of effective invalidation which are delivered apart form any concrete evidence or details. Above all keep your patronizing tone at the ready at all times and intersperse it with lots of eye rolling contempt and sighing which you will of course, deny you are employing, if asked directly. Remember your theme. It is that YOU are always right and never wrong no matter what the outcome. That is the dysfunctional goal. Don’t let yourself hear how irrational and overbearing you are. Deny it. Your miserable job is to defend your own point of view about other people’s experience, no matter what he says or does even if he hands you concrete evidence of it. You simply ignore the evidence or define it as something else, or perhaps invalidate the attempt to give you any evidence as an ‘attention seeking’ device. Whatever you need to defend your sorry dysfunctional relating is what you do. Emotionally and psychologically exhausting the other person to the point where they will give up trying to talk to you at ALL is the key to 'success' and the indicator that you have ‘won’ the contest you have deluded yourself you are in with him or her.

Now the group’s job is simply to observe the BS being produced by this god-like dysfunctional controller as well as the growing frustration of the target who will not be able to penetrate the dysfunctional mindset, no matter WHAT he or she says.
Remember though that if you are a group member and you see the person who is set up for being controlled getting too emotional about it, your job as a dysfunctional group member is to invalidate the targets’ perception and reactions and to defend your dysfunctional leader. Do not be tempted therefore to see the real problem or you too may become a target and you wouldn’t want THAT to happen now would you? Always remember that truth, reason and logic have nothing at all to do with this but as a group member you are trying very hard to make sure that the target doesn’t see that so you are obliged to add more confusion and chaos to his or her perception of it in order to save yourselves, thereby preserving the dysfunctional status quo. Got it?
If you are the target who sees this, remember that saying so will only increase the pressure on you to deny it so save your breath. To get out of this situation and to get out from under the pressure game, you will have to see it but pretend that you don’t. What the dysfunctional group wants it for you to agree with the dysfunction and call it ‘normal.’ At the very least, the members want you to pretend you don’t see it or if you do see it they want you to pretend it is normal too. Then and only then will they back off and leave you alone. If at the end of this ‘game’ you find yourself all alone (as far as the original group goes, you will then have to locate those who have actually detached from this dysfunctional way of relating because that is the only way you are going to get any support for your new reality and the stability that you will need by having your own truth mirrored back for you by others who have gone through the same sort of thing and survived it. Those who are a little ahead in escaping the convoluted anti-logic of dysfunction will be able to help you further along on your new and saner path.

As former targets of this group phenomenon, once you fully see and understand the reality of the situation and you know that ‘reason’ or ‘logic’ have nothing at all to do with it, you will be able to begin to really detach from the dysfunctional nonsense which formerly had you so thoroughly confused. The reason you were so confused is because logic does not penetrate illogic. It is like speaking two different languages based on two opposing premises of thought. It doesn’t compute and it will not compute, no matter how much you may want it to or how hard you try.

Dysfunctional systems like people who comply with the group dysfunction. They don’t like those who question them or their beliefs. Dysfunctional ‘gods’ do not ‘permit’ any ‘deviation’ from a ‘norm’ as it has been defined by the dysfunctional gods.

A Hot Tip for Your Growing Awareness

Dysfunctional ‘superiors’ frequently ask why we who are deemed by them to be ‘less’ are making a ‘big deal out of nothing’ or out of something that ‘happens to everyone.’

Here is your short answer:

“Everyone does not get psychiatrized and locked up for ‘claiming’ reality is reality; only some of us do. It is this double standard which is the ‘big deal’ and this should be glaringly obvious to anyone who has half a brain.

If you have been psychiatrized for your truth, you have no doubt received many patronizing responses from the not as yet psychiatrized, as a result of your complaints about what has been done to you.
No doubt, you have been ‘corrected’ perhaps even being told that nothing happened or that there is nothing at all unusual about how people have treated you and that all people get treated badly by others, or called names etc., yet THEY don’t complain about it like you do. This is where you are going to have to point out the blatantly obvious to those who are sure they understand your experience in this BETTER than you do. You must realize that it is not the complex they don’t understand. It is the perfectly obvious which they are blind to and that is what needs to be pointed out as if you are talking to idiots or aliens from another planet.

1. You must tell them this does not happen to them on a daily basis involving large groups of people who think they are somehow ‘hidden’ in plain sight while acting it all out. Tell them you are pressured by a large group of invalidating people who do just what this person is doing RIGHT NOW; invalidating everything you say.

2. Point out they are claiming this happens to them too. Ask them to explain why then, if it happens, they choose to support the aggressors violating their OWN boundaries, and to pretend that this behaviour of the aggressor is acceptable. Also ask them why they then invalidate your experience of the same sort of thing. Point out to them that psychiatrists don’t believe that this happens anywhere except in your own mind, so, if the other ‘thinks’ this happens to him or her also, then tell them they must also need to be forced out of their jobs, psychiatrically labelled for their own delusions and controlled by others who deny the whole experience exists also. After all, they too are telling you they believe in something which experts claim does not exist, so clearly they TOO need some nice medication for that.

This experience with others and psychiatry often happens at a time when we are under the most pressure we have ever been under in our lives and it is the time when we need the MOST emotional support we have ever needed, along with a sincere and listening ear to help us get through it. Instead, our emotional reactions are themselves treated as a ‘disease,’ along with the perception of the event or relationship that that induced them. Any support we may have had is often then yanked away from us like pulling a rug out from under us, and we are left totally alone with out truth or even attacked further for attempting to tell it. We are then pressured even MORE in an attempt to invalidate us further and silence our complaints for good. For we have been handed a new version of our own reality which the dysfunctional group and the now, attending psychiatrist likes better than our own.

When we finally break under enough pressure to fragment the minds of many people, this is then thought to ‘prove’ to the dysfunctional defenders of the status quo that we are ‘defective’ just as they proclaimed us to be in the first place, for seeing something none of them can see. This, of course, is exactly what they wanted to be able to ‘prove’ to themselves. This is how the dysfunctional circle of self defense works. This is the dysfunctional game played out to its predictable conclusion.

If you as the higher mind want to understand it, you must simply see it for what it is and not look for reason where there is no reason in the first place. Once seen and understood, you will be able to step OUTSIDE of this snare of group insanity.


1 comment:

Mark p.s.2 said...

I love your blog