This Year's Online CARD in the Spirit of the Season

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.

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 smouldering 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.

Breaking the Dysfunctional Code

Come visit with me on my website where there is a lot of information on many pages...something for everyone looking for alternative views validation and hope


Breaking the Dysfunctional Code

Are You Shocked?

Involved in the production, selling and purchasing of child porn, which means the planned and executed sexual abuse of children were:

Doctors, lawyers, cops, priests and teachers...”authority figures” whom children and many others are not “allowed” to question challenge for their behaviour or blame.

I am sure many of them are smiling, soft spoken, polite pillars, polite of the community whose friends and neighbours are, or will be, just shocked. And it appears that it is Canadians pillars leading the abuse.

Do you suppose that many of these people are actually parents themselves?

Here is the link- Don't forget to drop your jaws

I want you to think about something else alongside this case. Had the police not interrupted this and managed to rescue these children, and many children all over the world do NOT get rescued, I think it likely that many of these victims, who did not commit suicide, would very likely have ended up in the mental illness system, not believed about what they had been put through, and many of them would have received a nice psychiatric containment label, invalidating them for their “attention seeking stories” since no one believes that the pillars of the community, or anyone’s parents, would ever harm children. Yet this is reality isn't it? The FIRST thing the scum of the earth do, including the scum in the expensive suits, is REDUCE the targets of their abuse to the level of item, object, or commodity, since doing so makes the abuse, or use, of them acceptable to the scum of the earth.
The labels reducing the patient to a self contained “disease” process do not solve real life problems with real people in the real world. In fact, they often re-traumatize the victims of abuse all over again and keep them trapped in a position of permanent invalidation and often increased abuse BECAUSE of the reductionism.

Breaking Bad

How do you think I mean that?

Do I mean that someone who breaks away from the norm is breaking bad, OR
Do I mean that we human beings who want to live a decent life and make it possible for others to do the same need to break BAD; bad itself. All things mean what they mean in context. If you believe that you can identify ANY subset of humanity as the good group or the bad group based on concrete details like job title, for example, you are delusional yourself.

Do you really want to break the power of aggressors operating with hidden agendas of domination and control? If you do, talk CONSTANTLY about the hidden agendas of power and control and the people using them and do it with the SAME attitude of observation and clinical detachment which you currently use in observing and assessing the victims who complain about them.

Believe me...if you invalidate the crap out of them, while observing and assessing THEM like objects of observation, often enough, for long enough, they will give up their “game.”

In other words, use your metaphysical power in a way, on whom, and where it will do some genuine good, which is not about suppressing the feelings of the victims of abuse nor making abusers FEEL better about it when, or IF they get caught.

Rick's Rant-Veterans and PTSD